A Conflict of Visions: The Hidden Origins of Ideological Conflict by Thomas Sowell w/Jesan Sorrells & Ryan J. Stout

0:00 Hello, uh, my name is Jesan Sorrells, and this is the Leadership Lessons, uh, from the Great Books podcast, episode number 180. That's right, we're only 20 episodes away from our big 200th episode. Uh, you're going to want to pay attention, uh, to that. And so from our book today, we are going to start as we have been Um, every single episode starting this season, um, rather than starting with a long soliloquy, soliloquy, we're going to start off with— we're going to start off with a basic introduction, right, to the content.

0:40 Now, um, the book that we are going to be talking about today with our guest, um, in the very first chapter addresses, uh, the, the, the, the root causes, the seed of many of the problems that we see today in our societies and in our cultures, not just in America, but everywhere else where you might be happening to be listening to the sound of my voice. This seed is binary at its root, and it is— once you see it, and my guests and I are going to talk about this today— once you see this seed and you see its fruit, you will never— you'll never again mistake the fruit for the actual seed.

1:24 You will be able to go to the root causes. And that was part of the point of the author that we are talking about today writing this book. So as a matter of fact, we open up with this line from the very first chapter entitled The Role of Visions. And I quote, one of the curious things about political opinions is how often the same people line up on opposite sides of different issues. The issues themselves may have no intrinsic connection with each other. They may range from military spending to drug laws to monetary policy or education.

1:58 Yet the same familiar faces can be found glaring at each other from opposite sides of the political fence again and again. It happens too often to be a coincidence, and it's too uncontrolled to be a plot. Or as I would say, just to pause a second, a conspiracy. A closer look— back to the book— a closer look at the arguments on both sides often shows that they are reasoning from fundamentally different premises. These different premises, often implicit, are what provides the consistency behind the repeated opposition of individuals and groups on numerous unrelated issues.

2:33 They have different visions of how the world works, and we're going to talk about those visions today as we explore, well, the visions, uh, and the conflict that exists between those two visions in our book, A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggle by the great Thomas Sowell. Now, in thinking about this book, I want you to take a couple of things into consideration before I introduce my guests. Just some things to whet your whistle, some ideas that I've got here. The fact is that we, meaning you and me and every other human being, you know, we don't all share the same worldview.

3:23 Now, we know this when we're lined up, as Sowell wrote, on opposite sides of—, um, political issue or a cultural issue or a social issue or a monetary issue. And due to the vagaries of genetics, environment, choices, and even the kinds of messages we take in and reject, our worldviews are shaped in fundamentally different ways. This molding, of course, leads to different outcomes for different peoples. Some outcomes are great. Some outcomes are poor, as I was talking about with my guest before we hit the record button today.

3:57 And some outcomes are shockingly average. Sure, marketers, propagandists, politicians, and others seek to manipulate worldviews and their inputs to accomplish the goals that they seek to achieve. But even they don't realize that even they have worldviews that leak out of the bucket of their mouths and reveal their own motives and desires. They're not fooling anyone. And actually, my guest today would really appreciate this. In reality, no one is fooling anyone. Some people have just decided to go along, uh, for the ride.

4:34 At the bottom— and we're going to talk about all this today— when we strip away all the fluff and the nonsense, the reality is that, as Sowell has mentioned in his book in Chapter 1, there are two competing visions of human nature. These two visions are incompatible with each other and are fundamentally irreconcilable. They are both zero-sum. And to make matters even worse, or even more complicated, most people can't even recognize, identify, and critically examine either of the two visions that undergird their own individualized and previously held worldviews.

5:09 And I would assert, preciously held worldviews. These two visions locked in negotiation, which sometimes escalates into open conflict, uh, are fun— the fundamental reasons we don't perceive the world in the same way. Leaders, we don't enjoy acknowledging in our leadership, but two visions are locked in a zero-sum battle, not only within individuals, but within organizations and even cultures. And I don't think we're going to come to a solution to this today because as a partisan for one vision over another.

5:47 I do not think there is a solution, but I'm open to being convinced otherwise. And thus I want to bring in my, my guests today. So back for this episode is a person who I didn't have on my bingo card for this year to select for this book to talk about. The most unlikely person I would've ever thought would've come onto this show to talk about this book, but he has his own reasons. And we're gonna explore what all those were. Our good friend and, uh, raconteur, as I always say in Man About Town, Ryan J. Stout.

6:23 How you doing, Ryan? Could not be better, my friend. Thank you kindly. Always a joy and, uh, honor to be back and, uh, having these conversations, keeping me engaged in, uh, literature and, um, and, and leadership and conflict resolution, as, uh, said prior to the show, as, as, as a ballast, personal, personal sort of like ethos, or working towards that. The other day, I, um, you know, I have a history, as I'm sure some and— we're all due of, uh, kind of being

7:11 reactionary. But, uh, and as we mentioned previously, the kind of like the COVID years, um, that kind of brought the maybe worst out of me. And, and, uh, I had a— when I started reading this book and I was thinking about you, and I— and what popped into my head was, why would I not seek conflict resolution in all interactions. Why would— why would I not try to resolve whatever is in front of me? And, um, it's been— it's been something that's, uh, been part of like the morning meditation for the last few weeks.

7:50 So, so in addition to all the aforementioned, you know, uh, much appreciated. I'm glad to talk about it today. Awesome. Awesome. Yeah. And as a person who sort of is not, you know, is not afraid of conflict or doesn't avoid conflict, I don't seek it out, but I'm not afraid of it when it shows up as, as many people are in

8:12 our era. Um, you're right. It's one thing to sort of navigate conflict effectively. It's quite another to know what the underpinnings are of conflict. Um, and to engage with them, engage with those underpinnings. Like, one of the things I always tell folks that when I work with them in organizations is, uh, leaders, teams, all of that, it's actually one of the big tips for today. You have to know subtext in order to effectively negotiate over context. And the deepest subtext that you can ever know, you can ever critically examine, is the visions that are undergirding people's actions, right?

8:48 Right. Um, and we confuse a vision for a worldview. We'll talk about that today, but visions inform worldviews. So what we see informs what we— what we actually believe. And then what we believe influences how we vote, how we eat, um, even how we walk down the street, the social media platforms we go to or don't go to, even the kinds of people we choose to hang out with and have conversations with, and the kinds of people that we choose to yell at online and call you know, all kinds of dirty names to.

9:17 All of this is influenced by our vision, right? Our grand vision of the world. And, and most visions unfortunately are unexamined. And Sowell talks about all of this in his great book. Speaking of Sowell, let's, let's jump into that. So, um, Thomas Sowell, let's talk about him. Thomas Sowell, um, was— well, not was, is— he's, he's still alive. Um, he has written over— oh gosh, well, over 60, I think it's approaching 60 books now, um, on economics and social theory as well as cultural theory and philosophy.

9:53 Um, and he has served as a fellow at the Hoover Institute at Stanford University for many, many years. Um, in commenting on many issues of the day, he stands alongside Shelby Steele, Armstrong Williams, and other quite frankly, because we're doing this in February, Black conservatives who spring directly— whose, whose ideas spring directly from the influence of Booker T. Washington. And I've talked about this on the show before, and Ryan may not know this, but I've talked about this on the show before.

10:22 There are two strains of thought inside of Black culture, two, two rails, such as it were, two, two visions, honestly, huh, in Black American culture. Um, one rail is defined by Booker T. Washington. And if you follow that rail down the road, you wind up like— you wind up at the feet of writers like, um, like, well, like Thomas Sowell, um, but also Albert Murray, um, who probably would identify himself more as a centrist. Um, but then Shelby Steele, Armstrong Williams, and ultimately I think, uh, the young guy who we, who we already covered, um, last episode, um, in, um, Arguments for a Colorblind America.

10:59 Um, Coleman Hughes. Yes. So we, we talked about his book, uh, Coleman Hughes. You could trace a direct line from Booker T. Washington to Coleman Hughes, but you can also— there's another rail, um, in, in, in African American thought and culture where the root of it, or the, the beginning of that rail starts in the theories and the thinking of W.E.B. Du Bois. Um, you know, The Souls of Black Folk. From W.E.B. Du Bois, you can get to Marcus Garvey. Um, you get directly to Marcus Garvey, you get to, um, uh, Malcolm X, you get to Eldridge Cleaver, um, and finally you wash up on the shores of Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ibrāhīm X. Kendi.

11:43 And those are the two rails that African Americans in America have been riding on for the last, I would say, 150 years intellectually. Culturally, and even ultimately politically. By the way, the day that we're recording this, uh, Jesse Jackson, uh, passed away at the age of 84 years old. And while politically and based on his premise and his worldview, I disagreed with Jesse Jackson, we cannot disagree with the impact that he had. Without Jesse Jackson, you don't get Barack Obama and even Thomas Sowell.

12:18 Would

12:21 say that. Um, Sowell's ideas— now this is where I want to switch to— Sowell's ideas are so succinct and sharp that their provenance cannot be argued against, just discussed, even by those who vehemently disagree. So Sowell has the unique sort of, um, the unique

12:41 sort of, uh, notoriety where You know, that opposite line, that W.E.B. Du Bois to Ibram X. Kendi line. They know who he is, but he was born in 1930, right? Um, he, he came of age before the civil rights movement. He thought the folks in the civil rights movement were knuckleheads, and he was already writing, writing and arguing in the public as a public intellectual, public African American intellectual, prominently before those guys even came to prominence. And so they can't. They can't say that, well, he didn't do the thing or he didn't understand the pain.

13:16 And he grew up in the— he was a high school dropout, grew up in the segregated South, all of the things, right? He checks, he checks all the boxes, and yet he came to radically different conclusions than all of them did. And so his arguments are argued against, but never the place where he came from. And his arguments are so watertight that even his enemies have to admit that they are worth

13:42 arguing against. This book that we're going to cover today, A Conflict of Visions, represents, along with The Vision of the Anointed, which we haven't read on the show, and A Kliquest for Cosmic Justice, which I read, gosh, probably 15 years ago, and that book blew me away. Um, they are an informal trilogy of works designed to examine and clarify the two competing visions in the world that influence everything from economics to race relations. This book specifically lays out the implications of both visions and examines the logic behind each vision to fully understand and to fully logic out— while giving credit where credit is due— what people mean when they say the words justice, equality, or even power, all of which have become buzzwords in our current American cultural moment.

14:32 By the way, we're gonna reference George Orwell in the English language here a little bit later on. But Saul is a person who is so disciplined with his language and so disciplined with his ideas, uh, that you could tell he is not a lazy thinker by any stretch of the imagination and very powerful. So as I said, I hadn't necessarily thought that Ryan was gonna be the person to pick up this book and say, hey, I wanna do this one. Um, I thought maybe Tom Libby might want to, might want to pick that up, or, or maybe Libby Unger, or maybe David Baumrucker, or maybe another guest who had been on our show.

15:07 Um, because Ryan and I tend to talk about Jack Kerouac, right? We tend to talk about, uh, Charles Bukowski. Eventually we're going to hit on Bukowski in here, and we're gonna— I'm gonna— he's gonna be the first person that I tap on the shoulder for that. Or myself and Brian Bagley, we talk about theology books, right? Anything by Doug Wilson or Thomas Aquinas or, uh, Richard, um, Richard, uh, or, uh, uh, Ronald, um, Niebuhr, Ronald, Ronald Niebuhr. Like we're, we'll talk about theology books, right?

15:36 In theology context. Or if I'm gonna talk with Dave, I'm gonna talk with him about Dostoyevsky or, or Nietzsche, right? We're gonna talk about those kinds of areas. And so each one of my guests is not necessarily pigeonholed, but they do have books they like. And I give them plenty of space to pick the books they like. I had not anticipated Ryan picking this book, and so I want to talk with him a little bit about that today. And so this is my question for him to start off: what do you know about Sowell?

16:03 I sort of laid out some things that are publicly available about him, but what do you know about Sowell? And had you ever read any of his work or his writing before this? And sort of why did you figure this was the book that you were going to— you're going to sort of cut your eye teeth on? Today. So thank you so much for the introduction, appreciate it as always. The first time— very much so, in preparation for this, outside of reading

16:29 the book, um, watched several interviews Thomas Sowell, uh, also other people talking about Thomas Sowell. And you mentioned Coleman Hughes earlier, and I watched a, and, and Coleman Hughes said that this was a transformational book for him as well, to see things, uh,

16:56 in a deeper— uh, to get to the kind of the root cause or the bottom of things. And so he said he, he kept hearing this guy Thomas Sowell. You hear this guy's name again over and over, and he's like, all right, let me see how crazy this guy is, or something along those lines. And then he read had read this book, and it was like, oh, it was kind of like one of those aha moments. But prior to that, it's like, how have I, uh, heard of Thomas? Really, the first time I, I knew the name, I knew he was, uh, important in a lot of socioeconomic areas and theory and that sort of thing, but I really had no idea like who he was or why.

17:33 You know, you just kind of hear people's names and, you know, that's persons of importance, but I really don't know much about them. So that is

17:42 what motivated to um, to, to take the opportunity to, to read this book. What really, um, kind of the diving board into learning about Thomas Sowell was the George Floyd era, because during that time, I mean, I remember, I remember speaking with you like the week it happened. I was in Asheville, North Carolina, and, um, something you said. There was something that my— so it was interesting. So my cousin David, who's a 60-year-old white dude who's been working, uh, for Chrysler for the last 40 years— he started when he was 20 years old, okay?

18:22 He recently retired. But, uh, he said something almost identical in a text message to me as what you said to me over the phone. And I was like, all right, so let me— what am I not seeing here? Because this very much so almost outlines the constraint versus the constrained, the vision versus like the preconceived notions of, well, I wouldn't think that these two people have a very similar response to, to this event. And so that

18:52 really launched into, um, Coleman Hughes, and I, I came across Glenn Lowry and John McWhorter, and their And I kind of got hooked on them for probably 6 months. Yeah. And started to see in a much sort of deeper— and in, in the way, as you said, uh, Soul chooses his words wisely, you know, these are gentlemen here. I think that— I think the title of one of the podcasts or the YouTube channels, it was like the, the something, the Black intelligentsia. And it was by Lowry and John McWhorter. And you got it.

19:30 And who— and John McWhorter is someone who willfully admits that he used the benefit of what was called— what it was, it's, it's now DEI, but what was the old affirmative action, affirmative action? He said, yeah, I wouldn't have, you know, probably gone to the education— I wouldn't have had the job opportunities. He's like, I'm grateful. And and he admittedly so is like it, but he doesn't necessarily agree with it. So then we see also see the constrained versus the unconstrained vision within his perception of his own life and how it benefited him even though he does not agree with it.

20:07 And also coming across these cases, like these court cases where say it's, uh, Clarence Thomas or another judge where they say, I agree with the argument, but that But I'm not here to agree or disagree with an argument. I'm here for the law, for the law. Yeah. And to stick true to the law. And so that is just some of like the unraveling of how complicated, complex a lot of these situations can be. And interestingly enough, I think a lot of people, if they were to read this, would, you know, it

20:55 kind of reveals, you know, on some level, a lot of us are not who we think we are. Mm-hmm. And so reading about kind of like the constrained versus unconstrained, and we were just talking about, you know, if you're not a Democrat when you're younger, and then a Republican when you're older, and that sort of thing. And it's like, A lot of these

21:17 things can be masked as one another. Mm-hmm. Well, what's interesting is, just to play off of that, so Ryan knows me fairly well, folks. I think other than, other than a couple of other people, and Derulo Nixon, who comes on the show all the time, he knows me probably best out of all, all the, all the guests. Ryan's known me for Gosh, what is it, like 20 years now? Something like that. It's been a minute. It's been a minute. Let's just say it's been a minute. 25 years. It's 25 years. Okay. I wasn't gonna put the 5 in there.

21:49 Why do you gotta do that to me? Why you gotta, why you gotta curse at

21:54 me like that? Um, but I am the most unlikely person to go to a school for art. I'm the, I'm the most unlikely person to do that. And yet I did. I went to— I, I pursued my undergraduate degree in art, got my undergraduate degree in art, um, looked at beautiful paintings, attempted to draw beautiful things, attempted to create beauty, attempted to inject something beautiful into the world, got an artistic and an aesthetic sense and understanding that has, uh, stood me well, um, during the course of, uh, during the course of my career and has helped me quite frankly in business., and in other places where you wouldn't think an artistic sensibility would matter, right?

22:42 But that is an example of what Ryan's talking about, looking at someone, assuming they have one vision, and then it sort of squirts out in another direction, right? And this is where I think the brilliance of Soul's book really lies, is that the, the dividing line between the two visions, the, the irreconcilable dividing line between the two visions lies not in our institutions, um, or even in our culture, but I think it lies in our— in ourselves, right? So the ways in which Ryan has lived his life— I mean, Ryan has lived, in comparison to myself, a fairly— and we don't need to go into all your history— but a fairly unconstrained life up to probably about 10 minutes ago.

23:26 No, no, up

23:30 to about 15 years ago. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And even then, even then, Even then, but yes, please continue. Yeah. Yeah. Um, but even then, to your point, even then there were places and you and I have talked about this privately and in other conversations, there were places where the constraints showed up where you went, ah, that's the line, but no further. Right. And you see this, by the way, in people, I'm going to use a public example. You see this in people who, who lived a life of an unconstrained vision, like a Bill Maher.

23:58 Who are now sort of going, oh wait, oh wait, my vision's changed. And the ironic thing is when a— not ironic, but the interesting thing is when a person's vision changes, we say their mind changed and, or, or, or we, we want to toss them out of the quote unquote tribe, whatever tribe we happen to be in, whether that's the constrained tribe or the unconstrained tribe. And don't worry, we'll talk about these diff— these distinctions in just a, a moment here. We tend to wanna throw them out of the tribe.

24:30 But the reality is that on a case-by-case basis, we are all doing this. We're all making these kinds of decisions, even when I'll make it very small. When I discipline my kids, I, I'm not always disciplining my kids from a constrained vision. I have to balance that. It can't all be constrained, 'cause otherwise I'm gonna give 'em a complex. You know, but it also can't be all unconstrained. Otherwise, I'm a gentle parent and they don't learn anything. And then, and then eventually, eventually they're going to have to go to timeout for adults, which is called jail.

25:05 And so we don't need more of that. We actually need less of that. Right. So I think people, what, what Sol has hit on and what Hugh's picked up on is this line that runs through the human heart and he put it to words. He, he gave it, he gave it, he gave it language, right? And not, not religious language, not mythical language. He gave it hard, practical, solid, and even to your point on the critique of the book, and I'd like you to talk a little bit about what you thought of the book here, but repetitious language, right?

25:41 I mean, he, you mentioned it yourself, so go ahead. Yeah. Talk a little bit about that. Yeah. Getting to breaking

25:53 down things such as— the first— okay,

26:01 articulated versus systemic rationality. Mm-hmm. And one of the videos I was watching earlier was talking about language. And so when, when, when the unconstrained vision uses the word equity for equality, it's more reference to the equality of outcome, right? And so in the constrained vision, it's the equality of process, right? And so just make sure that we're following the same laws, and it's up to the individual who is flawed and not perfectible, to carry it out to the best of their ability.

26:40 And whatever the outcome is, is the outcome that they essentially have, uh, earned. Whereas, uh, the unconstrained vision and the equality of outcome is, let's make sure that everyone, you know, has a trophy. And much like the disciplining of, of 'Asan's children.' Uh, there's, there's a time and a place for it. And I think what gets confusing is where one philosophy or one idea or one vision starts

27:22 to overtake the other, depending on who is administering the consequence, so to speak. So for instance, yes, so if you're the constrained— so the constraint, you're— do you want to make your child a better, more successful human being, uh, provide lessons for them and have them understand the consequences so they can feel better later? You may not feel great about it because you're seeing, you know, uh, your child and loved one suffer for a little period of time, but you understand through your own experience, which is much different than the articulated words, with your own experience, that it will be long-term beneficial.

28:11 And the unconstrained, where it's like, okay, well, I want to feel good right now, essentially, and I don't want to punish my child. I don't want to see them in pain, and that makes me feel good. So there is this, uh, in— to borrow the constrained vision— there's the trade-off. That's right. Do I want to feel good now, or do I want to feel good later? And, and, and yeah, and how do you want to, you know, how do you want

28:42 to accept responsibility in, um, in the outcome of, of, of the person that you're

28:49 responsible for his life? Mm-hmm. Um, yeah, that was just— yeah, go ahead. Well, no, well, it's interesting that you brought

28:56 up consequences, right? So, um, I was raised and I've, I've, I've, I've integrated into my worldview, kind of like Jung integrating the shadow, right? I've integrated into my worldview the idea of consequences, right? And I'm trying to get that across to to, to my kids now, right? Um, one of the most outrageously revolutionary things that the most constrained woman I've ever met in my life, my mother, said to me— who, by the way, started off unconstrained and then gradually became more constrained as she got older, which was interesting.

29:31 Um, but, but, um, by the time I met her, she was like halfway through that journey towards becoming— towards, towards an object more of a constrained vision. Um, but, um, One of the most consequential things she said to me at 9 years old was, hey son, you can do whatever it is you want. Now here comes the, here comes the comma or the semicolon, but, which normally negates anything you said before, right? But you have to accept the

30:05 consequences of your decision. And for 9-year-old Hasan, that was like fireworks going off in my brain. My neural— my neurology, I— and this is why it, it stuck with me for so long. My, my, my, my neurons started sparking off, right? Because rather than hearing the, the but on that end first, right? Or what came on the other side of the but, I heard you could do whatever you want. And then after

30:33 my neurons calmed down, the consequences for the actions part really started to like, really started to like kick in. Like there will, if I decide, I've told this story to my kids, if I decide I'm going to climb the ladder, which my father has left by the side of the house, God bless him. Um, God rest his soul and God bless him. If I decide to climb that, that ladder and decide recklessly to jump from the roof of my house to the roof of my dog house. Which looked like an easy jump. I mean, it did.

31:02 It was only like, looked like it was only 12 feet. It was probably more like 50, but like, I'm gonna make this jump, right? If I decide to engage in reckless behavior, there is a consequence behind that. So I can climb the ladder. Here's the consequence. I'm gonna be at the top of the roof. I can even back up and start and, and think about starting to run, but there's gonna be a consequence. I might slip on the gravel. It was, it was a roof. In New Mexico, there's gravel on the roof. They didn't put tar on it till much later, whatever.

31:28 It was a whole thing. I might slip on the gravel, go through the roof, but there's all kinds of consequences that are going to happen. And as long as I'm willing to checkmark the box on each one of those consequences, I can do whatever I want. That idea, the power of that idea, which is based in the transition of going from a constrained vision or from an unconstrained vision to a constrained vision. And giving that idea to a child, particularly this child, probably led to more— it led to shenanigans, but it also led to, um, it also led to fewer— also led to fewer problems over the course of, over the course of many, many years.

32:11 And this is what I think we have to give to our children. We have to give them both visions, but we have to present them in equal fashion, right? We have to present them as either process, right, to your point, um, or outcomes and say, you know, which one, which one do you want? And at a certain point, of course, we also have to say, no, you know what, just based off of life experience, I just know more because there's just things you have, you just, you just don't know. You just don't know. Like, that's just the way it goes.

32:44 One of the interviews, uh, Thomas Sowell is, is asked a question, and the interviewer says, uh, well, don't you think, um, the university system, educational system, uh, would be able to suss out— and he was talking about, uh, just the general population, American population— suss out that nonsense? And he said, yes, it very much did so, until nonsense became a large part of

33:19 the

33:24 curriculum. And so when it— I look at, I mean, how is it not understood at this point of really all you need on some levels, like money and power, to kind of navigate and, and not get in trouble for anything? Do we not have enough evidence that that there's— I mean, the 2008 financial crisis, how many people went to— one guy. Oh, one guy, maybe, or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Everybody else got bailed out. Yeah. And so, I mean, it's when, when the body that is supposed to, uh, govern, or the body that does govern, cannot adhere or follow their own laws and the individuals they're elected to represent are, uh, the fated— of this sort of unintentional consequence lays on the individuals who, who are doing the electing, then that, that's the— that's, uh, I said before, I know there's a diagram, it's somewhere between like an ouroboros and a Venn diagram, kind of like mixed And I know, uh, Eric Weinstein has— there's this, uh, like the infinite energy diagram thing, and it's, it's kind of— oh yeah, it's like a Möbius strip inside of a thing.

34:41 But that's what it kind of— it's, it's— and how these things are on a continuum, and it's not just necessarily like— what this also showed was, was there's not necessarily a good and bad. So there's— it's It's more like kind of on this continuous spectrum, more of like, you know, you would see, um, kind of like, uh, the political— the political outlines or the political diagrams, uh, going too far one way or too far the other way. Too far the other way. And some— and like you said, with the raising of your children, and, uh, just talking to a friend of mine the other day who was a lieutenant in the police in Edison, and, uh, you know, he said, uh, And he said, you know, he said, I stopped on, uh, so much weed letting people off, you know.

35:30 He's like, because I understand. He's like, I read the situation. And so this is, this is— you think police officer trained, blah blah blah. He said, but I understand that, you know, I could— I read the situation and I read the person and I understand that like I could, I could have such a negative influence on how the rest of this person's life turns out through this one action. And he had to use sort of

36:00 like better judgment or, um, something in the sense that, that, that he could live with. And so, yeah, I— yeah, it just, it, um, it, it just kind of made me rethink and think about a lot of, um, We're going to get to the question, but a lot of what influenced decisions in the past as well. And, and whereas necessarily, like you say, you know, you see a police officer, he's, you know, he's iron to the knives, he has a hat, this and that, and that's who he was. And to, to, to, to someone getting pulled over by that, you think the absolute worst possible outcome.

36:39 Yeah. So those things aren't necessarily, but what he said was you, you absolutely need both sides because without, you know, you, you raise, you know, the one or the other. One or the other. Yeah. Yeah. You raise the very, you raise the very tiger that's going to turn on you and eat you, you know? Um, so you could either raise a tamed tiger that will, that you can, that you can ride, right? And that you can guide and that eventually you can release out and it'll go do the tiger things that it's supposed to go do.

37:09 Or you'll raise a tiger that'll turn on you and eat you. Um, and it always— the tiger always turns on the

37:20 tamer who raised it. Um, and then he jumps into some ideas that I think we, we don't actually look at the bottoms

37:28 of. He starts with, um, uh, a guy named— who I never heard of before I read this book, and I had to go look him up. Um, a gentleman named William Godwin., who wrote a book in 1793 called, um, Inquiry Concerning Political Justice. And this individual, Godwin, proposed basically what is an unconstrained vision of human nature in opposition to many of the writers of the Federalist Papers. Um, and, you know, there were a lot of folks in the late 18th century and early 19th century who were trying to suss out what these two visions of human nature could be in a political context, right?

38:13 So he traces in this chapter both of those visions and he, he names, of course, the proponent, the, the, the grandfather, the great-grandfather of the proponent of the unconstrained vision, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, right? Um, and the Rousseauian vision that eventually would lead into a Marxian vision which would eventually lead into a Stalinist vision, which would eventually lead into the current vision of human flourishing that we have in the great nation state of China. On the other side, he proposes that we have more of the representatives, or that there are the representatives of a constrained vision, uh, folks that started with Hobbes and Locke and then eventually wound up through the Founding Fathers and came down to, to today.

38:59 In what we see not in necessarily the dregs of 20th century progressivism, but more in the dregs of 20th century conservatism. Um, Ronald Reagan, or even, dare I say, George W. Bush. Now, we put political figures to these visions, and we do so because many of us, to, to Ryan's point, aren't exactly— particularly in the last 80 years in our country— aren't exactly educated. In how politics is a lagging indicator of where, where a society is going culturally and philosophically. Or as I often point out to my children and to anybody else who'll listen to me, um, the politicians and the government— you could frame it all in that kind of way if you want— they're always the last drunk person coming to the party at 4:30 AM, and everybody else has already moved down the street.

39:49 We're already on something else, and they show up last and they want to create all of the legislation. These two visions, as Sowell points out, really are surrounded by and really are consumed with the basic conceptions, as he says in his very first line in Chapter 2, um, their basic conceptions of the nature of man. So in a constrained vision, the moral limitations— I'm going to quote directly from this— in a constrained vision, the moral limitations of man in general and his egocentricity in particular were neither lamented by Adam Smith, who he quotes, uh, right at the beginning of, of that piece of the chapter, nor regarded as things to be changed.

40:31 They were treated as inherent facts of life, the basic constraint in his vision. The fundamental moral and social challenge was to make the best of the possibilities which existed within that constraint rather than dissipate energies in an attempt to change human nature. An attempt that Smith treated as both vain and pointless. Folks with a constrained vision tend to believe that the constraints that we have on ourselves at an individual level, that scaled up to a societal and cultural level, are tragedies of human nature that can only be ameliorated or negotiated through what sometimes seem

41:11 as though are brutal trade-offs. On the other side, the other rail, you have the unconstrained vision, and this is where he brings up William Godwin's work, Inquiry Concerning, uh, Political Justice. It was an immediate success upon its publication in England in 1793, and of course it was later on popularly associated with the French Revolution. And when Britain saw what was happening with France, where heads were rolling literally everywhere, Godwin was immediately shuddered to the back. Pache rose, Rosa Parks immediately shuddered to the back of the bus.

41:45 However, Godwin lays out the unconstrained vision of human nature in this way, and I quote directly from Sowell: Wherein Adam Smith's moral and socially beneficial behavior could be evoked from man only by incentives, in William Godwin's man's under— in William Godwin, man's understanding and disposition were capable of intentionally creating social benefits. Godwin regarded the intention to benefit others as being, quote unquote, of the ess— essence of virtue, and virtue in turn as being the road to human happiness.

42:22 Unintentional social benefits were treated by Godwin as scarcely worthy of notice. His was the unconstrained vision of human nature in which man was capable of directly feeling other people's needs as more important than his own, and therefore of consistently acting impartially even when his own interests or those of his family were involved. This was not meant as an empirical generalization about the way most people currently behaved. It was meant as a statement of the

42:53 underlying nature of human potential. Now, that idea has echoed down to our time through every révolutionnaire that's ever walked the planet since the French Revolution. All the way down to, well, all the way down to Mr. Momdami in New York City, or, or even down to the local level in your own town of a person who has a vision that is unconstrained for maybe, I don't know, putting in something as banal and uninteresting as a wastewater treatment plant versus people who would rather not have that thing in their backyard and have a more constrained vision

43:35 of where that should go. When we think about these visions, visions seed worldviews, and worldviews grow like trees, and they produce the fruit of identities. I would assert that in our era, we actually have it backward. We think that identity comes first and then worldview comes second. Actually, no, I think we have it deeply backward. Vision comes first, worldview comes second, and then we decide what our identity is. Identities then produce passions, fuel interests, and encourage or discourage the growth of skills.

44:07 Visions also provide groups— and this is where it's important for leaders to understand the difference between a constrained and an unconstrained vision— vision provide groups with goals to accomplish and benchmarks to attain. Visions are hard to articulate because they rely on leaders understanding themselves as well as understanding their followers. Now, once a vision is articulated, it is almost impossible to destroy it. This is why Rousseau and also the founding fathers continue to be the people whose visions we argue over even now, and in disparate places that have nothing to do with either America or France.

44:49 But this is also why marketers, propagandists, and quote unquote influencers really like manipulation, deceit, and tricks of language to hide

45:02 what their visions really are. So this leads to my next question for Ryan, next formalized question, and we're gonna kind of

45:11 kick off a conversation here. Um, Ryan, where have you experienced the outcomes? Because we can actually see this in practical ways. You and I were talking about this before we even got started. Where can you see the practical ways that a, an unconstrained or a constrained vision has shown

45:26 up in your own life? So, uh, before we get there, just seemingly, uh, the elected official or the savior sort of from the unconstrained, it, it, it has tapped into like the emotion of, of, of individuals and tapping into that emotion. Utilizing sort of charisma and language and

45:53 all the information, uh, to get— to, to somehow like commodify natural rights. Yes. And think that you're being done a favor. And it's this big— it's— there's a, there's a, you know, there's a line from, uh, my big factory planning The mother is, is kind of like trying to train the— or at least school the, the wife-to-be for the husband-to-be. And it was like how she deals with her husband, the, the patriarch, the old patriarch of the family. She said, well, I just manipulate him in a way to— so he thinks that it's his idea, and then he's all proud, and then they end up doing whatever she wants.

46:41 And so it's interesting to see, like, there's, there's so much like, you know, sort of dichotomous discourse in how these things kind of pop in and get applied into our contemporary times. So how it's for me, so as you know, a few years ago, I, I started it, I applied to be a substitute teacher in a in Ohio, living in Cincinnati, in the Mariemont School District, hired me. And, um, I said, I like the school so much, if you have a full-time position as a sub, I would love it. And they said, well, we think you're pretty great too.

47:21 So I, I reported there every single day for that entire school year. And they, uh, they liked and appreciated so much of what I did that, uh, the principal met with the school board and, uh, of the town, of the council, however they, you know, whatever bureaucracy determines this within. And at that point they said, uh, we think you're so great that we, we created a position that did not exist before for you to work with this population, which was, um, special needs, uh, And, um, and I was like, wow, that's incredible, that's wonderful.

48:03 I felt very honored. And when it came— then when it came to kind of like a salary, it ended up being pretty like, I don't know, about $100, $150 less a week than if when I was a substitute teacher. And so when I brought to their attention— and so this is a lot, it's As I was teasing through this the last, like, 24 hours, it is, uh, in, in, uh, in bipolar is something called a mixed episode. And so that's like mania and depression, you know, butting heads. That's a, that's a gross simplification.

48:41 However, for this conversation, I think it'll work. So between these two things, and this is— I'm quoting the principle in, in when I say this, Mr. Stout, there is no doubt— I believe there's no doubt that— I, I think there's no doubt that you can teach any class in this building. And I was like, oh wow, that sounds like I'm gonna have some sort of value that's, that's gonna be commensurate with pay, or vice versa. And it, and it, and it wasn't. And then when I presented, kind of like just restated his words back to him, it was just like a, well, this is just the way it is.

49:27 And so it was a lot of mixed messaging, um, whereas I think

49:39 there was a lot of, uh, I think there was a lot of, uh, constrained vision and unconstrained vision in, in that entire process, which seemed to drag out for probably about a 2-week period, and which ultimately, uh, resulted in me, uh, not accepting the position because I would have had to get a full-time job to keep that job. So that's insane. So it's saying I couldn't I couldn't wrap my head around that reality, right? And so it— that was also contributed to, you know, me moving back to New Jersey and being like, I don't even understand anything anymore, right?

50:23 Nothing, nothing really makes sense anymore. Um, and I mean, I even had like some educational components, uh, and it's like— and this is, this is where, you know, so So I was hired largely due to experience and having working with those populations. Uh, but I didn't have a piece of paper saying that I did so. And there was lots of— there was several people there who did have the, the piece of paper saying they did so, but were not good at their job because they had no experience with working with that population.

50:57 And I was, generally speaking, a few years older Uh, and I think that has in some cases some inherent value. And so we're bouncing back between the constrained and the unconstrained vision here. And it got, you

51:14 know, I, I think it— regardless of how much you articulate, the

51:24 system can get mucked up. In

51:28 those two sort of like, uh, irreconcilable— I think— please go. Yeah, yeah, no, I think as I was, I was making a note while you were talking. So one of the things I would note from that story, and that's great, um, I, I would think that experience is the, um— and I, and I think Saul would agree with this— is Experience is the field of— that's the field of the constrained vision, right? Because by experience, you understand what the trade-offs are in a way that's not theoretical. You understand them in terms of brutal truth, right?

52:09 In terms of the, the brute force of reality. Uh, at the close of the show today, I'm gonna talk a little bit about ceilings. Right? Because our, our, our skills hit a ceiling, right? Our passions hit a ceiling. Our interests hit a ceiling, right? Um, in my own life, I've started projects, I've ended projects. Um, I've, I've gained money and I've lost money and I've done all these kinds of things, right? Those all go

52:37 into the bucket of experience, but there's no way to measure that other than to look at it in terms of trade-offs and dealing with the world as it is. That's experience. But credentialing— credentialing uncoupled from experience— let me be very clear about this— credentialing uncoupled from experience is the provenance, or is the province, such as it were, of the unconstrained vision. And even Sowell brings this up in his chapter when he talks about social processes, right? So social processes exist to create outcomes.

53:16 Well, who better to lead on those outcomes than people with a theoretical vision of, of man's nature? And where do we go for a theoretical vision of man's nature? Where do we go to really reinforce our shoulds rather than what actually is? Well, we go to credentialing. We go

53:37 to licensing. We go to— academic education. We don't go to the plumber on the street who's actually plumbed for 30 years and say, hey, you know how to plumb for 30 years, come over here. No, no, no, no, no. Instead, we go get the person who has come to plumbing with all this theory, and we say, come over here and plumb for us. And then he costs 4 times as much as the person who's plumbing— never picked up a wrench in his life, right? And no understands the theory of plumbing, but not exactly the practice.

54:13 One of the great, one of the great, one of the great movies in the last couple years that I actually bothered to go to the theater about and go to the bath— go, or go to the theater to see was, um, Oppenheimer, right? Directed by Christopher Nolan. And there's a great line that Robert Oppenheimer, played by Cillian Murphy, Um, has in that, um, in that, uh, in that movie, um, he says to one of his fellow physicists, I believe it was in when, when they finally got to New Mexico, um, in like the middle of the second act or something, he says, at a certain point you have to move from theory to practice.

54:48 At a certain point you have to move from the credentialed unconstrained vision to the experience and the constraints that experience will put upon you. Because of the ceilings of reality. And this is exactly what I think you're talking about. Yeah, it was really brutal. Like, I never— it's— there's, there's nothing, um, more

55:16 sobering than thinking you'd had, uh, you know, in some sense kind of arrived at

55:26 a greater purpose contributing to, society in a very immediate, well, way with, with working with children. And they love me, I love them. It was a, it was a, it was a very symbiotic relationship in that regard. Symbiotically mutual. And only to be told by someone who was initially— this was, this was through other teachers telling me Yeah, that guy was a teacher, but he sucked as a teacher, so they moved him to here, and he sucked at that position, and then they moved to— so this one guy was in the school district, this was his fourth job, and they had to like create a job just to keep— because he had all these credentials, he had all these degrees saying that he was X, Y, and Z, but he couldn't perform any of those jobs to the level of decent.

56:18 And so not being a serviceable person, they'd rather hang on to the credentials than— and, you know, um, in addition to that, one of my favorite lines— my favorite line in The King's Speech, when the wife of, uh, um, the wife says, I thought you were a doctor, I thought you were a language specialist, you know, he goes, no, I never said I was any of those things. Well, she was like, well, if you're not a doctor, then you can't possibly help him. And so, yeah, well, and, well, and, and, and tipping my hand here a little bit, I think one of the, one of the, one of the challenges— so Ryan asked me, um, before we, we hit record, I want to sort of answer this question now sort of a little bit more publicly, but he asked me, um, you know, do I think the pendulum is swinging back from the excesses of the 2010s, huh, and the first part of the 2020s politically in this country and culturally in America right now and in the West overall.

57:26 And, and, um, the way that I would like to answer this question is this: the pendulum always swings away from an unconstrained vision when the unconstrained vision and the proponents of— the proponents of that vision hit upon the ceiling of reality, and, and, and reality is undefeated. It just is. So to your point about the gentleman who's moved through 4 different roles and has been terrible and suboptimal and— and, you know, and incompetent at all of them— he may survive the pendulum swing. In his role, for sure, he might survive the pendulum swing.

58:08 And, and, and he's rolling the dice, right? He's rolling the dice that he'll be able to survive the pendulum swing, batten down the hatches. And this is what bureaucracy does. Individuals in bureaucracies, um, batten down the hatches and then they, they try to ride out the storm, right? Um, it's this idea that, uh, you know, pendulum swings are temporary, but I'm permanent. Okay. Except the problem is, or the, or the, the challenge there is if the pendulum swings back too far, not too far, but swings back further than what, you know, initially maybe a credentialed vision that comes from an uncon— or credentialed outcome that comes from an unconstrained vision, um, would appreciate.

58:48 Eventually what winds up happening is house is cleaned and, and, and doge is the Elon Musk's doge is the, is the example to which I will point as the lived example, um, that may be coming to a bureaucrat near you, right? And when we see these things happening at the local level, not at merely the national level where they can be kind of ignored because it's over there, right? At the local level, then we can say with some certainty that yeah, the pendulum is indeed moving Towards a more constrained vision.

59:24 Now, the question we can argue, and folks with an unconstrained vision are going to argue about this with me, I can already hear them, and they're going to say, well, is this a good— well, we have to define what we mean by good. And so in a, in a constrained vision, good is just which trade-offs are better or worse, right? Which are going to come, come to a better or worse outcome, or Or in the case of not better or not worse, optimal or suboptimal. Let's just frame it that way, right? Whereas in an unconstrained vision, good means literally a moral cosmic good.

1:00:00 And the problem is we can't get to a moral cosmic good on this side of heaven. That is unattainable. Even through revolution, that is unattainable because what all the revolutionaries eventually find out is that the people who are selling you an unconstrained vision eventually

1:00:20 wind up constraining you, usually

1:00:24 physically. There's no lack of evidence. Yeah, but, but, okay, but, but Soul, Soul brings up— Soul brings up an excellent point when he talks about visions of, um, I think it's in the next chapter, visions of social processes, or it might be in— hold on a second, let me pull it here. Um, because he talks about— obviously he talks about the social processes, time, freedom of justice, right? And you have the same— I think you have the same edition that I do. So he talks about it here. I mean, we've already mentioned this before.

1:00:50 It's on page 63, Youth and Age, right? So with experience and articulated— just to quote from Sowell, right? With experience and articulated rationality having such vast differing weights in the two visions, it is virtually inevitable that the young and the old should be seen in correspondingly different terms. In the constrained vision, which depends upon, quote, the least fallible guide of human experience, close quote. The young cannot be compared to the old in a word we throw around a lot on this show— wisdom.

1:01:24 Adam Smith considered it unbecoming for the young to have the same confidence as the old. Wow. Can we bring that back? Ha ha ha. The wisest and the most experienced are generally the least credulous, he said., and this depended crucially on time. Quote, it is acquired wisdom and experience only that teach incredulity, and they very seldom teach it enough. Close quote. By contrast, when knowledge and reason are conceived as articulated rationality— that's credentialism, folks— as in the unconstrained vision, the young have considerable advantages.

1:02:05 Uh, Condorcet, uh, French theoretician, wrote in the 18th century, quote, a young man now leaving school possesses more real knowledge than the greatest geniuses, not of antiquity, but even of the 17th century, could have acquired after long study, close quote. Now we laugh, but we're not any better. Back to soul in an unconstrained vision where much of the malaise of the world is due to existing institutions and existing beliefs. Those least habituated to those institutions and beliefs are readily seen as especially valuable for making needed social changes.

1:02:45 According to William Godwin from his 1793 book, quote, the next generation will not have so many prejudices to subdue. Suppose a despotic nation —by some revolution in its affairs—possessed of freedom. Um, the children of the present race will be bred in more firm and independent habits of thinking. The suppleness, the timidity, and the vicious dexterity of their fathers will give place to an erect mien and a clear and decisive judgment. Close quote. Every swing towards an unconstrained vision relies on the children and the youth to lead it.

1:03:21 And this is what we are seeing in our culture right now. I just saw a video the other day of high school students fighting ICE folks and their local, like, cops, right, to, like, stop ICE from going into schools and taking out illegal immigrant kids. And I'm like, who— why are we using children as shock troops to fight adult battles in America in 2026. Why are we doing that? But that's the ultimate expression of an unconstrained pigeon. And I would venture to say, it's part of my French, uh, if I didn't have a brother, my brother didn't have me, and this was— we were living in— if we didn't kick the absolute shit out of

1:04:16 each each other on a daily basis. We may have been fighting those people too, but you understand and learn something as a child. This is what animals— this is what puppies learn. This is what animals in the wild learn when siblings— when bear cubs fight, when little bears fight, when you fight, you rough and tumble with, uh, what could be your sort of equal. And you understand that, uh, you start to understand what the limitations are, that it's probably not going to work out for you if you walk up to somebody and pull their gun out of the holster and then you get smacked upside the head.

1:04:54 Oh, and you're going to say that you were violated somehow. And listen, take all the political— take all of that out of it. Just in an incident, just in an

1:05:09 isolated incident of someone doing that behavior. You're not the victim if

1:05:17 you're provoking the man with the gun. I have not commented on the death of the two individuals who were protesting ICE activities in Minneapolis, Minnesota on this show because that's very much current events. And I have— where this is not a show about current events, this is a show about necessarily being timeless, such as it were, right? Because our human problems are indeed timeless. With that being said, let me comment very briefly. If you're a grown adult, man or woman, and you do not have an understanding, to Ryan's point, that another grown adult with a gun and a badge who has been granted power by the state— if you don't understand that, that individual, if you muck with them, the rules of engagement suddenly shift.

1:06:17 Then if you're just mucking with someone who doesn't have a badge and doesn't have a gun And has it been imbued by the power of the state? And again, to Ryan's point, take out all of the political implications out of it, take out all the sociocultural whatever out of it. If you don't understand the fundamental difference between interacting with, with those people in two different manners, then you are behaving quite frankly, not any better. Than the children that are in those videos fighting ICE agents.

1:06:55 You're behaving no better than a 14-year-old or a 12-year-old or a 13-year-old or a 15-year-old. And you need to go back because what has happened is you have been infantilized at a certain point in your mindset. And this is what Godwin was seeking to— Or this is what the, the, the purveyors of an unconstrained vision believe, or this is— these are the people who the purveyors of an unconstrained vision believe will be the shock troops towards a glorious, socially changed, dare I say, even utopian future.

1:07:31 And these are the people that a person with an unconstrained vision looks at and says, they

1:07:39 don't have wisdom. What are we doing? I'll bring up, I'll bring up a personal example that takes badges and all that out of the situation. I'm living— sure, it is 1999. I have a friend who is 6'4", 240 pounds. I played baseball with him, big dude, carry himself, hold himself. We're walking down the street in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and there is, uh, a couple guys, uh, standing on the corner —on George Street. And one of the guys, he's like doing karate to no one. He like is fighting the air, you know, and he's a big dude himself.

1:08:15 And he stands, and out of nowhere, we could see from about a half a block away, and this dude just jumps up and does a spin kick, right? And Ben, who's this large person who can handle himself, uh, he crosses the street, and I, I as we're crossing the street together. I was like, you scared of that guy? He goes, I'm not scared of anything on land. However, if I can avoid that by simply crossing the street, then I'm going to cross the street to avoid it. There's no need for me to do that. And so to take politics and take badges and all that shit out of the situation, it's, it's more of, uh, you know, what are you willing to risk, right?

1:08:57 And understand exactly, you can do whatever you want Mom, thank you. You can do whatever you want, hey son, but you're gonna pay for it. You're gonna pay for it. Well, and the thing, one of the things that gets you really, really, if you're unconstrained or if you're constrained in your vision of the world and in your worldviews and your politics, I would recommend, this is just sort of a brief recommendation before we, we switch to another topic about social processes. I would recommend taking a good, a good self-defense class.

1:09:36 Just take a good self-defense class, not martial arts. I'm not recommending that. I always talk about jiu-jitsu at least once on this show. This is gonna be the moment I talk about it. Yes, I'm in jiu-jitsu. There's nothing that makes you— there's nothing that moves you from being unconstrained to being constrained like being in a, like being in a jiu-jitsu engagement with somebody who's like 113 pounds and you think you can take them and then they just hold you for 5 minutes. And you can't do nothing.

1:10:00 There's nothing more— there's nothing that will move you from an unconstrained vision to an understanding of where the ceiling is on your skills and interests and abilities. Even if you are, to Ryan's point, you know, 6'4" and 240. Okay, cool. You're 6'4" and 240. Let's grapple. Go ahead and grab me. If I know a little bit of something and I'm in jiu-jitsu, and I don't even have to know even that much, like if I'm 2 or 3 years in, I'm still a white belt. I'm still the beginner, right? Trust me. Go ahead, grab me.

1:10:32 Let's, let's just see how this goes. But there's that kinds of— those kinds of experiences, grappling, boxing, combatives, self-defense. Um, I would assert team sports don't do it as well because most things to your point about crossing the street are 1v1 and then other people usually, usually come in. We can see this on videos. You know, of how like things work in the world and most people have a vision of themselves. And this is why I like your friend's perspective, cuz I actually have that perspective as well.

1:11:04 They have a vision of themselves as, uh, I'm going to do this unconstrained thing inside of this fight and it's just gonna magically work. Right. And I don't have a problem with you having an unconstrained vision about your physical prowess. Um, I do have a problem, however, when your unconstrained vision doesn't work out in the constraints of reality. In comparison to somebody else who, who may have also had an unconstrained vision, but has earned the right to have that because they put in the time and they put in

1:11:35 the constraints. So my pro tip is go do, go do some kind of self-defense something. Go put yourself under some kind of physical pressure. Go do that. And your vision will very quickly change for sure. Yeah, there's nothing like—— to steal a word from Robert Highland, there's nothing like grokking powerlessness to understand that you are not the end-all be-all. There you go. That's right. Well, and, and, and you have to get that. You have to get that message. As I have gone on my jiu-jitsu journey, that message continually gets updated.

1:12:12 The OS continues to get updated as you go higher and higher because you actually— what you realize is how little you actually know about whatever it is you're actually doing and where your ceilings actually are. Okay, back to the book, back to A Conflict of Visions: The Ideological Origins of Political Struggle. So both, um, by Thomas Sowell. Both, um, Ryan and I have the 2007 Basic Books edition, um, and it is a revised edition. Um, if you could find the original of it, I recommend going and There you go.

1:12:46 I'd recommend going out and getting it. It has this great blue cover. I love it. It looks— and when you put it on your shelf, you'll look smarter. So just go out and get it to put it on your shelf. You'll just look smarter from it. Uh, chapter 4, I'd like to talk a little bit about this because this is actually very important. So chapter 4 is about visions of social processes, right? And we are trapped in the social processes of our time. And this is why this chapter is very, very interesting to me.

1:13:13 So He covers several different areas. First, he talks about order and design. He talks about process costs because he's an economist and he believes in those. Then he talks about freedom and justice. And finally, he wraps up the chapter with implications, right, around freedom and justice and order and, um, and order and design for both the constrained and the unconstrained vision. He opens his chapter— he opens up Chapter 4 with this idea. He says, differences in the visions of human nature are reflected in differences in the vision of social processes.

1:13:50 It is not merely the social processes are seen as mitigating the shortcomings of human nature in one vision and as aggravating them in another. The very ways that social processes function and malfunction are seen differently by the two different visions, which differ not only in their view of morality, but also in their view of— and this gets back to consequence— causation. Social processes cover an enormous range from language to warfare, from love to economic systems. Each of these in turn comes in a great variety of forms.

1:14:25 But there are also some things in common among social processes in general. Whether viewed within the framework of a constrained or an unconstrained vision, social processes have certain characteristics and order, whether or not intentionally designed. Social processes also, and this is hugely important to remember, take time and have costs. Each of these and other aspects of social processes is seen differently in the constrained and the unconstrained vision. This is— hugely important for us to understand, particularly when we look at on page 91, visions of freedom and justice.

1:15:06 So I'm going to make a point here and then I'm going to go into a little bit of my analysis and I'm going to ask, I'm going to ask, uh, going to ask Ryan a question here. The two visions judge social processes by fundamentally different criteria. This is under freedom and justice. In the unconstrained vision, where individual intentions and individual justice are central, it is enormously important whether individual rewards are merited or merely reflect privilege and luck. Both individual leaders and social policies ought to be chosen with a view to their dedication to the goal of ending privilege and promoting either equality or merit.

1:15:44 Where have we heard this today? But in the constrained vision, Social processes are to be judged by their ability— this is important— to extract the most social benefit from man's limited potentialities at the lowest cost. This means rewarding scarce and valuable abilities, which include abilities which may be mere windfall gains to the individual possessing them, being in many cases either natural endowments or skills cultivated at prosperous parents' expense, but too costly for most people's means.

1:16:16 Sometimes the scarce and valuable traits to be rewarded may include skills and orientations picked up almost by osmosis from being raised in families where they exist. This is the core— close quote— this is the core of

1:16:36 all of our arguments today around social justice. When we think about —how this comes about. There is an idea in the field of psychology called locus of control. Now, locus of control is a very old idea. It's from at least the 1950s. And, um, it basically states that some people believe that they are in control of their own lives. And people who have a high locus of control, um, don't really care too much about the input of others from the outside world. They're not driven by external factors. They're not driven by social constraints.

1:17:12 Okay. Other people who have a different locus of control, they have a more of a, more of an external locus of control, engage in constant reaction and response to the vagaries of inputs on them from the outside world. I have people in my family who are like this. Locus of control, of course, at a psychological level, represents the individual application of the larger societal ideas that Soul is addressing. People with an unconstrained vision have a high external locus of control. They are very much consumed by how external processes are impacting their ability to engage in the world.

1:17:51 Whereas people with a high in— with a constrained vision have a high internal locus of control. They are very much consumed with what are the skills, abilities, talents, and passions and of course interests, and what is the personal ceiling that they can reach before they, well, get to their goal. The challenge of our time is that in our public lives— and this is the core idea here, folks— in our public lives, politicians, celebrities, marketers, and leaders sell people on an unconstrained vision for their lives.

1:18:27 They sell audiences on that. But when people look around at how they actually live with each other, constraints,

1:18:42 ceilings on their activities bind them brutally everywhere. Ryan, I think one of the things we're missing in our time— this is a, this is an idea that I'd like to explore with you. I think one of the

1:18:54 things we're missing in our time is an arising among elite leaders. So elite leaders sell an unconstrained vision, but if you look at their private lives, they live very constrained lives, but they don't sell that. You see this in marriage rates, right? So among upper income people, people making what we consider to be upper income, which in this society now is considered to be $250,000 and or more. That's considered to be upper income. Among those people, the rates of divorce are single digits.

1:19:31 They're very low. Whereas the ranks— the rates of consistent marriage— now, whether those marriages are happy, sad, whether there's cheating, adultery, shenanigans, who knows, right? We're not talking about any of that. Just the two people stayed married, it didn't divorce. The rates of staying married are incredibly high in the double digits. I think it's like 60, 80%, 90%. It's up there. But when you look at how those people, those celebrities particularly, but politicians as well, sell the vision of unconstrained good, human good, the people below that, uh, class rank or class distinction or wealth distinction.

1:20:17 Their divorce rates are 50%, huh, or more in some cases, depending upon which racial, ethnic, socioeconomic group you look at that's below the $250,000 a year rate. And their marriage rates are roughly the staying marriage rates are roughly the same, roughly the same level. So there is a disconnect between what the elites and the politicians and the marketers sell and how they actually live. And I think the challenge of our time and the challenge going forward to the future is going to be how do we get more serious elites to actually sell the vision of

1:20:57 the life they live in a serious way so that people will switch their behavior over. Because no one's list— I will say no one, very few people are listening to you and I. I mean, people are listening, but very few, let's be honest. And if Taylor Swift and Travis

1:21:18 Kelce get married, they're probably gonna stay married. And all of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce's fans though, are probably going to buy into the unconstrained vision of their lives and get divorced chasing and looking for— right. Looking for their own Taylor Swift or their own Travis Kelce. How do we fix this disconnect? Because this is, this is the challenge of our time on freedom, justice, equality. If we want to fix any of the social— like, if we want to fix child poverty, the easiest fix for child poverty— Sol has even written on this— the easiest fix for child poverty is for two parents to stay married regardless of circumstance.

1:21:51 That's the easiest fix for child poverty. That's how you break this poverty— the

1:21:57 child

1:22:03 poverty cycle. That's how you do it. Thoughts? How do we get people to start

1:22:14 selling more of a constraint? That's the question. But, um, it's funny, the, the question that Sol has asked at the beginning, and I either referenced it or said it, uh, when we started or before the podcast, education usually sorted out this nonsense, right? But, you know, as he said, uh, nonsense became part of the curriculum. So, right, uh, and then, so there's always a quote, John Adams quote, that I, I like to reference, uh, when because there's no panacea, there's no overnight, there's no quick fix, um, and both with the constrained and unconstrained mentioned the process in the last segment.

1:23:03 And John Adams: I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children

1:23:29 a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, stat— statutory tapestry and porcelain. Yeah, so, and also what we talked about prior to the podcast was the foundation. I think it's solid. And, and this is often, you know, I would venture to say that people who have, uh, a daily or regular regimented, uh, spiritual practice on some level have a less, uh, of a divorce rate than, than, than otherwise. Uh, I know finances contribute to that

1:24:14 as well, but it has to— I mean, but I know, I know poor people who— I know poor people who stayed married, to your point. I know poor people who stayed married who had a strong— who have, not had— who have a strong religious foundation, right? Um, And it can be asserted, I think, that among— I, I picked on celebrities and elite and elites. I use them all in the same sort of bailiwick. I don't, I don't

1:24:45 separate them out, but I would assert that they are probably going to sell more of a constrained vision if they have religion

1:24:59 and a spiritual practice versus if they don't. And I think we see this in the, the revelations to the normal public— not us who have been involved in conspiracy theories since the mid-1990s, but to the regular news-watching public— of the shenanigans— and I'm not using that term, uh, lightly— going on with Jeffrey Epstein. On his island, and we don't

1:25:28 need to go into the specifics of that. I don't know how we get— I don't know if this is a case of the elites doing what elites always do, which is, I got mine and I'm going to pull up the ladder. But it's a, it's a, it's a psychological pulling up or a, or a, or a spiritual pulling up or a social pulling up. As much as it is a material pulling up. Saul, even in one of the interviews, he's talking about how

1:26:00 this exact thing on

1:26:04 how, uh, Obama, who, uh, very successful financially, uh, and on the left— and it's the left versus the right and, and what their capacities to sort of like, or what the, the data tells

1:26:21 us of who contributes or donates more to, uh, uh, um, charity. Charity, yeah. And so, and he said the greatest example is Obama, who's doing very well for himself, has a brother in Africa who's living in complete destitution, right? And so if you— so it's back to, are you going to practice what you preach? Like, and so, and well, so, so here's I think this is something that kind of coincides with the constraint versus the unconstrained is, you know, the answer is we're talking about the, uh, internal versus external locus.

1:26:53 Okay. Uh, internal locus is probably a great place to start because the change has to come from within. If you don't want to change, then it's not going to— you need to start yourself. You're not going to change— you're going to change yourself before you're going to change anybody else. And so where the, uh, I think the,

1:27:12 the hiccup and some of the confusion can come because I mean media and what our elites and are selling is this one particular thing and it works very much so on the superficial level of looks and aesthetics. And now what they're selling is a lot of times is, is like you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you— like, it's a lot of me, love, self, self, self. And we're— and it's

1:27:43 interesting because the answer is yes, to look inward. It's not to look— and so it's— there's a— is a confusing message there. It's like, no, bring all the attention to your— to yourself. And like, readings like, uh, you know, the epidemic of narcissism

1:28:03 or whatever you want to throw in the Uh, uh, but that's— don't stop it— the hat you're wearing or the, or the clothes that are on your back or the name brag— name brand that's on the tag. You know, there has to be something like deeper, and that's where the absence of spirituality and the spiritual bankruptcy, you know, America and much of the world as well, kind of get, uh, confused and diverted from the things that are, I think, healthier is for us to create and contribute

1:28:36 that solid foundation. And technology has created such, uh, demand for immediacy, whether good, bad, or indifferent, that, uh, much like I was talking before the show, you know, can get pretty confusing out there. And if you don't have some of those, uh, foundations or those, those, uh, um, yeah, those foundations in place, then when things get really, really rough, you know, you may be drawn towards something that looks good on the outside and is shiny. However, you know, it just decamps your inside.

1:29:10 Yeah, yeah. And, and so, yeah, so that's, you know, I— yeah, taking a look inwards, um, and the best way that I have found personally for those things. There is an educational component. There's like, what you're— what you, you know, what am I feeding my body? What am I feeding my brain? What am I feeding my soul? X, Y, and Z. Uh, but I think the closest and

1:29:40 the most direct and quickest way to regain, uh, um, some sort of license over the internal locus of control is, is helping being of service in the community. And so it does a couple things. You're not thinking about yourself, and yet you're providing something that otherwise individuals would not be able to do for themselves, or you contribute to the betterment of others. And by virtue— and not just— not virtue in the sense of the unconstrained solving problems, virtue in the sense of, uh, let's call it, uh, self-esteem almost, or, or some sort of, uh, like higher calling or some sort of, um, reflection of what you would like to see in the world.

1:30:24 And you're contributing in that way instead of being some sort of like vacuous individual who is aspiring to claw their way to the top of the mountain because, you know, their favorite, uh, reality TV show is sitting on the top of the mountain and that's where they need to be as well. When we think about the solutions to problems, I talked about the, the swing of the pendulum, right? I have more and more become convinced that, and this is, you know, not been recently, but I've more and more become convinced that our— the solution to all of our problems at a leadership level is all local.

1:31:03 It's all localized solutions to, to the, to these problems., right? So to your point about serving

1:31:14 in your local community, right? If I want to— if I want to have an unconstrained vision, or if I'm the owner or the purveyor of an unconstrained vision, the best place to work that unconstrained vision out is not at the— to your point, the top of the mountain where the reality TV star show lives. That's not the best place to work it out. The best place to work out that unconstrained vision is— I'm gonna pull a Jordan Peterson here, but inside of my own family, making my own bed. And that'll give me— trying to fix my uncle of his systemic racism is going to give me all the challenges I could ever possibly need for the rest of

1:32:02 my life. That's as hyperlocal as it can get. Yeah. And, and, and that's for the, that's for the unconstrained vision. For the constrained vision, the challenge is on the opposite end where if I am only constrained to the local, I limit my ability to see that while I fixed my neighborhood and picked up the trash in my neighborhood. Those neighbors over there on the other street are also my neighbors in the, in the sort of biblical, who is my neighbor sense, right? The New Testament biblical sense.

1:32:36 And I probably need to take a group of neighbors from my street who have cleaned up my street, go one street over. I don't have to clean up the whole town, go one street over, introduce myself to those neighbors and go, hey,

1:33:09 you want to pick up— now the constrained vision. And then I have to, um, and then I have to, and then I have to figure out after I convince my neighbors to go one neighborhood over Then I have to convince those neighbors one neighborhood over that it's worthwhile to pick up their own trash and that we're going to help them and to convince them that we're not going to fool them. All of the, all of the challenges that I'm looking to scale up in an unconstrained vision or in a constrained vision are present in my local circumstances.

1:33:40 And this gets to locus of control too, in my mind, where I think So one of the things we don't talk about a lot on the show is self-awareness, which we probably should talk about it more, but self-awareness is not self-esteem, nor is it navel gazing. Self-awareness is the ability to look at what you've done or not done and say, whether it's in a spiritual practice, a meditative practice, whether it's driving home in your car after work without the radio on, without a distraction. With turning off the white noise in your head, looking at what you've done, looking at what you've accomplished and saying, is this absolutely the best way for me to have been oriented today?

1:34:22 And if the little voice inside of you says, no, you could have been oriented differently. And then you start talking to that little voice and you start saying, hey, how

1:34:34 could I been oriented differently? Now we're not coming. Pache Christianity, we're not coming from a space of, uh, conviction— or no, I'm sorry, not, not conviction. We're not coming from a space of condemnation. We are instead coming from a space of conviction. And I think that voice changes from conviction to condemnation because the conviction is positive, condemnation is negative. We switch from that, or that voice switches internally when we know we haven't gotten there. And I've seen this even in my own life, when we know we haven't gotten there And

1:35:08 we think that the thing is all on us without bringing other people in because we were meant to be in relationship. And to your point, education, I would put relationships in there. All of it goes in and it makes it a very complicated soup. And at the end of the day, you wanna keep that complication as local as possible. So again, if you wanna, if you wanna fight systemic racism, start in your own family. Seriously. Don't start with like Shopify or Spotify or like the United Way or your, even your local government.

1:35:40 Don't start there. Start with your racist Uncle Dan or your racist Aunt Bertha. Start there. Like, go bother them. Try to change them. This self-awareness piece

1:35:52 is, you know, we talked about, uh, you know, um, uh, how do you, you know, how do you, how do you influence someone to move from a

1:36:04 closed mindset to a growth mindset, right? And, and, um, and, and something I brought up in the beginning of the, of the, uh, the show, um, and this was really throughout the— I think it's close to 26 or 27 years we've known each other, but whatever, um, is, is the idea or in the practice of you know, leadership and conflict resolution. So probably for the longest time, I viewed those things as something out— like, unattainable. And it's not something to attain. It's more of a— I would think of practice.

1:36:44 And, and you're talking about like, how do you switch that mindset? And it's, it's You know, what I've really been acutely aware of the last 6 months is, wow, what, what can I contribute to this conflict or this, this interaction that is, uh, based more on a conflict resolution, uh, uh, and, um, community-oriented than self-serving? And as we know very much so in the familial context, like if you were taking care of your family, you're also being taken care of. And so it's just that it's the, the, it's the process is not immediate.

1:37:26 And so it's not, you know, it's not something that's easily gravitated towards because, you know, as I mentioned a few minutes ago, um, wanting to see results immediately. Well, and I also think, I think we're the generation The tail end of Gen X, man. Like, I'm going back to this— this is one of the themes we're exploring on this show this year is restoration, right? And who's going to be the leaders on restoration? And if we want to make it about generations, quite frankly, I think that those of us who are on the, the younger end of Gen X, so those of us who are in that, that, that 46 to 52-year-old age bracket, those of us who are floating in there Those of us who are young enough to have some common cause with older millennials, but are also, um, old enough to look at Gen Zers who are in their 20s and 30s and kind of go, what are you doing exactly?

1:38:27 Those of us who are able to sort of walk that tightrope generationally in our families first are going to be the vanguards of leadership. Um, around this space. And by the way, the reason we're going to be the vanguards, partially it's practical. The boomers, for all of the knocks against them and all of the, all of the, all of the vitriol spewed against them, are passing into history whether we like it or not. They just are. This is what's happening. And over the next 10 to 15 years. It will happen at a quickening pace that will be so shocking to us younger Gen Xers.

1:39:07 It will take us by surprise if we're not prepared. So that's number one. So I want, I want us to all get prepared. This is me talking to me as well as me talking to Ryan as me talking to all of you. We need to get prepared. We need to get our crap together. It's time, right? Because one day we will be looked to by the Gen Zers and by the younger millennials and even by the older millennials, and we will be taken to task for what we didn't do as far as leadership in our own families, the opportunities we missed inside of our own families, regardless of whether or not where our visions are, we are going to be taken to task.

1:39:43 And I don't think we're ready for— we ain't, we ain't ready for that reckoning. That's— we're not wired for it. So that's going to be interesting, but I want us to avoid that. We're really good at avoiding the reckoning. So Gen Xers, I'm talking to you because you know what I'm talking about. We're really good at avoiding the reckoning and this is how we do it. Okay. This is, this is the key, uh, that you hang around your neck in case you're gonna be latchkey. Okay. So I'm giving it to you right now.

1:40:05 Okay. Um, the, the second thing is, the second thought that I have is as we turn the corner on the, the, the, the chaos of the country that's we've been through in the last 25 years, I think the thing that we have to set down Uh, and I said this, this before, a couple of episodes ago, we were talking about The Great Instauration and a couple of other things, a couple of other books that we've talked about earlier this year, earlier this season. But I think we have to set down irony and cynical detachment in order to make this work.

1:40:40 And we have to be sincere. And that, again, I'm speaking to my Gen X folks out here, young and old. I understand how hard this is going to be. Trust me, I know, but we have to start putting it down. And the easiest and safest place for us to put down our, our ironic detachment and put down our cynicism and pick up sincerity and actually lead with sincerity is going to be in our families. So that's my good word. And we have to do it sincerely. We cannot do it from another place. Can we joke and be funny and all that other kind of stuff on the, on the— absolutely, that's okay.

1:41:22 But when we're leading in our families on these things, whether it's anti-racism or anti-taxism or whatever you want to lead on, even just like dealing with undealt with trauma, right? And saying, I forgive you and I love you and everything will be fine. Giving that forgiveness and taking in that forgiveness. We have to do it with sincerity, and that's going to be really hard for us as a generational cohort. But just

1:41:52 like most things, I think we can manage it. I don't think we have a choice, and I think we

1:42:01 could manage it. And that's so much— I mean, trade-off. Absolutely. Manageability, manageability is not a solution. There's no— there's no— because it's— so looking at these two, the, the outlines of the, the constrained versus the non-constrained and sort of

1:42:21 like the breakdowns of each one, uh, it just— if you, if you look at— go back to antiquity, it just, it just seems that we're talking about, uh, man's nature is flawed, selfish, and and, and thick. I mean, we've been essentially, as a species, we're dealing with the exact same problems with different outfits. Yes. For the last 100,000 years. Yes. If not longer, who knows? We don't even get into the hollow moon. We've got so much to talk about. No, huh? What Martians— but anyway, um, Yeah, I mean, it's, it's, it's the human condition.

1:43:04 And so the human condition hasn't really changed. No. And so— no, and we use technology to gild the lily. And we think that because we've, we've— I've said this before on the show, right? We think that because we've, we've achieved a certain level of technological expertise, that somehow we've, we've chipped a great,

1:43:28 a great piece off of the rock of reality. And, and we haven't, but that's a, but that's an unconstrained, that's a constrained vision, right? So I have a constraint. I do. I will admit I have a constraint. If you haven't, if you haven't already guessed it, I have a constrained vision. I mean, that's the point of this podcast is that, you know, and I do frame it and we're, we're coming up towards the end of our last, last sort of segment here where we talk about solutions to problems. I do frame solutions to problems as solutions because That's what people like to hear.

1:43:57 They like to hear that, hey, I'm gonna solve this and then, you know, it's gonna be done. And there were— leaders love to hear that. I'm gonna solve this problem. It's gonna be done. Use some of the things Hasan and his guests talked about and then we're gonna move on,

1:44:15 right? Except the reality is, to, to Ryan's point, we can either be ground down by the idea that we're always gonna be facing this again and again and again. And so we can fall into cynicism and nihilism. That's very easy. I mean, that's what Camus and Sartre, and before him, before those, those boys, Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky, that's what all those guys would say, right? Fall into nihilism, fall into existential dread. Well, I'm gonna stick up for Camus because he was an absurdist above all, and his philosophy was if you, uh, essentially He's like, if, uh, you're not— it's not, you know, he still talks about in, uh, Mythos Sisyphus, you know, the really— suicide or not, blah blah blah, right?

1:45:03 Yeah, he, he said, uh, well, first we must not despair. Number two, number two, he said, if you're having such difficulties with life and it is, uh, you're combative with the idea of having to live. He said, so, so the absurdist, he said, you're not combating life. He said, you are resisting death. And so if you are stuck in that place of you don't want to live and be here because X, Y, and Z challenges, and, and, and, and so don't look at it as an obligation to live life. It is, it is, it is a resistance, you're, you're denying death.

1:45:47 You're not letting death have the satisfaction of taking you down. Okay, Kevin, I'll grant you Camus might have the minority report on this. I'll give you that. I'll give you that he might have the minority report on this. And by the way, I do agree with half of that. Eh, maybe an eighth of that. Um, yes, to despair is a sin, by the way. That's, that's even in Christian circles. To despair is a sin. It's sinful. Like, because our hope lies not in despair, right? It doesn't lie in, um, looking into the abyss, to paraphrase from, from Nietzsche, and seeing the abyss, you

1:46:25 know, uh, stare back through, uh, back through you. And because we are human,

1:46:37 we tend to fall into that abyss very often. However, I don't think that that's the, that's the way we, we, we do the trade-offs, right? And so solutions are sexy, right? Except of course, when we're just arguing about the problem, which is what we've been pretty much doing for the last 25 years, right? Argue about the problem, argue about the problem, argue about the problem. And I get so sick of arguing about the problem. Done arguing about the problem. We know what the problem is. Great. We got the problem.

1:47:00 And, and actually with this book, what we've done is we further refined what the problem is. So now we can actually have a conversation about What are the potential trade-offs and what are the results? What are the outcomes of those trade-offs? What is the causality? Another area we don't understand that leads to these kinds of trade-offs. And then what are the consequences, right? We can sort of have that discussion rather than burying our heads in the sand and just kicking the can down the road, which we've been doing for the last 25 years in a chaotic culture.

1:47:31 You brought up the 2008, you know,, you know, economic crisis, right? Or I bring up to revisit again our current, our current contratrompe around illegal immigration. There are simple but not easy solutions. And maybe I shouldn't say solutions. There are simple but not easy trade-offs for these two kinds of problems. And the issue is the people who would have to execute those trade-offs or the people whose ox would be gored. Buy those trade-offs, don't want their ox gourd. And if they would just say that, like if the banker would just say, I don't want to go to jail.

1:48:10 I did what the federal government told me to do. Go yell at that guy. The banker would save his, his, his head from the noose. Instead, he doesn't say that. He just sort of hides and weasels around and goes and talks to the federal government people. And by the way, just as a side note, I think this is why people like, for better or worse, they like Donald Trump because as Dave Chappelle pointed out years ago, he was the first guy who stood on a stage in between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

1:48:43 And when they both accused him of using the system, he turned around and said to them, it was a system that you built. I use the system you built. And I know you build it because your friends come to my place to ask me for more money so you can build it more. And all of a sudden Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton had nothing to say. And Chappelle goes, and this is the great line. He goes, uh, he goes, it's like a man sitting outside a burning building with the people standing there, right? With a can full of gas and a handful of matches and going, yeah, the building's on fire and it's your fault.

1:49:18 He's like, I've I've never heard— to Chappelle's point— I've never heard a white man say that ever in my life. And that's why Donald Trump got elected, if you want to really know, because that's what we want. We want people that actually— now, what they do about it afterward, that's a different thing altogether, but they actually say out loud what the trade-off is. And that's where we're going in this session, or this next, this

1:49:51 final area of our time together, because Ryan has greatly glorified us with his presence today and his— from this book. And, um, and so we got to go on a restoration project. And I think, I think the big project— I've been leading up to this— I think the big part of our project is not that we don't perceive the world the same way. I don't think that that's, that's really a thing, because to Ryan's point human beings are always going to not see the world the same way. Heck, you're going to have two people born in the same family who are going to— one, one's going to have a constrained vision, one's going to have an unconstrained vision, even if they're raised by two parents with an unconstrained vision or two parents with constrained vision or two parents were kind of opposites.

1:50:29 This is how it's going to happen, right? Um, because the mix of experience and genetics and all of this is just too— it's just too much. Right? Nature versus nurture. I think instead what we should probably be pursuing is the creation of trade-offs by serious leaders. And American culture has allowed, for better or worse, since at least the 1970s, unserious and unconstrained manipulators to sell their ideas. And that began the unraveling of our society, um, in the decade in which both myself and Ryan were born and has just continued.

1:51:08 At a pace until, you know, right now. And the chaotic aftermath of that unraveling is also what we've experienced because, again, ideas and actions have consequences. It's not just things that occur in a vacuum. Now on this show, we've read Orwell. We read, um, episode number 85, Orwell and the English Language. That's a great essay. I would go back and read that and listen to that episode. Um, and Orwell was consumed with the deterioration of our language as far back as the 1940s. Uh, we read B.H.

1:51:40 Liddell Hart on failing to learn from history in episode number 167. And when we have slovenly language and we fail to learn from history, we are constantly surprised whether constrained or unconstrained our visions are. We are constantly surprised by the— well, to paraphrase from Thomas Sowell, the people lining up consistently time after time on the exact same sides of a particular issue. We gotta get ahold of our language. We've gotta get ahold of our history. We have to learn. And even in spite of all that, I still hold that the United States is the country best positioned with the people best positioned to lead, inspire, and practically tackle the

1:52:22 restoration project ahead of us in the next 25 years. We can only get to this project, however, if we have serious leaders, serious about history, serious about language, and most importantly, serious about their visions, serious about the tragic nature of reality, serious about the honest and hard and brutal trade-offs required to make a vision become a reality. Only children, like the ones we talked about in a previous segment, and adults with childish temperaments believe that adulthood can be the realm of unconstrained limits.

1:52:54 By the way, some of those childish people who are adults and who are behaving in a childlike fashion also run some of our biggest corporations— Google, Amazon, OpenAI— and they're playing with dangerous fuel with an unconstrained vision. By the way, I read an article the other day in one of these, uh, newsletters that I follow from— because I, I pay attention to the tech bros very closely, and somebody stood up— I won't tell you the name— but somebody stood up at MIT sometime late last year and claimed that death was immoral and that they were

1:53:37 going to spend a lot of money

1:53:41 to defeat death. Is it— oh, okay, the initials PT. Do they run a— do they run a, uh, surveillance— giant surveillance, uh, business? I'm not going to give you the name. I just said I saw the quote. I went and looked at the article, and it was indeed in MIT Technology Review, and I thought, wow, to collapse. Okay, did this person also just do a 4-part seminar on the Antichrist? It is the ultimate unconstrained vision. We are going— death is immoral. Transhumanism. Think about where you start with that.

1:54:19 Death is immoral. Think about where that come— what vision that comes out of. That, that statement is downstream from a whole series of assumptions that start from an unconstrained vision of human potential. Unbelievable. Anyway. But also lacking seriousness, I would assert, which is even more problematic, to borrow a modern word that I don't like, but more problematic than, than, than just talking about the immorality of death. We are drowning in a need for serious leadership, not leadership that takes itself seriously, but leadership that is soberly, practically, and without hype.

1:55:00 Laying out what is actually capable of being achieved by people with the talent, skills, and passions, the people that we are leading, and quite frankly, the people that we are responsible for, and at a furthest level, the people that we have empathy for really need— whether those people are in our family, in our local neighborhood, or even in the organizations that we work in. We need serious leaders, and this is what we're crying out for. Now, I do believe we have serious leaders. I do believe we have leaders who are mugged by reality.

1:55:31 And I do believe that these things take a long time. The pendulum takes a long time to swing back. And I think we are in the process of beginning that, but it's going to be a long, slow upward slog to paraphrase from Milton or Marilyn Manson. It's going to be a long,

1:55:50 hard road out of hell and up into the light. Ryan, final thoughts on all of this. What do you think? Can we— how do we use Thomas Sowell's writing? Why should leaders read this? What can they take from this? Like, how will this help them? How will this help the person who, like yourself, may not necessarily be in a big leadership position with a big title, but is leading people nonetheless? How is this book going to help them? So I think first and foremost, there is no— there's no jargon here. These really, like you said, he's succinct, he's direct, and outlines and provides citations to other individuals who were serious and direct And carrying— number one, I think just by reading the book, uh, and to, uh, I think the word osmosis was used earlier, just by on some level through osmosis of reading the book, something is going to infiltrate.

1:57:00 Um, and I think just in that regard, by proxy, it's going to, uh, hopefully add something to the— at least the

1:57:17 awareness of an individual's capacity to be a leader. And, um, this is digestible. It is of— in the, uh, in the concepts that one sort of relates to and can— because you can— it's, it's— I'd say it's pretty easy to go through here and

1:57:37 go, oh yeah, that's me. 'Oh, that's not me.' So, um, you can be made aware of what your deficiencies are and what also you excel at, and, and, uh, in a, in a pretty

1:57:50 easy term because the language is so clear and direct. Um, I think— I mean, I don't think you're— you know, my mother who reads every night, but she doesn't read this sort of material, it wouldn't you know, even, even through, even through her lens, it would, I believe, have some effect. And so it's accessible. Um, I think if you're serious about being an active participant in your own life, which is probably first and foremost, um, uh, something that, that, uh, and even if you're not there, this I mean, this, you know, one of the things that is, is pretty common after, uh, being a guest on this podcast with you, Hasan, is I, I often have the thought— or every time I have the thought— well, I've got a lot of work to do.

1:58:49 And if anything, a reminder that, uh, I mean, in every episode that I've done, it's clear It doesn't matter if there's one person watching or 10,000 people watching, listening, you're still touching someone. Like, someone— it's hitting someone's ears. And, and, and very much like AA, you know, in that regard, it's like, I am responsible. And so, and it doesn't make leadership a completely, uh, out of the realm, uh, just concept or idea. You don't have to be a president, you know, like you said, you don't have to be you know, the CEO or some sort of Fortune 500 company or something like that.

1:59:28 It's, it's, it can be in your own family, it could be at the workplace, and it can be as, as simple as, as, um, as simple as redirecting a conversation, uh, in regards or, or towards more of a conflict resolution. And, and, and through, uh, you know, at least the attempt of, uh, resolving even the most minor conflicts, it's, it's, it's through that process you're assuming some sort of like leadership skill. And I think, you know, just like anything else, like putting yourself in situations to express those things as well.

2:00:16 And I think through practice, um,— and repetition, uh, things become easier. And whereas it may have been difficult to have that hard conversation with a family member, but if you— and if you, like you said, if you start with a family member and you have that hard conversation, and then the next person is going to be a little easier, and then a little easier. And then, and then what I've experienced is like, wow, the conversation's actually not hard. There is, there is, there is, there is a perhaps a level of fear that is, is, uh, like the subtext of why, you know, I didn't want to, uh, be a leader or, or, uh, contribute to resolving a conflict or contribute to, uh, something that's going to have a more lasting effect and not produce like, uh, some sort of, uh, immediate solution.

2:01:11 Like, oh wow, I don't have to be, you know, the— like, I can— what if I can be the stepping stool? Like, you know, we all don't have to be, you know, uh, and I think probably like Mother Teresa is, is, is, is someone in, in contemporary times that is, is, uh, kind of, um, kind of jives in that sense. And I just— I mean, from what I understand, she, she basically had an argument with God whole life. Yeah. And, you know, she was sainted and, and for her work. And— but that's not why she was doing it.

2:01:49 So, yeah, I mean, really, really impressed by the book. Impressed by how it— you see something like this, and it can be a little daunting. Because it's a lot of it you know, the ideological origins of political struggles. Not, not a lot of people lining up around the block for that sexy talk. And, and, and, uh, when broken down, I mean, you know, often I have to read with the dictionary and thesaurus and that sort of thing. I mean, this is outlined pretty crystal clear. And, um, yeah, I mean, a worthy read for anyone.

2:02:25 And even if you just type in, uh, in a Google search, title this book in Thomas Sowell's name, and just read an article, read something that references this book. I think it will have some relevance, at least on the very least changing your mind on what these terms mean and how they can be applicable in, in a, in a semi-regular or practiced, you know, way. Awesome. Awesome. Cool. Well, thank you very much, Ryan, for coming on our show today. Thank you very much for your time and for taking on and tackling this book with us and going on the journey.

2:03:04 And well, with that, we're out.