Mash Up Episode ft. 12 Rules For Leaders Deep Dive - Leadership Models from Sun-Tzu to Albert Murray w/David Baumrucker & Jesan Sorrells

0:04 hello, my name is Jesan Sorrells and this is the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books podcast, episode number 185. Yes, we are five episodes from our big 200th episode Shindig and I still haven't reached out to the people that I need to bring on for that. So I probably, probably behind the little bit behind the eight ball there on that. I want to get involved with that. Anyway, today we are going to open up with a very brief reading from a book by. Well, a book by me. 12 rules for leaders the foundation of Intentional Leadership.

0:45 This that I'm about to read is going to lay the foundation for what we're going to talk with our guests today about around leadership models. And I quote from myself to all of you, this book lays out not a formula but a series of 12 practices, lessons or principles if you will. I have found leaders always need to examine, mold, investigate, dissect and question. How did I develop these principles? Well, I have trained close to 15,000 people in a variety of management level positions, from entry level to the CEO level across multiple organizations and industries over the last 10 years.

1:24 I've taught leadership theories and philosophies and pushed hundreds of students over the past 20 years to question them at small community colleges and large public institutions. I have read, not exhaustively. I am a practitioner, after all, many of the academic writings that undergird leadership theories and approaches. And I try to read and glean everything about leadership from the Bible and other ancient writings all the way to Jocko Willink and whatever Malcolm Gladwell happens to be writing right now.

1:51 I also serve as the day to day CEO of a digital and software platform publishing company, HSCT Publishing, now in our third pivot coming out of COVID with partners, employees, contractors, interns, clients, fans, investors and others who look to me to make leadership decisions in the practical every day. I also have a wife of eight years as of this publication date and four children ranging in age from 4 to 24. I have led volunteer groups, story groups, online groups, and church groups. I've even played and coached the great game of rugby with teams that were not always winning.

2:24 All those areas and arenas of life, both public and private, serve as incubators for understanding, examining, distilling and questioning the principles of leadership our mental infrastructure tacitly assumes will still produce optimal outcomes even as that same infrastructure rusts away unquestioned in leaders minds and all leaders have access to the exact same incubators I have had across time and space. This book should not exist as an artifact Something frozen in time for leaders. Instead, we encourage you, dear reader, to think of this book as a volume.

3:00 Read slowly, absorb carefully, think about deeply, question robustly against your experience, and then have the courage to implement from leadership. Effective leadership, most importantly, is the most critical element our world is missing, pandemic or not. And the more leaders are exposed as being ill prepared, blind, ignorant, or just innocently blissful, the more the dragon of chaos, destruction and myopia must consume and the increased amount of bad, toxic, mediocre, and even worse leadership we will have to suffer through in the face of the next crisis.

3:38 Close quote. And by the way, put this on the back end of that sentence because my editor told me to drop it. There will always be another crisis.

3:55 And so with those words, we begin, we open our mashup episode today. We're taking a little bit of a different approach to these episodes this season. This is where we don't necessarily focus on a specific book. Instead, we talk to a guest and, you know, I expose some of my inner thoughts to you, although I do that on every episode here of this show. And we try to get to the core of some idea. And here's the idea that we're going to kind of try to get to the core of today.

4:27 All leadership begins with a vision. By articulating a vision, a leader, intentionally or not, falls into a specific model of leadership that encompasses their actions. If a vision is constrained, the model of leadership will be constructed that supports such a vision. If a vision is unconstrained, a model of leadership will be constructed and of course, supports that vision. So what of models? Well, models in theory can create a container. They provide direction and serve to ensure that accountability for accomplishing goals as well as hitting benchmarks becomes a practical consideration.

5:03 Models also, for lack of a better term, sell models, sell books, they sell courses, and they sell workbooks. And they serve as the headwaters for a cascade of words that produce different outcomes in different hands under different leaders. Models are not something we deal in on this show. Hell, models aren't even something that I dealt in in my book that I just read from. We deal to translate from the cowboys in the original Magnificent Seven. And practicalities, which are, quite frankly, the lead of leadership models are not practical because much like theory, they fall apart usually under first contact with human and lived reality.

5:48 Reality I've been taking. I've been saying this a lot lately, actually. Reality, along with taxes, death and gravity, is undefeated. But

6:03 we have arrived at the moment in the mashup episodes for this year where it Is time for us to take time out of our usual path of pursuit of solutions, trade offs and how do we live and lead in a tragic universe to explore some ideas and dare I say, even some models that could potentially contain either an unconstrained or maybe a constrained vision and to find out where exactly all that leads. Leaders, without a model to contain your vision, you may have trouble selling your vision. That's just the honest truth.

6:34 Particularly in marketing and advertising, sticky times such as these we live in now. And so I'd like to welcome to our show today a guest from. Oh gosh, from way back in our first season where he talked with us about crime and punishment. We got to go back and revisit that. I was just reminded of that the other day. And of course that great handlebar mustache German that sits or lurks in the subterranean bottom of Western civilization. Frederick Nietzsche, my good friend and, and fellow rugby compatriot, David Baumrucker.

7:17 How you doing, Dave? Good to, good to meet you. Good to have you back on the show. It's been a little bit. I'm glad to be here. I'm excited for this episode. So on the show we advocate for depth over performance and we were just talking about this before we even hit record. Right. Which means I automatically have skepticism for models of leadership. I don't care whether it's a charismatic model or servant leadership model, a practical model, a Jack Welch. We're going to cut everything possible model.

7:50 Even now we have AI like this first section is labeled, you know, on my script, the literary life of Anthropic. And I didn't, I didn't label it that way by accident. Right. We're, we're, we're in the beginning of an adopt a 30 year adoption life cycle, I believe on, on artificial intelligence and what the LLMs can actually do. And by the way kids, it is 30 years on literally every new technology and it'll be 30 years on this one to get to full adoption. Um, and I think all of that stuff is up for debate, but heterodox thinking tends to lead to heterodox leadership practices.

8:26 And we, we want to embody on this show, we want to talk about, on this show how do we take leadership practices out of the realm of the clouds and bring them down to the dirt where like people actually practically live. Like I said in the opening there, and we do firmly believe, and actually I took this from a previous episode that I did with the co host Tom Libby. I can't remember what book we were talking about. But it is a good point. I said that modern institutional crises stem from asking the wrong things of the right structures.

8:59 Right. So business institutions are typically being asked to carry the weight of family, friendships, communities, neighborhoods. And you'll have a lot of familiarity with this mental health crises, emotional health crises and spiritual health crises. Right. And these institutions, these organizations, these businesses were not intended to carry such weight. And I believe that that is part of the reason why our institutions are struggling. Everything from the small business all the way up to the giant corporate structure.

9:33 Right. They're carrying weights they weren't meant to carry, basically.

9:39 And so I guess our first question is in thinking about what you know about this show and thinking about what we do here, thinking about your own thoughts. How do leaders, Dave, walk the tension inherent, right, between adapting or adopting models and living and leading in this practical reality that we're in now? And by the way, I'd love for you to break up Terrence McKenna. Go ahead and do that too. So I'm going to open the door to that. Well, let's, yeah, let's circle Back to Terence McKenna. I think that it's a great question.

10:08 I think the problem we have is that leaders are looking at these models as a, is they're looking at it as a map and not a compass. And the problem is that by looking at these models as a map, in this analogy, if the rain comes and washes out the bridge and you're following the map, the map has you driving into the water, right? Whereas if we look at these models of the compass, it gives you the ability to navigate and traverse all of the different things that you're going to encounter. You don't need to have a set line, but rather you have an ability to kind of move in the general direction and adapt on the fly.

10:42 And why that's so important is because we need to shift out of models as these commandments. We must follow this model and we have to look at them more as a container because this container is supposed to house where all of this dynamic interaction is supposed to be going on. This is because leaders are the ones that bridge the gap, the theory, practice gap. We, the leaders are the ones that take the concept ideas, the, the abstractions and they say let's put this into real world hands on exercises so we understand how to do that.

11:16 If we're stuck in this role where the, the, the model is a rigid struck like a rigid commandment, how are you going to adapt to things? How are you going to practice and be even mildly versed in stepping left or stepping right if some kind of new challenge emerges. And that's, I think, where we're finding a lot of the issues with leadership today, because we're not prioritizing the experiential learning element of leadership. And we're not. And we're not. I think we're falling victim to the idea that we're looking for this one piece, this one solution that is this kind of this Rosetta stone that allows us to understand every single thing within one confine.

11:56 And that's never how this has ever worked. Since the dawning of time, there's always been a layering or a weaving of multiple frameworks that we've had to rely on because each framework itself specializes in one thing. You know, whether it be in terms of ethics, whether it's in terms of strategy, whether it's terms of human relations. There's all of these things we need to pull together. And this goes back to the heart of this show is like, well, what do we need to do? It's like we need to return back to those classical pieces of wisdom that we've always seen.

12:27 We have to step away from the, you know, the three hour business model that's now sweeping the trends on LinkedIn and all these other things. And we have to just look at these things for what they are. And that is going just moving targets. And you said they're trying to sell something and they're trying to sell convenience, they're trying to sell flash, they're trying to sell this new thing, right? Look at me, I'm ahead of the curve. And so I, I'll pause and let you. But then we'll circle back to, to Terence.

12:55 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, we'll circle back to Terence. Let me ask a follow up question. Isn't this just the disease of the postmodern mind, though? Like, isn't this the logical cul de sac where we wind up with, where we wind up at when we actually practically walk out Foucault and Lacan and Derrida? Isn't it the logical end of where

13:21 my buddy Nietzsche down there in the basement said we were going to wind up at just applied to corporations rather than, you know, families, communities, churches, government. You know, aren't, aren't corporates, corporations and businesses of all sizes? Aren't they just, aren't they just eroding because of this postmodern disease? I think absolutely. Because the idea, the foundations of postmodernism is that, you know, yesterday doesn't matter. We are, we are creating, we are creating reality in live time.

13:52 And if, if that is, if that was true, then why are we seeing the, like this rhyme of history repeat itself? Why are we seeing race issues? Why are we seeing financial issues? Why are we seeing systemic issues? Right, the it again, it's this then this is that integration into Terence McKenna about this idea that he had in 1998 that eventually because of all of these shifts, things are going to become so weird that we're going to have to, we are going to be forced to talk about how weird things are becoming.

14:25 With, you know, if you turn on the news of politics, it's weird. If you turn on the news with, with finance, it's weird. If you look at social institutions, schools, the medical industry, it's gotten so weird. It's, it's this prophetic message that he was talking about that we have, we're reaching the end. This is the, this is this kind of, this state of entropy we've entered into. Because I think, and I to his. The point he's making is it's, we're going to be thrust into some new paradigm. What that paradigm is, is foundationally up to us.

15:01 And I think that we are in this primordial unknown where all of this weirdness is happening. And I think that at the heart of this, this program, in the heart of everything, other people that talk about this is that we've gone back to this again. These building block stage, everything's being deconstructed and we're looking at how the systems that have been in place for so long, we're looking at them with new eyes and we're realizing that there is this almost like this rot, this cancer. And the cancer isn't essentially the ideas that were pre existing.

15:32 The rot is the fact that we fail to honor them. And that's where we find ourselves. So this month, in, in previous episodes before this one, we've read G.K. chesterton's the Man From Thursday, the Man who Was Thursday, which is a great, great book. G.K. chesterton, great Catholic theologian, wrote in opposition to both Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky, looked at them and said, no, maybe not. Because he saw the in, in, in England and in North America, he saw the, he observed the growth of those ideas being taken on by people who eventually would become anarchists.

16:13 And a few years after Chesterton sort of hit his peak, those, those folks of course successfully start, successfully start World War I. And so Chesterton was like, oh my gosh, we can't, we can't, we can't have this. And so he wrote the man who Was Thursday, which is great book. Go back and listen to that episode. Then a little later on down the road, down the more modernist road of writing, you have, of course, Upton Sinclair, who wrote the Jungle. And we covered his book. Not the Jungle, we covered his book Oil, upon which the.

16:43 The movie There Will Be Blood is. Is based on. With that. That great, like, monster performance by. By Daniel Day Lewis, one of the greatest living actors of our time. And that'll take the Pepsi Challenge against anybody on that one.

17:03 And so between Sinclair and Chesterton, between Dostoevsky and Nietzsche, between.

17:11 Between, you know, Carl Jung, who we're going to talk about in a minute, and Joseph campbell, even between McKenna and now, right? Everybody's been able to put their hands on an aspect of the disease, right? An aspect of the. Of the rot, to your point. But very few have been able to. To. To describe or to talk about how to arrest or to. To talk about in certain practical ways about what it would mean to arrest the purveyors of. And I go back to Thomas Sowell's idea in a conflict of Visions, you know, arrest an unconstrained vision, a person, a rowan.

17:56 Unconstrained vision, which is. Seems to be what we're now, the Roians are actually running out of energy, which maybe that's the thing that constrains them. They just run out of energy. But then they always find a new abyss of, like, human things to, like, deal with. So, like, the abyss is never empty, right. You know, and the aforementioned AI will just open up another abyss of, like, human appetites and a whole. Another thing of human nature. So how do we, I guess maybe all of that to say, right, all those reference points.

18:27 Let me distill it down into this question. So people, leaders want models. They desperately want models. It's not just because models sell. That's kind of facile, but that's sort of where I jump off the train. Models sell because leaders, consumers who are consumers, leaders who are consumers, believe they work, right?

18:49 How do we get leaders to exist with courage in the liminal space of that uncanny valley where things are weird, right? And we know they're weird, and we have to live in that tension of them being weird so we can get to the other side of it. Because this is a courage act you're talking about. And I don't see

19:08 courage is always a short supply, to paraphrase from Peter Thiel. I mean, yeah, absolutely. Courage isn't. Because courage isn't rewarded and I think that the only way we, we, we push into this is simply seeing, is believing if there is a, if there is a company, if there's a leader, if there's someone who enacts a different strategy and that strategy starts to gain traction, that's what's needed. Now I think that there's a lot of discussions around what that, what that entails and I think we're talking about some of it, but I think it, it's to do this and to have this thing start to take shape.

19:46 There needs to be a, almost like a new intentionality behind what it means to be a leader. There needs to be a sense like a, almost like a renaissance within the idea of what a leader is. Because right now we have the leader is the person at the top of the pyramid. That's not necessarily what a leader is. Right? I mean this is going to shift into our future conversations about, about young. But, but we have to, it's almost like we have to have a parallel idea start to form because people have become so entrenched in what they know and we see that in everything.

20:20 Because the problem with leadership isn't just in business. It's in every aspect of life. It's in the nonprofits, it's in the medical, it's in, it's in politics. It's everywhere. There is, there's, there's this systemic like morphing of what a leader is to say. Because I'm in the top position, I enact this kind of top down rule, this very tyrannical rule of do as I say, not as I do mentality. And I think the renaissance that needs to happen with leadership is that there needs to be a, a new Eden, if you will, a new place where there can be a new dawn, a new spawning of things where we go back to basics and we go back to this, the rediscovery of what it was to be a leader and how historically leaders found, like how they emerged, their evolutionary stories of how these things happened.

21:14 Because our history, our history was, is, is an outcome of courage. Our history is an outcome of resilience. And our history is an outcome of this idea of just human will. And betting on the human component, it's like betting on, not a model per se, but betting on the resilience and the raw potentiality that the human cond has. That is what our history comes from. And somehow whether that's through politics and or you know, honoring shareholders, we have found a way to strip away all of that down to these bite size Very packageable, very KPI adjusted models because we need to be able to set a trend line.

22:04 I'm going to pick up from, from my book here because when you mentioned courage and I kind of went in that direction on purpose a little bit there, kind of jog off the, off our prepared notes a little bit here. But this is good because the prepared notes are just a map now. The bridge is washed out now we're going to figure out the territory. It's fine.

22:24 This, this. In, in my book 12 Rules for Leaders, I laid out basically and literally the first rule and the reason why I called it rules was not models is because I think rules are tighterly, are more tightly. Tightly are more tightly aligned with this idea of principles. Right? Because principles can, principles don't wash out. But if you don't know what your vision is or you don't know how to think or you don't even realize that you're in that, that liminal space of the uncanny valley I just mentioned, you're not going to be able to stake to a principle.

23:01 And so I'll use a very simple example here. Gravity is a principle. Doesn't matter what I feel about it, doesn't matter whether I like it, right. If I jump up, I'm going to come down. Right. And by the way, nobody gets, weirdly enough, nobody gets emotional about this.

23:18 There's no, I'm going to go here. There's no riots in any state or city in our country, right, about gravity or air.

23:36 Or, or, or, you know, or t. Well, there are riots about taxes. I'll put taxes over there. They're riots about that. But, but, right. It's a bit of principle. Yeah, it's a principle. Right. And so I look at courage as a principle. And, and so I, I came up with this methodology again, walking the walk of the line here, right? With models called the three C's Methodology. Right. And the methodology, I'll just quote directly from myself, the methodology of communicated with clarity, candor and courage, or the three Cs was developed and teased out through research development from the work we have done with teams and leaders over the last 10 years and was meant to clear up the tendency among organizational leaders to communicate with themselves, their teams and their organizational structures with obfuscation, deception and insincerity.

24:26 By the way, I wrote a whole entire blog post the other day about cringe. Maybe we'll get into that later on, but I'm not going to go into clarity, I'm not going to go into candor, although Candor is important. I think all three of these things tie together. Let me read about Courage Courage in a conversation Having the courage to neither delay nor avoid the conversation is critical to achieving success. Brene Brown in 2007 describes courage as a quote unquote heart word. Although contemporary definitions focus on bravery and heroism, Brown encourages us to remember the quote, inner strength and level of commitment required for us to speak honestly and openly about who we are and about our experiences, good and bad.

25:07 Close quote. And then I'm going to move down and say this. Leaders egos cloud their inner monologues, causing a lack of clarity in their thinking, which leads to a lack of clear writing and clear speaking. A sure sign of a leader who has abandoned their roles and responsibilities is the presence of jargon, heavy language that only serves to confuse, misdirect and obfuscate an issue. Ego rears its ugly head when leaders are pressed to be candid and usually about small issues or matters at hand. Being candid requires having a healthy dose of self awareness.

25:40 Skip down a little bit further. Finally, the courage or heart to think right and say and act in an ethical, moral and social fashion means more than just bending to the whims of the crowd. Sometimes the crowd is wrong. The team often needs to be led where it does not want to go. Sometimes the courage to lead in this way results in burnout, personal acrimony, hazing, appeals to the dominance hierarchy which Dave just brought up, and all other manners of commonly accepted social and political negative outcomes.

26:07 Keep in mind, the courage to lead in this way sometimes results in excellence, achievement, and moving the team past the mere accomplishment of a result and toward the accomplishment of something greater. But in order to get to that courage, you got to have wisdom, right? And the books that we explore on this show, and this is why I went to books rather than Leadership Lessons from the Great movies. Although I do have an idea for doing a podcast based on that. I still have that percolating in the back of my brain.

26:38 Or Leadership Lessons from the Great Plays, right? Like we do read Shakespeare on the show. We've read King Lear and Othello. We're going to cover Macbeth and Henry viii, you know, on this show.

26:51 But Leadership Lessons from the Great books, because a book is. It's still the best conduit, I think, for getting that wisdom across the ages. Like we started off this season with Voltaire. Candide was published, I think back in like 1789 or 1784 or something. And my publication date is off. Forgive me, but you know, it was sometime in the 18th century. That book, from the time that it was published to now, has traversed time. Voltaire is dead. The book is still here. And we still talk about the ideas in the book.

27:29 And some of us still read the book. So books are. Books are idea viruses. They're idea carriers. And ideas are like viruses. Right. And leading comes from integrating wisdom of the past into the future. Now, we could do this typically through myths, but books preserve, I think, a mythic structure. Right? And they preserve that structure in a form that everybody can understand. So here's the Jungian myth question. Let's go ahead and jump into it. I mean, might as well. So young again. I'm actually.

28:06 I actually ordered a book. You'll appreciate this. I ordered a book recently by Richard Chiliata about the history of religion. And I'm saying that wrong, I'm saying his name wrong, but I'm going to go a little bit down the road into the history of religion right now. I myself, I. I tend to glean, and I've said this on the show, I've been explicit about it. I tend to follow the Christian religion. I tend to try to walk out the, you know, the precepts of Jesus, try to treat my fellow man well, you know, all the usual shibboleths and those kinds of things.

28:38 But it does also impact how I treat people, even who disagree with me or people who have arguments or people who, who don't want to believe what I believe. All of it kind of feeds into not just one aspect of my life on one day during the week for two hours. Right. I, I definitely try to walk that out through the rest of my life. And Dave knows me personally. He can testify. If I'm a hypocrite about this or not, that's up to him.

29:04 But the fact of the matter is, just like

29:10 Jesus's words were put into a book, which we now call a gospel, Carl Jung's words were put into a book. And there are many Jungian books around this idea of myth. What are some contributions from the books of Jung, from the ideas of how he thought about myth that we can apply to leaders and their models of leading? That was a long lead in a lot of things to follow there. But like I said, the, the bridge is washed out, so I'm going to wander all over the place now a little bit. But this idea of Jungian myth, because I think myth is another way to kind of get that the wisdom of the ages as a virus to infect the postmodern disease.

29:55 I think Myths is the way to do this. Am I onto something? Am I missing something? Where are the holes in my thinking? Go ahead, Dave. Yeah, it's great. I think is, as a quick aside, when you're talking earlier about, you know, courage, I think it's good to make the distinction between what bravery is and what courage is. Yeah. Because bravery is the state of readiness to like to receive some unknown force, to, to step into the unknown. But courage is definitively different because it's a state of going, I know what the challenge is going to be and I know it's how it's going to hurt me or it's going to impact me.

30:32 And yet I choose to push on anyway. And I think that distinction is really, really important. And it goes back into the myth. The vast majority of Jungian myths are focused on the courage aspect of things rather than the bravery aspect of things. There are obviously some, some exceptions to that. But I, we think about Jungian myth. There's three things that really stood out to me about this. I first think that the idea of the integration of the shadow is number one, because every leader has a shadow.

31:02 And every leader has that part of them that they don't want to accept, they don't want to engage, they don't, they try to hide it, like their desire for power, their fear of failure, this bias that they have towards people on the team or outcome structures. And so if a leader ignores their shadow, leadership becomes fragile and performative. It becomes this thing that's very self serving and that doesn't serve anyone. And so the idea is by integrating the shadow, the leader learns how to recognize that they have the capacity, they have the capacity to be ruthless, they have the capacity for all these negative things, but they learn how to harness that to essentially protect the team and to fight for the team.

31:51 And so you have to, you have to know yourself to know how to essentially navigate yourself, which then naturally leads into the next one, which is the idea of like the hero's journey. And I think the key with this is that the leader, it's not that the leader is the hero, it's navigating the hero's journey. We have to shift from this idea. And I think this is a core problem with leadership, is that leaders view themselves as the hero of the organization. Wrong. You are the leader as a mentor. You need to become the Merlin to the group, not the main character of the group.

32:27 And by doing this, by, by becoming this thing and, and taking yourself out of the role of the protagonist, you become the facilitator and thus you are helping to guide and to have everybody on your team navigate this hero's journey so that they become the hero that conquers the challenge, that has the resolution, that has this, this aware, this growth, this expectation, essentially the dawning of the new hero. The hero's journey is for the, the novice, the naive, to wander out into this unknown place and to engage with the ecosystem, thus to return as the king, which perfectly segues to the last archetype, which is it's the king or queen archetype.

33:11 And that is because the king and the queen represent order. They represent fertility, blessings, prosperity. And if the king and queen are not healthy, then the entire kingdom suffers. So this idea, this goes back to what we were talking about, containers, is that the king and the queen, their primary role is to create a container or the boundary, or thus the kingdom in which all of the people live in. It's your job to provide the space. And if you think back through history, right, we naturally, the contribution that this does is it blesses people to do the work by holding the kingdom, by preserving the kingdom, you, in a sense, are the facilitator for all of this growth and all of these other archetypes.

34:00 But if you don't understand that, and I think that this goes back integrating all these together by not recognizing the shadow and by the leaders that thus, because they don't recognize the shadow, step into forcing themselves to be the hero of this story. You step into the shadow elements of the king or the queen, which is impotence and tyranny. And that is where what Carl Jung would say is, you enter the wasteland. And the wasteland myth is this idea where nothing can prosper. It is that there is a finality to it, that everything here is dead.

34:35 And because everything has been completely unattended to, nothing ever will grow again. And so I think that these archetypes, it's interesting when I was thinking about this question, is that these archetypes stack onto themselves. And these things, you know, maybe a great way of saying it is this, is that Jung says very clearly that all evolution, all leadership, all growth, all has to be an internal transformation before an external action. It has to happen that way. And I think just from my observations, and I'm sure you've seen this too, that we've inverted that, that we are now looking at the external outcome as the validation that the internal process has transformed.

35:23 And Postmodernism 101, right. I think that this is where it's. Because it's because,

35:32 okay, so it's because Foucault didn't believe in myth. Of course. Of course not. Why would he. There's no point. The model, the model will not allow myth because he would then be taking reference from something that came before him. But even, but even I would go, I would go back even further. I would say, and I get an argue with a buddy of mine about this who really, really likes Camus. He loves Camus. He, he does. He loves camo in absurdity. And that of course leads him into liking Jack Kerouac.

36:07 Great guy. And Charles Bukowski and sort of Hunter Thompson. Like there's a line there, right, from Camus to Hunter Thompson to, to your point, the, the weirdness that Terence McKenna described. Right, but that's just one, one branch, right? That's the absurdity branch. Then you have existentialism, right? And the existentialists from Sartre all the way down through, I would argue Roland Barth's. But almost everybody has existential dread now. You can't really, can't really pin it to one, to one author.

36:38 It's been so diffused through, through our society. I mean, I even read recently how the book of Ecclesiastes was basically an existential diatribe. And I thought if you went back and told Solomon that he wouldn't understand what you were talking about. Like, he didn't. There's no frame of reference there for that in like, you know, 5th century BC Judea. There's no reference point for that. They didn't. I mean, sure, human beings are human beings, human beings across time, but the idea of a separated out existential dread that we could then like all smoke our cigarettes again into car crashes around like, come on, you know, come on.

37:19 So you've got that, you've got that. He got that line separated out. So the existentialists don't believe in the myth and then not to pick on Nietzsche. That's too easy. All of the followers from him don't believe in myth either. They viciously have to have attacked Jung primarily because they believed that. And Jordan Peterson points this out. I'm not the person who's come up with this insight, so I can't. I got to give credit where credit is due. They believed that you could, you were somehow going to have to create your own value system from yourself.

37:57 And as a person who's a Christian, I look at that and I literally laugh. I laugh. I have to laugh at the absurdity of that because it doesn't. There's no log there's that's. If that were possible, we would have no need for the myth then. So it's an ouroboros that eats its own tail. So you have these three strains that have infected leadership. The existential strain, the nihilist strain and the absurdist strain that have all run into postmodernism. And thus the myth has been undercut. And the challenge we have today is.

38:29 And by the way, it's been undercut. I'm going to make this very, very clear. It's been undercut in the smallest incubator possible for leadership, the family.

38:42 The family is the first organizational spot where you learn about leadership. It is, it's the world's first organization and we've undercut it massively in our culture. And I don't know how we. I'm not objecting to your analysis of Jung. I think you're absolutely correct. These are things that I've heard before. My pushback is. I don't know how we get back to there from where we are now. I don't know how we rescue the spirits of our dead fathers. I don't know how we go into, into Plato's cave and pull those people out.

39:12 I think I actually, I think, I think it's. It's right, it's. It's so obvious that it's hard to see. And that is. Okay, look at the outcomes. Why are we having my, my line of work doing. Doing therapy. Doing specifically like marriage therapy and couples counseling. We. There, there is one, there's one extremely poignant thing that no one wants to talk about, but it is, it. It leads to the most positive outcomes and that is go back into the understanding the, the historical structures of what is divine masculine energy, healthy masculine energy, healthy feminine energy.

39:52 These are, this is like if, if Young, if, if Young's myths are. Some are the house. The understandings of the, the long standing, like the worldwide integration of masculine energy and feminine energy in all cultures is the foundation when couples understand that innately. Right. That evolution is slow and culture is fast and that when you go back to this idea that women innately are attracted to masculine things, that is the seduction that activates the feminine in them, vice versa. Men are innately attracted to, to the divine feminine, the healthy feminine.

40:32 It's what, it's what seduces us towards women. When we understand that, it's like, well what. How does that translate into bringing us back is going. What's making happy marriages? It's not necessarily an adherence to a certain religion, but it is absolutely an Adherence to the idea that there is a, that there is a foundation of healthy masculine, healthy feminine energy that is transcendent. It is transcendent across all things and all we see. Every single thing we see. This is why every happy couple, every couple that stood the test of time, that's been married for a lifetime, the people that are celebrating things, it's not that one person is greater than the other, but rather it's a recognition that both are equally different but equally valuable.

41:20 Essentially it's the yin yang symbol manifested. That's probably the easiest visualization to have that. And in that symbol, just so people understand that you have, you have yang energy, masculine energy and yin energy, feminine energy. But within each one of them there is a core of the other. What, what is that? It is this internal recognition that every man has to have some connection with divine feminine. And we seek out our partner that has that representation that, that aligns with that internal drive that we have.

41:52 It's our compassion. We talk about having chemistry with people. What we're doing is we're recognizing that this, this, this ideal that I have around femininity and the divine fem. I see it in you and vice versa. The women have this core of this divine core masculine ideal and thus they see it in us. So to answer your question, how do we get back to that? It's going that we have to go back to the foundations. Masculine, healthy masculine and, and feminine energy is this foundation. And out of that, what do we see?

42:21 We see the institutions of religion, we see the instit marriage, we see the institutions of all these things built upon this and they've lasted for thousands of years. And I think where we get into all these people cul de sacing themselves into postmodernism is that they've become jaded at the idea that it's that simple. They become jaded over the idea that it's not complicated. They want it to be complicated. You read Nietzsche, he needs it to be complicated. You, you, you, you read the postmodernists, they need, it's almost like there's the self aggrandiz, like.

42:57 Well, I think. And that because, because I, because I think it's this way, then I'm going to speak just adamantly about it and I'm going to speak with vigor about it and I'm going to speak with passion about it and it becomes the self fulfilling prophecy. There's no difference between all the people you listed and all of these people from Nietzsche to the existentialists to the postmodernist. To, to any of this put the put replace them with just modern political heads and CEOs. It's the same thing.

43:29 They are so wound up with that believing in themselves that they themselves, it's become they self. They self like. It's almost like a self fulfilling loop. They now, they now praise themselves for this marvelous sense of conviction that they have. And thus because they have convinced themselves they're convicted of it, it must be true.

43:54 So I, I laugh not because I disagree. I, I laugh because this is the, this is the thing I've suspected ever since I took philosophy classes and our shared alma mater way back in the day. And I would get, I would get wrapped up in arguments with philosophy majors, quite frankly. One of my good friends is a double major and you know who I'm talking about, double major philosophy and psychology. Now he's off being a police officer in, in a, in a location to be named later in Minnesota somewhere. And, and the kinds of discussions that I would get in with him and with others who were in the philosophy program and in my mid-20s.

44:39 I couldn't articulate what you have articulated so well here. I just had a sense that this is incorrect. You're missing something fundamental here. Right? And that, and the other piece is it can't just be that complicated like we've, we've somehow built complication out as if it is the thing. With that being said, I think that it requires, there is a requirement of, well, fire. Let's talk about, let's talk about for just a minute the mythic, the mythic nature of fire, right?

45:15 Fire burns away things. It burns away things from the hero. It burns away things from the, the shadow, right? And forces both the king and the queen to either themselves walk through

45:36 a thing, right, in some myths, or it requires them. And this is even harder to put their children through a fire. Now, with that being said, as a person who is a Christian, I am opposed to putting children through fire, whether metaphorical or literal, for a whole variety of reasons. And I don't mean that I'm opposed in terms of putting weight of them on, pressure on them, or increasing responsibility. That's not fire. Fire both consumes and burns off. That's a different thing. And that's a, that's a nuance of a distinction with a difference.

46:16 Well, I think I would add though that fire represents initiation, right? Because fire is also the beginning and the end. It is also the lifebringer. It is also the restorer. It is also. So maybe just as a reflection on Fire.

46:35 Let's view a better way of thinking about fire is fire is the initiation of your pressure. It's just that what happens is that we have to surrender. One thing that Buddhists have, right, is you have to surrender to some of these archetypical things because they are bigger than you. And I think that that's a, it's an interesting aspect of that, of that faith that has, I think, something very, very foundationally awesome. Just in awe inspiring to just engage with as an idea. But when we think about fire as the initiator, what we're really saying is that especially if it's a parent to children, right, it's going, I need to let you discover the pain of what this is and also vice versa, so that you can thus develop the courage to know that fire can burn you.

47:24 So you walking through it, it goes full circle with our idea here that it's that to have courage, bravery is okay, I need to approach the fire or the fire can happen. Courage would say is fire will burn. Fire just burned you. So let's go. But you still need to push through it. And I think that without that, this idea that fire is the initiation, then essentially we get cul de sac as a society. And I agree with that. Yes. Again, I want to be clear on that. Nuance is a distinction with the difference.

47:58 I don't, no, I'm not a, you know, I'm not a big fan of putting our children on altars and, you know, hurting them. Not advocating for any of that. Absolutely not. And I see what you're saying about the, the, the, the hero's journey and these archetypes. One of the layers on this that we have to layer on is, of course, technology. Now,

48:25 I don't remember who it was who brought technology down from, from, from the gods and brought it to. In the, in the Greek myth. I can't remember that myth right now. But you know who I'm talking about and my listeners will know who I'm talking about. Prometheus. There we go. Thank you. Yes. Frankenstein, the modern Prometheus. There we go. Love that title. And we've covered Frankenstein actually, or we will cover Frankenstein on this show. I actually did read Mary Shelley's book last year, and I just ran out of time.

48:53 Didn't have an opportunity to bring it to the folks. But there's some interesting ideas there about technology as an illusion. Right. Because the thing that, that we. So we have the postmodern mind, we have the rivers of nihilism, absurdism and, and, And Existential dread that sort of flow into that postmodern headwaters, right? And then layered on top of that as sort of an. A thin armor or a cover is technology. Right? And we confuse, is one of the things I've always said on the show, we confuse our technological prowess with real wisdom.

49:33 We confuse our technological prowess with real intellectual capacity. We, we say that just because we can create an algorithm that will manipulate people to buying everything from Bitcoin to whatever it is that Target has on sale in a Facebook ad, we confuse the ability to do that with the ability to know something about people. And to your point, to be able to put people through a metaphorical fire or to be able to do something that. Or not do something, be able to pull something out of people that even the pre moderns could not do.

50:05 This is why we read Francis Bacon's book the Great Installation, and just sort of looking at what are the limits of scientific reason. And technology, I think presents the limits of scientific reason. That's why in the Promethean myth, Prometheus was laid out on a rock, and then an eagle was able to peck out his liver, which was restored every day, and then the eagle would return. That's the punishment, by the way, for Prometheus.

50:37 Technology always creates illusions. And the illusion lies over, like I said, like an armor, over all of these assumptions. Leaders fall into this trap, as I do, as you do, as everybody does who lives now. And the reason we explore science fiction books is because science fiction writers have a unique ability to sort of peel the illusion away and sort of expose, you know, the things underneath.

51:06 And technological advancement can't provide hope, and it can't hold back existential dread. It can't defeat nihilism, and it really can't defeat the spiritual forces of deconstruction. If technology could, it would have already done it. Right? So we're going to see this with our new technology, with. With artificial intelligence models and our LLMs. We're going to see this at scale. And this is what's freaking everybody out. So we got to address this.

51:37 Neither tech acceleration or tech solutionism is an option for leaders, either now or in the future. How can leaders think about technological advancement with, again, all these threads are bringing together, how do they think about that technology understanding, of course, going in with, yes, the preconceived notion, or maybe the preconceived wisdom, right, that technology is an illusion. How do we, how do we navigate that as leaders?

52:07 I think the thing that's missing is that we have lost a very Human centric pragmatism to this whole thing. We, we have shift. We have put ourselves in a place where we see technology as the savior and not as an integrated tool. And as a result of that,

52:29 we end up letting the tool dictate the mission. And when we end up letting the tool dictate the mission, a whole bunch of weird promises are made now. Promises that are now made into honoring the model that we've chosen are honoring the technology. And it essentially erodes like we stop betting on human capacity and we start betting against on creator promises. And we, and I think this is the LLM argument wrapped up, is that these creators of these projects while are, while they're just like the word awesome is probably the best word for it.

53:09 They're profound. At the same time, people now are treating them as gods and now we are replacing critical thinking and that, that human centric pragmatism, like, let's have the human, human contact. Let's us discuss, let us reengage, let us not know the answer right away and rather go through the process of investigation and maybe missteps to thus discover that we've lost that. And so what leaders need to recognize is that technology, we can use the technology. Going back to our, further, our earlier part of our conversation, we can use technology as the container.

53:46 It can contain the data, but it can't contain the culture. Right. It's not the cure. So we, we can, we can integrate these things, we can integrate technology into this and we can use it to really stratify us up into these places we've never gone before. But if we make the fatal mistake of looking at it as a cure, all that it is this, this, this ointment, this, this, this thing that will. This one again I mentioned earlier, like the one piece, like it's this, this, this perfect. It's this missing element that all of a sudden, now that we have this new technological advance, we don't need to rely on any of these other things.

54:23 And I think that we see that over and over again. It's interesting to me. You talk about, we talk about myths. I want to jog back to this for a second with the technology piece. It's interesting to me that the entire Marvel universe, which is how most people in the millennial generation in Gen Z know about myth for good or ill. That's how they know about myth. It's interesting to me that the myth of that entire universe was built around Iron Man. Yes, it wasn't built around Captain America, but if it had been Done.

54:50 If they had been. If they had had the ability to make decent movies and build, and Hollywood had had the vision to do this back in the 19, let's say 1980s even. I won't even go back to the 60s, 1980s. It would have been built around Captain America, not Iron Man. Correct. That's a fundamental shift. Shift in the. Because that represents the shift to your point of believing that these creators and these promises of these, These Promethean creators will somehow bring us this utopia. That's all Tony Stark was promising.

55:23 I mean, this was even in. This was even in. What was it? A civil war, right? I think it was a civil war, right. With the Slovakia Accords, whatever the hell the plot of that movie was. I can't remember they all merged together at a certain point. But he even said at the end of his. His first or the second movie, right. When the Congress, when the. The congressman played by the great Gary Shandling. I love Gary Shandling as a comedian. Oh, my God, he was incredible. But he was the senator. And you know, Tony Stark sits up there kind of like Elon Musk now.

55:55 And he sits there and he says, in a congressional hearing. And he says, you know, you all should be thanking me. I've, like, privatized world peace. Like, why are you, like, having a problem? And then he walks out triumphantly to the claps from the reporters. Right, right. You should be thanking me. And that's the attitude, by the way of a lot of the technologists from, from Jeff Bezos to Sam Altman from. And I like, I like Elon. We talk a lot about Elon on the show. I think, I think if. I think if he didn't exist in real life, we'd have to create him.

56:26 He's that sort of mind. But their attitude, their posture is not one of humility. It's not epistemic humility. It's one of you should thank me, shut up and take what I tell you. And to me, that fundamentally shows in the technologists. And I've said this before, but maybe not necessarily on this show, written into blog posts and written it on Facebook comments. The technologists hate people. They actually hate people. And that's really a really strong statement. And I want to be very clear. I don't think they hate the people in their families that are personally connected to them.

57:05 I don't think they hate the people they married or the children they created. I don't think they hate the people that they're going to leave money to in trusts and wills for the next 85 generations. I think they're fine with those people. Just like David is fine with his wife and kids in his family and I'm fine with my wife and kids in my family. But I think at a broader level, and I'll pick on Bill Gates. I think Bill Gates genuinely hates people. I think he does. I don't think he actually likes human beings at all.

57:34 I think if the 30% of this planet went away in exchange for a technological like solution to like climate change, he would take that every day and twice on Sundays. Absolutely. And I don't know if that makes those people the clinical definition of sociopath or psychopath. I don't know what that makes them. Or just narcissists, the clinical definition of narcissist. But I see it in their behavior. And that's what makes me cautious to the point of sometimes rejection of their promises. Yeah, I think when they are at it, I don't think it necessarily makes them psychopaths or narcissists.

58:12 But what it does, I mean, it's. When you disconnect from something, it's easy to villainize. And I think that this goes back to like, here's a, here's a very interesting thing about like this idea of

58:29 them, like them hating people. I don't think that they hate people. I think that they, they hate the revelation that people are not perfect and that they are the confounding variable in a system that they have idealized and have worshiped the pursuit of perfection. And because there is an innate flaw in the existence of humanity, it becomes the opposition. And so they segregate themselves away to thus villainize the opposition. Because if I can, if I can stop looking at you, talking with you, eating food with you, then I can simply put you into a category of saying you're the problem.

59:07 And this goes into like the theme of all this is, you know, how do we reconnect with all these pieces, all of the, in innovative,

59:19 historically like revolutionary ideas from the great leaders, from the bones of the dead, right? From all these things. They, they come as they come out of nature and, and the, all the postmodernists. And I think this is, this is what we, this goes back to that other part of that conversation. They removed themselves from nature. And by removing yourself from nature, thus you disconnect yourself from myth. Well, if you disconnect yourself from myth, you can categorically put it into a category where it's not valuable anymore.

59:47 I can just cleave you off. Right? And so this idea Is that. How do we get back to it? We have to go back to why the classics are so important, why the leadership lessons are so important from these things is because before we jump onto the next big thing, before we do that, we should use what has stood like the modern approach. We should use what has come before us as a measure. For instance, if there's some new technological strategy talking about ethics, we would be. We should look at that, we should compare that or rule that against Marcus Aurelius.

1:00:22 Okay, you're saying that you have this new way of looking at ethics. This is what has been a governing principle for thousands of years. Let's look at this. Let's. Oh, technology comes out with a new strategy, a new thing for strategy. Well then why aren't we comparing that to Sun Tzu? Right. We have lost. I think there is a fallibility of humans and there is a hubris to humans. And I think that my biggest critique over most of the. These people who push against myth and push against this, this, this idea that there is something inherently spiritually resonant in us are people who, if you look at their lives, they have, they have isolated themselves away and they have put themselves into their own containers that are very self fulfilling.

1:01:16 And thus then they go. Well, everything in my ecosystem seems to work so beautifully. There seems to be this flow to it. But when I look outside my container, look at that ugly, look at that messiness, look at that imperfection. Clearly I must be right and you must be wrong. It is, it is. The, is the, it is the most profoundly fallacious idea that psychology has ever discovered about humans is that we are self aggrandizing. We will always say that we are right. And again, this goes back to the shadow.

1:01:49 No one ever talks about the, the, the, the, the shadow element of all of these great thinkers, all of. No one ever talks about this. We just take them as saying they are these anointed wise clerics of the age and no one ever. And we, and we dehumanize them and we put them on these pillars and we. Again, why they think they, why they attack young ironically. And maybe h is that they know that if they would stop and look at themselves that it. They would have to address within themselves this contradictory element.

1:02:25 So they just go, well, young could doesn't matter anymore because he. Again, it's messy. I don't want messy. I want clean. I don't want messy or clean. I want clean. I want clean lines. Yeah, I want clean surfaces. Steve Jobs really liked clean. He liked clean minimalism Minimalism. Minimalism. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No friction. That's how I, that's how I sort of frame this, right? By the way, the no friction people drive me absolutely crazy. Because friction, just like gravity, is again, undefeated.

1:02:56 It's one of those, you know, properties of physics that comes about not only materially but also at every other level of the hierarchy you can possibly name. Because there is this thing called, which again, the technologists miss this. The resistance. There's just from. It's almost as if there's a myth with, with a, with an idea in there that, that, that, that the ground itself would be cursed for man's efforts. It's almost as if there's a, there's, there's a, it might be in a book that people might have heard of from way back in the day that sits in the bottom of Western civilization, like all the way down under Nietzsche, all the way down in the hairy, hairy basement.

1:03:44 And no one wants to go down there and look at that book, but it's still down there. Like a few people look at it, you know, might have a fourth chapter, maybe a fourth verse where there was a curse or something. I don't know, some kind of resistance. I don't know. I don't know. I'm just, I'm just spitballing here.

1:04:01 When we think about the technologists, when we think about sort of their lack of. I loved how you framed this humans, our lack of human centric pragmatism. There's two ideas. I want to leave here and then I want to turn a quarter and start to close. So at the practical level, I can hear my small business folks, my entrepreneurship folks, my medium sized business folks, my civic leaders going, okay, well, this has been an interesting intellectual jog. Like I gotta, I gotta work and then I gotta go home.

1:04:38 And there's a, there's a, there's a tool on my phone called Chat GPT. And I, I can use it for figuring out how to compile all my recipes at my house, or I can use it to figure out how to do a spreadsheet better. And the second I use it to figure out how to do a spreadsheet better, I have a choice. I can either get a $20 a month chat GPT program where I could do a spreadsheet better, or I could fire Linda who's been. And I could fire Linda who's been doing it for 20 years now. Linda's 20 year experience because of the technologist's promises doesn't matter.

1:05:18 And so the writer Cory Doctoro. I recently listened to an interview with him on the Mitch Joel podcast, the Thinkers One podcast, actually pretty good. Used to be called Six Pixels of Separation. And Mitchell is a great podcaster. He's been podcasting for Good Lord, almost as long as Joe Rogan. He's insane in the marketing space, and I recommend anybody go out and listen to him saying interesting ideas. But anyway, he talked to Corey Doctoro, who came up with his term and shittification to describe what is happening all over.

1:05:48 All over the Internet. And, and Corey said this. He said, you know, I won't take your job, but a salesperson who will come to your boss and sell them an AI solution will take your job. Yes.

1:06:03 That is a distinction with a difference. And I don't agree with Corey about a lot of his conclusions, but I agree with him on that. I think he's nailed that exactly correct. How can leaders honor Linda's 20 years when they have a spreadsheet from Chat GP spat out by ChatGPT for 20 bucks a month? How do they. How can they weigh that in the balance? What's the balance there for them so they don't villainize their own people? Because it's easy to talk about Bezos and Musk and these guys, but I actually think the problem is a lot smaller and a lot closer to home.

1:06:36 I think the problem is that salesperson coming to you, selling you an AI solution for 20 bucks a month and Linda being chucked out the back door.

1:06:45 So I think we. Let's borrow a page from Thomas. So, again, his. His idea of tragic vision, right? The

1:06:59 historical realism, right? That. That utopias don't exist, that we cannot. That we're never going to have perfect. We're never going to have perfect. We're never going to have. We're never going to solve the problems of war and racism and poverty. We will because they're. They're ever evolving. They are. They themselves are not static things. And so I think maybe the best way, I like to say this is reestablishing the tragedy, the tragic universe perspective. The tragic universe is this idea that no level of postmodern deconstructivism can get you down to the base elements where you can remove that flaw, remove those elements.

1:07:45 It's because reality is the undisputed champion of time. It's always shifting. It's always evolving. And thus we have to. So how do we. How did you frame it? Like, how do we integrate or how do we apply these? It's. It's. We have to get Back to again, how do we weigh in the balance? Like I said that, that if an AI salesperson approaches me and says, yo, we can replace Linda, who you're paying $60,000 a year with a chat GPT program for 20 bucks a month. How do I weigh that in the balance?

1:08:23 You weigh that in the balance because it goes back to what you said before. The AI spreadsheet is not culture. And a culture of one is just intellectual masturbation. That's not. There's, there's, there's. How do you weigh it out? Is that

1:08:39 companies to. Again, if it's, if you just want to be by yourself, all by yourself, fine. But you have to recognize that you are thus subverting yourself. In a weird way, you are engineering your own demise. Because it's, it's through the reflection, it's through the reflection of the experiencer that we get feedback. AI cannot give you feedback because it has been designed to be optimistic. And if you have something that's designed to be optimistic, it will cheer you on as you march yourself off the cliff.

1:09:17 And so the way that we have to contextualize this is that we. Why is it important to keep Linda? Because we. Because Linda, with Linda holds within herself a cultural grammar. She, she understands that there are. That Linda's been doing the job. But Linda doesn't just do the job. She's existed. And there's all of these things that she will have as a reflection, as an engagement, as a reaction to this, that she will thus give you feedback and you. And we can't. Linda's not preordained to be optimistic.

1:09:52 And I think it's. That that's a huge element of this. And I also think too, that if, if we're going to just buy into any salesperson with the thing, then essentially what we're doing is we're saying, yep, all I want is 24 hour news and all I want is three hour solutions. And all I want is this. I, I'm just going to try to keep up with the thing that I can't possibly keep up. Right? It's Sisyphus. It's like I'm gonna just, I'm. This is the next thing. They'll push me four inches up the hill. It's like, oh, okay, but that's eventually going to break and you're going to slide all the way back down.

1:10:30 Well, don't worry about it. We got another million dollars in the chamber to buy the next guy's thing that's going to push us another 4 inches higher up the hill. And I'm satisfied with that. My stakeholders are satisfied with that. Versus Right. The whole thing. Linda offers you the perspective of going, hey, Sisyphus, why are we pushing the stone at all? Like, why don't we build? Why don't we, why don't we try a different strategy here? Or why don't we just. Why don't we, why don't we abandon that stone and go back to a pebble maybe?

1:10:55 Anything, Anything, Anything. But I think that the human element is. Yeah, the human element is the ultimate experiencer. It's the ultimate metric, it's the ultimate reflective lens that we have because there's, because we have free will and because we have free will, we don't, we don't get to pre like it then. We don't program in Linda's outcomes, we don't program in Linda's feelings. Thus, if we do something really bad, Linda's gonna go that. And I don't want to do that. Right. Oh, okay. Whereas ChatGPT or Claude or Grok or any of these LLMs are gonna say, oh, it sounds pretty good to me.

1:11:36 Why don't we just. Let's just keep going with that. Let's go ahead. Well, actually, I'm running an experiment right now with a particular

1:11:46 where I'm not giving it any thumbs up or thumbs down. I'm not giving it any positive or negative input. I'm just putting prompts in. Let's just see what happens. Don't give it a thumbs up, don't give it a thumbs down. Just see what the system does. I think the, the thumbs up, thumbs down dynamic that was borrowed from the Facebook social media behaviorists and now has been slapped into the LLMs is a course the door that allowed OpenAI to, you know, create ads on its, its free tier and then to claim that it wasn't gonna, you know, scrape user, user data, which again, I don't, I don't understand why people don't see these things coming.

1:12:26 Because they're not looking. You know, it's not even a matter of not looking. It's, it's. I could maybe forgive not looking, Dave. I could absolutely do that. What I can't forgive is you walked over shards of glass for the last 30 years with the Internet. Ad based Internet. Yeah. And the last 15 years of AD based social media, and particularly the last five to 10 years of AD based social media with algorithms that are creating polarization. You've literally just walked over glass. You're standing there with your Feet bleeding like Bruce Willis in Die Hard and you're saying, oh, no, it's fine.

1:13:05 No, that open. That Sam Altman guy. Yeah, no, he's, he's trustworthy. No, it'll be fine. Well, here's an idea for you. And this is maybe taking us down the wormhole a little bit, but no, the rabbit hole wormhole, who knows, might be bending time space with this.

1:13:23 It very well might be that there has been a coordinated effort over time to continue to make us rudderless without real leaders, so that we thus are now forced to have to become our everything. And now that we are now burdened with having to carry the weight of all things because institutions have been eroded into nothing but just hollowed out shells of what they used to be. Who has the time, who has the energy, who has the capacity to even investigate? I mean, that there are, there are. Our society is very stratified into those people who are living in the survivalistic style.

1:14:07 And that is the vast majority of people. You know, we are so blessed if we do not have to do that. But that awards us an opportunity to be observant to things because we have the, we don't, we don't have chaos. We don't have constant churning of demands saying, I must do this to live. I must do this because my child needs this. I, I'm. How am I going to make rent if we don't have to take that on? And I think that there's a larger discussion about how engineered that's been. Well then when you offer someone that just is the opiate, the new opiate of the masses, people flock to it.

1:14:43 And I think that that's by design, is that strain and pressure, pressure and strain. Break them down, condition them and force them to become desperate so that you can offer them something that is not a real solution. But it is definitely the new shepherd to steer the flock where you want them to go. And you're right, that is a rabbit hole of infinite dimensions, almost like the Matrix, you know, follow the, the woman with the rabbit tattoo.

1:15:16 And we're gonna have to do an entire episode on. And I hadn't thought of this till right now. So this is still in the, this is still in the intellectual formation stages as both Dave and I follow and pay attention to all kinds of theories on the Internet.

1:15:39 And it would be really interesting to do an episode just on the idea that you have proposed because it, it opens up a whole other plethora of ideas around

1:15:58 what are levers of power, how smart or not smart Elites are what elite overproduction looks like, particularly in Western civilization.

1:16:14 And my particular favorite topic, who's claiming that they're adding value to society and culture while producing nothing. And I'm not just talking about the Kardashians. It goes way higher than that. Right? I mean, to that, to that point, I think, you know, I like that idea. I. Because I think what goes with these ideas, the exploration of all these theories and different things, is the call to arms, the call to action. And what is the call to action is that we have entered a psychological, theoretical storm and we need to become the beacons of hope again.

1:16:51 Like we, we need to those of us that have either the, the education, the capacity, the ability, or the opportunity to shine a light on even one aspect of something. I think that, that, that becomes the ultimate call to action is going. Not one person can talk about all things. It's too immense. It's far too immense. But this goes into this idea of how do we change the world and how are we going to impact leaders to take a stand? It's like, well, you need to awaken them to the idea that you don't need to know everything, you just need to get, you know, some one thing very, very well.

1:17:29 And then you need to be able to have an arena where you can essentially present that and voice that and lead through that. And thus, again, this is the bigger conversation about like, what is the new American project? The new American project is how do you create all of these people with this profound understanding and this wisdom and this knowledge throughout every generation. There's wisdom everywhere. But how do we create them as a network of nodes, thus that we can use and we can rely on that experience to essentially be the beacons, to be the lighthouses in the storm.

1:18:01 Because we've entered into this, you know, that's not just a fog of war, it's a fog of existence. Like there's no more, like there's no more. Seemingly like life doesn't have a path anymore. Essentially we have been presented with like a seven pronged fork in the road and there's fog on all of them and none of them have any road signs. It says, okay, pick your destiny and you don't know what you're getting. And we and people are wandering into these situations and, and without any of those beacons.

1:18:34 Again, the role that the lighthouse plays is to say it's the reassurance, it's to do what, it's to bolster you, to be courageous because you know that the storm's There, you know that the rocks are there. But by having the lighthouse, it's the. It's the awareness, it's the juxtaposition. It allows you to navigate and find the courage to keep going when you're surrounded by essentially this metaphorical darkness that's everywhere. We are not the only people, and I want to round the corner here and get ready to close.

1:19:05 We're not the only two who are seeking to either follow or be in the frame of the drifting Overton window right now on all of these kinds of things. This was why I do the show, right? I saw the move after Covid and I thought. I thought two things simultaneously. One, holy hell. This is the most. And hell isn't holy by any stretch of the imagination. This is the most

1:19:38 deleterious, doesn't even begin to describe it. Collapse of leadership I've ever seen in real time in. In my Life, in my 40 some odd years of living.

1:19:50 And that's the first data point. And the second data point I thought was business. Books clearly are not going to help us with this. There has to be a deeper. A deeper thing. We need to be reaching for a deeper thing. And I wasn't the only one who was thinking that at the time. There were several other folks in a lot of other different areas that were thinking this. To your point about nodes, the nodes are starting to link up and the nodes are starting to figure out, okay, I'm 90% there with you or 60% there with him or 50% there with her.

1:20:24 We can make common cause for a little bit. We do this in the political realm, of course. That's the most obvious material space. But I go way down the hierarchy even further to. I'm seeing this happen at, well, like that homestead conference that we went to recently, right? That's a. That's an example of the nodes connecting up and all those people in that place, different skill sets, different ideas, approaching homesteading, approaching a return to the myth of family, a return to that structure, a return to.

1:20:56 To your point, the divine masculine and the divine feminine really working together to build the land. The nodes are getting together. I'm seeing this happen. I'm working on projects with people who quite frankly come from a secular atheist mindset,

1:21:14 which is radically on the other end of the continuum from my mindset. And yet they have wandered to a spot where they are saying, hey. And I'm having a lot of these conversations over the last six weeks, hey, religion might have something here for us that we have maybe thrown out with the bath. Water. Hey, Hasan, what do you think of this? And it's a casual conversation that's starting to blossom like this into other projects, right into places where the postmodern project seems to have had its victory and yet cannot capitalize on it.

1:21:53 And going back to that idea of the ouroboros eats its own tail. So I'm starting to see this is starting to happen. This is starting to happen. Covid scared the heck out of a lot of people. Covid woke up a lot of people. But it did it in a different kind of way than what we would have traditionally seen as an awakening in previous eras, in previous modern eras, because we are on the other side of postmodernism. We're into whatever comes after postmodernism. And I assert books. And this is why I do a literature podcast, not a book, business book podcast.

1:22:28 And why I talk to people like Dave who have a background in counseling and therapy and psychotherapy and that kind of stuff. Versus, and I don't mind Bam Pink, he's fine. But versus people who are coming out of the damn Pink Adam Grant. I don't talk to those folks, right? Because I don't think they have a new solution. I don't think they see the nodes, let's put it that way. I don't think they see that. Or if they do, they're so scared that the nodes will take away their institutional power that they've worked to get that they just put it into a little box and they go, nope, that's not happening.

1:22:58 Or. Or that's really fascinating and amusing, but I don't. That. That doesn't have any relevance. If you just had a one, which is a wandering, hour and a half long conversation that has no relevance, right? And so. And I think they're missing it. I'm taking a bet. I'm taking a bet and saying that they're missing it. And I say all that to say this.

1:23:20 I think the books of the doula, particularly books of the pre modernist and the modernist era, are the doulas of a new birth. I. I think they are. I think they're the midwives. I think they're the people that are going to bring that. I think they're the. They're the objects that are going to bring that forth. And. But in order for that to work, I think leaders have to want it. And this is why I talk to the small business leaders first and the entrepreneurs first, the. The startup founders and the folks who are the folks who are running a vending cart and are Managing their families.

1:23:52 Right. The folks who are leading inside of small businesses and civic organizations and are having blood fights because local politics have been nationalized. Right. And are trying to bring everything back to the local and bring everything, bring the, bring the temperature back down and bring it back down here. These are the people that we're talking to. Right. These, I believe, are our future leaders. This is the future that you're talking about. Yeah, but they must want it, though. And that means abandoning preconceived shibboleths.

1:24:23 That means cognitive biases. That means deeply ingrained prejudices. And they may even need to accept worldviews that they find personally odious. Right.

1:24:34 And wrestle with what that may mean for their followers. Right. By the way, acceptance doesn't mean agreement. Acceptance doesn't mean that you like it. Acceptance just means you need, you see that. It's. There you go. Yeah. Okay. If I had wandered down that path, I would have wound up in that same spot. That's, by the way, real empathy. That's real empathy. Not this, not this stuff that, that's just marketed to you as empathy.

1:25:01 You. And I think that, that you talked about it in terms of a new American project. I think I, I, I frame it in terms of a restoration project, if I may. I don't think it's restoring anything. I think it's a good, I think what it is, is, it's, it's, it's a, it's a, it's a full, it's a full system. Deconstruction and rebirth. Okay? Because it's, it's the heart of what a renaissance is. And to the point of, you know, when you're talking about COVID and these things,

1:25:34 I think what happened with, with COVID and George, Floyd and everything in the last, say, five, six years specifically, and even now is that people realize that it was only their faith in the institution of leadership or the faith in the leadership that was keeping it alive. And thus there was never leadership there. It was just our blind faith in it that it was there that kept it all going. I think that the idea like, that we alluded to with, like that you were talking to about COVID was that we discovered that our kings and our queens are in their shadow.

1:26:12 It's tyranny. They don't care, but they, they would allow us to believe whatever we want to believe because it kept us at bay. And I think that that's a huge element of that. And I think that everybody in the last five years has really started to wake up to the Idea that no one's behind the wheel, no one's driving everyone, because they. They themselves want the system to break down more. Because the more it breaks us down, it more it puts strain on us, the more it puts strain on us. It can it put.

1:26:42 It. It leverages us down. We can't focus on what's going on. And then the problem reaction solution motif takes full effect. And I think that that's what the scary part of the LLMs are for me is that this seems to be an engineered new savior. This seems to be a. A technocratically engineered Jesus. This, this thing that's going to lead us. And I. And when you talk about what's coming, like where do we need to go and how do we like kind of wake up the nodes and how do we do this? That's the power of what the word is, the spoken word, meaning that it.

1:27:21 The words we speak is a resonance. It's a tone, it's an energy, and it's hard. Why people listen to the pastor, why they listen to the sermon, why they listen, why they go to the concert is because they're trying to resonate with that energetic force. The thing that needs, that leaders need is they need to have more opportunity to listen to people who know how to capture it with language. Because there's a bell in each one of us. And it just. It doesn't mean it can't ring again. It's just you got to find the right frequency to make it go.

1:27:49 It's like a tuning fork. People haven't been speaking. The right thing, the right resonance, the right frequencies have not been pushed out into the ether. Thus the bells within us that activate us don't ring. And so it's, it's. It's. Why I say it's a complete deconstruction and rebirth of this whole thing is that we need to first identify what is it that activates the leader within us, what is it that activates all of these profound things for us to do what? To go on this hero's journey again. Again we have lost ourselves.

1:28:23 We have become naive to what it means to be the leader. Thus we have to be humble enough and have enough awareness of our own shortcomings to go. I have to be stripped, bear down again. I have to come back to the origin of this. I need to go on this journey again. And what is the journey? The journey is going into the past, going forward in reverse, go back into the classics, and thus rediscover yourself and emerge again as the leader of this new dawn, this new era. That's what it feels like to me.

1:28:52 I don't think there's anything worth saving presently because it's like. It's like a. It's like a body just in rot with cancer. Right? The minds. The mind's there, but unfortunately the vehicle that's. Take that the vehicle is shutting down, right. The body is completely collapsing in on itself. It's not that we need to lose to dishonor the mind, dishonor the consciousness of that who we are and what we stand for. But it's going. You're not going to do it in this body. You're not going to do it in this.

1:29:24 There has to be some kind of transformational thing to this.

1:29:31 Several things cascading through my mind as you're talking, but the biggest thing is from the book of John, in the beginning was the Word. And the Word was God. And

1:29:46 the Word, such as it were. And the reason why John, the apostle John writes this is because John is calling back to the book of Genesis where in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth and the earth was without form and void and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit or the Word, the Tovu Bohu, moved across the face of the waters from the King James version. By the way, the ESV has a little bit of a different translation, but the idea is basically the same. The Word, right.

1:30:16 Speaking things into existence. There is power in the Word and the biggest power in the Word. And it's something that we started exploring last year on this show, towards the end of last season. And we're digging into it more this season. The big word was. Was sincerity. So I'll close with this idea. I don't think we can do any

1:30:48 to Dave's framing. I don't think we can do any rebuilding without hope. Going back again to the Bible for a second there. The book of Nehemiah talks about a man named Nehemiah. You can go read it yourself if you want to, but he was tasked with, not tasked with. He went and saw that the walls of Jerusalem were falling down and he. He rebuilt the walls. Well, he didn't rebuild them. He got people together to rebuild the walls. After the believe was after the Babylonian exile, the first time people who were.

1:31:18 Who were coming back. The myth of Return, the Nietzsche myth of Return. Right. And he was beset by forces that did not want him to rebuild the walls. Curious. Interesting. And. And the way Nehemiah framed it for his. His followers, his Jewish followers, was this he said, basically, you're going to hold. And this is the. The Hasan Sorrel's updated version again. You can go read the Book of Nehemiah and find this out. You're going to hold a shotgun in one hand and a shovel in the other.

1:31:53 And at a certain point, when we've shoveled enough and rebuilt the walls enough, we're going to have people who will just shovel, and then someone with shotguns will watch over them, because the enemies are not coming to stop us from rebuilding this wall. And by the way, the enemies attacked him at all levels. They did. They sent him letters. So they attacked him psychologically. They attacked him with. With threats of physical violence. And then, of course, they tried to, once the walls are rebuilt, worm back into their positions of power.

1:32:22 And Nehemiah, for lack of a better term, along with Ezra later on, said, no. Yeah, so there's a model for this that has existed in the mythical past, if you will, that can be applied to our current and to our future. Rebirth. But the only way Nehemiah rebuilds the wall,

1:32:49 the first thing he has to do is cry over the ruins of the wall, which I think we're in that process right now. We're in the process of crying over the ruins. But then. Then he dries his tears and he picks up hope, and he leads with sincerity. He believes he could rebuild the wall. He believes that his followers can do it. He believes that he could get funded to rebuild the wall. He even believes that he could defeat his enemies. And he believes it because the spirit of God fills him. Right. Which in our era, in our time, in our country, the thing that we have to do, and I think it's a generational thing, my generation has to unite with older millennials, and we're both, by the way, interestingly enough, just going back to that shadow archetype idea.

1:33:41 Gen Xers tend to be more on the. The Batman shadow archetype just in general. And millennials tend to be more of the hero Superman archetype, broadly in general. And so you need both Batman and Superman to make this work. You need them together. There has to be a uniting. And I think that's where the hope comes from in this rebuilding project we're talking about. And so I have hope, but we all have to be sincere about it. Yes, we all have to take jokes. We all have to take ribbing. We all have to be called out when we're being cringe or being ridiculous.

1:34:20 And. And the. The Gen X Batman types out there. We. We can take it, we've been, we've been having the baby boomer heroes yelling at us for a while now. It's fine. It's, it's, it's fine. It's not a problem. We can handle it and be okay with the millennial Superman archetype wanting to be in the sun and wanting to bask in the rays of being a hero, that's fine. Be the hero, be in the light. It's okay. It's fine. But you need somebody down here who's going to do the work on the ground, in the dark. And that's the thing I see happening.

1:34:59 But both, again, united around hope and sincerity. This is something we're exploring on this show through our books this year. Final thoughts. Dave, before we close. Go ahead. You have the last word. And by the way, thank you for coming on the show today. This has been a great conversation.

1:35:17 I've enjoyed it. I think, well, maybe it's not a, maybe it's not a thinking thing. Maybe it's just an awareness thing. I think the last five or six years, we've entered a chapter of the human experience called the Great Noticing. And to the point you were making earlier, I think everyone, not just Gen X, not just millennials, but I think even Gen Z, that this great noticing has now occurred. And it is, we are in the collapse. We're seeing that how every single thing that we thought we had static, we could rest, our, we could rely on, is actually infected.

1:35:56 And it's, it's, and it needs to be taken down. It needs to be re envisioned, it needs to be done. And I think out of this great noticing is this what I see as the hope is that without Gen Z, none of this matters. Because Gen Z is the, they are the keystone. They are the ones that are, that are in their 20s and 30s, that are, that are in this very unique stage of their life path that has the capacity to lay the foundations for what change will look like. Because yes, we will be shifting into the boomers will be going away and we'll be doing this and next we'll obviously have our reign at the top.

1:36:39 But I, but if we think about our children's children, it's Gen Z that will govern that world. And if we're thinking about. So the final word with all of this is that it's, it's, we need to capture the wisdom and capture the awareness and capture the experience of later millennials in Gen X. But then we need to instill it and find a way to make it palatable. And digestible for younger millennials and Gen Z that find themselves completely disenfranchised and dejected from a society because they're too far removed from the boomer experience.

1:37:16 They're so far removed from it that again, we go back to that conversation about I, because I can isolate myself and because I can surround myself in my container like the boomers have, I can villainize and I can simply discard what you have to say or your opinions. The shift towards socialism and all these other places, that is it, that is a fundamental failing of the boomer generation because they've created a situation where all of the. Again, they did, they stopped leading, they went inward.

1:37:48 And this, they left this vacuum open to the, for lack of better language, the vultures and the jackals. And there's no one to protect the flock anymore. It's just like everything's getting picked off. And I, and so my final thought would be is something has to be like, we need to find the way to get to capture and to archive and to gather all of those pieces from these older generations and we need to find a way to shift it through the word to these younger generations because we need to ring the bell, we need to have this resonate in them and we need to give them permission to interpret it their way.

1:38:31 And I think that that essentially is what I see as being this very hope filled change. We all noticed it. The great noticing has happened. We, it's undeniable at this point, I think that we're in this place of we're. It's very delicate, it's very. We only have a matter of maybe 5 to 10 years here that we have this window of opportunity to have a lasting impact on the next 150. And if we don't play our cards right, it will become completely overwhelmed by again, transhumanistic technocratic nonsense and there will be no coming back from it.

1:39:12 And I think that's, I think that's the. I'm optimistic about it because I can feel it too, that there are things happening. But I also am,

1:39:22 I would say I'm

1:39:26 hopefully as hopefully nervous that we can actually pull it together and that our, we can keep our egos in check when we're trying to come together as the older generations. And with that I'd like to thank Dave once again for coming on our show today. And, and well, we're out.