Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky w/Hana Kabele Gala & Jesan Sorrells

0:00 Hello, my name is Jesan Sorrells, and this is the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books podcast, episode number 188. Opening up with a selection from our. From our book today. We start with part one, Underground, and I quote, I'm a sick man. I'm a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased. However, I know nothing at all about my disease and do not know for certain what ails me. I don't consult a doctor for it and never have, though I have a respect for medicine and doctors.

0:47 Besides, I'm extremely superstitious, sufficiently so to respect medicine. Anyway, I am well educated enough not to be superstitious, but I am superstitious. No, I refuse to consult a doctor from spite that you probably will not understand. Well, understand it. Though of course I can't explain who it is precisely that I am mortifying in this case, by my spite. I am perfectly aware. Aware that I cannot pay out the doctors by not consulting them. I know better than anyone that by all this I am only injuring myself and no one else.

1:20 But still, if I don't consult a doctor, it is from spite. My liver is bad. Well, let it get worse. I've been going on like that for a long time. 20 years now. I am 40. I used to be in government service, but I'm no longer. I was a spiteful official. I was rude and took pleasure in being so. I did not take bribes, you see. So I was bound to find a recompense in that at least a poor Jess. But I will not scratch it out. I wrote it, thinking it would sound very witty. But now that I have seen myself that I only wanted to show off in a despicable way.

1:55 I will not scratch it out on purpose. When petitioners used to come for information to the table at which I sat, I used to grind my teeth at them and felt intense enjoyment. When I succeeded in making anybody unhappy, I almost always did succeed, for the most part. They were all timid people, of course. They were petitioners. But of the uppish ones, there was one officer in particular I could not endure. He simply would not be humble and clanked his sword in a disgusting way. I carried on a feud with him for 18 months over that sword.

2:26 At last I got the better of him. He left off clanking it. That happened in my youth, though. But do you know, gentlemen, what was the chief point about my spite? Why, the whole point, the real sting of it lay in the fact that continually, even in the moment of the acutest spleen. I was inwardly conscious with shame that that I was not only not a spiteful but not even an embittered man, that I was simply scaring sparrows at random and amusing myself by it. I might foam at the mouth or bring me a doll to play with, give me a cup of tea with sugar in it, and maybe I should be appeased.

3:00 I might even be genuinely touched. So probably I should grind my teeth at myself afterwards and lie awake at night with shame for months after. That was my way.

3:17 Close Quote

3:22 the Marketer the author, the blogger Seth Godin once infamously quipped, we are all marketers now. He said this or wrote this in one of his many books, I can't remember which one, in response to the rise of social media and the penetration of the endlessly ubiquitous Internet into every single aspect of our lives. He was noticing that when ordinary people have access to the previously gatekept tools of broadcasting, they wouldn't fail to begin to market themselves as aggressively as corporations marketed products to them for the majority of the industrial Revolution.

3:56 What does that have to do with what I just read with our book today? Well, if we are all marketers now, then it naturally follows from that that we are all liars now. Cause if you know marketers, you know that all of them do two things without fail. One, they ruin everything they touch. And I'm saying this as a marketer, by the way. And two, they are usually lying to get you to buy something. But a society can't exist on a steady diet of lies. Eventually, truth, capital T, truth crushed to earth, as my grandmother would have said back in the day, will rise again.

4:36 And this is not a new situation. Back in the day, about 2,000 years or so ago, a man was arguing with the dominant cultural power brokers of his time and he said something that took them by surprise then and continues to take us all by surprise even now. He said, and I quote or it was framed and I quote to the Jews who had believed on him. Jesus said, if you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth and the truth will set you free. John 8:31 32 KJV

5:12 the book we are covering today trans stands at a transitional moment, or is positioned at a transitional moment in the history of mankind when European society at a time and at that time the vanguard of the Western world was transitioning from individuals knowing the biblical truth, such as it were, and advocating it for vociferously and moving towards a time, the time in which we now live at the end of where individuals, communities, even the state struggle to state the truth in a time of comfortable, habitual and institutionalized lying.

5:46 On the show today we are going to cover a book whose narrative links ideas about lying but Lives Inside of liars and the power of moral courage. That's all the way at the end of this book. From the three books we've already covered this quarter. So we've looked at the Third man, we looked at east of Eden and Invitation to a Beheading. You should go back and listen to those episodes. And we are going to glean what we can from this book today. Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky Leaders I'm beginning to believe that the problem isn't that all marketers are liars and that we are all marketers.

6:28 Now I'm beginning to believe the problem is that we can't or won't find our way back to telling the truth.

6:38 And today on our show we have a new guest co host. This is her very first episode. I want to welcome to the show Hannah Cabela Gala. Ahana tabella gala. Dr. Hana Cabela gala is a certified Executive coach and the creator of Rapid Transformational Neurocoaching. For more than a decade, she has helped high achieving professionals, especially tech leaders, entrepreneurs, particularly men in their 30s to their 50s, recover their identity and break through the patterns that keep them stuck. As a professor of business management at South Seattle College in the great state of Washington, she also shapes the next generation of professionals and entrepreneurs through courses in service operations, ethics and talent management, bringing the same blend of practical business experience and rigorous insight into both the classroom and the coaching room.

7:35 Welcome to our show, Hana. How are you doing today? Thank you so much for having me. As you know, I love the concept of your podcast, so this is a super exciting time for me and thank you for having me. Absolutely. So I had a long intro there. I typically have a long intro. I do a lot of yammering to kind of set all this up. It's just, it's my want. I want to start off with, as I always do with talking a little bit about the author of our book. We have covered Crime and Punishment, but only like the first four chapters and we did that with Dave Bomb Rucker.

8:15 Gosh. Now about a two years ago now we got to go back and re pick up Crime and Punishment Notes from Underground is significantly shorter, significantly shorter than Crime and Punishment or Brothers Karamazov. And I'm probably mispronouncing that so you can correct all of my pronunciations, if you would like. But Notes for Underground is a unique book by Dostoevsky. But let's jump in a little bit into who he was.

8:45 I know that you really like this book. You really enjoy Dostoevsky's writing. What is it that jumps out to you about his life and talk a little bit about what you know about him because you. You hail from the part of the world that he wrote from. So. Yeah, yeah. So I. I was born and raised in the Communist Czechoslovakia, and there we actually had mandatory Russian from fourth grade. Everybody and I grew up literally surrounded by the Russian greats. It's a privilege in a way, looking back. But my mother was a.

9:28 She taught Russian and literature and history of art. And so the bookshelves in our living room were lined with the grades. Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, the lot. And I loved War and Peace and Tolstoy growing up. And I always shy away from Dostoevsky because he seemed so morose and sad and, you know, he is. That just. He is. But I was thinking about the. The difference between, say, War and Peace. And look, this is not a book from, like, for everybody. But I loved it because I'm the. The person who will just revel in these huge tableaus and the depictions of, you know, 45,000 characters and the Russian and French intertwining and all of that.

10:37 It's so epic. Right? But I thought, you know, when I discovered Dostoevsky, I thought the magnitude and the sort of the epic scale is there as well, but he turns it inwards. So to me, Dostoevsky is so profound because he has this ability to look inside one's soul and really get into those ugly corners we don't want other people to see and discover. And he has this laser sharp ability to just go in there and just keep pushing. And I will say, Brother Karamazov are or is my probably top three of all the books I've ever read in my life.

11:34 And about the. You said something about Dostoevsky. I actually wrote about him writing Brothers Karamazov. Somebody can find it on my substack somewhere. But he reminds me a little bit of David Foster Wallace like this, you know, like, I see his writing. If I was to describe to another person what Brother Karamazov or Crime and Punishment is, to me, it would be. This is like David Foster Wallace in the 19th century. Wow. Okay, I. I had never thought of. Well, no, but like, this is why I love inviting on folks coming from different nationalities, different ethnicities.

12:27 Different, whatever, different regions. Because as an American, I can only look at the context of the books that we cover on this show through the, the lens, through the window of my American ness right now. That, of course, is going to break down into different structures in the United States, which is just sort of how it, how it, how it happens. And we've had tons of those kinds of conversations on this show.

12:52 But we are, when we read books like Notes from Underground or we were going to tackle Brothers Karmazov last year, and I just, I looked at it and I was like, oh, this is 800 pages. And I put it down and I'm a, I'm a, I'm a, I'm a big boy. Like, I'll get in there, I'll wrestle with, with a text. I just, I didn't have the will at that point to be able to go in there and really do that, really do that work fair. And so. And I appreciate the fact that, like, you're, you're a big fan, which means that might be your second book that you might come on for, because I might need a hand holding through the brother's garments off.

13:35 But, but Dostoyevsky is a writer for me because again, I'm coming at this through an American lens. And yes, you know, I've talked about this on the show. I'm, you know, I'm a Christian. You know, I was, you know, raised, embedded in sort of that, that. Not sort of in that environment, also being African American layers on top of that. And then there's class structures that layer on top of that. So I bring all of that to the text right now. That doesn't mean that I allow that or I try to allow that to

14:08 disengage Dostoyevsky from the text, which is what a lot of deconstructionists will do. I reject all of that. The text has to stand on its own. It has to stand as it is. And then I have to look at it and go, okay, how do I bring this into, into the framework that I'm in? And so when I look at Dostoevsky, to your point, I see a. I do. I see a deeply pessimistic guy about human nature. I see a person who is struggling with their orthodox Christianity and trying to make that fit with what they see happening around them.

14:40 But I also see a person who is really into. And I wrote something on my substack about this that you commented on. And by the way, if you have an opportunity, go look at Honda's substack. It's Great. It's Tough Cookies. Fabulous name. Go, go check it out. We'll have a link to it in the, in the, in the show notes. Go, go, go get it. It's a nice plug. I'll take it. Yeah, go subscribe. But I had written, you know, he, he also struggled with, with, with gambling and with playing poker and with the thrill of.

15:14 And I, I understand. It's. It's the thrill of that. It's a thrill of the chase. It's the thrill of the getting. And, you know, it wasn't until, you know, his wife kind of got a hold of him and even then, I don't even think. I don't know, she fell in love with his words. And I wonder about. I wonder if she really ever got a hold of the man or if it was just constant because men and women don't change across culture. I wonder if it was just constant, just like, just like whipping him to keep him out of the gambling dens.

15:45 Is this a question? Because. Yeah, this is. Yeah, this is a question. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, you probably know more about this actually. You probably know more about this than I do. So his, his first. And the historians out there don't, you know, hold this against me, but I believe that. So his first wife passed away kind of young, and then he married woman who was. And I wrote about this because I think that it's just so.

16:20 How, how shall I describe this? It's such a great example of essentially technology allowing you to be productive. Bear with me where I'm going with this. When I read Brothers Karamazov and I had this, like, I'm so into this text, it just pulled me in. And yes, you're correct. I think the audiobook is like 45 hours. And the, the, the book itself again, is like this big. And the. I had this feeling of, you know, when I think of David Foster Wallace, who I actually really, really like. He's my, one of my most favorite American writers.

17:05 But I always had this image of him sitting at the keyboard and just like typing in this headed trance. And, you know, he was not. He was an addict, kinda like he, he was playing with different drugs and, And I think that it kind of helped his writing, at least the productivity part. The genius was there always, but the delivery was definitely helped. And I thought, so how did Dostoevsky. Right. Brothers Karamazov. Because, like, with a pen, with a quill. What was happening? Like, how do you, how do you produce?

17:49 I mean, I'm always. This is my toxic trait I'm always looking at, like, how was it literally delivered? Like, tell me the execution bit. How does this mechanically work? And so the story is that he was under a deadline, as he was always. Because he was always out of money or in debt, and the creditors were onto him and he had to deliver like a book, short book, I think it was the Gambler, actually. And he found a. By recommendation, a young woman who was. She was studying and she was top of her class in stenography.

18:36 And so he hired her and she would come in and. And take whatever he was dictating and do the shorthand, and then transcribed it on a typewriter, I think. Was it a typewriter? No, it was also by hand, but longhand, that's what it was. There were no typewriters because I looked into it and wrote about it. Because eventually through the words and through the work, she transcribing his dictation, they fell in love. And she did have a huge impact on his life in a sense that he got way better. I can't imagine living with some like a genius like this.

19:23 And constantly, when he did publish something and he got money or advances theory is, you know, relatives would show up and ask for money. He was never able to say no. So they were constantly struggling materially. But I think that she brought a lot of peace and structure to his life and made him better. And I think they had like three kids, two survived. And I think, you know, this whole. Behind every great man there's a woman. I. I kept thinking about that when. When I was looking into this particular story.

20:08 Well, and I think. So Stephen King has a great book called On Writing, Right. And probably other than Ernest Hemingway's Collected Quotes, you know, about writing that people have sort of collected from things, interviews and things that he wrote over the course of his life on writing by Stephen King is probably. And myself and other guests have talked about this before for probably the best. This is how the sausage is made book on writing ever published by a major author. Right. And

20:42 I do believe fundamentally that writers really break into a bunch of different categories, Right. So you have writers like Charles Portis, who wrote True Grit. He literally lived in a cabin in Arkansas. After he published True Grit, he went off, he became a journalist for a little while in London and then he went into a cabin in Arkansas, wrote True Grit and then, well, actually wrote a couple of other books and then wrote True Grit like it was his third book, if I remember correctly, Charles Force's third book.

21:12 And that became a huge hit. And he Stayed in his cabin in Arkansas for the rest of his life, which is amazing to me. That's the ultimate sort of writer's revenge, like a comedian's revenge, where they show up to your house and heckle, you know, or they show up to your job and heckle you.

21:32 Jerry Seinfeld tells that joke all the time. And it's a great joke. I mean, because it's. It's spectacular. I don't show up to your job and, heck, will you. I'm working here. Like, what are we doing? But writers tend to fall into. Or at least they tend to be framed. And Stephen King talks about this in terms of. To your point about addiction. The addiction is the thing that drives them. Like David Foster Wallace or Dostoyevsky, whatever the addiction is. The addiction is the thing where the genius has to.

21:56 Has to live. Or writers are. And he talks about this again in On Writing. Writers are considered to be just typists, right? So, for instance,

22:07 it's either Ray Bradbury or Isaac Asimov. I think it's Ray Bradbury, actually, who wrote. No, it was Isaac Asimov wrote a ton of books. A ton of writing came out of Isaac Asimov. And yet only a few of those things were hits because he just. Every day, just typed for four hours. And he would describe himself as a typist because it was the discipline. And he would type it whether it was good. He'd type it whether it was bad. Sometimes you're going to get a hit, sometimes you're not. You do it for four hours and you go home, right?

22:41 And then, of course, you have the earliest Hemingway types, where the weird sort of hybrid of both of those, where they have the discipline, but they also have the addictions that drive them in certain ways. When I look at Dostoevsky, I say all that to say this. When I look at Dostoevsky's life and when I look at how he. How he produced his product, right? How he produced his ideas, I often think of.

23:09 I wonder how much more productive he would have been if he had had a typewriter. Like, would he have been the obsessive that sat at the typewriter? Or would he still have been. We still have been chasing the gambling bug. Like, would that still have been a thing for him? And so I see something like Notes are Underground, which I'll talk directly about the book here now, but I see something like Notes from Underground is sort of his first attempt to sort of wrangle his obsessions together and put them into one spot.

23:37 That way he could do a Bunch of other different things later on. You know, maybe here is a good point to say that if I have never read Dostoevsky, I would not recommend reading Notes from the Underground as your first foray into Dostoevsky. And here's why. So it's enticing because unlike all the other, you know, beasts of a book, this is what, 300 pages less. And so it's like, oh, I can feel smart, see what Dostoevsky is about, and I can read this slim book. And let me tell you, don't. If this is your first attempt, I would discourage people from doing it because it is so bleak.

24:35 It's so bleak. It's. I think that the structure is a bit of a challenge because the book is divided into two parts and the chronologically earlier part follows the later part. So you have to pay attention. But also it really is. He is at his best describing the. The bad in humans. And I would maybe push back a little bit on the sort of the struggle with. With faith. And I think that you mentioned at the beginning, I think that, yes, his time, he was writing at this extremely violent, as in volatile time.

25:30 You had the sort of social upheaval in Europe. You had the sort of. The changes with the serfdom and all the legal and practical consequences of changes in the tsarist Russia that he was living through. So he was noticing all of that. And he lived in Russia, but he also traveled to Europe. Right. His gambling took him to like Baden Baden and all these fancy casinos of the. Of the time. And so there's this tension that is really present in his writing. And back to the. Back to the Notes from the Underground, I think that he is.

26:24 The main character is awful. The main character is a bad guy. Now, you quoted different translation. Mine opens with I am a wicked man. And I mean, it starts with, I'm a bad. I'm a sick man, I'm a wicked man and an attractive man, et cetera, et cetera. And I think that the power of that book is in a lot of lessons, which I'm happy to dive into. But I think that it is also really hard to read a book where the main character or the hero is really the anti hero. So, like, I thought about this because as much as I love Dostoevsky, reading this book is a challenge.

27:23 It's, you know, and I don't. And it reminded me of. I like movies and I'm a huge cinephile, yet there are stories that are really hard for me to get into because like all the mob, you Know, like, say what you want about Sopranos and this particular genre. I have such a hard time rooting for a murderer or a gangster. Like, it's really hard for me. So. And. But there's always a redemption. There's always this humanity you can relate to. And I think in this book there is a recognition. I think it resonates with us because we can sometimes recognize some of the toxic traits, but there's also no redemption.

28:22 And I think that's where it hits so hard. Yes, I would absolutely. So I would absolutely agree with that. We'll get. We'll get back to the book in a second.

28:36 I. I absolutely agree with you. And I'm also a huge cinephile, so maybe we'll. We'll talk later about what are your top five directors of all time. If. Well, if Christopher Nolan isn't on that list, I don't know if we could be friends. I don't know. I don't know if you can come back. No, it's fine. No, no, he absolutely is. I'm sure it's fine. I know. No, um, but. But I think so. You're right. There's the arc of this book. If you're. If you're going to read this book, I. I agree with Hannah. If you're going to read this book as a leader and you're going to look for leadership lessons in this book, this is one of the harder books that we've.

29:15 We've. We've addressed on this show. I would put it up there with Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, a book that made me incredibly uncomfortable. A whole variety of reasons. I've talked about that before on this show. Go back and listen to that episode. We did that episode with Claire Chandler. I would also put this book on par with Adolf Eichman and the Hannah Arendt. Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem, Another book that on the surface looks easy to get into. Or there. Right. Yeah, yeah. But. But reveals so many other things underneath, as Hannah Aaron is kind of going through this process of watching this trial and trying to figure out what.

30:02 Well, what. What secular morality actually means when it's unhooked fully from. From religion. And then the other book that I would put it on par with that we've covered on this show is. Is the Power of the Powerless by Vaclav Havell. Another book, small. Right. And yes, I do see. I do see. You've got the biography of Hovel behind you. Yeah, yeah. Fascinating guy. But. But I worked for him. Oh, really?

30:35 Okay, I'm sorry. Peeling away layers of the onions. No, it's fine. Peeling away layers of the onion. No, this is good. Okay, I'm gonna take a. I can't just let that go. How?

30:46 I was like, this is, like finding out that you worked for, like, one of the. One of the disciples or whatever. Oh, yeah, I dictated. I dictated Peter's Gospel. Oh, really? You might want to have dropped that earlier. I was the first intern there they ever had at the Prague Castle, which is where the president's office is located. And I was studying political science at Charles University, and my aunt actually was like, why don't you go? Because we were so high on the revolutionary spirit after the Berlin Wall fell.

31:23 And, you know, we. We all kind of lived through it, and it was such an amazing experience. And I happened to be in Prague, and. And, you know, Havel was such a. An icon for. For us, and the fact that he was a playwright made a huge difference, and for a lot of people, me particularly. And so I just went in and I was like, I want to be an intern here. And they looked at me and they were like, we don't know what an intern mean. What does that mean? And I said, I will do anything. I will stand by the copy machine, the Xerox machine.

32:05 I will do whatever you need, and you don't have to pay me. And they were like, okay, great. So I. That's the part they heard was the I don't have to pay you part. That's the part. And. But, yeah, I ended up in the press office and worked there for a couple years, and it was absolutely amazing. And I have met a lot of very important people, and I have tons of lessons from that time, one of them being, we're all people.

32:35 And I think that. To take it back to the book we're discussing, I think that's what's really hard, because similar to. I'm so glad that you brought up Hannah Arendt, because she struggles with that. You know, like, there's. There's this. We're all children of God. We're all. There is this knowledge for most of us that were part of the whole. There is shared consciousness. You are a bit of a villain, and you are a bit of a good person depending on your circumstances. There's so much into this, about this sense of wanting to belong to humanity.

33:24 And when you read about people like Eichmann or when you read the Notes from the Underground, you go, really? I'm part of that. That's awful. I hate it. And, and there are moments when you go, oh, yeah, I have done that. That's not comfortable at all. Well, and it gets to this idea. And I think this is where.

33:52 The, the, the Christianity piece has to come back in because modern, and I can only speak to modern American evangelicalism, which is what I know modern American evangelicalism has, for better or worse in, in, in the post war, and by the way, post World War II, last 80 or 90 years now of that history has fallen into the trap of just being nice, being the greatest commandment. If we're just nice, then we don't have to worry about all those other, I'm going to use an old school word here, sins. We don't have to worry about all those other sins.

34:33 We don't have to worry about greed or lust or vanity. We don't have to worry about pride, which we talk about on this show. Envy, which is of things, jealousy, which is of people. We don't have to worry about any of those things. We don't have to, we don't have to comment culturally on coveting your neighbor's wife or your neighbor's stuff or your neighbor's husband. We don't have to comment on any of that. Just be nice. And that reduces Christianity to being a very personal thing without cosmic significance.

35:07 And the second that an Eichmann shows up, just being nice doesn't work. The second that the dyspeptic, and I'm being gentle here, underground man shows up, that doesn't work. For dealing with her, for addressing that sort of person, we're going to talk a little bit about Plato's Cave because I think there's, there's a lot of parallels to the allegory of Plato's cave in here. When people are happy in the cave, they're happy looking at the shadows on the wall and they don't want to see the real thing, that happiness in and of itself.

35:44 And this is a, this is a philosophical jump here, folks, and I'm going to make that happiness in and of itself is evil, but we don't have. It's lying. It's lying. We don't have language for that when we've just decided in, again, in the United States of America, evangelical context that the highest sin that we can commit is to not be nice. Now, that sounds. When I say that, and I recognize that some of my evangelical listeners will be listening to this and they are going to get off the train and stop listening and some of my secular folks are going to be like, yeah, you guys Are.

36:17 Whatever. No, stop. Because the secular people fall into the same trap too. You think that the highest thing is to just be nice. Just be nice and everything will be fine. And that's not. That's not the highest thing. So when evil does show up, and we talked about this in Eichmann in Jerusalem a little bit, but we also have talked about this in term. In 1984, we talked about this. We covered Brave New World. We even talked about this. We talked with the unreliable narrator in Lolita. When evil does show up, whether it's seductive or deceptive or whatever, you have no.

36:52 Heck, we talked about this last episode, an invitation to a beheading about the Nuremberg Trials. How are you going to judge evil if the only barometer you have is we have power and we're not. And we're. And we're not. We have power and we're nice. So that makes us better. That's not enough. That's thin. And I think Dostoyevsky saw the thinness of that coming, but he didn't have an answer for how to solve that problem. He could just show you the problem. And so I actually see a great peril to not.

37:24 I have two points, not just to the evangelical Christianity. I see this. Let's be nice. And that overrides everything in every Single Corporation in 2020 of, you know, like, it's such a

37:48 easy default that cannot stand because truth requires courage. They. These two are inseparable. And the moment you separate them, you are living a lie. You are the happy pig, you know, and. And it's the sitting in the cave and watching the shadows. That's not happiness, because it's not truth. And I will say the second point is to me, because Brothers Karamazov is Dostoevsky's last publication, I think that he is resolving this. I think that he leaned into his faith a lot more towards the end of his life, and he.

38:48 He urged people, or at least it seemed to me through the reading that I, as. As a Christian, I too saw. And it doesn't matter if it's, you know, Catholic or Orthodox. The. The Christian spirit is. It requires you not only to act, but also there you cannot have a framework only based on morality that is civil. You absolutely have to have transcendence. And I think that is one of his most powerful messages. At least that's what I took from it. Yeah, yeah. Civil morality will always fail. Eventually it's going to run up against something it cannot deal with.

39:37 And I don't for leaders. I'm not Talking about civil morality, I want to be very clear. I'm not talking about civil morality in terms of what someone is doing in some governmental office somewhere over there. I'm talking about civil morality in terms of what you are doing in your organization right now, even if your organization is five people, that's civil morale. You've created an environment where that has to exist. And by the way, most of us aren't taught that, right? And so we're not even trained in how to think that or even think in those kinds of terms.

40:13 But because.

40:17 Because uncivil and deeply unserious people are being pressed down upon us all the way down to the substrate level and their ideas and their posture and their perspective on the world. And by the way, deeply unserious people rely on lying to protect them and allow them to keep being unserious. That's the state that they have to operate in when their power is pushed down to the substrate just because it's power. Now, we at the community level, we at the, the level in Seattle or the level in north central Texas, where I live, right, where I'm recording this from right now, today, we have to live with that.

40:56 We have to live with the outcomes of that. And we have to figure out how to face it, particularly when it shows up in our schools, it shows up in our churches, it shows up in a bunch of institutions that we thought were solid but maybe proved to not be as solid as we anticipated.

41:17 But got something, I think, that will point this out even further. So I'm going to go back to the book, going to go back to Notes from Underground. I'm going to pick up from part one, and it's going to be chapter seven. So the way this book is divided up, there's multiple chapters in each part, and they are. They're short. Right? And this is what Hannah is saying, and she's exactly correct. It's deceptively short. But the Titan, the writing is incredibly tight, even for someone like myself who's like, I'm working my way through Ben Hur and Les Miserables for the show in June, right?

41:57 I'm going to. I'm going to the barricades. Go look at the French Revolution and go to the barricades. But. But in looking at this book, it is definitely written. He definitely thought about every single sentence. And he, and he, he, he. I could see him sweating through every single sentence. And so the writing is tight, even though the, the passages or the chapters are short. So let me pick up here, like I said in Chapter seven. I marked this piece here. He's.

42:38 Well, the underground man is talking about the laws of nature and man. And this relates a little bit to what Hannah was saying about corporations.

42:52 Then this is what you. This is all what you say. There we go. New economic relations will be established, already made and worked out with mathematical exactitude. He's talking about the industrialists, by the way, who were beginning to rule in Europe during his time. So that every possible question will vanish in the twinkling of an eye simply because every possible answer to it will be provided. Then the quote unquote palace of Crystal will be built. Then. In fact, those will be the halcyon days.

43:23 Of course, there is no guaranteeing, this is my comment, that it will not be, for instance, frightfully dull then. For what will one have to do when everything will be calculated and tabulated, but on the other hand, everything will be extraordinarily rational? Of course, boredom may lead you to anything. It is boredom sets one sticking golden pins into people. But all that would not matter. What is bad, this is my comment again, is that I dare say people will be thankful for the gold pins then.

43:50 Man is stupid, you know, phenomenally stupid. Or rather he is not at all stupid, but he is so ungrateful that you could not find another like him in all creation. I, for instance, would not be in the least surprised if all of a sudden, apropos of nothing in the midst of general prosperity, a gentleman with an ignoble, or rather with a reactionary and ironical countenance were to arise and put his arms akimbo and say to us all, I say, gentlemen, hadn't we better kick over the whole show and scatter rationalism to the winds simply to send these logarithms to the devil and to enable us to live once at more, live once more at our own sweet, foolish will.

44:32 That again, would not matter. But what is annoying is that he would be sure to find followers such as the nature of man. And all that for the most foolish reason, which one would think was hardly worth mentioning, that is that man, everywhere and at all times, whoever he may be, has preferred to act as he chose and not in the least as his reason and advantage dictated. And one may choose what is contrary to one's interests and sometimes one positively ought. That's my idea. One's own free, unfettered choice, one's own caprice, however wild it may be, one's own fancy worked up at times to frenzy.

45:06 That is the very most advantageous advantage which we have overlooked, which comes under no classification and against which all systems and theories are continually being shattered to atoms. And how do these wiseacres know that man wants a normal, a virtuous choice? What has made them conceive that man must want a rationally advantageous choice? What man wants is simply independent choice, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead. And choice, of course, the devil only knows what choice.

45:51 I read things like this, and Hannah, you don't know this, and I haven't talked about it on the show in a long time, but I took a lot of philosophy classes in college, a lot. Matter of fact, I would have probably run off, become a philosophy major if my mom hadn't told me, there's no money in that. Go do something else. So I went and became an art student because, of course, that's better.

46:16 But I'm. I'm fascinated by what Dostoyevsky is doing here, because when you talk about independence and you talk about choice again, I think about this in an American context. We're a weird country because we've staked our existence on a creed. And yes, the creed is, is most notably named in the Declaration of Independence. But then the thing that follows on from the creed, if that's the vision statement, the mission is laid out in the Constitution, and the Constitution is staked on two amendments right at the beginning, right up front, there's the First Amendment, which is.

46:55 You can say whatever you want to say. Dave Chappelle has this great joke, right? I'm going to read it. I love that. Oh, my God. Yeah, you can say whatever you want to say, but here's the Second Amendment. You're going to need a gun. You need to arm yourself, because it, the Constitution fundamentally understands something that Dostoevsky is getting to here. You can give human beings independent choice. You can grant them all kinds of rights that, by the way, the government isn't granting them, they come from God, which is a whole other conception there.

47:27 But let's just go with that. You're granting them the rights and, and these people, if you give them free and unfettered access to these rights, they're going to. They're going to take advantage of them. With that being said, there will be consequences and repercussions. There always are. And Dostoyevsky gets. And, and, and to your point about the serfs earlier, he's positioning this during a time when Russia is leaving its, for lack of a better term, slave state. I hate using that term, but it's one that will resonate with my, with my Audience here, it's leaving that state, it's leaving that and going into some transitioning into something else that's not fully defined.

48:09 While these tensions from Europe, these industrialized tensions. And when he talks about, and the reason why I picked that section is because the way he talks about the industrialists are the exact same way we talk about the technologists right now.

48:24 Yeah, this is true. Go ahead. No, no. So I guess my question here is.

48:32 How do you, how do you navigate choice as a leader? And that's a very deep philosophical question, but how do you navigate choice as a leader? How do you, how do you take something like notes from underground? You go, okay, the first part of this, to your point, which is philosophically heavy, is really focused around this idea of what man is going to choose to do versus what he's going to be compelled to do. And then the second part is about how he lies to himself and compels himself to do different things.

49:03 Okay, but let's just focus on this. How do you, how do you, how do you navigate this world as a, as a leader or just as an individual? When the algorithm, not the logarithm, the algorithm now is designed to push you to engage in certain behaviors and to undermine your free will and to under, or at least to give you the idea that free will is non existent. How do we, how do we navigate this? Because I think Dostoevsky would look at the environment that we're in now if we could transport him from back then to now.

49:31 I think he would say we're having the same problem. It's just in a box that we carry around in our pocket. Yeah, the packaging is different, but the main questions remain very similar or are identical. I think that when it's interesting, you're phrasing it in terms of choice, I phrased it almost in terms of free will. And one of the things that I'm taking from the book, and I think any leader can take from the book, is that self awareness without mastery is hell self. So the main character is super self aware.

50:17 Dostoevsky lets you see everything that goes on in his mind. He is super self aware. The self awareness is totally there. But because he, there's a point, I don't know where it is. But I think he, like, he's awful. He knows it. And he says, I can't help it. And it's like, well, sure you can. Do you have agency? And that's where. So to me it's self awareness is not enough. Self awareness without mastery is meaningless. So we are I think societally at the point where thanks to immediate access to every little brain fart by billions of people we're very self aware.

51:08 But the question now what? That's still unanswered. So self awareness without mastery is meaningless. He has. Back to your question about choices. The main character, the man in the underground, he had choices and he often made choices that were irrational. So back to the question about the leaders. You will have people who will do things that are essentially they will self destruct just not to give you the win. So I think that that's something that like we have free will but we a don't always follow it and act upon it.

52:02 Two we. The. The power of spite is very strong. So he does so much in the book out of spite. He's just annoyed with himself and he's annoyed with everybody else and he knows that he's going against his own proclamations and his own if he even has any moral standards, which he doesn't. But he goes even against that because he's so. And it's almost like telling you I know I could, I'm not going to. He admits to lacking moral courage in part two. He outright admits to lacking a moral courage when he goes and sees the prostitute.

52:55 The prostitute right after the, the party that by the way, I have a question about the party which I'll ask you because again based on, you know, you know, your knowledge of Russian, there's some cultural things going on in there that I could sense that I'm totally, completely missing as an American because to me that entire sequence seemed ridiculous. Also as a Gen Xer I'm like, I don't care about these people. Like why do I, what do I care if they like me or not? Like I'm just going to go home.

53:19 But I get it. It's a different context. So I need to kind of understand that before I jump to the prostitute and the party. I want to close the loop on this idea. So I love what you said there. Self awareness without mastery as hell, I love that. That's, that's, that's like clippable. We're going to put that in. That's going to wind up somewhere. The, the challenge of our. One of the challenges, one of the many challenges of our time is that we believe we have mastery. We're deceived into thinking we have mastery because we have at our fingertips all this information but no practical wisdom to apply it.

54:01 So the self aware person can be self deceived by their own self awareness, by Their lack of mastery and to your point, wind up in hell.

54:14 What does the.

54:18 How do you separate that out? Because I don't think people need to know how to separate that out. I don't. And I also think, weirdly enough that people are afraid to separate that out, because I think they're afraid. And I think the reason they're afraid to separate it out without going all Freudian is that the separating out process, I think, would deconstruct them. And they're not prepared for where that. They're not prepared for the cul de sac at the end. Not even the cul de sac, sorry, the clearing at the end of that path.

54:48 So it's so interesting because I have. I have personal professional experience with this. I work with people who. This is very important, have achieved tremendous success because. And they're. They have certain personality, character beliefs about themselves based on external validation. And the main character is all about external validation. He goes after people who he despises, but he is so hungry for their approval throughout the whole book. Right. What you're touching upon is so important because I think that he understands that he is.

55:38 Modern psychology would call it disalignment or. I actually brought this book, so I have it handy. Martha Beck Talk has a great book called the Way of Integrity. And she basically describes the like in the aerospace, a plane being in integrity means that the sort of. The bolts have to align right. Perfectly with the. With the COVID of the. Or the

56:10 shell of the aircraft in order to move properly. Right. Like, the aircraft has to be in integrity. And in a way, so do we. We have to figure out who we are and act in integrity. I think Shakespeare in Hamlet says, you know, integrity is being true to yourself and truly true to the others. Right. So there's the dual being in integrity, being truthful. That takes incredible courage. And the main character in this book, he's afraid, as you said, to deconstruct and then put together to be in alignment.

56:54 Because he hates himself. He doesn't like the person he thinks he is. And that makes it really, really hard to move through the world. Because if you don't have clarity about yourself, if you don't have this understanding of who you are without the external validation, you will always chase after what people tell you you should be. You will always try to sort of fill out the form that they are giving you, the mold that they're giving you. And so, like, my clients are very successful, you know, accomplished individuals, high achievers.

57:38 But at some point, if one of these things goes away, A bad deal, a marriage crumbles. You might not get, you know, you might get laid off. Who are you if you're not who you thought you were based on the external validation? And so these are deeply existential, deeply existential questions. And I think that back to what you were saying about him, you know, having the courage to face who he is, he doesn't have that courage and he's afraid to look because it's not pretty. It's very ugly. Right. What he sees.

58:18 And there are glimpses. And if I'm on this track, I will add another book that I thought I will bring to today, because your essay that you published on Substack was in reference to Dostoevsky and you talked about lying. And I think that there is a distinction between lying, which is, I'm a liar and I know that I'm telling a lie. I know that this cake requires three cups. And I'm going to tell you, you should use 2 cups of flour so that your cake comes out wrong. Right. Like I'm lying on purpose.

59:00 But there is a wonderful essay by. You've Already Know Where I'm Going with this by Harry Frankfurt on bullshit. And I think that. And in his take, bullshitting is, as a verb, is believing your own lies. And I think that that's really interesting and an important part of the psyche of the man in the underground, because he so often wants to believe his own fables, but he can't. He knows deep down that he can't. So there's like these ventures into, oh, okay, I'm going to believe this. And then he realizes that his actions are actually completely not in integrity.

59:51 Right. And that gets to exactly where. Where I was going in the second part. So part two picks up with him remembering. And I'm going to sort of summarize this, but him remembering or him recalling a series of incidents that occurred to him during a snowstorm. Interestingly enough, in. In, I believe he's in Moscow and

1:00:21 runs across.

1:00:25 I don't how to frame this. He runs across former associates. Let me frame that. Let me frame it that way. I think they are schoolmates. They're schoolmates. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And. And the title, of course, of Part two is and when I. When I ran across. By the way, when I wrote just a side note, when I ran across. Apropos of Nothing, I double underlined that because actually I. I read Woody Allen's band biography, autobiography, all 800 pages of it, looking for the things that would have made people go over.

1:00:57 Clem didn't want to cancel it. And of course his biography is Apropos of Nothing. That's the title of it. I was like, oh, that's where you got it from. Gotcha. Okay, so the joke goes deeper there, Woody. But part two in Notes of Underground is titled Apropos of the Wet Snow. And it of course opens up with this poem here, which I'm not going to read. But he starts off with remembering an incident that occurred to him when he was only 24. And he says, my life was even then gloomy, ill regulated and as solitary as that of the savage.

1:01:34 I made friends with no one and positively avoided talking and buried myself more and more in my hole. At work, in the office. I never looked at one. And I was perfectly aware that my companions looked upon me not only as a queer fellow, but even looked upon me. I always fancied this with a sort of loathing. Right, so he's got the self loathing, he's, he's again a gentle word, dyspeptic. In his temperament and his posture, he is not high achieving. To Hannah's point, he has not achieved nothing. By the way, the first part of the book is written as a 40 year old, 40 year old looking back.

1:02:07 And of course he's still dyspeptic and believing that no one should live past 40. As a person who's going to be in my late 40s, actually not going to be. I'm in my late 40s. I looked at that and I went, well, okay, sir, whatever. Okay, as a person over 50, absolutely disagree. Yeah, like, whatever. I don't, I don't have anything for you, sir. I guess. Okay, that's fine. This is my whole fine. But, but the incident that he, that he describes in getting together with those, with those former classmates, the desperation that he has in seeking their external validation, their external approval drives him to spending money he doesn't have to robbing his servant.

1:02:57 Well, not robbing, no denying his servant wages that were rightfully his. Drives him into this brothel house where he meets this prostitute who he also proceeds to sort of tear down. Not sort of to tear down. And there's no, there's no denouement. Nobody becomes better at the end of this. There's no. It's kind of like the bit from the movie adaptation with Nicolas Cage where he stands up at the Robert McKee Screenplay Writing Seminar and Robert McKee is played by the brilliant Brian Cox and he says, Nicholas Cage says, what is, what, what happens if you're going to write a story where Nothing happens where nobody, nobody changes.

1:03:48 Right? Nobody develops, nobody grows, nobody, nobody, nobody overcomes everything and succeeds in the end. Like what happens if you have that story? And of course Bob McKee then blows him off the stage and tells him to get the hell out because if he has no conflict. Why am I going to watch your. Why am I going to waste my time with your movie for two hours? Which is by the way that is the correct answer. Why am I going to waste my time with your movie for two hours? I don't know what Bob would have done with Dostoyevsky or this but he's.

1:04:18 He. There's no resolution with this. Right. And you see a lot of people running around like this. You talk about subset. We talked about substack several times. I have a substack. It's called Crying Voice. Crying in the wilderness. Go check it out. Go check out Hana substack. That's the second plug there. We talk a lot about substack. A lot of the writers I follow on substack are very. They're very not depressed but they're very much the 24 year old underground man types and they're just churning out content and much of it's good analysis.

1:04:50 But to what end? What's the denouement here? And I've reached a point in time in my life where. And I don't know if you have but I've reached a point in time in my life and I try to talk to leaders who are tired of masticating endlessly over problems and let's get to a solution already or at least a trade off that we could then execute on. On.

1:05:11 He's not at that stage and I don't know how you get a person like that from from there to here. I don't even know if you can. So I will push back on this in. In a way and one is absolutely agree let's be real and give the leaders something to go on and. And like take home and I agree. So. So we already mentioned some of the things like the you know, self awareness is nothing without mastery. But also. And that despite is a great motivator. But I think that we are circling around the truth and how it is meaningless without courage.

1:05:55 Right. Like you have to walk the talk and the. The main issue here is he is the main character in this book is lying to himself and he is completely dependent on external validation. But I think that there is a development. So it's not a resolution but it is in a way. And Dostoevsky really smartly flips the timeline. And when you meet the man in the underground, he's a miserable, miserable man, wicked man. He's spiteful, he hates himself, he hates the world. He has all these ideas and there's this narcissism and he kind of revels in his own misery, right?

1:06:56 But you look at the same person at 24, and I think that there are two things. One, he didn't have a bad life. He was pretty well off with a servant. He had a job that was pretty decent. He was 24. So, you know, like what's. And he pretty healthy, right? Like, he opens with this. He is healthy, he has means. And. And yet he's deeply miserable. And I think that because he decides to be miserable and just revel in his own misery, to me, it was a great example of how toxic and terrible victimhood is.

1:07:47 And he blames everybody for where he is and he completely lacks agency. So one of the. And and because of that, he makes all these bad choices and he ends up completely miserable. 40 year old, right? So I think that it's not that it's a resolution or a happy ending, but we see the end. Like, you keep going, this is how you're gonna end up. And so to me, if I'm looking at people in 2026, leaders, you know, people who need to follow you, I think one message stands up really, or stands out for me. And that's.

1:08:33 Truth is like a verb, you know, to sound trite, but it requires courage and it has to be shown. People will not trust you because of what you say. Because the main character keeps saying all these things. When he meets the prostitute Liza, he tells her so much and then. And tears her down, tells her her life is horrible and how is she going to end up and blah, blah, blah. And then she takes his word, comes to him for help a couple days later, and he completely rejects her. Right? Like this is an example of.

1:09:18 These are words I can keep yapping, but my actions don't follow. So the take for the leaders, to me is you cannot rely on these platitudes and mission statements that mean absolute nothing. You have to tell people what it means. And this is something that I'm really passionate about because I've met a lot of people who, you know, were. Are part of these big corporations and you have these meaningless, you know, do no harm and like, they're all bullshit, because what does that mean? And I actually am a big fan of looking at actions and forcing leaders to come up with specific actions.

1:10:08 You can't just tell me what you want, what is the wish, but also what does it look like in reality, right? So if you say, I listened to Ben Horowitz speaking about. He actually wrote a book about this too. But you know that Andersen Horowitz has like this list of things they want you to do. Like their mission statement for the employee. And one of them is you have to respect the founders, right? And treat them with respect. But what does that mean? And so he would say, Hurwitz was talking about, okay, respect means that you're never late to a meeting.

1:10:52 And if you're late, I'm going to fine you like 20 bucks a minute, right? You cannot be late. And that to me is very meaningful. Not just what, but like how does that look like? And so if you're a leader, you can't just say, follow me because I'm telling the truth. You have to actually demonstrate that you do. Because all the people around the main character in the Notes from the Underground, they sense how awful he is because he never does what he says. And so that gap is never bridged. He doesn't bridge it inside himself and he never bridges it with other people.

1:11:33 And that makes him a laughable, despicable character. Okay, well, he's full of, he's, he's full of self. He's, he's full of self righteousness, right? Because he.

1:11:53 In our own time, we have a lot of this, the self righteous.

1:11:59 Actually I wrote it. I wrote a blog post about this. Yes. So we have a, a growing problem, right? And AI, it's the first time we're, we're, we're about. Yeah, we're about an hour and 20 minutes into our conversation here. So now I'm going to mention AI. It's a good spot. So what AI allows us to do what the LLMs allow us to do as mid career, like I'm, I would be considered mid career. Mid career to senior leaders, right? What it allows us to do is it allows us to not have to deal with the self righteous 24 year old who just graduated from maybe Seattle College, maybe colleges I used to work at, I came out of higher education as well, right?

1:12:48 Who know everything and are obnoxious and can say it louder and louder and louder, but actually don't have any life experience at all to back up anything that they're saying. And normally as a mid career senior leader, my task from the organization would be to develop those people to do the hard work of knocking off all the obnoxious nonsense,

1:13:15 utilizing the tools of social shaming and embarrassment in their appropriate forms to basically mold this person into someone who is quite frankly able to be managed by other people. Um, that's the job. That's one of the main jobs of middle management and has been the main job of middle management, I would assert, for the last 50 years in American culture. The LLMs eliminate all of that because for a thousand dollars a month I can get an LLM stack that isn't obnoxious. I don't need to knock anything off of it.

1:13:49 I just have to write better prompts. That's all I have to do. I just have to write better prompts. So on the one hand, we have the first generation of people graduating college this year who fully went through college with ChatGPT,

1:14:06 graduated by the way, which gives them confidence to say things that they don't have any experience about. Layered on top of the fact that every obnoxious thought that has come out of their head since kindergarten has been supported by peers, parents, educational system all the way up the ladder. And by the way, we're in the second generation of this now. This is no longer a passing millennial thing. The zoomers were all raised in this way. And we're busy working on the third generation right now.

1:14:36 Kids. I have a nine year old, so kids who are like his age, right, we're working on third generation of that. I'm watching it. I watch it happen at soccer practice, like I coach my kids soccer team. I see it how, I see how the kids show up. So it's, there's more of it coming in, there's more on the pipe, let's just put it that way. So we have that dynamic, right? And mid career and senior professionals are correctly looking at the what's coming down the pipe and going, I don't have to deal with it for a thousand dollars a month.

1:15:04 I don't have to deal with it. It's cheaper to spend the thousand dollars a month now. We'll be okay as mid career and senior professionals for a while.

1:15:15 But here's my point. The self righteous obnoxious 24 year old in Notes for Underground, the underground man who now has access to a cell phone and LLMs in our time isn't going to become better in 25 years. They're just going to become more of what they already are and they're going to become more of what they already are without having been developed or caught by the mid career and senior professionals. So my assertion is, and I'm working on this idea and tell you can tell you what you think of this.

1:15:47 The mid career and senior professionals like the folks that you coach, that you work with. I think the hardest job they have right now is not developing the juniors. That's actually not the hardest job. The hardest job is resisting the temptation not to develop the juniors because it's just easier to not do is it's just easier. And when you don't have to put up with any nonsense. Why would I, I don't want, I don't need to be told that like my language isn't culturally appropriate. Shut up. You're 24.

1:16:20 What some tick tock video shows you that? I don't even go to that neighborhood. I don't know anybody. I don't know her. I don't live over there and I don't have to, by the way, I don't have to live over there. But you do have to know,

1:16:35 you do have to know who Kevin Costner was in Waterworld. And yeah, he's not just a guy in Yellowstone. Like you do have to know. It's part of your cultural legacy. You do have to know what that means. So when you make the, when I'm sitting in a marketing meeting and I make the reference of we will build it and they will come and somebody goes, you have to know what that means. And if you don't know what that means, if you're like confused and I tell you, go watch a movie, you can't get offended.

1:17:00 You don't have room to get offended because I could replace you with an LLM tomorrow. Go hang out with your mom or whatever who came in on the interview with you when we still hired you. Like go away, go, go away. Just get out, get out. It's still free association. I'm still not required to hire you. The state isn't like holding a gun to my head saying I must hire this 24 year old who has this particular worldview. It's still free association for the time being. So get out, go find another job, go work at 7:11 or something.

1:17:29 I don't know. This is the challenge for mid career professionals who I'm speaking for. And I don't, I don't know if you're seeing this but I'm working on a, working on a thesis and eventually I'll have a longer substack article about this because I'm working through thoughts in my head. Am I seeing this correctly? I guess that's the question. Am I seeing this moat correctly, this growing delta or is this something that I've overblown. And it'll all go away tomorrow. Because this is just cultural development.

1:17:54 No, I think it tracks. And the jobs that are disappearing first are the entry level positions. And that's because the LLMs work, you know, 247 and they are infinitely cheaper than the people. I think that a huge part of like my students are coming through. Generally they would have an associate degree from like a technical or community college and then they would come back for their bachelor's, which is the management program I teach. But they usually have a couple years of experience, then they get their bachelor's and they are amazingly humble, which is a rare quality in their peers or in that generation.

1:18:52 And so they don't struggle as much. But I, I do see this as a problem. And it's interesting. You're talking about almost like, you know, we are, we're almost giving up on the responsibility to mold the new generation because you run a 3 seconds cost benefit analysis and you go, screw that. Nope. Right. Like again, why? And the answer is because these people will, you know, hopefully still work when, and pay your, your retirement, but maybe not. And you're going to threaten me with Social Security?

1:19:35 Don't threaten me with, don't threaten me, Will not. I don't, I don't need to threaten anybody. Social Security is disappearing in about seven minutes. Right? Yeah. So like, what are you really, what are we threatening with? But, but I think it's a. I, I do really like the point that you made about agency and how it is the responsibility of the others to, you know, like, this man clearly has nobody. Right. And, and by his own choice. But the question is, if you're the leader and you have a bunch of younger people on your staff, are you taking the time to mentor and build that agency and do you have good system for that to happen?

1:20:29 And, and I think that in a way it is a two way street that everybody keeps forgetting, which is they need to want to get coached. And when that is lacking, you're like, right, I'm sorry, why again, why would I put myself in this? And, and so it goes back to looking for people not based on their skill set, but based on their character. And the willingness to be coached is extremely important. And you want people who not only will listen, but also then apply. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Looking for people based on the, the, the way.

1:21:21 There's a way to frame this. You know, Martin Luther King Jr. Said content of their character, not the color of their skin. Right, okay, well, the, the content of their character, not the, the the, not the nature of their academic or credentialing. The degrees. The degrees. Yeah. Yeah.

1:21:42 Okay. So to the 24 year olds that I just like raked over the calls. Okay. How it's hard. And I get it. I was 24, you were 24. I get it. You're out there, you're unproven. You want to make your mark in the world. You want to be taken seriously. You, you, you do think you're special and you do think that you're unique and you do think that everything that has ever happened to you is the first time that it's ever happened to any human being in the history of the world. And by the way, I say this again just to be fully transparent with you.

1:22:14 You know, I've mentioned this on the show before. I got four kids, you know, they're in age range from like 30 all the way down to nine. I have a 21 year old and a 16 year old. They're girls. So I'm dealing with this like I'm in the developmental loop of some of this directly out of my own house, right. And so, and I'm seeing it show up in their friends, right, that they, that they bring to the house or, or when we go places and we interact with people. And I, I see it, right? So I'm not talking about this in just sort of like some ephemeral theory kind of thing that I saw maybe somewhere.

1:22:46 I get the frustration with the old heads, as we say in the African American community. That's the term. I get the frustration right. To the 24 year olds, how do they put the self righteousness on the back burner? How does that, how do you put the self righteousness and, and the, the. I have all the knowledge, but I don't have the wisdom thing. How do you put all that on the back, back burner in order to come humbly and ask for coaching or ask for mentoring? How does that happen? And ambitious people, by the way, will always do this.

1:23:20 So I do think there will be and I think, I think the, the strike, the separations are already starting to happen. They've been happening for a while

1:23:31 in which you'll have the top folks who understand the game and they will pursue ruthlessly what they need to pursue and the rewards will start to accrue to them. And they've been pursuing it ruthlessly since they were 13. And good luck to you catching them. They're building them out. Then you'll have all the people at the bottom who are the man underground, the underground man they, they're going to tweet, they're going to go onto Blue sky, they're going to have a substack, scrape together a couple of subscriptions and like I said, go work at 7:11.

1:24:04 They're angry. They're never gonna, they're gonna wind up a 40 year old civil servant with a bad liver. That's just where they're gonna wind up at. Okay, but then you have the vast majority of people in the middle who don't understand what the question is. So for the vast majority of people in the middle, what can they do? The vast majority of 24 year olds in the middle who know they have to break through but don't know how because senior leaders look like they're over there and it's not. There's no mediator there.

1:24:35 You got to go do it. But you also have to pay your rent and figure out how to live and maybe have a relationship and navigate modern dating and have all these things you have desperately going on inside of yourself that no one understands. And you of course have 50,000 people following you on Instagram reels every time you post something because you've been posting on Instagram since you were like six. What do we say to those people? Because they are living in it. They're living in an environment where every single thought, to your point earlier in this episode, every single thought is public.

1:25:06 Every single brain fart. I loved how you put that. Can just come out. I'm a personal believer that maybe everyone doesn't. So thought you die in your own head. That's why I have this podcast and you know, I think about it a lot and then I spout things out. But what do we do with that 24 year old who has come up in that environment, who's in the middle, who's not ambitious, but also not, not the underground man. What does that person do? So if I had a good answer, I wouldn't be sitting here. I would probably enjoy bajillions of dollars somewhere in the French Alps.

1:25:44 But

1:25:48 I actually have started writing a book for teenagers especially about like specifically about these topics. So I think that if I may, I would bring it back to one of the core topics we touched upon already, which is self awareness and integrity. So you want to be true to yourself and the outside world. And the part about being true to yourself is really hard for a 24 year old. If you were told that you are fantastic, special and the best since you were a toddler, which you know is and experienced, many have, right?

1:26:34 Like you're great. You're great. We, you know, you don't have to even work that hard to get decent grades. You don't have to like. It is true. I see the lowering of standards in many areas, right? Like you don't do the chores that people did 50, 30, 20, 10 years ago. There's a lot that is happening, right? Even the activities are less frequent because you're spending a lot of time on the electronics, blah, blah, blah. So I think that the number one thing you need is humility, right? This, this sort of like, well, maybe I'm not as great as I thought I am and, or I am great for who I am, but I want to be better.

1:27:22 Right? Like you don't compare yourself with anybody but yourself ten years from now. So I think there, I took a note and I think there's two sources of wisdom for you. And not just wisdom, but also action. The again, self awareness without mastery means nothing. So you need that the action piece. And I think books are, again, I would send people back to books because there's so many great lessons. And again, like you think you're the first person going through this. Guess what? There's about, you know, 5 billion who had that very same experience.

1:28:08 So I think going back to the classics and making yourself ready is great starting point. And then because I think that it also reminds you again of the struggles and just physical struggles that people had to live through. You know, at 24, you had usually six kids already. So like, that's a different. That really gives you gratitude and self awareness. So I would start there. That should give you some again, knowledge and self awareness. But then the second piece is you don't know what you don't know.

1:28:47 And there are others who can lead you to more of a self discovery. And the simplest trick is if you want to do better, you know, ask your friends, hey, like honest talk. What is it? Like, what do I do great and where I could improve? Right. And if it's somebody with whom you have a close enough relationship and then, then, okay, let's start there. You can, you can kind of start improving. And the second piece would be if you're surrounded with people like you, then they might not always give you their like, valuable feedback because they are in the same boat.

1:29:31 Yeah, but going to mentors and they don't have to be mentors, you know, it can be like, I can talk to you as your professor and say, great in class, writing is sloppy. I would probably choose different words. But then, you know, you're Always late with your assignments. That cannot happen in real life. Like we, you know, there are certain expectations, and if you have three times a year, you know, grandma died, emergency, I don't trust your words. Like, so I think you're right that knowledge and wisdom are completely different and you can grow into wisdom later.

1:30:16 But I still think reading is. Is really, really valuable. Checking in with other people and sort of

1:30:27 being open to the feedback. And the reason why I suggest Friends first is because they will always phrase it the kindest way. They will always try to make it as palatable as possible, even though they're delivering something that it's not that wonderful. And so if you start learning that feedback is not about you, it's about your actions or it's not a. It's not a reflection of your character most of the time, but it's about your abilities that you can improve, then I think that eases you into this state where you are able to take feedback.

1:31:08 And when somebody who's your senior leader will say, hey, this was not great, but I like the direction, do it differently. You're like, okay, great. It's not a. I'm not gonna focus on the 90% that was. That was. You know, I will not focus on the 10% that was bad. I'm gonna focus on the 90% that is actually great, which is I still have a job and I have a second op. You know, second chance. Yep. Yep. All right, I'm gonna pause here because I gotta go to the restroom. Oh, yeah. I'm gonna get some. All right.

1:31:39 And we're back. Okay.

1:31:44 Yeah. Truth is meaningless without courage. I love how you've talked about that self awareness piece without mastery being hell. I love that.

1:31:56 I also think you're onto something here, because the underground man at 24 has no evidence of a. There's no evidence of a social structure around him of any kind. And the friends that he does have going back to just the party for just a second, not only do they dislike him immensely, they. They are shocked that he's even still around, right? As if they expected him to fade into the. Fade into the. The verge. Like Homer in that. In that great. That great meme. And maybe he did right when he went into the civil.

1:32:31 A little surface, right? Just sort of. Just sort of recedes. Just recedes. Seeds into the distance. The question. One of the questions I wanted to ask very briefly about that section in the book in the original Russian, what are we missing there as an American reader? Like, are there a loot? Is it. Is It a one for one translation. Are we getting everything or are there things that we're missing inside of that, that, that sequence? Because there's some class themes in there that, as I said previously, don't really resonate with me because I, I don't like what.

1:33:06 Well, so he has this whole thing about the money, right? Like he's ripping. He's ripping off his, his, his. He's not paying his, his. His butler, basically. Polo is his name. Yeah. Of all I know. So random. He's like, okay, well that's fine. He's not paying him his wages and he's doing this and doing that. And I thought, you know, I would just go write the man in iou. Like, what's the problem here? Now I'm, again, I'm looking at this through the framework of, you know,

1:33:42 we don't really. I mean, if you're going to pay somebody, you better pay them, right? Like, this is, this is just sort of the reality of, of. Of life. I don't know that that was the reality of life that Dostoyevsky was seeing. Clearly it wasn't. But are there things that I'm missing in the original Russian that are illusions or that you would miss if you were reading a translation of it and it's not in the original Russian? I'm always curious about that with authors that write in different languages, because I know there's things we're missing when it goes into English, but I don't know what they are.

1:34:12 So a, you are under the false assumption that I have read this in Russian, which I have not. I can read Cyrillics, however, that is now, like, you know, I see a tombstone and I am able to read the name and that's about it. So not enough for Dostoevsky. Okay, I will say, and this would be for another podcast, but I would love to talk about translations and how immensely important they are and how. I think that the reason why so many books that were not English can still be

1:34:58 relevant is in a large part thanks to translations that kind of modernize the, the, the words. And so the meaning remains, but the words might be different. And I think that one of the reasons why today's people, the students struggle with, like, Shakespeare is because it's so hard. Like, thy. What? Like, I don't. But like, I grew up reading Shakespeare in translations and it made it way more modern and way more relatable. And, And I think there's a huge power in translations. So that's one point.

1:35:45 Second point. So money. I have noticed for Dostoevsky is a huge topic. And in. Yes, because he was constantly in debt because, you know, like, this was a. A very real personal situation for him. But also what you're kind of picking up on is

1:36:15 the relationship between money and personal pride. And this.

1:36:29 How shall I describe this? Honor. The sense of honor. And so that like in Brothers Karamazov, one of the. The brothers is like, he borrows money and then he has this idea that he. He borrows money, he spends half of it on his, like, you know, women and booze and blah, blah, blah. But in his mind there's this, like, if I don't spend it all, I can still return it honorably, right? Like, I can spend some of it, but if I don't spend it all, then I still retain some shred of honor. And. And it is the, in the society, in the Russian society that he's described, Dostoevsky is describing.

1:37:25 Another angle about money is also that you were often wined and dined based on your pedigree. And so even if you didn't have the money to pay because you were nobility, people would invite you and pay you because you are the nobility. So there's this idea that when he goes out with his friends or the schoolmates, the people he despises and who hates him, but, you know, that's the society or the set of people. In the second part, there's this Zverkov character, somebody who is like a really accomplished guy, and they all talk about paying for his dinner, paying for him, even though he's the most accomplished.

1:38:23 So there's this. There's this aspect of borderline servility

1:38:31 and respect for money and, and your pedigree, your social status, that goes against logic. Right. And so I noticed the,

1:38:46 the way I interpret the interaction between the main character and his servant is he could just say, hey, I'm. I'm withholding the money. And essentially, you're my servant. You're my serf. I can do whatever I want, but he can't do that. And he is ashamed in front of the servant because it. He's aware that that's bad. It's dishonorable. Right? Like, he needs to get money from somebody who's lower status. And that's so uncomfortable because it's so dishonorable.

1:39:28 So, like a door in the floor in my head just opened up with what you just said there.

1:39:40 I would never have tied again. I'm an American. I don't. Wow. Yeah, Well, I mean, that's. The depth of that's the depth of the cultural assumption there. So I would never tie money to honor. So in America, here's the weird thing about America. And Marxists often comment on this. At least they did in the 20th century, not so much now because they're younger and they don't know history. So, so stupid. It's, it's fine. They're, they're going to learn. They're going to learn because human nature hasn't changed.

1:40:15 But Marxists in the 20th century would often comment that the reason the first stage towards Marxism never really worked the United States to their conception of work is that everyone in America wanted to be middle class and they had no way to overcome that. They had no solution for that. Well, the reason why everyone in America wants to be middle class is because we don't tie money to honor. Money is this other thing over here. And honor. If we even talk about honor, which we don't because we're not an honor coded society anymore.

1:40:46 We haven't been an honor coded society for 80 years. Honor is over here somewhere. Honor is about a different thing. And so we separate those two. And the door that just like swung open in my brain was one of the. Was related to something else that we read on the show. So we read Lenin's basically Lenin's manifesto about how to organize. How to organize the question of how to organize the populace or something. I can't remember the title of it. And

1:41:19 Lennon is a fascinating character to me because he was absolutely a sadistic and megalomaniacal tyrant who also had.

1:41:35 Who also hated himself much like the underground, big time, big time hated himself. And, and somehow through. Not somehow through the exegesis of history operating outside of him. Wound up running the whole thing and then appointing somebody to replace him. Well, not appointing, sorry, selecting someone to replace him who. And you wouldn't think it would be worth. You could replace somebody worse with Lenin, but he managed to do it. He managed to replace some. Somebody who's worse than him. And so one of the things that's always been fascinating to me is how he, how he successfully took over an entire culture.

1:42:18 And the money and honor piece ties that. That's why Marxism worked as an overarching way of organizing, not as an economic theory, but as an overarching way of organizing society in Soviet Russia for 80 years because of that conception of honor tied in. Or one of the factors was that conception of honor tied into money and then how that then striates through class. Whereas in America it strikes totally differently and it's Not a one to one comparison. Even nowadays when Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, the representative from Brooklyn, runs around in a dress at the Met Gala that says Eat the Rich on it or Tax the Rich or whatever the hell that dress said, like everybody in America knows,

1:43:12 every American knows she's playing a game. And ultimately one day she'll be, the next day she'll be running down the street in sweats and a T shirt, jogging like anybody other, like any other 30 year old woman in, you know, in Washington D.C. and she will be indistinguishable from Bill Gates, who will show up at a grandma, you know, or a grandpa sweater, having a hot dog at a stand. Like everybody wants to be middle class here. Which I get it, if you're looking at that from other countries, that makes zero sense how that works.

1:43:50 But we don't tie the money to, not in that way anyway. We don't tie money to honor. So that was a huge insight for me. So like I said, you swung open the door in my head. I got to think some word through that idea, but I never heard it express, expressed that way. And so there's two things and, and just quick point one is that it's not that the money is tied to honor, it's that he sees it as a demonstration of his own failure, right? So, so the real he cannot unmask himself as a loser in front of his servant.

1:44:35 And that is like he would rather avoid that because it's embarrassing. But I will say the second point is money absolutely has been tied to. Not in Russia, not to honor per se, but definitely goodness of some sort. And a nobility, right? So like you have these,

1:45:04 you have almost like a character.

1:45:11 There's something about your good character if you come from money. And again, there's this almost servility right about this. But also the situation in Russia has been so vastly different from what was going on at the time in the US and or in Europe, because. So the serfs, the difference, like the chattel slavery, right? Like people, slaves are objects, right? You treat them as objects. They have zero rights, the serfs. I actually talked about this in a context of feudalism in Europe. The people were tied to land.

1:45:55 So the feudal nobility owned land. And the village that sit on that land, those people were your people, but they still would have to ask you if they can marry. And you had to work on that land, on that property for six days a week or whatever for the master, but you still had some rights, right? Like you could go and say, I'M going to Italy to learn how to be a carpenter or whatever. And maybe they would say yes, and then you would leave and come back and build the church in your village. But then in Russia the disparity was so stark, right.

1:46:39 Like the, the, the poverty was so bad that the sort of. And, and for life. So you were tied to the land and you had way less rights. I almost. If there's a hierarchy, you have the, the slaves at the very bottom being treated as objects. Then you have the Serbs in Russia who have some rights, but any master can overrule them anytime he wants. And, and he will. And, and you're tied to the land. And then you have the, again, like the, the nobility. Yeah, and, and, yeah, and. Or the people in sort of the Western Eastern Europe, like Austro Hungarian Empire, where we Also in like 18th century, they're there where some, some changes to the system.

1:47:31 But yeah, you were, you were essentially born, raised, tied to the land. That's it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then that whole system of course fell apart in. Right in the trenches of World War I and earlier for Russia. Yeah, yeah, but the. Yeah, I, I can go into that rabbit hole of the. But, but I, I think that if your brother is hungry by the Tsar, but which is what happened to Lenin. His brother was, was killed for, you know, revolution against the Tsar and, and it radicalized him and he was poor and, and I think that the, the idea that again, like it's a, it's a so enticing you can see today, like let's dismantle freaking everything.

1:48:19 Okay. That's easy. And how are we going to build? Oh, we're not. Okay. We don't have the plan. We just have the, like we're fed up and we're gonna dismantle and we're gonna like everything is bad. And you're like, is it? Well, and that gets back to, I mean, the three revolutions, right. That made the modern world. Right. So you've got the French Revolution, you have the American Revolution, you have the British Revolution, all based on fundamentally different

1:48:48 conceptions of what reality, quite frankly should be. And I look at the Russian Revolution as a, the, the follow on or the logical conclusion such as it were from the French Revolution. And I'm not quite. No, no, I'm not quite. The challenge that we try to approach or on this show is. And with the kind of books that we, that we are covering here, we try to look at things historically obviously, but then also bring this down to individuals and try to, you know, there's a hierarchy. Right. You got to scale it up the hierarchy and scale it down.

1:49:31 Right. And to your point, deconstructing everything doesn't work. Matter of fact, I, I would assert that we're at the end of a 25 year long American deconstruction project. We actually rudely ended it. I think January 6th was probably the end of the deconstruction project. And now we're in a weird middle ground between the end of deconstruction and the beginning of something else. And there are people, not just politicians, but also cultural folks, social leaders, economic folks who are looking around going, we're done with that.

1:50:07 We're done with the deconstruction. Because to your point, you could deconstruct down to nothing and then what do you have? You just have raw power. And even raw power can be deconstructed. So you, so you wind up with nothing basically. And nothing is not a forward. Is that fuel in the momentum? There's not fuel for forward momentum. Right. And so now we have to begin the building, we have to begin the laying of the rails for the building. So no more deconstruction. We're done with that. That's it.

1:50:35 It's over. Maybe 80 years from now you could deconstruct again. But we got to rebuild institutions, we've got to rebuild systems, we have to rebuild structures. And I, I, as a partisan for America, I think this is the best place in the world to do that. Agree. But, but other places, you know, I think they're gonna have to go through the same thing. You're gonna have to do that because deconstruction and revolution doesn't work. It doesn't lead to building. So if I may, tied back to the man in the underground.

1:51:10 Yes. To me the, the tearing down is easy and the building is hard. Yeah. And so we, what we have on display is somebody who's like tearing down and revealing. He's, he's showing up like, he's showing us how rotten he is. Right. Like he has this infinite self awareness. But we see 16 years later when he's 40, that he hasn't done jack shit about where he is. And, and, and we see the complete utter despair that he, that he is experiencing when he's older. And so I think the, the sort of, the parallel to today is now we know, okay, you told us how bad America is and you told us how this is all, you know, failing and how these institutions don't work and how these principles don't work.

1:52:18 But if you're Going to sit in this 16 years later, you're going to be rotten and miserable and we're not going to move an inch and that's not where we want to be. Right. So there needs to be this agency, this bias for action. And I think also the, and he doesn't talk about it in the book, but I think that eventually there needs be to, to be the hunger for transcendence that, you know, something that goes beyond what you're doing. And in reality, in 2026, I was just looking at some numbers and like the, the turn to Christianity among young people and particularly Catholicism, like the old school Christianity is on the rise.

1:53:06 So I think that people do sense that you need more than just the rumination and self analysis and ad nauseam, you know, like revelations about our inner, like the navel gazing that leads nowhere. Yeah, yeah, no, I agree and I'm seeing those numbers too on the turn to Catholicism, orthodox Christianity. And you know, my particular group of Christians, the American evangelicals, have no answer for this and they need to develop one. And there are some that are beginning to sort of light bulb is kind of gone off and, and I do believe that fundamentally.

1:53:51 I was actually have a conversation with somebody who's a good friend of mine this weekend about this, but I do believe that fundamentally, you know, in America anyway, those three, those three or four, four strands. And American Catholics, I hate to tell you, you're more Protestant than your European brothers. Just point that out. But, but agreed, but just. Anyway, we're, we're gonna have to figure out at a theological level over the next 25 years what does a uniquely American theology with those, those strains influencing it look like and what does it look like when it builds both in opposition to and in some cases hand in hand with a more secular, materialist, reductionist culture, which by the way is just going to keep right on going there.

1:54:44 It's not like the secular materialists are going to, are going to stop. Okay, we got around the corner, we gotta, we gotta close this out. This has been a great conversation, Hana. I've had a tremendous, this has been tremendous. You opened up the. Like I said, you opened the door on the floor in my head for a bunch of different things. I want to invite you on, to have you back. We got to continue this conversation, keep this rolling. I love the, the, the quote from Thomas Sowell, the great Thomas Sowell, the, the Economist.

1:55:12 He says it's amazing how much panic one honest man can spread among a multitude of hypocrites. We are in a time where Foreign that's spreading. I believe we're fundamentally in a time where people are kind of like in the Matrix, kind of like waking up and we are going into Plato's cave. We are pulling out folks like the underground man. And we're bringing them up into the light and they're fighting, they're kicking and screaming all the way, but we're bringing them up and we're saying, hey, this is the light.

1:55:42 Now there are some people you can't pull out of there. They want to stay in there. They want to stay in the cave of the Internet ordering doordash and being self righteous and self aware all at the same time in equal measure. But to be honest about it and to engage effectively with those folks, books like Notes from the Underground give us a map of where we can go and how we can maybe not a map of how what we where we can go gives us a map of the territory that we are facing in a way that's manageable.

1:56:12 And a book is still the most subversive way to get across ideas ever, the human beings have ever created.

1:56:22 How do, how can leaders. This is my last question. How can leaders stay on the path? I think we've talked a lot about this today in one form or another, but you get the last word as usual for guests on this show. How can leaders stay on the path with. With this book? If they're going to pick this up for the first time, how do they stay on the path? Reading this. Reading this very small but very difficult book. Well, thank you so much for having me. I will. This was such a blast and I'd love to come back to answer your question.

1:56:56 How can leaders stay on the path and what lessons they can take from this book I'd say kind of to recap. 1. The Self Awareness is nothing without mastery. So I think thinking about what's inside is great and important, but it cannot stop there. The second lesson I think is really about integrity. Dostoevsky shows somebody who doesn't have any integrity. He lies to himself and he lies to everybody else. And the lesson here is if you keep doing this, you will end up alienated, alone and miserable later on.

1:57:53 So it's not a mirror of what could be

1:57:59 as a good example, but it's really a terrible example example of what may happen. And I think

1:58:08 the last thing I would say is if I am a leader today, the lesson I'm taking from the Notes from the Underground is definitely that you have to walk the talk and you cannot bring people with you by Just talking. You have to demonstrate your integrity in daily life, in your daily actions, in the everyday operation of your small company, big company enterprise, what have you. Either we come, you know, either we show up on time or we don't. And if we tolerate this, then okay, that's the company you have.

1:58:55 If you work hard and you want other people to work hard, then you better work harder than them because you can ask for things you're not demonstrating. And I think that there is and has been a gap between what the management is telling us and what it feels like on the ground. And I think that there is now the reckoning of sort of closing the gap and the companies. And it doesn't have to be great or enviable. And I think above all, you can stay pretty unique, right? Like you can be a company that does things certain way that nobody else does.

1:59:41 Nobody else is organized the way you are. But if you have a vision and you walk that talk and it is, you will attract people who, who will fit that, that culture and, and you can make it happen. I think that the, the idea that everything needs to be ubiquitous, you know, like we all have to, and, and that is one of those, like it forces you to be who you're not. And so this, this courage is a verb and truth is a verb because you need to have the courage to sustain it and be that sort of a sovereign individual is really critical.

2:00:27 Awesome. Thank you Hana for coming on the podcast. We will have links to Hana's substack and her LinkedIn profile. We'll also have links to a couple of the books that she mentioned and articles, as you mentioned in the show notes below the audio player where you are listening to this show right now. Once again, I would like to thank Hannah for coming on the podcast. And with that. Well, no, you're welcome with that. Well, we're out.