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

0:00 Hello, my name is Jesan Sorrells,

0:04 and this is the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books

0:08 podcast, episode number 188.

0:13 Opening up with a selection

0:18 from our. From our book today.

0:21 We start with part one,

0:25 Underground, and I quote,

0:29 I'm a sick man. I'm a spiteful man. I am an

0:32 unattractive man. I believe my liver

0:36 is diseased. However, I know nothing at all about my disease and do

0:39 not know for certain what ails me. I don't consult a doctor for it and

0:43 never have, though I have a respect for medicine and doctors.

0:47 Besides, I'm extremely superstitious, sufficiently so

0:51 to respect medicine. Anyway, I am well educated enough not to be superstitious, but

0:55 I am superstitious. No, I refuse to consult a doctor from

0:59 spite that you probably will not understand. Well, understand

1:02 it. Though of course I can't explain who it is precisely that I

1:06 am mortifying in this case, by my spite. I am perfectly aware.

1:10 Aware that I cannot pay out the doctors

1:13 by not consulting them. I know better than anyone that by all this I am

1:17 only injuring myself and no one else. But still, if

1:21 I don't consult a doctor, it is from spite. My liver is bad. Well,

1:25 let it get worse. I've been going on like

1:29 that for a long time. 20 years now. I am 40.

1:33 I used to be in government service, but I'm no longer. I was a spiteful

1:36 official. I was rude and took pleasure in being so. I did not

1:40 take bribes, you see. So I was bound to find a recompense in

1:44 that at least a poor Jess. But I will not scratch it out. I

1:48 wrote it, thinking it would sound very witty. But now that I have

1:51 seen myself that I only wanted to show off in a despicable way. I

1:55 will not scratch it out on purpose. When petitioners

1:59 used to come for information to the table at which I sat, I

2:03 used to grind my teeth at them and felt intense enjoyment. When I succeeded in

2:06 making anybody unhappy, I almost always did

2:09 succeed, for the most part. They were all timid people, of course. They

2:13 were petitioners. But of the uppish ones, there was one officer in particular I

2:17 could not endure. He simply would not be humble and

2:20 clanked his sword in a disgusting way. I carried on a feud with him for

2:24 18 months over that sword. At last I got the better of him.

2:28 He left off clanking it. That happened in my youth, though.

2:33 But do you know, gentlemen, what was the chief point about my spite?

2:37 Why, the whole point, the real sting of it lay in the fact that continually,

2:40 even in the moment of the acutest spleen. I was

2:44 inwardly conscious with shame that that I was not only not

2:47 a spiteful but not even an embittered man, that I was simply

2:51 scaring sparrows at random and amusing myself by it. I might foam at the

2:55 mouth or bring me a doll to play with, give me a cup of tea

2:57 with sugar in it, and maybe I should be appeased. I might

3:01 even be genuinely touched. So probably I should grind my teeth

3:04 at myself afterwards and lie awake at night with

3:08 shame for months after.

3:12 That was my way.

3:17 Close Quote

3:22 the Marketer the author, the blogger Seth Godin once

3:26 infamously quipped, we are all marketers now.

3:30 He said this or wrote this in one of his many books, I can't remember

3:33 which one, in response to the rise of social media and

3:36 the penetration of the endlessly ubiquitous Internet into

3:40 every single aspect of our lives.

3:44 He was noticing that when ordinary people have access to the previously gatekept

3:48 tools of broadcasting, they wouldn't fail to begin to market themselves as

3:51 aggressively as corporations marketed products to them for the majority of the

3:55 industrial Revolution. What does that have to do with

3:58 what I just read with our book today? Well,

4:02 if we are all marketers now, then it naturally follows from that

4:06 that we are all liars now.

4:11 Cause if you know marketers, you know

4:15 that all of them do two things without fail. One, they ruin everything they

4:19 touch. And I'm saying this as a marketer, by the way. And two,

4:22 they are usually lying to get you to buy something. But a

4:26 society can't exist on a steady diet of lies. Eventually,

4:30 truth, capital T, truth crushed to earth, as my grandmother would have said back in

4:33 the day, will rise again. And this is not

4:37 a new situation. Back in the day, about

4:41 2,000 years or so ago, a man was arguing with the dominant cultural power brokers

4:45 of his time and he said something that took them by surprise then and continues

4:48 to take us all by surprise even now. He said, and I quote

4:53 or it was framed and I quote to the Jews who had

4:56 believed on him. Jesus said, if you hold to my teaching, you

5:00 are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth and the

5:04 truth will set you free. John 8:31

5:08 32 KJV

5:12 the book we are covering today trans stands at a transitional

5:16 moment, or is positioned at a transitional moment in the history of mankind

5:20 when European society at a time and at that

5:24 time the vanguard of the Western world was transitioning from

5:27 individuals knowing the biblical truth, such as it

5:30 were, and advocating it for vociferously and moving towards a time, the

5:34 time in which we now live at the end of where individuals,

5:38 communities, even the state struggle to state the truth in a time

5:42 of comfortable, habitual and institutionalized

5:45 lying. On the show today we are going to cover a

5:49 book whose narrative links ideas about lying but Lives Inside of

5:53 liars and the power of moral courage. That's all the way at the end of

5:56 this book. From the three books we've already covered this quarter. So

6:00 we've looked at the Third man, we looked at east of Eden

6:03 and Invitation to a Beheading. You should go back and listen to those

6:07 episodes. And we are going to glean what we can from

6:10 this book today. Notes from

6:14 Underground by Fyodor

6:17 Dostoyevsky Leaders

6:22 I'm beginning to believe that the problem isn't that all marketers

6:25 are liars and that we are all marketers. Now I'm

6:29 beginning to believe the problem is that we can't or

6:32 won't find our way back to telling the truth.

6:38 And today on our show we have a new

6:42 guest co host. This is her very first

6:45 episode. I want to welcome to the show

6:49 Hannah Cabela Gala.

6:53 Ahana tabella gala. Dr. Hana Cabela gala

6:56 is a certified Executive coach and the creator of Rapid

7:00 Transformational Neurocoaching. For more than a decade, she has helped high

7:04 achieving professionals, especially tech leaders, entrepreneurs, particularly

7:08 men in their 30s to their 50s, recover their identity and break through the

7:11 patterns that keep them stuck. As a professor of

7:15 business management at South Seattle College in the

7:18 great state of Washington, she also

7:22 shapes the next generation of professionals and entrepreneurs through courses in service

7:25 operations, ethics and talent management, bringing the same

7:29 blend of practical business experience and rigorous insight into both the

7:33 classroom and the coaching room. Welcome to

7:36 our show, Hana. How are you

7:40 doing today? Thank you so much for having me. As you

7:44 know, I love the concept of your podcast, so this

7:48 is a super exciting time for me and thank you

7:51 for having me. Absolutely. So I had a long intro there.

7:55 I typically have a long intro. I do a lot of yammering to kind of

7:59 set all this up. It's just, it's my want.

8:04 I want to start off with, as I always do with talking a little bit

8:07 about the author of our book. We have covered Crime

8:11 and Punishment, but only like the first four chapters and we did that with Dave

8:14 Bomb Rucker. Gosh. Now about a two years ago now

8:18 we got to go back and re pick up Crime and Punishment Notes

8:22 from Underground is significantly shorter, significantly shorter than Crime and

8:25 Punishment or Brothers Karamazov. And I'm probably

8:29 mispronouncing that so you can correct all of my pronunciations, if you would like.

8:33 But Notes for Underground is a unique

8:37 book by Dostoevsky. But let's jump in a little bit into

8:41 who he was.

8:45 I know that you really like this book. You really enjoy Dostoevsky's

8:48 writing. What is it that jumps out to you about

8:52 his life and talk a little bit about what you know about him because you.

8:56 You hail from the part of the world that he wrote from. So. Yeah,

9:00 yeah. So I. I was born and

9:04 raised in the Communist Czechoslovakia, and

9:08 there we actually had mandatory Russian

9:12 from fourth grade. Everybody and

9:16 I grew up literally surrounded by the Russian

9:19 greats. It's a privilege

9:23 in a way, looking back. But my mother was a.

9:28 She taught Russian and literature and

9:31 history of art. And so the bookshelves in our

9:35 living room were lined with the grades. Tolstoy,

9:38 Dostoevsky, Chekhov, the lot.

9:42 And I loved War and Peace and

9:45 Tolstoy growing up. And I always

9:49 shy away from Dostoevsky because he

9:53 seemed so morose and

9:57 sad and, you know, he is. That

10:01 just. He is. But I was thinking about

10:05 the. The difference between,

10:09 say, War and Peace. And look, this is not

10:12 a book from, like, for everybody. But I

10:17 loved it because I'm the.

10:20 The person who will just revel

10:24 in these huge tableaus and the

10:28 depictions of, you know, 45,000 characters

10:31 and the Russian and French

10:35 intertwining and all of that. It's so epic. Right?

10:40 But I thought, you know, when I discovered

10:42 Dostoevsky, I thought

10:47 the magnitude and the sort of the epic

10:51 scale is there as well, but he

10:54 turns it inwards. So to me,

10:58 Dostoevsky is so profound

11:02 because he has this ability to look inside

11:06 one's soul and really get into

11:10 those ugly corners we don't want other people to

11:13 see and discover. And he has this

11:17 laser sharp ability to just go in there and

11:20 just keep pushing. And I will

11:24 say, Brother Karamazov are or is

11:28 my probably top three of all the books

11:32 I've ever read in my life. And

11:37 about the. You said something about Dostoevsky. I

11:40 actually wrote about him

11:44 writing Brothers Karamazov. Somebody can find it on my

11:49 substack somewhere. But

11:52 he reminds me a little bit of David

11:56 Foster Wallace like this, you know, like, I

11:59 see his writing. If I was to describe to another

12:03 person what Brother Karamazov or

12:07 Crime and Punishment is, to me,

12:11 it would be. This is like David Foster Wallace in the

12:14 19th century. Wow. Okay, I.

12:18 I had never thought of. Well, no, but like, this is why I love

12:22 inviting on folks coming from different

12:25 nationalities, different ethnicities. Different, whatever, different

12:29 regions. Because as an American, I can only

12:32 look at the context of the books that we cover on this show

12:36 through the, the lens, through the window of my American ness

12:40 right now. That, of course, is going to break down into different structures

12:44 in the United States, which is just sort of how it, how it, how it

12:47 happens. And we've had tons of those kinds of conversations on this show.

12:52 But we are, when we read books like

12:56 Notes from Underground or we were going to tackle Brothers

13:00 Karmazov last year, and I just, I looked at it and

13:04 I was like, oh, this is 800 pages.

13:08 And I put it down and I'm a, I'm a, I'm a, I'm a big

13:12 boy. Like, I'll get in there, I'll wrestle with, with a text. I just, I

13:15 didn't have the will at that point to be able to go in there

13:19 and really do that, really do that work fair.

13:23 And so. And I appreciate the fact that, like, you're, you're a big fan, which

13:27 means that might be your second book that you might come on for, because I

13:30 might need a hand holding through the brother's garments off.

13:35 But, but Dostoyevsky is a writer for

13:38 me because again, I'm coming at this through an American

13:42 lens. And yes, you know, I've talked about this on the

13:46 show. I'm, you know, I'm a Christian. You know, I was, you know, raised,

13:49 embedded in sort of that, that. Not sort of in that environment,

13:53 also being African American layers on top of that. And then there's class

13:57 structures that layer on top of that. So I bring all of that to the

13:59 text right now. That doesn't mean that

14:03 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.

14:12 I reject all of that. The text has to stand on its own. It has

14:15 to stand as it is. And then I have to look at it and go,

14:17 okay, how do I bring this into, into the framework that I'm in?

14:21 And so when I look at Dostoevsky, to

14:25 your point, I see a. I do. I see a deeply pessimistic

14:28 guy about human nature. I

14:32 see a person who is struggling with their orthodox Christianity and trying to make

14:36 that fit with what they see happening around them.

14:40 But I also see a person who is really into. And I

14:44 wrote something on my substack about this that you commented on. And by the way,

14:48 if you have an opportunity, go look at Honda's substack. It's Great. It's Tough Cookies.

14:52 Fabulous name. Go, go check it out. We'll have a link

14:55 to it in the, in the, in the show notes. Go, go, go get it.

14:59 It's a nice plug. I'll take it. Yeah, go subscribe.

15:04 But I had written, you know, he, he also

15:07 struggled with, with, with gambling and

15:11 with playing poker and with the thrill of. And I, I

15:15 understand. It's. It's the thrill of that.

15:19 It's a thrill of the chase. It's the thrill of the getting. And, you know,

15:22 it wasn't until, you know, his wife kind of got a hold of him

15:27 and even then, I don't even think. I don't know, she fell in love with

15:31 his words. And I wonder about. I wonder if she really ever got a hold

15:34 of the man or if it was just constant because men and women don't change

15:38 across culture. I wonder if it was just constant, just like, just like whipping

15:42 him to keep him out of the gambling dens.

15:45 Is this a question? Because. Yeah, this is. Yeah, this is a question.

15:49 Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, you probably know more about this actually. You probably know more

15:52 about this than I do. So his,

15:55 his first. And the historians out there don't, you

15:59 know, hold this against me, but I believe that. So his

16:03 first wife passed away kind of young,

16:07 and then he married woman

16:11 who was. And I wrote about this

16:15 because I think that it's just so.

16:20 How, how shall I describe this? It's such a great example

16:24 of essentially technology allowing you

16:27 to be productive. Bear with

16:31 me where I'm going with this. When I read Brothers

16:34 Karamazov and I had this, like, I'm so into this

16:38 text, it just pulled me in. And yes, you're

16:42 correct. I think the audiobook is like 45 hours.

16:45 And the, the, the book itself again, is like this big.

16:50 And the. I had

16:53 this feeling of, you know, when I think of

16:57 David Foster Wallace, who I actually really, really like. He's

17:01 my, one of my most favorite American writers.

17:05 But I always had this image of him sitting at the keyboard and

17:09 just like typing in this

17:12 headed trance. And, you

17:16 know, he was not. He was an addict,

17:20 kinda like he, he was playing with different

17:23 drugs and, And I think that it kind of

17:27 helped his writing, at least the productivity part.

17:32 The genius was there always, but the delivery was

17:35 definitely helped. And I thought, so how did

17:40 Dostoevsky. Right. Brothers Karamazov. Because,

17:43 like, with a pen, with a quill. What was happening?

17:47 Like, how do you, how do you produce? I mean, I'm always. This

17:51 is my toxic trait I'm always looking at, like, how was it

17:55 literally delivered? Like, tell me the execution bit. How does

17:59 this mechanically work? And

18:02 so the story is that he was under a

18:06 deadline, as he was always. Because he was always out of

18:10 money or in debt, and the

18:15 creditors were onto him and he had to deliver like

18:19 a book, short book, I think it was the

18:22 Gambler, actually. And he found

18:26 a. By recommendation, a young woman who was.

18:31 She was studying and she was top of her class in

18:34 stenography. And so he hired her

18:38 and she would come in and. And take whatever he

18:42 was dictating and do the

18:45 shorthand, and then transcribed it

18:50 on a typewriter, I think. Was it a

18:54 typewriter? No, it was also by hand, but longhand, that's what it was.

18:58 There were no typewriters because I looked into it and wrote about it.

19:01 Because eventually through the words and through the work,

19:05 she transcribing his dictation,

19:09 they fell in love. And she did

19:13 have a huge impact on his life in a sense that he

19:17 got way better. I can't imagine living with

19:21 some like a genius like this. And constantly,

19:25 when he did publish something and he got money

19:28 or advances theory is, you know,

19:33 relatives would show up and ask for money. He was never able

19:37 to say no. So they were constantly

19:41 struggling materially. But I think that she brought a

19:44 lot of peace and

19:48 structure to his life and made him

19:51 better. And I think they had like three kids, two

19:55 survived. And I think, you know,

19:59 this whole. Behind every great man there's a woman.

20:03 I. I kept thinking about that when. When I was looking into

20:07 this particular story. Well, and I think.

20:11 So Stephen King has a great book called On Writing, Right.

20:15 And probably other than Ernest

20:19 Hemingway's Collected Quotes, you know, about writing that people have

20:22 sort of collected from things, interviews and things that he wrote over the course of

20:26 his life on writing by Stephen King is probably. And myself and other

20:29 guests have talked about this before for probably the best. This is how

20:33 the sausage is made book on writing ever published by a

20:37 major author. Right. And

20:42 I do believe fundamentally that writers

20:46 really break into a bunch of different

20:49 categories, Right. So you have writers like Charles

20:53 Portis, who wrote True Grit. He

20:56 literally lived in a cabin in Arkansas. After he published True Grit,

21:01 he went off, he became a journalist for a little while in London and then

21:04 he went into a cabin in Arkansas, wrote True Grit and then, well, actually wrote

21:08 a couple of other books and then wrote True Grit like it was his third

21:10 book, if I remember correctly, Charles Force's third book. And that became a huge hit.

21:14 And he Stayed in his cabin in Arkansas for the rest of his life, which

21:18 is amazing to me. That's the ultimate sort of

21:21 writer's revenge, like a comedian's revenge, where they show

21:25 up to your house and heckle, you know, or they show up to your job

21:28 and heckle you.

21:32 Jerry Seinfeld tells that joke all the time. And it's a great joke. I mean,

21:35 because it's. It's spectacular. I don't show up to your job and, heck, will you.

21:38 I'm working here. Like, what are we doing?

21:41 But writers tend to fall into. Or at least they tend to be

21:45 framed. And Stephen King talks about this in terms of. To your point about

21:48 addiction. The addiction is the thing that drives them. Like David Foster Wallace or

21:52 Dostoyevsky, whatever the addiction is. The addiction is the thing where the genius has

21:56 to. Has to live. Or writers are. And he talks about this again

22:00 in On Writing. Writers are considered to be just typists, right?

22:03 So, for instance,

22:07 it's either Ray Bradbury or Isaac Asimov. I think it's Ray Bradbury,

22:11 actually, who wrote. No,

22:14 it was Isaac Asimov wrote a ton of books. A

22:18 ton of writing came out of Isaac Asimov.

22:22 And yet only a few of those things were hits because he just. Every

22:26 day, just typed for four hours. And he would describe himself

22:30 as a typist because it was the discipline. And he would type it whether

22:33 it was good. He'd type it whether it was bad. Sometimes you're going to get

22:37 a hit, sometimes you're not. You do it for four hours

22:40 and you go home, right? And then, of course, you have the earliest Hemingway

22:44 types, where the weird sort of hybrid of both of those, where they have the

22:47 discipline, but they also have the addictions that drive them in certain

22:51 ways. When I look at Dostoevsky, I say all that to say this. When

22:55 I look at Dostoevsky's life and when I look at how he. How he

23:00 produced his product, right? How he produced

23:03 his ideas, I often think of.

23:09 I wonder how much more productive he would have been

23:13 if he had had a typewriter. Like, would he have been the

23:16 obsessive that sat at the typewriter? Or would he

23:20 still have been. We still have been chasing the gambling bug. Like,

23:23 would that still have been a thing for him? And so

23:27 I see something like Notes are Underground, which I'll talk directly about the book here

23:30 now, but I see something like Notes from Underground is sort of his first attempt

23:33 to sort of wrangle his obsessions together and put them into one

23:37 spot. That way he could do a Bunch of other different things later on.

23:42 You know, maybe here is a good point

23:46 to say that if I have never read

23:50 Dostoevsky, I would

23:53 not recommend reading Notes from the Underground as your first

23:57 foray into Dostoevsky. And here's why.

24:01 So it's enticing because unlike all

24:05 the other, you know, beasts of a book,

24:10 this is what, 300 pages less.

24:14 And so it's like, oh, I can feel

24:18 smart, see what Dostoevsky is about, and

24:21 I can read this slim book. And let me tell you,

24:25 don't. If this is your first attempt, I would

24:28 discourage people from doing it because it

24:32 is so bleak. It's

24:36 so bleak. It's. I think that the structure

24:39 is a bit of a challenge because the book is divided into two

24:43 parts and the chronologically

24:47 earlier part follows the later part.

24:51 So you have to pay attention. But also

24:56 it really is. He is at his

25:00 best describing the.

25:04 The bad in humans. And I would maybe push back a

25:08 little bit on the sort of the

25:11 struggle with. With faith. And I think that you

25:15 mentioned at the beginning, I think

25:19 that, yes, his time,

25:22 he was writing at this extremely

25:26 violent, as in volatile time.

25:30 You had the sort of social

25:34 upheaval in Europe. You had the

25:38 sort of. The changes with the

25:41 serfdom and all the legal and

25:45 practical consequences of changes

25:49 in the tsarist Russia that he was living through.

25:53 So he was noticing all of that. And he lived in Russia,

25:57 but he also traveled to Europe. Right. His gambling took

26:01 him to like Baden Baden and all these fancy

26:05 casinos of the. Of the time. And so

26:08 there's this tension that is really

26:12 present in his writing. And

26:16 back to the. Back to the Notes from the

26:20 Underground, I think that he is.

26:24 The main character is awful.

26:29 The main character is a bad guy. Now, you quoted

26:33 different translation. Mine opens with

26:36 I am a wicked man. And I mean, it

26:40 starts with, I'm a bad.

26:45 I'm a sick man, I'm a wicked man and an

26:49 attractive man, et cetera, et cetera. And

26:53 I think that the power of that book is in

26:57 a lot of lessons, which I'm happy to

27:01 dive into. But I think that it

27:05 is also really hard to read

27:08 a book where the main character or the

27:12 hero is really the anti hero. So, like,

27:16 I thought about this because as much as I love

27:20 Dostoevsky, reading this book is a challenge. It's, you know,

27:24 and I don't. And it reminded

27:28 me of. I like movies and I'm

27:32 a huge cinephile, yet there

27:35 are stories that are really hard for me to get into

27:40 because like all the mob, you Know, like,

27:44 say what you want about Sopranos and this

27:48 particular genre. I have such a hard

27:51 time rooting for a

27:54 murderer or a gangster. Like, it's really hard for me.

27:58 So. And. But there's always a redemption.

28:02 There's always this humanity you

28:06 can relate to. And I think in this book there is a

28:10 recognition. I think it resonates with us because

28:14 we can sometimes recognize some of the toxic traits,

28:19 but there's also no redemption. And I think that's

28:24 where it hits so hard. Yes, I would

28:27 absolutely. So I would absolutely agree with that. We'll get. We'll

28:31 get back to the book in a second.

28:36 I. I absolutely agree with you. And I'm also a huge cinephile,

28:40 so maybe we'll. We'll talk later about what are your top

28:44 five directors of all time. If.

28:48 Well, if Christopher Nolan isn't on that list, I don't know if we could be

28:51 friends. I don't know. I don't know if you can come back. No, it's fine.

28:54 No, no, he absolutely is. I'm sure it's fine. I know. No,

28:58 um, but. But I think so. You're

29:02 right. There's the arc of this book. If you're. If you're going to read this

29:05 book, I. I agree with Hannah. If you're going to read this book as a

29:08 leader and you're going to look for leadership lessons in this book,

29:13 this is one of the harder books that we've. We've. We've addressed on this show.

29:16 I would put it up there with Lolita

29:20 by Vladimir Nabokov, a book that made me incredibly

29:23 uncomfortable. A whole variety of reasons. I've talked about that before on this show.

29:27 Go back and listen to that episode. We did that episode with Claire Chandler.

29:31 I would also put this book on par with

29:35 Adolf Eichman and the Hannah

29:39 Arendt. Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem,

29:42 Another book that on the surface looks

29:46 easy to get into. Or there. Right. Yeah,

29:50 yeah. But. But reveals so many other

29:53 things underneath, as Hannah Aaron is kind of going through this process of

29:57 watching this trial and trying to figure out what.

30:02 Well, what. What secular morality actually means when it's

30:05 unhooked fully from. From religion. And then the other

30:09 book that I would put it on par with that we've covered on this show

30:12 is. Is

30:16 the Power of the Powerless by Vaclav Havell. Another

30:20 book, small. Right.

30:23 And yes, I do see. I do see. You've got the biography of Hovel behind

30:26 you. Yeah, yeah. Fascinating guy. But.

30:30 But I worked for him. Oh, really?

30:35 Okay, I'm sorry. Peeling away layers of the onions. No, it's fine.

30:38 Peeling away layers of the onion. No, this is good. Okay, I'm gonna take

30:42 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

30:49 the. One of the disciples or whatever. Oh, yeah, I dictated. I dictated Peter's

30:53 Gospel. Oh, really? You might want to have dropped that earlier.

30:58 I was the first intern there they

31:01 ever had at the Prague Castle, which is where the president's office

31:06 is located. And I was studying political science

31:10 at Charles University, and

31:13 my aunt actually was like, why don't you go? Because we

31:17 were so high on the

31:20 revolutionary spirit after the Berlin Wall fell. And, you

31:24 know, we. We all kind of lived through it, and it was such

31:28 an amazing experience. And I happened to be

31:31 in Prague, and. And, you know, Havel was such

31:35 a. An icon for. For us,

31:39 and the fact that he was a playwright made a

31:42 huge difference, and for

31:46 a lot of people, me particularly. And so I just

31:50 went in and I was like, I want to be an

31:54 intern here. And they looked at me and they were like, we don't know what

31:57 an intern mean. What does that mean? And I said, I will do

32:01 anything. I will stand by the copy machine, the

32:04 Xerox machine. I will do whatever you need,

32:08 and you don't have to pay me. And they were like, okay, great. So I.

32:13 That's the part they heard was the I don't have to pay you part. That's

32:15 the part. And. But, yeah, I ended up in the

32:19 press office and worked there for a couple years, and it was

32:22 absolutely amazing. And I have met a lot of very

32:26 important people, and I have tons of lessons from that time,

32:30 one of them being, we're all people.

32:35 And I think that. To take it back to the book we're

32:39 discussing, I think that's what's really hard, because

32:44 similar to. I'm so glad that you brought up Hannah Arendt, because

32:48 she struggles with that. You know, like, there's. There's this.

32:52 We're all children of God. We're all.

32:57 There is this knowledge for most of us that

33:01 were part of the whole. There is

33:06 shared consciousness. You are a bit of

33:10 a villain, and you are a bit of a good person depending on your

33:14 circumstances. There's so much

33:17 into this, about this sense of

33:21 wanting to belong to humanity. And

33:25 when you read about people like Eichmann or

33:29 when you read the Notes from the Underground, you go,

33:33 really? I'm part of that. That's awful. I hate

33:37 it. And, and there are moments when you go, oh, yeah, I have done

33:41 that. That's not comfortable at all. Well, and it gets

33:45 to this idea. And I think this is where.

33:52 The, the, the Christianity piece has to come back in because

33:57 modern, and I can only speak to modern American evangelicalism, which

34:01 is what I know modern American evangelicalism has,

34:05 for better or worse in, in, in the post war,

34:09 and by the way, post World War II, last 80 or

34:13 90 years now of that history has fallen into

34:17 the trap of just being nice,

34:21 being the greatest commandment. If we're just nice,

34:25 then we don't have to worry about all those other, I'm going

34:29 to use an old school word here, sins. We don't have to worry about all

34:32 those other sins. We don't have to worry about greed or lust

34:36 or vanity. We don't have to worry about pride, which we talk about on this

34:39 show. Envy, which is of things, jealousy, which is of

34:43 people. We don't have to worry about any of those things. We don't

34:47 have to, we don't have to comment culturally on

34:51 coveting your neighbor's wife or your neighbor's stuff

34:55 or your neighbor's husband. We don't have to comment on any of that. Just be

34:58 nice. And that reduces Christianity

35:02 to being a very personal thing without cosmic significance.

35:07 And the second that an Eichmann shows up,

35:12 just being nice doesn't work. The second

35:16 that the dyspeptic, and I'm being gentle here,

35:19 underground man shows up,

35:23 that doesn't work. For dealing with her, for addressing that

35:26 sort of person, we're going to talk a little bit about Plato's Cave because I

35:29 think there's, there's a lot of parallels to the allegory of Plato's cave in here.

35:34 When people are happy in the cave, they're happy looking

35:38 at the shadows on the wall and they don't want to see the real thing,

35:42 that happiness in and of itself. And this is a, this

35:46 is a philosophical jump here, folks, and I'm going to make that happiness in and

35:49 of itself is evil, but we don't have. It's lying. It's lying. We don't

35:53 have language for that when we've just decided in, again,

35:57 in the United States of America, evangelical context that the

36:01 highest sin that we can commit is to not be nice.

36:05 Now, that sounds. When I say that, and I recognize that some of my evangelical

36:08 listeners will be listening to this and they are going to get off the train

36:11 and stop listening and some of my secular folks are going to be

36:15 like, yeah, you guys Are. Whatever. No, stop. Because

36:19 the secular people fall into the same trap too. You think that the highest thing

36:22 is to just be nice. Just be nice and everything will be fine. And

36:26 that's not. That's not the highest thing. So when evil does show

36:30 up, and we talked about this in Eichmann in Jerusalem a little bit,

36:34 but we also have talked about this in term. In 1984, we talked about this.

36:37 We covered Brave New World. We even talked about this. We talked with the

36:40 unreliable narrator in Lolita. When evil does

36:44 show up, whether it's seductive or

36:47 deceptive or whatever, you have no.

36:52 Heck, we talked about this last episode, an invitation to a beheading about the Nuremberg

36:55 Trials. How are you going to judge evil if the only

36:59 barometer you have is we have power and we're

37:03 not. And we're. And we're not. We have power and we're nice. So

37:07 that makes us better. That's not enough. That's thin. And I think

37:11 Dostoyevsky saw the thinness of that coming, but he didn't have

37:14 an answer for how to solve that problem. He could just show you the problem.

37:20 And so I actually see a great peril

37:24 to not. I have two points, not just

37:27 to the evangelical

37:31 Christianity. I see this.

37:34 Let's be nice. And that overrides everything in every

37:38 Single Corporation in 2020

37:42 of, you know, like, it's such a

37:48 easy default that

37:52 cannot stand because truth requires

37:55 courage. They. These two are

37:59 inseparable. And the moment you separate them,

38:04 you are living a lie. You are the

38:07 happy pig, you know, and.

38:11 And it's the sitting in the cave and watching

38:14 the shadows. That's not happiness, because it's not

38:18 truth. And I will say the second point

38:22 is to me, because Brothers Karamazov

38:26 is Dostoevsky's last

38:30 publication, I think that he

38:34 is resolving this.

38:38 I think that he leaned into his faith a lot more

38:42 towards the end of his life, and he.

38:48 He urged people, or at least it seemed to

38:51 me through the reading that I,

38:55 as. As a Christian, I too saw.

38:59 And it doesn't matter if it's, you know, Catholic or Orthodox.

39:03 The. The Christian spirit is. It

39:06 requires you not only to act,

39:10 but also there you cannot have a

39:13 framework only based on morality that is

39:17 civil. You absolutely have to have transcendence.

39:21 And I think that is one of his

39:25 most powerful messages. At least that's what I took from

39:29 it. Yeah, yeah. Civil morality will always

39:33 fail. Eventually it's going to run up against something it cannot deal

39:36 with. And I don't

39:40 for leaders. I'm not Talking about civil morality, I

39:44 want to be very clear. I'm not talking about civil morality in terms of

39:48 what someone is doing in some governmental office somewhere over there.

39:52 I'm talking about civil morality in terms of what you are doing in your organization

39:56 right now, even if your organization is five people,

40:00 that's civil morale. You've created an environment where that

40:03 has to exist. And by the way, most of us aren't taught that, right? And

40:07 so we're not even trained in how to think that or even think

40:11 in those kinds of terms. But because.

40:17 Because uncivil and deeply

40:21 unserious people are being pressed down upon us all the way

40:24 down to the substrate level and their ideas and their posture

40:28 and their perspective on the world. And by the way, deeply unserious

40:32 people rely on lying to protect them and

40:35 allow them to keep being unserious. That's the state that they have to operate

40:39 in when their power is pushed down to

40:43 the substrate just because it's power. Now, we

40:46 at the community level, we at the, the level in

40:50 Seattle or the level in north central Texas, where I live, right, where I'm recording

40:54 this from right now, today, we have to live with that. We have to live

40:57 with the outcomes of that. And we have to figure out how to face it,

41:01 particularly when it shows up in our schools, it shows up in our churches, it

41:05 shows up in a bunch of institutions that we thought were solid but

41:08 maybe proved to not be as solid

41:12 as we anticipated.

41:17 But got something, I think, that will point this

41:20 out even further. So I'm going to go back to the book, going to

41:24 go back to Notes from Underground. I'm going to pick up

41:28 from part one, and it's going to be

41:32 chapter seven. So the way this book is divided up, there's

41:35 multiple chapters in each part, and they

41:39 are. They're short.

41:43 Right? And this is what Hannah is saying, and she's exactly correct. It's

41:47 deceptively short. But the Titan, the writing is incredibly tight,

41:50 even for someone like myself who's like, I'm working my way through Ben Hur and

41:54 Les Miserables for the show in June, right? I'm going to.

41:58 I'm going to the barricades. Go look at

42:02 the French Revolution and go to the barricades. But.

42:06 But in looking at this book, it is definitely written.

42:10 He definitely thought about every single sentence. And he, and he, he,

42:13 he. I could see him sweating through every single sentence.

42:17 And so the writing is tight, even though the, the passages or the

42:21 chapters are short. So let me pick

42:25 up here, like I said in Chapter

42:28 seven. I marked this

42:32 piece here. He's.

42:38 Well, the underground man is talking about

42:42 the laws of nature and man. And this

42:46 relates a little bit to what Hannah was saying about corporations.

42:52 Then this is what you. This is all what you

42:55 say. There we go. New economic relations will be established, already

42:59 made and worked out with mathematical exactitude. He's talking about the

43:03 industrialists, by the way, who were beginning to

43:06 rule in Europe during his time.

43:10 So that every possible question will vanish in the twinkling of an eye simply

43:14 because every possible answer to it will be provided. Then

43:17 the quote unquote palace of Crystal will be built. Then. In fact,

43:21 those will be the halcyon days. Of course, there is no guaranteeing, this is my

43:25 comment, that it will not be, for instance, frightfully dull then.

43:29 For what will one have to do when everything will be calculated and tabulated,

43:33 but on the other hand, everything will be extraordinarily rational?

43:38 Of course, boredom may lead you to anything. It is boredom sets one

43:41 sticking golden pins into people. But all that would not matter. What is bad,

43:45 this is my comment again, is that I dare say people will be thankful for

43:49 the gold pins then. Man is stupid, you know, phenomenally

43:52 stupid. Or rather he is not at all stupid, but he is so ungrateful

43:56 that you could not find another like him in all creation. I,

44:00 for instance, would not be in the least surprised if all

44:03 of a sudden, apropos of nothing in the midst of general

44:07 prosperity, a gentleman with an ignoble, or rather with a

44:10 reactionary and ironical countenance were to

44:14 arise and put his arms akimbo and say to us all,

44:18 I say, gentlemen, hadn't we better kick over the whole show and scatter

44:21 rationalism to the winds simply to send these logarithms to the devil

44:25 and to enable us to live once at more,

44:28 live once more at our own sweet, foolish will. That

44:32 again, would not matter. But what is annoying is that he would be sure to

44:36 find followers such as the nature of man. And all that

44:39 for the most foolish reason, which one would think was hardly worth

44:43 mentioning, that is that man, everywhere and at all times,

44:47 whoever he may be, has preferred to act as he chose and not in the

44:50 least as his reason and advantage dictated. And one may choose

44:54 what is contrary to one's interests and sometimes one positively ought. That's

44:58 my idea. One's own free, unfettered choice, one's own

45:02 caprice, however wild it may be, one's own fancy worked up at times to

45:05 frenzy. That is the very most advantageous

45:09 advantage which we have overlooked, which comes under no classification and against which

45:12 all systems and theories are continually being shattered to atoms.

45:17 And how do these wiseacres know that man wants a normal,

45:20 a virtuous choice? What has made them conceive that man

45:24 must want a rationally advantageous choice? What man

45:28 wants is simply independent choice, whatever that

45:32 independence may cost and wherever it may lead. And choice,

45:35 of course, the devil only knows

45:39 what choice.

45:51 I read things like this, and

45:56 Hannah, you don't know this, and I haven't talked about it on the show in

45:59 a long time, but I took a lot of philosophy classes in college, a

46:03 lot. Matter of fact, I would have probably run off, become a philosophy major if

46:07 my mom hadn't told me, there's no money in that. Go do something else.

46:10 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

46:20 doing here, because when you talk about

46:23 independence and you talk about choice again, I think about this in an

46:27 American context. We're a weird country because

46:31 we've staked our existence on

46:34 a creed. And yes, the creed is, is

46:38 most notably named in the Declaration of Independence. But then the thing that

46:42 follows on from the creed, if that's the vision statement, the

46:45 mission is laid out in the Constitution, and the Constitution

46:49 is staked on two amendments right at the beginning, right up

46:52 front, there's the First Amendment, which is. You can say

46:56 whatever you want to say. Dave Chappelle has this great joke, right? I'm going to

47:00 read it. I love that. Oh, my God. Yeah, you can say whatever you want

47:02 to say, but here's the Second Amendment. You're going to need a gun.

47:06 You need to arm yourself, because it,

47:10 the Constitution fundamentally understands something that Dostoevsky is

47:14 getting to here. You can give human beings independent choice.

47:18 You can grant them all kinds of rights that, by the way,

47:23 the government isn't granting them, they come from God, which is a whole other conception

47:26 there. But let's just go with that. You're granting them the rights

47:30 and, and these people, if you give them free and unfettered access to

47:34 these rights, they're going to. They're going to take

47:38 advantage of them. With that being said, there will be consequences

47:42 and repercussions. There always are.

47:46 And Dostoyevsky gets. And, and, and to your point about the serfs earlier,

47:49 he's positioning this during a time when

47:54 Russia is leaving its, for lack of a better term,

47:57 slave state. I hate using that term, but it's one that will resonate

48:01 with my, with my Audience here, it's leaving that state, it's leaving that and

48:05 going into some transitioning into something else that's not fully

48:09 defined. While these tensions from Europe, these

48:12 industrialized tensions. And when he talks about, and the reason why I picked that section

48:16 is because the way he talks about the industrialists are the exact same way we

48:19 talk about the technologists right now.

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

48:27 is.

48:32 How do you, how do you

48:36 navigate choice as a leader? And

48:40 that's a very deep philosophical question, but how do you navigate choice as a

48:43 leader? How do you, how do you take something like notes from underground?

48:47 You go, okay, the first part of this, to your point, which is philosophically heavy,

48:51 is really focused around this idea of what man is going

48:55 to choose to do versus what he's going to be compelled to do.

48:59 And then the second part is about how he lies to himself and compels himself

49:02 to do different things. Okay, but let's just focus on this. How do you,

49:06 how do you, how do you navigate this world as a, as a leader or

49:09 just as an individual? When the algorithm, not the

49:13 logarithm, the algorithm now is designed to

49:16 push you to engage in certain behaviors and to

49:20 undermine your free will and to under, or at least to give you the idea

49:23 that free will is non existent. How do we, how do we navigate this? Because

49:27 I think Dostoevsky would look at the environment that we're in now if we could

49:29 transport him from back then to now. I think he would say we're having

49:33 the same problem. It's just in a box that we carry around

49:36 in our pocket. Yeah, the packaging

49:40 is different, but the main questions remain very

49:44 similar or are identical. I think that

49:47 when it's interesting, you're phrasing it in terms of

49:51 choice, I phrased it almost in terms of free

49:55 will. And one of the things that

49:58 I'm taking from the book, and I think any leader

50:02 can take from the book, is

50:06 that self awareness without mastery

50:10 is hell self. So the main

50:13 character is super self

50:16 aware. Dostoevsky lets you

50:20 see everything that goes on in his mind. He is

50:24 super self aware. The self awareness is totally there.

50:28 But because he, there's a point, I don't know where it is.

50:32 But I think he, like, he's awful. He knows it. And

50:36 he says, I can't help it.

50:40 And it's like, well, sure you can. Do

50:43 you have agency? And that's where. So to

50:47 me it's self awareness is not enough.

50:51 Self awareness without mastery is meaningless.

50:55 So we are I think societally at the point where thanks

50:59 to immediate access to every little

51:03 brain fart by billions of people we're

51:06 very self aware. But the question now what?

51:11 That's still unanswered. So self

51:14 awareness without mastery is meaningless.

51:19 He has. Back to your question about choices. The

51:22 main character, the man in the underground, he

51:26 had choices and he often

51:30 made choices that were irrational. So

51:34 back to the question about the leaders. You will

51:38 have people who will do

51:42 things that are essentially they will self destruct

51:47 just not to give you the win. So I think

51:51 that that's something that like

51:55 we have free will but we a

51:59 don't always follow it and act upon it.

52:02 Two we. The. The

52:06 power of spite is very strong.

52:11 So he does so much in the book

52:15 out of spite. He's just

52:19 annoyed with himself and he's annoyed with everybody else and

52:22 he knows that he's going against his own

52:27 proclamations and his own if he even has any

52:32 moral standards, which he doesn't. But

52:36 he goes even against that

52:39 because he's so. And it's almost like telling you

52:43 I know I could, I'm not going to. He

52:47 admits to lacking moral courage in part two. He outright

52:50 admits to lacking a moral courage when he goes and sees the

52:55 prostitute. The prostitute right after the, the party that by the way,

52:58 I have a question about the party which I'll ask you because again based on,

53:02 you know, you know, your knowledge of Russian, there's some cultural things going on in

53:05 there that I could sense that I'm totally, completely missing as an American because to

53:09 me that entire sequence seemed ridiculous.

53:13 Also as a Gen Xer I'm like, I don't care about these people. Like why

53:16 do I, what do I care if they like me or not? Like I'm just

53:18 going to go home. But I get it. It's a different context. So

53:22 I need to kind of understand that before I jump to the prostitute and

53:26 the party. I want to close the loop on this idea.

53:30 So I love what you said there. Self awareness without mastery as hell, I love

53:33 that. That's, that's, that's like clippable. We're going to put that in. That's going to

53:36 wind up somewhere. The,

53:41 the challenge of our. One of

53:44 the challenges, one of the many challenges of our time is that we believe we

53:48 have mastery. We're deceived into thinking we have mastery because

53:52 we have at our fingertips all this information

53:56 but no practical wisdom to apply it.

54:01 So the self aware person can be self deceived

54:05 by their own self awareness, by Their lack of mastery

54:09 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

54:21 to separate that out. I don't. And I also think,

54:24 weirdly enough that people are afraid to separate that out,

54:28 because I think they're afraid. And I think the reason they're afraid to separate it

54:31 out without going all Freudian is that

54:35 the separating out process, I think, would

54:38 deconstruct them. And they're not prepared for

54:42 where that. They're not prepared for the cul de sac at the end. Not even

54:44 the cul de sac, sorry, the clearing at the end of that path. So

54:48 it's so interesting because I have.

54:51 I have personal professional experience with this. I work

54:55 with people who. This is very important,

54:59 have achieved tremendous success

55:03 because. And they're. They have certain personality,

55:07 character beliefs about themselves based

55:11 on external validation.

55:15 And the main character is all about

55:18 external validation. He goes after people who

55:23 he despises, but he is so hungry for

55:27 their approval throughout the whole book. Right. What

55:30 you're touching upon is so important because I think that he

55:35 understands that he is. Modern

55:39 psychology would call it disalignment or. I

55:42 actually brought this book, so I have it handy.

55:46 Martha Beck Talk has a great book called the Way of

55:49 Integrity. And she basically describes the like

55:53 in the aerospace, a plane being in

55:57 integrity means that the sort of. The bolts

56:01 have to align right. Perfectly with the.

56:05 With the COVID of the. Or the

56:10 shell of the aircraft in order to

56:14 move properly. Right. Like, the aircraft has to

56:17 be in integrity. And in a way,

56:21 so do we. We have to figure out who we are

56:26 and act in integrity. I think

56:29 Shakespeare in Hamlet says, you know,

56:32 integrity is being true to yourself and truly true

56:36 to the others. Right. So there's the dual being in

56:40 integrity, being truthful. That takes incredible

56:43 courage. And the main character in this book,

56:48 he's afraid, as you said, to deconstruct and

56:51 then put together to be in alignment. Because he

56:56 hates himself. He doesn't like the person

56:59 he thinks he is.

57:03 And that makes it really, really hard to move through the

57:07 world. Because if you don't have clarity about yourself,

57:10 if you don't have this understanding of who you are without

57:14 the external validation, you

57:18 will always chase after what people

57:22 tell you you should be. You will always try to sort of fill

57:26 out the form that they are giving you, the mold that they're giving you.

57:29 And so, like, my clients are very successful,

57:34 you know, accomplished individuals, high achievers.

57:38 But at some point, if one of these things goes away,

57:42 A bad deal, a marriage crumbles.

57:47 You might not get, you know, you might get laid

57:51 off. Who are you if you're not who

57:54 you thought you were based on the external validation? And so

57:58 these are deeply existential, deeply existential

58:02 questions. And I think that back to what you were

58:06 saying about him, you know, having the

58:09 courage to face who he is, he doesn't have that courage and

58:13 he's afraid to look because it's not pretty.

58:16 It's very ugly. Right. What he sees. And there are glimpses.

58:21 And if I'm on this track, I will add another book

58:25 that I thought I will bring to today, because

58:30 your essay that you published on Substack

58:34 was in reference to Dostoevsky and

58:38 you talked about lying. And I think that there is a

58:41 distinction between lying, which is,

58:45 I'm a liar and I know that I'm telling a lie. I know

58:49 that this cake requires three cups. And I'm going to tell you, you

58:52 should use 2 cups of flour so that your cake comes out wrong.

58:56 Right. Like I'm lying on purpose.

59:00 But there is a wonderful essay by. You've

59:03 Already Know Where I'm Going with this by Harry Frankfurt on

59:07 bullshit. And I think that. And in

59:10 his take, bullshitting is, as

59:14 a verb, is believing your own lies.

59:18 And I think that that's really interesting and an important

59:22 part of the psyche of the

59:26 man in the underground, because he so often

59:31 wants to believe his own

59:34 fables, but he can't. He knows deep down that

59:38 he can't. So there's like these ventures into, oh,

59:42 okay, I'm going to believe this. And then he

59:45 realizes that his actions are actually completely

59:50 not in integrity. Right. And that gets

59:53 to exactly where. Where I was going in the second part. So part two picks

59:57 up with him remembering.

1:00:02 And I'm going to sort of summarize this, but him remembering or him recalling

1:00:06 a series of incidents that occurred to him during a

1:00:10 snowstorm. Interestingly enough, in.

1:00:13 In, I believe he's in Moscow

1:00:17 and

1:00:21 runs across.

1:00:25 I don't how to frame this. He runs

1:00:29 across former associates. Let me frame that. Let me frame it that way.

1:00:33 I think they are schoolmates. They're schoolmates. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

1:00:37 And. And the title, of course, of Part two is

1:00:41 and when I. When I ran across. By the way, when I wrote just a

1:00:43 side note, when I ran across. Apropos of Nothing, I double underlined that because actually

1:00:48 I. I read Woody Allen's band biography,

1:00:52 autobiography, all 800 pages of it, looking for the things that would have

1:00:56 made people go over. Clem didn't want to cancel it. And of course

1:01:00 his biography is Apropos of Nothing. That's the title of it. I was like,

1:01:03 oh, that's where you got it from. Gotcha. Okay, so the joke

1:01:07 goes deeper there, Woody. But part two in

1:01:10 Notes of Underground is titled Apropos of the Wet Snow.

1:01:15 And it of course opens up with this poem here,

1:01:19 which I'm not going to read. But he starts off

1:01:23 with remembering an incident that occurred

1:01:27 to him when he was only 24. And he says, my life was even then

1:01:30 gloomy, ill regulated and as solitary as that of the

1:01:34 savage. I made friends with no one and positively avoided talking and buried myself

1:01:38 more and more in my hole. At work, in the office. I never looked at

1:01:41 one. And I was perfectly aware that my companions looked upon me not only as

1:01:45 a queer fellow, but even looked upon me. I always fancied this with a sort

1:01:48 of loathing. Right, so he's got the self loathing, he's,

1:01:52 he's again a gentle word, dyspeptic. In his

1:01:55 temperament and his posture, he is not high achieving.

1:01:59 To Hannah's point, he has not achieved nothing. By the way, the

1:02:03 first part of the book is written as a 40 year old, 40 year

1:02:07 old looking back. And of course he's still dyspeptic and believing that no one should

1:02:10 live past 40. As a person who's going to be in my

1:02:14 late 40s, actually not going to be. I'm in my late 40s. I

1:02:18 looked at that and I went, well, okay, sir,

1:02:22 whatever. Okay, as a person over

1:02:26 50, absolutely disagree.

1:02:29 Yeah, like, whatever. I don't, I don't have anything for you, sir. I guess. Okay,

1:02:33 that's fine. This is my whole fine.

1:02:36 But, but the incident that he, that he describes

1:02:40 in getting together with those, with those former classmates, the

1:02:43 desperation that he has in

1:02:47 seeking their external validation, their external approval

1:02:52 drives him to spending money he doesn't have to

1:02:56 robbing his servant. Well, not robbing, no denying his

1:02:59 servant wages that were rightfully his. Drives

1:03:03 him into this brothel house where he meets this prostitute

1:03:07 who he also proceeds to sort of tear down. Not sort of

1:03:11 to tear down. And there's

1:03:15 no, there's no

1:03:18 denouement. Nobody becomes better at the end of this.

1:03:22 There's no. It's kind of like the bit from the

1:03:26 movie adaptation with Nicolas Cage where he stands up at the Robert

1:03:29 McKee Screenplay Writing Seminar

1:03:34 and Robert McKee is played by the brilliant Brian Cox

1:03:37 and he says, Nicholas Cage says,

1:03:42 what is, what, what happens if you're going to write a story where Nothing happens

1:03:46 where nobody, nobody changes. Right? Nobody develops,

1:03:50 nobody grows, nobody, nobody, nobody

1:03:53 overcomes everything and succeeds in the end.

1:03:57 Like what happens if you have that story? And of course Bob McKee then

1:04:01 blows him off the stage and tells him to get the hell out because if

1:04:03 he has no conflict. Why am I going to watch your. Why am I going

1:04:06 to waste my time with your movie for two hours? Which is by the way

1:04:09 that is the correct answer. Why am I going to waste my time with your

1:04:11 movie for two hours? I don't know what Bob would have done with Dostoyevsky

1:04:17 or this but he's. He. There's no

1:04:20 resolution with this. Right.

1:04:24 And you see a lot of people running around like this. You talk about

1:04:28 subset. We talked about substack several times. I have a substack. It's called Crying Voice.

1:04:32 Crying in the wilderness. Go check it out. Go check out Hana substack. That's the

1:04:35 second plug there. We talk a lot about substack. A lot of the writers I

1:04:38 follow on substack are very. They're very

1:04:42 not depressed but they're very much the 24 year old underground man

1:04:46 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

1:04:54 in my life where. And I don't know if you have but I've reached a

1:04:57 point in time in my life and I try to talk to leaders who are

1:05:00 tired of masticating endlessly over problems and let's get

1:05:04 to a solution already or at least a trade off that we

1:05:07 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

1:05:14 that from from there to here. I don't even know if you can.

1:05:19 So I will push back on this in. In a way

1:05:23 and one is

1:05:27 absolutely agree let's be real and give the leaders

1:05:30 something to go on and. And like take home and I

1:05:34 agree. So. So we already mentioned some of the things like

1:05:38 the you know, self awareness is nothing without

1:05:41 mastery. But also. And that despite is a great

1:05:45 motivator. But I think that we are circling

1:05:48 around the truth and how

1:05:52 it is meaningless without courage. Right. Like

1:05:56 you have to walk the talk and

1:06:00 the. The main issue here

1:06:04 is he is the main character in this book

1:06:08 is lying to himself and he

1:06:12 is completely dependent on external validation.

1:06:16 But I think that there is a development.

1:06:20 So it's not a resolution but it is in a

1:06:24 way. And Dostoevsky really smartly flips

1:06:28 the timeline. And

1:06:32 when you meet the man in the underground, he's a

1:06:36 miserable, miserable man, wicked man. He's

1:06:39 spiteful, he hates himself, he

1:06:43 hates the world. He has all these ideas

1:06:47 and there's this narcissism

1:06:51 and he kind of revels in his own misery, right?

1:06:56 But you look at the same person at

1:06:59 24, and I think that there are two things.

1:07:03 One, he didn't have a bad life.

1:07:07 He was pretty well off with a servant.

1:07:10 He had a job that was pretty decent.

1:07:15 He was 24. So, you know, like

1:07:20 what's. And he pretty healthy, right? Like, he opens with

1:07:23 this. He is healthy, he has means.

1:07:27 And. And yet he's deeply miserable. And

1:07:31 I think that because he decides to

1:07:35 be miserable and just revel in his own misery,

1:07:39 to me, it was a great

1:07:42 example of how toxic and terrible

1:07:46 victimhood is. And he blames

1:07:49 everybody for where he is and he completely

1:07:53 lacks agency. So one of the. And

1:07:57 and because of that, he makes all these bad choices

1:08:01 and he ends up completely miserable. 40 year old,

1:08:04 right? So I think that it's not that it's a resolution

1:08:09 or a happy ending, but we see the end. Like,

1:08:12 you keep going, this is how you're gonna end up.

1:08:17 And so to me, if I'm looking at people in

1:08:21 2026, leaders, you know, people who need to follow

1:08:24 you, I think one

1:08:27 message stands up really, or stands out for me.

1:08:31 And that's. Truth is like a

1:08:35 verb, you know, to sound trite, but

1:08:39 it requires courage and it

1:08:42 has to be shown.

1:08:46 People will not trust you because of what you

1:08:49 say. Because the main character keeps saying all these things. When he

1:08:53 meets the prostitute Liza, he tells

1:08:57 her so much and then. And

1:09:00 tears her down, tells her her life is horrible and how is she

1:09:04 going to end up and blah, blah, blah. And then she

1:09:08 takes his word, comes to him for help

1:09:12 a couple days later, and he completely rejects her. Right?

1:09:16 Like this is an example of. These are words

1:09:19 I can keep yapping, but my actions don't

1:09:23 follow. So the take for the leaders, to me

1:09:27 is you cannot rely on these

1:09:32 platitudes and mission statements that mean absolute

1:09:36 nothing. You have to tell people what it means.

1:09:40 And this is something that I'm really passionate about because I've met

1:09:43 a lot of people who, you know, were.

1:09:47 Are part of these big corporations and you have these

1:09:51 meaningless, you know, do no harm and

1:09:55 like, they're all bullshit, because what does that mean? And

1:09:59 I actually am a big fan of

1:10:02 looking at actions and forcing leaders

1:10:06 to come up with specific actions. You can't just tell me

1:10:11 what you want, what is the wish, but also what does

1:10:15 it look like in reality, right? So if you

1:10:19 say, I listened

1:10:23 to Ben Horowitz speaking about. He actually wrote a book

1:10:26 about this too. But you know that Andersen Horowitz has like

1:10:30 this list of things they

1:10:34 want you to do. Like their mission statement for the

1:10:37 employee. And one of them is you have to respect the founders, right?

1:10:41 And treat them with respect. But what does that mean?

1:10:45 And so he would say, Hurwitz was talking about, okay,

1:10:49 respect means that you're never late to a meeting. And if you're late, I'm going

1:10:53 to fine you like 20 bucks a minute, right? You cannot be

1:10:57 late. And that to me is very

1:11:00 meaningful. Not just what, but like how does that

1:11:04 look like? And so if you're a leader, you can't just say,

1:11:08 follow me because I'm telling the truth. You have to actually

1:11:12 demonstrate that you do. Because all the people around

1:11:15 the main character in the Notes from the Underground, they

1:11:19 sense how awful he is

1:11:22 because he never does what he says. And so that

1:11:26 gap is never bridged. He doesn't bridge it inside

1:11:30 himself and he never bridges it with other people. And that makes

1:11:34 him a laughable, despicable character.

1:11:37 Okay, well, he's full of, he's, he's full of

1:11:41 self. He's,

1:11:45 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.

1:12:03 So we have a,

1:12:06 a growing problem,

1:12:10 right? And AI, it's the first time we're, we're,

1:12:14 we're about. Yeah, we're about an hour and 20 minutes into our conversation here. So

1:12:17 now I'm going to mention AI. It's a good spot. So

1:12:21 what AI allows us to do what the LLMs allow us to do

1:12:25 as mid career, like I'm, I would be considered mid career. Mid career

1:12:28 to senior leaders, right? What it allows us

1:12:32 to do is it allows us to

1:12:36 not have to deal with the self righteous 24 year old

1:12:40 who just graduated from maybe Seattle

1:12:44 College, maybe colleges I used to work at, I came out of higher education as

1:12:47 well, right? Who know everything

1:12:51 and are obnoxious and can say it louder and louder and louder,

1:12:55 but actually don't have any life experience at all to back

1:12:59 up anything that they're saying. And normally

1:13:03 as a mid career senior leader, my task from the

1:13:06 organization would be to develop those people to do the hard work of

1:13:10 knocking off all the obnoxious nonsense,

1:13:15 utilizing the tools of social shaming and embarrassment in their

1:13:18 appropriate forms to basically mold this person

1:13:22 into someone who is quite

1:13:25 frankly able to be managed by other people.

1:13:30 Um, that's the job. That's one of the main jobs of middle management and has

1:13:33 been the main job of middle management, I would assert, for the last 50 years

1:13:36 in American culture. The LLMs

1:13:39 eliminate all of that because for a thousand dollars a month

1:13:43 I can get an LLM stack that isn't obnoxious.

1:13:47 I don't need to knock anything off of it. I just have to write better

1:13:50 prompts. That's all I have to do. I just have to write better prompts.

1:13:54 So on the one hand, we have the first generation of people

1:13:58 graduating college this year who

1:14:01 fully went through college with ChatGPT,

1:14:06 graduated by the way, which gives them confidence

1:14:09 to say things that they don't have any experience about.

1:14:14 Layered on top of the fact that every obnoxious thought that has come out of

1:14:17 their head since kindergarten has been supported

1:14:21 by peers, parents, educational system

1:14:25 all the way up the ladder. And by the way, we're in the second generation

1:14:28 of this now. This is no longer a passing millennial thing.

1:14:32 The zoomers were all raised in this way. And we're busy working on the third

1:14:35 generation right now. Kids. I have a nine year old, so kids who are like

1:14:39 his age, right, we're working on third generation of that. I'm watching it. I watch

1:14:42 it happen at soccer practice, like I coach my kids soccer team. I see it

1:14:46 how, I see how the kids show up. So it's, there's more of it coming

1:14:50 in, there's more on the pipe, let's just put it that way. So

1:14:54 we have that dynamic, right? And mid career and

1:14:58 senior professionals are correctly looking at the what's

1:15:02 coming down the pipe and going, I don't have to deal with it for a

1:15:03 thousand dollars a month. I don't have to deal with it. It's cheaper to spend

1:15:06 the thousand dollars a month now. We'll be okay as mid career

1:15:10 and senior professionals for a while.

1:15:15 But here's my point. The self righteous

1:15:18 obnoxious 24 year old in Notes for Underground, the

1:15:22 underground man who now has access to a cell phone and

1:15:26 LLMs in our time isn't going

1:15:29 to become better in 25 years. They're just

1:15:33 going to become more of what they already are and they're going to become more

1:15:36 of what they already are without having been developed or

1:15:39 caught by the mid career and senior professionals. So

1:15:43 my assertion is, and I'm working on this idea and tell you can tell you

1:15:46 what you think of this. The mid career and senior professionals like the folks that

1:15:50 you coach, that you work with. I think the hardest job they have right now

1:15:53 is not developing the juniors. That's actually not the

1:15:56 hardest job. The hardest job is resisting the temptation not

1:16:01 to develop the juniors because it's

1:16:04 just easier to not do is it's just easier.

1:16:08 And when you don't have to put up with any nonsense. Why would I, I

1:16:12 don't want, I don't need to be told that like my language

1:16:15 isn't culturally appropriate. Shut up.

1:16:19 You're 24. What some tick tock video

1:16:23 shows you that? I don't even go to that neighborhood. I don't know anybody. I

1:16:26 don't know her. I don't live over there and I don't have to, by the

1:16:29 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

1:16:38 just a guy in Yellowstone. Like you do have to know. It's part of your

1:16:42 cultural legacy. You do have to know what that means. So when you make

1:16:45 the, when I'm sitting in a marketing meeting and I make the reference

1:16:49 of we will build it and they will come and somebody goes,

1:16:53 you have to know what that means. And if you don't know what that means,

1:16:56 if you're like confused and I tell you, go watch a movie, you can't get

1:17:00 offended. You don't have room to get offended because I could replace you with an

1:17:03 LLM tomorrow. Go hang out with your mom or

1:17:06 whatever who came in on the interview with you when we still hired you. Like

1:17:09 go away, go, go away. Just get out, get out.

1:17:13 It's still free association. I'm still not required to hire you. The state

1:17:17 isn't like holding a gun to my head saying I must hire this 24 year

1:17:20 old who has this particular worldview. It's still free association for

1:17:24 the time being. So get out, go find another job, go work at

1:17:28 7:11 or something. I don't know. This is the

1:17:32 challenge for mid career professionals who I'm speaking for. And I don't,

1:17:36 I don't know if you're seeing this but I'm working on a, working on a

1:17:38 thesis and eventually I'll have a longer substack article about this because I'm working through

1:17:41 thoughts in my head. Am I seeing this correctly? I guess that's the question. Am

1:17:44 I seeing this moat correctly, this growing delta or

1:17:48 is this something that I've overblown. And it'll all go away tomorrow. Because this is

1:17:51 just cultural development. No, I think it

1:17:55 tracks. And the jobs that are disappearing

1:17:59 first are the entry level

1:18:02 positions. And that's because the

1:18:05 LLMs work, you know, 247 and they are

1:18:10 infinitely cheaper than the people.

1:18:15 I think that a huge part of like my students

1:18:19 are coming through. Generally they would

1:18:23 have an associate degree from like a technical or

1:18:26 community college and then they would come back for their bachelor's, which is the

1:18:30 management program I teach. But they usually have

1:18:34 a couple years of experience, then they

1:18:38 get their bachelor's and they are

1:18:41 amazingly humble, which is a rare

1:18:45 quality in

1:18:48 their peers or in that generation. And

1:18:52 so they don't struggle as much. But I, I

1:18:56 do see this as a problem. And it's interesting. You're talking about

1:18:59 almost like, you know, we are, we're almost giving

1:19:03 up on the

1:19:06 responsibility to mold the new generation

1:19:10 because you run a 3

1:19:14 seconds cost benefit analysis and

1:19:18 you go, screw that. Nope. Right. Like again,

1:19:22 why? And the answer is because these people will, you

1:19:25 know, hopefully still work when, and pay your, your

1:19:30 retirement, but maybe not. And

1:19:33 you're going to threaten me with Social Security? Don't threaten me with, don't threaten me,

1:19:36 Will not. I don't, I

1:19:40 don't need to threaten anybody. Social Security is disappearing in about seven

1:19:44 minutes. Right? Yeah. So like, what are you really, what are we threatening with?

1:19:48 But, but I think it's a. I, I do

1:19:52 really like the point that you made about

1:19:56 agency and how it is the responsibility

1:20:00 of the others to, you know,

1:20:04 like, this man clearly has nobody. Right. And,

1:20:08 and by his own choice. But the question

1:20:12 is, if you're the leader and you have a bunch of

1:20:15 younger people on your staff, are you

1:20:19 taking the time to mentor and build

1:20:23 that agency and do you have good system

1:20:27 for that to happen? And, and I think that

1:20:31 in a way it is a two way street that everybody keeps

1:20:35 forgetting, which is they need to want

1:20:38 to get coached. And when that is

1:20:42 lacking, you're like, right, I'm sorry,

1:20:46 why again, why would I put myself in this?

1:20:49 And, and so it goes back to

1:20:54 looking for people not based on their skill set, but

1:20:57 based on their character. And

1:21:01 the willingness to be coached

1:21:05 is extremely important.

1:21:08 And you want people who not only will listen, but

1:21:12 also then apply. Yeah, yeah,

1:21:16 yeah. Looking for people based on the, the, the

1:21:21 way. There's a way to frame this. You

1:21:24 know, Martin Luther King Jr. Said content of their character, not the color of their

1:21:28 skin. Right, okay, well, the, the content of their character,

1:21:32 not the, the the, not the nature of their

1:21:35 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.

1:21:45 Okay. How it's

1:21:48 hard. And I get it. I was 24, you were 24. I get

1:21:52 it. You're out there, you're unproven. You want to make your mark in the world.

1:21:55 You want to be taken seriously. You,

1:21:59 you, you do think you're special and you do

1:22:03 think that you're unique and you do think that everything that has ever happened to

1:22:06 you is the first time that it's ever happened to any human being in the

1:22:09 history of the world. And by the way, I say this again just

1:22:13 to be fully transparent with you. You know, I've mentioned this on the show before.

1:22:17 I got four kids, you know, they're in age range from like 30 all the

1:22:20 way down to nine. I have a 21 year old and a 16 year old.

1:22:23 They're girls. So I'm dealing with this like I'm in the developmental loop of some

1:22:27 of this directly out of my own house, right. And so,

1:22:30 and I'm seeing it show up in their friends, right, that they, that they bring

1:22:34 to the house or, or when we go places and we interact with people. And

1:22:37 I, I see it, right? So I'm not talking about this in just sort of

1:22:41 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

1:22:49 African American community. That's the term. I get the frustration right.

1:22:55 To the 24 year olds, how do they put the self righteousness on

1:22:59 the back burner? How does that, how do you put the self righteousness and,

1:23:03 and the, the. I have all the knowledge, but I don't

1:23:07 have the wisdom thing. How do you put all that on the back, back burner

1:23:10 in order to come humbly and ask

1:23:14 for coaching or ask for mentoring? How does that happen?

1:23:18 And ambitious people, by the way, will always do this. So I do think

1:23:21 there will be and I think, I think the, the strike,

1:23:25 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

1:23:35 and they will pursue ruthlessly what they need to

1:23:39 pursue and the rewards will start to accrue to them. And

1:23:42 they've been pursuing it ruthlessly since they were 13. And good luck to you catching

1:23:46 them. They're building them out. Then you'll have all the people at the

1:23:49 bottom who are the man underground, the underground man

1:23:54 they, they're going to tweet,

1:23:57 they're going to go onto Blue sky, they're going to have a substack,

1:24:01 scrape together a couple of subscriptions and like I said, go work at 7:11. They're

1:24:05 angry. They're never gonna, they're gonna wind up a 40 year old civil servant with

1:24:08 a bad liver. That's just where they're gonna wind up at. Okay, but

1:24:12 then you have the vast majority of people in the middle who don't understand what

1:24:15 the question is. So for

1:24:19 the vast majority of people in the middle, what can they do?

1:24:22 The vast majority of 24 year olds in the middle who know they have to

1:24:26 break through but don't know how because senior leaders look like

1:24:30 they're over there and it's not. There's no

1:24:34 mediator there. You got to go do it. But you also have to

1:24:37 pay your rent and figure out how to live and maybe

1:24:41 have a relationship and navigate modern dating and have all these

1:24:45 things you have desperately going on inside of yourself that no one understands.

1:24:49 And you of course have 50,000 people following you on Instagram reels every

1:24:53 time you post something because you've been posting on Instagram since you were like six.

1:24:58 What do we say to those people? Because they are living in it. They're living

1:25:01 in an environment where every single thought, to your point earlier in this episode,

1:25:05 every single thought is public. Every single brain fart. I loved how you put that.

1:25:08 Can just come out. I'm a personal

1:25:11 believer that maybe everyone doesn't. So thought you die in your own head.

1:25:15 That's why I have this podcast and you know, I think about it a lot

1:25:19 and then I spout things out. But what do we do with that 24 year

1:25:22 old who has come up in that environment, who's in the middle, who's not

1:25:26 ambitious, but also not, not the underground

1:25:29 man. What does that person do?

1:25:33 So if I had a good answer, I wouldn't

1:25:37 be sitting here. I would probably enjoy bajillions of dollars

1:25:41 somewhere in the French Alps.

1:25:44 But

1:25:48 I actually have started writing a book for teenagers

1:25:52 especially about like specifically about these topics.

1:25:56 So I think that if I may, I would bring it

1:26:00 back to one of the core topics we touched upon already, which

1:26:03 is self awareness and

1:26:07 integrity. So you want to be true

1:26:11 to yourself and the outside world.

1:26:14 And the part about being

1:26:18 true to yourself is really hard for a 24 year old. If you were

1:26:22 told that you are fantastic, special and the

1:26:25 best since you were a toddler,

1:26:29 which you know is and experienced, many

1:26:33 have, right? Like you're great. You're great. We,

1:26:37 you know, you don't have to even work that hard to get decent

1:26:40 grades. You don't have to like. It is true. I see

1:26:44 the lowering of standards in many

1:26:48 areas, right? Like you don't do the chores that people did 50,

1:26:52 30, 20, 10 years ago. There's a lot that is

1:26:56 happening, right? Even the activities are

1:26:59 less frequent because you're spending a lot of time

1:27:03 on the electronics, blah, blah, blah. So I think

1:27:07 that the number one thing you need is

1:27:11 humility, right? This, this sort of like, well,

1:27:15 maybe I'm not as great as I thought I am and, or

1:27:18 I am great for who I am, but I want to be better. Right?

1:27:22 Like you don't compare yourself with anybody but yourself ten

1:27:26 years from now. So I think

1:27:30 there, I took a note and I think there's

1:27:34 two sources of wisdom for you.

1:27:39 And not just wisdom, but also action. The again, self

1:27:43 awareness without mastery means nothing. So you need

1:27:47 that the action piece.

1:27:50 And I think books are, again, I would send people

1:27:54 back to books because there's so many

1:27:58 great lessons. And again, like you think you're the first person going

1:28:01 through this. Guess what? There's about, you know, 5 billion who

1:28:05 had that very same experience. So I think

1:28:09 going back to the classics and making yourself

1:28:12 ready is great starting

1:28:16 point. And then because I think that it also reminds you again of

1:28:19 the struggles and just physical struggles that people

1:28:23 had to live through. You know, at 24, you had usually six

1:28:27 kids already. So like, that's

1:28:31 a different. That really gives you gratitude

1:28:35 and self awareness. So I would start there.

1:28:39 That should give you some again, knowledge and self awareness. But then

1:28:43 the second piece is you don't know what you don't know.

1:28:47 And there are others who can

1:28:50 lead you to more of a self discovery. And

1:28:54 the simplest trick is if

1:28:58 you want to do better, you know, ask your friends, hey,

1:29:02 like honest talk. What is it? Like, what do I do

1:29:06 great and where I could improve? Right. And if it's somebody

1:29:10 with whom you have a close enough relationship and then,

1:29:13 then, okay, let's start there. You can, you can kind of start improving.

1:29:17 And the second piece would be if

1:29:21 you're surrounded with people like you, then they might not always give

1:29:25 you their like, valuable

1:29:28 feedback because they are in the same boat. Yeah,

1:29:32 but going to mentors and they

1:29:35 don't have to be mentors, you know, it can be like,

1:29:39 I can talk to you as your professor and say,

1:29:43 great in class, writing is sloppy. I

1:29:47 would probably choose different words. But then, you know, you're Always

1:29:51 late with your assignments. That cannot happen

1:29:54 in real life. Like we, you know, there are certain

1:29:58 expectations, and if you have three times a year,

1:30:02 you know, grandma died, emergency, I don't trust your words.

1:30:07 Like, so I think you're right

1:30:10 that knowledge and wisdom are completely different and you

1:30:14 can grow into wisdom later. But I still think

1:30:18 reading is. Is really, really valuable.

1:30:22 Checking in with other people and sort of

1:30:27 being open to the feedback. And the reason why I

1:30:31 suggest Friends first is because they will always

1:30:35 phrase it the kindest way. They will always try to make

1:30:38 it as palatable as possible, even though they're delivering something

1:30:42 that it's not that wonderful. And so if you

1:30:46 start learning that feedback

1:30:50 is not about you, it's about your actions or it's

1:30:53 not a. It's not a reflection of your character

1:30:57 most of the time, but it's about your abilities that you

1:31:01 can improve, then I think that eases

1:31:05 you into this state where you are able to take feedback. And when

1:31:09 somebody who's your senior leader will say, hey,

1:31:12 this was not great, but I like the direction, do it differently.

1:31:16 You're like, okay, great. It's not a. I'm not gonna focus on the

1:31:20 90% that was. That was. You know, I will not

1:31:23 focus on the 10% that was bad. I'm gonna focus on the 90% that is

1:31:27 actually great, which is I still have a job and I have a second op.

1:31:30 You know, second chance. Yep. Yep. All right, I'm gonna pause

1:31:34 here because I gotta go to the restroom. Oh, yeah. I'm gonna get some.

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

1:31:44 Yeah. Truth is meaningless without courage. I

1:31:48 love how you've talked about that self awareness piece

1:31:51 without mastery being hell. I love that.

1:31:56 I also think you're onto something here, because the underground man at

1:32:00 24 has no evidence of a.

1:32:04 There's no evidence of a social structure around him of any kind.

1:32:07 And the friends that he does have going back to just the party for just

1:32:11 a second, not only do they dislike him

1:32:15 immensely, they. They

1:32:18 are shocked that he's even still around, right?

1:32:22 As if they expected him to fade into the. Fade into the. The verge. Like

1:32:25 Homer in that. In that great. That great meme.

1:32:29 And maybe he did right when he went into the civil. A little surface, right?

1:32:32 Just sort of. Just sort of recedes. Just recedes. Seeds into

1:32:36 the distance. The question. One of the questions I wanted to ask very

1:32:40 briefly about that section in the book in the original

1:32:44 Russian, what are we missing there as an American reader? Like, are there a

1:32:47 loot? Is it. Is It a one for one translation. Are we getting everything or

1:32:51 are there things that we're missing inside of that, that, that sequence? Because

1:32:54 there's some class themes in there that, as I said

1:32:58 previously, don't really

1:33:02 resonate with me because I, I don't like what.

1:33:06 Well, so he has this whole thing about the money, right?

1:33:10 Like he's ripping. He's ripping off his, his, his. He's not paying his, his.

1:33:14 His butler, basically. Polo is his name. Yeah. Of

1:33:18 all I know. So random. He's

1:33:22 like, okay, well that's fine. He's not paying

1:33:26 him his wages and he's doing this and doing that. And I thought,

1:33:30 you know, I would just go write the man in iou.

1:33:34 Like, what's the problem here? Now I'm, again, I'm looking at this

1:33:37 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,

1:33:45 right? Like, this is, this is just sort of the reality of, of. Of life.

1:33:49 I don't know that that was the reality of life that Dostoyevsky was seeing. Clearly

1:33:53 it wasn't. But are there things that I'm

1:33:56 missing in the original Russian that are illusions or

1:34:00 that you would miss if you were reading a translation of it and it's not

1:34:03 in the original Russian? I'm always curious about that with authors that write in different

1:34:06 languages, because I know there's things we're missing when it goes into English, but I

1:34:10 don't know what they are. So a, you are

1:34:14 under the false assumption that I have read this in Russian, which

1:34:18 I have not. I can read

1:34:21 Cyrillics, however, that is now,

1:34:26 like, you know, I see a tombstone and I am able to read the name

1:34:30 and that's about it. So not enough for

1:34:33 Dostoevsky. Okay, I will say,

1:34:38 and this would be for another podcast, but I would

1:34:41 love to talk about translations and how

1:34:46 immensely important they are and how. I think that the

1:34:49 reason why so many books that were

1:34:53 not English can still be

1:34:58 relevant is in a large part thanks to

1:35:02 translations that kind of modernize the,

1:35:06 the, the words.

1:35:11 And so the meaning remains, but the words might be different.

1:35:16 And I think that one of the reasons why today's people, the

1:35:19 students struggle with, like, Shakespeare is because it's

1:35:23 so hard. Like, thy. What? Like, I don't.

1:35:28 But like, I grew up reading Shakespeare in translations and

1:35:32 it made it way more modern and way more relatable.

1:35:35 And, And I think there's a huge

1:35:40 power in translations. So that's

1:35:44 one point. Second point. So

1:35:47 money. I have noticed for

1:35:50 Dostoevsky is a huge topic.

1:35:55 And in. Yes, because he was

1:35:59 constantly in debt because, you know, like, this was a.

1:36:03 A very real personal situation

1:36:07 for him. But also what you're

1:36:11 kind of picking up on is

1:36:15 the relationship between money

1:36:19 and personal

1:36:22 pride. And this.

1:36:29 How shall I describe this? Honor.

1:36:32 The sense of honor. And so that

1:36:36 like in Brothers Karamazov, one of the. The brothers

1:36:40 is like, he borrows money and then he has

1:36:44 this idea that he. He borrows money, he

1:36:47 spends half of it on his,

1:36:51 like, you know, women and booze and blah, blah, blah. But in

1:36:55 his mind there's this, like, if I don't spend it all,

1:36:59 I can still return it honorably, right? Like,

1:37:04 I can spend some of it, but if I don't spend it all,

1:37:08 then I still retain some shred

1:37:12 of honor. And. And it

1:37:15 is the, in the

1:37:19 society, in the Russian society that he's

1:37:22 described, Dostoevsky is describing. Another

1:37:25 angle about money is also that you were

1:37:29 often wined and dined based

1:37:33 on your pedigree.

1:37:38 And so even if you didn't have

1:37:42 the money to pay because you were

1:37:45 nobility, people would

1:37:49 invite you and pay you because you

1:37:53 are the nobility. So there's this idea that

1:37:56 when he goes out with his friends or the schoolmates,

1:38:00 the people he despises and who hates him, but, you know, that's the

1:38:04 society or the set of people. In

1:38:08 the second part, there's this Zverkov

1:38:11 character, somebody who is like a really accomplished

1:38:15 guy, and they all talk about paying

1:38:18 for his dinner, paying for him, even though he's the most

1:38:22 accomplished. So there's this. There's this aspect of

1:38:26 borderline servility

1:38:31 and respect for money and, and

1:38:34 your pedigree, your social status,

1:38:38 that goes against logic. Right. And

1:38:42 so I noticed the,

1:38:46 the way I interpret the interaction

1:38:49 between the main character and his servant

1:38:54 is he could just say, hey, I'm. I'm

1:38:57 withholding the money. And essentially, you're my servant. You're my

1:39:01 serf. I can do whatever I want, but he

1:39:04 can't do that. And he is ashamed in front of the

1:39:08 servant because it.

1:39:12 He's aware that that's bad. It's

1:39:15 dishonorable. Right? Like, he needs to get money

1:39:18 from somebody who's lower status.

1:39:22 And that's so uncomfortable because it's so dishonorable.

1:39:28 So, like a door in

1:39:32 the floor in my head just opened up with

1:39:35 what you just said there.

1:39:40 I would never have tied again. I'm an American. I

1:39:44 don't. Wow. Yeah, Well, I mean, that's. The depth of that's the depth of the

1:39:47 cultural assumption there. So I would never tie

1:39:51 money to honor. So in

1:39:55 America, here's the weird thing about America. And

1:39:58 Marxists often comment on this.

1:40:02 At least they did in the 20th century, not so much now because they're younger

1:40:06 and they don't know history. So, so stupid.

1:40:10 It's, it's fine. They're, they're going to learn. They're going

1:40:13 to learn because human nature hasn't changed. But Marxists in the 20th century would

1:40:17 often comment that the reason the first stage towards

1:40:21 Marxism never really worked the United States to their conception

1:40:24 of work is that everyone in America wanted to be middle

1:40:28 class and they had no way to overcome that. They had no solution for

1:40:32 that. Well, the reason why everyone in America wants to be middle

1:40:36 class is because we don't tie money to honor. Money is this other thing

1:40:40 over here. And honor. If we even talk about honor,

1:40:43 which we don't because we're not an honor coded society anymore. We haven't been an

1:40:46 honor coded society for 80 years. Honor is over

1:40:50 here somewhere. Honor is about a different thing. And so we

1:40:54 separate those two. And the door that

1:40:57 just like swung open in my brain was one of

1:41:01 the. Was related to something else that we read on the show. So we read

1:41:05 Lenin's basically Lenin's manifesto about how to

1:41:09 organize. How to organize the question of how to organize the

1:41:13 populace or something. I can't remember the title of it. And

1:41:19 Lennon is a fascinating character to me because

1:41:24 he was absolutely a sadistic and

1:41:27 megalomaniacal tyrant who

1:41:31 also had.

1:41:35 Who also hated himself much like the underground, big time, big

1:41:39 time hated himself. And, and

1:41:42 somehow through. Not somehow through the exegesis of

1:41:46 history operating outside of him. Wound

1:41:50 up running the whole thing and then appointing somebody to replace him.

1:41:53 Well, not appointing, sorry, selecting someone to replace

1:41:57 him who. And

1:42:01 you wouldn't think it would be worth. You could replace somebody worse with Lenin,

1:42:05 but he managed to do it. He managed to replace some. Somebody

1:42:08 who's worse than him. And so one of the things that's always

1:42:12 been fascinating to me is how he, how he

1:42:15 successfully took over an entire culture. And

1:42:19 the money and honor piece ties that. That's why Marxism worked

1:42:24 as an overarching way of organizing, not as an economic theory, but as

1:42:28 an overarching way of organizing society in

1:42:32 Soviet Russia for 80 years because of that conception of honor

1:42:36 tied in. Or one of the factors was that conception of honor

1:42:39 tied into money and then how that then striates

1:42:43 through class. Whereas in America it

1:42:47 strikes totally differently and it's Not a one to

1:42:50 one comparison. Even nowadays when Alexandria

1:42:54 Ocasio Cortez, the representative from Brooklyn, runs around in

1:42:58 a dress at the Met Gala that says Eat the Rich on it

1:43:02 or Tax the Rich or whatever the hell that dress said, like

1:43:06 everybody in America knows,

1:43:12 every American knows she's playing a game. And ultimately one day

1:43:15 she'll be, the next day she'll be running down the street in sweats

1:43:19 and a T shirt, jogging like

1:43:22 anybody other, like any other 30 year old woman in, you know, in

1:43:26 Washington D.C. and she will be indistinguishable from Bill Gates, who will

1:43:30 show up at a grandma, you know, or a grandpa sweater, having a hot

1:43:34 dog at a stand. Like

1:43:37 everybody wants to be middle class here.

1:43:41 Which I get it, if you're looking at that from

1:43:45 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

1:43:53 money to honor. So that was a huge insight for me. So like I said,

1:43:56 you swung open the door in my head. I got to think some word through

1:43:59 that idea, but I never heard it express, expressed that way.

1:44:03 And so there's two things and, and just

1:44:06 quick point one is that

1:44:10 it's not that the money is tied to

1:44:14 honor, it's that he

1:44:17 sees it as a demonstration of

1:44:22 his own failure, right? So, so the real

1:44:26 he cannot unmask himself as a loser

1:44:30 in front of his servant.

1:44:35 And that is like he would rather

1:44:39 avoid that because it's embarrassing. But I will say

1:44:43 the second point is money absolutely has been

1:44:47 tied to. Not in Russia,

1:44:50 not to honor per se, but definitely

1:44:54 goodness of some sort. And

1:44:58 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

1:45:15 from money. And again, there's this almost

1:45:18 servility right about this. But also

1:45:23 the situation in Russia has been so

1:45:26 vastly different from what was going on at the time

1:45:30 in the US and or in Europe, because. So the

1:45:33 serfs, the difference, like the chattel slavery, right? Like

1:45:37 people, slaves are objects, right?

1:45:42 You treat them as objects. They have zero rights, the

1:45:45 serfs. I actually talked about this in a context

1:45:49 of feudalism in Europe.

1:45:53 The people were tied to land. So the feudal

1:45:58 nobility owned land. And the village that sit on that

1:46:02 land, those people were your people, but they still

1:46:06 would have to ask you if they can marry. And

1:46:10 you had to work on that land, on that property for

1:46:14 six days a week or whatever for the master,

1:46:18 but you still had some rights, right? Like you could go and say,

1:46:21 I'M going to Italy to learn how to be a carpenter or whatever.

1:46:26 And maybe they would say yes, and then you would leave

1:46:30 and come back and build the church in your village. But then

1:46:35 in Russia the disparity was so

1:46:38 stark, right. Like the, the, the poverty was

1:46:42 so bad that the

1:46:46 sort of. And, and for life. So you were tied to the land

1:46:50 and you had way less rights. I almost. If there's

1:46:54 a hierarchy, you have the, the slaves at the

1:46:57 very bottom being treated as objects. Then you have the Serbs in

1:47:01 Russia who have some rights,

1:47:05 but any master can overrule them anytime he wants.

1:47:08 And, and he will. And, and you're tied to the

1:47:12 land. And then you have the, again, like the,

1:47:16 the nobility. Yeah, and, and, yeah,

1:47:20 and. Or the people in sort of the Western Eastern Europe, like Austro

1:47:23 Hungarian Empire, where we Also in like 18th century, they're

1:47:27 there where some, some changes to the

1:47:31 system. But yeah, you were, you were essentially born, raised,

1:47:35 tied to the land. That's it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then that whole system of

1:47:38 course fell apart in. Right in the trenches of World War I

1:47:44 and earlier for Russia. Yeah, yeah, but the.

1:47:47 Yeah, I, I can go into that

1:47:50 rabbit hole of the. But, but I, I think that if

1:47:54 your brother is hungry by the Tsar,

1:47:58 but which is what happened to Lenin. His brother was, was

1:48:02 killed for, you know, revolution against the Tsar and, and

1:48:06 it radicalized him and he was poor and, and I

1:48:09 think that the, the idea that again, like it's a,

1:48:13 it's a so enticing you can see today, like

1:48:17 let's dismantle freaking everything. Okay. That's

1:48:20 easy. And how are we going to build? Oh, we're not. Okay. We don't have

1:48:24 the plan. We just have the, like we're fed

1:48:28 up and we're gonna dismantle and we're gonna like everything is bad.

1:48:31 And you're like, is it? Well, and that gets back

1:48:35 to, I mean, the three revolutions, right. That made the modern

1:48:39 world. Right. So you've got the French Revolution, you have the American Revolution, you have

1:48:42 the British Revolution, all based on fundamentally different

1:48:48 conceptions of what reality, quite

1:48:51 frankly should be. And I look at the

1:48:55 Russian Revolution as a, the, the

1:48:59 follow on or the logical conclusion such as it were

1:49:03 from the French Revolution. And

1:49:07 I'm not quite. No, no, I'm not

1:49:10 quite. The

1:49:14 challenge that we try to approach or on this show is.

1:49:18 And with the kind of books that we, that we are covering here, we try

1:49:21 to look at things historically obviously, but then

1:49:25 also bring this down to individuals and try to, you know, there's a hierarchy. Right.

1:49:28 You got to scale it up the hierarchy and scale it down. Right. And to

1:49:32 your point, deconstructing everything doesn't work. Matter of fact, I, I would

1:49:36 assert that we're at the end of a 25 year long

1:49:40 American deconstruction project. We actually rudely

1:49:43 ended it. I think January 6th was probably the end of the

1:49:47 deconstruction project. And now we're in

1:49:51 a weird middle ground between the end of

1:49:54 deconstruction and the beginning of something else.

1:49:58 And there are people, not just politicians, but also cultural

1:50:01 folks, social leaders, economic folks who are looking

1:50:05 around going, we're done with that. We're done with the

1:50:08 deconstruction. Because to your point, you could deconstruct down to nothing and then what

1:50:12 do you have? You just have raw power. And even raw

1:50:16 power can be deconstructed. So you, so you wind up with nothing

1:50:19 basically. And nothing is not a forward.

1:50:23 Is that fuel in the momentum? There's not fuel for forward momentum. Right.

1:50:27 And so now we have to begin the building, we have to begin the laying

1:50:31 of the rails for the building. So no more deconstruction. We're done with that.

1:50:34 That's it. It's over. Maybe 80 years from now you could

1:50:38 deconstruct again. But we got to rebuild institutions, we've got to rebuild

1:50:42 systems, we have to rebuild structures. And

1:50:45 I, I, as a partisan for America, I think this is

1:50:49 the best place in the world to do that. Agree. But,

1:50:53 but other places, you know, I think they're gonna have to go through the same

1:50:56 thing. You're gonna have to do that because deconstruction and

1:50:59 revolution doesn't work. It doesn't lead to building.

1:51:04 So if I may, tied back to the

1:51:08 man in the underground. Yes. To me

1:51:12 the, the tearing down is easy

1:51:17 and the building is hard. Yeah. And so

1:51:20 we, what we have on display is somebody who's like

1:51:25 tearing down and revealing. He's, he's showing

1:51:28 up like, he's showing us how

1:51:32 rotten he is. Right. Like he has this infinite

1:51:35 self awareness. But we see

1:51:39 16 years later when he's 40, that he

1:51:42 hasn't done jack shit about where he is.

1:51:47 And, and, and we see the

1:51:50 complete utter despair that he,

1:51:54 that he is experiencing when he's older.

1:51:58 And so I think the, the sort of,

1:52:02 the parallel to today is

1:52:06 now we know, okay, you told us how bad America is and you

1:52:09 told us how this is all, you know, failing

1:52:13 and how these institutions don't work and how these

1:52:17 principles don't work. But if you're Going to sit in this

1:52:21 16 years later, you're going to be rotten and

1:52:25 miserable and we're not going to move an inch and

1:52:29 that's not where we want to be. Right. So there needs to be this

1:52:32 agency, this bias for action.

1:52:36 And I think also the, and he doesn't

1:52:40 talk about it in the book, but I think that eventually there needs be to,

1:52:43 to be the hunger for transcendence that, you know,

1:52:47 something that goes beyond what you're doing. And in

1:52:51 reality, in 2026, I was just looking at some numbers and

1:52:54 like the, the turn to Christianity among young

1:52:58 people and particularly Catholicism,

1:53:02 like the old school Christianity is on the

1:53:05 rise. So I think that people do sense

1:53:09 that you need more than

1:53:13 just the rumination and self

1:53:16 analysis and ad nauseam, you know, like

1:53:20 revelations about our inner, like the navel

1:53:24 gazing that leads nowhere. Yeah, yeah, no,

1:53:28 I agree and I'm seeing those numbers too on the turn to

1:53:31 Catholicism, orthodox Christianity. And

1:53:35 you know, my particular group of Christians, the American evangelicals, have no

1:53:39 answer for this and they need to develop one. And there are

1:53:43 some that are beginning to sort of light bulb is kind of gone

1:53:46 off and, and I do believe

1:53:50 that fundamentally. I was actually have a conversation with somebody who's

1:53:54 a good friend of mine this weekend about this, but I do believe that fundamentally,

1:53:57 you know, in America anyway, those three, those three

1:54:01 or four, four strands. And American Catholics, I hate to tell

1:54:05 you, you're more Protestant than your European brothers. Just point

1:54:09 that out. But, but agreed, but just.

1:54:13 Anyway, we're, we're gonna have to figure out at a

1:54:17 theological level over the next 25 years what

1:54:20 does a uniquely American

1:54:24 theology with those, those strains influencing it

1:54:27 look like and what does it look like when it

1:54:31 builds both in opposition to and

1:54:35 in some cases hand in hand with a more secular,

1:54:40 materialist, reductionist culture, which by the way is just going to keep right on going

1:54:43 there. It's not like the secular materialists are going to, are going to stop.

1:54:48 Okay, we got around the corner, we gotta, we gotta close this out. This has

1:54:52 been a great conversation, Hana. I've had a tremendous,

1:54:56 this has been tremendous. You opened up the. Like I said, you opened the door

1:54:58 on the floor in my head for a bunch of different things. I want to

1:55:01 invite you on, to have you back. We got to continue this conversation, keep this

1:55:04 rolling. I love the, the,

1:55:08 the quote from Thomas Sowell, the great Thomas Sowell, the, the

1:55:11 Economist. He says it's amazing how much panic one honest

1:55:15 man can spread among a multitude of hypocrites.

1:55:19 We are in a time where Foreign

1:55:23 that's spreading. I believe we're fundamentally in a time where people are

1:55:27 kind of like in the Matrix, kind of like waking up and we are

1:55:31 going into Plato's cave. We are pulling out folks like the underground man. And we're

1:55:35 bringing them up into the light and they're fighting, they're kicking and screaming all the

1:55:38 way, but we're bringing them up and we're saying, hey, this is the light. Now

1:55:42 there are some people you can't pull out of there. They want to stay in

1:55:45 there. They want to stay in the cave of the Internet ordering doordash and

1:55:50 being self righteous and self aware all at the same time in equal measure.

1:55:54 But to be honest about it and to engage

1:55:58 effectively with those folks, books like Notes from the Underground give us a map

1:56:02 of where we can go and how we can maybe not a map of how

1:56:06 what we where we can go gives us a map of the territory that we

1:56:09 are facing in a way that's manageable.

1:56:12 And a book is still the most subversive way to get

1:56:16 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

1:56:25 on the path? I think we've talked a lot about this today in one form

1:56:28 or another, but you get the last word as usual for guests on this show.

1:56:33 How can leaders stay on the path with.

1:56:37 With this book? If they're going to pick this up for the first time, how

1:56:40 do they stay on the path? Reading this. Reading this very small but very

1:56:44 difficult book. Well, thank

1:56:47 you so much for having me. I will. This was such a blast

1:56:51 and I'd love to come back to answer your

1:56:55 question. How can leaders stay on the path

1:56:58 and what lessons they can take from this book

1:57:02 I'd say kind of to recap.

1:57:06 1. The Self

1:57:09 Awareness is nothing without

1:57:13 mastery. So I think

1:57:17 thinking about what's inside is great and

1:57:20 important, but it cannot stop there.

1:57:24 The second lesson I think is really

1:57:28 about integrity. Dostoevsky shows

1:57:32 somebody who doesn't have any integrity. He

1:57:35 lies to himself and he lies to everybody else.

1:57:40 And the lesson here is if you keep

1:57:43 doing this, you will end up alienated,

1:57:48 alone and miserable

1:57:51 later on. So it's not a mirror

1:57:56 of what could be

1:57:59 as a good example, but it's really a terrible example example

1:58:03 of what may happen. And I think

1:58:08 the last thing I would say is if I am

1:58:12 a leader today, the lesson I'm taking from the

1:58:15 Notes from the Underground is definitely that

1:58:19 you have to walk the talk and you cannot

1:58:23 bring people with you by Just talking.

1:58:27 You have to demonstrate your integrity in daily life,

1:58:31 in your daily actions, in the

1:58:36 everyday operation of

1:58:39 your small company, big company enterprise, what have you.

1:58:44 Either we come, you know, either we show up on

1:58:48 time or we don't. And if we tolerate this, then

1:58:52 okay, that's the company you have. If you

1:58:57 work hard and you want other people to work hard, then you better

1:59:00 work harder than them because you can

1:59:04 ask for things you're not demonstrating. And I think that there is

1:59:08 and has been a gap between what the

1:59:12 management is telling us and what it feels like

1:59:16 on the ground. And I think that there is

1:59:21 now the reckoning of sort

1:59:24 of closing the gap and the companies. And it doesn't

1:59:28 have to be great or enviable. And I think above

1:59:32 all, you can stay pretty unique, right? Like you

1:59:36 can be a company that does things certain way that

1:59:39 nobody else does. Nobody else is organized

1:59:43 the way you are. But if you have a

1:59:46 vision and you walk that talk and it is, you

1:59:50 will attract people who, who will fit that, that

1:59:53 culture and, and you can make it happen.

1:59:57 I think that the, the idea that everything needs to be

2:00:00 ubiquitous, you know, like we all have to,

2:00:04 and, and that is one of those, like it forces you to

2:00:07 be who you're not. And so this, this courage

2:00:12 is a verb and truth is a verb

2:00:15 because you need to have the courage to sustain it

2:00:20 and be that sort of a sovereign

2:00:23 individual is really critical.

2:00:27 Awesome. Thank you Hana for coming

2:00:31 on the podcast. We will have links to

2:00:34 Hana's substack and her LinkedIn profile. We'll

2:00:38 also have links to a couple of the books that she mentioned and articles, as

2:00:42 you mentioned in the show notes below the

2:00:45 audio player where you are listening to this show

2:00:49 right now. Once again, I would like to thank Hannah for coming

2:00:53 on the podcast. And with that. Well, no, you're welcome

2:00:57 with that. Well, we're out.