Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion w/ Nicky Billou & Jesan Sorrells

0:07 Hello, my name is Jesan Sorrells, and this

0:11 is the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books podcast,

0:14 episode number 191.

0:19 Opening with a brief selection from our

0:23 book today, and I quote,

0:28 this book is called Slouching Towards Bethlehem because for several years

0:32 now certain lines from the Yeats poem, which appear two pages back, have reverberated

0:35 in my inner ear as if they were surgically implanted there.

0:40 The widening gyre, the falcon which does not hear, the falconer, the gaze blank

0:43 and pitiless as the sun. Those have been my points of reference, the only

0:47 images against which much of what I was seeing and hearing and

0:51 thinking seemed to make any pattern.

0:54 Slouching Towards Bethlehem is also the title of one piece in the book, and that

0:57 piece, which derived from some time spent in the Haight Ashbury district of San

1:01 Francisco, was for me both the most imperative of all these

1:04 pieces to write and the only one that made me despondent after it

1:08 was printed. It was the first time I had dealt

1:12 directly and flatly with the evidence of atomization,

1:16 the proof that things fall apart. I went to San

1:20 Francisco because I had not been able to work in some months and had been

1:23 paralyzed by the conviction that writing was an irrelevant act, that

1:27 the world, as I had understood it, no longer

1:30 existed. And we're going to skip down a little

1:34 bit and I'm going to pick up this one. I suppose almost everyone who writes

1:37 is afflicted some of the time by the suspicion that nobody out there is listening.

1:41 But it seemed to me then, perhaps because the piece was important to me,

1:45 that I had never gotten a feedback so universally beside the

1:49 point that I'm going to flip down

1:53 a little bit further and I'm going to go to this. I

1:56 was in fact as sick as I have ever been when I was riding slouching

2:00 towards Bethlehem. The pain kept me awake at night. And so

2:04 for 20 and 21 hours a day I drank gin and hot water to blunt

2:08 the pain and took Dexatrin to blunt the gin and wrote the piece of I

2:11 would like to tell you, I would like you to believe that I kept working

2:14 out of some real professionalism to meet the deadline. But

2:18 that would not be entirely true. I did have a deadline, but it was

2:21 also a troubled time, and working did to the trouble what Jen did

2:25 to the pain. What else is there to tell?

2:29 I am bad at interviewing people. I avoid situations in which I have

2:32 to talk to anyone's press agent. This precludes doing pieces on most

2:36 actors, a bonus in itself. I do not like to

2:40 make telephone calls and would not like to count the mornings I have sat on

2:43 some Best Western motel bed somewhere and tried to force myself to put through the

2:46 call to the district to the Assistant district attorney. My

2:50 only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small,

2:54 so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate

2:58 that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best

3:01 interests. And it always does.

3:06 That is one last thing to remember.

3:09 Writers are always selling

3:12 somebody out.

3:21 Here's on my own thoughts on this before I introduce my guest

3:25 today. My special guest today, his first time

3:29 on the show. Betraying a person's

3:33 confidence to gain personal advantage, and yet not being sure why you were doing

3:36 it and what end it serves is where the beginning of the

3:40 erosion of trust starts.

3:44 And once trust in a high trust society bound by traditions, family

3:48 bonds and the surety of community is riven by such erosion, the

3:51 beginning of social chaos is not far behind.

3:56 But a society that is eroding a trust can survive chaos, adapt to it, and

3:59 emerge on the other side with a different sort of trust schema altogether together

4:03 by individuals just refusing to play the game of selling out their principles,

4:06 their values or their relationships. It's a lot of

4:10 psychological, moral and emotional weight for individuals to carry during times of

4:14 chaos, when it seems as though every bond around them is

4:17 fraying, tearing and breaking.

4:22 But it's only the act of buying in, not

4:26 opting out, that works to preserve not what was in the past,

4:29 but the circumstances, fragile though they may be,

4:33 for a different and potentially far better future.

4:36 Otherwise, the Hobbesian war of

4:40 all against all breaks out and then nothing

4:44 worth preserving remains. And it's

4:47 monstrously difficult to cobble together a high trust society again

4:51 out of nothing. Today on

4:55 the show, we are going to take a second crack at this book

4:59 that launched our author into public consciousness as a literary talent

5:02 in the early 1960s, documenting the coming unraveling

5:06 of American culture, an unraveling that eventually would lead to

5:10 the cultural chaos we in 2026 are

5:14 just beginning to exit at the end of our

5:17 fourth turning. Today on the show,

5:21 we are going to pull cautions for leaders around

5:24 communication, around negotiation, around

5:28 tradition, around family, around what's worth preserving, and around how you

5:32 behave during an unraveling. We're going to pull these

5:35 cautions for leaders from our book today. Slouching

5:39 towards Bethlehem by the late great

5:43 Joan Didion

5:47 leaders, there are four patterns in an 80 year historical

5:50 cycle and in the fall of an unraveling

5:54 period, no One can really figure out what

5:58 the heck is going on.

6:03 And joining us on our journey today is my special guest, first time on the

6:07 show, Nikki Ballou.

6:10 Nikki is the host of the Thought Leader Revolution podcast and he works

6:14 with and coaches consultants. He works with coaches consultants

6:17 and, and entrepreneurs to help them scale their

6:21 revenue. He is also the world's expert on

6:24 podcast guesting. He, he actually reached out to me

6:28 via, via Matchmaker FM and which is

6:32 where I sometimes, sometimes get guests from. That's some deep inside baseball for those of

6:35 you who are listening. And he reached out to me and we started

6:39 talking and he was really excited about the concept of the show. So I challenged

6:43 him to, to take a crack at this book which he'd never read before. And

6:46 he went out, he bought the book, he read it, he had some interesting insights

6:50 for me in our pre production call and he has

6:54 agreed to join us today to have a much longer and probably a

6:58 lot deeper conversation here. Moving into Slouching

7:01 Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion. Welcome to the show, Nikki, how are you doing

7:05 today? Hey,

7:09 Sal, my brother, thanks for having me on the show, man. It's truly an honor

7:11 to be here. So tell us a little

7:15 bit about yourself. I always like to do that at the beginning because folks don't,

7:19 don't know you, they don't know what your interests are. So tell us a little

7:22 bit about yourself.

7:29 You know, I have a standard introduction of myself that I give when

7:33 I come on shows and I'm not going to give that today because

7:37 I want to talk about me as a lover of books.

7:42 Okay? Okay.

7:47 So I'm originally

7:51 an immigrant from the Middle East. I'm a Christian from Iran.

7:54 And growing up in Iran, my parents

8:00 enrolled me and my brothers in the

8:04 American Community School in Tehran. So I went and was schooled primarily in

8:07 English. We also had to take Farsi there as well. And I

8:11 had a number of teachers that

8:15 really were fabulous. One was Ms. Sally Flaherty

8:19 who just passed, I think late last year, God

8:22 rest her soul. And she

8:27 introduced me to the idea of

8:31 loving reading books. And

8:35 by the time I was eight or nine years old,

8:39 I was reading every day for fun.

8:45 And I would read stories, I would read novels, and

8:48 I would read history. And

8:53 by the time I was 11, I read

8:57 my first adult level book, which, which

9:01 was the Eagle has Landed

9:05 by Jack Higgins, one of the great

9:09 thriller novels of all time. It was published originally in

9:12 1974. And then I read the Crash of

9:15 79, a whole bunch of other books like that. And I was Just hooked

9:20 and saw my brother.

9:24 I track the books that I read and

9:28 I've been using a website called

9:30 goodreads.com Now I started using

9:34 goodreads.com in 2015, but something

9:38 got messed up in my account and they lost

9:42 nine or nine or ten years of my, of

9:46 my books that I'd been

9:50 tracking. But I can tell you this, that over a

9:54 ten year period I, I read over a thousand

9:57 physical paper books. And for the last seven

10:01 straight years, I've never read under 103

10:05 books. And my best year was last year when I

10:09 read 159 books. I love books, I

10:13 adore books. I think books

10:16 ennoble the soul and I think books

10:21 are just a darn good time. So that is my story

10:25 as a reader. Books are,

10:29 and this is one of the reasons why I do this show. Books are

10:33 everything that you've mentioned. They are also a

10:36 really, really awesome way. They're the best way.

10:40 We've actually found the best technology I think humanity has found

10:44 to smuggle ideas across generations.

10:48 And I like to write that down. That is so well said.

10:52 Smuggle ideas across generations. Okay, I gotta. Either books

10:55 are the best way to smuggle ideas. Dude, that's

10:59 genius, man. Well, when you look at it,

11:03 even books, like, even books that don't appear to have much

11:07 weight to them, right? So we've read all kinds

11:11 of books on this show. We've read everything from the

11:14 Homers, the odyssey translated by T.E. shaw,

11:18 Lawrence of Arabia, he translated his version of the Odyssey. We read that

11:22 on the show all the way to. Oh gosh.

11:25 I mean, we've read Crime and Punishment, right? The first four chapters

11:29 of Crime and Punishment. But we've also read lighter fare, right?

11:33 Like we once read for the kids. We once read a Click Clack

11:36 Moo by Doreen Cronin.

11:40 A cardboard, not a cardboard, but a small book for, for

11:44 kids. I actually brought my son on and, and we talked a little

11:48 bit about Click Clack Moon. This is back when he was probably 6 or 7.

11:51 Because that book is so subversive about leadership and

11:55 about what it actually means to like struggle

11:58 and to build a team. And then what happens when that

12:02 doesn't work? Books are a way to

12:05 smuggle ideas, like I said, across generations, across time.

12:10 So when I pick up Click Clack Moo with my six year old,

12:13 I can also hold on to this physical book, this physical thing in the world

12:18 and then I can hand this off to, you know, my kids

12:21 when they have kids, or I can hand this off to, to My, to my

12:25 grandkids directly. And I can smuggle that idea about leadership directly

12:29 into them. And it's, it's, it's a miracle

12:33 that we even came up with this technology.

12:37 And it's a real shame that

12:41 people aren't reading physical books as much as they were. But I don't think

12:45 the physical book in and of itself will ever fully go away. I think it's

12:48 about to transform. I think it's about to transmogrify

12:52 into, into something else because it's just, it's too

12:55 good a technology to kill it. It

12:59 is. And I also think

13:02 that there's going to be a

13:06 large cohort of the younger generation

13:10 that is going to hit 30, 35 and 40 and

13:14 is going to start discovering the value of paper books.

13:17 Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, I agree with that. Well, and

13:21 we're already starting to see this move in the younger generation,

13:25 the gen zers, the zoomers, such as they are sometimes called.

13:29 And they like old things. They like,

13:33 well, what they perceive as old. Right. Pre Internet things.

13:37 Right. Pre social media, pre digital things. And so

13:41 that's one of the reasons why I do this show, because I can introduce a

13:44 book. I can have a conversation with somebody who's really interesting about that

13:48 book and about the ideas in it. Yes. For leaders,

13:52 obviously, but then for everybody. Right.

13:55 Like, it's amazing when you go on my YouTube channel, the number of comments I

13:59 have just on a couple of books that I did last year are just phenomenal

14:03 for people who actually, you know, when are like, they actually say to me, I'm

14:06 going to go out and buy this physical book. Or I, or I've had this,

14:09 I've had this physical book for years. I've never heard anybody talk about it until,

14:13 until you, you brought it up, you brought it up on the show. So it

14:16 allows us to make connections again across time. That's just, it's

14:20 amazingly subversive. Amazingly

14:24 subversive. Speaking of which,

14:27 Ms. Didion. So we just covered, we just covered

14:33 A Book of Common Prayer. That was our last episode. If you haven't had a

14:35 chance to listen to that, go back and listen to that with Tom Libby. And

14:39 this follows along with us covering

14:43 this month, Eudora Welty and the Optimist's Daughter.

14:47 So go back and listen to that episode as well. These three books

14:51 kind of go together because they are fundamentally about

14:54 communication. They are fundamentally about communication across time.

14:58 And the, the, the, the next essay I'd like to

15:02 pull from to sort of set the next piece of our conversation here. Is

15:06 from John Wayne, A Love Song. I love this essay.

15:10 Me too. And, and I want to just pull a couple of different pieces

15:13 about this and then have a conversation with Nikki, because those of you who

15:17 don't know Nikki, Nikki hosts his own

15:21 podcast. And Nikki is very engaged with, with men

15:24 and with masculine masculinity and masculine encoded communication.

15:28 And there's, there's an element in here that I want to. I want to explore

15:32 with Nikki here in just a moment. So from John

15:35 Wayne, A Love Song. I'm going to quote this from Ms.

15:39 Didion. In the summer of 1943, I was eight, and my

15:43 father and mother and small brother and I were at Peterson Field in Colorado Springs.

15:47 A hot wind blew through that summer blue until it seemed that before

15:51 August broke, all the dust in Kansas would be in Colorado, would have

15:54 drifted over the tar paper barracks in the temporary strip and stopped only when

15:58 it hit Pike's Peak. There was not much to do, a summer like

16:02 that. There was the day they brought in the first B29, an event to

16:06 remember, but scarcely a vacation program. There was an officers club,

16:10 but no swimming pool. All the Officers club had of

16:13 interest was an artificial blue rain behind. Was artificial blue rain behind the bar.

16:18 The rain interested me a good deal, but I could not spend the summer watching

16:21 it. And so we went, my brother and I, to the movies.

16:25 Now that's, that's our. That's our open. And then I'm going to

16:29 move down. As it happened, I.

16:33 No, I don't want to. I don't want to do that one. So they went

16:35 to go. They went to go and see a John Wayne movie. And,

16:39 and she says this, a picture called War of the Wildcats.

16:43 And then she says this a little later on in the essay. In John Wayne's

16:46 world, John Wayne was supposed to give the orders. Let's ride,

16:50 he said, and saddle up. Forward, ho. When a man's got to

16:53 do. When a man's got to do. Hello there,

16:57 he said when he first saw the girl in a construction camp or on a

17:01 train or just standing around on the front porch waiting for somebody to ride up

17:05 through the tall grass. When John Wayne spoke, there was no

17:08 mistaking his intentions. He had a sexual authority so

17:12 strong that even a child could perceive it. And in a

17:16 world we understood early to be characterized by venality and doubt

17:19 and paralyzing ambiguities. He suggested another world,

17:24 one which may or may not have existed ever, but in any case

17:27 existed no more. A place where a man could move free,

17:31 can make his own code and live by it. A world in which if a

17:35 man did what he had to do, he could one day take the girl and

17:38 go riding through the draw and find himself home free. Not in a hospital

17:42 with something going wrong inside, not in a high bed with flowers and drugs and

17:45 the four smiles, but there at the bend in the bright river,

17:49 the cottonwoods shining in the early shimmering in the early

17:53 morning sun. And then I'm gonna go down a little

17:57 bit further. He talks, she talks about how John Wayne was

18:01 born Marian Morrison in Winterset, Iowa, the son of a

18:04 druggist and moved as a child to Lancaster, California,

18:08 and then played football and then became this

18:12 actor, right? She says this

18:17 there a meeting on the old Fox lot with

18:20 John Ford, one of the several directors who were to sense that

18:24 into this perfect mold might be poured the inarticulate longings of

18:28 a nation wondering at just what pass the trail had been lost.

18:33 Damn it, Raul said. Raul Walsh, later, the son of

18:37 a looked like a man.

18:42 Yeah. Masculine coded communication,

18:46 Nikki, that's what Joan Didian is talking about in this essay.

18:49 At the core of it, and the reason why I wanted to talk with

18:53 you about this today is because a rebellion

18:57 began in Didian's time against masculine coded communication.

19:01 And it's a rebellion that has continued on even into our day.

19:07 One of the things that, and I don't want to get too far into your

19:10 other projects, one of the things that I noted

19:13 in the meeting that I attended on Thursday was how

19:17 deeply masculine coded the communication was. That was one of the things that just

19:20 immediately jumped off the page to me, even in how you checked people

19:24 and how you changed what they were doing, the

19:28 difference between second person and first person in terms of

19:32 ownership and accountability and attempting to get people to engage in accountability.

19:36 And I was struck in my observation,

19:39 particularly considering that I was just, just gone through Satchi towards Bethlehem.

19:43 And we're going through a month of books that are written by women.

19:47 Women and men communicate radically different. And

19:51 the coding that's underneath our language

19:55 is so fundamentally different, but we don't

19:59 notice the difference until someone comes along who

20:03 is communicating in totally the opposite direction and sort of jars

20:06 us out of our assumptions, Right? And so

20:13 there's currently in America an attempt to reassert masculine

20:16 coded communication. And I think that that's part of the reason why Donald

20:20 Trump is so popular. I think it's one of the unstated reasons why he's popular.

20:24 He's a return to masculine coded communication. It's

20:27 also the reason why he's genuinely hated by people who genuinely

20:31 hate him. And they don't know why. They'll assign it to a political thing

20:35 or they'll sign it to a policy thing, but in reality, it's not about policy

20:38 and it's not about politics. In reality, it is about

20:42 how he communicates the language he chooses to use,

20:46 because he could do the exact same policies, have the exact same politics, and if

20:50 he were Mitt Romney, no one would have any problems.

20:54 But Mitt Romney's communication is coded much more feminine than

20:58 Donald Trump's is, even though they are both men

21:02 and they come from the same generation, which is also very interesting to me.

21:06 Now, the question here is for Nikki and I

21:09 wanted to tee this up for you.

21:13 Sure. What, what can we learn about masculine communication

21:17 from John Wayne? A Love Story by Joan Didian? What can we learn

21:21 from that chapter?

21:25 It's interesting. They, some of the pieces that you

21:28 read from showed me that Joan has a bit of

21:32 a love hate relationship with John Wayne, right? She does? Oh, yeah, for

21:36 sure. I mean, she can't help loving him because

21:40 she was a woman and at the time she wrote this, she was a very

21:43 young woman. She was in her late 20s or early 30s,

21:47 and still in the bloom

21:50 of her feminine essence,

21:54 her hormones and whatnot. And John Wayne, even at that

21:58 point in time, when he was in his 60s and not

22:01 what he used to be when he was much younger, but was still

22:06 a masculine man. And the feminine essence

22:09 cannot but help be drawn to and attracted to

22:13 a masculine essence in a very masculine man like John Wayne. And it's

22:16 obvious she's trying not to like him, but she can't help herself. She

22:20 can't help herself. She just can't. It's,

22:24 it's, you know, she's the kind of woman who'd walk up

22:27 to him and say, I hate your guts, and then kiss him passionately and rip

22:31 his clothes off. And, you know, that's,

22:34 that's the sense that I got from her writing about John Wayne

22:38 and the piece where you talked about that he

22:42 suggested this other world that may or may not have existed. Well, of course it

22:45 existed. It still existed at the time that she wrote about it. And

22:49 outside of the west, it existed everywhere in the world.

22:53 And the kind of man that John

22:57 Wayne portrayed himself as in the movies

23:01 that he made was that man who made his own code and

23:04 lived by it. And what was incredible about the United States of

23:08 America, and in my opinion still is incredible about the United States of

23:12 America, is that a free society like The United States

23:16 gives men an opportunity to

23:19 define that code and to live by it if they so

23:23 choose. What made John Wayne so popular

23:27 is because Americans, and really

23:31 men and women all over the world were drawn to this.

23:35 They want that kind of man to be an

23:38 exemplar in the world. The kind of man that is

23:42 black and white in his view of things. The

23:45 kind of man that believes in a code, that

23:49 defines a code and lives by it. The kind of man

23:53 that inspires the rest of us to get out of our own

23:56 doldrums and strongly move forward

24:01 in life, living our best lives

24:04 because we've identified a code by which we live our life.

24:08 The reason why the last 60 odd years

24:12 have been hard for Western civilization

24:16 as a whole is because society as a whole and

24:20 the culture as a whole doesn't cotton to that anymore.

24:23 John Wayne is a demonstration

24:27 of a bygone and better era for most men.

24:31 And those of us that are lucky enough to have known who he is,

24:35 to have seen his movies and watched his interviews,

24:39 understand this. And Joan Didion at some level

24:42 understands this. But unfortunately, Joan came of age

24:46 in an era where young women were starting to be told

24:50 that, hey, there's a patriarchy out there and you don't have to listen to men

24:53 and Kumbaya, get out there and seek your own freedom,

24:57 burn your bra and all that stuff. And

25:01 that was a very beguiling, a false message that a

25:05 lot of those women were fed and bought into.

25:09 But I'm telling you right now, in 2026,

25:14 every woman I know who's over the

25:18 age of 50 who was brought up with that

25:22 message is either publicly or privately

25:25 starting to doubt it very strongly. And I think Joan

25:29 Didion didn't have an opportunity to doubt it

25:33 intellectually because all the rest of this book

25:37 is written from the point of view of a 60s feminist,

25:41 right, the patriarchy as she defined it.

25:44 But in this particular essay, there's a part

25:48 of her essence that's rebelling against her rebellion. And

25:52 that's what I noticed. So this is why

25:55 I say this book is part of. It's the documenting of the

25:59 beginning of the unraveling of American culture. Right.

26:03 So I'm a big fan of Strauss and Howe's

26:06 generational theory of like 80 years seculum cycles, right.

26:11 And. And Didian wrote and spent

26:14 the majority of her writing career and wrote her most

26:18 interesting books and essays

26:22 and contributions to the culture during that

26:26 unraveling time that started, quite

26:30 frankly, if we want to be really blunt about it, it started quite frankly, with

26:33 the assassination of John F. Kennedy. That's when the unraveling really started.

26:37 And the unraveling ended with September

26:40 11th. That's the, that's the, that's the framework that, that

26:44 the. And, and that's about a 25 year. That's about 25 year unraveling

26:48 cycle that occurred there. And then everything that's

26:52 been post September 11th, I would say, up to January.

26:55 January, sorry, July of 2024. And the Assembly,

26:59 Pennsylvania. Yeah. Yep. That was chaos.

27:03 That's the chaos. That's the winter of chaos that always comes after the fall of

27:06 an unraveling. Gideon was born

27:10 in a secular spring coming

27:14 out of World War II. Right. A place of calm,

27:17 a place of rebirth, a place of

27:21 renewal, and moved very much into like was called a 68, the

27:25 Summer of Love. Right. And so she is a young woman, to your point. And

27:28 most young people at that time, they never thought the summer would ever end,

27:32 which is why. And I don't get into like the

27:35 generational sniping back and forth thing on this podcast because I don't think that's useful.

27:40 However, I will say this. This is why boomers are confused at the end

27:44 of their lives overall as a generation by what's happening now, because

27:47 three generations went through unraveling and chaos. I'm part of the Gen X generation.

27:51 We were knee. We've been knee deep in chaos ever since late time out of

27:55 mind. Yeah, exactly. It's just, it's been defined by chaos. And one of the

27:59 points I make on this show is we have

28:02 to rebuild for the next secular spring, which is coming

28:06 up. We're coming into a spring cycle and

28:10 we have to look back at things like this and go,

28:14 what is worthwhile that we can pull forth from this? And so that's why

28:18 this, this mem. This, this sort of essay fascinates me because.

28:21 Well, for a couple of reasons. One, I think we will

28:25 have a return to, to the sort of. Maybe not in the same way, but

28:28 a return to the sort of John Wayne coded communication style. I do

28:32 think we are going to. We're going to do that. I think it's gonna be

28:34 the younger generation that's going to guide us in that direction because they want that,

28:38 they want that assuredness, that black and white, that, to your point, they do

28:42 that, that there's a definite right, there's a definite wrong, there's a definite

28:46 answer. But it's going to be really hard to kind of get that, that

28:50 sort of personality or that sort of communication launch because we have something that

28:53 Didyon didn't have in her time. We've got fragmentation with the Internet,

28:57 and we've got fragmentation with multiple channels and multiple voices. So it's really hard to

29:01 push through, but it can be done. And then the other thing

29:04 that I see happening is this is in our business and

29:08 among our leaders, we're seeing this sort of

29:13 transformation post Covid where

29:19 not to put too fine a point on it, and I'll just go for this.

29:22 The feminine coded language hit a wall, as it always does in a

29:26 crisis, because feminine coded language is about social

29:30 status and keeping everybody calm and keeping everybody cohesive and making sure

29:33 everybody gets along. And there's nothing wrong with that. You want to have that. That's

29:36 how you build. That's how you build a town in the Old West. That's how

29:40 you build a society and a culture. But during a

29:43 time of, of, of. Of chaos

29:47 and strife, masculine coded communication

29:51 is what becomes dominant at that moment. And

29:54 that's why I go back to Trump is the highest example

29:58 of this. But that's why his reelection campaign worked,

30:02 because it was the strongest example of signal to noise ratio

30:06 in terms of communication. Whether to your point about

30:10 Didion, whether you wanted to kiss him or slap him, it doesn't matter.

30:13 It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. You know,

30:17 and I don't know how many folks are

30:21 actually going to. How many leaders are actually picking up on this example and

30:24 seeing it and understanding what they're seeing.

30:28 And I think this essay gives you a sort of framework to understand what

30:32 you're seeing, not to repeat it maybe necessarily in your own business or your own

30:35 family, your own community, maybe you might want to take a different tact,

30:39 but you are going to want to use this as a frame.

30:43 Yeah, just another thought that I have there. No, it's a good thought. And

30:49 people who weren't alive when John

30:52 Wayne was alive just don't understand

30:58 truly how revered and popular this man was

31:01 across the globe. Across.

31:05 This man is quite possibly the

31:08 biggest celebrity of all time,

31:12 right? Quite possibly. I mean, there's a few people that you

31:16 can say, well, what about them? But not many. Not many. I mean, I don't

31:19 know. Michael. Michael Jackson might have Michael Jackson, Michael Jordan,

31:23 maybe Elvis. Look, but they

31:27 did all that's true. But let me say this about John

31:30 Wayne. There was a 25 consecutive year

31:34 period where John Wayne was top 10

31:38 box office in Hollywood, right? Top 10.

31:42 Nobody else has ever come close to achieving that. Nobody.

31:46 Nobody. Well, okay, Michael, Mike.

31:49 Michael Jackson had a couple of massive albums, but there were

31:53 a couple of massive albums. His entire career wasn't the John Wayne's level.

31:57 And I love Michael Jackson. Michael Jordan, you know, one of the

32:00 goats in professional basketball in the 90s,

32:04 certainly was at that level. In the Bulls run for that one

32:08 decade. John Wayne was 25 years. Here's another thing I want

32:11 to tell you. There was an annual poll

32:15 taken of the most popular actor in America

32:19 starting in the early 60s. Okay. Who do you

32:23 think won that poll every year for

32:26 55 straight years? Oh, John.

32:30 John Wayne. Yeah. Dude. He died in

32:33 1979. The last year where he was still the number

32:37 one actor in the United States was 2006.

32:40 2006, 27 years

32:44 after his death, the number one actor.

32:50 People don't understand how huge he was. Why was he such a big

32:55 celebrity? Why? There was something

32:58 about the type of man he portrayed on the screen

33:02 that instantly, instantly connected

33:07 with the essence and soul of men and women

33:11 around the globe. John

33:14 Wayne was famously a Republican. You know this, right? Famously a

33:18 Republican. Yes. Jimmy Carter,

33:23 39th President, United States. Famously a Democrat.

33:27 Famously a Democrat. When he was asked,

33:31 who would you like to invite to your

33:34 inauguration? The only name he

33:38 said, he said, whoever you want. John Wayne's got to be there. He said,

33:42 I want John Wayne at my inauguration. I don't care what it takes. I

33:46 know he's a Republican. He's got to be there. Doesn't matter. Doesn't matter. He's got

33:49 to be there. He's got to be there. Look, I, I. Okay,

33:53 so look, I'll just lay it all on the table. When I was younger, I

33:57 was not a massive fan of John Wayne. I was much more of a fan

34:00 of Clint Eastwood. Good, Bad and the Ugly High Plains Drifter.

34:04 All that. Right. You know,

34:09 and over the course of time,

34:13 I've appreciated John Wayne more. As a matter of fact,

34:17 I watched a movie a couple weeks ago, John Wayne movie

34:21 on, on hbo. Tall in this. Well, not

34:24 on hbo. Tcm. Tall in the Saddle. I never even heard

34:28 of this movie before, Right? And I think it's from like

34:32 1948,

34:34 49, somewhere around there. And it's

34:38 John Wayne doing John Wayne things. He's probably in his, like,

34:41 mid-30s. And there's a, there's a, there's

34:45 a sequence in the movie, right, where he gets into this

34:49 fist fight with this other, with this other guy. And

34:53 the other guy, I believe, played a role in, in the Quiet Man. I

34:57 recognized him from the Quiet Man. I can't remember this, this actor. Great movie. I

34:59 love the Quiet Man. Great movie. I love the Quiet Man. Yeah. And.

35:04 And they both have a. They. I mean, they have a real donnybrook. Like, they're

35:06 tearing up the room and they're getting after it. And Wayne was what,

35:10 64250? He was a big boy. He was a big boy.

35:14 He's a big boy. And if John Wayne hit you

35:18 like you were going to know it. You're going. You're going to get your. Your

35:20 bell rung, right? Yeah. And that guy didn't. He did not

35:24 back down to John Wayne. It's like, okay, we're gonna have ourselves a

35:27 Donny Brook. Let's have ourselves a donnybrook. Let's go ahead. And

35:31 the, The. The whole dynamic of that, of that one, that fight,

35:36 and they did cut it in two different angles. It was. Was really well done.

35:40 At the end of the fight, the. The skinny, scrawny old man walks

35:44 in and basically he says to. To the guy who was fighting John Wayne, he

35:47 says, so, were you guys? Are you guys all right in here? Like, what's going

35:50 on? He's like. And the guy says, and this is again, masculine coded

35:54 communication. He doesn't say, I have a fight. He didn't say,

35:58 we're having a fight. He didn't say any of the things that, like, you would

36:00 hear out of a modern. If this is in a modern film, you didn't hear

36:03 say any of that. He just goes, oh, no, we're fine. We're just rearranging the

36:05 furniture in the room. Yeah, that's awesome.

36:09 That's a John Wayne line, man. Classic, classic line.

36:14 And that is the core. And it struck me when I was watching

36:18 the movie, and it's in black and white, of course, and it struck me when

36:21 I was watching this movie that to her point about

36:24 John Ford, directors were understanding. John

36:28 Ford understood this more so than most directors. Stagecoach, all the way

36:32 through his career, that. The Searchers, man. The best Searchers.

36:36 Oh, my top five movie of all time, in my opinion. The last scene of

36:40 the Searchers with the door closing and he just walks away. Ridiculous.

36:43 Genius. Genius. The only. Probably, the only last scene better is

36:47 at the end of Godfather. Like, probably. Like, that's,

36:50 you know, and I'm a huge cinephile guy. Everybody knows who listens to the show.

36:54 I'm a huge movie guy, huge movie guy. But

36:59 Ford understood that America needed myths. And he

37:03 saw in John Wayne a container he could pour the myth

37:07 in. But he also saw a person who could carry that Myth.

37:11 And in our time coming up,

37:15 we're going to need people that can have myths poured into them that they can

37:18 carry. And I don't know if we've made enough strong men

37:22 to be able to carry those myths. Well,

37:26 interesting you should say that. I believe that today's John

37:30 Ford is a man by the name of Dana

37:33 White. And I believe that

37:37 Dana White is in the myth making business as well,

37:41 through his properties, the ufc.

37:45 The, the, the slap. I forget the name of the slap company

37:49 and the boxing thing that he's done, but in particular,

37:53 the UFC and these fighters

37:58 and the way that he builds these myths are

38:02 less relevant and important as an individual

38:05 than the whole concept of the Ultimate Fighting Championship of strongmen

38:09 slapping each other in boxing. But he's saying that there

38:13 is still a powerful place

38:16 in our world for men who live by a

38:20 code and are willing to go out there and use their

38:23 wits and their fists to get it.

38:27 And if you look at, if you look at

38:31 a week and a half ago, there was a

38:35 fight, UFC fight. And

38:38 this UFC fight was between a guy named

38:42 Hamza Chamayev, who's a Dagistani based fighter,

38:46 undefeated, and an American fighter by the name of Sha

38:50 Strickland, who was not undefeated and was a massive

38:53 underdog. And in that fight,

38:57 Mr. Strickland not only didn't lose,

39:01 he won. He beat this guy. He beat him to the point where I saw

39:04 his face afterward and I watched the fight. I'm going, those punches don't look hard.

39:08 Oh, they're hard. I saw the guy's face. He's.

39:13 That his face is messed up for at least three months based on how

39:17 he got hit. And I saw Strickland got hit, and, you know, he had a

39:20 broken nose, but he wasn't nearly as badly disfigured as his opponent,

39:23 which is, I guess, why he won the fight. But if you look at it,

39:28 the whole UFC narrative is a myth making narrative.

39:31 And Dana White has made himself a gazillion dollars

39:36 by creating the myth of the strong man through the UFC fight.

39:40 And when it's an American man beating a foreigner, and in this case,

39:43 a Christian beating a Muslim, which is part of, you know, a subtle,

39:47 a subtle subtext of the narrative, it's something that

39:51 really, really resonates with a lot of people. Well, those

39:55 Dagestani guys, I could tell you as a, as a jiu jitsu guy, those

39:58 Dagestani guys train like nobody's business. They aren't no slouches.

40:02 They're not. They, they ain't no slouches. And Sean

40:06 Strickland, he's a

40:10 unicorn, man. He's a unit. Yeah, exactly. He's.

40:13 He's that classic sort of Boston

40:17 Southie, working class, blue collar.

40:21 I'm gonna run my mouth, you know, and you're. Does he ever. Eh.

40:25 Oh, my God. And you're going to take it or leave it, you know, however

40:28 it is. And the thing is, he can back up running his

40:32 mouth by just walloping you or grounding and pounding you. Right.

40:37 And it's interesting that you mentioned Dana White. I would not have thought. I would

40:40 have not have poured Dana White into that. Or not poured. I would not have.

40:44 I would not have made that analysis or that align between Dana White

40:47 and John Ford. I think that's very interesting because

40:52 I'm very interested in the decline of boxing in the United States and

40:56 the rise of ufc. Like, how that has sort of, like,

40:59 things have sort of flipped kind of in the similar way where baseball is

41:03 no longer as popular a sport in the United States as football currently

41:07 is. And it's one

41:11 of those cultural things that just never gets commented on. It just sort of happens.

41:14 And the flow of it is just hap. Not just happening. But, I mean, it's

41:17 being guided by Dana White and others. But I remember UFC 1.

41:20 I mean, I remember the Gracies, when they came out and just killed everybody.

41:24 They were amazing. Yeah. And everybody was like, I have no idea what to do

41:27 with this jiu jitsu thing. We all better figure this out.

41:30 We better go figure this out. And of course, over the last 30 years, they've

41:33 been able to figure it out, both the men and the

41:37 women. But ufc, I remember back

41:41 in the early days was associated with gladiatorial combat. It

41:45 was associated with cage fighting. And of course, over time, it has become

41:48 professionalized. And so it's interesting that you would say that. That Dana

41:52 is sort of, sort of molding that myth because he's had time to do it,

41:55 you know? Yes, definitely in a. Definitely in

41:59 a. In a. In a masculine, coded

42:02 kind of way. So. Yep. Yeah, I.

42:06 I not remembered the Sean Strickland fight until. Until you just mentioned it. Yeah.

42:10 It was a hell of a fight. I really enjoyed that fight. It was fun

42:14 to watch. And when. When Hamza

42:19 came out like a bat out of hell in the first round, that's. That's been

42:22 his strategy. That's how he's won all those 15 fights. He comes out like a

42:26 bat out of hell, and most people are just overwhelmed by him.

42:29 But Joe Rogan said before the fight that this is what

42:33 Hamza's going to do. He's going to come out like a bat out of how

42:35 he's going to come at Sean, he said, and he's not going to be able

42:37 to keep him down. Can't keep Sean down. So. And he's. And he's

42:41 going to get tired. And. And he also said Sean's going to get tired,

42:45 but Sean's cardio is 30 times as strong as

42:48 Hamzat's. So when Hamza's tired,

42:52 Sean's like, that's my second win. Now I'm going to. Now I'm going to hammer

42:55 you. And he said, because it was everybody who said, oh, Hamzat's going to kill

42:58 him. And he said, I don't know about that, guys. You know, this isn't as

43:01 much of a slam dunk as you think it is. And Sean, he

43:05 also said, Sean Strickland's lost some fights, but he also beat the greatest

43:09 middleweight of all time, Israel Adesanya. Right again with this

43:12 unorthodox thing that Izzy couldn't figure out is he couldn't figure

43:16 out how to do it. So. But the beauty of Sean Strickland

43:20 is Dana White has understood making

43:23 a myth out of this man. And how did he do it? First of all,

43:27 he encouraged him to run his mouth. He encouraged him to run his

43:30 mouth. In fact, he told him, the more you run your mouth, the better. And

43:34 when Sean was in Toronto, I saw him fight Dracus du

43:37 Plessis. We, we got tickets. We went to see that fight. It was a lot

43:41 of fun with my two sons.

43:45 At the end of that fight, you know, before the fight, Sean just

43:48 hammered some of Toronto's leftist media. He just hammered him. He said, people like

43:52 you are a disease. And, and he looked around in the room, he

43:56 said, look at this guy that's the enemy. Because that. The guy was

44:00 making some pro trans comments or something like that. And then

44:03 they came back to J. How could you allow him to do that? You have

44:07 an obligation. And he said, I have an obligation

44:11 to tell a grown man how to think. Haven't you ever heard of free

44:15 speech? I'm not going to tell him how to think. Sean. Sean.

44:20 And there's myth making in all

44:23 of this. Dana White does those press conferences and says what he

44:27 says because he wants a certain narrative out there, and that narrative is

44:31 about building certain fighters and certain fights up to get more excitement.

44:35 He realizes that young men in particular

44:38 are hungry for masculine avatars that

44:42 they can Latch onto and say, I want to be like that guy. I want

44:46 to be like that guy. He got it. And that's what helped

44:49 him turn UFC into a multi, multi, multi billion dollar brand.

44:53 UFC is going to take over boxing. You watch this

44:57 new boxing outfit he's brought. He's putting in the same type

45:01 of UFC myth making strategies into building these

45:04 boxers up. Boxing is going to be a thing again. And this slap thing.

45:08 Who the hell thought slapping people would be a spectator sport? Dude, it

45:12 is a huge spectator sport. Huge. It's

45:15 masculinity for fat people, buddy. Oh, it's masculine,

45:21 I tell you. I saw a couple of clips of that on YouTube and I

45:25 thought, are you kidding me? And then I went on to. I went on to

45:28 something else. I was like, I gotta. I can't, I can't. The things. At least

45:31 once a day, the Internet asks me to look at something and I'm like, I

45:34 can't. I can't even with you people. And then I gotta walk away.

45:40 But have you seen those guys get hit? I mean. Oh, yeah, slaps are

45:44 nutty, man. They are no joke. That's like standing

45:47 for a. For a right hook. That's like standing in place to take a right

45:51 hook. I mean, it's crazy, man. I've zero interest in any of that, thank you

45:55 very much. I'd rather slip the right hook and. Yeah, no, we're done with that.

45:59 But, but you understand what this man is doing? He is a

46:02 myth maker. He is a myth maker. And, and

46:06 he just like John Ford, understood the American public was looking for this.

46:10 He understood that a massive global audience of young men

46:14 was looking for heroes and he was going to supply them.

46:17 Yep. Yep. Let's go back to the book.

46:21 Back. Let's go. Let's go back to the book. Let's go back to the

46:25 book. Back to Slouching towards Bethlehem. I want to pick up with.

46:30 With another idea that, that runs through here

46:34 in her essay on keeping a notebook. I think this was also very, very

46:37 relevant. I think there's some relevance here for, for leaders as

46:41 well. I'm going to pick up a couple of different pieces here.

46:47 And I quote, my first notebook was a big five tablet

46:50 given to me by my mother with the sensible suggestion that I stop whining

46:54 and learn to amuse myself by writing down my thoughts.

46:58 She returned the tablet to me a few years ago. The first entry is an

47:02 account of a woman who believed herself to be freezing in the Arctic night,

47:06 only to find when day broke, that she had stumbled onto the

47:10 Sahara desert where she would die of heat before lunch.

47:14 I have no idea what turn of a five year old's mind could have prompted

47:18 so insistently ironic and exotic a story, but it

47:21 does reveal a certain predilection for the extreme which has dogged me into adult

47:25 life. Perhaps if I were analytically inclined, I

47:29 would find it a truer story than any I might have told about Donald Johnson's

47:32 birthday party or the day my cousin Brenda put kitty litter in the

47:36 aquarium. That's funny.

47:40 That's funny. It's funny. So the point of my keeping a notebook

47:44 has never been, nor is it now, to have an accurate factual record of what

47:47 I have been doing or thinking. That would be a different impulse entirely, an

47:51 instinct for reality which I sometimes envy but do not possess.

47:56 At no point have I ever been able to successfully keep a diary. My approach

47:59 to daily life ranges from the grossly negligent to the merely absent. And. And on

48:03 those few occasions when I have tried dutifully to record a day's events, boredom has

48:06 so overcome me that the results were are mysterious at best.

48:10 What is this business about shopping? Typing. Peace. Dinner with E. Depressed.

48:14 Shopping for what? Typing What? Peace. Who is E? Was this

48:18 E depressed or was I depressed? Who cares? In fact, I have

48:22 abandoned altogether that kind of pointless entry. Instead I tell what some would

48:25 call lies. That's simply not true. The members

48:29 of my family frequently tell me when they come up against my memory of a

48:32 shared event. The party was not for you. The spider was not a black

48:36 widow. It wasn't that way at all. Very likely they are right.

48:39 For not only have I always had trouble distinguishing between what happened and what merely

48:43 might have happened, but I remain unconvinced that the distinction for

48:47 my purpose, for my purposes matters.

48:51 And then I'm going to skip down a little bit. She's going to talk about

48:53 cracked crab and come her father coming home from Detroit in

48:56 1945. And I'm going to go to this piece here, how it felt to

49:00 me. That is getting closer to the truth. About a notebook. I

49:04 sometimes delude myself about why I keep a notebook. Imagine that some thrifty

49:08 virtue derives from preserving everything observed. See enough and write it down,

49:11 I tell myself. And then some morning, when the world seems drained of wonder,

49:15 someday when I'm only going through the motions of doing what I'm supposed to do,

49:18 which is right on that bankrupt morning, I was simply open my notebook in

49:22 there and there will be always all be a forgotten account with accumulated

49:25 interest paid passage back to the world out there.

49:29 Dialogue overheard in hotels and elevators and at the hat check counter

49:33 in pavilion. One middle aged man shows his hat check to another and says

49:36 that's my old football number. Impressions of Bettina

49:40 Aptheker and Benjamin sonnenberg and Teddy Mr. Alcapuco

49:43 Stauffer, careful apricus about tennis bums and

49:47 failed fashion models and Greek shipping heiresses, one of whom taught me significant

49:51 lesson, a lesson I could have learned from F. Scott Fitzgerald. But perhaps we almost

49:55 meet the very rich for ourselves by asking when I arrived

49:58 to interview her in her orchid filled sitting room on the second day

50:02 of a paralyzing New York blizzard, whether it was snowing

50:06 outside

50:10 and then I'm going to skip ahead this last piece. It is a difficult point

50:13 to admit. We are brought up in the ethic that others, any others, all

50:17 others, are by definition more interesting than ourselves, taught to be diffident

50:21 just this side of self effacing, only the very young and

50:25 the very old may recount their dreams at breakfast, dwell upon self interrupt with

50:28 memories of beach picnics and favorite liberty laundresses and the rainbow trout in

50:32 a creek near Colorado Springs. The rest of us are expected,

50:36 rightly to affect absorption in other people's favorite dresses, other

50:39 people's trout. And so we do. But

50:43 our notebooks give us away. For however dutifully we record what we see around us,

50:47 the common denominator of all all we see is always

50:50 transparently, shamelessly, the implacable

50:54 eye. Close Quote.

51:06 One of the knocks I have on Didian and I've been I sort of

51:10 took me a little while to understand it and to sort of really get where

51:13 my my disjunction is with her. And Nikki already mentioned that

51:17 she was part of and writing during a time of feminism

51:20 becoming the dominant driver of communication, or not

51:24 even communication, ideological and cultural thought in America, particularly for American

51:28 women and women in the west and women fundamentally

51:31 globally later on in the 80s and 90s.

51:35 But that's not my biggest problem with Didion.

51:39 That's a side trek for me or a

51:43 side side adventure. The biggest thing for me and it took

51:47 it was revisiting this after a couple of years and really looking at her again.

51:52 The biggest problem for me was her

51:56 her level of solipsism, her

51:59 level of inability to

52:03 fundamentally and it's not care but

52:06 to fundamentally determine determine something

52:10 about her own actions from some form of self

52:13 awareness. And in that piece on keeping a notebook, she's not keeping a

52:17 notebook to become more self aware. She's keeping a notebook because

52:21 she actually doesn't understand what's going on with

52:25 herself. And

52:29 I think a lot of people are like that. I think a lot of people

52:31 don't have any idea what's going on with themselves, men and women alike.

52:36 I agree with you. I think a lot of people struggle with that. Like,

52:39 it's really, really hard to turn the lens

52:43 on yourself, but then

52:47 it's harder even to turn the lens on yourself, see

52:51 the thing, acknowledge the thing, and make the change. And

52:54 Didian's classic move was she was an observer, right? She. She was.

52:58 And that's. We're going to talk about in the essay that that grounds this book

53:01 Slouching Towards Bethlehem. In a moment, she would go, she would observe, she would write

53:05 down. And she opens the book, of course, like we. We mentioned

53:09 in the preface or in the introduction, by saying that she believed that writing

53:12 was no longer a fundamental act that would change society.

53:16 Right? And that's why she wrote Slouching Towards Bethlehem because she didn't believe

53:20 her writing had any meaning.

53:24 That's. That's funny that that's a sign of solipsism,

53:28 that that's what that is. And that's the thing that's been bugging me about her

53:31 writing. That's my biggest knock against her. And she.

53:35 Now, look, let me be very clear. She was able to make a career off

53:39 selling that, because she was that. And she was able to write in a

53:42 literary way around it.

53:46 But I guess my question is, if you're a leader

53:50 and you don't understand her leader, if you're anybody and you don't

53:54 understand yourself, should you bother keeping a notebook? It's

53:57 like I'm questioning even that advice that I've been giving people. Like, I give. I

54:00 give people that advice all the time who are leaders. Like, no, go keep a

54:02 notebook. It'll help you out. But maybe that's bad advice.

54:07 I don't think it's bad advice. I think

54:12 that in Joan's case, she didn't use her notebook

54:16 in a way that would have benefited her in a maximal way

54:20 if she took the time to actually read what she'd written.

54:25 From the point of view of what is this telling me about

54:28 myself? I think she'd have got a lot of value out of it because

54:33 whatever motivated her to write what she wrote said

54:36 something about her state of mind and the state of her soul at that time.

54:41 And if she cared enough to examine that, she'd get value from that.

54:46 I think people that are in leadership

54:50 positions need to ask themselves if they're really

54:54 leaders or if they just have the title.

54:59 Because if you're really a leader, it's not all about you.

55:04 It's about the people that you lead.

55:07 It's about making a difference for others above self.

55:12 You know, a person who is very self focused,

55:16 in my opinion, is circling the drain of life,

55:19 while a person who's a true leader

55:23 is looking at how their life

55:27 can enhance the lives of others,

55:31 be it in the family, be it in their community,

55:35 in their workplace, be it in society as a whole, and be it

55:39 for all mankind. So you talk about Joan Didion.

55:43 Yeah, she's very solipsistic. I agree with you.

55:47 I found what she had to say fascinating because

55:51 I think she is an erudite observer of the human condition.

55:56 I think her biggest problem is, along with a lot of the

56:00 gals and guys back in the 60s, she

56:03 rejected religion. It's obvious

56:06 she's rejected religion from how she speaks, how she thinks and how she writes.

56:10 If she had not done that, if she

56:14 had grounded herself in the religious tradition, I think

56:18 she'd have become more introspective and I think her writing

56:22 would have been more powerful and more impactful

56:25 on more people. And I think what people in the last

56:29 25 years, in this time of chaos that you talk about in the current term

56:32 returning Hasan, are looking for,

56:37 is they're looking for meaning. Have you read and

56:40 discussed on your show Viktor Frankl's Man's Search For Meaning?

56:44 Has that been one of the books you guys have gone through? Yes, went back.

56:48 We went through that in the second season, I believe. Second or

56:52 third season of the show. Yes. Well, that book to me

56:56 is a primer for every human being who's looking to

56:59 understand why the heck they're here and what's going to make their life have

57:03 mattered. And if, if you read

57:07 that book, a big part of the subtext

57:10 of that book is that you need a relationship with your higher

57:14 power, with God. I don't think Viktor

57:17 Frankl would have survived the

57:21 Holocaust and his brutal

57:24 stay in the Nazi concentration camps if he

57:28 didn't have that. If Viktor Frankl had

57:32 been a contemporary

57:37 secular, anti religious

57:40 psychiatrist and he was transported back

57:44 to Nazi times and went into that

57:47 concentration camp. I believe he'd have been dead in six months.

57:52 Well, I mean, Alexander Solzhenitsyn points out something in the Gulag archipelago.

57:56 He makes an interesting point. He says that and I mean, and

58:00 he went into, he went into the Gulag during

58:03 Stalin's purges right after World War II.

58:07 And while the Gulag was not a Nazi concentration camp, it was still no joke,

58:11 you know, in Siberia breaking rocks. And one of the things,

58:16 one of the, one of the things that Solzhenitsyn pointed out was that

58:20 people who came into the

58:25 Gulag and were the loudest purveyors

58:28 of Marxist ideology,

58:32 when they saw what was actually going on in the Gulag,

58:37 either would do one of two things. They would either crumble or they would double

58:40 down. And they would double down all the way to the,

58:44 to the hanging or all the way to the execution or all the way to

58:47 just being worked to death, whatever the clearing was at the end of the path.

58:52 And he said the people who came in with religion would either

58:56 do their time and they would come out one of two ways. Either reaffirmed

59:00 in their religion, they would double down or they would abandon it

59:04 because of what they saw. Right?

59:08 Now, both Frankl and, and

59:11 Solzhenitsyn both had those sort of

59:15 life bending experiences that, to your

59:19 point, Didion, raised in, not only raised

59:22 in, but also had her career in mid century America where she didn't suffer that

59:26 much of anything. I mean, I'm not going to say, I'm not going to compare

59:30 suffering. I don't think you win anything by playing a suffering

59:33 Olympics. She had her challenges during her time,

59:37 right? Including her husband, you know, Gregory Dunn dying. And

59:41 I read the Year of Magical Thinking and then her daughter dying as well. That

59:44 was a, one terrible. That was just terrible. Right?

59:49 So again, I'm not going to play the suffering Olympics. But she's a product of

59:53 her historical time and in her historical era. We talked about this and we

59:56 covered a book of Common Prayer. She had to go and visit San Salvador and

1:00:00 see the Civil War up close and then come back and figure out how to

1:00:03 like put all that trauma that she experienced in some

1:00:07 sort of boxes so readers of the New Yorker in the New York Times

1:00:10 could understand it. We're never going to go there,

1:00:14 but Frankel and Solzhenitsyn are on a different

1:00:18 par, they're on a different level. And

1:00:23 the challenge, I'm glad you brought up grounding. The

1:00:27 challenge of that grounding, right, is we don't know how firm it

1:00:30 is until it's actually tested. And I

1:00:34 think that's one of the things we're concerned about in our culture now. We talked

1:00:37 about, we talked a lot about John Wayne, but the,

1:00:40 the idea of testing you talked about in the ufc, right? That's

1:00:44 testing. I know many

1:00:47 religious people, many Christian people who I love

1:00:51 Desperately and dearly. They have not been

1:00:55 tested.

1:01:00 And that's a real challenge for us. You know,

1:01:04 have we made life too comfortable? Perhaps. Perhaps

1:01:08 life is too comfortable in America. And I know you're. I know you're in

1:01:11 Canada, so, you know, I'm gonna say in the West. In the west it

1:01:15 is. And that leads to

1:01:20 sort of one of my thoughts that I have every time I read Slouching Towards

1:01:23 Bethlehem, just in general. I read this collection of essays. It always sort of puts

1:01:27 me in mind of the Book of Judges, that. That book at the end of

1:01:30 the. Not at the end. And in the Bible

1:01:34 where Israel sort of unravels, right? I mean, they start off with

1:01:38 Joshua and everything's fine, and then they just unravel throughout the

1:01:42 entire book. And the last line of the Book of Judges is probably the

1:01:45 coldest line in the Bible. And there's a lot of cold lines in the Bible,

1:01:49 but that is one of the coldest. And it's. It says, in those days, there

1:01:52 was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes.

1:01:58 And that's where the book closes. And it's just insanity.

1:02:02 Like, just wild things happen in the Book of Judges. People getting

1:02:05 cut up, people getting. It's. It's a whole thing. Go, go read it. It's

1:02:09 wild. And this is what you get without

1:02:12 grounding. But this is also what you get when you had grounding

1:02:16 and then you floated away from it. So

1:02:23 I guess I say all that to ask this question. How do we

1:02:27 know? One of the challenges on this show is how do I make. How do

1:02:31 we make this relevant for our lives? Right? How do we make this book. How

1:02:33 do we make this content relevant for what we're doing right now? And of course,

1:02:37 the first organizational, the first organization that people are

1:02:40 ever involved in is family. So we have to start in the home,

1:02:44 right? How can. How can listeners,

1:02:48 men or women, ground. Ground

1:02:53 that religious tradition in their home? How do they do it if they're not

1:02:56 particularly religiously motivated? We've never really talked about this on the show before. I mean,

1:02:59 it's been actually. No, we talked about it in City of God. We're

1:03:03 talking about Augustine. So it's been a minute, but how do you ground

1:03:07 that religious tradition in your home? How do you do that in a practical way?

1:03:15 I think you can start by reading your religious text. I mean, if you're a

1:03:18 Christian, I'm a Christian. You can start by reading a Bible.

1:03:22 If you got kids who read the Bible to your kids, get a

1:03:27 children's version of a Bible for your kids that they can read on their own.

1:03:32 Go to church, find a good Bible based church.

1:03:37 I think that's a start then.

1:03:41 Additionally, you are who you hang around and

1:03:44 ask yourself, who are the people that you spend the most time with

1:03:48 on a day to day basis? Are you spending time with

1:03:52 a bunch of secular types who have a sense of

1:03:56 moral relativism about the world? Are you spending time

1:03:59 with devout and religious people that

1:04:03 seek to live life as godly good humans?

1:04:08 These are questions to ask yourself. These are ways in

1:04:11 which to live and to love. And the other thing I would

1:04:15 tell you is you should read, you should read a lot

1:04:19 of books because reading will open

1:04:23 your heart, your mind and your soul to truth.

1:04:30 And I believe Christianity in particular

1:04:34 is grounded in eternal truth.

1:04:38 And if someone takes the time to read

1:04:41 widely,

1:04:45 you'll develop a good meter.

1:04:49 You know, the most widely read people I know have the best

1:04:53 meters of anyone I know. Hey son, you got a really good

1:04:57 bullshit meter. In the time that I've known you, I've noticed that

1:05:01 about you. And I attribute that to the fact that

1:05:04 you take the time to be curious, to

1:05:08 read, to absorb ideas, to discuss them with other people

1:05:12 like me on a regular basis. That just makes it very

1:05:16 difficult for someone to con you or fool you.

1:05:20 Well, you also said something to me like the first time that we talked on,

1:05:23 on your podcast, actually a little bit before that, right? You said that I

1:05:27 was the first person, not first person, but you said I was one of a

1:05:29 handful of people that you knew who think.

1:05:34 And that. And that struck me because.

1:05:45 Much like reading, thinking is fundamental.

1:05:50 And the question of our time, one of

1:05:54 the questions I would sometimes ask leaders when I was doing more workshops and

1:05:57 trainings than I do now is.

1:06:01 And it is the penultimate question I think of our moment. How

1:06:05 clearly do you think.

1:06:10 And in, in our attempt to move our grounding from

1:06:14 religion to therapy, we've got a lot of muddled

1:06:17 thinking. Like therapeutic grounding is always going to give you muddled

1:06:21 thinking. And we live in a therapy culture. People

1:06:24 would rather go talk to a psychotherapist and

1:06:28 confess their sins, then go talk to a pastor

1:06:32 and confess their sins. People would rather be in a group

1:06:35 therapy session with other folks than go and be at church

1:06:39 praying. And we could talk about why that is.

1:06:43 But the fact of the matter is that these are the decisions that people have

1:06:46 made and we're seeing the outcomes of those at a, at a

1:06:49 sociocultural, but also all the way down to an individual And a

1:06:53 family level. Right. And that's going to be real hard to

1:06:56 pull back. But thinking clearly

1:07:01 is. Is the real. Is the real challenge, right? I mean, I think about the

1:07:05 level of, like, SSRI use that is in.

1:07:09 In the. In American culture alone. I don't know about Canadian culture, but is it

1:07:12 an American culture alone to

1:07:16 block, you know, taking drugs designed to block or to redirect or

1:07:20 to. To ameliorate anxiety, to ameliorate

1:07:24 that sense of. Of anxiousness, Right. Where is

1:07:27 this anxiousness coming from? Because that's what you're grounding in, right? So

1:07:31 there's an idea in church. You'll appreciate this as a Christian. There's an idea in

1:07:34 church and in the. In Christian theology that. That what you worship is

1:07:38 your idol, right? Well, if you're. If you're constant and what you focus

1:07:42 on is what you worship. So if you're constantly focused on anxiety, if

1:07:45 you're constantly focused on the things that are making you anxious, well,

1:07:49 that's an idol. And by the way, idols always judge you brutally,

1:07:53 and you are never forgiven. When you're judged by an idol, you're never

1:07:57 forgiven. So we have a rampant idolatry,

1:08:01 rampant therapeutic culture. This is one

1:08:04 of those things that, like, flummoxes me on this show. How do we get people

1:08:08 to thinking clearly enough? Forget to go to church.

1:08:12 I mean, that may be a step too far. People. How do we get them

1:08:14 thinking clearly enough just to write down in a notebook,

1:08:19 even if it's solipsistic thinking, but just write down in a notebook? How

1:08:23 do we get them to cross that? Read smart people's

1:08:26 writing. Read smart people's writing. I mean, look,

1:08:31 there's a Canadian professor at

1:08:35 Concordia University. His name is Gad Said.

1:08:39 He's quite popular on the Internet. He's written a bunch of books. This is

1:08:43 not his first book, but it's the first book that became quite famous.

1:08:47 It's called the Parasitic Mind. How Infectious Ideas

1:08:50 Are Killing Common Sense. I read this book, and

1:08:54 I've got my notebook over here, and I take notes on

1:08:58 interesting things that I've read in the book. Do the same

1:09:02 with the Bible. You know, I'm also

1:09:05 reading

1:09:09 Ted Soren's biography of Kennedy.

1:09:13 This is a hagiography. There's no question, man. The. The man worships

1:09:17 Kennedy. But there's a lot of good things in this book

1:09:21 that I've learned from, and when

1:09:24 I read it forces me to

1:09:28 think. Reading physical paper

1:09:32 books forces you to think. Listening to

1:09:35 smart podcasts like this one forces you to think.

1:09:40 You want your thinking to become clearer? Engage

1:09:44 in it. The reason why people aren't able to think

1:09:48 properly today is because too many people doom scroll for much of the

1:09:51 day. I got a. I got a challenge for you.

1:09:56 Lock your phone away on a Saturday morning.

1:10:00 Turn it off. Get an old fashioned watch and wear it. Lock it

1:10:04 away for 10 hours once a week

1:10:09 and read and be present with people instead. Give that

1:10:13 a try.

1:10:19 In our house, we call that a Sabbath. There you go.

1:10:24 But we use old school words. You know, we're, we're sort of traditional that way

1:10:27 a little bit. No, you're right. Like it's

1:10:33 the. I wrote a blog post about this some months ago,

1:10:37 right? Um, it's easy to say stop doom

1:10:41 scrolling. It's easy to say read a book. It's easy to say these things.

1:10:45 The, the practical hard part is doing it right is, is

1:10:49 being encouraged to do it, being encouraged to engage with it, being

1:10:52 encouraged to go down the road of it and

1:10:56 look, long form podcasts like this can, can get you there. We can show

1:11:00 you the way, right? We can show you the way down the path. But to

1:11:03 paraphrase from the Matrix, you know, you gotta, you gotta walk the path,

1:11:07 right? You do, you know, you have to walk it. And the ones who

1:11:11 walk the path, the, the delta between.

1:11:15 Between them and those who don't just, just gets bigger and bigger and

1:11:19 bigger. With every, with every book that, that Nikki reads, every book

1:11:23 that I cover on this show, it just gets to be larger and larger.

1:11:27 You know, I'm currently working my way through Les Miserables, right? And every

1:11:31 time I run across something in that book by Victor Hugo, man, like

1:11:36 there's so many amazing lines in there. So much

1:11:39 amazing like, like thinking, not like, but so much amazing

1:11:43 thinking that's involved in that. You could see how Victor Hugo

1:11:47 conceptualizes. And this is a preview. So listen to the

1:11:50 episode of Labor's Raw. We're going to talk about that with Libby Younger. You're going

1:11:53 to love that episode. But how he conceptualizes French culture

1:11:57 in, in the, in the early 19th century, how he conceptualizes

1:12:01 life, and you begin to see parallels between how

1:12:05 he's conceptualizing life in a post

1:12:08 Napoleonic, you know, pre1848 revolution

1:12:11 sort of moment, a snapshot moment in France

1:12:16 and the levels of class and distinctions about wealth, the

1:12:20 distinctions about status and distinctions about geography.

1:12:23 He spends a huge chunk of that book just going over

1:12:27 the battle of Waterloo. The battle of

1:12:31 Waterloo, for God's sakes. And

1:12:34 you read it and you Go. Not only this guy have

1:12:38 clear thinking, but this guy was able to articulate to other folks

1:12:42 what that clear thinking was. And that's why they'll be reading this book

1:12:46 for another 500 years. Like it'll just last. It just will. It'll smuggle

1:12:50 those. It'll smuggle those ideas across time, across

1:12:54 the generations, across generations to other people who,

1:12:58 who just will never experience the French

1:13:02 Revolution, they'll never experience Waterloo, but they'll get to experience the way Victor

1:13:05 Hugo thought about. Thought about those things. Well, I'll tell you,

1:13:09 I'd love to come on your show and talk about Victor Hugo. I'd

1:13:13 love to come on your show and talk about Ayn Rand, because iron. Ayn Rand.

1:13:16 Loved Victor Hugo. Loved Victor Hugo. She thought

1:13:20 he was the greatest writer of all time, even

1:13:24 though he was a socialist. Professed

1:13:27 socialist. She said he lived as a free thinker

1:13:32 and she thought

1:13:36 his work was absolutely marvelous. And I happen

1:13:40 to agree with her. I think

1:13:43 Les Miserables is a beautiful book

1:13:47 to come and talk about on the great book series. And so is Ayn

1:13:51 Rand's Atlas Shrugged or the Fountainhead

1:13:55 or Anthem or we the Living, I mean, spectacular books.

1:13:59 We're going to cover all those. We're actually. So

1:14:03 we're sort of beginning to think about again, this is some inside baseball on

1:14:07 the show, but we're beginning to think about sort of what are our books for

1:14:09 next year? Where are you sort of started having that. I'm having that discussion

1:14:13 with folks and trying to figure out from guests what they are interested in coming

1:14:17 on and talking about and what we're going to put together and of

1:14:20 course, figuring out where do I want to position, you

1:14:24 know, season six of the show and what do we want to. What do we

1:14:26 want to focus on for, for that season? Not

1:14:30 just, not just to. To get more listeners and to grow the show,

1:14:34 obviously, and expand the reach, but also to do more of the work that we're

1:14:37 doing right now, challenging people to think, challenging people to engage.

1:14:42 And we have not covered, interestingly enough, we have not covered any of

1:14:46 Ayn Rand's books yet. We have not. We've not. I've not wandered into

1:14:50 that Objectivist, you know, thing over there

1:14:54 yet. Quite just yet. Not.

1:14:57 Not because I'm afraid of Ayn Rand. I've actually read Atlas Shrugged. It was years

1:15:01 ago, but I read Atlas Shrugged and I read the

1:15:04 Fountainhead again years ago. It's just there's so many good

1:15:08 books. I gotta curate it. I gotta figure out and I gotta. I gotta

1:15:12 Move around. But we'll definitely, we'll definitely be covering both of

1:15:15 those potentially next year. So, yeah,

1:15:19 stay tuned. I'm interested, I'm interested in chatting about them

1:15:23 both. Ayn Rand's two favorite authors were Mickey

1:15:26 Spillane and Victor Hugo. There you go. There you go.

1:15:31 So let me do this. I want to be

1:15:36 aware of our time. We've been talking for a while. I want to get us

1:15:39 to some conclusions. I want to round the corner a little bit on

1:15:43 Didion. I do want to bring up a

1:15:46 couple of points from her titular essay,

1:15:50 Slouching Towards Bethlehem. By the way, this book is divided

1:15:54 up into, into several parts, parts. So part one

1:15:57 is called Lifestyles in the Golden Land, then part two is called

1:16:01 Personals, and then part three is Seven Places of the Mind.

1:16:05 And so she, she, she's done something that actually I,

1:16:09 I borrowed when I wrote my book of essays that I still haven't

1:16:13 published, but then when I wrote my book of essays. And so she, she's divided

1:16:16 up her content and her thinking, such as it

1:16:20 were, into all these little different piles, right. To show you little, little

1:16:24 pieces of herself. And so I want to,

1:16:28 I want to grab Slouching Towards Bethlehem and I want to make a couple of

1:16:30 points around that as we begin to round the corner and

1:16:34 close. So Slouching Towards Bethlehem was

1:16:38 written in, I believe it's 1961,

1:16:42 is when this essay was originally written. Originally published. Let me go back and

1:16:45 look. Yes, 1961. And

1:16:50 it was written because.

1:16:55 And this is where regionalism then comes into the United States. So

1:17:00 regionalism in the mid century in the United States, we talked

1:17:04 about this on the show before, was a very powerful driver

1:17:09 for creativity and for literature. So Eudora Welthy,

1:17:12 who we covered on the show, she wrote a lot from a Southern perspective.

1:17:16 Charles Portis wrote a lot from a Western perspective.

1:17:21 And Didion, interestingly enough, wrote a lot from

1:17:24 the perspective of the Californian who has the

1:17:28 dream of going out east, sees the reality, and then runs right

1:17:32 back to California. Didion had zero interest in the middle of the country

1:17:36 she knows going on there. And she wasn't curious.

1:17:39 And that was her sort of blind spot.

1:17:43 But again, she was a regional writer, right? She could afford to be

1:17:47 regional at a time when regionalism really worked. And so in

1:17:50 looking at Slashing Towards Bethlehem, this is an essay written

1:17:54 by a person who has been hired

1:17:58 to do what used to be called reportage, to go out,

1:18:02 to go see what the people are doing in a particular area, and

1:18:06 then they report back to The. The hoi polloi.

1:18:09 And you get that sense when you read, when

1:18:13 you get to the opening of Slouching Towards Bethlehem. And so I'm going to read

1:18:16 a little bit from that. The center was not holding.

1:18:20 It was a country of bankruptcy notices and public auction announcements and commonplace

1:18:24 reports of casual killings and misplaced children in abandoned homes and

1:18:28 vandals who misspelled even the four letter words they scrawled.

1:18:32 It was a country in which families routinely disappeared, trailing bad

1:18:36 checks and repossession papers. Adolescents drifted from city to

1:18:39 torn city, sloughing off both the past and the future as snakes

1:18:43 shed their skins. Children who were never taught and

1:18:47 would never now learn the games that had held the society together. People

1:18:50 were missing. Children were missing, parents were missing. Those left

1:18:54 behind filed desultory missing persons reports, then moved

1:18:58 on themselves. It was not a country in open

1:19:02 revolution. It was not a country under enemy siege. It was the United

1:19:05 States of America in the cold late spring of 1967. And

1:19:09 the market was steady and the GNP high. And a great many articulate

1:19:13 people seemed to have a sense of high social purpose. And it might have been

1:19:16 a spring of brave hopes and national promise, but it was not. And

1:19:20 more and more people had the uneasy apprehension that it was not.

1:19:25 All that seemed clear was that at some point we had aborted ourselves and

1:19:28 butchered the job. And because nothing else seemed so relevant, I

1:19:32 decided to go to San Francisco. San

1:19:36 Francisco was where the social hemorrhaging was showing up. San Francisco was where the missing

1:19:39 children were gathering and calling themselves hippies.

1:19:43 When I first went to San Francisco in that cold late spring of

1:19:47 1967, I did not even know what I wanted to find out. And so I

1:19:51 just stayed around a while and made a few friends.

1:19:56 And then what follows from that is a

1:20:00 almost anthropological pulling apart

1:20:04 of what exactly was going on in San Francisco in.

1:20:08 And I. I said early 60s. I apologize. In 1967, in the late

1:20:12 60s, Haight Ashbury and

1:20:16 people getting high on acid. And the year before, the

1:20:19 Summer of Love.

1:20:23 It's a story, it's an essay of the

1:20:27 relationships between people and the ways in which people

1:20:31 are not honoring those relationships.

1:20:35 Every single seed that

1:20:38 produced the fruits of the last 25 years of chaos

1:20:43 and social unraveling, those seeds were planted,

1:20:47 and Didion saw them being planted, but didn't know what to do

1:20:51 about them. In the essay Slouching Towards Bethlehem,

1:20:54 she was just a documenter and an observer. It was like watching Johnny

1:20:58 Appleseed throw the seeds out and just see what would Develop.

1:21:05 I am fascinated by this because Didion said she wrote this

1:21:09 essay in order to come to terms with

1:21:13 the disorder, in order to make sense of what she

1:21:16 perceived as chaos coming.

1:21:20 She didn't provide any solutions because she didn't have any.

1:21:25 And as a creative, I think she was more

1:21:28 fascinated with the destruction of the

1:21:32 center and the erosion of the center than she was fascinated

1:21:36 by the shoring up of the center. By the way, the politically,

1:21:40 you know, 1968 would then produce

1:21:44 the backlash of Nixon. Okay. And then Nixon, of

1:21:48 course, eventually would go away. There would be the seventies, not go away. He would

1:21:52 eventually resign office because of Watergate.

1:21:55 But then the, the, the echo of Nixon would come

1:21:59 about from a president who was formerly the

1:22:03 governor of California and who also really liked John

1:22:06 Wayne. Ronald Reagan.

1:22:10 Yep.

1:22:15 What did you make of Slouching towards Bethlehem as we close? What did you make

1:22:18 of that essay? What did you make of reading that being. Being a Gen Xer,

1:22:21 living in the backwash of all of this. Like, I looked at this and I,

1:22:24 I didn't think of my parents because my parents, I mean, my parents in

1:22:28 1968 were 20 and my father had gone to Vietnam by that

1:22:32 point. My mother was 19 and

1:22:35 they weren't even, like they hadn't even met each other yet. They wouldn't meet each

1:22:38 other for another few years. So, you know,

1:22:42 and my father, my mother marched for civil rights and did those kinds of

1:22:46 things. I will tell you, the African American experience was

1:22:49 different than this experience that Didian documented here at Hate Ash.

1:22:53 Yeah, no kidding. Very different. Very different. You know,

1:22:57 but it was. So for me, it's anthropological.

1:23:01 Reading this as a African American Gen

1:23:04 Xer, it's, this is, this is,

1:23:09 this wasn't your life, man. This was not anything

1:23:12 culturally that. But, but, but it's fascinating because

1:23:16 we have a country that's big enough to contain all that. Yeah, yeah,

1:23:20 you do. While at the same time,

1:23:24 the seas, as I already said, that would produce

1:23:27 fruit later on in my life, were planted here at Haight

1:23:31 Ashbury. The, the, the grandsons,

1:23:35 the grand, the grandsons and granddaughters of those folks

1:23:39 who were high on LSD and couldn't figure out how to feed their children.

1:23:42 They're now dying in la, homeless, doing, having open air,

1:23:47 open air needle exchanges in front of kids, like it's

1:23:50 the same thing. And we haven't solved the problem. As a matter of

1:23:54 fact, if anything, in the United States, particularly in LA and in San

1:23:58 Francisco, we've scaled it up to a level where the

1:24:01 state now approves of it, rather than locking these people

1:24:05 up, rather than engaging in any sort of law and order, Matter of fact, Nixon

1:24:09 got in trouble. Well, not Nixon got in trouble. One of the reasons why Nixon

1:24:12 got elected was because the middle of the country wanted somebody to do something about

1:24:15 the hippies. Yeah, yeah.

1:24:20 So

1:24:23 I didn't grow up in this. I mean, my family came

1:24:27 to Canada in 1982.

1:24:31 I would have been. Had I been in the

1:24:35 United States, this wouldn't have been my experience. I would have been

1:24:39 a. An immigrant, probably living somewhere in

1:24:42 SoCal, Southern California. A lot of Iranians would have gone there,

1:24:46 working hard. And I'd be thinking, these hippies are nuts.

1:24:50 And I'd probably have voted for Richard Nixon and

1:24:54 later Ronald Reagan to do something about the hippies as well.

1:24:59 I think she's a brilliant observer of what was going on there. It was fascinating

1:25:02 to see that there were so many people that went into that life,

1:25:08 that dissolute life, where rather than trying

1:25:11 to discover who the hell they are and build

1:25:15 a life of meaning for themselves, they throw it away

1:25:19 on getting high. You know, it's like

1:25:22 they're escaping reality. And

1:25:26 Joan kind of observed it and probably escaped reality

1:25:30 a few times along with him. She doesn't talk very much in this particular

1:25:34 essay about her own partaking in things like wheat

1:25:37 and cocaine and so forth, but it's pretty

1:25:41 obvious that she hung around a lot of people that did this. And it would

1:25:45 have been astonishing to me if she

1:25:48 didn't partake herself, you know,

1:25:52 astonishing. I'm the middle American.

1:25:55 She looked upon, across, upon with such disdain

1:26:00 in how she decided to go about chronicling

1:26:04 America. So I was fascinated

1:26:07 by what she had to say, but I also looked at it and went,

1:26:11 yeah, that's not me. That's never going to be me. And

1:26:15 I'm glad that I came from a family that

1:26:18 valued hard work, that valued

1:26:22 God, that valued country, and wanted to build a

1:26:26 better future for myself and the people that I love. Well,

1:26:29 that's what I have to say about Joan. And I'll also say

1:26:33 this. The election of Ronald Reagan took place in

1:26:36 1980 because the American people really wanted to elect John Wayne

1:26:40 president. That'd been true for probably about three and a half

1:26:43 decades, but he went ahead and died and had no interest

1:26:47 in becoming a politician ever. He said that multiple times in his life.

1:26:51 And, you know, Ronald Reagan was a stand in for John

1:26:55 Wayne. That's how, that's why he got elected president, honestly.

1:26:59 Well, and, and, and Didion starts, you know, she, she

1:27:03 frames her observations through William Butler Yates

1:27:07 poem the Second Coming. Right? And

1:27:13 the. The things that she saw the center starting

1:27:16 to unravel were correct. The

1:27:20 center was beginning to unravel. The. The signs of it were

1:27:24 around the edges. But there was still enough in her

1:27:27 time, there was still enough of the core left

1:27:31 where the. The folks who were in charge of

1:27:35 preserving the core never thought that

1:27:41 it would unravel or it would come apart. And this is, this is,

1:27:45 this is the thing that I take from. From slouching towards Bethlehem. This is the

1:27:48 big lesson I take from it.

1:27:52 Never think that it can't happen here. Allow yourself to

1:27:56 go into that space, whether it's in your

1:28:00 family, in your. In your neighborhood, in your community.

1:28:03 Never think that an illness

1:28:07 can't come along and unravel the core of your family. Or financial

1:28:11 exploit exploitation, but financial strife or financial

1:28:15 something disaster can't come along and unravel your family. We saw a little bit of

1:28:18 this with COVID Never think that

1:28:22 a natural disaster can't occur, like a flood or an earthquake or a fire or

1:28:26 something like that, and unravel the core. Never think that it can't

1:28:30 happen. Because when you think it can't happen, you don't plan. And when you don't

1:28:34 plan, then you are surprised when the unraveling

1:28:38 begins. Like the very good people who

1:28:42 read Didion's essay initially in 1967, 68,

1:28:48 when they read that, I'm sure they thought, those crazy hippies, that's

1:28:52 just weirdness. That's just on tv, that's over there. That's not in my town,

1:28:55 that's not in the place that I live. It can't happen here.

1:29:01 Well, yeah, it can. And

1:29:05 it did. And it did. You know,

1:29:08 and the unraveling is always a gradual thing.

1:29:12 Thing. That's where. Where one. One thread gets pulled here

1:29:16 and another thread gets pulled there, and everything seems to be disconnected. And that's the

1:29:20 other thing you said to Didian. Like, she couldn't connect the threads. She couldn't figure

1:29:23 out how it all came together. She could

1:29:27 describe the threads unraveling, but she couldn't figure out how all the threads came together.

1:29:31 And to your point about tradition and grounding, I think if she had a grounding

1:29:35 in religion, she would have had a better idea of how those threads came together

1:29:38 together. But even just grounding in a,

1:29:41 in a secular culture that continued to give nods to religion

1:29:47 would have been enough. It was more than enough for many people.

1:29:51 And yet. And yet. And yet

1:29:56 now we live on the other side of this. Right. And so I want to

1:29:59 sort of bring us home with this. We live on the other side of unraveling,

1:30:02 live on the other side of chaos.

1:30:06 I think the question for our time, and this is why the, the. This year

1:30:09 on the show we've really been focused on what I call a restoration project.

1:30:14 How do we restore, how do we rebuild a center?

1:30:18 Now I have an idea that centers, multiple centers actually are

1:30:21 being rebuilt in a lot of different places, some

1:30:25 online, some in real life. Very little overlap because

1:30:29 we've got a fragmented communication and media culture now

1:30:32 and there's no mass culture anymore that just doesn't exist.

1:30:36 And so, but people are all seeing the

1:30:40 same thing and they're all saying, how do we rebuild? How do we rebuild,

1:30:44 how to rebuild? And I'll use two examples.

1:30:48 I pay attention quite a bit to

1:30:51 ministries that are being run by 30 and

1:30:55 40 year olds. And what I'm seeing is a strong

1:30:59 online element to all these ministries that is then combined with

1:31:03 an in person element and they're doing both of the same thing. And they're building

1:31:06 out a new model that's not the mass

1:31:10 evangelical model that Billy Graham piloted. And then that was taken to

1:31:13 a logical conclusion by, by other folks in the late

1:31:17 90s and is now dying, the big evangelical model.

1:31:22 So I'm seeing that in churches. I'm also seeing in homesteading. I just went to

1:31:26 a homestead conference where like 50,000 people showed up. People

1:31:30 raising their own food and, and

1:31:33 figuring out how to get water out of the ground and recapturing

1:31:37 knowledge that has been lost from the time when,

1:31:41 you know, the vast majority of people in the United States either lived on

1:31:45 farms, worked on farms, or knew somebody who did live or work on a farm.

1:31:48 Farm. Right in their own generational time, they could remember that. And now we're

1:31:52 pulling that back. And again, that's another center that's being built out.

1:31:56 We're having another center being built out in the technology

1:32:00 space that is both anti AI and pro AI.

1:32:04 And that that whole tussle is going on right now and the centers are being

1:32:08 built out there. But the thing is,

1:32:12 because it's not happening at mass, everybody can't see it. And so when I

1:32:15 tell people, people about, I say I see centers being

1:32:19 rebuilt, people stare at me like I'm crazy because they're not seeing that in their

1:32:23 algorithm. They're not seeing that when they do scroll, they're not seeing that

1:32:27 when they go out to look at or deal with folks in real life.

1:32:31 So I guess the question is we round the corner is

1:32:35 how do we, how do we rebuild the center? How do we do that in

1:32:39 our own communities and our neighborhoods and move that out in concentric circles. I think

1:32:43 you're part of that. That's why I'm asking you this question. I think you're building

1:32:45 a center as well. I think you're building a center for masculinity and for

1:32:49 masculine men and for sovereign men. I think you're building out this

1:32:52 center and I think you're doing it with a combination of, in real life

1:32:56 and online and you're putting it together and you're letting it grow and grow

1:33:00 and grow and grow and grow. But it's one center among many centers

1:33:04 that are being built out versus just a common center that

1:33:07 everybody can agree on because that's now dead and gone. And we're not going to

1:33:10 get back to that. No, no, I,

1:33:16 I want to see a hundred thousand men like me build

1:33:22 strongly traditional masculine centers

1:33:26 and communities. Because of a hundred thousand men,

1:33:31 build 10,000

1:33:37 man strong communities. We'll have

1:33:40 a billion men that are part of something like this.

1:33:45 I also think that

1:33:48 we need to very strongly stand up against the

1:33:52 so called progressive

1:33:56 movement globally because there's nothing

1:34:00 progressive about it. It's designed to destroy the traditional

1:34:03 order and they don't care if they burn it all to the

1:34:07 ground as long as they get to rule over the ashes. It's

1:34:11 my opinion that

1:34:15 one person at a time, my

1:34:19 job on a day to day basis is to persuade people and

1:34:23 convince them that socialism and progressivism

1:34:27 are an unadulterated evil

1:34:31 that we all need to stand against. And honestly, if I

1:34:35 were to, if I were to rewrite the

1:34:38 American Constitution, I would keep it virtually the

1:34:42 same. But there'd be one thing that I'd add in there, that if there is

1:34:46 an ideology whose prime focus is to

1:34:49 overthrow this system, there's no place for that

1:34:53 ideology in this country and it has to go. There's no place

1:34:56 for people who speak of that

1:35:00 and the

1:35:03 educational system, the

1:35:09 media and storytelling need

1:35:13 to be in the hands of people that love America and believe in

1:35:17 freedom. The fact that we allowed over

1:35:21 a course, course of decades, an ideology

1:35:25 that is hostile to the very idea of Americanism to overtake these

1:35:28 institutions and march through them is a big reason

1:35:32 that traditional America

1:35:36 collapsed. And I think Donald

1:35:39 Trump's election and all these

1:35:42 factors, all these centers that you're talking about, Hassan, that are coming

1:35:46 up in masculinity, in, in

1:35:50 ministry, in online

1:35:55 folks that are speaking about what matters, people

1:35:59 like Charlie Kirk and Benny Johnson and so forth

1:36:03 are as a result of

1:36:06 one person standing up and saying, enough.

1:36:11 I don't like what America's become, so I'm going to give up

1:36:14 my very cushy, comfortable life

1:36:18 to step forward as America's leader and turn this around. And that's.

1:36:21 That's Donald Trump. Because if you think about Donald Trump,

1:36:26 there was really no reason this man needed to become President of the United

1:36:29 States. He had a brilliant life and a brilliant

1:36:33 career. If Donald Trump never got into

1:36:37 politics and just rode off into the

1:36:41 sunset as one of the world's great marketers

1:36:44 and real estate tycoons, he would have still

1:36:48 lived an incredibly consequential life. But what

1:36:52 he saw bothered him, and he decided to give all that up to

1:36:55 step forward and do something about it. And I don't know

1:36:59 if the American people

1:37:03 really understand what a massive act of love this

1:37:07 was on his part.

1:37:11 And it. It's my belief that Donald Trump

1:37:15 winning his second term is given the

1:37:19 world a chance to overthrow all this evil.

1:37:24 And people like you who have your podcast and talk about the great

1:37:28 books, you're part of the center too, man. You're part

1:37:32 of having real discussions and forcing people to think.

1:37:37 Look, I would have never picked up a Joan Didion book if you hadn't said,

1:37:41 I want to talk about this on the show. She's nobody I would remotely consider

1:37:45 reading because her politics are anathema to me.

1:37:49 But I said, okay, let's go for it. And I'm glad I read it. I

1:37:52 learned a lot. I actually have some sympathy for this woman after reading this book.

1:37:57 I still don't agree with her political philosophy, but I

1:38:01 learned a lot from her about

1:38:05 what led that generation

1:38:10 to go over the cliff and leave behind the

1:38:14 beautiful life that they had for

1:38:18 a fake narrative that's basically

1:38:23 caused chaos not just for America, but

1:38:27 across the entire globe. And this book

1:38:31 helped me see that a little more clearly. And for that, I'm grateful and for

1:38:33 the opportunity to have a conversation with a brilliant man like Jason. So else.

1:38:38 And that's my mic drop, brother.

1:38:42 Thank you, Nikki, for coming on the show today. What are all the

1:38:46 places where we can connect with you? Of course, we'll have links to

1:38:50 everywhere where you are in the show notes, but where could folks get a hold

1:38:53 of you? Where are all the places where. Where we can connect with. With Nikki

1:38:56 Ballou. I'm the only Nikki Ballou on planet Earth. So if you go on

1:39:00 social media and you type in N I, C, K, Y, B, I L L

1:39:03 O U. You'll find me and nobody else. So try that

1:39:07 if you enjoy reading. I've got a

1:39:11 few books that I've published on Amazon. Again, go to Amazon and type in Nikki

1:39:15 Ballou. I've been, in addition to this show on about a thousand other

1:39:18 shows, and I have two shows of my own, the Thought Leader

1:39:22 Revolution and the Sovereign Man Podcast. You've been on

1:39:25 one show, you're about to come on the second. And if you're a business

1:39:29 owner and one of the things right now in your

1:39:33 world is that you're really trying to figure out

1:39:36 how to make the difference you were born to make,

1:39:41 I'll tell you what one of my clients said that I should be saying

1:39:45 about me and the work that I do. I look for good humans

1:39:50 that at some level are getting in their own way. They

1:39:54 may not even understand why, and they're trying to figure

1:39:57 it out up here, but the mission they have is

1:40:01 in their heart. And what I do for good people

1:40:05 like that who are up here is I get them out of here, I get

1:40:08 them into their hearts and I point them and move them forward like

1:40:12 a missile toward their mission. So if that's you, go to my

1:40:16 website, ercleacademy.com forward/appointment, jump on my calendar.

1:40:19 I'll give you 45 minutes of my time free of charge.

1:40:23 We can talk about anything you like. And that's it.

1:40:27 Beautiful. We will have links to all of

1:40:31 those places where you can get a hold of Iggy Blue

1:40:34 and you can get a hold of Circle Academy and become a part of everything

1:40:39 that. That he is, that he is building between his

1:40:42 podcasts, his books, and the center

1:40:46 that he is, he is rebuilding. Just in time

1:40:50 for the next historical spring.

1:40:55 I'd like to thank Nikki for coming on the podcast today. And with that, well,

1:41:00 ladies and gentlemen, we're.