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

0:07 Hello, my name is Jesan Sorrells, and this is the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books podcast, episode number 191. Opening with a brief selection from our book today, and I quote, this book is called Slouching Towards Bethlehem because for several years now certain lines from the Yeats poem, which appear two pages back, have reverberated in my inner ear as if they were surgically implanted there. The widening gyre, the falcon which does not hear, the falconer, the gaze blank and pitiless as the sun.

0:45 Those have been my points of reference, the only images against which much of what I was seeing and hearing and thinking seemed to make any pattern. Slouching Towards Bethlehem is also the title of one piece in the book, and that piece, which derived from some time spent in the Haight Ashbury district of San Francisco, was for me both the most imperative of all these pieces to write and the only one that made me despondent after it was printed. It was the first time I had dealt directly and flatly with the evidence of atomization, the proof that things fall apart.

1:19 I went to San Francisco because I had not been able to work in some months and had been paralyzed by the conviction that writing was an irrelevant act, that the world, as I had understood it, no longer existed. And we're going to skip down a little bit and I'm going to pick up this one. I suppose almost everyone who writes is afflicted some of the time by the suspicion that nobody out there is listening. But it seemed to me then, perhaps because the piece was important to me, that I had never gotten a feedback so universally beside the point that I'm going to flip down a little bit further and I'm going to go to this.

1:56 I was in fact as sick as I have ever been when I was riding slouching towards Bethlehem. The pain kept me awake at night. And so for 20 and 21 hours a day I drank gin and hot water to blunt the pain and took Dexatrin to blunt the gin and wrote the piece of I would like to tell you, I would like you to believe that I kept working out of some real professionalism to meet the deadline. But that would not be entirely true. I did have a deadline, but it was also a troubled time, and working did to the trouble what Jen did to the pain.

2:26 What else is there to tell? I am bad at interviewing people. I avoid situations in which I have to talk to anyone's press agent. This precludes doing pieces on most actors, a bonus in itself. I do not like to make telephone calls and would not like to count the mornings I have sat on some Best Western motel bed somewhere and tried to force myself to put through the call to the district to the Assistant district attorney. My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests.

3:02 And it always does. That is one last thing to remember. Writers are always selling somebody out.

3:21 Here's on my own thoughts on this before I introduce my guest today. My special guest today, his first time on the show. Betraying a person's confidence to gain personal advantage, and yet not being sure why you were doing it and what end it serves is where the beginning of the erosion of trust starts. And once trust in a high trust society bound by traditions, family bonds and the surety of community is riven by such erosion, the beginning of social chaos is not far behind. But a society that is eroding a trust can survive chaos, adapt to it, and emerge on the other side with a different sort of trust schema altogether together by individuals just refusing to play the game of selling out their principles, their values or their relationships.

4:09 It's a lot of psychological, moral and emotional weight for individuals to carry during times of chaos, when it seems as though every bond around them is fraying, tearing and breaking. But it's only the act of buying in, not opting out, that works to preserve not what was in the past, but the circumstances, fragile though they may be, for a different and potentially far better future. Otherwise, the Hobbesian war of all against all breaks out and then nothing worth preserving remains. And it's monstrously difficult to cobble together a high trust society again out of nothing.

4:53 Today on the show, we are going to take a second crack at this book that launched our author into public consciousness as a literary talent in the early 1960s, documenting the coming unraveling of American culture, an unraveling that eventually would lead to the cultural chaos we in 2026 are just beginning to exit at the end of our fourth turning. Today on the show, we are going to pull cautions for leaders around communication, around negotiation, around tradition, around family, around what's worth preserving, and around how you behave during an unraveling.

5:34 We're going to pull these cautions for leaders from our book today. Slouching towards Bethlehem by the late great Joan Didion leaders, there are four patterns in an 80 year historical cycle and in the fall of an unraveling period, no One can really figure out what the heck is going on.

6:03 And joining us on our journey today is my special guest, first time on the show, Nikki Ballou. Nikki is the host of the Thought Leader Revolution podcast and he works with and coaches consultants. He works with coaches consultants and, and entrepreneurs to help them scale their revenue. He is also the world's expert on podcast guesting. He, he actually reached out to me via, via Matchmaker FM and which is where I sometimes, sometimes get guests from. That's some deep inside baseball for those of you who are listening.

6:37 And he reached out to me and we started talking and he was really excited about the concept of the show. So I challenged him to, to take a crack at this book which he'd never read before. And he went out, he bought the book, he read it, he had some interesting insights for me in our pre production call and he has agreed to join us today to have a much longer and probably a lot deeper conversation here. Moving into Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion. Welcome to the show, Nikki, how are you doing today?

7:07 Hey, Sal, my brother, thanks for having me on the show, man. It's truly an honor to be here. So tell us a little bit about yourself. I always like to do that at the beginning because folks don't, don't know you, they don't know what your interests are. So tell us a little bit about yourself.

7:29 You know, I have a standard introduction of myself that I give when I come on shows and I'm not going to give that today because I want to talk about me as a lover of books. Okay? Okay.

7:47 So I'm originally an immigrant from the Middle East. I'm a Christian from Iran. And growing up in Iran, my parents

8:00 enrolled me and my brothers in the American Community School in Tehran. So I went and was schooled primarily in English. We also had to take Farsi there as well. And I had a number of teachers that really were fabulous. One was Ms. Sally Flaherty who just passed, I think late last year, God rest her soul. And she

8:27 introduced me to the idea of loving reading books. And by the time I was eight or nine years old, I was reading every day for fun. And I would read stories, I would read novels, and I would read history. And by the time I was 11, I read my first adult level book, which, which was the Eagle has Landed by Jack Higgins, one of the great thriller novels of all time. It was published originally in 1974. And then I read the Crash of 79, a whole bunch of other books like that. And I was Just hooked and saw my brother.

9:24 I track the books that I read and I've been using a website called goodreads.com Now I started using goodreads.com in 2015, but something got messed up in my account and they lost nine or nine or ten years of my, of my books that I'd been tracking. But I can tell you this, that over a ten year period I, I read over a thousand physical paper books. And for the last seven straight years, I've never read under 103 books. And my best year was last year when I read 159 books. I love books, I adore books.

10:14 I think books ennoble the soul and I think books are just a darn good time. So that is my story as a reader. Books are, and this is one of the reasons why I do this show. Books are everything that you've mentioned. They are also a really, really awesome way. They're the best way. We've actually found the best technology I think humanity has found to smuggle ideas across generations. And I like to write that down. That is so well said. Smuggle ideas across generations. Okay, I gotta. Either books are the best way to smuggle ideas.

10:58 Dude, that's genius, man. Well, when you look at it, even books, like, even books that don't appear to have much weight to them, right? So we've read all kinds of books on this show. We've read everything from the Homers, the odyssey translated by T.E. shaw, Lawrence of Arabia, he translated his version of the Odyssey. We read that on the show all the way to. Oh gosh. I mean, we've read Crime and Punishment, right? The first four chapters 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 Moo by Doreen Cronin. A cardboard, not a cardboard, but a small book for, for kids. I actually brought my son on and, and we talked a little bit about Click Clack Moon. This is back when he was probably 6 or 7. Because that book is so subversive about leadership and about what it actually means to like struggle and to build a team. And then what happens when that doesn't work? Books are a way to smuggle ideas, like I said, across generations, across time.

12:10 So when I pick up Click Clack Moo with my six year old, I can also hold on to this physical book, this physical thing in the world and then I can hand this off to, you know, my kids when they have kids, or I can hand this off to, to My, to my grandkids directly. And I can smuggle that idea about leadership directly into them. And it's, it's, it's a miracle that we even came up with this technology. 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 the physical book in and of itself will ever fully go away. I think it's about to transform. I think it's about to transmogrify into, into something else because it's just, it's too good a technology to kill it. It is. And I also think that there's going to be a large cohort of the younger generation that is going to hit 30, 35 and 40 and is going to start discovering the value of paper books. Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, I agree with that.

13:20 Well, and we're already starting to see this move in the younger generation, the gen zers, the zoomers, such as they are sometimes called. And they like old things. They like, well, what they perceive as old. Right. Pre Internet things. Right. Pre social media, pre digital things. And so that's one of the reasons why I do this show, because I can introduce a book. I can have a conversation with somebody who's really interesting about that book and about the ideas in it. Yes. For leaders, obviously, but then for everybody.

13:54 Right. Like, it's amazing when you go on my YouTube channel, the number of comments I have just on a couple of books that I did last year are just phenomenal for people who actually, you know, when are like, they actually say to me, I'm going to go out and buy this physical book. Or I, or I've had this, I've had this physical book for years. I've never heard anybody talk about it until, until you, you brought it up, you brought it up on the show. So it allows us to make connections again across time.

14:19 That's just, it's amazingly subversive. Amazingly subversive. Speaking of which, Ms. Didion. So we just covered, we just covered A Book of Common Prayer. That was our last episode. If you haven't had a chance to listen to that, go back and listen to that with Tom Libby. And this follows along with us covering this month, Eudora Welty and the Optimist's Daughter. So go back and listen to that episode as well. These three books kind of go together because they are fundamentally about communication.

14:55 They are fundamentally about communication across time. And the, the, the, the next essay I'd like to pull from to sort of set the next piece of our conversation here. Is from John Wayne, A Love Song. I love this essay. Me too. And, and I want to just pull a couple of different pieces about this and then have a conversation with Nikki, because those of you who don't know Nikki, Nikki hosts his own podcast. And Nikki is very engaged with, with men 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 with Nikki here in just a moment. So from John Wayne, A Love Song. I'm going to quote this from Ms. Didion. In the summer of 1943, I was eight, and my father and mother and small brother and I were at Peterson Field in Colorado Springs. A hot wind blew through that summer blue until it seemed that before August broke, all the dust in Kansas would be in Colorado, would have drifted over the tar paper barracks in the temporary strip and stopped only when it hit Pike's Peak.

15:59 There was not much to do, a summer like that. There was the day they brought in the first B29, an event to remember, but scarcely a vacation program. There was an officers club, but no swimming pool. All the Officers club had of interest was an artificial blue rain behind. Was artificial blue rain behind the bar. The rain interested me a good deal, but I could not spend the summer watching it. And so we went, my brother and I, to the movies. Now that's, that's our. That's our open. And then I'm going to move down.

16:31 As it happened, I. No, I don't want to. I don't want to do that one. So they went to go. They went to go and see a John Wayne movie. And, and she says this, a picture called War of the Wildcats. And then she says this a little later on in the essay. In John Wayne's world, John Wayne was supposed to give the orders. Let's ride, he said, and saddle up. Forward, ho. When a man's got to do. When a man's got to do. Hello there, he said when he first saw the girl in a construction camp or on a train or just standing around on the front porch waiting for somebody to ride up through the tall grass.

17:06 When John Wayne spoke, there was no mistaking his intentions. He had a sexual authority so strong that even a child could perceive it. And in a world we understood early to be characterized by venality and doubt and paralyzing ambiguities. He suggested another world, one which may or may not have existed ever, but in any case existed no more. A place where a man could move free, can make his own code and live by it. A world in which if a man did what he had to do, he could one day take the girl and go riding through the draw and find himself home free.

17:41 Not in a hospital with something going wrong inside, not in a high bed with flowers and drugs and the four smiles, but there at the bend in the bright river, the cottonwoods shining in the early shimmering in the early morning sun. And then I'm gonna go down a little bit further. He talks, she talks about how John Wayne was born Marian Morrison in Winterset, Iowa, the son of a druggist and moved as a child to Lancaster, California, and then played football and then became this actor, right? She says this there a meeting on the old Fox lot with John Ford, one of the several directors who were to sense that into this perfect mold might be poured the inarticulate longings of a nation wondering at just what pass the trail had been lost.

18:33 Damn it, Raul said. Raul Walsh, later, the son of a looked like a man.

18:42 Yeah. Masculine coded communication, Nikki, that's what Joan Didian is talking about in this essay. At the core of it, and the reason why I wanted to talk with you about this today is because a rebellion began in Didian's time against masculine coded communication. 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 other projects, one of the things that I noted in the meeting that I attended on Thursday was how deeply masculine coded the communication was. That was one of the things that just immediately jumped off the page to me, even in how you checked people and how you changed what they were doing, the difference between second person and first person in terms of ownership and accountability and attempting to get people to engage in accountability.

19:36 And I was struck in my observation, particularly considering that I was just, just gone through Satchi towards Bethlehem. And we're going through a month of books that are written by women. Women and men communicate radically different. And the coding that's underneath our language is so fundamentally different, but we don't notice the difference until someone comes along who is communicating in totally the opposite direction and sort of jars us out of our assumptions, Right? And so

20:13 there's currently in America an attempt to reassert masculine coded communication. And I think that that's part of the reason why Donald Trump is so popular. I think it's one of the unstated reasons why he's popular. He's a return to masculine coded communication. It's also the reason why he's genuinely hated by people who genuinely hate him. And they don't know why. They'll assign it to a political thing or they'll sign it to a policy thing, but in reality, it's not about policy and it's not about politics.

20:40 In reality, it is about how he communicates the language he chooses to use, because he could do the exact same policies, have the exact same politics, and if he were Mitt Romney, no one would have any problems. But Mitt Romney's communication is coded much more feminine than Donald Trump's is, even though they are both men and they come from the same generation, which is also very interesting to me. Now, the question here is for Nikki and I wanted to tee this up for you. Sure. What, what can we learn about masculine communication from John Wayne?

21:18 A Love Story by Joan Didian? What can we learn from that chapter?

21:25 It's interesting. They, some of the pieces that you read from showed me that Joan has a bit of a love hate relationship with John Wayne, right? She does? Oh, yeah, for sure. I mean, she can't help loving him because she was a woman and at the time she wrote this, she was a very young woman. She was in her late 20s or early 30s, and still in the bloom of her feminine essence, her hormones and whatnot. And John Wayne, even at that point in time, when he was in his 60s and not what he used to be when he was much younger, but was still a masculine man.

22:07 And the feminine essence cannot but help be drawn to and attracted to a masculine essence in a very masculine man like John Wayne. And it's obvious she's trying not to like him, but she can't help herself. She can't help herself. She just can't. It's, it's, you know, she's the kind of woman who'd walk up to him and say, I hate your guts, and then kiss him passionately and rip his clothes off. And, you know, that's, that's the sense that I got from her writing about John Wayne and the piece where you talked about that he suggested this other world that may or may not have existed.

22:44 Well, of course it existed. It still existed at the time that she wrote about it. And outside of the west, it existed everywhere in the world. And the kind of man that John Wayne portrayed himself as in the movies that he made was that man who made his own code and lived by it. And what was incredible about the United States of America, and in my opinion still is incredible about the United States of America, is that a free society like The United States gives men an opportunity to define that code and to live by it if they so choose.

23:23 What made John Wayne so popular is because Americans, and really men and women all over the world were drawn to this. They want that kind of man to be an exemplar in the world. The kind of man that is black and white in his view of things. The kind of man that believes in a code, that defines a code and lives by it. The kind of man that inspires the rest of us to get out of our own doldrums and strongly move forward in life, living our best lives because we've identified a code by which we live our life.

24:08 The reason why the last 60 odd years have been hard for Western civilization as a whole is because society as a whole and the culture as a whole doesn't cotton to that anymore. John Wayne is a demonstration of a bygone and better era for most men. And those of us that are lucky enough to have known who he is, to have seen his movies and watched his interviews, understand this. And Joan Didion at some level understands this. But unfortunately, Joan came of age in an era where young women were starting to be told that, hey, there's a patriarchy out there and you don't have to listen to men and Kumbaya, get out there and seek your own freedom, burn your bra and all that stuff.

25:00 And that was a very beguiling, a false message that a lot of those women were fed and bought into. But I'm telling you right now, in 2026,

25:14 every woman I know who's over the age of 50 who was brought up with that message is either publicly or privately starting to doubt it very strongly. And I think Joan Didion didn't have an opportunity to doubt it intellectually because all the rest of this book is written from the point of view of a 60s feminist, right, the patriarchy as she defined it. But in this particular essay, there's a part of her essence that's rebelling against her rebellion. And that's what I noticed. So this is why I say this book is part of.

25:57 It's the documenting of the beginning of the unraveling of American culture. Right. So I'm a big fan of Strauss and Howe's generational theory of like 80 years seculum cycles, right. And. And Didian wrote and spent the majority of her writing career and wrote her most interesting books and essays and contributions to the culture during that unraveling time that started, quite frankly, if we want to be really blunt about it, it started quite frankly, with the assassination of John F. Kennedy. That's when the unraveling really started.

26:37 And the unraveling ended with September 11th. That's the, that's the, that's the framework that, that the. And, and that's about a 25 year. That's about 25 year unraveling cycle that occurred there. And then everything that's been post September 11th, I would say, up to January. January, sorry, July of 2024. And the Assembly, Pennsylvania. Yeah. Yep. That was chaos. That's the chaos. That's the winter of chaos that always comes after the fall of an unraveling. Gideon was born in a secular spring coming out of World War II.

27:15 Right. A place of calm, a place of rebirth, a place of renewal, and moved very much into like was called a 68, the Summer of Love. Right. And so she is a young woman, to your point. And most young people at that time, they never thought the summer would ever end, which is why. And I don't get into like the generational sniping back and forth thing on this podcast because I don't think that's useful. However, I will say this. This is why boomers are confused at the end of their lives overall as a generation by what's happening now, because three generations went through unraveling and chaos.

27:50 I'm part of the Gen X generation. We were knee. We've been knee deep in chaos ever since late time out of mind. Yeah, exactly. It's just, it's been defined by chaos. And one of the points I make on this show is we have to rebuild for the next secular spring, which is coming up. We're coming into a spring cycle and we have to look back at things like this and go, what is worthwhile that we can pull forth from this? And so that's why this, this mem. This, this sort of essay fascinates me because. Well, for a couple of reasons.

28:23 One, I think we will have a return to, to the sort of. Maybe not in the same way, but a return to the sort of John Wayne coded communication style. I do think we are going to. We're going to do that. I think it's gonna be the younger generation that's going to guide us in that direction because they want that, they want that assuredness, that black and white, that, to your point, they do that, that there's a definite right, there's a definite wrong, there's a definite answer. But it's going to be really hard to kind of get that, that sort of personality or that sort of communication launch because we have something that Didyon didn't have in her time.

28:55 We've got fragmentation with the Internet, and we've got fragmentation with multiple channels and multiple voices. So it's really hard to push through, but it can be done. And then the other thing that I see happening is this is in our business and among our leaders, we're seeing this sort of transformation post Covid where

29:19 not to put too fine a point on it, and I'll just go for this. The feminine coded language hit a wall, as it always does in a crisis, because feminine coded language is about social status and keeping everybody calm and keeping everybody cohesive and making sure everybody gets along. And there's nothing wrong with that. You want to have that. That's how you build. That's how you build a town in the Old West. That's how you build a society and a culture. But during a time of, of, of. Of chaos and strife, masculine coded communication is what becomes dominant at that moment.

29:54 And that's why I go back to Trump is the highest example of this. But that's why his reelection campaign worked, because it was the strongest example of signal to noise ratio in terms of communication. Whether to your point about Didion, whether you wanted to kiss him or slap him, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. You know, and I don't know how many folks are actually going to. How many leaders are actually picking up on this example and seeing it and understanding what they're seeing.

30:28 And I think this essay gives you a sort of framework to understand what you're seeing, not to repeat it maybe necessarily in your own business or your own family, your own community, maybe you might want to take a different tact, but you are going to want to use this as a frame. Yeah, just another thought that I have there. No, it's a good thought. And people who weren't alive when John Wayne was alive just don't understand truly how revered and popular this man was across the globe. Across. This man is quite possibly the biggest celebrity of all time, right?

31:12 Quite possibly. I mean, there's a few people that you can say, well, what about them? But not many. Not many. I mean, I don't know. Michael. Michael Jackson might have Michael Jackson, Michael Jordan, maybe Elvis. Look, but they did all that's true. But let me say this about John Wayne. There was a 25 consecutive year period where John Wayne was top 10 box office in Hollywood, right? Top 10. Nobody else has ever come close to achieving that. Nobody. Nobody. Well, okay, Michael, Mike. Michael Jackson had a couple of massive albums, but there were a couple of massive albums.

31:54 His entire career wasn't the John Wayne's level. And I love Michael Jackson. Michael Jordan, you know, one of the goats in professional basketball in the 90s, certainly was at that level. In the Bulls run for that one decade. John Wayne was 25 years. Here's another thing I want to tell you. There was an annual poll taken of the most popular actor in America starting in the early 60s. Okay. Who do you think won that poll every year for 55 straight years? Oh, John. John Wayne. Yeah. Dude. He died in 1979.

32:33 The last year where he was still the number one actor in the United States was 2006. 2006, 27 years after his death, the number one actor.

32:50 People don't understand how huge he was. Why was he such a big celebrity? Why? There was something about the type of man he portrayed on the screen that instantly, instantly connected with the essence and soul of men and women around the globe. John Wayne was famously a Republican. You know this, right? Famously a Republican. Yes. Jimmy Carter, 39th President, United States. Famously a Democrat. Famously a Democrat. When he was asked, who would you like to invite to your inauguration? The only name he said, he said, whoever you want.

33:40 John Wayne's got to be there. He said, I want John Wayne at my inauguration. I don't care what it takes. I know he's a Republican. He's got to be there. Doesn't matter. Doesn't matter. He's got to be there. He's got to be there. Look, I, I. Okay, so look, I'll just lay it all on the table. When I was younger, I was not a massive fan of John Wayne. I was much more of a fan of Clint Eastwood. Good, Bad and the Ugly High Plains Drifter. All that. Right. You know, and over the course of time, I've appreciated John Wayne more.

34:15 As a matter of fact, I watched a movie a couple weeks ago, John Wayne movie on, on hbo. Tall in this. Well, not on hbo. Tcm. Tall in the Saddle. I never even heard of this movie before, Right? And I think it's from like 1948, 49, somewhere around there. And it's John Wayne doing John Wayne things. He's probably in his, like, mid-30s. And there's a, there's a, there's a sequence in the movie, right, where he gets into this fist fight with this other, with this other guy. And the other guy, I believe, played a role in, in the Quiet Man.

34:56 I recognized him from the Quiet Man. I can't remember this, this actor. Great movie. I love the Quiet Man. Great movie. I love the Quiet Man. Yeah. And. And they both have a. They. I mean, they have a real donnybrook. Like, they're tearing up the room and they're getting after it. And Wayne was what, 64250? He was a big boy. He was a big boy. He's a big boy. And if John Wayne hit you like you were going to know it. You're going. You're going to get your. Your bell rung, right? Yeah. And that guy didn't.

35:23 He did not back down to John Wayne. It's like, okay, we're gonna have ourselves a Donny Brook. Let's have ourselves a donnybrook. Let's go ahead. And the, The. The whole dynamic of that, of that one, that fight, and they did cut it in two different angles. It was. Was really well done. At the end of the fight, the. The skinny, scrawny old man walks in and basically he says to. To the guy who was fighting John Wayne, he says, so, were you guys? Are you guys all right in here? Like, what's going on?

35:50 He's like. And the guy says, and this is again, masculine coded communication. He doesn't say, I have a fight. He didn't say, we're having a fight. He didn't say any of the things that, like, you would hear out of a modern. If this is in a modern film, you didn't hear say any of that. He just goes, oh, no, we're fine. We're just rearranging the furniture in the room. Yeah, that's awesome. That's a John Wayne line, man. Classic, classic line. And that is the core. And it struck me when I was watching the movie, and it's in black and white, of course, and it struck me when I was watching this movie that to her point about John Ford, directors were understanding.

36:28 John Ford understood this more so than most directors. Stagecoach, all the way through his career, that. The Searchers, man. The best Searchers. Oh, my top five movie of all time, in my opinion. The last scene of the Searchers with the door closing and he just walks away. Ridiculous. Genius. Genius. The only. Probably, the only last scene better is at the end of Godfather. Like, probably. Like, that's, you know, and I'm a huge cinephile guy. Everybody knows who listens to the show. I'm a huge movie guy, huge movie guy.

36:57 But Ford understood that America needed myths. And he saw in John Wayne a container he could pour the myth in. But he also saw a person who could carry that Myth. And in our time coming up, we're going to need people that can have myths poured into them that they can carry. And I don't know if we've made enough strong men to be able to carry those myths. Well, interesting you should say that. I believe that today's John Ford is a man by the name of Dana White. And I believe that Dana White is in the myth making business as well, through his properties, the ufc.

37:45 The, the, the slap. I forget the name of the slap company and the boxing thing that he's done, but in particular, the UFC and these fighters and the way that he builds these myths are less relevant and important as an individual than the whole concept of the Ultimate Fighting Championship of strongmen slapping each other in boxing. But he's saying that there is still a powerful place in our world for men who live by a code and are willing to go out there and use their wits and their fists to get it.

38:27 And if you look at, if you look at a week and a half ago, there was a fight, UFC fight. And this UFC fight was between a guy named Hamza Chamayev, who's a Dagistani based fighter, undefeated, and an American fighter by the name of Sha Strickland, who was not undefeated and was a massive underdog. And in that fight, Mr. Strickland not only didn't lose, he won. He beat this guy. He beat him to the point where I saw 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. That his face is messed up for at least three months based on how he got hit. And I saw Strickland got hit, and, you know, he had a broken nose, but he wasn't nearly as badly disfigured as his opponent, which is, I guess, why he won the fight. But if you look at it, the whole UFC narrative is a myth making narrative. And Dana White has made himself a gazillion dollars by creating the myth of the strong man through the UFC fight. And when it's an American man beating a foreigner, and in this case, a Christian beating a Muslim, which is part of, you know, a subtle, a subtle subtext of the narrative, it's something that really, really resonates with a lot of people.

39:54 Well, those Dagestani guys, I could tell you as a, as a jiu jitsu guy, those Dagestani guys train like nobody's business. They aren't no slouches. They're not. They, they ain't no slouches. And Sean Strickland, he's a unicorn, man. He's a unit. Yeah, exactly. He's. He's that classic sort of Boston Southie, working class, blue collar. I'm gonna run my mouth, you know, and you're. Does he ever. Eh. Oh, my God. And you're going to take it or leave it, you know, however it is. And the thing is, he can back up running his mouth by just walloping you or grounding and pounding you.

40:35 Right. And it's interesting that you mentioned Dana White. I would not have thought. I would have not have poured Dana White into that. Or not poured. I would not have. I would not have made that analysis or that align between Dana White 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 the rise of ufc. Like, how that has sort of, like, things have sort of flipped kind of in the similar way where baseball is no longer as popular a sport in the United States as football currently is. And it's one of those cultural things that just never gets commented on. It just sort of happens. And the flow of it is just hap. Not just happening. But, I mean, it's being guided by Dana White and others. But I remember UFC 1. 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 with this jiu jitsu thing. We all better figure this out. We better go figure this out. And of course, over the last 30 years, they've been able to figure it out, both the men and the women. But ufc, I remember back in the early days was associated with gladiatorial combat. It was associated with cage fighting. And of course, over time, it has become professionalized. And so it's interesting that you would say that. That Dana is sort of, sort of molding that myth because he's had time to do it, you know?

41:56 Yes, definitely in a. Definitely in a. In a. In a masculine, coded kind of way. So. Yep. Yeah, I. I not remembered the Sean Strickland fight until. Until you just mentioned it. Yeah. It was a hell of a fight. I really enjoyed that fight. It was fun to watch. And when. When Hamza came out like a bat out of hell in the first round, that's. That's been his strategy. That's how he's won all those 15 fights. He comes out like a bat out of hell, and most people are just overwhelmed by him. But Joe Rogan said before the fight that this is what Hamza's going to do.

42:33 He's going to come out like a bat out of how he's going to come at Sean, he said, and he's not going to be able to keep him down. Can't keep Sean down. So. And he's. And he's going to get tired. And. And he also said Sean's going to get tired, but Sean's cardio is 30 times as strong as Hamzat's. So when Hamza's tired, Sean's like, that's my second win. Now I'm going to. Now I'm going to hammer you. And he said, because it was everybody who said, oh, Hamzat's going to kill him. And he said, I don't know about that, guys.

43:00 You know, this isn't as much of a slam dunk as you think it is. And Sean, he also said, Sean Strickland's lost some fights, but he also beat the greatest middleweight of all time, Israel Adesanya. Right again with this unorthodox thing that Izzy couldn't figure out is he couldn't figure out how to do it. So. But the beauty of Sean Strickland is Dana White has understood making a myth out of this man. And how did he do it? First of all, he encouraged him to run his mouth. He encouraged him to run his mouth.

43:31 In fact, he told him, the more you run your mouth, the better. And when Sean was in Toronto, I saw him fight Dracus du Plessis. We, we got tickets. We went to see that fight. It was a lot of fun with my two sons.

43:45 At the end of that fight, you know, before the fight, Sean just hammered some of Toronto's leftist media. He just hammered him. He said, people like you are a disease. And, and he looked around in the room, he said, look at this guy that's the enemy. Because that. The guy was making some pro trans comments or something like that. And then they came back to J. How could you allow him to do that? You have an obligation. And he said, I have an obligation to tell a grown man how to think. Haven't you ever heard of free speech?

44:16 I'm not going to tell him how to think. Sean. Sean. And there's myth making in all of this. Dana White does those press conferences and says what he says because he wants a certain narrative out there, and that narrative is about building certain fighters and certain fights up to get more excitement. He realizes that young men in particular are hungry for masculine avatars that they can Latch onto and say, I want to be like that guy. I want to be like that guy. He got it. And that's what helped him turn UFC into a multi, multi, multi billion dollar brand.

44:53 UFC is going to take over boxing. You watch this new boxing outfit he's brought. He's putting in the same type of UFC myth making strategies into building these boxers up. Boxing is going to be a thing again. And this slap thing. Who the hell thought slapping people would be a spectator sport? Dude, it is a huge spectator sport. Huge. It's 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 thought, are you kidding me? And then I went on to. I went on to something else. I was like, I gotta. I can't, I can't. The things. At least once a day, the Internet asks me to look at something and I'm like, I 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 nutty, man. They are no joke. That's like standing for a. For a right hook. That's like standing in place to take a right hook. I mean, it's crazy, man. I've zero interest in any of that, thank you very much. I'd rather slip the right hook and. Yeah, no, we're done with that. But, but you understand what this man is doing? He is a myth maker. He is a myth maker. And, and 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 was looking for heroes and he was going to supply them. Yep. Yep. Let's go back to the book. Back. Let's go. Let's go back to the book. Let's go back to the book. Back to Slouching towards Bethlehem. I want to pick up with. With another idea that, that runs through here in her essay on keeping a notebook. I think this was also very, very relevant. I think there's some relevance here for, for leaders as 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 given to me by my mother with the sensible suggestion that I stop whining and learn to amuse myself by writing down my thoughts. She returned the tablet to me a few years ago. The first entry is an account of a woman who believed herself to be freezing in the Arctic night, only to find when day broke, that she had stumbled onto the Sahara desert where she would die of heat before lunch. I have no idea what turn of a five year old's mind could have prompted so insistently ironic and exotic a story, but it does reveal a certain predilection for the extreme which has dogged me into adult life.

47:26 Perhaps if I were analytically inclined, I would find it a truer story than any I might have told about Donald Johnson's birthday party or the day my cousin Brenda put kitty litter in the aquarium. That's funny. That's funny. It's funny. So the point of my keeping a notebook has never been, nor is it now, to have an accurate factual record of what I have been doing or thinking. That would be a different impulse entirely, an instinct for reality which I sometimes envy but do not possess. At no point have I ever been able to successfully keep a diary.

47:59 My approach to daily life ranges from the grossly negligent to the merely absent. And. And on those few occasions when I have tried dutifully to record a day's events, boredom has so overcome me that the results were are mysterious at best. What is this business about shopping? Typing. Peace. Dinner with E. Depressed. Shopping for what? Typing What? Peace. Who is E? Was this E depressed or was I depressed? Who cares? In fact, I have abandoned altogether that kind of pointless entry. Instead I tell what some would call lies.

48:26 That's simply not true. The members of my family frequently tell me when they come up against my memory of a shared event. The party was not for you. The spider was not a black widow. It wasn't that way at all. Very likely they are right. For not only have I always had trouble distinguishing between what happened and what merely might have happened, but I remain unconvinced that the distinction for my purpose, for my purposes matters. And then I'm going to skip down a little bit. She's going to talk about cracked crab and come her father coming home from Detroit in 1945.

48:57 And I'm going to go to this piece here, how it felt to me. That is getting closer to the truth. About a notebook. I sometimes delude myself about why I keep a notebook. Imagine that some thrifty virtue derives from preserving everything observed. See enough and write it down, I tell myself. And then some morning, when the world seems drained of wonder, someday when I'm only going through the motions of doing what I'm supposed to do, which is right on that bankrupt morning, I was simply open my notebook in there and there will be always all be a forgotten account with accumulated interest paid passage back to the world out there.

49:29 Dialogue overheard in hotels and elevators and at the hat check counter in pavilion. One middle aged man shows his hat check to another and says that's my old football number. Impressions of Bettina Aptheker and Benjamin sonnenberg and Teddy Mr. Alcapuco Stauffer, careful apricus about tennis bums and failed fashion models and Greek shipping heiresses, one of whom taught me significant lesson, a lesson I could have learned from F. Scott Fitzgerald. But perhaps we almost meet the very rich for ourselves by asking when I arrived to interview her in her orchid filled sitting room on the second day of a paralyzing New York blizzard, whether it was snowing outside

50:10 and then I'm going to skip ahead this last piece. It is a difficult point to admit. We are brought up in the ethic that others, any others, all others, are by definition more interesting than ourselves, taught to be diffident just this side of self effacing, only the very young and the very old may recount their dreams at breakfast, dwell upon self interrupt with memories of beach picnics and favorite liberty laundresses and the rainbow trout in a creek near Colorado Springs. The rest of us are expected, rightly to affect absorption in other people's favorite dresses, other people's trout.

50:41 And so we do. But our notebooks give us away. For however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all all we see is always transparently, shamelessly, the implacable eye. Close Quote.

51:06 One of the knocks I have on Didian and I've been I sort of took me a little while to understand it and to sort of really get where my my disjunction is with her. And Nikki already mentioned that she was part of and writing during a time of feminism becoming the dominant driver of communication, or not even communication, ideological and cultural thought in America, particularly for American women and women in the west and women fundamentally globally later on in the 80s and 90s. But that's not my biggest problem with Didion.

51:39 That's a side trek for me or a side side adventure. The biggest thing for me and it took it was revisiting this after a couple of years and really looking at her again. The biggest problem for me was her her level of solipsism, her level of inability to fundamentally and it's not care but to fundamentally determine determine something about her own actions from some form of self awareness. And in that piece on keeping a notebook, she's not keeping a notebook to become more self aware. She's keeping a notebook because she actually doesn't understand what's going on with herself.

52:27 And I think a lot of people are like that. I think a lot of people don't have any idea what's going on with themselves, men and women alike. I agree with you. I think a lot of people struggle with that. Like, it's really, really hard to turn the lens on yourself, but then it's harder even to turn the lens on yourself, see the thing, acknowledge the thing, and make the change. And Didian's classic move was she was an observer, right? She. She was. And that's. We're going to talk about in the essay that that grounds this book Slouching Towards Bethlehem.

53:02 In a moment, she would go, she would observe, she would write down. And she opens the book, of course, like we. We mentioned in the preface or in the introduction, by saying that she believed that writing was no longer a fundamental act that would change society. Right? And that's why she wrote Slouching Towards Bethlehem because she didn't believe her writing had any meaning.

53:24 That's. That's funny that that's a sign of solipsism, that that's what that is. And that's the thing that's been bugging me about her writing. That's my biggest knock against her. And she. Now, look, let me be very clear. She was able to make a career off selling that, because she was that. And she was able to write in a literary way around it.

53:46 But I guess my question is, if you're a leader and you don't understand her leader, if you're anybody and you don't understand yourself, should you bother keeping a notebook? It's like I'm questioning even that advice that I've been giving people. Like, I give. I give people that advice all the time who are leaders. Like, no, go keep a notebook. It'll help you out. But maybe that's bad advice. I don't think it's bad advice. I think that in Joan's case, she didn't use her notebook in a way that would have benefited her in a maximal way 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 myself? I think she'd have got a lot of value out of it because whatever motivated her to write what she wrote said something about her state of mind and the state of her soul at that time. And if she cared enough to examine that, she'd get value from that.

54:46 I think people that are in leadership positions need to ask themselves if they're really leaders or if they just have the title.

54:59 Because if you're really a leader, it's not all about you. It's about the people that you lead. It's about making a difference for others above self. You know, a person who is very self focused, in my opinion, is circling the drain of life, while a person who's a true leader is looking at how their life can enhance the lives of others, be it in the family, be it in their community, in their workplace, be it in society as a whole, and be it for all mankind. So you talk about Joan Didion. Yeah, she's very solipsistic.

55:44 I agree with you.

55:47 I found what she had to say fascinating because I think she is an erudite observer of the human condition. I think her biggest problem is, along with a lot of the gals and guys back in the 60s, she rejected religion. It's obvious she's rejected religion from how she speaks, how she thinks and how she writes. If she had not done that, if she had grounded herself in the religious tradition, I think she'd have become more introspective and I think her writing would have been more powerful and more impactful on more people.

56:26 And I think what people in the last 25 years, in this time of chaos that you talk about in the current term returning Hasan, are looking for, is they're looking for meaning. Have you read and discussed on your show Viktor Frankl's Man's Search For Meaning? Has that been one of the books you guys have gone through? Yes, went back. We went through that in the second season, I believe. Second or third season of the show. Yes. Well, that book to me is a primer for every human being who's looking to understand why the heck they're here and what's going to make their life have mattered.

57:04 And if, if you read that book, a big part of the subtext of that book is that you need a relationship with your higher power, with God. I don't think Viktor Frankl would have survived the Holocaust and his brutal stay in the Nazi concentration camps if he didn't have that. If Viktor Frankl had been a contemporary secular, anti religious psychiatrist and he was transported back to Nazi times and went into that concentration camp. I believe he'd have been dead in six months. 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 he went into, he went into the Gulag during Stalin's purges right after World War II. And while the Gulag was not a Nazi concentration camp, it was still no joke, you know, in Siberia breaking rocks. And one of the things, one of the, one of the things that Solzhenitsyn pointed out was that people who came into the Gulag and were the loudest purveyors of Marxist ideology,

58:32 when they saw what was actually going on in the Gulag, either would do one of two things. They would either crumble or they would double down. And they would double down all the way to the, to the hanging or all the way to the execution or all the way to just being worked to death, whatever the clearing was at the end of the path. And he said the people who came in with religion would either do their time and they would come out one of two ways. Either reaffirmed in their religion, they would double down or they would abandon it because of what they saw.

59:05 Right?

59:08 Now, both Frankl and, and Solzhenitsyn both had those sort of life bending experiences that, to your point, Didion, raised in, not only raised in, but also had her career in mid century America where she didn't suffer that much of anything. I mean, I'm not going to say, I'm not going to compare suffering. I don't think you win anything by playing a suffering Olympics. She had her challenges during her time, right? Including her husband, you know, Gregory Dunn dying. And I read the Year of Magical Thinking and then her daughter dying as well.

59:44 That was a, one terrible. That was just terrible. Right? So again, I'm not going to play the suffering Olympics. But she's a product of her historical time and in her historical era. We talked about this and we covered a book of Common Prayer. She had to go and visit San Salvador and see the Civil War up close and then come back and figure out how to like put all that trauma that she experienced in some sort of boxes so readers of the New Yorker in the New York Times could understand it. We're never going to go there, but Frankel and Solzhenitsyn are on a different par, they're on a different level.

1:00:21 And

1:00:23 the challenge, I'm glad you brought up grounding. The challenge of that grounding, right, is we don't know how firm it is until it's actually tested. And I think that's one of the things we're concerned about in our culture now. We talked about, we talked a lot about John Wayne, but the, the idea of testing you talked about in the ufc, right? That's testing. I know many religious people, many Christian people who I love Desperately and dearly. They have not been tested.

1:01:00 And that's a real challenge for us. You know, have we made life too comfortable? Perhaps. Perhaps life is too comfortable in America. And I know you're. I know you're in Canada, so, you know, I'm gonna say in the West. In the west it is. And that leads to sort of one of my thoughts that I have every time I read Slouching Towards Bethlehem, just in general. I read this collection of essays. It always sort of puts me in mind of the Book of Judges, that. That book at the end of the. Not at the end.

1:01:31 And in the Bible where Israel sort of unravels, right? I mean, they start off with Joshua and everything's fine, and then they just unravel throughout the entire book. And the last line of the Book of Judges is probably the coldest line in the Bible. And there's a lot of cold lines in the Bible, but that is one of the coldest. And it's. It says, in those days, there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes. And that's where the book closes. And it's just insanity. Like, just wild things happen in the Book of Judges.

1:02:05 People getting cut up, people getting. It's. It's a whole thing. Go, go read it. It's wild. And this is what you get without grounding. But this is also what you get when you had grounding and then you floated away from it. So

1:02:23 I guess I say all that to ask this question. How do we know? One of the challenges on this show is how do I make. How do we make this relevant for our lives? Right? How do we make this book. How do we make this content relevant for what we're doing right now? And of course, the first organizational, the first organization that people are ever involved in is family. So we have to start in the home, right? How can. How can listeners, men or women, ground. Ground that religious tradition in their home?

1:02:54 How do they do it if they're not particularly religiously motivated? We've never really talked about this on the show before. I mean, it's been actually. No, we talked about it in City of God. We're talking about Augustine. So it's been a minute, but how do you ground 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 Christian, I'm a Christian. You can start by reading a Bible. If you got kids who read the Bible to your kids, get a children's version of a Bible for your kids that they can read on their own. Go to church, find a good Bible based church.

1:03:37 I think that's a start then. Additionally, you are who you hang around and ask yourself, who are the people that you spend the most time with on a day to day basis? Are you spending time with a bunch of secular types who have a sense of moral relativism about the world? Are you spending time with devout and religious people that seek to live life as godly good humans? These are questions to ask yourself. These are ways in which to live and to love. And the other thing I would tell you is you should read, you should read a lot of books because reading will open your heart, your mind and your soul to truth.

1:04:30 And I believe Christianity in particular is grounded in eternal truth. And if someone takes the time to read widely,

1:04:45 you'll develop a good meter. You know, the most widely read people I know have the best meters of anyone I know. Hey son, you got a really good bullshit meter. In the time that I've known you, I've noticed that about you. And I attribute that to the fact that you take the time to be curious, to read, to absorb ideas, to discuss them with other people like me on a regular basis. That just makes it very difficult for someone to con you or fool you. Well, you also said something to me like the first time that we talked on, on your podcast, actually a little bit before that, right?

1:05:26 You said that I was the first person, not first person, but you said I was one of a handful of people that you knew who think. 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 the questions I would sometimes ask leaders when I was doing more workshops and trainings than I do now is. And it is the penultimate question I think of our moment. How clearly do you think.

1:06:10 And in, in our attempt to move our grounding from religion to therapy, we've got a lot of muddled thinking. Like therapeutic grounding is always going to give you muddled thinking. And we live in a therapy culture. People would rather go talk to a psychotherapist and confess their sins, then go talk to a pastor and confess their sins. People would rather be in a group therapy session with other folks than go and be at church praying. And we could talk about why that is. But the fact of the matter is that these are the decisions that people have made and we're seeing the outcomes of those at a, at a sociocultural, but also all the way down to an individual And a family level.

1:06:54 Right. And that's going to be real hard to pull back. But thinking clearly is. Is the real. Is the real challenge, right? I mean, I think about the level of, like, SSRI use that is in. In the. In American culture alone. I don't know about Canadian culture, but is it an American culture alone to block, you know, taking drugs designed to block or to redirect or to. To ameliorate anxiety, to ameliorate that sense of. Of anxiousness, Right. Where is this anxiousness coming from? Because that's what you're grounding in, right?

1:07:31 So there's an idea in church. You'll appreciate this as a Christian. There's an idea in church and in the. In Christian theology that. That what you worship is your idol, right? Well, if you're. If you're constant and what you focus on is what you worship. So if you're constantly focused on anxiety, if you're constantly focused on the things that are making you anxious, well, that's an idol. And by the way, idols always judge you brutally, and you are never forgiven. When you're judged by an idol, you're never forgiven.

1:07:57 So we have a rampant idolatry, rampant therapeutic culture. This is one of those things that, like, flummoxes me on this show. How do we get people to thinking clearly enough? Forget to go to church. I mean, that may be a step too far. People. How do we get them thinking clearly enough just to write down in a notebook, even if it's solipsistic thinking, but just write down in a notebook? How do we get them to cross that? Read smart people's writing. Read smart people's writing. I mean, look, there's a Canadian professor at Concordia University.

1:08:36 His name is Gad Said. He's quite popular on the Internet. He's written a bunch of books. This is not his first book, but it's the first book that became quite famous. It's called the Parasitic Mind. How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense. I read this book, and I've got my notebook over here, and I take notes on interesting things that I've read in the book. Do the same with the Bible. You know, I'm also reading

1:09:09 Ted Soren's biography of Kennedy. This is a hagiography. There's no question, man. The. The man worships Kennedy. But there's a lot of good things in this book that I've learned from, and when I read it forces me to think. Reading physical paper books forces you to think. Listening to smart podcasts like this one forces you to think. You want your thinking to become clearer? Engage in it. The reason why people aren't able to think properly today is because too many people doom scroll for much of the day.

1:09:52 I got a. I got a challenge for you. Lock your phone away on a Saturday morning. Turn it off. Get an old fashioned watch and wear it. Lock it away for 10 hours once a week and read and be present with people instead. Give that a try.

1:10:19 In our house, we call that a Sabbath. There you go. But we use old school words. You know, we're, we're sort of traditional that way a little bit. No, you're right. Like it's

1:10:33 the. I wrote a blog post about this some months ago, right? Um, it's easy to say stop doom scrolling. It's easy to say read a book. It's easy to say these things. The, the practical hard part is doing it right is, is being encouraged to do it, being encouraged to engage with it, being encouraged to go down the road of it and look, long form podcasts like this can, can get you there. We can show you the way, right? We can show you the way down the path. But to paraphrase from the Matrix, you know, you gotta, you gotta walk the path, right?

1:11:07 You do, you know, you have to walk it. And the ones who walk the path, the, the delta between. Between them and those who don't just, just gets bigger and bigger and bigger. With every, with every book that, that Nikki reads, every book that I cover on this show, it just gets to be larger and larger. You know, I'm currently working my way through Les Miserables, right? And every time I run across something in that book by Victor Hugo, man, like there's so many amazing lines in there. So much amazing like, like thinking, not like, but so much amazing thinking that's involved in that.

1:11:44 You could see how Victor Hugo conceptualizes. And this is a preview. So listen to the episode of Labor's Raw. We're going to talk about that with Libby Younger. You're going to love that episode. But how he conceptualizes French culture in, in the, in the early 19th century, how he conceptualizes life, and you begin to see parallels between how he's conceptualizing life in a post Napoleonic, you know, pre1848 revolution sort of moment, a snapshot moment in France and the levels of class and distinctions about wealth, the distinctions about status and distinctions about geography.

1:12:23 He spends a huge chunk of that book just going over the battle of Waterloo. The battle of Waterloo, for God's sakes. And you read it and you Go. Not only this guy have clear thinking, but this guy was able to articulate to other folks what that clear thinking was. And that's why they'll be reading this book for another 500 years. Like it'll just last. It just will. It'll smuggle those. It'll smuggle those ideas across time, across the generations, across generations to other people who, who just will never experience the French Revolution, they'll never experience Waterloo, but they'll get to experience the way Victor Hugo thought about.

1:13:06 Thought about those things. Well, I'll tell you, I'd love to come on your show and talk about Victor Hugo. I'd love to come on your show and talk about Ayn Rand, because iron. Ayn Rand. Loved Victor Hugo. Loved Victor Hugo. She thought he was the greatest writer of all time, even though he was a socialist. Professed socialist. She said he lived as a free thinker and she thought his work was absolutely marvelous. And I happen to agree with her. I think Les Miserables is a beautiful book to come and talk about on the great book series.

1:13:50 And so is Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged or the Fountainhead or Anthem or we the Living, I mean, spectacular books. We're going to cover all those. We're actually. So we're sort of beginning to think about again, this is some inside baseball on the show, but we're beginning to think about sort of what are our books for next year? Where are you sort of started having that. I'm having that discussion with folks and trying to figure out from guests what they are interested in coming on and talking about and what we're going to put together and of course, figuring out where do I want to position, you know, season six of the show and what do we want to.

1:14:26 What do we want to focus on for, for that season? Not just, not just to. To get more listeners and to grow the show, obviously, and expand the reach, but also to do more of the work that we're doing right now, challenging people to think, challenging people to engage. And we have not covered, interestingly enough, we have not covered any of Ayn Rand's books yet. We have not. We've not. I've not wandered into that Objectivist, you know, thing over there yet. Quite just yet. Not. Not because I'm afraid of Ayn Rand.

1:14:59 I've actually read Atlas Shrugged. It was years ago, but I read Atlas Shrugged and I read the Fountainhead again years ago. It's just there's so many good books. I gotta curate it. I gotta figure out and I gotta. I gotta Move around. But we'll definitely, we'll definitely be covering both of those potentially next year. So, yeah, stay tuned. I'm interested, I'm interested in chatting about them both. Ayn Rand's two favorite authors were Mickey Spillane and Victor Hugo. There you go. There you go.

1:15:31 So let me do this. I want to be aware of our time. We've been talking for a while. I want to get us to some conclusions. I want to round the corner a little bit on Didion. I do want to bring up a couple of points from her titular essay, Slouching Towards Bethlehem. By the way, this book is divided up into, into several parts, parts. So part one is called Lifestyles in the Golden Land, then part two is called Personals, and then part three is Seven Places of the Mind. And so she, she, she's done something that actually I, I borrowed when I wrote my book of essays that I still haven't published, but then when I wrote my book of essays.

1:16:15 And so she, she's divided up her content and her thinking, such as it were, into all these little different piles, right. To show you little, little pieces of herself. And so I want to, I want to grab Slouching Towards Bethlehem and I want to make a couple of points around that as we begin to round the corner and close. So Slouching Towards Bethlehem was written in, I believe it's 1961, is when this essay was originally written. Originally published. Let me go back and look. Yes, 1961. And it was written because.

1:16:55 And this is where regionalism then comes into the United States. So regionalism in the mid century in the United States, we talked about this on the show before, was a very powerful driver for creativity and for literature. So Eudora Welthy, who we covered on the show, she wrote a lot from a Southern perspective. Charles Portis wrote a lot from a Western perspective. And Didion, interestingly enough, wrote a lot from the perspective of the Californian who has the dream of going out east, sees the reality, and then runs right back to California.

1:17:33 Didion had zero interest in the middle of the country she knows going on there. And she wasn't curious. And that was her sort of blind spot. But again, she was a regional writer, right? She could afford to be regional at a time when regionalism really worked. And so in looking at Slashing Towards Bethlehem, this is an essay written by a person who has been hired to do what used to be called reportage, to go out, to go see what the people are doing in a particular area, and then they report back to The.

1:18:08 The hoi polloi. And you get that sense when you read, when you get to the opening of Slouching Towards Bethlehem. And so I'm going to read a little bit from that. The center was not holding. It was a country of bankruptcy notices and public auction announcements and commonplace reports of casual killings and misplaced children in abandoned homes and vandals who misspelled even the four letter words they scrawled. It was a country in which families routinely disappeared, trailing bad checks and repossession papers.

1:18:38 Adolescents drifted from city to torn city, sloughing off both the past and the future as snakes shed their skins. Children who were never taught and would never now learn the games that had held the society together. People were missing. Children were missing, parents were missing. Those left behind filed desultory missing persons reports, then moved on themselves. It was not a country in open revolution. It was not a country under enemy siege. It was the United States of America in the cold late spring of 1967.

1:19:09 And the market was steady and the GNP high. And a great many articulate people seemed to have a sense of high social purpose. And it might have been a spring of brave hopes and national promise, but it was not. And more and more people had the uneasy apprehension that it was not. All that seemed clear was that at some point we had aborted ourselves and butchered the job. And because nothing else seemed so relevant, I decided to go to San Francisco. San Francisco was where the social hemorrhaging was showing up.

1:19:38 San Francisco was where the missing children were gathering and calling themselves hippies. When I first went to San Francisco in that cold late spring of 1967, I did not even know what I wanted to find out. And so I just stayed around a while and made a few friends. And then what follows from that is a almost anthropological pulling apart of what exactly was going on in San Francisco in. And I. I said early 60s. I apologize. In 1967, in the late 60s, Haight Ashbury and people getting high on acid.

1:20:18 And the year before, the Summer of Love.

1:20:23 It's a story, it's an essay of the relationships between people and the ways in which people are not honoring those relationships. Every single seed that produced the fruits of the last 25 years of chaos and social unraveling, those seeds were planted, and Didion saw them being planted, but didn't know what to do about them. In the essay Slouching Towards Bethlehem, she was just a documenter and an observer. It was like watching Johnny 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 essay in order to come to terms with the disorder, in order to make sense of what she perceived as chaos coming.

1:21:20 She didn't provide any solutions because she didn't have any. And as a creative, I think she was more fascinated with the destruction of the center and the erosion of the center than she was fascinated by the shoring up of the center. By the way, the politically, you know, 1968 would then produce the backlash of Nixon. Okay. And then Nixon, of course, eventually would go away. There would be the seventies, not go away. He would eventually resign office because of Watergate. But then the, the, the echo of Nixon would come about from a president who was formerly the governor of California and who also really liked John Wayne.

1:22:07 Ronald Reagan. Yep.

1:22:15 What did you make of Slouching towards Bethlehem as we close? What did you make of that essay? What did you make of reading that being. Being a Gen Xer, living in the backwash of all of this. Like, I looked at this and I, I didn't think of my parents because my parents, I mean, my parents in 1968 were 20 and my father had gone to Vietnam by that point. My mother was 19 and they weren't even, like they hadn't even met each other yet. They wouldn't meet each other for another few years. So, you know, and my father, my mother marched for civil rights and did those kinds of things.

1:22:46 I will tell you, the African American experience was different than this experience that Didian documented here at Hate Ash. Yeah, no kidding. Very different. Very different. You know, but it was. So for me, it's anthropological. Reading this as a African American Gen Xer, it's, this is, this is,

1:23:09 this wasn't your life, man. This was not anything culturally that. But, but, but it's fascinating because we have a country that's big enough to contain all that. Yeah, yeah, you do. While at the same time, the seas, as I already said, that would produce fruit later on in my life, were planted here at Haight Ashbury. The, the, the grandsons, the grand, the grandsons and granddaughters of those folks who were high on LSD and couldn't figure out how to feed their children. They're now dying in la, homeless, doing, having open air, open air needle exchanges in front of kids, like it's the same thing.

1:23:51 And we haven't solved the problem. As a matter of fact, if anything, in the United States, particularly in LA and in San Francisco, we've scaled it up to a level where the state now approves of it, rather than locking these people up, rather than engaging in any sort of law and order, Matter of fact, Nixon got in trouble. Well, not Nixon got in trouble. One of the reasons why Nixon got elected was because the middle of the country wanted somebody to do something about the hippies. Yeah, yeah. So

1:24:23 I didn't grow up in this. I mean, my family came to Canada in 1982.

1:24:31 I would have been. Had I been in the United States, this wouldn't have been my experience. I would have been a. An immigrant, probably living somewhere in SoCal, Southern California. A lot of Iranians would have gone there, working hard. And I'd be thinking, these hippies are nuts. And I'd probably have voted for Richard Nixon and 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 to see that there were so many people that went into that life,

1:25:08 that dissolute life, where rather than trying to discover who the hell they are and build a life of meaning for themselves, they throw it away on getting high. You know, it's like they're escaping reality. And Joan kind of observed it and probably escaped reality a few times along with him. She doesn't talk very much in this particular essay about her own partaking in things like wheat and cocaine and so forth, but it's pretty obvious that she hung around a lot of people that did this. And it would have been astonishing to me if she didn't partake herself, you know, astonishing.

1:25:53 I'm the middle American. She looked upon, across, upon with such disdain in how she decided to go about chronicling America. So I was fascinated by what she had to say, but I also looked at it and went, yeah, that's not me. That's never going to be me. And I'm glad that I came from a family that valued hard work, that valued God, that valued country, and wanted to build a better future for myself and the people that I love. Well, that's what I have to say about Joan. And I'll also say this. The election of Ronald Reagan took place in 1980 because the American people really wanted to elect John Wayne president.

1:26:40 That'd been true for probably about three and a half decades, but he went ahead and died and had no interest in becoming a politician ever. He said that multiple times in his life. And, you know, Ronald Reagan was a stand in for John Wayne. That's how, that's why he got elected president, honestly. Well, and, and, and Didion starts, you know, she, she frames her observations through William Butler Yates poem the Second Coming. Right? And

1:27:13 the. The things that she saw the center starting to unravel were correct. The center was beginning to unravel. The. The signs of it were around the edges. But there was still enough in her time, there was still enough of the core left where the. The folks who were in charge of preserving the core never thought that it would unravel or it would come apart. And this is, this is, this is the thing that I take from. From slouching towards Bethlehem. This is the big lesson I take from it.

1:27:52 Never think that it can't happen here. Allow yourself to go into that space, whether it's in your family, in your. In your neighborhood, in your community. Never think that an illness can't come along and unravel the core of your family. Or financial exploit exploitation, but financial strife or financial something disaster can't come along and unravel your family. We saw a little bit of this with COVID Never think that a natural disaster can't occur, like a flood or an earthquake or a fire or something like that, and unravel the core.

1:28:28 Never think that it can't happen. Because when you think it can't happen, you don't plan. And when you don't plan, then you are surprised when the unraveling begins. Like the very good people who read Didion's essay initially in 1967, 68, when they read that, I'm sure they thought, those crazy hippies, that's just weirdness. That's just on tv, that's over there. That's not in my town, that's not in the place that I live. It can't happen here.

1:29:01 Well, yeah, it can. And it did. And it did. You know, and the unraveling is always a gradual thing. Thing. That's where. Where one. One thread gets pulled here and another thread gets pulled there, and everything seems to be disconnected. And that's the other thing you said to Didian. Like, she couldn't connect the threads. She couldn't figure out how it all came together. She could describe the threads unraveling, but she couldn't figure out how all the threads came together. And to your point about tradition and grounding, I think if she had a grounding in religion, she would have had a better idea of how those threads came together together.

1:29:38 But even just grounding in a, 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. And yet. And yet. And yet now we live on the other side of this. Right. And so I want to sort of bring us home with this. We live on the other side of unraveling, 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 on the show we've really been focused on what I call a restoration project. How do we restore, how do we rebuild a center? Now I have an idea that centers, multiple centers actually are being rebuilt in a lot of different places, some online, some in real life. Very little overlap because we've got a fragmented communication and media culture now and there's no mass culture anymore that just doesn't exist. And so, but people are all seeing the same thing and they're all saying, how do we rebuild?

1:30:43 How do we rebuild, how to rebuild? And I'll use two examples. I pay attention quite a bit to ministries that are being run by 30 and 40 year olds. And what I'm seeing is a strong online element to all these ministries that is then combined with an in person element and they're doing both of the same thing. And they're building out a new model that's not the mass evangelical model that Billy Graham piloted. And then that was taken to a logical conclusion by, by other folks in the late 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 a homestead conference where like 50,000 people showed up. People raising their own food and, and figuring out how to get water out of the ground and recapturing knowledge that has been lost from the time when, you know, the vast majority of people in the United States either lived on farms, worked on farms, or knew somebody who did live or work on a farm. Farm. Right in their own generational time, they could remember that.

1:31:51 And now we're pulling that back. And again, that's another center that's being built out. We're having another center being built out in the technology space that is both anti AI and pro AI. And that that whole tussle is going on right now and the centers are being built out there. But the thing is, because it's not happening at mass, everybody can't see it. And so when I tell people, people about, I say I see centers being rebuilt, people stare at me like I'm crazy because they're not seeing that in their algorithm.

1:32:23 They're not seeing that when they do scroll, they're not seeing that when they go out to look at or deal with folks in real life. 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 our own communities and our neighborhoods and move that out in concentric circles. I think you're part of that. That's why I'm asking you this question. I think you're building a center as well. I think you're building a center for masculinity and for masculine men and for sovereign men. I think you're building out this center and I think you're doing it with a combination of, in real life and online and you're putting it together and you're letting it grow and grow and grow and grow and grow.

1:33:01 But it's one center among many centers that are being built out versus just a common center that everybody can agree on because that's now dead and gone. And we're not going to 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 and communities. Because of a hundred thousand men, build 10,000 man strong communities. We'll have a billion men that are part of something like this. I also think that we need to very strongly stand up against the so called progressive

1:33:56 movement globally because there's nothing progressive about it. It's designed to destroy the traditional order and they don't care if they burn it all to the ground as long as they get to rule over the ashes. It's my opinion that one person at a time, my job on a day to day basis is to persuade people and convince them that socialism and progressivism are an unadulterated evil that we all need to stand against. And honestly, if I were to, if I were to rewrite the American Constitution, I would keep it virtually the same.

1:34:42 But there'd be one thing that I'd add in there, that if there is an ideology whose prime focus is to overthrow this system, there's no place for that ideology in this country and it has to go. There's no place for people who speak of that

1:35:00 and the educational system, the

1:35:09 media and storytelling need to be in the hands of people that love America and believe in freedom. The fact that we allowed over a course, course of decades, an ideology that is hostile to the very idea of Americanism to overtake these institutions and march through them is a big reason that traditional America collapsed. And I think Donald Trump's election and all these factors, all these centers that you're talking about, Hassan, that are coming up in masculinity, in, in ministry, in online folks that are speaking about what matters, people like Charlie Kirk and Benny Johnson and so forth are as a result of 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 my very cushy, comfortable life to step forward as America's leader and turn this around. And that's. That's Donald Trump. Because if you think about Donald Trump, there was really no reason this man needed to become President of the United States. He had a brilliant life and a brilliant career. If Donald Trump never got into politics and just rode off into the sunset as one of the world's great marketers and real estate tycoons, he would have still lived an incredibly consequential life.

1:36:51 But what he saw bothered him, and he decided to give all that up to step forward and do something about it. And I don't know if the American people really understand what a massive act of love this was on his part. And it. It's my belief that Donald Trump winning his second term is given the world a chance to overthrow all this evil.

1:37:24 And people like you who have your podcast and talk about the great books, you're part of the center too, man. You're part 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, I want to talk about this on the show. She's nobody I would remotely consider reading because her politics are anathema to me. But I said, okay, let's go for it. And I'm glad I read it. I learned a lot. I actually have some sympathy for this woman after reading this book. I still don't agree with her political philosophy, but I learned a lot from her about what led that generation

1:38:10 to go over the cliff and leave behind the beautiful life that they had for a fake narrative that's basically caused chaos not just for America, but across the entire globe. And this book helped me see that a little more clearly. And for that, I'm grateful and for the opportunity to have a conversation with a brilliant man like Jason. So else. And that's my mic drop, brother.

1:38:42 Thank you, Nikki, for coming on the show today. What are all the places where we can connect with you? Of course, we'll have links to everywhere where you are in the show notes, but where could folks get a hold of you? Where are all the places where. Where we can connect with. With Nikki Ballou. I'm the only Nikki Ballou on planet Earth. So if you go on social media and you type in N I, C, K, Y, B, I L L O U. You'll find me and nobody else. So try that if you enjoy reading. I've got a few books that I've published on Amazon.

1:39:13 Again, go to Amazon and type in Nikki Ballou. I've been, in addition to this show on about a thousand other shows, and I have two shows of my own, the Thought Leader Revolution and the Sovereign Man Podcast. You've been on one show, you're about to come on the second. And if you're a business owner and one of the things right now in your world is that you're really trying to figure out 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 about me and the work that I do. I look for good humans that at some level are getting in their own way. They may not even understand why, and they're trying to figure it out up here, but the mission they have is in their heart. And what I do for good people like that who are up here is I get them out of here, I get them into their hearts and I point them and move them forward like a missile toward their mission. So if that's you, go to my website, ercleacademy.com forward/appointment, jump on my calendar.

1:40:19 I'll give you 45 minutes of my time free of charge. We can talk about anything you like. And that's it. Beautiful. We will have links to all of those places where you can get a hold of Iggy Blue and you can get a hold of Circle Academy and become a part of everything that. That he is, that he is building between his podcasts, his books, and the center that he is, he is rebuilding. Just in time for the next historical spring. I'd like to thank Nikki for coming on the podcast today. And with that, well, ladies and gentlemen, we're.