The Man Who Was Thursday by G. K. Chesterton w/Neal Kalechofsky & Jesan Sorrells

0:00 Hello, my name is Jesan Sorrells, and this is the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books podcast, episode number 184. Opening up from our book today with a well, with a poem and I quote to Edmund, Clara, Hugh Bentley A cloud was on the mind of men, and wailing went the weather. Yea, a sick cloud upon the soul. When we were boys together, science announced nonentity and art admired decay. The world was old and ended, but you and I were gay. Round us in antic order their crippled vices came lust that had lost its laughter, fear that had lost its shame.

1:11 Like the white lock of Whistler that lit our aimless gloom, Men showed their own white feather as proudly as a plume. Life was a fly that faded and death a drone that stung. The world was very old indeed. When you and I were young, they twisted even decent sin to shapes not to be named. Men were ashamed of honor, but we were not ashamed. Weak if we were, and foolish. Not thus we failed. Not thus. When that black bale blocked the heavens, he had no hymns from us. Children we were Our forts of sand were even as weak as we.

1:48 High as they went, we piled them up to break that bitter sea. Fools as we were in motley, all jangling and absurd. When all church bells were silent, our cap and bells were heard. Not all unhelped. We held the fort, our tiny flags unfurled. Some giants labored in that cloud to lift it from the world. I find again the book we found. I feel the hour that flings Far out of fish shaped Pomonok Some cry of cleaner things and green carnation withered as in forest fires that pass roared in the wind. Of all the world 10 million leaves of grass or sane and sweet and sudden as a bird sings in the rain.

2:29 Truth out of Tusitala spoke, and pleasure out of pain, Yea, cool and clear and sudden as a bird sings in the gray, Dunedin to Samoa spoke and darkness unto day. But we were young, we lived to see God break their bitter charms. God and the good Republic come riding back in arms. We have seen the city of Mansoul even as it rocked relieved. Blessed are they who did not see, but being blind believed. This is a tale of those old fears, even of these emptied hells, and none but you shall understand the truth, the true thing that it tells of what colossal gods of shame could cow men and yet crash of what huge devils hid the stars yet fell at a pistol flash the doubts that were so plain to chase, so dreadful to withstand.

3:22 Oh, who shall understand but you? Yea, who shall understand the doubts that drove us through the night as we too talked to main and day had broken on the streets, Error broke upon the brain between us. By the peace of God, such truth can now be told. Yea, there is strength and striking root and good in growing old we have found common things at last, and marriage and a creed and I may safely write it now, and you may safely read.

4:05 There are certain books

4:10 that remind you of things you have seen other places. Partially that's because the books themselves influence other mediums, but also it's partially because we all have short memories. There are books that have been adapted to movies, and usually not well, then there are the films that would work better as books or stories. And of course, in our time of declining attention spans, dopamine driven distractions, and the technological hijacking of the brain, there are certain social media performances that don't translate to any other medium at all.

4:49 I'm sure Neil Postman would have something to say about that, and I'm sure that none of it would be good. But before Postman, there was our author who wrote the poem I read just now, who we are covering today. The writer of over 80 books, several hundred poems, 200 short stories, 4000 essays which were mostly newspaper columns, columns and several plays. This author was prolific in the way that only a man, a denizen, such as it were of the 19th century could be. And the book we are going to address ourselves to today is probably the most psychedelic story I've read by a 19th century author in a really, really long time.

5:30 It starts out with the reader believing and contemplating and trying to accept the reality that he's building in one way, and ends with we believing a totally, completely different thing. Now, of course, you could say that all good literature accomplishes such a dramatic two-step, but only rarely does a piece of literature accomplish such a two-step so well. The term that I've heard used for this book is so paradoxically, today on the show we are exploring meaning and what it means for leaders from one of the more entertaining and profoundly Catholic books we've covered on this show, the man who Was Thursday by the great Catholic apologist and prolific writer G.K.

6:23 Chesterton. Leaders, there is no dark side in literature. Matter of fact, it's all dark. The only thing that makes it look light or sheds any Light upon it is the sun. And I'm joined today back from back for this episode from his last foray into the space. During last year's mashup episode where we talked about the weird intersections between Pink Floyd, all quiet in the western front, and Lord of the Rings is a growing friend of the show. This is the second time he's been on. So that's two more times than most, folks.

7:03 Neil Kalakofsky, how you doing today? Neil, how's it going? I'm doing great, Jesan. How are you? There's no dark side of the moon, really. It's all dark. That's right. I wonder if you were going to pick that up. Yes. Oh, yes. You were not going to slip that by me.

7:21 I think after reading this book, I think that Chesterton would have been a big fan of Pink Floyd. I think he would have. Yeah, I think he would have. He would have shown it to all their shows in a rumpled, rumpled suit, and he would have critiqued them, you know, with that big mustache and the, the bad combover. But it would have been sharp, it would have been ribald, but he would have gotten the paradox. He would have understood what they were trying to lean into or lean out. So, so. Well, the thing, and we talked about this a little bit last time, you know, that's a little bit paradoxical.

7:56 I think that's going to be our word for today about Pink Floyd is that these guys were in some ways godless rock and rollers, and yet they were really, you know, crying out for faith, right? Oh, absolutely. They were decrying the lack of faith, the lack of humanism, and the. What I think Chesterton might have said is you're looking in the wrong place. You know, you are, you're not. You're. You're. You're trying to find God without, you know, finding God. Right? Well, he would have also. He would have also.

8:32 And we talked about this on the, the episode, the mashup episode that we did. We touched a little bit on this. But he would not have been a fan of the psychedelic experiments of Aldous Huxley. He would not have been a fan of any of that. He would have. As a matter of fact, he would have. And you could tell from the man who was Thursday how he goes after Nietzsche. He would have seen that as a direct line from Nietzschean worldview and would have rejected the dominoes all the way down the path. Right.

9:05 But I also think he would have been shocked by how popular Huxley got and then how influential he got. And that probably would have disappointed him. I. I can imagine that would. He would have taken that badly. I think the fabulism, he would love. It's the fact that it descends so quickly into hedonism. That's the, you know, almost. Almost. Almost like there's no red, you know, light at all on the. There's just. There's no red light. There's no kaboom. Right down. It's a kaboom.. There's no William F. Buckley on the highway.

9:36 It's just. You're going, yeah, well, saying this much and no more. Right, right. Yeah, it's all the way. But, you know, you think of Lewis Carroll. Right, Right. Who Chesterton must have. He may even have crossed. I'm not sure of the timeline, whether they were contemporaries in any way, but certainly they were literary. Close enough. Literary contemporaries. And, you know, Lewis, Alice in Wonderland is some pretty wild stuff. Right. But it doesn't descend. There's never an orgy in Alice in Wonderland.

10:06 Right. There's no Eros or loving or anything like that. That would have been. Lewis Carroll would have just been completely bl. By stuff like that. And then 100 years later, you have Grace Slick singing White Rabbit at, you know, at Woodstock and. Which my neighbor was at, by the way, he was telling me. And he saw that performance. Really? Yeah, Just. Just as an aside, it was kind of funny. He sent me a clip of Grace Slick singing White Rabbit, and he says, I remember this like it was yesterday.

10:33 And I wrote back. I said, I'll bet she doesn't.

10:41 Yeah. Chesterton was born in. He was born in. He was born in 1874. And looking up. Looking up on Google, just. Just because it's interesting that you sort of. Alice in Wonderland sort of. I don't know. Go ahead, tell me. Yeah, so Alice in Wonderland was written in. Let me go ahead and pull that up, because I don't have it off the top of my head.

11:04 Alice in Wonderland was written in 1865. So, yeah, I mean, a little bit earlier than Chesterton was born. So he not only would have. Would have. Would have been exposed to Carol, it would have been one of those background influences that was just sort of floating around there now, how much she would have. How much she would have, shall we say, embraced Lewis Carroll, for lack of a better term. We don't know that. But. But yeah, he. I mean, Lewis Carroll had a long life in the middle of the middle of the 19th century.

11:36 He was born in. Let me see, it was like 1836 or something. So he had a. He had a long and all. Let me pull this up. He had a long lifespan. And then I'll tell you the other guy who jumped to mind when I read Besides the obvious, C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, which. Yeah, the influence is, you know, jump. Jumping out at. You know, like, even in the poem you read. Yep, I noticed. So at some point he mentioned Dunedain, which. Yes. In all to. To be clear, I looked up on Wiki, and apparently it's an island somewhere in the South Pacific.

12:12 It is, but in the Lord of the Rings, the Dunedain were the noblemen. Right. Who survived the fall of Numenor and then come back to. To Middle Earth. And. And there's no way that's, you know, a mistake. No. No. Coincidence. Yeah. No. So Lewis Carroll was born 1832. He died 1898. Okay. Alice in Wonderland was, like I said, was 18. Now was 1865. G.K. Chesterton was born in 1874, died in 1936. Right. So while Chesterton overlapped a little bit with the end of Carroll's life, most of Carroll’s work would have been in the background, probably for him.

12:55 Which it's weird to think about that because we tend to put these people on pedestals, literature, whatever. But, you know, like. Like his relationship. Like Chesterton's relationship with. Oh, what was the author, the eugenicist and author. Um, Bernard Shaw. George Bernard Shaw. Right. So he was. He was a sparring partner against George Bernard Shaw for years. Right. And roundly opposed the Fabian Society, roundly opposed Fabian socialism, thought eugenics was nonsense. There are some, depending upon what you read in his Wikipedia article, there are some intimations that maybe he might have been anti Semitic, but maybe not.

13:40 Nobody really knows for sure, you know, but it was one of those things where, you know, Carroll is in the air, Tolstoy's in the air, Dostoyevsky's in the air. And these guys are just reading them like. Like we read YouTubers. We're like, oh, yeah, that's just the critical drinker over there. Or that's, you know, whoever that we're going to on YouTube. I don't know. You know, in 100 years, who knows? Who knows who's gonna be. Who knows what YouTuber will rise in the back of your mind somewhere. Right, exactly.

14:07 The other guy that jumped to mind, unfortunately, also known for his anti Semitism was Roald Dahl. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. At the end, I was getting. This is very Charlie and the Chocolate Factory a little bit where people are just flying up in the air and you know, it is. Yeah. And I think Dahl was much less. He must have been 50s and 60s again, I guess. But, you know. Yeah, but I was, I was actually kind of. Yeah. Flashing on some Roald Dahl there at the end. But. And then I think I was telling you earlier, before the podcast, you know, some of this seems like the early movies of, you know, Keystone Cops or, you know.

14:48 Yes, yes. When the anarchists are running around Europe, you know, I picture them running around in stilted fashion like they're being filmed, you know, in 1912 or something. I had a Buster Keaton flashback. Yeah. When they're, when the whole, the whole section occurs in the book where they are chasing them across the field and they're chasing them through the town and it's just like chapters, long chase and. Yeah, it's Benny Hill, man. It's. That's it. Yes. Oh my God, I'm glad you brought this up like this.

15:20 And I'm like, oh my God. Oh my God, the Benny Hill music. Yakety Sax.

15:26 That's right. Ah. Oh. Got that song stuck in my head. I remember Benny Hill. Oh my God. Yeah. Like 1980 British TV would come over and you could see like clips of Benny Hill, like 11:30 at night or something. Yeah. So this will tell you the, the. Just the age gap that we have. I was exposed to Benny Hill. So I'll frame it this way. Before I would go to school in the mid-90s or I go to high school, there were two programs I'd watch. If I got up early on PBS, I could watch the last 10 minutes of Benny Hill, where usually the last 10 minutes involved some lady in scanty clothes running around doing some.

16:06 Something. And then the music would come up and then I would immediately change from that to Sports center hosted by. Oh, what's his name, the guy who's sort of gone off the rails lately on MSNBC. Keith Olbermannn. Keith Olbermann and Dan Patrick. Those are my guys. And this is before we knew how crazy Keith Olbermannn was. This is before Dan Patrick had a podcast, you know, all this time. Right. And. And Stuart Scott would come on sometimes and I'd watch Stuart Scott with Dan Patrick and I would just watch Michael Jordan highlights and eat my cereal.

16:38 And then I would go to school. Like that was my whole entire. That was my. That was part of my exposure to like Benny Hill. And now this. Interesting. So my nine year old, we got a bunch of chickens in my. On my property. And like a bunch of chickens, like not a few, like. Like 12 to 15. It's ridiculous for chicken farmers. And. And whenever he's chasing the chickens. Chickens around. I play the Benny Hill music. It's basically Yakety Sax.

17:10 Yeah. Like he's chasing the girl. Yeah, exactly. He's got his hands out. Like, he's got his hands out the whole nine yards. You could not put that on TV today. I think that would be. Benny Hill would be immediately canceled. Like, immediately. It wouldn't even get out of the writers room before the music ended. They would be closing that show down.

17:33 Oh, my gosh. Okay, well, getting back to the man who Was Thursday. Let's. Let's focus this for just a minute. Yes. So The Man Who Was Thursday was published in 1908. It is one of G.K. Chesterton's more famous books associated with him. It was written as an adventure story, a detective story. And as I put it in. In my writing, in my notes here, a boisterous narrative with an unexpected denouement. And it is an unexpected denouement. Like, it takes a. It takes an immediate left turn in the last two chapters, and you don't know what he's going to do.

18:09 Like, I. I was. I was. I looked at the book and I go, oh, my gosh, this is so short. Because the chapters are short. It's real easy to read. It's written in a flowing narrative style. You get to the last two chapters, and you're like, how is he gonna. How's he gonna bring it home? How is he going to. He has to bring it home somehow. How is he going to turn this corner? And then he turns the corner, and you wind up in this weird. This is a psychedelic part. You wind up in this weird, psychedelic cul-de-sac with.

18:35 With robes and dudes sitting in chairs. It's very much Lord of the Rings. Like, it's very Lord of the Rings or that hideous strength by C.S. Lewis where they're all sitting in robes at St. Anne's at the end. You know, the victory has come. And they're sort of. You know, they're just kind of reflecting on what their role in the entire saga has been. I was completely channeling Lewis when I was reading that. Yeah. And it's. And there's no preparation for any of that. It just sort of dumps into it, and you're like, oh, I. Okay.

19:08 I didn't realize it was going to be this kind of game. Right. The other thing about the book is it continues to confound readers. Like, it was. So this is 2026. When we're recording this episode, it is 118 years since this book was published, which is weird for me to think about, but in the 118 years, I don't think anybody's gotten their arms around the man who was Thursday. That's fair. You know, someday you're talking to me, but I would love to introduce you to my friend Bill, who's a profound.

19:44 He's. I'm pointing in that direction because he lives over there, you know, so your viewers can see. Yeah, yeah, he's right off screen. He's over there. Right. And Bill and I, first of all, we belong to a C.S. Lewis Book Club together. But he is one of the best read people that I know, and he's a huge Chesterton fan. And maybe we could do a follow up to this at some point where he comes on and he's just. I think you'll find him just an interesting, profound kind of guy. Very committed Catholic, very, very, you know, serious religious fellow and a deep thinker.

20:25 So I'm gonna ask him that very question, like, basically. And I should have done this in preparation for the show, but of course I didn't, which is. Bill's hard to get hold of, by the way, because in keeping with Chesterton and Tolkien, he. He doesn't have a cell phone. There you go. He is hard. I actually have to physically walk over to his house, which is like, you know, two and a half blocks. That's a lot. That's a lot of commitment. I mean, I can't just text him. What? Yeah. What is this, 1908?

20:56 Yeah, yeah, yeah. What are we doing? This is 100. This is 118 years ago. He's talked a lot about G.K. Chesterton, and he would enjoy this. This conversation. So at some point, putting the two of you together will be my. I will enjoy that conversation from. From my. From my chair to the side. But so to me, I can't separate because I have such a Lord of the Rings thing. Lord of the Rings was a massive influence on me growing up. So is C.S. Lewis. It colored a lot of my worldview, both of them together, both as a kid, where I kind of sort of thought Middle Earth was real or that I knew it wasn't quite real, but it should be real, right?

21:41 Yeah, yeah, yeah. It should be a place like that. Right. Seems like a better place than the one I was actually at to, you know, much later as an adult, where I started to realize the profound philosophy that. That, you know, that that was. Was underneath it all. And you know, certainly there's some. To me, the most obvious. First of all, there's a lot of literature mechanisms in here where I go, Tolkien, Tolkien, Tolkien. Or literally throughout, like here in your, in your poem. I don't know if you can see this on the screen, but over here in your poem I wrote very J.R.R., right?

22:13 Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it is, right, because it is, it's. It's the, the first of all the fact that there's a poem like that, you know, in Tolkien, every once in a while the hobbits would just start, you know, reciting. They're just like running around reciting poetry and eating second breakfast. Can you imagine like a modern literary work where suddenly someone just read a poem for three pages?

22:36 No, no, no, no. The reader would be gone at verse two. I have to, I have to give you that. I did do a little wiki search or a little R and D before this. And here's an interesting thing. The person to whom he dedicated that poem is Edmund Clerihew Bentley. Yes. Do you know what a clerihew is? I have no idea what a clerihew is. Neither did I. But wiki, boom. Nailed it. Clerihew apparently is named after this guy. A four line poem. That's autobiographical. And so it's like there's some. I was actually looking a few of these up.

23:14 Unfortunately I don't have them like right here. But you can, you can look them up. Some of them are cute. So of course this clerihew. Poetry examples. Right. And Albert Einstein, though he was divine. He made the world spin with a theory of time. You know, things like that. Right. Kind of, you know. Yeah. Quick,

23:38 I'm just seeing these right now. Discovered radium, you see. She glowed with pride. Oh dear. In her lap she would have. She also died of radium poisoning, so she did. That's a little dark, but you get the idea. Anyway, who knew those poems had a name? And someone invented them. Apparently it was this friend of Chesterton's. So. That's amazing. Yeah, that's amazing. I. And they're called clerihews. Yeah, that's amazing. I know. I did not. I did not know that at all. And that's why we. This is my gift to you, my friend.

24:10 You impart knowledge to me. I give these little bon mots trivia. Well, someday you'll be at a dinner conversation and you'll say, Someone will say, does anyone. Does anyone know what a clerihew is? Like. Like you're like you're on an airplane, someone's there. A Doctor, on this plane. Is there anyone on this plane that knows what a clerihew is? Turns out like we have a poet. This will save his life. Weirdly enough, I do. Strangely enough, ma'am, I. With the clerihew. It's a musical instrument, I think.

24:44 Yeah. Play with clerihew along with the harpsichord. And I failed at it. Now I'm switching to the piano and I'm totally better. Isn't there a clerihew and Jethro Tull or something? The clerihew. Some guy off to the side like some bizarre. Oh, more like in the Grateful Dead. Oh, my Lord. Anyway, they. They would have had a Clair Huxtable for sure. Oh my gosh. I'm not going to tell you a funny Grateful Dead's not on this show, but not on the show that is Grateful Dead story. But, but okay, so back to Chesterton, who never encountered the.

25:16 Although it's interesting to speculate, what would he have thought of the Dead? You know, I don't know. You know, so, so here's a follow up question for this. So I asked you this question when we were talking about All Quiet on the Western Front and Lord of the Rings in our mashup episode. And you, you gave me a very interesting answer that has stuck with me

25:39 for a long time now. And, and this is why I have fascinating folks like yourself on the show, because I get to ask you good questions that you give me stuff and it sticks with me and it incorporates into other things that I think. And the question that I asked you was, at the end of this, towards the end of that episode, will there ever be another writer like Tolkien? Will. Will the English, Will English literature ever be able to produce another writer like Tolkien? And you said probably not, because Tolkien was sort of the, the pinnacle of the mountain of all of English culture and society and thought it all sort of concentrated at a tip of the spear into that man and his, his output.

26:18 Okay, but when we look not, but. And when we look at the History of 19th century Literature in England, you have Lewis Carroll, you have Charles Dickens, you have GK Chesterton, you have George Bernard Shaw, you have Robert Louis Stevenson, you have C.S. Lewis on the tail end of this. And of course you have Tolkien, you have these lions, these literary lines. Rudyard Kipling, who, by the way, we haven't covered any of Kipling's work on this show yet. We sort of working our way around to it. We will cover.

26:57 We will cover Rudyard Kipling coming up here fairly soon. I'm trying to find the right text to Bring to folks. But the, the, the. A. The 19th century literary tradition in England was so rich, it's almost stunning. It's like the height. It's the height of a, of a literary.

27:23 The man who was Thursday comes along in a weird time when the Boer wars have occurred, right? England is having a little bit of trouble holding onto its colonies, but it's always had trouble because it's England. So they don't really think that it's anything really interesting that's happening there. But what is happening that's more so interesting is the continent is getting ready to roil literally 12 years later with World War. World War I. 10. 10 years later with World War I. Like you're going to get into World War I. Going to be off to the races, right?

27:56 I mean, this is the, this is the beginnings of. Or the, the foundation is being laid for the death of the British Empire, but nobody knows it at that point. Nobody realizes it at that point, right? So I say all this to say. Or I asked, I lay. That's the content I laid for this question. The man who was Thursday. The reason is the reason we can't get our arms around it and pigeonhole into some space. Is it because it is truly the heir to that entire English tradition. Was Chesterton trying to bring everything into this one book and say sort of.

28:33 And sort of make a final statement?

28:39 Well, I'm not sure I'm the, the right person to ask to answer that question, but I'll give it Where's Bill? Where's that guy? Yeah, where's Bill? Ask that same question to Bill when he comes along. So. But I think that the, the, the, the reason we have our. One of the reasons we have difficulty getting our arms around Chesterton is that I think we in 2026 have difficulty. You know, there used to be saying there's no second act in American life, right? Which once they know you as an actor, that's it, you're an actor forever.

29:19 Once you're a playwright, you're a playwright forever. You can't do. You can't do different things or it's very difficult. I think that that kind of is broadly true where particularly in the world of the Internet, we pinhole people as you're this. And once someone is known as a Christian apologist, well, they can't also be funny, right? They can't also be indulged in, you know, what we would call almost psychedelic literature because that's just not things that go together, right? So I'm saying that's Kind of the.

29:55 The shallow view, right? Yeah, that. So I think one of the reasons, and I think one of the reasons Tolkien actually slips by that is because his books are theoretically written for children. They're not, of course, they're profoundly deep works for adults. But he slips it in there. Right? That's. CS Lewis does that with Narnia. Right. Because it's. In some ways, we read Narnia to our kids because we think of them as kids stories, but of course, they're not. They're much more than that. But that was, I think, some of the additional genius of.

30:29 Of Tolkien where I don't think he sat down and said, well, here's a way to get a Christian message across in a way that, you know, people will not, you know, object to immediately in this world of, you know, material anarchy that I see all around me. I don't. I don't think he sat down and thought that, but it was part of his genius to kind of

30:49 develop the delivery mechanism in such a. You know, I've read the Lord. I. I know I have a Lord of the Rings shaped head, so I talk about it a lot, but I read it as a kid. I read it as a young adult. I've read it as an adult. I've read it very recently. I've read it to my kids, with my kids. So the. I. So I think that that's part of it. I think he doesn't. It's difficult to put him in a pigeonhole, and he's not famous enough in the way that Tolkien is. Just so, you know, they're not going to make a movie out of the man who called, you know, the man who was Thursday.

31:23 Yeah, yeah. Right. Whereas, you know, the Tolkien works are so famous that they kind of blow away a lot of those sort of. Well, I'm not sure I. What pigeonhole do I put this in? Kind of. Kind of. Objection. So that's one reason. I think the other reason is something that you touched on, which is he's so very British. Right. To me. So I was telling you earlier I had this characterization of Chesterton. I want to save it for the show. Here it is. I think if you took CS Lewis and Winston Churchill and put them together, you'd get G.K.

31:58 Chesterton. Right. I think that's my image of G.K. Chesterton. And by the way, I didn't realize until actually after I read the book, he was a big guy. He was almost £300. Yeah. Oh, yeah. He was a big boy. Oh, yeah. He was A big boy. Which makes me wonder about Sunday, because, correct me if I'm wrong, but Sunday's a big. Sunday's a big. Yes, yes, yes. That's how he's. That's how he's described as sort of this. This sort of all encompassing. Yeah, like. Like at the end, he's almost like. Right. It's.

32:31 It's like the. The kid in again, in Roald Dahl. Who's the kid who. Who, like. Or somebody takes the bubble down and they end up blowing up to Violet Beauregarde or something. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like three times her size or something like that. So. So I think also, though, we're just. That is a vanished archetype, the Winston Churchill, you know, the guy who. Who first of all was grounded in certain moral certitudes, but also could get along with just about anyone. Right. Always had the right thing to say at the right time, you know.

33:14 You know, like, Churchill's famous, you know, the. The woman who says, you know, Mr. Churchill, if you were my husband, I would poison you. And he said, madame, if you were my wife, I would drink it. I would drink it.

33:31 Well, it's like that. Yeah. Who could pull a line like that off today? I'm. Come on. You know. You know, I don't see Tom Cruise nailing a line like that in a movie. No, no, no. The problem is. The problem is all those guys are on Twitter. That's the problem. They're all on Twitter. Yeah, that's it. Yeah. Maybe that's what. Yeah, for the. For the. For the great. The zap. So. But. So I think that's. It's partly that he's just. I mean, he's almost like, you know, like a Roman senator. He's so far back and so archetypal that you can't.

34:03 He's almost not like. Not a real person. You know, we don't see people like that anymore. Well, and it's interesting that you talk about his weight and sort of the rumpledness that Chesterton had, and then we'll. We'll go. We'll head back to the book here because I want to turn the corner, sort of talk about some other themes that I want to talk about today. But it's interesting you talk about his weight, his rumpledness. You know, he struggled with gout and gluttony and those kinds of things. And we live in a post television era, like one of the.

34:32 One of the. I would love to write a substack essay on this because I've been thinking about this off and on for the last four or five years, how no one really is appreciating how much that box in your house called a television has gotten pulled apart in the last 15 years. It's got pulled apart by streaming, it's been pulled apart by different distribution channels. It's been pulled apart by the death of attention, it's been pulled apart by the transition of advertising and marketing technology, and it's primarily been pulled apart by the creation of the Internet.

35:09 The second you could have an infinite number of channels, and the second that infinite number of channels was attached to what in the future will be an AI template in your pocket, which is currently a template in your pocket. Once that was attached, once those two things came together from thank you, Steve Jobs. The explosion that was going to happen was, was, was, was for the television, a thermonuclear explosion. Now, don't get me wrong, the physical object still exists on your wall, sure. But what it meant when jfk.

35:43 This is where I mentioned Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death. Right. Postman didn't want to talk about digital. He didn't, he didn't care about any of that. His, his whole focus was on what TV meant for reality. That's why Amusing Ourselves to Death is such an amazing book written back in 1985. But Postman noted that, and I'm going to tie the suggestion in a minute, but noted that what TV meant was images mattered more than the medium. Right. So the medium is the message, for sure. Marshall McLuhan, he backed that up.

36:17 But both of those things were intricately, intricately tied together. And so you couldn't have a sweaty Richard Nixon on TV in 1960. You know, you had to have JFK pack on the pancake makeup. Sure. Fast forward to our era. One of the most notorious changes I've seen in the last two years is how we have gone from as a culture, at least on Internet culture, the online culture, from being very, very positive about everybody's body to now Ozempic-face. Right. And we've done that in two years. All of a sudden, body positivity went out the door because Ozempic is here.

37:00 Right, right. And so body positivity wasn't really body positivity. It was, I don't have a get rich or get weight loss quick over system so that I can show up as an image, which is what we have primarily made our mode of messaging since the rise of television.

37:20 I don't have that tool to go to that mode and so I'm going to be positive and I'm going to shape what the tool says about. Right. Chesterton, to your point, this is why that archetype no longer exists. Because of tv, because of the Internet, and because of Ozempic. That, that, that, that. I don't care how quippy he is. If he's £300, right. You can't put that guy, you know, he'll. He won't make it. Yep, he won't make it. Yeah. And that's a real,

37:50 That's a real shame. It's. In some, in some ways, you know, Hassan, I feel like we're describing the modern Tower of Babel that is just building itself higher and higher and eventually is going to come crashing down. The, The. Because the. I mean, you know, I guess your viewers will, Will get, Get the, the idea. I'm not a huge fan of a lot of modern culture. I just, I find it horrific, most of it. And the. To me, what I mourn most is the death of books. But behind the books has to be the writer, and behind the writer has to be the culture that produces the novelist.

38:37 The idea that the writer was rewarded. Chesterton was probably rewarded from a young age for being quippy and for being sharp and for having the bon mot and for, you know, or however you pronounce it. But I don't speak French. Amongst my many defects, that's one of them. And the. But there was a time where that was, you know, sort of lauded because. But, you know, you mentioned Twitter, so would. Would the Chesterton of today have been on Twitter? The problem is I can't distinguish the Chesterton on Twitter from the bot on Twitter.

39:10 Right. I could be talking to, To a, you know, to nothing. And the, the. That just leads to chaos. I, I don't know. You know, was it, Was it Chesterton, it just made that witty observation about Marco Rubio or was it, you know, an AI whose server is somewhere in Tierra del Fuego? I mean, I have no idea. So it's, It's. There's a lot about modern culture that I, you know, it's hard to see. And maybe this will let me. If you want to lead us back to the book. It's hard to see the way out where we go from here to you.

39:48 Oh, okay. We got to a, you know, a kind of better place. Um, one last thing. And I, we do want to get back to the book, but, you know, I sort of dabble in the side with some writing and, And I wrote a. I'M writing a screenplay, a movie screenplay that is in the 80s. I traveled around a bit. I'm just going to make this super quick, I promise. But it does tie back. And I started my travels in Amsterdam, literally landing 1986, no idea where I was, very little money, one way ticket to speak the language, you know, and I'm setting the, the opening movie.

40:25 I'm writing this actually for my daughter who said, gee, you should write something because I've been telling her stories of these travels forever. Yeah. So I'm doing it in the form of a fictionalized movie script. And it starts off with the fictional me in the travel bureau, which, which was a true. Actually happened standing there in the travel bureau. And I won't take you through it except to say, you know, there's a voiceover saying, okay, I have no money or very little money. I don't, I don't speak the language.

40:51 I don't know where I am, I don't know where I'm sleeping that night. And it was better.

40:59 And it was. And, and the, the point of the story is me bumbling through Europe for eight months, which actually happened. Right. But nothing bad, you know, Nothing bad. Yeah, it's all fun. I saw, I met some really interesting people, had some great times, and that's what I was trying to convey to, to my daughter, which is, I think it might have been better and I think we may have created something in the Internet and social media. Parts of it are great. Like I can look up G.K. Chesterton on Wiki and in five seconds, you know, learn more about, learn what a clerihew is.

41:32 You know, I had no idea 24 hours ago. And, But

41:39 I kind of think the negatives maybe outweigh the positives. I don't, I don't think you're, I don't think you're alone in thinking that. Yeah. And, well, I think Chesterton might have something for us. So back to the book, back to them. The man who Was Thursday. So we're gonna go into chapter two. Okay. The Secret of Gabriel Syme in, in my edition. It's on page 10. I'm gonna go down to the bottom of it here, and I'm going to go into an argument that Chesterton was having with, with a couple of people.

42:15 And this is where I sort of began to understand a little, or at least I thought I began to understand what it is that, that Chesterton was trying to pull off with, with this book. So Gabriel Syme is a, is a detective. I'm going to sort of lay the lay the groundwork here. He's a detective and he's on an investigation of an anarchist, an anarchist named at this point named Gregory, right? And Gregory presents himself as being erudite, as being polite, as being formal. You know, all the things that I said about, you know, 19th century British culture come together right in, in, in, in, in Gregory.

43:03 And Gregory's trying to explain to Syme after they have a poetry battle in the first chapter what exactly it is that this idea of anarchism is about. So I'm going to read a couple of different sections from here as Gregory's answers to to Syme on page 10, and I quote, it does seem to have a moral underneath all its gaiety, assented Sime. But may I ask you two questions? You need not fear to give me information, because as you remember, you very wisely extorted from me a promise not to tell the police.

43:35 A promise I shall certainly keep. So is it in mere curiosity that I make my queries? First of all, what is it really all about? What is it you object to? You want to abolish government? To abolish God, said Gregory, opening the eyes of a fanatic. We do not only we not only want to upset a few despotisms and police regulations, that sort of anarchism does exist, but it is a mere branch of the non conformists. We dig deeper and we blow you higher. We wish to deny all those arbitrary distinctions of vice and virtue, honor and treachery upon which mere rebels base themselves.

44:12 The silly sentimentalists of the French Revolution talked of the rights of man. We hate rights as we hate wrongs. We have abolished right and wrong and right and left, added Sime with simple eagerness. I hope you will abolish them too. They are much more troublesome to me. You spoke of a second question, snapped Gregory. With pleasure, resumed Sime. In your all your present acts and surroundings there is a scientific attempted secrecy. I have an aunt lived over a shop, but this is the first time I have found people living from preference under a public house.

44:42 You have a heavy iron door. You cannot pass it without submitting to the humiliation of calling yourself Mr. Chamberlain. You surround yourself with steel instruments which make the place, if I may say so, more impressive than homelike. May I ask why, after taking all this trouble to barricade yourselves in the bowels of the earth, you then parade your whole secret by talking about anarchism to every silly woman in Saffron Park? Gregory smiled. The answer is simple, he said. I told you I was a serious anarchist.

45:09 And you do not believe me. Nor do they believe me. Unless I took them into this infernal room, they would not believe me. Sime smoked thoughtfully and looked at him with interest. Gregory went on, Now pause. This is the key piece right here. This is when I thought, Chesterton, you're onto something. The history of the thing might amuse you. He said, when I first. When first I became one of the new anarchists, I tried all kinds of respectable disguises. I dressed up as a bishop. I read up all about bishops in our anarchist pamphlets and superstition and a vampire and priests of prey.

45:40 I certainly understood from them that bishops are strange and terrible old men keeping a cruel secret from mankind. I was misinformed when, on my first appearing in an episcopal gaiters in a drawing room, I cried out in a voice of thunder, down, down, presumptuous human reason. They found out in some way that I was not a bishop at all. I was nabbed at once. Then I made up as a millionaire. But I defended capital with so much intelligence that a fool could see I was quite poor. Then I tried being a major.

46:08 Now I am a humanitarian myself. But I have, I hope, enough intellectual breadth to understand the position of those who, like Nietzsche, admire violence, the proud, mad war of nature and all that, you know. I threw myself into the major. I drew my sword and waved it about constantly. I called out blood abstractedly, like a man calling for wine. I often said, let the weak perish. It is the law. Well, well, it seems majors don't do this. I was nabbed again. At last I went in despair to the president of the Central Anarchist Council, who is the greatest man in Europe.

46:40 What is his name? Asked Sime. You would not know it said, answered Gregory. That is his greatness. Caesar and Napoleon put all their genius into being heard of, and they were heard of. He puts all his genius into not being heard of, and he is not heard of. But you cannot be for five minutes in the room with him without feeling that Caesar and Napoleon would have been children in his hands. He was silent and even pale for a moment and then resumed. But whenever he gives advice, there's always something as startling as an epigram and yet as practical as the bank of England.

47:09 I said to him, what disguise will hide me from the world? What can I find more respectable than bishops and majors? He looked at me with his large but indecipherable face. You want a safe disguise, do you? You want a dress which will guarantee you harmless. A dress in which no one would ever look for a bomb. I nodded. He suddenly lifted his lion's voice. Why then dress up as an anarchist? You fool. He roared, so that the room shook. Nobody will ever expect you to do anything dangerous then. And he turned his broad back on me without another word.

47:44 I took his advice and have never regretted it. I preached blood and murder to those women day and night. And by God, they would let me wheel their perambulators.

48:01 This hide in plain sight is the. Yes. This is the crux of the man who was Thursday. Let's talk about anarchists. Okay. In the year of our Lord 2026, we proclaim that we have no anarchists. And yet. And yet, anarchists were a real problem in the late 19th century and well into the middle quarter of the 20th century. Their actions inspired politicians, activists, feminists, artists, poets, philosophers, the crazy and of course, the power hungry. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand kicked off the first World War.

48:42 And the trials of the murderers Leopold and Loeb. The crime of the century in 1924 further cemented the ideas, the ideas of burning everything down, of anarchists into popular culture. The analogy that we have to draw here is a very simple one. And anarchists back in the day were what terrorists are to the postmodern mind now. Men who have no other desire but to deconstruct or burn down the world around them. And when I was reading this book, quote came to me, very famous quote, actually, from the 2008 film the Dark Knight.

49:22 And it's rather instructive here, so I'm going to read the whole quote. This is where Alfred Pennyworth, played by the great Michael Caine, and Bruce Wayne, played. Played by Christian Bale, are watching a video of this new villain that has shown up in Gotham City. A man who. Chesterton would like this. A man who laughs as he burns everything down. And I quote from Bruce Wayne. Targeting me won't get their money back. He's talking about mobsters. I knew the mob wouldn't go down without a fight. But this is different..

49:58 They crossed the line, Alfred Pennyworth. You crossed the line first, sir. You squeezed them, you hammered them to the point of desperation. And in their desperation, they turned to a man they didn't fully understand, Bruce Wayne. Criminals aren't complicated, Alfred. You just have to figure out what he's after. Mr. Pennyworth. With all due respect, Mr. Wayne, perhaps this is a man you don't fully understand either. A long time ago, I was in Burma. My friends and I were working for the local government.

50:28 They were trying to Buy the loyalty of tribal leaders by bribing them with precious stones. But their caravans were being raided in a forest north of Rangoon by a bandit. So we went looking for the stones. But in six months, we never met anybody who traded with him. One day I saw a child playing with a ruby the size of a tangerine. The bandit had been throwing them away. Bruce Wayne. So why steal them, Alfred? And this is the killer line here. Well, because he thought it was good sport. Because some men aren't looking for anything logical.

51:10 Because some men aren't looking for anything logical like money. They can't be bought or bullied, reasoned or negotiated with some men. Some men just want to watch the world burn.

51:30 Let me ask you a question. Go ahead. Do you think Osama bin Laden really thought he was going to destroy America by killing 3,000 people on 9 11? Or he just wanted to watch those towers burn? I think Osama bin Laden thought two things and that's a great question.

51:53 I think he thought two things just like the Joker or the Dark Knight thought two things. And I think they are twin tracks upon which the train of anarchy or terrorism or chaos runs.

52:05 The first thing he thought was that the United States was a weak horse. He actually said this. They always think that. Always. And, and he didn't care that history has consistently proven that we are not. He didn't care about GDP. He didn't care about military prowess. He didn't care about any of the on paper reasons why we're not. He didn't care. He said the lesson that Osama Bin Laden was seeking to deliver on one rail of that track was the same lesson that the Viet Cong taught everybody back in the 60s and 70s that if you just culturally outlast the Americans, they will go home.

52:52 And that makes them weak. That's the first thing Osama bin Laden thought. The second thing Osama Bin Laden thought was that. And again, because he's a fanatic. This is the fanaticism he thought. Islam has been around for 1400 years. By this point the Americans have only been around 200 and some odd years. Right? We're eternal, they're not. We win at the end of the day. So all we have to do is play an eternity game with weak willed and cowardly people and we'll win. And that's the mistake that the anarchists and the terrorists and the people who want to watch the world burn always make.

53:46 Because fanatics can never understand. They don't have a theory of mind of other people. They only have a Theory of mind of themselves. And they project that. Narcissism. Oh, God, yes. Extreme narcissism. Oh God, yes. And I think it is also often wrapped up in the artist's personality as well. I mean, everyone knows that Hitler was a failed artist and that was part of the thing that, that drove him. You know, Stalin was a failed theologian. He was, he was in the seminary for a while. The, the, I guess when you start shooting people, they, they move you out.

54:21 That's the. They kind of, they kind of let you go. Maybe this isn't for you. Yeah, the. But. So the idea that there. But, but, but I think that that that culture clash or that that misunderstanding goes both ways and that's, that's what makes that line from that movie so compelling because I think the civilized person has a great deal of difficulty understanding someone who really just wants to rip everything down. The civilization, fun of it, sometimes the civilized person. And this is what I. So I turned 21 three weeks after September 11th.

55:01 And a lot of guys from my generation, 20 years ago went to Afghanistan and went to Iraq. I know a lot of those guys. A lot of those guys are my friends. They went and they came back and they've told me what they saw when they went. And on the one hand, we can do the hand wringing thing that we always do in America about war. Like we're doing it right now as we go around and around with Iran, we're doing the hand wringing thing again. And by the way, that's one of the negative lessons that we learned about Vietnam.

55:31 From Vietnam, we can always hand wring and scream about a quagmire. I got into an argument the other day about a guy who's like, this is just going to be a quagmire. I'm like, we're three days in or we're three weeks in. I know that's the astonishing thing to me where you say, well, we're winning in every single way you can win a war. And it's three weeks and you're already declaring it a quagmire. And you're already declaring it a quagmire. Number one, there's no boots on the ground. Ground. Number two, like, even if there are boots, if we do put boots on the ground, you can't.

56:01 The conditions for a quagmire don't. What are you talking about? Because. And we're wandering far from Chesterton here, I realize, and we will get back. But I think at the back of that is the. Wouldn't it Be great if it was a quagmire. We want it to be a quagmire. Boy, that. Or the, or the, or the fanciful desire that exists on both the political right and the political left in our country for everything to be clean and effortless. Yes. And, and, and add to that also what we were talking about earlier, this bizarre world we find ourselves in 2024, where we want everything wrapped up in like an hour long TV show.

56:38 Well, it's been an hour, so I think the war should be over. Jack, Jack Ryan should have gotten the bad guys. He should have all been shot. Didn't. Yeah, didn't they get the bad guy yet? Yeah, didn't, didn't the black. Yeah, didn't the black widow like beat up on all the 6 foot 5, 250 pound dudes with her legs and like, aren't we all done by this point? Like it's,

57:00 this is all part and parcel of the ongoing cultural discussion you and I have been having. And we do want to get back to Chesterton. But I think, I guess to loop this back to Chesterton, it's important, I think if people read this book to realize anarchists in 1908, they were a real thing. They weren't just people with handlebar mustaches, sort of, you know, you know, Keystone Copping their way around the world. They would, you know, they. By the way, two, two American presidents were shot by anarchists.

57:35 One died, one died right away, McKinley. And who was the other one was Cleveland. Was it Taft or Cleveland? I think it was Cleveland. It was Cleveland. Cleveland. And you know, whether was he an anarchist? Like he had an A on his forehead. I don't know about that. But he, you know, he didn't have a, he was one of these people who just wanted to rip down. He didn't have a coherent political philosophy that said I shoot the president and then good things happen. Right? No, it was just rip down the world around you.

58:08 And there was a real thing to that. And

58:15 I think Chesterton was.

58:19 It's easy to see these people as buffoonish today, but you know, they were really dangerous. They did really dangerous things. They were, they were, they were dangerous men in those times. And the spirit of anarchy, which you'll appreciate this in some, in some form or another, which is the spirit of Cain, right? From Genesis, you know, Genesis 5. Right. It's that same spirit. It's a spirit of envy, it's the spirit of jealousy, it's a spirit of resentment, it's a spirit of, of Entitlement. Osama bin Laden, to go back to this example for just a minute, believed he was entitled to the Islamic empire that he thought he deserved.

59:00 And if he didn't have it, he was going to kick down every toy around him. There you go. Just like the Joker in the Dark Knight believes he's entitled to the chaos that he foments. He's entitled to that. Another great moment in movie is when the convicts are on the boat and the Joker, like, gives him a bomb to, like, blow up the boat with the civilians, or they could blow up their own boat. And the one convict. And this is sort of the. And this is where now you get into, like, progressive ideas of humanity versus actual humanity.

59:27 You know, the convict on the boat gets up and takes the, the, you know, the, the explosive device away from the, the warden or whatever the trigger away from the warden on the boat who's getting ready to do the thing, right? Blow up the other. Blow up the other boat. And he's like, I'm gonna do what you should have done 10 minutes ago, right? And he sits down and he does nothing, right? He gets to be the hero in that moment, but because he recognizes that even though I'm a violent criminal, there's certain places I can't even go to, which is very much a progressive post 20th century.

59:57 Post, post 20th century. A progressive post World War II way of looking at the world, it's the. It's the outcome of the Nuremberg trials. We're the good guys. We put the bad guys on trial. We don't appeal to God because why would we do that? Instead, we appeal to a secular morality. Secular morality will judge you, but it won't provide any meaning because secular morality is based off of this reductionist mindset, this materialist, reductionist mindset. And Chesterton, in talking about Nietzsche, and this is what I hooked on in that section where he puts the words of Nietzsche into Gregory's mouth, the anarchist's mouth.

1:00:39 He was drawing a philosophical line between. Drawing a philosophical line from nihilism directly to anarchy. If you believe in nothing, if you believe the Nietzschean lie, then the only clearing at the end of the path for you is burning the world down. That's the only clearing. Here's a interesting bit of trivia I want to lay on you. You might find this so in the. You mentioned Cain and this made me think of the Bible. Do you know the, the Bible story? Of course you do. The Noah Bible story where God comes to Noah and says the world is filled with lawless Violence, basically think of it as another term for anarchy and I'm going to send another flood and, you know, these are the things going to happen.

1:01:24 Do you know what the word in Hebrew is for lawless violence? No, I don't. Hamas.

1:01:35 The same term that the. Hamas, the, the Islamic movement. Now, that doesn't mean that in. That's not why they picked the term. It's an. They're. They, they came in there in Arabic, it's an acronym that stands for Islamic Liberation Movement, but it happens to be the exact same word. Now, if you don't see a little bit of a wow moment in that, because that word's been around for three, 500 years.

1:02:06 So there's, there is something going on in the, there's something we're missing as modern Western folks, but I also think there's something. Oh, no, no, no. I, I'm going to look that up, but I'm going to go on this premise. So there's something we're missing as modern Western folks. And I think guys like Jordan Peterson, Jonathan Peugeot, there's a certain, there's a certain line of folks that are trying to draw us back to it. And I think Chesterton was early on this Jung was kind of in the middle.

1:02:33 And now we've got other, other folks. I already mentioned Peugeot, I mentioned Jordan Peterson and others even to a certain degree, Lex Fridman, although he's kind of shaky, but who are trying to bring us back to this thread. And it's the thread that we keep missing. And the thread is the thread of the logos, the thread of the word. Right. And so the word can be used to, obviously to create, but the word can also be used to, to your point about Hamas, interestingly enough, to destroy. Words have meaning.

1:03:06 Words have meaning. Yes. And I think that, and I think this does loop back to, to The Man Who Was Thursday, I think, ultimately without God, you know, as you say, you know, the Nuremberg trials, we're going to punish you because you violated some secular, you know, morality that we're kind of inventing in real time here, you know, as opposed to, you know, you know, you have broken the, the law of God. You know, as you point out, you know, the Nazis could legitimately say, well, you made these law, our laws said it was fine.

1:03:50 Right. So that's, and that's what Hannah Arendt. So we covered Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt's reporting on the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1965, I believe it was in, in Jerusalem, right, Where the Mossad Went. They snatched him from some South American somewhere, Argentina, I think it was. Yeah, they did snatch a grab, the Mossad did, which is, you know, what they're notorious for, and. And put him on trial in the dock in. In Jerusalem. And she documented exactly what you're talking about.

1:04:23 And one of the points she made, which got her into a lot of trouble with Holocaust survivors in America. And they. And actually, it's interesting that the grandsons and granddaughters of Holocaust survivors still have a problem with Hannah Arendt for bringing this up, but she's not wrong. There was no appeal made to a religious violation or even a moral violation. The only reason, not the only reason, but the reason why the Eichmann trial was so interesting is because there was. There was a lot of tap dancing in Jerusalem, of all places around that moral violation.

1:05:02 And instead we're merely going to punish this man for the precedent or under the precedent set at the Nuremberg trials, which is. Oh, you were just following orders. Well, the orders were immoral. So we're going to punish you for following immoral orders. You should have known better. And Adolf Eichmann, and she writes about his psychology in Eichmann in Jerusalem. Go listen to the episode we did last year. Go read the book. I would encourage every leader here to read it, but she writes about how when you look at Eichmann, if you do a psychological profile at Eichmann, he was just a civil service bureaucrat.

1:05:36 Yeah. He came across like a. Like a mid-level marketing manager. Not. No, no, knock on marketing managers. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Let's be very, very, very clear. Right. Listening to this. Let's be very, very clear. Like, you know, when I look at Tom Libby, though, you know, and the light catches him just so. Okay, all right. I am so kidding. Stop, stop, stop. Tom. Tom's a good man. Tom doesn't deserve that. Tom's a great guy. The. The thing with Eichmann is. And the thing. And by the way, I think this is going to be a real problem with AI is you will have orders from nowhere.

1:06:18 Right. Orders with nobody behind them. Right. Because no appeal can be made. And thus decisions were made, but not by me. That's its own form of. And I'm going to draw a parallel here. Bureaucratized anarchy. Sure. And how do you put AI in jail? How do you fire AI? How do you solve AI? How do you. How do you. We're very much consumed with. How do we prevent AI from getting control of. Name your weapon here or name your military system here. I'M less concerned about that. I'm more concerned about how do you.

1:06:57 How do you prevent the human in the loop from consciously abandoning accountability and responsibility? Because it's just easier. Because we've proven it over the last eight years. It's just easier to sort of say, I was following orders, shrug my shoulders, and be a mini anarchist myself. And we, by the way, we have evidence of mini anarchism. We have mini anarchism in our, in our families, we have mini anarchism in our communities. We have many anarchists in our workplaces. You know, we, we have people who.

1:07:36 Without a, a, a, a, a Chesterton's fence of morality, right. Based on God, which is what Chesterton would say you need to base it on whether it's your Catholic conception, your Jewish conception. He probably wouldn't be in favor of the Islamic conception, but he would be probably begrudgingly be like, okay, at least it's something. You have to have a conception of a higher transcendent power that puts a fence around you. Otherwise, so, you know, let it go. It's not what I do for a living. Right.

1:08:06 I work on a lot of grants for a lot of different projects. And I'm gonna, I'm not gonna go into any detail because I like to say I'm under so many NDAs, I can't even talk in my sleep. But the. I can tell you that there are a lot of projects that are currently trying to find their way through the

1:08:28 how to use AI in a medical context in such a way that it's not making, say, the ultimate medical decision, but it kind of is. Right? So. And you can see it. You can see it eroding. In the time that I've been doing this, I'm watching it eroding. There used to be a very fixed line, like it had to come down to, essentially, is the AI giving you advice like, gee, that sounds like a cough. Right? So there's a lot of people have wearables, right? I don't happen to have them. I have nothing against it.

1:09:03 I just don't happen to wear one. And that wearable is continually transmitting information about the wearer. And sometimes it will say the, the information will be, wow, your heart rate seems to be like 260. That's really high. You might want to go to an ER, you know, to see what's going. That's unusually high. Yeah, yeah, that, that's for, for those listening at home, that's high. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So if your heart rate is 260 and you're listening to this, go to the emergency room, turn this off and go directly.

1:09:38 Turn this off and go directly to the er. Right. But so the, the, in that. And that sort of advice giving, which is generally okay, and goes down a certain track through the fda, which is a relatively easy track to get down. And then there are ones where the, you might say, well, your heart rate is 260, you should take this pill. It's a little closer to telling you, giving you something. And then finally it's not too far from that to your heart rate is 260. And I can inject this medication into you and I'm going to do it without you saying yes or no, or a doctor saying yes or no.

1:10:19 That's doable today. It's not out there to my knowledge anyway, but it's, you gotta wonder when we'll cross that line. So I am watching with trepidation the development of the casual acceptance of euthanasia. Sure, yeah. With growing horror. And it's one of those areas where both the Jewish rabbi and the Christian evangelists should make a common cause. Because when the AI is infused with that sort of ability to pattern, recognize ruthlessly to an end

1:11:22 and can then advise humans in what to do, humans with no guardrails

1:11:33 are going to follow what the AI says. And we talk a lot as Christians, particularly in the last 50 years. We talked a lot in the bookends of Roe v. Wade. We talked a lot about abortion and beginning of life issues in this country. And I believe it is becoming more critical. I think it will become more critical over the next 25 years to begin to talk about end of life issues. What if this person doesn't even realize they're talking to an AI? Right. And this is going to go directly to suffering. This is going to go directly to meaning, this is going to go directly to autonomy and agency.

1:12:17 All of these areas that make us really uncomfortable.

1:12:24 And we don't want to think about it, we don't want to talk publicly about. And yet we have governments. I'm looking at you, Canada. I'm looking at you. State of New York. I'm looking at you. Soon to be Oregon and California. I'm looking directly at you all. Now we have lawmakers who are saying, well, we'll just sort of set the guard, set up the rails here and you all can do it. I'm sure it will be fine. I'm sure it will be fine. And, and that's just another example of, in my mind, it's just another Example of anarchy.

1:12:55 It's just another example of.

1:13:00 Chesterton opposed anarchy because, yes, anarchy comes directly from nihilism at a social level. I think he would also approach or oppose anarchy because anarchy at a personal level leads to the deception of autonomy, the deceptive idea that you are an autonomous being that can make their own choices even out to death. And it removes at the smallest level the Tolkien level or even the CS Lewis level. It removes from individuals the ability to behave heroically. Why would I behave heroically if I can just like on Futurama, that great cartoon from Matt Groening, I could just go into a suicide booth on the street corner and just be gone.

1:13:44 I don't think we're far away from it. I've never watched. Is that term, Is that a thing in it? Oh, yeah, that was a thing in the cartoon. Yeah. Gray and called it like, like 15, 20 years ago now. Yeah, that's one of the jokes in the. That's one of the jokes in that cartoon. You can just. There's suicide booths on every corner and if you want, you just. You just go, oh, my gosh. Yeah, oh, dear. Yeah, oh dear. Well, but I mean, we're not that far away from. We're not that far away from that conception and being advised and nudged by AI.

1:14:10 Right. Isn't there a booth that you could. I'm not making this up. That will basically fill with nitrogen gas and kill you. I think that's. I think someone in suicide, someone in Switzerland died from that matter. Well, and I'm seeing. I don't want to go too far down this road, but I'm seeing that it's just, It's a. It's a concern that I have. It's a growing concern. And when I read books like the man who Was Thursday, and then I look at how little we have sort of updated our moral code in the last 120some odd years, but we've updated our technology to make us.

1:14:49 To help us do immoral things faster and better. Right, and where is that morality going to come from? And who is going to speak up for it? And that, of course, is the role of the apologist. That's. That's the role of Chesterton is speak up for that morality and, and, and to. Well, again, I'm going to bring up William F. Buckley here to stand to thwart history and yell stop. As loudly as you possibly can.

1:15:18 All right, back to the book. Back to. Back to the book. The man who Was Thursday. So I'm going to go to chapter five The Feast of Fear. The Feast of Fear is an interesting little Bond Mott where Sime goes to a breakfast, a breakfast of anarchists that is being held in a restaurant on a balcony overlooking Leicester Leicester Square. I'm probably mispronouncing that terribly. And

1:15:51 he sees several archetypes while he's at this breakfast. And I want to run through a few of them to sort of draw a. Draw a parallel.

1:16:09 At one corner of the square they're projected a kind of angle of a prosperous but quiet hotel, the bulk of which belonged to a street. Behind in the wall there was one large French window, probably the window of a large coff room. And outside this window, almost literally overhanging the square, was a formidably buttressed balcony big enough to contain a dining table. In fact, it did contain a dining table, or more strictly, a breakfast table. And round the breakfast table, glowing in the sunlight at evidence to the street, were a group of noisy and talkative men, all dressed in the insolence of fashion, with white waistcoats and expensive buttonholes.

1:16:40 Some of their jokes can almost be heard across the square. Then the grave secretary gave his unnatural smile and saim knew that this boisterous breakfast party was the secret conclave of the European dynamiters. Then, as time continued to stare at them, he saw something that he had not seen before. He had not seen it literally because it was too large to see. At the nearest end of the balcony, blocking up a great part of the perspective, was the back of a great mountain of a man. When Sime had seen him, his first thought was that the weight of him must break down the balcony of stone.

1:17:12 His vastness did not lie only in the fact that he was abnormally tall and quite incredibly fat. This man was planned enormously in his original proportions, like a statue carved deliberately, as colossal. His head, crowned with white hair, as seen from behind, looked bigger than a head ought to be. The ears that stood out from look larger than human ears. He was enlarged terribly to scale, and the sense of size was so staggering that when Symes saw him, all the other figures seemed quite suddenly to dwindle and become dwarfish.

1:17:44 They were still sitting there as before, with their flowers and frock coats. But now it looked as if the big man was entertaining five children to tea.

1:17:54 Simon never thought of asking whether the monstrous man who almost filled and broke the balcony was the great president of whom the others stood in awe. He knew it was so with an unaccountable measure, with an unaccountable but instantaneous certainty. Simon Dean was one of those men who were open to all the more nameless psychological influences In a degree a little dangerous to mental health. Utterly devoid of fear and physical dangers, he was a great deal too sensitive to the smell of spiritual evil.

1:18:20 Twice already that night, little unmeaning things had peeped out at him almost pruriently and given him a sense of drawing nearer and nearer to the headquarters of hell. And this sense became overpowering as he drew nearer to the great president. Then I'm going to skip down here for just a second. In the presence of the president, the whole company looked sufficiently commonplace. Nothing about them caught the eye at first, except that by the President's caprice they had been dressed up with a festive respectability which gave the meal the look of a wedding breakfast.

1:18:50 One man indeed stood out at even a superficial glance. He, at least, was the common or garden dynamiter. He wore indeed the high white collar and satin tie that were the uniform of the occasion. But out of this collar there sprang a head quite unmanageable and quite unmistakable, a bewildering bush of brown hair and a beard that almost obscured the eyes like those of a sky terrier. But the eyes did look out of the tangle, and they were the sad eyes of some Russian serf. The effect of this figure was not terribly like that of the president, but it had every diableri that can come from the utterly grotesque.

1:19:23 If out of that stiff tie and collar there had come abruptly the head of a cat or dog, it could not have been a more idiotic contrast. And he goes through every single one of the dynamiters and describes their physicality. And there's a. There's a link that Chesterton is making here from physicality and physical structure all the way into respectability. And this is an interesting point because

1:19:56 Chesterton was a classicist, just like every great Englishman was of his era. And we as Americans in the 21st century claim that we do not see class, claim that we do not acknowledge class, and yet we are all classicists to one level or another. Yeah, sure, Bill Gates runs around wearing a grandpa sweater and, you know, chino slacks, right? But no one's going to mistake him for being your grandpa wearing chino slacks.

1:20:28 And with that being said, the great thing of America, the great thing that we can construct on, I think, is that everybody here wants to be middle class, but no one in Chesterton time wanted to be. Everyone wanted to be upper class. And that is where anarchists hid. They hid in the upper classes, which, of course, Chesterton's making. Did they hide there or did the upper classes produce them? Well, I think Chesterton's offering the question. I think he's, he's, he's, he's asserting a problem with class and money.

1:21:03 And that's the chicken or the egg question that he doesn't know the answer to. I mean, you look at the Bolsheviks, right? A lot of them were intellectual bourgeoisie types. They were not the proletariat. Correct. Yeah. There's. Do you know the Basketball Diaries by Jim Carroll? Did you ever read that? Yeah, they made it into a movie. There's a great line in that somewhere where Jim Carroll, for like five seconds thinks he's a communist. And he comes to his father and he says, I'm a proletariat. And the father says, I'm the proletariat.

1:21:32 And he goes, and I think those guys are crazy. He goes, let me tell you who the proletariat is. This guy right here. This guy right here. So I think that partially what produces your anarchists and to a certain extent your terrorists, you know, I'm thinking maybe a little bit about like Patty Hearst here is privilege in a way, because material stuff is boring. In the end, you get bored. You know, it's. There's only so much TV you can watch. There's only so many, you know, I guess, you know, great, you know, cars you can drive and so on and so forth.

1:22:11 And there's a hollowness at the center of it. And I think people seek to fill that hollowness. I think this is one of the. I know we keep getting dragged back to the modern world. We're trying to go back to 1908, but one of the horrible things about the modern world is people are filled with entertainment all the time and they're bored silly, you know, and they're looking, they almost don't know anymore what it is to feel anything. And so they go to these ridiculous extremes, like, I'm going to blow something up just because it sort of, you know, I'm gonna feel something when I do it.

1:22:45 And. But even back in the beginning of the 20th century, you tended to find, you know, your anarchists and your revolutionaries and your bomb throwers kind of among the upper classes and. But you're bang on about America today. I mean, I don't think anybody really wants to be, except for a very few wants to be. No. You know, I like to say the, the, the goal is rich, not famous. Right. You don't want to be known. Right. The edge of the Internet. I think Fame is a curse. So, yeah, yeah, I think you're onto something there.

1:23:25 And, you know, said on a podcast, everyone. Everyone. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Well, so, well, there's fame and then there's. There's influence, right? That's, that's, that's the distinction with the difference, right? So I'm not podcasting to be an influencer. I'm not even podcasting to be famous. I'm podcasting because I like having interesting conversations with people and having other people listen in on those and get some insights and move on with the rest of their lives. That's why we're here.

1:23:55 I think that. And it's interesting when you talk about anything that's an ism or an ist, a theory or an idea that always captures people with enough wealth to be comfortable. So the example that proves the rule is Virginia Woolf, right? Virginia Woolf was wealthy enough to be a feminist and to complain and to deconstruct and all of that.

1:24:24 And of course, she was wealthy enough to resist attempts to improve her talent and resist critiques of her talent. And, and you can see sort of not really an archetype, but the beginning of the archetype of the Virginia Woolf feminist in Ford Maddox Ford's parades end, right? And he ran into a lot of those folks. So did Hemingway, by the way. A lot of those people, right. And so that specific type that you're talking about, even today in our era, resists critique, resists correction, and has enough money to be able to.

1:25:05 Rob Henderson talks about this. The great blogger and good writer talks about luxury beliefs. They have enough money to be able to adopt these beliefs of how the world. You can believe crazy things, Right? Because you never experience the consequences of the crazy things. The problem is, and this is what Chesterton objects to in the anarchists, is that the average people don't have the protections that you have based on your wealth. And so what happens when you throw a bomb is an average person gets blown up.

1:25:37 So going back to just one more time, Osama bin Laden came from wealth, right? Not a surprise. Not a surprise. Crazy wealth. Yeah, crazy wealth, right? Most of the folks. And of course, wealth is, Is, Is proximal, right? Most of the folks who are, quite frankly, the true believers in Hamas or any other anarchist movement, those people have enough money to survive. And they're not living in Gaza, by the way. They're living in Qatar. Yeah. So there was, There was something about this, and I can't go searching through the book right now, but he was talking about exactly that, that Chesterton was where essentially, you know, the, the people that pay the price for these.

1:26:24 He didn't call them luxury beliefs, but is the average. Is the. The average person. Right. I'll find it. Maybe if I don't find it here while we're talking, I'll find it later and I'll send it to you. But I, you know, you also see this quite a bit in, in, you know, the terrorist groups of the. The 60s and 70s, which were before your time. But, but, you know, I was scared of every time I got on an airplane, even as a kid. Right. They were. The interesting things is they all started off as sort of some kind of national or some, what they would say social justice or national justice movement.

1:27:01 And they all ended up being criminal gangs in the end. Chesterton talks about this at some point that it just becomes. It just becomes mere criminality in the end. You know, the IRA started on what. I'm not versed enough in the politics of England and Ireland to say whether they were just or not just. I'm not, I'm not the person to, To. To get into all that. But I think by the end it was more like, well, we need money, so let's go rob a bank, you know, as opposed to, you know, that bank is. We're robbing that bank because it's, you know, the bank of England or, you know, something.

1:27:36 Something like that. It's in here somewhere. I saw it and I meant to mark it, and of course I didn't. That's okay. You'll search the book. As I bring up an additional sort of example to back this up. Frank Miller, who was the comic book writer back in the 1980s and artist, he did a bunch of work on Daredevil. He also resurrected Batman in the 80s, which eventually became the Batman that we now know as Batman, the grim, gritty Batman. That was Frank Miller's contribution to the mythos. But. Oh, yeah, but in the Dark Knight Returns,

1:28:11 Frank Miller talks about, or he sets up a scene right, in that. In that graphic novel where Superman is reflecting, by the way, Superman is a government agent fully, completely co opted by the US Government. But, but Superman is reflecting. Clark Kent is reflecting on the. The subcommittee hearings that were held about superheroes, right, that eventually stripped all the superheroes of their identity, right? And they called up Bruce Wayne, right? And as Superman thinks in, in retrospect, you know, Bruce sat up there, as Bruce Wayne would do, and the senators asked him, you know, what's the difference between you and a criminal?

1:28:52 And I'M paraphrasing this. You can go find it. The Dark Knight Returns. It's a great little sequence. And Superman thinks Bruce laughed his scary laugh like he always does. And Bruce said, senator, we've always been criminals. Like we're never not. And then he walked out of that Senate subcommittee. And he could have made all the moms and the kids happy, but that Bruce wasn't going to do that. And then he got into his race car. The right thing to say, or the. Or what they wanted to hear. Right? That's right.

1:29:19 And Bruce got into his race car and drove away. Right. And that's the fundamental difference between. And this is what we. In the Dark Knight quote that I brought forward. Right. If you're going to go battle with anarchists, if you're going to go battle with demons. Right. If you're going. To. Let's go on Nietzsche for just a minute. If you're going to stare into the abyss and allow the abyss to stare back through you, if you're going to actually do that, not philosophically, but practically, well, you have to get down in the dirt with these people.

1:29:54 And again, this is where, as when I'm thinking about the dark side of leadership, and I guess maybe that's the sub. The subtext of this episode today, Chesterton understood what the dark side of that was and what that actually meant, as anybody does who understands what good is. So in order to understand good, you have to understand evil and you have to be willing to accept what evil is. And I think a lot of people in our time play footsie with evil, just like the Germans played footsie with the Russians about oil and natural gas for years and years.

1:30:26 And they were somehow magically shocked that Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine and their. Their natural gas supply got cut off. You were playing footsie with him for 15 years. What did you. Who did you think you were dealing with? Like, what are we talking about? But average people don't. They're unwilling to accept that there's that level of depravity inside of people. And then here's the other thing they are unwilling to accept. And maybe they should be unwilling to accept. I'm not saying average people have to go this far, but you have to be.

1:31:00 You have to be willing to accept what it is that it takes to actually root out that depravity. Right. And we're under this, our impression in the west that good will win because it's so easy on tv. The good guys always win. Yeah. That it's really costless and Bloodless and doesn't involve actual sacrifice. And that, you know, it's. It's. It's quite astonishing. And in some ways, you could almost argue that that is the way that we are being attacked is essentially our own values used to just do Jiu Jitsu us on us in a way.

1:31:39 Right. And it's. Yeah, it's. It's the. The. I. I have. I have one. One political maxim that, that, that I, I kind of keep to, you know, in the back of my mind at all times. And it goes like this. If someone says they want to kill you, believe them. Right? Yeah. Right. It's very simple. They do want to kill you. They do want to kill you. Yeah. Let me kill you. That's right. Yeah, they do. They're not just expressing some cultural difference. No. They want you dead. They want you dead. They want you dead.

1:32:14 Yeah. And actually, I, I have a very. I agree with that political maxim and. And not only. And I go a step further. Okay, well, I'll accommodate you, but I'm not gonna. Gonna just. And it's interesting that you brought up Jiu Jitsu. I do Jiu Jitsu, Right. We're doing Jiu Jitsu for many years. And one of the two principles that's sort of involved in that hobby, such as it was, were because I don't compete professionally. I have zero interest in doing that. I like. I like challenging the professionals and giving them fits, but I don't feel like it needs to go compete myself.

1:32:47 But what you find out in. I learned a lot of lessons in Jiu Jitsu, and I always talk about at least once on the show every episode because it's so. Been so impactful and here we are. But you have to get in close, and the enemy gets a vote. And if you're afraid to. If you're afraid to get in close, and if you're afraid that if you want it to all work out optimally for yourself, you're foolish. Yeah. You're just foolish. Right. So, like, I'll see. This drives my wife crazy, but people will talk about.

1:33:24 And we talk about this in my Jiu Jitsu gym, but, like, my wife will be like, oh, well, you know, this person over here, da, da, da, da, or whatever, that person over there not. Could you take them? She doesn't ask you that kind of way, but she's like, well, if things happen, like, what are you going to do? Like, it doesn't. It doesn't matter. I'm not. I'm not worried about what they are going to do. I'm not worried about the 250 pound guy who's like 2% body fat. I'm not worried about what he's going to do.

1:33:46 I'm worried about what I'm going to do in that situation because he's going to get a vote. That, by the way, in, in one of the things I love about. I mean, you and I both love basketball, right? Yeah. In the NBA, I think when an NBA player is playing at the top of his game, I don't think he even sees the defense. Oh, I don't think he doesn't matter what they're doing. No, it doesn't matter. It's. It's almost part of the. And this is kind of like a less, you know, it's not, you're not, you know, try to kill the other person.

1:34:13 You're just trying to beat them. But the. I think that's one of the most amazing things when you see players get into that zone where I don't think they're even seeing the other, other team. I don't even care, you know. Right. It's called the. Right. It's called the. I heard this term used. I think I'm using it correctly. Or it's called the zone of proximal development. Right. Where, where. Or, or I call it, I call it the flow zone. Right, Right. So if I'm going with somebody and I'm not thinking and things are just going,

1:34:48 Yeah. Oh, he just like made this thing suck for me on this joint. Well, it doesn't matter because I'm going to do this thing over to here. Like I'm thinking of. I was just in a role a few days ago. It is a small anecdote. Just enrolled a few days ago with somebody who's significantly smaller than me and female, but she's of a higher rank, so she's a real problem to deal with. And so all of the natural things that I would do, the natural advantages that I would have of size, of weight, of speed or whatever, I have to put all those, I have to put all those.

1:35:16 I do have to put all those aside because otherwise it's not going to be competitive for her. Right. And so we're going. And she did. She put this, like, she put this. It doesn't matter what it's called. It's called a baseball choke. But she put this choke on me and I'm watching this happen in real time. Like I watched her put the hand in. I watched her sink it and she's like trying to sink it and trying to sink it and try to sink it. I'm thinking, well, this currently sucks, but I could go over there on that side of her.

1:35:42 Right. So all I have to do is just survive this amount of suck here to get to the other side over there. Let me work my way over there.

1:35:54 I know. We're ripping all over the place. Yeah, we are ripping all over the place. Do you want. Do you ever watch Seinfeld? Do you ever see the one? Oh, my gosh. I am the biggest fan of Seinfeld ever. And yes, I know. During the karate with the little children. Children. He goes, jerry, you. Jerry, fight the belt. You fight the belts.

1:36:17 I know. I love that episode. Oh, my gosh. It was so good. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. And it's interesting. So, like, when he was doing that, when. When that episode came on, I was actually involved in taekwondo at the time. So I was. I was. I was. And oh, my God, that got passed around. Oh, my God, that episode got passed around our gym. It was ridiculous. It's a classic. Absolute classic. I'm going to pull this back to Chesterton, because I know that's where you want to go. What do you think Chesterton would have thought of the Batman Chronicles?

1:36:52 I think Chesterton would have been disappointed because for as much as the conceptual ideas that we've weighed on Batman put on Batman, the ways in which they work to defeat nihilism, they aren't Christian. At the end of the day. They're not. They don't. They don't uphold a Christian ethic. They uphold strength. They uphold brutality. Christian superhero. I think the closest that you get. And you're asking, I'm a comic book guy. I've been a comic book guy for a long, long time. Yeah, yeah, me too.

1:37:30 I mean. Yeah, yeah. Way back. I think the closest you get is Superman. And the joke about Superman is it's. It's a Jesus archetype made by two Jewish kids from Cleveland. That's right. Yeah. So. But does. Does. Has there ever been a superhero that, like, professed a belief in God? What about the. So this was a little after my time, but wasn't there the watch. Wasn't there, the Watcher? Wasn't he sort of godlike in his sort of, like, ability to. Yes. So you're talking about Iwatu and the Watchers in.

1:38:02 In Marvel Comics. Yeah,

1:38:06 kind of. But comics have always been partially because of the Jewish influence in comics. Partially. But also partially because you're attracting artists and creatives who tend to Be more anarchic. Not religious types. Not religious types. Right. So they tend to shy away from that. Also, I think that if you have a character and again, the closest that you get is truth, justice in the American way with Superman, that's the closest you're going to get in our denater time. That's the closest you're going to get.

1:38:41 I feel like there's a hole there that could be filled by someone who wanted to create a character. Well, the challenges in our time at the business level, comic books don't make any money now. They just don't. They're. They're. They're. What do you call it? They're either side things or they're part of a side business or if you have them as an independent. And there are tons of independent creators that are still making comics and digital, but digital distribution, sort of. Not sort of digital distribution, destroyed the comic book model basically.

1:39:13 Then you have the dynamic of bad artists. So we went through in the mid 2000s when I jumped out of comics, you could see art changing. So Marvel Comics, once they got acquired by Disney, actually even before that, they stopped accepting submissions from independent artists. So there was a time in the 90s and I submitted to Marvel where if you were a good enough artist, you could submit to Marvel and get picked up off the street. You didn't have to go to a convention. You just sent in your samples.

1:39:42 I think was. Tom Brute was the editor in chief at the time of that. Of that outfit. And you. You would have somebody look at your samples, they would call back. They would just like if you submitted a manuscript in writing. So they had gatekeepers, you could submit. And I knew guys who submitted. There was a guy who worked at a printing company across the street from me who I went and did some. Some art classes with him and he taught me some stuff about drawing. He submitted to Marvel Comics, I don't remember if he ever got accepted or not, but Marvel dc, then you had Image came along, you know, Jim Lee, Mark Silvestri, Todd to Todd McFarlane and Rob Liefeld, all those boys all came along and blew up sort of the.

1:40:20 The big two idea. But those guys were all genuine artists. They had genuine chops. Even Rob Liefeld, who I didn't particularly care for. I did not particularly care for his art style compared to what happened in the mid-2000s with art in comics. He was a frickin. He was a stud that all collapsed, which allowed manga and other influences to come into Western comic art. And that just is totally manga. And the collapse of the distribution system have totally ruined American comics. And then you have a third factor in there, which is the Disney vacation of everything.

1:40:56 So the second Marvel sold to Disney,

1:41:01 all of their properties fell underneath the mouse house. And no one in the mouse house. No one is talking about God. No one. Because why would they. They can, they could, they could do a theme park without God, which is the whole point, by the way. Everything supports the theme parks, which is what people don't really realize. Yeah. You do a billion dollar Avengers movies, but you sell far more tickets to the, to the theme parks. The theme parks are what drive that business. It's amazing. Yeah. Still, I wonder if there's not a.

1:41:34 Not a niche there for someone. But the. Because the

1:41:41 struggle of the religious man seems. Or woman. I didn't mean to make it just about men seems

1:41:53 really. Well, it seems like fertile ground for a superhero. Right. Who struggle with, you know, their. The morality of. First of all, there's the, the struggle. You know, one of the things I always liked about like X Men, for example, is, you know, just being different. Right. You're just. It's sort of like you're the. You're the. Well, it went back to every kid in high school who was like different. Right. And you know, and then you say, well, what if you took that kid which is. Gave him superpowers?

1:42:24 I'm sure he would be fine. I know what I would have done. Yeah. And that's. And that's the Peter Parker Spider man. Much ass would have been kicked. Absolutely. Absolutely. That's right. Well, that's the, that's the Peter Parker Spider man archetype that Steve Ditko and. And Jack Kirby and Stan Lee came up with actually where Steve Ditko the Jack Kirby. But I mean,

1:42:54 I think you're right. I think there is a hole in the market there. I don't know how you fill it. I don't know if comic books are the correct plug for that hole. Partially because to your point. Well, not even to your point. I don't know if it's the correct plug to fit that hole because I'm not quite sure sure that there's a market there anymore among individuals who are, who are in the, in the. In the formative years where comics work. So the formative years were like. My father gave me my first comic book when I was.

1:43:32 I never talked about this on the show before. You seen enough? Huh? Or some odd episodes. I never talked about this before. Might as well talk about it now. But. But my father Gave me my first comic when I was eight years old. Seven. Eight years old. It was a. It was a Spider man. I can't remember which number. I'm sure it was illustrated by Todd McFarlane. I'm sure it was. Or one of the guys that came in pre Todd McFarlane into the marvel. I wish I had a copy of that freaking comic book. It'd be worth tons now.

1:44:01 But that was the first comic book that I ever got, and I can tell you, I'm a Gen Xer. So we were the last generation that really experienced comic book culture as a subculture of nerds and geeks and people who, like, were doing something that was way off. Right, exactly. Doing things that was way off. Those who are listening, I'm holding up my hand as a proud member of the. The nerd and geek club. The Nerd and Geek club, exactly. And what we saw in our generation, in our 20s, our late teens and 20s, was the switchover over and more women started coming in.

1:44:38 Popular culture started coming in. You know, I, I don't go to conventions, but you see the cosplaying at conventions and more and more normal people are showing up. And then of course, again, Marvel gets Disney and starts putting out good movies. And by good, I mean not the kind of trash you would have seen in the 80s. You actually started to put together movies that can actually be released. Like the first time I saw Captain America and the first time I watched Iron man, that first, like Marvel phase one movies, I thought, holy hell, they're actually going to pull it off.

1:45:12 They're actually going to do it. Now the challenge is they actually did do it. And then of course, they drained all the water out of the pool, because that's what you do with your Disney. Sure, but, but with all of that, I thought, I thought comics would at least run parallel to that. Nope, it's all dead. So. So the formative years now of folks are formed by the myths in the movies. Not the myths in a 32 page or 16 page or 22 page flimsy magazine. Plus, if you don't have distribution, how are you going to get them into people's hands?

1:45:47 Because part of the joy of comics is you could go to the grocery and you experience this. You could go to the drugstore, you could go to the grocery store. They were in the back of the magazine rack. You didn't have dedicated shops. Like when I was a kid, I had dedicated shops. I was part of that revolution. The shops are almost all gone. Like, there's no dedicated Comic book. There's none. But there's very few dedicated comic book shops still around that are actually doing business and surviving.

1:46:12 So it's like record shops. I mean, there's a few around, and you hear people going back to vinyl, but it's. It's a. It's a. It's. It's. It's the crazy few. It's not. Yeah, well, vinyl sales crossed a billion dollars a couple of weeks ago. Are you kidding me? I'm kidding. That is good news, man. I love the idea of vinyl coming up, because the commonality between those things was this. There was a culture of it, right? You and I, if we had known each other as kids, would have been sitting over comic books going, oh, man, look, you know, look at this.

1:46:44 Right? And the same thing with. With. With records, you would listen to the records as with your friends, you know, and, you know, for example, in this room I'm sitting in, you don't do that anymore. In this room I'm sitting in are three sets of headphones. You have headphones on your head. Right? Okay. I will listen to music later by myself, you know, and. But it used to be a very communal experience, and you all sat. And the record itself, the vinyl record and the sleeve that it came in was part of that really cool experience.

1:47:18 You know, I think you and I have talked about this before, so we don't have to go too deeply into it. But, I mean, you know, I remember sitting around the Sgt. Peppers album and going, why is George's hand pointing to that particular piece of text on the back where they printed the lyrics? You know, why is Paul the one turned around? You know? You know, you debated all these things endlessly, and there was. There was. There was a lot of. Lot of friendship, and

1:47:48 I want to avoid the word culture, but it keeps coming. That came out of it, and now it's all been sort of swept away. But I'm really. I wonder maybe if some of it is coming back. When you say that vinyl sales passed a billion dollars, maybe that's a harbinger of good things to come. So let's wrap up this episode. This is. Okay. All right, man. It was Thursday. GK Chesterton, I'm going to ask you a couple questions here, Neil.

1:48:18 I think that. But I will say that. No, but I will say this. I'll start my closing comments with this idea. I want to piggyback off of what you just said. Sure. So one of the very reason. One of the reasons I do this podcast for many reasons, but a Big reason is I believe in the subversive power of books. And comic books are subversive. Don't get me wrong. So are kids, cartoons. Oh, my God, the suppressiveness. And Looney Tunes is unbelievable. But. But books at the end of the day travel across time to people, right?

1:48:53 So I read a book now at. In my late 40s. That book travels across time on my shelf with an idea in it. And my kid, who's my youngest kid, who's now nine, 30 years from now, picks up that book and he gets a totally different set of ideas, but it's still there. The book is the most subversive document we've got. And you talk about culture. Books, vinyl records, and then the digital and podcasts, they become this thing that connects people. Because at the end of the day, we need mediums to get across messages of restoration and messages of rebuilding.

1:49:37 And these subversive mediums can do that, particularly if the dominant culture. To our point, on our show today, this has been a running theme, particularly if our dominant culture is denatured or has been deconstructed by people who followed the logic of anarchism and now are done with it. I think anarchism is a spent force. That doesn't mean that I don't think the spirit is still there. That'll always be there. It's part of the human condition. But I think the. I think the support for it and the ideas of it are beginning a downward.

1:50:09 A downward spiral. And what is coming up, what is ascending is rebuilding and restoration because we've deconstructed enough. And that's one of the other reasons why I do this show. Because we've deconstructed enough, we have to know how to build now. We have to figure it out. Right. I love that concept of ideas traveling through time. Oh, and the book is. The book is the best technology we've ever created to have that happen, it's genius. So in the spirit of that, if my grandchild 20 years from now is listening to this podcast.

1:50:45 Go to sleep. Go to sleep. Go to sleep. And read the Lord of the Rings. And read the Lord of the Rings. That's right. Yes, that's right. Not in that order. Not in that order. What should leaders, business leaders, civic leaders, leaders who have managed to get to the end of the podcast with us, this part here, you know, our wanderings. What should they take from the man who was Thursday? What's the big lesson to take from that? What can they apply to their leadership lives?

1:51:23 Oh, dear. I have to Answer this. Oh, yes. So this is, this is your, this is, this is the penultimate question for the guest.

1:51:32 So I think you asked me this last time and I did never, never despair. Right. Yeah, was my answer. That's, that's the message of, of the Lord of the Rings. The message to me. And I don't know if this will help a, you know, a business leader deciding, you know, what to invest in next week or anything like that, but generally is without God there is only anarchy. And the, I think Chesterton presented that in a fun, I think he was having fun in the man who Was Thursday. I don't think he meant it to be taken all completely seriously, but that things fall apart quickly once you get away from, from God.

1:52:22 And you know, I'm not trying to offer that up as business advice. I think that that's, but you know, a good business is, is like a, it's like a well lived life. You know, you, you want to have a purpose and you want it to adhere to certain rules. And I think ultimately if you look for what rules, you know, you're trying to make your business or your life adhere to, I think.

1:53:00 Whatever your conception of God might be, I think looking there is your best, first place to start, to start looking. I think as we were saying earlier, you know, I said this to my daughter the other day and I realized it's a long answer to your short question. But you know, if you look to the Internet to find your morality or your, your sense of right and wrong or even whether you should invest in Tesla or not invest in Tesla, heaven help you, man, because there is only anarchy out there. You're not going to get your answer because it's, because there's, that's the howling winds of chaos.

1:53:36 So you have to have that internal sense of, you know, again, I'm trying to, I'm answering your question in real time, so forgive me if I'm going on a bit, but you know, one of the things that we have in business, for example, you and I have this, my wife and I talk about this a lot, which is you're always, you're hiring people, you're firing people, you're, you're, you're constantly, of course, it's, it's really all about people in the end. And ultimately usually when you're making a decision about a person, you're basing that on kind of, I mean, yes, you can have the resume in front of you and yes, you can say, oh, they went to 15 Ivy League schools and they did this and they did that.

1:54:15 But ultimately it's really a gut decision really with people. And there's, you know, there's something, what I, what I call basically your spider sense, right, which basically says, do I want to be in business with this person? And most of. There's a few instances where I did not follow that advice and I came to regret it. And off camera sometime I will tell you that that's true from many years ago. So it's nothing recent, nothing recent at all, decades back. But there are many times where I did follow that advice and I found generally it always, it always worked.

1:54:53 But you know, what we call spider sense or I just had a feeling about someone I think is another way of expressing something about their really that there was something you had in common with them that resonated. And if you want to put a religious interpretation on that, I don't think that's so excellent. There you go, my friend. That's the best I can come up with. That's. No, that's actually, that's actually very, very good. No, that's. That's actually very, very good. I usually let the guest the have the last word on that.

1:55:32 So I want to thank Neil for coming on our show today and talking with us about the man who Was Thursday by GK Chesterton. Go out and pick up that book and come to your own conclusions. And with that, well, we're out.