1984 by George Orwell - Part One w/David Baumrucker, Claire Chandler, Tom Libby & Jesan Sorrells

My name is Jesan Sorrells and this is the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books podcast, episode number 152. The 20th century was an era, at least the middle part of it, of some of the most literate readers in the history of the world. The readers of the mid 20th century were reading, absorbing and thinking about ideas that sat at the high, the high watermark of print culture.

Many books, essays, magazine articles and news reports are written during the 20th century designed to prove many different points and advance many, many different

ideas. The mid 20th century was also the start of the Western world's obsession with an endlessly expanding visual culture, a culture that included and began to shift in the direction of the power of screens, both television and movie screens, and really began to examine their power to shape and deliver messages and even to deliver culture.

The mid 20th century was also the end result, the logical high water mark of all of those utopian Enlightenment ideas about man as an individual and man in relation to institutions and governments. At the same time, the mid 20th century marked the beginning of the decline and ultimate fall of the Enlightenment project that had begun

400 years earlier. In the 17th century, these two seemingly paradoxical and disparate events collided and were reported on through the writing and the reportage of various journalists, poets, prose and narrative writers, and of course political writers like the author we are going to be talking about here today.

Talented writers and hack writers alike both penned their letter and shaped the culture of the west at this dynamic mid century mark, while increasingly pessimistic and cynical views of human nature dominated the very zeitgeist alongside the ever growing lust for institutional power, institutional control and institutional

dominance. Now the main way for an increasingly intellectual and literate reading public to understand, contemplate and even access these views and opinions about human nature, of about government and even the future was of course the novel, the technology of the novel. And today we will work through the dominant themes of one of the seminal dystopian novels of the mid 20th

century. A novel whose author's last name has become an adjective for almost every form of totalitarianism under the Sun, George Orwell's 1984 and I'm going to hold up the book for those of you who are watching on the video. The copy that I have is a Signet Classics version with the white cover and the blue eyeball leaders. Some books, even not well written ones, can lodge their ideas so deeply into the public's imagination that it requires a metaphorical crowbar and even sometimes

metaphorical dynamite to extract them. And that is some of what we are going to be doing today on the podcast with a fine panel of folks. You're going to hear three voices today if you're listening to the audio version, and of course, if you're watching on video, you're going to see three faces joining me today. So we're going to start by introducing our folks. So Claire Chandler is the author of Growth On Purpose and the

founder of Talent Boost. She also joined us on episode number 63 to discuss the Myth of Sisyphus and the most difficult podcast episode I've done so far to date. This is her. This is her. This is the, the crowning achievement of Claire Chandler on the show. Episode number 121, where we covered Lolita. Again, I want to be very clear, a book I did not pick, but I read it anyway and we had a vibrant discussion. I recommend going back and listening to,

listening to us talk about that. We're also going to be joined today by David Baumrucker. He's a licensed professional clinical counselor and founder of Momentum Life Counseling. He joined us for episode number six because he's been supporting the show for quite some time now where we talked about Milan Kundera's the Unbearable Lightness of Being and episode number 15 where Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Crime and

Punishment, part one. David, we have to go back and do part two of that book and like cycle back around to that maybe in this new format we'll be be able to, we'll be able to do that. And of course, today we joined in our conversation by our usual partner in crime on this show, the, the aforementioned, well, not aforementioned, but the now mentioned Tom Libby, who just came on and talked with us about Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Hello, everyone. How are we doing today? Hey there. Doing great, doing good. Fantastic as always. It's always love and life. Isan love and life. I complain about much. I try. I tried. People don't listen, so I stop. I would tell a whole story about something that happened to me this morning, but Tom's very tired of hearing about it and Claire heard about it before we came on. And David, you and I will have a session and we'll, we'll work through,

we'll work, we'll work through the various things. We'll do it off the air. Avian Challenge. We're going to write into a novel called Hasan's Avian Challenge. Book One. Book one. Book one. It is, it is the second time in my life clear that. That has happened to me. I don't know what that means. Anyway, David has no idea what we're talking about right now and neither does anybody else. So it's just. It's just gonna be. It's just gonna be one of these things

that just sort of pops up in the episode. I have no idea what any of that means. I just, I just, I just nod and. And then he gets. And he gets paid like 200 for like a 15 minute hour. And it's fine. It's just. I mean. There you go. Yeah, the bill will be in the mail. Wait, you're getting paid for this? Oh, man. Secret is out. He just made it awkward. This is group therapy. Welcome. Welcome to our session. Today we're going to be discussing totalitarianism. Journey

should be good. It should be good for everybody. Oh my. All right, well, we are reading, like I said, we are looking at the themes and the larger. The larger ideas in George Orwell's 1984. And as I mentioned in my intro, my longer intro episode, which you should go back and listen to before this episode number one, 151, where we talked about the literary life of George Orwell, which we're not going to

talk too deeply about that today. We did talk about a little bit of the content of the book and some of the challenges that I had reading it. One of the dynamics that I will mention on this episode as well is because this is copyrighted material, we will be referencing pieces in the book rather than reading directly from it. Because George Orwell's estate viciously protects George Orwell's copyright, which I find to be very, very fascinating and also very ironic anyway.

And which align. It also aligns with everything else that you know about or that we learned about George Orwell. And I wonder how much he would actually be in favor of that if he were. Even. If you were even still alive. It would be. Yeah, I don't think Tom. I don't think he. I don't think he would be. I think he would probably have a problem with, with some, some of the things that his heirs have done in his name, including that the, the. The. Was it the second wife that he married

who was the one who was most. The most vicious protector of his estate up until her death in the 1970s. Sonia Brownwell Orwell. She was the one who sort of set up what we now know as sort of the. For lack of a better term, although we're going to use it a lot today, the Orwellian myth structure that exists around both this book and Animal Farm, which we're also going to cover later on. Later on this month. So the book itself is structured in

a three book form. And so in the first book, we are introduced to the character of Winston. Winston lives in a totalizing one Party state, Oceania, which is at war with East Asia or Eurasia, depending upon which day of the week, is working for whatever propaganda goal it is that Oceania wants to. Wants to put forth. And Winston has a job as a member of the Outer Party. So there's the Inner Party, there's the Outer Party, and

then there are the proles or the proletariat. The proletariat are what we would call in the United States probably the working class or the poor. The Outer Party are folks who would be probably like a lot of us on this recording today. Probably a lot of us listening would be considered middle class, for lack of a better term. And then the Inner Party folks are the upper class, right? The folks who know the game is all a game and yet also are the

loudest proponents of the game. They are the folks that later on, Alexander Solzhenitsyn would write in the Gulag Archipelago. They're the same people who, when they were sent to the Gulag, shouted the loudest in favor of Communism. Solzhenitsyn documents this in his book. And that is what is documented here in the first part of 1984. We also get the beginnings of Newspeak, the removal of. And the changing of the language in the first part here of

1984. And some of the philosophies that the Party

has around history. There is no past because the past can be erased and manipulated and changed. There is no future, because if there were a future, folks would actually be working towards something that would be outside the Party. There is merely always the ever expanding

now, the ever expanding present. And that sets up some of the things that we see and can think about as dominant themes that Orwell was trying to push throughout his entire life as an author, particularly as a political writer and quite frankly, a polemicist, we cover. Tom and I covered his essay on the English language a few episodes back. I would recommend going

listening to that. And while Orwell did have a lot of good things to say about the nature of language and the understanding of language when he was putting together 1984, I want to read you a direct quote from him. And he said this. What it is really meant to do is

to discuss the implications of dividing the world up into, quote, unquote, zones of influence. I thought of it in 1944 as a result of the Tehran conference and in addition to indicate by parodying them the intellectual implications of totalitarianism, and that's really the point of 1984 at a large level is what are the intellectual implications of totalitarianism

and how do we think about that? If you go and look at Orwell's Wikipedia page and you know just a little bit about human nature and a little bit about personality, Orwell, like any good artist, was a persnickety, difficult and probably deeply, personally unpleasant. Ma' am. He did not impress me after reading his Wikipedia page, did not impress me as a guy. And I did some other research. It wasn't just

Wikipedia. When I did some other digging around on the, on this great sampling tool we have called the Internet, which again I think Orwell would have been blown away by that, but went into some digging around and found out that yes indeed he was a deeply difficult individual. People did not like him. His, his classmates at Eton

did not like him. He suffered, well, not suffered, but he, he had the, he had the psychological, the psychology of being uncomfortable with being middle class in, in England and also having to serve in the military in, in, in India and tried to, and we'll talk a little bit about this later on, try to make, trying

to make hay with the Spanish Civil War. And that didn't really work out. As a matter of fact, the writer Henry James told him that all the things you're going to go to fight for in Spain are all just a bunch of clap trap. You don't actually really believe that. Which as an upper crust, you know, British gentleman, I'm sure in that, in a very Doug Murray lilt, he rejected that feedback from Mr. Henry James, as the British often do.

But he was fascinated by systems, he was fascinated by institutions and he was fascinated by how things all click together. And that is one of the. You gotta sometimes give the author, not sometimes you have to give the author's due. That is what has I think driven this book directly into the zeitgeist of particularly the progressive left imagination in the United States, but increasingly a globalized imagination

of what totalitarianism actually is. And I have some thoughts on that today which we can discuss. But I've rambled on long enough and I've introduced the book. So I'm going to go around the horn. We're going to start with, with Tom and then we'll go to David and we'll go to Claire. What are your thoughts or impressions of 1984 I know it's been a little while, Tom, but go ahead. I, I mean, I remember again as we were kind of joking about this a few minutes ago, but

yeah, I read it almost 30 years ago, so it's been a while. But I do remember it being kind of impactful at the time. And if you think about like, you know, back in the 80s, I mean, I read it probably 88, 89. So it was like. So we were like, we were confused, like, oh, is this the book written a couple of years ago? Or. And then like, of course, your teacher standing in front of the class going, no, this book was written in 1940, whatever it was. And I was like, then

how do they know what's happening in 1984? Like, we were very confused why we're reading this book in the first place. But I do remember it was, it was kind of impactful. It was impactful to the point where people are, you know, the idea or concept. If we had a such a strong political party that could actually do this, like, what would be the pros and cons of it? And we had a lot of classroom discussion around the what ifs. Right. Like, we're a

pretty strong two political party country. We've tried several times to have a third party. It doesn't usually last long. It doesn't usually. And it doesn't usually make a lot of impact. So we've been a strong two political party almost from the beginning of our country. So when we think of one of them falling off and just one of them taking power and it becoming. What's the difference between a political party holding all the cards versus a dictator holding all the cards or

a monarchy holding. It's essentially the same thing. It's government by committee, sure, but it's still one ideology. It's one direction, one unilateral thought process that kind of dictates who you are, what you do, what you think and how you act. So it was, it was pretty impactful to me when I was three. So I've been, I've been a huge, huge, huge advocate for trying for us to get a third party that actually sticks it. Obviously I'm not successful at it, so I'm not

suggesting that it's going to happen. But I've always felt like we've needed, you know, you always have, like when people tell you there's always three sides to every story, right? His, hers and the truth. So I figured if we had three political parties, we could kind of figure out like, right, wrong and indifferent, like, and then be able to kind of select between the, the three, you know, the three things that you want to do that you, that

you feel you should be focused towards. So I feel like this book kind of talks your, you into some of that stuff, I guess, is what my point was. Like you start thinking about that stuff as you're reading it, essentially. Right, right. Well. And you read it at a depressionable age, which a lot of people do read 1984

in high school. That's the first time they're, they touch on these ideas and just like Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, it's one of those books that, and Catcher in the Rye and the Great Gatsby, you know, is. Yeah, Brave New World. Right. Huxley. Right. The Big Five. Right. That sort of just embed on you at a very. Or imprint on you at a very impressionable age and then sort of set the tone for your thinking in the, in the future. Dave, what were your thoughts on this

book? I, I think the book's, it's unique and I think that it's honest. My opinion is a better book than Brave New World. But I, I, why I like this book is because it is very linear. Like, you walk through this book and I think Orwell's perspective was that he cared less about characters and more about, like, this activism through his art. And it seems like he is very dedicated to world building and shaping a perspective and shaping a message. And I like this book in that term because I think the

ambiguity. Again, we can make the argument that Winston isn't developed enough. Right. We come into the book like, was Winston always like

this? What happened to Winston? How do we, we, we meet him somewhere in this weird middle ground. And I remember when I first read it, I was kind of frustrated with that. And I, as time goes on, I went back and I looked at things with this and I was like, well, but that offers us a very unique perspective, though, because there is less character development. I think it makes it

easier for us as a reader to almost insert ourselves in that. And I think, I don't know, but that was a feeling I kept on getting when I went back to this is going. Maybe that's what his intention was, that I'm not going to put a lot of focus on the nuanced character pieces, but I'm going to let the characters be almost like the, the pong paddles, right? Like bouncing this idea or this interaction between, like, power

and totality and propaganda. It's like the characters seem to be these interplacing people like pieces that we would just kind of walk with them along this and go, oh, this is the introduction to that theme in the book. And then we'd seen somebody else. And this is our introduction to that theme in the book. And for that, I really liked it. Going back, Tom, what you said, I think that it. When I first read it, too, it was impactful. I had no idea why it

was impactful. Like, I just knew that when I was reading something in high school going, there's something to this. And you have to. Obviously, I had to get a little bit older and to spend some time actually reflecting. And I think the last 15, 20 years have been really, really interesting because we think about the word Orwellian, right? And the beautiful thing is both the right and the left can use it because double speak. And isn't that a fun thing we have to bear witness

to now? So, again, it's a very. I would agree it's impactful. And I think that only getting ready for this episode and going back and looking at it again, just, I guess, with a new set of eyes for myself, I was like, oh, there are some things of this I didn't really realize the first time I watched. I was trying to. I was focusing on the characters. I was focusing on Winston. I was focusing on just the interaction, especially at the end with the romance and the lack thereof. And then there was

some interesting pieces I focused on in the beginning. And then I went back. I'm like, I don't think that this is the whole. I don't think this is what the perspective of this is about characters at all. I think that the characters are secondary to the storyline. Okay. I might be. I might be. I'm out to push back on you a little bit, Dave, because I was not. Maybe. And maybe I'm reading too many literary novels. That might be it. I might be. I might be, too. I'll grant you that. I might be

too down that road. Right. Things. And I. I am. More. Well, we'll get to James Baldwin and everyone's protest novel in a minute. Claire, you are. You were very excited to read 1984. This is one of the books that I initially sent out. My request of, like, hey, who wants to join me on this podcast episode? Like, I do at the end of every year. You're like, yeah, that one. And I did not, by the way. Normally I try to, like, pick people, like, who I think is going to do what. And I did not

anticipate this one coming from you, so. So why are you excited about 1984. First and foremost, because I had to rehabil my reputation with your audience after selecting Lolita. I. I did pick Lolita for its controversy because I had never read it, and I wanted to see one. What all the fuss was about because I knew that we would have a. An exceptionally interesting conversation, which we did, you know,

so. So this was in part to sort of counteract that, but it was also an opportunity to not revisit high school, but to reread something that I first read as an idealistic high school student who was naive, who had not experienced much grit in the world. Right. So it's interesting when I. When I remember and Tom and David, you. You touched upon it already, sort of your memories of your first introduction to the book was far different from revisiting it now.

And now having gone through some grit, some decades of realism, some decades of true polarization. And I know we will get into, you know, is it. Is it still dystopian when it's really mirroring kind of current political life? I don't know. I think we might need to come up with a different description of it. But I also chuckle, Hasan, when you. When you described Mr. Orwell as persnickety, because it's one of my favorite English vocab words, I used it the other day in

reference to. I think zoom was being persnickety at the. At the time, you know, so if even fiction is in some way autobiographical, you know, I. I think you do see a little bit of the persnicketiness of Mr. Orwell and David. It's interesting your observation about the fact that these characters were not terribly well developed, and maybe you didn't notice that the first go around. I didn't really either, and I couldn't put my finger on what was different

this time until you said that. And I think it also, for you, it made it easier to insert yourself into the novel. For me, it made it easier to care less about the fate of the characters, because it wasn't really about the characters themselves. It was about the what if? And it was about the, you know, a particular character named Winston that we don't care that much about, because to your. To your point, we

don't really know his backstory. We don't know how he got to where he is, but at the end, when he made the decision to choose conformity over love because that was the easier path, you know, do we really care that he never really figured it out? I don't. I don't know. I'm kind of undecided about that. So a lot, a lot to unpack, certainly. But reading it again as an adult, at least in the, in the guise of an adult versus my idealistic high school years, very different

book indeed. The first time I read this

book was when I was about 15, 16 maybe. And interestingly enough, I did read it, along with Brave New World and Brave New World, which you'll also cover on the podcast coming up here in a little bit. Brave New World stuck with me more than 1984, even at like the age of like 15, partially because to the point that David has already brought up. Aldous Huxley is just a more literary writer, right? He's, he's just, he's writing into more of

a developed space. The characters are more developed, their motivations are more clear, I guess at a, at a, at an authorial level, or maybe not an authority level. Maybe that's what I want to say. They're clearer at a character development level. Right. And I was also reading this book during a period of time when I was beginning to explore and really get into movies. So I was being very much influenced by. This is why I brought up

screens in the introduction. I was very much being influenced by screens and visual culture. You know, it was a summer. I mean, my. The summer of the year I turned 16. I watched probably a hundred movies in that summer. So I had my first interaction. Well, this was the heady days of the end of the collapse of Blockbuster Video, the heady days of the collapse of Blockbuster Video when you could walk into Blockbuster and

you could walk out with like packs of videos. They were bundling DVDs together because they couldn't figure out how to compete with anything. And they would just give them to you walking out the door. They walk out with like $20 worth of movies. It was insane. And so, you know, I would go from watching, you know, Shawshank Redemption to, you know, Braveheart to Goodfellas to Apocalypse now to, you know, she Wore a Yellow

Ribbon. And also at the same time, I'm reading, you know, I'm reading these, reading these books. So all those, all these things were kind of merging together in my head, which made for a heady stew. Yeah, Tom? Oh, I was just gonna. I was just kind of chuckling inside that watching Apocalypse. I can only imagine a 16 year old watching Apocalypse now route while reading A Brave new world in 1984. What I could only imagine the turmoil inside. That's my grandma told me when she. So

my grandma, who was, Who Is fan of Oprah. Oprah came on at 4 o' clock where I lived when I was in high school. She, she, she, this was the deal. She said you could watch any movies that you want between like noon and 4. But when 4 o' clock comes, you're done. Oprah's coming on, you're done. And like, you're done. That's it. Like, I don't care if you're in the middle of the movie. I don't care if the guy's screaming. I

don't care what's happening. Like, you're out. Go outside. Like, do something else. And so I knew I had that little, that little spot where I would be able to, to consume. And I did. I did. It was a, it was a big summer. Okay? So several. I've taken notes while everybody's been talking. Several things that jump out to me. The keyword that everybody uses is. And even I've used is impactful. Right? So follow up question. Oh, actually, before I even do the follow up question, reading it again,

right In. In light of me be their 30 years have now passed. I got to admit, I was gonna save this for later, but what the hell, I'll go with it now. I kind of. This is gonna be terrible, but I'm gonna be the terrible person. I laughed at the book. I laughed at it. I did. I chuckled and I, I thought, oh, you sweet summer child. Right? Like the last 30 years that we've lived through. Not in the Soviet Russia, which is dead and gone as of, as of the 1980s. Pachay, Vladimir Putin. The

greatest geopolitical disaster of the 20th century, according to him. Not my words, his. But we don't need like the Stasi and like children reporting on their parents. We've got cell phones for that and everybody has them in their pocket by the way. We're feeding all of our data into them. We don't need screens on this that are on all the time that watch us and that we watch. We already have those. They're brought to us by Apple. We don't need them.

We have them. We have them. They're brought to us by Apple and by Android. Right. They're brought to us by Goog Google. We have the greatest behavioral tracking system ever created in the history of the world. It's called the Internet. And so I read these things and then we just all went through Covid together and we're all gonna have different opinions about what happened with COVID But we did all go through Covid together and we can all sort of

see with our eyes exactly what happened. Whatever the reasons are or justifications don't matter. Like, these are the things that happen, right? And I need an explanation. And I put this, I did put this in my, in my book or in my script. We could talk about this today. I need an explanation. If that's not Orwellian, if those things aren't Orwellian, then I need an explanation for what happened in the last 30

years. I need a better explanation other than maybe just governmental incompetency or just foolish people who are pursuing power. Now. Keep that in the back of your head. Because that was sort of the, the framework that I came to and I. Did I crack? I sort of cracked up laughing. I did. Like, I was like, okay, like, this is definitely written from a mid 20th century perspective when the horrors of this seemed to be more horrible. And now we've wound up in, we've

wound up in a different spot. So follow up question, which I was originally going to go back to. How young a person do you think should read this book? Who would you throw, what's the minimum age? You would throw this at somebody?

So my, my first reaction to that is it sort of, it, it sort of triggers for me and I, and I, I laugh at myself when I look at the high school students of today, my nephew being one of them, and the thought of him reading what I read at his age, I, I feel. Not specific to 1984, but a lot of the books that we've already mentioned, I think he's not ready for those. First of all, he's not, he's not a big reader. I always had a book in my hand. My last day of school,

I made a beeline to the library. I was that kid, right? So he's, he's, he's got different interests, but I also feel I'm laughing at myself because I'm finally at the point where I go, kids today, but kids today don't read, you know, to the level that, that we did. Or at least that's my, my accusation of that. How early should someone read this book? Among the others that we mentioned, today's kids of, of today's era. I, because kids, to me, the, my, my,

my initial reaction to that is it depends on the era. If we're talking about today's kids, I think they could read it, but I think they're going to read it, discard it and go, oh, yeah, Big Brother, isn't that a reality TV show on cbs? And then they'll move On. So, you know, this is the TV and tablet generation. I think, I think the same age group, I think that, you know, middle, high school. Middle, high school, meaning like sophomore, junior would probably make sense.

I'm kind of with Claire here in a, in a sense, not exactly, but in a sense, but because I do think today's kids, I, I definitely don't think they read as much as, as we were. And I don't, I also don't think the curriculum is forcing them to read as much as we had to as well. But I do think that they're, I think they're, they are more advanced than we were.

I think they think differently. I think they think through problems differently. I think they, they see things differently than we did because they've had so much exposure to it such, in such early way earlier than we did. Our only exposure was the evening news. They're exposed to it 24 7. They can see whatever they want. So I don't, I don't think the age much matters. I think, I think that that middle high school age would be great

for them to read it. But I think their reaction to it might be a little bit different than what you were thinking, Claire. I think their reaction to it is going to be not so much is like, you know, oh, isn't Big, Big Brother a show? But kind of what Hasan was alluding to a few minutes ago. They're going to read the book and it's not going to be as impactful because they're already seeing some of it, right? Like so, so they're already seeing that the government can see everything that

they do. The government, Big data is the, the government at this point. Like I think they're already seeing all that. So it's not gonna shock them. It's not gonna, it's not gonna be as in like when we looked at that, we were like, oh, wait, what, oh my God, what if a government actually did that? And my kids, my kids are looking at it going, what are you talking about, dad? The government is already doing that. We're just falling into their trap, so to speak. And it doesn't matter if they're

a Democrat or Republican, they're both doing it. So to, to my kids, that single source of Big Brother that was, is, is represented in 1984 as one political party in my kids views. It's just the government

is the government. They, they think that, that regardless of the parties that, that they represent, they would represent that whole thing. And I, I think that, I think they would read that book and go and yeah, like I think, I don't think, I don't think it would be like, like I said, we've all said it was impactful to us. I don't think it would be impactful to them the same way because I think that they, they would

feel like they're already living it. What, what might surprise them and what I, what I think what I would love to hear or see is if any one of them could, could wrap a bow around the fact that this book was written 80 years ago like that. That I think I would like to see what that association would be. But I don't think the content of the book would, would surprise them as much as it did us. Yeah, I, I think I, I think probably 10th grade is what I think just development stage

wise. That's when we're trying to find where we're trying to find our tribe. Right. We really want to isolate. I think political activism has started in 9th grade now. So I think we have to start recognizing the fact that children are more political today than they ever were. I just think the big difference is that at least. So I read this in I think 2000. For me it was we, we the students were the ones asking the questions. I think we're a post question

asking educational system. I think we're in a prompt delivery education system. So I think that we have to get. It'd be fascinating to listen to see them do it. Tom, to your point, I think, I do think that there are some radical advantages that kids today have that we don't have just in terms of awareness. I think that they're hyper aware and maybe that's what all the mental health stuff

is about. But I think it'd be interesting because when I'm, when I have my experience working with people under the age of 23, I'm very prompt driven. I have to present a series of secular prompts in sequence and out of that just a wonderful array of different ideas come out of it. But they're not self driving those questions. They're not self invoking. Like I'm thinking about this because I would love what I would the prompt again to what I would love to ask them is going is if this was

the vision 80 years ago. Use your minds guys. What is your vision? Right? What is the multiplier effect that you kids can see going 80 years into the future? Because I think that that would also be a fascinating thing to watch them because yeah, I think that's a really good question. I don't know the answer. I just think that 9th and 10th grade and maybe you have to put the book on audio and maybe you have to kind of watch, kind of prompt them through listening to pieces by pieces of it.

But I don't think the material is above their head. I think that they're definitely ready for it. I think I, I think I read it my junior year, so 11th grade, but I'm fine. Like I said, I'm fine. 10 or 11 is fine with me. Either one of those I think would be fine. I'm fascinated by the idea of prompt of prompt, a prompt delivery based system versus a post question asking system or maybe not possible pre question

asking system. I'm going to get back to that because there's a fundamental difference. I'm doing a lot of work, interestingly enough, in some other work that I'm doing with other clients out of my leadership consultancy. I'm currently doing a lot of work with the four major LLMs. So I'm working with Perplexity, I'm working with Copilot, I'm working with Claude,

and I'm working with ChatGPT. And the way, David, to your point, the way that you think in relation to those systems is a fundamentally different way of thinking than search based thinking which comes out of Google and which is what we're all all sort of very familiar with. So it is a different way of thinking. It's interesting that you, that

you brought that up. Okay, let's turn the corner here and talk a little bit about some of my personal problems with this book and then I'll use this to jump off to other folks with this. So yes, I did kind of chuckle at it. I tried to take the book seriously, I did on its own merits and I failed miserably at probably at doing that. And the biggest reason, I think I failed miserably at it.

And by the way, this really began to happen to me when we, when we, as we got more into the book and as Orwell began to develop more of the ideas that Winston was beginning to articulate. Right. So right around the middle of book one and going into book two, Winston begins to. And it's almost as if weirdly enough, from a literary perspective, it's almost as if Orwell didn't have enough for two more sections in this book. And so he had to come up with the woman foil because

anyway, he had to come up with the woman foil. And so he creates the character Julia and she is a about as one dimensional character as I've ever seen. In literature. And, and. And there is one line in here when. When she first, you know, sort of engages with him and Winston is. Is growing and is thinking and is. And is moving, but he thinks about her in a particular way. And one of the things. A couple things he says. He says, number one, that her. Her.

Her sexuality and her. Yeah, here we go. With Julia, everything came back to her own sexuality. The sex impulse was dangerous to the party. And because the sex impulse was dangerous to the party, every act of sexual engagement that they had in the book was a act of protest and an act of rejection of the party. Which, by the way, I will say this as a person who's been married a long, long time. I've never. Even when I was single, I never met a person. And then immediately,

like, boom. Like, just went to the thing. I don't know how it works now, apparently I hear that that happens a lot now. It did not happen for me that way. There was some sort of seduction there. And I presumed that even more in the 1940s there would be some form of seduction. But then I went back and read, read, read and looked a little bit at Orwell, and I think Orwell struggled with women. So there you go. I don't think he knew

how to write that. So Winston literally meets Julia. She drops a note in his hand, and then, like, they're off to the races. It's. It's weird. It's the 1940s version of, like, OnlyFans or Tinder. Yeah, it's the 1940s version of Tinder. Hand to hand Tinder. So. So. So he's got these ideas, right, wrapped around this one dimensional character of Julia, and it becomes more and more clear as he, you know, starts to set up. Try to set up a relationship with her, and he's

trying to find a place to meet her that's away from the telescreens. And then he meets this guy, Mr. Charrington, who eventually turns out to be something else. But we'll leave that aside for just a moment. It becomes more and more clear to me, or became more and more clear to me as I was reading the book, that what Orwell was writing was protest literature. It was protest literature against the Stalinist regiment. It was also protest literature against capitalism. Because some of the

things he says in the book about capitalism, I'm like, that's not. That's. I don't

think that that is what you think it means. But he's coming. Well, he's coming at it, and I have to give forgiveness so one of the principles that I have, whenever I read something that's from the mid century of the United States or of the west, going all the way back into like the 1890s or 1880s, I give those people grace because they didn't know about gulag there in. The idea of a concentration camp where you would put your political enemies was not a reality for them.

When. When Communism was first pitched by Lenin and the Marxist ideals were first pitched by Lenin, and Stalin wasn't running anything yet and Trotsky was still alive, everybody thought this could work. Everybody thought this was absolutely a new way of creating a new man. They weren't saying it in an ironical, cynical, nihilistic way. That all came after World War II. We actually talked a little bit about this with Tinder Is the Night, because

this kind of popped up with Tender Is the Night. You also had the. The old ending of the Victorian colonialism, right? And so historically, you have this brew. And then the shock of World War I came, and then people finally were like, oh, my God, like, wait, the institutions failed. Holy crap, what are we going to do? And so there's this holy crap moment that happens between the end of World War I and the beginning of World War II, where all the idealism and everything else is just sort of up

in the air. And this is what Orwell came out of. So Orwell's writing a protest novel with all of that underneath him. And I did find myself agreeing with James Baldwin's idea, which he writes in his book Notes of a Native Son, where he wrote a critique called Everyone's Protest Novel about Uncle Tom's Cabin. And one of the points that he made is that in that novel or in that essay is that protest literature is not actually literature. It's just pamphleteering.

And pamphleteering is fine, but we shouldn't treat it as literature. We shouldn't treat it as a novel. We shouldn't treat it as if it's some erudite intellectual thing. And James Baldwin, of course, is writing in the context of, again, Uncle Tom's Cabin. He's writing the context of civil rights. He's writing in the context of slavery. But the critique applies here because Orwell was writing protest literature. He was protesting against Stalinism. He was protesting against

gulags. He was protesting against what he saw as the. The. The lack of purity. It's interesting, in political parties in America, we talk about politics, we talk about purity tests, the lack of purity in Marxism and the lack of purity in democratic socialism. He was protesting against that, and I thought you always get the impression when someone's writing a protest literature, like, Alice Walker did this with the Color Purple. That was also

protest literature. You always get the impression that they want you to do something with, with their protests. They want you to take action. It's interesting that David said that political activism is now replaced, you know, reading and as a form of identity format, not reading, but as a method of identity formation. Now, in the ninth grade, that's

insane to me. Like, that's absolutely insane. You don't know anything about anything. When you're in ninth grade, you're gonna tell me you have some political opinion about capital gains taxes or something. Like, you don't, you don't work, you have no money. What are you getting active about? What are we doing? Active about what? So that's, I would love to explore that later. Maybe not on the

show. We'll talk about that later. But my point is, when you're writing, when a writer writes a polemic like this, he wants you to do something. And so I guess the question is, what did Orwell want us to do? Totally different question to what I wrote down, but we're going a totally different direction, which is fine. So I'm going to start with David, and then we'll move to Claire and then Tom. David, what does Orwell want us to do with his.

What I think is his protest literature? And you can disagree with that, that framing, that's fine. But what does he want us to do? What action does he want us to take? Because I can't tell. Great

question. I, I, My takeaway from all this is I think that Orwell wants us to choose living naturally. Meaning that I think that Julia is not a person, but she's the personification of the wild, untamed nature. That's why he can be a grotesque man and she still falls for him. Because it's more of a, it's more of an encounter with this representation. And at the end, when he get, when he, when he betrays her, he betrays what? He betrays his own nature, he betrays his own humanity.

I take away from this book that Orwell is asking us to choose us to always, like, define maybe a higher order, meaning that there's no reference to a spiritual north in this book anywhere. And I think that there's an undertone that if we had a high, like a higher order or a guiding principle within us, we would, we wouldn't sabotage ourselves. We wouldn't. We wouldn't for lack of better. I mean, we wouldn't, we wouldn't just undercut ourselves in these pieces because he. It

feels like all of these encounters. And I think the whole idea of doublespeak is that because we are not standing for us, we are not making a declaration that we need to stand for something or we stand for nothing. It felt like this whole entire book was just this projection of this lost soul in society that you don't, you know, you're not, you're not, you don't have allegiance with anything.

Right? So you. And so he is attracted to, like, the women he finds on the screen, even though he's disgusted by her. It's like it's because you're rejecting your own nature. At least that was my takeaway, that every single person in the book is more of a placeholder of some form, of a deeper thing that we need to connect with within ourself. Whether it's friendship, companionship, whether it's sex, whether it's love, whether it's just loyalty, it seems like all these people are

parts of it. And I think that that's why when he's going back and he's changing words, he's like, the new speak. He's having this crazy introspective moment where he's like, what am I doing? Like, what. What in the world am I? And yet he continues to do it. And it feels like all of this, this entire book is just herself reflection for me. So I think that that's what he's asking us to do is just be, Be introspective. Claire, what is Orwell asking us to do?

Yeah, I mean, it's, it's a little bit trite by now, right? But to say, because we hear it every day, you know, the, the one party that's not in power tells the other party, think for yourself. Right? Don't just, don't just take what they tell you on the news because it's not really news anymore. It's really just an entertainment channel and it's spunning your own narrative. So I think it's that. But I,

but I think at its core it is also. And David, I think this is, is in alignment with what you're saying as well. It's be, be the first one who does not sort of revert back to, I'm going to go the path of least resistance. I peaked my head up out of, you know, out of the foxhole. I got threatened with rats, didn't like that so much. And therefore I, you know, I, I gave up the one woman who finally might have loved me because

did I mention the rats? And. Right. And then he just sort of at the end of it goes, yeah, I just, I, I love Big Brother and I, and I. So I think if there, if there is a call to action and we could even debate. Is that really true? But if there is a call to action, I think it is something around that it's to say there has to be a first person character, what have you, that goes into the breach who doesn't say, well, I tried a little bit. It got uncomfortable.

Yes. So much about love. But you know, do you know the divorce rate? That wasn't going to work out anyway with Julia. And so. Right. So I think, I think if there is a call to action, it's that be, be the first one, because there has to be a first one who is going to rise above. And you could probably make the same argument about the Color Purple, about a lot of the other protest type narratives that they're saying. We, we can't. There, there always has to be one who breaks the barrier.

Look, I think he's not, not to jump on the bandwagon here, but I mean, it seems like a pretty easy question to answer. Right. Like, I just. The way you put it, Clara, I think the two of you guys are kind of saying the same thing, just different ways. And I'm going to say a third way. I think he's giving us a roadmap on how to lose our individualities. Right. Like, I think that's what one of the things that he. That's like an underlying tone of the book. Like

you are not an individual anymore. You're just going to conform. And you know, Claire used the, the term conform and you know, David, you used. Used it a little differently, but it's, it's essentially he's giving us the roadmap and I think it's a warning to your point. It's like, it's like a warning sign. Like, hey, don't. Don't allow this to happen. Like, you have to, you have to fight the power. We've been talking about fighting the man. I don't even

forever. Right. He's just adding. He's just, he's just giving it to you in a kind of, in a way that he thinks is going to, to like really hit and resonate with you is like two plus two equals five. Right. Like, that's the whole, the whole thing. Like, because they said so. And you just can't fight that. You're just gonna. To your point, you're going to conform to that. And I, I think that there's more to it than, than just someone has

to fight back. I think the whole point of it is that he's showing you that we all have to, all of us have to fight back. He can't be an individual like you. You can't just say, like, listen, I, I've seen enough post apocalyptic movies and read enough of these books. If you get that one person that just raised the hand and goes, hey, this is wrong, boom. They shoot that person and nobody else wants to say anything. So, you know, like, it's, it can't be. The problem

solves itself. Yeah. See, it, it can't be. It's basically like, you know, one of those things where, you know, the sum of the parts have to be greater than the, than the, the parts themselves. Right. Like, I forget, I, I always forget how to, how that phrase goes. I always mess it up. But, but the reality of it is it can't just be one person sitting in a, in a room rewriting history. As, as you may mentioned, David, you can't just be that one person. Go, hey, this is wrong.

I shouldn't be doing this. I'm gonna go, I'm gonna go start a riot. I'm gonna go start a revolt. I'm gonna start a revolution. Has to like you, There has to be something to fight the machine. You have to, you need a machine to fight the machine. You can't, like, you know, that's like, it's like going into a, you know, into a. What was that the movie Real Steel with the robot fighters. That's like going in the ring with the robot fighter. I'm not, I'm gonna lose that fight. Well, I think

that's, but I think that's a common. Claire, you use the term trite. Yeah, we use the term trope. That's a common trope, right? Of these, of science fiction novels. I mean, heck, even Isaac Asimov, the link that I sent out to everybody, Isaac Asimov's critique of 1984, which was a really well written critique by a guy who wrote a lot of science fiction. And even he, he was like, really like, what are we, what are we doing here? Like, I'm a professional writer. This is not, this is not the thing.

So I, I, I look at the trope and I look at, I was born in the late 70s. I came of age after all this was over. Like, it's, it's sort of like I came of age after the rebel, after Big Brother was Already installed. The rev. Already over. Like, what am I revolting against?

Right? Like sometimes the black community, depending upon, like, what the ages of the black folks have to be sitting around the room together, eventually somebody will bring up Malcolm and Martin, and eventually then somebody else will bring up crack cocaine, and then that ends the conversation. Like, this is because, like, it's over. Like, the revolution's over. And, you know, I take from that, as an. As a person in the African.

As an African American person, the person who lives in that community are. And engages with that community sometimes I take from that. That weirdly enough, kind of like Glenn Lowry and John McWhorter, I take from that you've won the freedom to go off and to Tom's point, be an individual. You've run. You've won the freedom to go off and do that. You don't need a revolution anymore. Now.

What you need is. I've been saying this word a lot more often lately. You need a reformation of systems, a reformation of institutions, because the. The unique things that created the environment for a revolution are over. Like those. Like, you know, those. Those dynamics are done. And by the way, if you don't believe me. If you don't believe me, say what you want about blm, they tried to start a revolution. And where are we at today? Where's the revolution?

If I think. Or even going back. Or even going back one second, David. Even going back further. Occupy Wall Street. I remember. I'm old enough to remember when Occupy Wall street of the Bernie Bros. Were out there, I walked past some of those in campus because I was living and working in New York. Well, not living, but working in New York City. I talked to some of those people. Revolution is over. Broke the Tea Party people. The revolution is over, bro. You lost. To paraphrase

for the Big Lebowski, do what your parents did, sir. Go get a job. So, like, what are we? What. I get it. That Orwell is passionate. This is Baldwin's critique, also with African American novelists specifically. This is his. Was his specific critique even in the 50s, particularly with Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison. We are at a point where the mode for revolution has shifted,

and we need a different word, I think. But the only words that were offered in 1984, to everybody's point here, are words that would inspire revolution. So what are we? I'm. You know, I. I don't know what to do with that. Go ahead, David. Sorry, I didn't mean. I did not mean to cut you off. No, no, it's fine. So my My job is very unique because when people come and they're talking to me about meaning making, I don't ask people what they're living for. I

ask what they're willing to die for. And I think that that's a fundamental piece that is missing. And I think that that's almost like the comparison between 1984 and like the Matrix idea is that Neo was willing to die for something. He's no longer standing. I want to live for this. And I think that when we think about blm, my only criticism about that is no one was willing to die for. For blm. I think everyone was living for a world that BLM could create. But I

don't think that people were willing to die for that. And I think that's a massive, just shift. And there's a. Almost like this invisible wall there, because if you go to like the World War II generation, right, there's a very staunch difference in attitude and. Or how they look at America, right, Versus every generation that's come because there was an existential threat like, I'm willing to die for this. And I think that a lot of the generations have

compoundingly been focusing on what am I living for? It seems nuanced, but I think it's everything. And I think when we think about meaning making and we think about the book, and I think that maybe that's. I was. Claire, when you were talking, it kind of struck me like maybe that's an underlying message here. Is that. Is Orwell Is. Is. Was Winston even willing to die for change? Or was he just trying to find a reason to live?

Right, because finding a reason to live is different than something findings like, I'm willing to die for this cause. And so, I don't know. There's an idea that was coming to my head when you were talking because, I mean, no one gets to the answers in psychotherapy going, what are you living for? Nobody answers the question. But if I ask people, what are you willing to die for? Amazingly, three or four themes come out of everybody, and all of a sudden you

start having a very different conversation. Well, and you. So I. I love that. And I don't think that's a. That's a small distinction. I think it's huge. I think one of, one of the. So first of all, the short answer to your question, no, I don't think Winston was. Was willing to die because again, did we mention the rats? Right? So he's willing to forego the idea of maybe some. Some torture light for, you know, to, to

in the balance of true love. I think what makes for me 1984 deeply unsatisfying is there's no, there's no triumph at the end. Winston, you know, the hero didn't win. Well, the hero didn't win because Winston didn't win and Winston wasn't a hero. I mean, coming back to your, you know, your earlier observation about this isn't really deeply developed characters. Hasan, you had mentioned my all time favorite movie earlier when you said the

Shawshank Redemption. One of the things that makes that movie so powerful is it's deeply unfair throughout the entire movie treatment of our protagonist, the hero, etc. But there's a, in the title of the movie, there's a redemption. You know, it started out as a Stephen King short story and it became this massively just powerful movie to me because there was a, there was a triumph at the end. There was a, there was a hero and he got his redemption. We don't see that in 1984.

So for me, the ending is deeply unsatisfying because it's like he did think he was going to be part of a revolt and a, and a rebellion, but he wasn't willing to lead it from the front. He was just willing to follow somebody different from who he was told to follow. And at the end it didn't matter and he just went back to conforming more completely. Tom, you had a thought when David was talking. I saw across your face. Well, I, my, I, I, it's, it's hard. It's right. I, I think, I think to say

that, you know, movements that die because. No, that people aren't willing to die for that. I, I think that I, I'm not sure how I feel about that because specifically about the BLM movement, which is really where I, where I kind of hit me. I was like, people did die for that. They just died prior to the movement starting. But they were the catalyst, right? Like, so they, they, people were dying for BLM before they knew it was blm, right? Like, so there have been people to stand on the side of

principle for the black community and die over it. We just didn't label it as BLM until somebody put a label on it after the fact. Now, I do agree, once you started the BLM movement, it kind of died off for probably that reason. I'm not, I'm not going to argue that. But to say nobody died for BLM is probably a slight miscalculation of words. Back, back to the book part of it though, you know, it's Weird. And I don't know how this relates to the

book at all. It just sparked into my brain because my daughter and I had a conversation a couple of weeks ago that I think kind of to your point, David, about like the generations of. And what they're fighting for or what they would die for and so on and so forth. And my daughter and I got

into a conversation about the difference, the differences in the generations themselves and where there was a, a really, a big drop off in, in her brain. In her brain, in the, the mannerisms and the ways in which we interact with each other from Gen X to the millennials. Like so there's, there's this huge gap of, of the way that, and quite honestly, I don't think the, the, the views of Gen X to the, to the Greatest generation are as far away as people think

they are as compared to the Gen X and the Millennials. I think that is leaps and bounds away from the idealisms and the way that we think. And then the millennials to the Gen Zs are even more. I think the, I think that the, it's like, it's like compounding the problem, right? Like we're, and when we were talking about this, I had said, yeah, because there's nothing that has happened in the generations, lives that have mattered. If you think about it, every generation before

them had some impactful event that happened to them. World War II, Vietnam, etc. Etc. Ours was 9 11. When 911 hit, there was a dramatic change in what you would die for in this country. People were becoming, they went back to patriotism. They wanted to go join the military and die for the country because they, they just couldn't fathom what just happened on US soil. That was only 22 years ago. 24, 24 years ago. That was, that was not that long ago. But the two generations that I've mentioned

were way too young to live through it and have it impact them. Right? So I think, I think there's, I think there's a lot of, a lot of unknowns when you ask that question to a Gen Xer or older. They probably can answer that question a lot easier and faster than millennials and younger. So spinning this back to the book at least a little bit, I think is I, I think that's part of the problem, right, that people, when they read this book

and you're. I think you're right, David. Where there's nothing in this book that says that I would die to protect that or die to, to eradicate that. There's no, either way, there's nothing clear that says, this is so bad, somebody should do something about it, or it's so positive that we should all fight for it. There's no impactful thing that happens in 1984 that clearly defines who the protagonist really is. Because to your point, Claire, I think it's dead on. You can't get behind Winston as a

protagonist. He's just not that right. He's not. He's not a hero. But that's. I think that's the underlying problem with the book. In that critique that you were talking about, Islam was like, that's what it is. There's no. There's no impact. There's no singular impactful event that makes you think yay or nay on whether this book is right or wrong or. There's no moral compass. There's no. Like, there's no. Although us reading it, we have

moral compasses. So when we read the book, we feel a certain way and we read it and know that we wish or don't. Like, we want it to go this way or that way. And the fact is, it just doesn't. It just kind of ends. Right. Like. It does. Yeah, it just sort of stops. Right. Like, just sort of in the. But anyway. Anyway. Right. It sort of stops, like, in the middle of a sentence or. Like, it's very clear. It's very French. It's a very French book. Wait, didn't we use that same phrase for

Tenders? We did. We did use it, actually. We did. Well, there's something. So there's something interestingly inherent in writers who write in a British. More British mode than writers who write in a more American mode. So if you're writing more in an American mode, like, even a writer, like. What's his name? Cormac McCarthy, right. In blood Meridian or the Road or no country for Old Men or whatever. Like, even the most sort of. For lack of a better

term. And I like Clint Eastwood, too, as a director. I put Clint Eastwood of Cormac McCarthy in the same box in my head, because they're just saddle bastards. Like, I watched Gran Torino a few. Few weeks ago. They just write. They just write saddle bastard books and they write sad. They reduce saddle bastard movies. Like, they're just sad at the end. And. But, But. But there's a. There's a redemption arc that's built into that because they're still Americans, fundamentally.

Right. But people writing in a British mode, even if they're Americans, they adopt that British mode. Please. The British are very much influenced by the French. They don't want to admit it, but the French are okay with an open ending sort of, ah, let me go over here and have some wine and baguettes, you know, and then we're done, you know, or, or, you know, or we're all going to be nihilists, but we're going to have good food at the end.

If you eat terrible food over there. Yeah, well, the British

aren't on board with the food thing, but they are on board with the, with the sort of, for lack of a better term, cynicism and disillusionment and just sort of saying that this is just the thing. That as it is, there is no happy ending here. And I don't know if that's the knock on effect from the end of colonialism and from the decline of the Victorian empire or if that comes specifically out of the British experiences that happened during World War I, which are still impacting the

continent and still impacting this globally today. Something that everybody has talked about here. This is my next point and then we'll move on. But something that everybody's talked about here and I think we have to touch on this. And David kind of kicked it off, but Claire, you also picked it up and then Tom, you didn't, you didn't mention it at all. Probably because we don't actually usually talk about this on the show. So

it's not something that we've, we've sort of touched on earlier. But the, the main critique that I probably had against Orwell even before, or not Orwell, but against 1984, even before reading it and then reading it, it sort of jumped out to me even before the Baldwin critique was the lack of a transcendent belief system. So we know in Communist Russia, we know this for a fact, Stalinist Russia that Orwell was, was actively writing against Orthodox Christianity was strong. We

know this. We have clear historical evidence for this. People prayed, people did vigils, people prayed in the Gulags. Again, Solzhenitsyn brings this up. He even mentions that there were people in the Gulag who came in atheists and walked out Orthodox Christians and there were people who came in Orthodox Christians and walked out atheists. That is the transcendent piece. I don't know how Orwell missed that,

but that's the transcendent piece in here. And when you talk about what will people, what are you willing to die for in our own time? Everybody who follows Islam in a radical fashion knows exactly the answer to that question. They know it. And by the way their main critique against the West. Let me, let me, let me restate radical Islam's main critique against the West. You're not willing to die for anything. We are. We beat you. We eat your culture. Convert or die. And I'm simplifying,

but that's the message. That's the message. That's the message. They've been screaming at us for 50 years. They know what they're willing to die for. They're willing to die for a transcendent

idea. I would assert that politicians don't understand this, particularly Western politicians don't understand this. And thus they say that the language, that language that comes from a state of transcendence or from an understanding of the transcendence, it's just naive people and just, if we give them enough factories and like Netflix, they'll turn into Westerners. And I don't, I don't think that's, I don't think that's the truth. I think that's fundamentally missing something about

transcendence. And I can speak to this a little bit as a Christian who tries to live out and walk out Christian principles and believes that there is a soul and there is a God and I will have to answer to, to him when I show up there and there is someplace I am going that has nothing to do with evolution or biology. Okay. When you speak out of that language, you write out that language, your narrative becomes different. Orwell didn't have any of that. Orwell

believed that religion was the opiate of the masses. He, he really did believe that whole Marxist thing. He never wrote anything about religion. I don't think he fundamentally understood it. It's missing from 1984. So the question here is, if Winston had had a religion, would Winston have been more of a hero? Would the protagonist actually have been a hero? Tom, I'm going to start with you. I'm going to go all the way around. Tom. David. And then, Claire, you'll have the final word on this. I,

I don't know. I, I don't know if I would, I'm not sure I would classify it the way that you just classified it. Well, okay, how would you, how would you classify it, then? Well, I'm just saying, like, I don't know if I don't. I, I mean, I understand, like, what you're saying, you know, radical Islam, I get all that. And then, yeah, whether, whether it's Christian values or any other, you know, religious belief system. I'm not sure.

How do I word this? I, I, I mean, maybe if you want to, if you want to say, like, if you're trying to, if you're trying to lean toward a yes or a no, I would probably have to say yes. Just because it would give. What we were talking about a few minutes ago, it would at least give him that moral compass. Right. Like, again, because to, to David's point when he mentioned, like, there's no, there's no North Star here. There's no, you know, religious or moral compass,

North Star, there's nothing for him. So. And again, even if going with the, the. I was gonna say the Brotherhood, because I was just thinking of a different book, by the way. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. If I was. He was going with, with, you know, with the, you know, Big Brother, Y, at least he would still be considered a hero because he went with his moral compass. Right. Even if that for him, if that was the right way to go. But like I said before, there was no to him. There was no right or

wrong in making that decision. It didn't feel to me like he had to make a right or wrong decision. And if he did have some sort of religious in instinct or a religious teaching or background, then you could lean on that moral compass for whichever way he's selected and call him the hero. To your point, you know, when you're on your statement, like, we can't call him a hero at this point, but maybe you can if he's standing on something of some

sort of principle. But. So I, If I had to say yes or no, then yes. I mean, I think it would be. You'd have no choice but to call him. But to, but to say he was the hero. He was the hero. Okay. I. I think it really depends. Does Winston honor his belief? Right? Does it, does he. Does he honor it? Or is like, is he a fair weather believer in whatever he believes in? Right. I mean, so if we take the premise that Winston believes in something, whether it's religious, whether it's secular,

but he believes in something and that's. Something pushes him to, again, be that singularity, be that person. Like you were saying, the one person says, no, I don't care. I have integrity with my belief and I'm. If I'm the only one in the room and that. Then fine, I'm going to be that only person in the room. I think if there was a splash of that, I think the book would read entirely differently and I think that that would have a very, very different

feel to it. I don't necessarily need a book to have a happy Ending or have this kind of, like this. This kind of wonderful resolution at the end of it. I think there's a lot of stories in history that don't, but I think what those tragic stories lead to, if there's this presence of, I was standing for this, I was fighting for this. I was. I was holding some kind of moral ground for myself or others. I think the tragedy in that person's story becomes like the fuel that fires that kind of

burns someone else's fire. It becomes like we learned that that person died doing this or fighting for this. And then we hear that, and that becomes this very powerful thing for the next people. Right? Become a next generation, next whoever hears the story. I mean, think about, like, the whole idea of, like, you know, Leonidas, the Spartans, the whole idea behind that. Just as one eye just off the top, like, he died at the same time. The way he died made all the difference.

Right. And so I think that. That, to answer your question, I think it depends on, does he, like, does he. Does he stay true to this? And is he willing to kind of dig his heels in to go, this is who I am. Good, better and different versus him going, this is what I believe, and it's not convenient, so I'm not going to do it. Claire? Yeah, my. My thought on that, I think, Tom, you. You already

said it. I think very well in terms of, you know, the lack of a. And you were echoing David's comment about the North Star. If we. If we get hung up on, if he were a religious person, would this have been a different spin? If we change that to, if he were a moral person, would there be a different spin? And I do think the answer is yes. I think what we're struggling with with Winston is not his lack of religion, it's his lack of morality. He did not make decisions in the book based on a belief

that something was right or wrong. It was based on an avoidance of pain. Right. So you could say, if you really want to boil it down, was he a coward? And therefore that's why we could never contemplate him being a hero. Yeah, I could probably. I could probably live with that as being a statement on. On, you know, the character or the lack thereof of Winston. But I do. I do think it comes down to he lacks. Tom, you said it. He lacks a moral compass. There,

there. So he was amoral. He wasn't immoral. He was amoral. And he made his choices not based on a moral code, but based on avoidance of pain. Okay. Okay. I don't Know what to think about. I don't know what to think about all the, all y' all with on this. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna. Well, you know what? This is, this is why I talk to people who were kind of all over the map, all over the place for me. I don't. I'm not living in an echo chamber here. Right. Hey, son. Not to interrupt. Do

you, do you, do you need. Are you thinking that it's his lack of like its lack of belief or religiosity or that that is the reason why he lacks that moral compass? Because I think that the three of us are maybe taking it from saying that's one possibility, but I think it's the other side of the coin that's equally opportune to think about as saying that morality can exist self derived as a reflection of the society. Right. I guess that's my question for you is how are you determining

morality? Right. So that. Well, yeah, that's a good question. So I fundamentally believe that everyone comes with a world view and a worldview comes from somewhere. I find I do fundamental. That's like sort of my fundamental, like things. Right. And we, we don't often articulate our worldview because we don't actually know the concrete foundation that it sits on. And most people haven't done the hard work, the introspective work, such as it were, or even the critical thinking work to

determine where that worldview came from. Who laid the concrete, should it be all dug up? This is why you have a job, David. Like people don't do that work and then they build things on top of it and it struggles and falls apart and collapses. Right. Usually around my age, like in the mid-40s. So to answer your question, I do think that religion has to inform morality. I think we've done a really interesting job in the secular west of trying to separate both of those two. And

when you separate both of those two, I think you might. I think the clearing at the end of the path is the meaning crisis recurring currently in. Because if my morals are separated from a religious foundation, and that's why I brought up Islam on purpose, I didn't bring up Christianity because let's face the moral, let's base it on Islam. That's fine. The way we could talk about the Quran and it doesn't come weighted with all the stuff that

the Bible comes weighted with. Okay, fine. If we're going to base it on the Quran. Cool. You separate the Quran from morality.

Now you have people who are living or making decisions in a place of moral laxity. Right. And that then influences how, and I think Orwell would agree with this part, it influences how people use language, which we're going to talk about here in just a minute, because I think that that's actually the core of his idea. It influences how people talk about ideas,

influences how people build institutions. And fundamentally, which is of course the point of all this in the podcast, which of course we're going to get, we're going to wrap up with. It influences how leaders lead. And I think we are naive to the point almost of danger to. And I would even assert we're sometimes past the point. We're somewhere past the point of danger. Actually. We're well into the wild of not understanding the link between religion and morality or saying that it

does not exist. Which is why I said, okay, let me think about that some more because I'm willing to, to consider a majority point of view and I'm willing to have my point of view be the minority report. That's fine. But let's just. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. Let's see where we wind up at. At the end of the, at the end of the road. Right. And I think one of the things that, so Orwell wasn't going to write anything that he didn't understand or know about this is why Julia is

a one dimensional character. He didn't really understand women. Wasn't, wasn't there something. What's, I read something somewhere that said Julia was loosely based on his, his second wife. Like the, the. Yeah, so. Yeah, so. So it's not that she, it's not that he viewed it as he was writing it, that she was an empty character. It was just his experience with his wife. Is that, that's what we're led to believe at this. Yes, yes. And I mean, marriage is hard.

Relationships are hard. You know, and that's all I'll say about that because we all, we all know what I mean here. Like, you know, relationships are hard. Marriage is hard. None of this is easy. And if you're already a person who just personality wise, again, looking at Orwell's Wikipedia

write up and some other things. If you're already a person who's sort of struggling with what your status is and then you're, you're, you're marrying somebody and then you're expecting to build a life with them, but they're also struggling with that, that's going to come out in your writing and there's going to Be clearly things that you are going to be blind to. So I think he was blind to. To women as a

three dimensional character. As a three dimensional character in his. In his book. I also think he was blind to, you know, religion because Marxist ideas about religion impediments have influenced his thinking. And I think that that blindness leads you to create certain characters and situations in 1984, that when you're asking me to do something as protest literature, there's a piece of this puzzle that is missing.

And the piece of that puzzle that's missing is what we've been talking about here. What are you willing to die for? So that's sort of my twisted windy hook. David, answer to your question. I don't know if that got where you were looking for, but close enough. Close enough. Okay, that's fine. Cool. I almost hit the target. All right, it's good. All right, so we do. Let's turn the corner here. Let's turn the corner because we've talked

about the two main themes of the book. We've talked about. Well, one of the main things, we talked about Orwell as a writer and we've talked about the meaning of 1984. What we should take from it. I guess we should. Let's touch on totalitarianism and dystopia. So Orwell says, and this is for politics in the English language. I love, I do

actually love this quote from him. I think this is dead on from him. He says our civilization is decadent and our language, so the argument runs, must inevitably share in the general collapse. The same thing is happening to the English language, he says later on in the same essay. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. Sort of a chicken and an

egg idea, by the way. Later on in 40 years later, the critic Harold Bloom would bring up this critique as well when he would talk about, Interestingly enough, the 1980s, when some of us on this call were in high school or in middle school, would talk about how the. The American mind was shifting and there was a lack of

critical thinking that was going on, right? So Orwell was consumed. This was his big bugaboo. And I'll grant him this, his big bugaboo was the English language. What are we doing with the English language? Is the English language tight? Is the English language actually expressing our thoughts in a clear, and I've taken to talking about this way, serious manner? 1984 didn't become a dystopic novel until after Orwell's death. And it kind of irks me because I think, I think of it in terms

of. Just like he does with the English language and the foolish thoughts. I think of it in terms of chicken and egg. Which came first, 1984 or totalitarianism? Did one inform the other? Did we already have these tendencies in our government and in our institutions and 1984 just laid them out for us where we could all see them? Or

now let me go all conspiracy minded here. Did the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission utilize George Orwell in order to get these ideas out there to soften up the public so they could do them all later? Because they operate on a 500 year long timeline versus the rest of us who barely operate on a 10 minute timeline. Right. And they relied on all of us to forget was George Orwell a CIA plant? You know, these are the things in my conspiratorial mind that begin to work

with 1984. Right. I do think we live in times where the dystopic elements of 1984 are evidence around us. This is, I would agree with, with the younger generations here. We do already have things watching us. So I mentioned this before. We do already have social control. We do already have bad food and speech codes. The only thing we are missing is like the one world uniform. That's the only thing we're missing, like where we all get to wear the jumpers like together because we're

all on one team. I remember a comedian years ago made a joke about how like if the aliens ever come down, we all don't have a uniform. We need the Earth uniform that says we're from Earth, like this is the jumper, you know, because apparently in the future everybody dresses in just one uniform. You just eliminate the probable clothes like just right there. We do have digital gulags. We do have cancel codes, we do have cancel culture. We do have social norming of speech.

Now we can argue that technology has just, and this is an argument I'm willing to listen to, technology has just taken our tendencies that we already had to their logical conclusions. But I think that I saw something today like 87% of Facebook's revenue comes from advertising on the platform. Platform. And they're just going to use AI to make that advertising better. Better for

who? I'm not quite sure. Won't be better for the human beings who are being advertised too, but it'll be better for somebody. Whoever's paying. It's gonna be whoever writes the check is going to be better for them. It's gonna be better for the shareholders of Facebook. That's who's gonna be. So everybody. Ultimately, yes. Go by shareholders. Go by stock and Facebook, if you can. I believe it. Today. It's at $673.94 a share. I believe is what it is at now.

Oh, I. I think we. I think we got the dystopia we dreamed about in our fever dreams in the mid 20th century. We got it. Except the only thing we're missing is replicants and bad uniforms. That's the only thing we're missing. Like, we got our Blade Runner future. Right? And we also have slovenly language. Some of the things I've seen and always. And this is going to be. Claire, you're going to love this. This

is going to be my old man. Get off my porch yelling. You know, about the language, but, like, the things I see in texting and the things I see people talking about online, like, is that even English? Like, what are we talking about here? Like, I don't know what a skibidi toilet is. I have no idea. I don't want to know. Don't anybody tell me. I don't care. It doesn't matter. I'm too old to care. And Tom's laughing because he probably knows what it is better than I do. And I

don't care. I'm just laughing because I. Like, we have rules in my house. My. All of my kids are adults and we have rules in my house. Like, if you're not going to use the real word, don't say it like you. If you say that's sus to me, I'm gonna. I'm just gonna smack you and you're gonna leave the room. Suspect. That's very suspect, dad. Like. Like, I like. Although my nephews yesterday used a

word that I think is so spot on for this generation. They call themselves screen agers because all they do is walk around on their phones looking at their screens. I think creating new words like that are is fine. I have no problem with that. That's more like a pop culture thing. I'm okay with that. I'm less okay with the shorthand butchering the actual word. Like, you know, again, let's. I'm gonna be the man of principle on this conversation. I'm gonna say no to

all of it. I'm gonna be the main principle. This is the line. There has to be a line. He's got the red line. Gotta draw the line. I'm gonna be picard in Star Trek, every time we draw a line, we fall back, and then we draw another line and then we fall back. No, no, no, it ends here. This thing is stopping right now. And yes, I have raised three teenagers. I'm soon to be raising a fourth. I know exactly what I'm talking about. I've been in the war for a while, so

I know all about lines. I'm all done. Are all gone. Your war's done. You're. And I got one. I got one on you, by the way, so. Yeah, you do. You got five. Tom's revolution is over also. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's. He's well into his reformation years now. He's ready to be for the Renaissance. I guess the question is, if we take the premise. If we take my premise that we're well into the dystopia, just with, like, better lighting and better food

and. Maybe you don't have to take my premise. Maybe you can tell me that my premise is nonsense, which is fine. How do we create? Well, say what you want about Donald Trump. He's been running around saying that we're about to live in a golden age or that we're moving towards a golden age. That actually. Which is his sort of the Trump version of Ronald Reagan's Morning in America kind of thing. And I'm not going to

argue about the politics of that. That's not the point of this. I'm merely saying it's been a long time, a long time since I have heard a national politician of any stripe talk about how the future might actually be better. This is the reason, I think, at a pop culture level, why all of our dystopias, even like the Hunger Games and things like that, are just recycled tropes from the mid 20th century, because we got the things we wanted in our fever dreams. We got the

terrors as well. And now we don't know how to move from the terror to the utopia. We just know we want it, but we don't know how to move there. By the way, Peter Thiel wrote that in his book Zero to One as well. He said that we're deeply pessimistic culture. This is why we're not innovating correctly. He said, if you look at the Chinese, they're pessimistic, but they make plans. We're pessimistic, and we make no plans. Like, that's. That's the only way. That's the

comparison between the two cultures. Right. And I think he's onto something. I think he's dead. Onto something. And so Donald Trump runs around, talks about how we. We could live in a golden age in the future, and everybody laughs at him because that's the pessimism, right? They think he's just a foolish old boomer. Everybody goes, okay, Boomer, whatever, and, like, moves on. But I think we have to change our language. I think we have to change

our idea structure. I think we have to break with the mid

20th century. I think we need to build and not deconstruct. So I guess the larger question that I have here, and we could break it down into all these other tiny areas if we want, is how can leaders lead people to a golden age if they don't collectively or individually even believe in something like that anymore? To my point, when I was answering David's question, if they don't even underground, if they don't even under.

Understand the substrate of what lives underneath their cynicism and their nihilism, and they don't even know that it's cynicism and nihilism because they're just living their lives. Like, how can they build towards anything golden ever? How can that. How do we not just wind up just staying in the same spot? How do we fix this problem? This is the. This is the end of the show. How do we fix this problem? Let's out with this. How do we fix this? How do we use 1984 to fix this? Because I

don't know how. This is why I'm asking. I have no idea. Claire, go ahead. I'm gonna dump this on you, and then. David. Yeah? Thanks. Thanks. You're welcome. You're welcome. Well, you're. That. You're the English major. You. Yeah, you got the word. Got the fancy words. I know. I was hoping we were just gonna dive into language, which I have some thoughts on as well, but, you know. I think I dive into language. No, no, no. Let me. Let me. I'll.

I'll. I'll speak to the other. Because I do, you know, I do think it is incredibly hard to. To attach personal meaning to this idea of come along and be part of this golden age when it is said in the same breath, and, And Donald Trump is saying it now, but he's not the first one to try to usher it in. Right. It's just that

happens to be the. The current version, but when it is also said in the same conversation as these are all the things you should be fearful of, I think that's what keeps stunting our ability to actually put our own shoulders to the wheel. And be willing to die for doing what it takes to usher in a true golden age. Because it is built upon a foundation of. This is why those are other. This is why you need to be part of, you know, what's. What's better.

And so as long as those things are said in the same breath as part of the same strategy, we can't get out of the starting gate. I like that. I would. I mean, yeah, the language of today is really, really complex and is really, really frustrating. I. I think, you know, we have to realize that words are the actual building blocks of

reality. What we speak does become reality. And every historian and what would say that if you look at every world leader, it's through their language that they form and shape up the world as it played out. Nothing happens because we're quiet. Everything happens because people are talking. And I think when we think about how do we fix the problem? Again, I always talk to people about building trust. And trust is an equation. It's predictability plus consistency. We

don't have either one of those things with our leaders. We either get predictable, but we don't get consistent, or we get consistent, but they're not predictable. And so there's always these nuanced differences in what we have. And so we're left always clear to your point going, can we. Can I believe you? Like, I want to believe you? I want to walk forward to it. You know, I think how we fix the problem is, is that it seems to me just all I

do is talk with people. And it's very unique. Talking with people in two different parts of the country at the same time. That's wild to see the perspective of that happen. Has the one thing that's universal is that it's, It's. It needs to be a grassroots up, not top down. I think that's how you change everything, is that we have got to get out of this megaphone leadership style that we've had in every single culture that I can remember.

You know, I think, yeah, messaging is great, right? The slogan's great. Make America. Make America great Again, Great slogan. I can't knock him for the slogan, but I think that the jury is still out for me and going, okay, that's just words. And we need to show we need to see this. And I think it comes down to, again, how are we. If we're going to go to a golden age as people, then it starts in the communities. It starts in our neighborhoods. It starts in our. Like, how do

we frame our local. Like, how do the States become great. Like, how does each individual state kind of come together and do that? I think if we're going to become great again or if we're going to pull ourselves out. To your point earlier, Hassan, I don't think we're in the dystopian future at all. In fact, I think that we are at a very interesting schism. I think that we're just at this very interesting crossroads in our society where we have been kind of like Prometheus playing with all of

these tools, and we've kind of. Some things are wonderful and some things are extremely volatile, but I don't think we've crossed into that threshold yet. I think that there's still a lot of potential for good and a lot of potential for positivity. But I think we're reading reaching this very unique fork in the road as a society and as a world population. We're going to have to come together and choose, like, which path we're going

to go. Ben, that's above my pay grade to know what we're going to do with that. But I think when it comes down to how do we fix it. Yeah, it's when we start focusing on what we do. Tom, I like when you said, like, we have house rules with we say the full word. I think that's a phenomenal example of what I'm talking about. It starts there. Well, then if that steps into local community activities and schools and we say we have to get rid of this, we have to have some

kind of, again, holding the line idea that you were talking about. If we have to have some form of a grassroots starting point that pulses out and then that starts to become. The thing that I think will change everything about our society is that we just have to reverse. The messaging has to come from the other, the exit point of the megaphone. It has to go towards the cone versus the other way around. Tom, the podcast. Podcast audience is not like dead air. Go ahead.

It's not like what? It's not like dead air. Oh. Look, I think, I think this, this question is a moot point. And let me, let me explain why. First of all, this is all definition, right? It's like, so who's going to decide what the golden age is and what it isn't? Who's going to make that determination? Is it going to be. Is it going to be our president? Is it going

to be the president of some other country? Is it going to be some world global committee that somebody gets together and who's to say that that Committee is going to define something that I consider my golden age. Like, I, I, I think that, I think that what we're, like I said, I, I made a comment earlier about, about 1984, giving us the road map to a lack of individuality. And I think this kind of question is the exact same thing, because

I think the golden age is going to be determined by us individually. Like, my, what I think is whether I agree with you or not, whether we're in the, this, this dystopian c set of circumstances already or not, or it's coming or it's past, or I think how things impact you individually is way more valuable to you as a leader. If you're, Again, we're trying to. The way you

phrase, the question is how do leaders bring this into, into a golden age? And I think it's, we find our own people, right? If I'm a leader of a company, I'm hiring the people that are going to be, that are gonna want to believe in what I believe in, and I don't care whether it's religious or moral or

immoral. You could be the worst person on the planet. If some, if you get a group of people to follow you and they think you're the greatest thing since sliced bread, then who the hell is going to tell you that you're the worst person on the planet, right? Like, you have a whole faction of people that are following you, telling you you're great. Like,

and I'm not suggesting that we follow terrible people, by the way. I'm just, I mean, all I'm saying is I think, I think that this idea of how can leaders bring us to this golden age? I'm not following a leader that has already decided that there's a golden age. If I don't believe in what that golden age looks like, I'm not following that leader. So whether Trump is or isn't or whomever, whatever president you mentioned, like,

it's not up to them. It's up to you. It's up to me. It's like, so if I want to follow that president, great, then I'm believing in their, their golden age. I'm going to believe in what they're, whatever nonsense they're spewing or. Well, I, if I'm following them, I don't think it's nonsense. But you might, you might think it's nonsense, right?

I think as leaders, I think it's important, important for us to, and I've said this on the podcast several times, Hsan, I, I think as leaders, it's important for us to find our moral compass, to lead by example through that moral compass. The people who want to follow us will follow us. They're going to go to that gold, whatever. They're going to go to our definition of a golden age with us and, and we're going to be h. Now. So does that mean that the world goes to hell in a hand

basket? But my little set, my little world is going to be perfectly fine. I, I don't know. I don't know that I, I don't. I don't have a crystal ball. I can't read the future. But I can tell you that I'm always at a point of. I'm really not happy with where we're going. I'm really not happy with where we were. But nobody has a solution that I want to follow to the next part, to the next

point in history. Like I have, I have yet. And again, whether it was Biden, Obama, Trump, name a president, I still have yet to have one that I thought was so good that I would follow him. I'll take your. David. I have not had a president I would die for. I'll just tell you that right now. I've. I've not had a single president in my lifetime that I would take a bullet for. It just doesn't. Hasn't happened yet for me. So, like, I don't know. I, I

think, I think as. And I think your guys's kind of views and vantages and how language impacts this, I think is really valuable. I actually do, I think because language is the definition of what that golden age looks like, right? You have to be able to verbalize it, you have to be able to express it, explain it, detail it. And if you can't, then you're useless to me. Right? So all these changes in language and all this stuff, I totally agree with you

guys that language is important. But. But what I think we're failing on and kind of leaning a bit more toward what you were talking about, Claire, with the, like, what are we fearful of really? Like, if, if we're really shooting for a golden age, then to your point, Claire, these roadblocks shouldn't even be in our, in our purview. We shouldn't be even looking at them. We shouldn't even be worried about them. Just go for the gold and drive, right? Just drive to it.

If you think about and, and if you come down to almost a little microcosm and I know I'm, I'm going a little bit over in time that you guys had here. But, but if you go down to a little micro, like a little, this microcosm of the, of a, of this think of like a, think of a, like a, a gold, a gold medal athlete, right? You don't think they've had challenges in their lives. You don't think they've had negatives, you don't think they have roadblocks, things that could have shot, shut them down.

Every one of them have stories like that, but they just ignored it or moved past it or persevered through it. And we can't come up collectively as a society as how to do that. That's also a problem. Like, I just think, I think we just, I, I think that everybody defines these things differently. I don't think we're ever going to get all on the same page on what that golden age definition is. So therefore we may not ever hit it. We may not never

get, we may not ever get there. Or we're already there and we're not seeing it, but somebody else already found it and nobody's paying attention to them because they don't know how to, they don't know how to express it. They don't know how to get the, their version of the language out. So I think there's a lot of things here that, and I think this, what I just said, I'm sure can turn into a whole nother podcast episode. Oh, I asked,

I asked a loaded question. I asked a loaded question here at the end. I, I mean, I'm notorious for doing that. I load up the gun at the end and then, you know, it just, yeah, I've been doing this for a while now. He does this to me all the time. All the time. All the time. Okay, final thoughts. We gotta close, as I usually say, right around this moment. Thank you to Claire Chandler. Thank you to David Baumrucker. Thank you again to Top Libby for coming on the podcast today.

Your contributions have been amazing as usual. This is a complicated book that opens up a lot of doors. Even though I may have trouble with the way that it is written or some of the ideas in it, it does engender conversation and I think it is worthwhile for leaders to read at the very minimum, at least as a warning. Maybe, maybe a warning frozen in time, but a warning nonetheless. Claire, David, final thoughts. So Tom, I, I, you're right. Everything you just sort of

unpacked for us can, can be a, a future episode. And I'm happy to go down that rabbit. Hol and Hassan And David, what's interesting to me is I do think, Hasan, to your point, this is, this is not the best book ever written. We know that. But in the true spirit of being literature, it did open up conversation. I suspect that the combination of us can have a conversation about a paper

bag and make it, you know, interesting for two hours. So what's interesting to me, though, you know, coming back to, I don't want to sort of continue the golden age thing, but there's so much noise in the political sphere and really effective leaders. And when I think of leader,

I don't immediately go to politics for the very reasons all of us have touched upon. There's so much noise. But the most effective leaders of tribes of organizations, both for profit and nonprofit, figure out a way not to mandate, don't bring in your political speech and don't lobby, you know, at the work site. But they, they get their employees energized and committed to a unifying idea, a pursuit of something, whether you call it a golden age,

a mission, a purpose, a long term vision. And they make those connections for those people so that they can then, because their moral compass is in alignment with that shared mission, they can put away the distraction of the political morass that surrounds us every day in 24, seven news cycles and follow a leader they feel a connection to. And Tom, that was

what you talked about. I also think it is not a coincidence that the root of the word culture, which I do a lot of my consulting work based on, is cult. Right? And I think there is a profound difference between an authentic leader who understands that they have the most direct impact on the culture of an organization, which not coincidentally, again, David, I love your formula for trust, comes from predictability, consistency, all of the things,

you know, we didn't really dive too much into language. And very briefly, I just want to get on a soapbox about that because 1984 was all about the party that ascended into power controlling and mandating conformity by continuing to narrow down the language that people were allowed to use and priding themselves on the fact that every new edition of their dictionary, the Newspeak Dictionary, got smaller and smaller in

a different way. Leaders in high functioning organizations try to narrow down language to come up with a shared vocabulary so that they can get to greater predictability and consistency in terms of how they think of success, how they view talent, how they measure and evaluate performance, and what they deem to be acceptable in terms of behavior and values.

And the best leaders, the one who are well intentioned around that and don't use that in, in a way that mandates conformity but that actually inspires conviction are the ones who are going to succeed in the long game. Yeah, I love. I would agree with pretty much everything you just said, Claire. I going off you would mention the word culture. The word I introduce people to is curiosity. Because the Latin derivative of that, the origin point is to care. And I think that we've lost

the ability to care in our society. And I think if we're thinking about how do leaders transform the landscape of today, we have to reteach people how to be tolerant enough to care. Like are you willing to sit with someone that you disagree with and care and shift out of perception and walk into perspective with people because we have a really, really bad problem with that in our society that we don't understand that. I guess we have made a really weird game of in group, out group. Right. And

to the two party system comments we made earlier. I'm Tom, I'm very much with you. I think that, you know, a stool with two legs is a very awkward stool. And we wonder why we always fall over. And I think we have to sit and we have to wonder why that has been prevented. And I think it's been prevented because this masquerading that's hidden in 1984 of this weirdly I would say the uni party of 1984. I don't think it's a one party, I think it's a

uni party. I think that if there's a reflection on today, I think that's very what we have because our Congress has been deemed fairly moot at this point. It's very obvious to anyone who's paying attention that lobbyists and special interests own this country. And we wonder why change doesn't happen. And well, again, the unit party won't allow that to happen.

And so when we're thinking about again, how are leaders going to change or impact society building off of what both of you said, I think it comes down to this idea of that we have to slow things down, we have to get curious, we have to take our time to not rush in this very, very dopamine driven, consumer based culture we have because it's almost as if we have failed this to recognize that because they're making us make these decisions so fast that they're

removing our ability to contemplate what's actually going on. If there was a conspiracy, I think that's the one I see just as a behaviorist and someone who works with just Understanding just how dopamine works and the structuring of recycling thoughts. Anybody who is trying to quickly make you change your language, quickly make you change your. Like, the laws quickly push things through, I think those are the people we have to be very, very

careful about. And I think that going back to 1984, it seems like a certain level of complacenc happened with the entire population that's in 1984, that they're just like, oh, this is just how it is. And I think that maybe that's. You know, we made a comment about 9, 11. And I remember. I remember sitting in 10 in my 10th grade class watching, watching that. And my mom actually was in. Had flown Baltimore, and I was like, she has to be in New York. That's wild. Okay.

What interesting reflection, right? Doing that. But when we're thinking about that, we became. When it, when. When change in the threat is instant, when we have that instantaneous hit, boy, that is the number one study thing that drives monumental change and monumental adaptations is the velocity that something hits. I think maybe the hybrid between a brave new world and this is that maybe the society that we're living in is, what if that change in the 2020s is not fast, but it's

very, very slow? It's like boiling the frog. It's like that. We don't recognize how far we have slid down the hill because the changes are so micronized by day by day, week by week, party by party, that there's just this kind of subtle like, Yeah, I guess it's more of the same. I guess that's frustrating again. And we don't realize that they're playing a game of inches and we're just not paying attention. And they've moved halfway across this whole game board already.

That's what it feels like to me sometimes. And I think that if we promote the idea of just going back to what I said earlier about, about caring, taking the time to be present and to care and to listen to people, I think there'll be a radical change that would really change politics. I mean that in Term Limits, but that's a different conversation, Right? But. But if we were able to have that idea that the people who are leading us would take the time to sit down and you actually felt

them caring for you. Right. That's a very different thing than someone showing up, waving their hands. Let me sign an autograph. Okay, I'll see you at the next stop. I think that that's kind of what our society has done. And we do it with politics. We do it with our movie stars as we do it with our sports athletes. There's really, you know, we hail

them for all their charity work, but really there's no person. There's very few. I'll say there's very few, to my point, or I, maybe I won't speak in absolutes, but there are very few people that are, that are taking the time to actually sit down and care and make themselves be seen that way. And I think we should celebrate those people. But I think we just have to be mindful that that's not the standard. That's, that's, that's the exception.

I'm going to close here with one thought that occurs to me as everybody has spoken. And once again, thank you, Claire, David and Tom for coming on the show today, talking about, talking about this book and our thoughts around this book and how it applies, you know, here at the end for leaders and, and talking about some of the major themes that are in it for all the problems we've got in the United States of America. And we got a lot of problems. One thing still, at the end of the day, we are

still a republic. And in a republic, fundamentally, the power for the government comes from all of us, all four of us. In this conversation today, everybody listening today. And I'm not just talking about get out the vote like mtv. This isn't that. If you want better politicians, if we want better celebrities, to David's point, we want people who understand the English language. To Claire's point, we want people who could draw a line in their house. To Tom's point, it has to start with us in

our families. There are traditionally, in Christianity is a larger idea here that there are three main institutions that God or reality set up when the building blocks of reality were laid way back in the deep, deep, deep parts of history, whether that's 14 billion years ago or 6,000, take your pick. I don't care. When those bulky blocks were laid, I was not around and neither was anybody who's listening to any of this. But those building blocks were laid. And the three building blocks are this.

The first building block is the block of the family. Then the second building block is the block of the church or community with traditions, with fashions, with, to Claire's point, culture. And then the final building block is the block of the state. State always comes last in the form of the government or the pharaoh or the king, or in our case, as David mentioned, our unit party, congress, and some would say our imperial presidency. Okay, okay.

Three Three. There's three spheres. And when one sphere becomes overwhelmingly powerful and overwhelms the other two spheres, it is a responsibility of those other two spheres to get together and reign that back in. I talked about this on the podcast a couple years ago. Who's going to tell Caesar he's gone too far? Who's going to check Caesar? While in a republic, the people who check Caesar are the people who are running their households. That's who

checks Caesar in a republic. You want a better republic, you want better elected politicians, you have to be in it for the long game. I think all of us would agree on that. That. But the long game is not a game of 20 years. The long game is a game of not just your kids, but also your grandkids. I was talking with somebody about this this weekend, and he's starting to talk to his sons about who they are going to be married to. They just graduated high school. Who

are they going to be married to and who were. How are they going to raise their children. And he's been talking with them about this their entire lives. But now the conversations have become more sharper and more meaningful because they are at the age where these decisions can actually be to get to have real impact. That's legacy. We don't think in those terms in America for a whole variety of reasons.

And I don't really care what those are. What I care about is that we start thinking about those right now. And part of those legacy thoughts do come in reading of books, what you do in your house, the ways you make your people that are. That you have influence over literate, so that they cannot be fooled by a politician, whether a politician wants to lead them into a golden age or not. So they can't be fooled by a leader.

So that they don't place too much weight on the workplace and instead put the appropriate weight of leadership on the family and on the community and dare I say, on the larger culture. That's what we do in a republic. If we were in a monarchy, or if we were in another governmental system, even a parliament, I would make a different recommendation. But that is my recommendation to you. You want to put the republic back together. You want to get a golden age?

You want to what? You. You wonder where our presidents came from. They weren't like Topsy, as my grandma would say. They didn't just grow.

They came from somewhere and they

came from our families. We have to fix our families and we have to lead our families before we can create a better republic, whatever that may mean to Tom's point which I think is well founded whatever that may mean in our own individual houses and then our families and our houses link together which creates communities and then our communities create workplaces together and then we have traditions that bind us and now we can move forward on something thicker even than technology

Technology will not bind us together it does not have that kind of power it only has the power to Claire used the word earlier polarize and divide us as we have seen but families, traditions these are the things that bind us together these are the things I think that if we if one person listening to my voice takes advice from this and starts building that then I think yeah on a long enough timeline with consistent and persistent curiosity and caring yeah yeah we'll have our golden age

absolutely As a cynical Gen Xer this is what I'm betting on I want to thank my guests for coming on the show once again today and with that well we're out.