Hello. My name is Jesan Sorrells and this is the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books podcast, episode number 135. There are some books that define what it means to be a leader in ways that are counterintuitive. And we spent a lot of time on the podcast last year exploring some of those books and exploring what counterintuitive thinking around leadership might look like.
All the way from looking at, how to network via the war of 18 12, all the way to how to think about and how to engage against, propaganda and ideology and the power of the powerless by Vaclav Havel. And finally, wrapping up towards the end of the year, we looked at Huckleberry Finn and what it means for leaders to engage with humor in a world that might indeed be humor less or increasingly humor less. Although, I think we're at the end of that. I think we're in a
slow healing cycle from that. Then there are some books that challenge us in deeper kinds of ways and combine ideas that have come from other places that we may not be familiar with and really make them succinct. And today, we're going to be covering one of those books. Now I got to admit, when I first read this book, I was not convinced that it was a leadership book, at least not by the title,
even though it has the word leadership in it. I was convinced that it was something else because of the provenance of the book, the nature of the publisher, Cannon Press, and the type of man who is behind the publisher, Doug Wilson. But we covered, in the final episode of 2024, Doug Wilson's commentary on the book of Revelation when the man comes around. And so I decided to start off this year, a year where we opened up with Shop Class as Soulcraft by
Matthew b Crawford. I decided to continue that process of noodling into what does it look like to engage with material reality in a world of anxiety, trouble, and strife with this book. And I'm not going to show it to you because, guess what, I don't have a physical copy of this book. But I do have a digital copy, and we are going to be talking about, insights from that book, and insights from the digital copy of that book today with our guest cohost from the end of last year whose name and
voice you will recognize when I say it. So today, we'll be extracting leadership lessons from what I consider to be one of the best, probably straight leadership books of 2024, Leadership and Emotional Sabotage, Resisting the Anxiety That Will Wreck Your Family, Destroy Your Church, and Ruin the World by Joe Rigney. Leaders, here's a question for you. How do you solve a problem like Ed Friedman?
And today, we will be joined in our conversation by our first guest cohost of 2025, who, as I've mentioned before, was our last guest cohost to the final episode of 2024, where we did discuss that commentary, on the book of Revelation by Doug Wilson, when the man comes around. We are joined today by my friend and former pastor, who I've never really mentioned that on this show, Brian Bagley. How are you doing, Brian? Hey, man. I'm I'm glad to be here. Thanks for having me.
So, Brian has on his, very snazzy vest. I have on my flannel, which is lined with sheep's wool that I got from, that I got for, for Christmas. My wife says that I look very much like a farmer now. I look like a blue collar guy, which kinda goes along, I think, a little bit with the nature of the book and the kinds of things that, Joe is attempting to get to here in Leadership and Emotional Sabotage. So you'll see that on the video. You won't hear any of that on the audio, but
you'll see that on the video. So it'll be good for you. You look great, by the way. You look great, by the way. You know, I it's interesting. So I was, like, I was looking at we were doing our prerecording, kinda going through our prerecording checks with my, my, production assistant. And I was looking at the video, and I was like, oh my god. Like, all gray on that side. What is happening? Well, you know It's wisdom. We
something's well, something's coming out. It might be might be that something's coming out. I don't know about coming, you know, going in. But, let's see if we can get to some wisdom today. So just like with most books that are new or relatively new, we're not gonna read directly from the book today. We're gonna comment on it, and we're gonna talk about larger themes in the book.
And we're going to I'm gonna ask Brian some questions, and we're gonna kinda walk through some of the big chunky ideas in the book. This book is short, and, it's only a 108 pages. So it's easy an easy read. And I was kind of I will admit, I was kind of perturbed when I when I figured out how short it was because I was, like, really, how how good could it be? But short, small books are what Canon Press is known
for. Books that distill down the BS and the nonsense and really get into just this is what this thing is, right, that we're talking about. And we'll talk a little bit about Joe Rigney. And we'll talk about his background, why he wrote this book potentially, and sort of some ideas I have about that. So I'd like to kick off with a brief
a brief summary of the book. So what Joe Rigney is doing is he's taking ideas that were, formerly proposed in a book called The Failure of Nerve, by a guy named Ed Friedman, many years ago. A book that was, to my knowledge, never fully completed. And, he's taking these ideas, which were written with a focus on evolutionary biology, a focus on psychology, and a focus on secularism. And he is applying a biblical worldview to these ideas and placing them in a biblical context.
And Rigney, the author of Leadership and Emotional Sabotage, picked up a few principles that Ed Friedman had talked about. But not all of them. But he he picked up a bunch of them. And those include ideas of emotional systems being, around in the world. Chronic anxiety, triangulation, a concept called herding, which we're gonna talk, a little bit about today. What it means to be and what it is what it means to be and and who is a well differentiated leader.
Empathy. We're sure gonna talk a lot about empathy today, particularly weaponized empathy. We're gonna talk a little bit about that. And, because Joe got into a little bit of trouble talking about weaponized empathy a few a few years ago. And this idea of emotional sabotage, which, Friedman never really discussed because Friedman didn't really believe, just like most secular atheists don't believe in a fallen world. But Christians do, and they know that we have to we know that we have to operate
within that very carefully. In chapter 1 of Leadership and Emotional Sabotage, Rigney draws on the bible, Shakespeare, Homer. And he does all of this to show how anxiety that's current in our society, is not just a general crisis, but a crisis of degree. And he he makes some distinctions with the difference in the book that I think are important in the first few chapters.
In chapter 2, Rigney builds on that concept of a crisis of degree, by talking about and addressing this question, how can a leader lead through a crisis of degree? What does that actually look like? And then in chapter 3, Ricky describes the concept of emotional sabotage.
One of the things that's interesting to me and why I wanted to talk with Brian about this is because, the dynamic of emotional sabotage occurs a lot in churches, and has occurred a lot more, I think, as the crisis of degree has increased over the course of the last, I would say, 25 years. And it has led to church splits. It's
led to church leadership being questioned. The probably most public example that I could think of recently that has happened that's in the public zeitgeist is all the dynamics between Beth Moore and anybody that you can mention in the Southern Baptist Conference. As growing leaders and this is from a review of Joe Rigney's book. As growing leaders begin to exercise renewed biblical leadership, the pushback is often negative and pronounced at first. How can a leader lead
through this? And I don't think it's just in I don't think it's just in churches. I think as leaders and we're about to see this, I think, with the new Trump administration, at a macro political level, but I also think we're about to see this at a micro political level. As corporations move away from DEI and other initiatives that they have that they have pushed for the last well, since that mostly peaceful summer of 2020.
What you're going to see is a lot of emotional sabotage. I'm already starting to see the little tiny spring shoots, the leaves coming up on the trees of that on places like LinkedIn and the Drudge Report as the quote unquote resistance to well, to being emotionally manipulated really begins to kick in. And it's gonna be interesting to see how these CEOs and these leaders respond to the pushback, that is negative and pronounced against emotional
sabotage. So these are some of the main ideas that are at the front of leadership emotional sabotage. And I'd like to kick off by asking Brian Bagley, what do you think about this? What do you think about this book? Talk about it. I know you had mentioned when we started talking about talking about this book that you had started it and then you put it down. Now you've gone back into it. What do you think of this book? Yeah. No. I think it's
a I think it's a timely book. I think, there it there's a lot of application in not just in the church. I think it's I think your your analysis there, you're you're drawing the line between the the DEI, and emotional sabotage, I think it's absolutely absolutely spot on. I think there's, there are plenty of examples where, people have made appeals to a motion, that I think in a bygone era would have just been, you know, shrugged off. You know? In a more masculine era, there those
appeals to a motion would have just been dismissed. But we don't live in a masculine era. We live in a feminine era. And so there's a lot more weight being been given to emotional appeals, whether it's through mass media, politically, even, unfortunately, as much as I hate to say it, theologically. And, you know, you would you, you would hope that that theology your theology would be, you know, theology is the is the thing that's at the the
headwaters of any society. It's their their what they think about God and man. And so, you know, if your theology is warped, then everything downstream of that will be as well. And so so I think, you know, just from reading the book and I I think Joe Rigney has I think he's ahead of the curve with this book. I think he's got some things he said some things that need to be said,
and I'm excited that he wrote it. I'm I'm glad that I I was able to get through it, and, and I look forward to applying it in the coming, months years. Well, it's interesting that you mentioned that religion and you and I have had this discussion. Theology is or religion is is upstream or other things. I let's frame it this way. Other things that we value in civic and public life are downstream from
religion. And someone who is non sec who is secular will listen to this and will say, rightly so, they will say, well, that may be true, but religion is just a social construct of man. Now, we're not gonna get into the objections to that or the the the or the ideas around that. Otherwise, we'll be here for 4 hours, and we don't have that kind of time today. Instead, what we're going to do is we're going to grant that argument that religion is a social constructive man for the purpose of
talking about where that social construct sits. Right? And religions all the way always go back to worldviews. Right? What do you view where do you view your place in the world? Where do you view Right. Who you are? I would assert that worldviews go directly to and and the misorderedness that we have in our worldviews go directly to the postmodern meeting crisis that we've had for the last now going on 60 no. Almost 80 years, actually, in the west
overall. We've had an increasingly misordered sense of meaning ever since, particularly in Europe, Christianity died its last death, in the bombing of Dresden, I would say, probably, in, in 1943, 44, whenever that happened. I think it just it just that event
just wiped out. And it's not just that event. It was a culmination of a lot of things, but that just sort of wiped out Christian Europe and allowed for the rise of deconstructionism that infected academia and other areas of our of our of American public civic life over the course of the last 80 years or so. Joe Rigney, I think, would probably agree with us in all this.
Just a little background on the author. He earned a bachelor of arts degree in communication from Texas A&M University, followed by a master of arts in biblical and pastoral studies from Bethlehem College and Seminary, and a master's degree in classical Christian studies from New Saint Andrews. That would be Doug Wilson's outfit in, in Idaho, and a PhD from
the University of Chester in England. He also served for a brief time as a briefing pastor or maybe currently serves as a preaching pastor at Cities Church in Minneapolis. Let's talk a little bit about Joe Rigney. So John Piper booted him from his little conclave up there in, in Minneapolis. Can you tell the listeners why that happened and who John Piper is? Because maybe most folks may not know. Yeah. John Piper is a great preacher, pastor, and he's kinda he
kinda cut his teeth. He kinda became famous in the 19 nineties for a series of, I would say, college age, it was a movement of of mainly college students at that time in the early nineties. It was called the Passion Movement, and, it was it was sort of the the awakening of this, reformed movement among Christians, especially younger Christians, and that gave rise to other aspects of the reformed church planning movements such as Acts 29.
And there were some other things that kinda sprang from passion, but but, Piper's sort of the the grandfather of that that whole movement. But he's very it's interesting because, reform guys tend to be more Presbyterian ish. You know? You see you see there there are lots of reformed baptists. I'm probably gonna get the smack down online about this, but but there are reformed baptists, and and Piper is certainly one of them. I mean, I would say
you know? And I'm Baptist, and I I I would say I lean more towards the reform way of thinking about things. But but bottom line is, Piper is he's like the granddad in in all of that. And so so, you know, he founded Bethlehem College. He was the pastor there at Bethlehem Baptist Church and had a very, very successful ministry for a long time. Started, I think he was in charge. I think it was Crossway Press. I'm not sure. Maybe it wasn't Crossway. But there's there's
some big publishing outfit. It's Crossway, I think, that he founded, and it's huge. It's got a lot of a lot of publicity. It's a great it they've got a lot of great resources. So Piper's been very successful. And, and so Rigney kinda grew up under him and and but Rigney, kinda took a little bit of a you know, he he developed his own ideas about some things, based on his own theology. And, and so I think that's where you were going with that.
Right? Yeah. Yeah. And we'll get into a little bit deeper of that or around that when we talk about sort of some flack that Rigney has gotten. But I think, leadership and emotional sabotage comes directly out of Rigney's experiences defining what is going on in the public culture in a way that goes that cuts against the grain of the pipers or the Tim Kellers, or even, I would say, Alastair Beggs of the world.
And the reason why it cuts against the grain of those types of folks is because those folks, to your point about Piper, cut their eye teeth on building in the 19 nineties when we lived in a much more Christian positive culture. I mean, it was still becoming Christian negative, but it was it was nominally still Christian positive. And now we live, I would assert, in a fully Christian negative culture. Mhmm. You wouldn't believe the kind of pushback I
get from people when I talk about Christianity on this podcast. You wouldn't believe the kind of pushback that I get. And it's I'm I'm not talking about it in terms of, like, oh, I'm a martyr. Feel sorry for me. No. Like, that's not what I'm talking about. I'm saying there are people who genuinely just sort of skip past these topics and go right to the other books whenever I talk about a book based in theology or the bible. Or they'll they'll skip past because they it doesn't mean
anything to them. They're like, that doesn't mean anything to me. Christian negative doesn't mean hostility. Christian negative can just mean passive aggressiveness or even just, like, I'm just gonna ignore the thing because it doesn't matter. And I think that's where we're at as a culture in the United States. So Rigney came up, like and I think Rigney is right around our right around my age. I'm in my mid forties now. He came up during a time when the transition from Christian positive to
Christian negative was almost fully complete. And he could see it in his own peers. And so he writes from that perspective versus Piper who's writing from the other end and leading from the other end of the telescope. The The other thing I would say to that, if if I can jump in, is just Yeah. There there's another there's another you're absolutely right about that, Haysan. There's another aspect of this, and that's the s the eschatology. So Piper is gonna be more of a premillennialist,
and Joe Rigney is gonna be more of a postmillennialist. And so that and the reason that gets into the the civil sphere and Christian nationalism. K? So so Piper and, oh, you Tim Keller, couple of other guys that you mentioned, premillennialists. Right? And so they take a much more conciliatory tone with the world. Why? Because they don't really see it as their job to necessarily, build anything. I'm I'm not I'm not saying they don't care about building things, you know, building a
church or or ministry. I'm not saying that. But they fundamentally believe that that that things are gonna get worse and worse and worse, and god's gonna Jesus is gonna come again in the second coming and just rescue rescue the church from a really bad situation. So they don't feel any pressure to be involved in politics, to try to reform politics, to try to, reform
the the the public sphere in any way. Right? We're just gonna preach Jesus and be nice and pray this prayer, this simple prayer, and, you know, just think about keep you know, think about your life in a Christian way and just love God and and get along with folks and and it'll be okay in the end. And Rigney's you know, he's not looking at it like that. He's saying, no. Christ doesn't return until until the enemies of God are are made a
footstool under his feet. So that only happens through the execution of the, the the gospel plan, the the great commission, if you will. And so that means we have to go into these spheres and, conquer them for Christ, if you will. So that's the whole the whole point of Christian nationalism. We have 2 different ways of thinking about how to confront a secular culture. And the and they're they're I I wouldn't say they're diametrically opposed,
but they're they're clearly 2 different paths. And so, so that's another thing in play. Well, in that and then you get into, like, essentially the article. You get into, like, infant baptism, which I'm not gonna get into. I'm just not gonna get into on this podcast. I'm a I'm a I always say I'm a recovering Catholic, a recovering orthodox Catholic. And so, maybe next time maybe sometime this year, we'll come on and we'll talk about the
intricacies of infant baptism for our audience. That'd be interesting. I don't care. Because there's some definite, oh, let's put it this way. We're the the orthodox and the the orthodox Catholics and the Catholics, the western Catholics are reading the reading the, the passages around baptism differently than the baptists are. Let's just say that. They're just reading them differently. True statement.
So True statement. It's interesting, though. Let's let's talk about Christian nationalism because this one's a little bit more this one actually irks or pokes the secularist right in the right in the eye. Particularly, the more leftist a secularist happens to be politically oriented, the more Christian nationalism riles them up. And the reason why, I think, and I wanna go to a deeper thing other than the nationalism or this weird heuristic shorthand that's always put out thereof. Well,
we gotta separate church and state. And Christian nationalism just wants to combine churches. We're gonna have a theocracy, Handmaid's Tale, blah blah blah blah. Then they start, like, foaming at the mouth, and they create a golf and create make a Hulu show or something that a bunch of people on the on the East Coast and the West Coast watch. Christian nationalism, I think, irks people of a political stripe because they are of a purton they are of a particular psychological
temperament, I would assert. I think Rigney would agree with me, and I got this from the book too. So Rigney is very much concerned with what has happened and how to solve it, which is great. He's describing the what. He's saying, this is emotional sabotage. This is, this is, weaponization of empathy. This is, what what what what's the other things on my list? Oh, yeah. These are the emotional systems. This is what anxiety looks like in the church. This is
what triangulation looks like. He's very much consumed with, like, this is the what, and now let's move on to the how do we solve it, which is great, right, for for the podcast and for where we're going this year. Great for our show. I am, of course, a root cause guy, which means I'm I'm very interested. And and you can say this is for my own self referential reasons. Sure. Okay. I'm very interested in the why
and the how. Mhmm. So the reason why Christian nationalism hoax people of a certain temperament, I think, is because of the problem in our world today that if you mention it, we get you booted from polite society. And Brian actually already mentioned it. So but boom. Brian's already been booted from polite society, so it's fine. It's fine. And he still eats, and somehow his kids still have clothes, so it's cool. Like, being booted. Yeah. Boot boot boot for life is fine. This is fine.
But I think the problem is this, or the the why is this. We have we have a dominance or preponderance, maybe this is the best way to put it, of the prioritization of a more feminine temperament in communication and social situations. And that has slowly come to overwhelm public discourse over the last 40 years. As a matter of fact, probably the biggest example of this is the recent hearings for the secretary of defense, Pete Heggeseth, and just go online and search Pete Hegiseth female senators.
And you will find all kinds of memes and videos that will pop up, in your browser. And if you are at work in a place where HR is looking over your shoulder, you might want to make sure to not go through the VPN at work when you look at this. Because HR will have feminine HR will have a conversation with you. Whether that feminine comes in the form of a man or a woman, I do not care. It's a temperament issue. Right? That's
right. And I think that but I think that people are searching around for why that feminine temperament has has come to so dominate public discourse in work, in churches, in schools, in government. And I think the why is because it's it's several factors. But I think there's been changes in social structures and changes in globalized communication patterns, with the advent of the commercial Internet. I think the commerce this is one of the things that the commercial Internet
opened up. It opened the door to a feminine temperament dominating public discourse because the nature of the applications built on top of the commercial Internet, most notably social media, prioritizes social norming, a a tamping down of conflict, and making sure that everybody stays in on track. And by the way, you can see this from a masculine version of the feminine temperament, which is surveillance
and data gathering. That would be Google. And you can see this in a more softer feminine version of this in feminine temperament. And this would be, exemplified by Tinder and online dating. Oh, and even, by the way, OnlyFans. Let's just throw it out there. What the heck? Why not? And I think that all of this has taken leaders who were raised again like Piper and made their bones like Piper, has taken them all completely by surprise. Because they came out of a more masculine temperament, a more
masculine way of communicating and dealing with problems. And this has led to a failure to function in relational systems. And that's what Rigney, I think, is trying to diagnose, but he doesn't talk about the why. Otherwise, his book will probably be twice as long. Do you think I've hit on anything here, or am I grasping at straws? No. I I think that's good. I I do think you're I I I think Britney is not concerned about why we're here. He's assuming
that you agree with him on that point, I think. Right. He's just saying he's just saying, hey. Just look around. There are people who, are resisting leaders through emotional manipulation, and and I think I don't think you you you could disagree on the the temperament of of the, society, you know, whether it's masculine or feminine, and know as a leader that there are people trying to emotionally manipulate you. I mean, that is that is happening in corporate boardrooms
and cubicles all over America. So Okay. So so why has that worked so well in the formerly strongly nonpolitical or conservative organization like the church? And I mean the the the church in a western sort of context, not necessarily a specific denomination. Yeah. Because this is this disease is striking everywhere from the I mean, the orthodox are resisting, but I think they're the last Yeah. Bulwark, you know, backed up against the wall. But everything else is like even in Protestantism,
everything else has fallen to this. Why has that happened? You you you hit on something really, really good when you were talking about it's a it's it's a matter of temperament. Right. Right? It so when we're talking about men and women, we're not talking about men and women, good, bad. We're talking about we're talking about men, women the way that they are. Right. So women are more emotional. They are, they tend to be more nurturing. Now I everybody can sit here and think of a woman who's not
nurturing at all. Like, you you've got one in your head. Nope. She's not a not one nurturing bone in her butt. Okay? And then we can all think of the one guy who we know who's like, oh, he's the sweetest little guy I've ever met. So gentle. Okay. Okay. I'm not talking about your exceptions. I'm talking about broad categories in general. Okay? Women tend to be more nurturing than men in general. Okay? Men tend to be less nurturing, more direct in general. And so I
think I I think that's what we're talking about here. We're you're talking about a, a society that has, deferred to a more feminine way of communication over time. And so I think you see I think you see that in you're talking about in churches, you know, like with Piper, with with Tim Keller. The way that they planted those church efforts in those big cities, they knew they were going into negative world. New York City was already
well on its way to, to negative world. And so rather than confront that world head on, they chose a more winsome approach. Like, they were you know, they wanted a they wanted a conversation. They wanted a dialogue. They wanted to, you know, rather than come in there with a Billy Graham crusade and pray this prayer and give your life to Christ and repent from your sins, it was like, well,
hey. Let's have a conversation with with someone who's not a Christian or an atheist or, you know, a a seeker as it may be called, and and let's see if we can convince them. Right? Let's win them over, and those and and so but in an increasingly negative world, that just doesn't work. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. So We've talked a little bit about Brittany, his background,
Christian nationalism. We have not touched on infant baptism because I'm just not gonna do that today as I already mentioned. But both all those things kind of led him to being booted out of, of, Piper's outfit up there in, in Minneapolis, Bethlehem College. And, he landed on, and began to work with Doug Wilson and created this book, Leadership and Emotional Sabotage. And I think this is the first book of many that's gonna come from Rigney's, Rigney's
pen. By the way, the Internet has also given us the opportunity to publish. And so it's taken the person who would normally have stood on the street corner with a clapboard and said the end is near ringing a bell. And now that guy just goes to Idaho and blogs all day. And, eventually, he finds people who are doomers and gloomers. But he also finds people, if he's really sophisticated in his communication, who understand that if he's taking flack for saying the end
is near, he must be over the target. And so I wanna talk a little bit about that. One of the things that Rigney talks about in his book is courage. Right? Courage of the world, courage of the church. Talk a little bit about that, Brian. Like, what does it take to confront these individuals and even systems? Because it's really systems thinking. That's the thing that attracted me to this book. Because I'm a systems thinker. Like, I see how things click
together and that's also what makes me a root cause guy. Because if you could figure out how the system is clicked together, then you can go you could basically engineer reverse engineer the system Mhmm. Figure the thing out, and go, oh, okay. That was the seed. If we just go pluck that out, we can solve we can solve the problem. Right? Yep. So
but that takes courage. Right? And the the venture capitalist, Peter Thiel, once infamously said the courage has always been in short brilliance is always in short supply, but so is courage, basically. And I'm butchering that that phrase. But it's true. Like, courage has always been in short supply. So in a time where and I'm not gonna talk about I mean, the easy examples to bring up are
cancel culture and things like that. Those are easy to bring up. But in a time where we, as leaders, have to have courage, how do we do that in the face of weaponized empathy and in emotional sabotage? How how do you avoid being emotionally manipulated as a leader? Yeah. I think you have to be willing to speak to the elephant in
the room. So a lot of times, people will know that there's something wrong, but because they don't want to ruffle feathers or there's some sort of protected, I don't wanna say protected class, but like a there's some protected idea. It could be protected class. It could be a you know, there's just we we don't wanna acknowledge, that this problem could be something else because of, you know, what whatever it is that we're protecting. Right? So
it could be, sexual orientation. It could be anything. It could be a number of things, right, that we're we're saying, oh, that's off limits for voting. Don't talk about that. Don't address that. And then people use that to sabotage some some effort that's being done. Okay? I'll I'll use an example even even better than sexual orientation. We don't do any or not any. We do very little psychological research around IQ anymore in this country. Absolutely.
Because it's brutal. It's absolutely brutal. That's right. Particularly, the correlations. And nobody likes to use this term because now they think you're leaning into causation when you say correlation. No. I'm saying correlation, and I have a relatively high IQ. So it's okay. I've done pretty good. I know what I'm talking about. But the correlations between IQ and ethnicity, No one wants to do any research touching on any of that ever since Charles
Murray got slammed back in the day. Yep. And if you don't do that kind of research Mhmm. Then you can't solve the problem because what that what that IQ research takes you into is a space where you don't know what to do about IQ. Because as a researcher with a limited number of scientific materialistic tools at your disposal, you're now wandering into a space where that tool those tools don't work. And so there's to your point, there's a lack of courage around IQ. Forget it.
Answer. There's all kinds of beliefs. Yeah. There's all kinds of things that you're just not allowed to talk about because Right. You know, well, we don't we don't we don't wanna talk about the underlying cause. The underlying causes are gonna cause us to confront some other truths that we don't like. Right. So so I think when it comes to courage, it's,
you know, Elon Musk is a great example of this. I think, you know, Elon Musk has, you know, people were trying to bully him at Twitter, into silence or into, you know, like, I think it was was it him and Bob Iger? Somebody was trying to basically deny they were gonna punish Twitter by not they were gonna punish Elon Musk by by saying, hey. We're not gonna give our advertising dollars to you until you can either shut your mouth or say what we want you to say. And
and, Rogan had some or not Rogan. Musk had some choice words at that interview that he gave. I don't know if you saw that. But, yeah, it was but but, basically, he was saying, like, like, look. There's there's this this whole this whole problem with free speech in our country, and people are trying to bully me with money. Like, like, I'm not gonna do that. Like, agree with me or don't agree with me, but that's not like, you're not gonna
back me down on that. And and I think when it when it comes to sort of this emotional sabotage and, oh, you don't care about people. You you don't like this person, this this class of people. You don't care about them. You you know? That that's that type of emotional sabotage that I think we're Rigney is trying to address in this in this book. Brene Brown, the writer of Darren Greatly, talks about
courage being a heart word. And and she's coming from, again, you know, a social work background, which is a a field that is dominated by a feminine temperament. And that's fine. That's that's sort of the nature of sort of where a, where a where a occupation is going to go. Right? And I don't disagree with her. I do think courage takes heart. It is a heart word. But when we search our hearts, as it says in the bible, we find that they are, to paraphrase from Jeremiah, deceitful above all
else. Right? Who could know them? One of the things that the heart of man has to run up against invariably, and we talked about this in our episode on shop class versus shop class at Soulcraft by Matthew Crawford. Invariably, the heart of man has to run up against the boundaries of limits of material reality. Like, I'll give you an example. So no matter how much Brian and I, who are separated by a few 100 miles. Right? I'm
recording this right now. No matter how much we may want to be in the same room physically, unless I can manipulate my atoms over distance to go to where Brian is, and Brian can manipulate his atoms to come over distance to where I am, we can't physically be in the same spot. There's a limit to that reality that we are trying to aggregate by utilizing this platform to have a conversation. There are limits to the material reality of me being physically in the same space
as Brian and Brian being physically in the same space as myself. And no matter how much fantasizing or anger or disgust I have, no matter how many regulations I write, no matter how many senators I buy, there's nothing that's going to change the reality of me taking my Adams and going them taking them over to where Brian is, and Brian taking, yeah, his Adams and
bringing them over to where I am. And by the way, the reason why I'm using that example is because we have a lot of people who right now are trying to defy material reality and claiming that the virtual world defies material reality. And if that's true, that becomes a religion. Mhmm. Yep. But from those headwaters come the poison fruit of emotional sabotage. Because if I don't get my way and I run up against the limits of material reality, I just I already said that, like, material reality
can be abrogated. That's my religion. But yet, the water's still wet. The wood is still there. Something's gotta break. Either I'm gonna break or material reality is gonna break. Talk talk to us a little bit about or talk with us a little bit about what leaders can do to help those people who can't because there I think there's a lot more of these people than we think there are. Navigate the limits
of material reality. Yeah. And who and who default, by the way, to being inside of these Internet spaces and these social media spaces because there, they feel as though they are free. Mhmm. Yeah. I I think just just material the the world that we exist in is not material. It's not merely material. There are all kinds of immaterial things as well. There are immaterial categories that we can't define even science acknowledges that we
can't define. There are dimensions that we don't have access to that physicists are just saying, yeah, like, we they exist, and there might be up to a 150 of them, and we can't even get to them. Right. So so, you know, even the the, the old school atheists of, you know, the Scopes monkey trials are having a much harder time holding to that worldview as they
get the further they get along. And, I mean and so, anyway, I just say that to say to the to anyone who's, you know, a hardcore materialist, that, you are making assumptions about the unseen world that can't be proven. And, you know, you can't you can't prove that everything's material. You're making that assumption. And and and that's a and from that assumption, you're drawing metaphysical conclusions, based on that assumption. And and that's fine, but just know that's that's what you're doing.
The one thing that you you mentioned a little bit ago about, empathy, one of the one of the problems with empathy, is there are, yeah. And empathy is a good thing. Empathy can be can be wonderful. I mean, there are times, like, even if you ever dealt with somebody going through grief, the emotions that they're dealing with cannot be explained in a material way. I mean, like, you're you're dealing with the departure of a human being. The grief that you're experiencing cannot be explained
materially. I I mean, it's not just mere chemical, reactions in your brain. I mean, it's a it it's in your mind. It's in your soul. It's not just your body. You do have a a physical reaction to grief, but your your your reaction goes way beyond mere physical. And so so dealing with someone in grief, it does require empathy for sure, but you can't stop with empathy. At some point, empathy has to give way to sympathy.
And and what's the the difference between the 2 and I think I think where where the discussion gets lost, and and I I I think Brene Brown's great. I think she's done some great things. I think Brene Brown, the one thing she has missed is is, she dismisses sympathy. And she's even said so in some of her videos that I've watched some in her YouTube, and she's like, sympathy is not blah blah blah blah. You I don't care if you you have to have sympathy because,
so let's say somebody's in a you know, stuck in some quicksand. Okay? An empathetic person says, oh, I see you stuck in that quicksand. I'm gonna get in that quicksand with you. K. The problem is now we're both sinking in quicksand. We're both going to die. A sympathetic person would say, that quicksand looks terrible. Hey. Let me hand you a stick. Let's see if I can
pull you out of there without getting in with you. Right? That's the difference, I think, between, the the clearest difference that that you can make between empathy and sympathy. Again, it you know, when somebody's grieving, empathy is very, very appropriate. But after a period of time to help that person move on, you have to move over to sympathy at some point. I'm not saying, you know, it's gotta be day 1 or even day 365. I'm just saying there is a difference.
Right. Well, and Joe Rigney, in his book, Leadership and Emotional Sabotage, hits on something, I think, that is an extra aspect of this that Brene Brown misses. The scientific materialist mindset misses, the political progressive mindset misses. And they miss it because when you when you when you deconstruct God, when you do the Nietzschean thing and deconstruct God all the way down to the bottom, or at least you try, and you try to deconstruct the bible and
it's not really deconstructing God. It's deconstructing the bible as an avatar or stand in for God. When you do that, you also deconstruct evil. And Ed Friedman, Renee Brown, both these folks on either side of the spectrum on empathy. And I think I think Ed Freeman would agree with you about empathy. I think he would absolutely agree with you about the difference between empathy and sympathy. Absolutely. And Ed Freeman was writing, you know, failure of nerve 30 years
ago now. Right? 40 years ago now. Evil intent has to be factored in to people's hearts. So to your point about sitting with someone in grief, I can absolutely sit in someone grief sit in sit with somebody who is grieving their loved one. The challenge for people who do not have a worldview that includes, quite frankly, Satan or Luciferian intent is that they don't know what the hard
limits this goes back to that idea of material reality. They don't know what the hard limits of their empathy are because they don't have a good Richter scale internally for when it goes from being grief stricken, genuine remorse about something that has happened to manipulation. And this is the problem we're having. This is the core of the point of the
problems we're having today. And I think pastors are facing this in counseling sessions all over the place and talking with people who are, to your point earlier about Piper's Church, seekers. They're seeking. Well, what they're seeking is a defined, clear, black and white, and I know we hate black and white, but a clear, defined black and white definition of what is good and what is evil and where the boundaries are. And the courage to say that in a counseling session I mean, as a former
pastor, you've been in counseling sessions before. How many people let's frame this question this way as we begin to round the corner for our close here. Short book, short episode. I recommend you pick up I recommend you pick up Leadership
and Emotional Sabotage. You're gonna get a lot of this from this book. But, how many how many folks as a pastor, as a former pastor, did you sit in rooms with where the line between what they were doing that was good and what they were doing that was evil was very clear? Yeah. It's not clear at first. It takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of conversation. And and sometimes it's not even clear to the person. That's the thing. The person who's doing the manipulating, they
don't even know they're doing it. Right. It's it's a behavior that was learned maybe from their parents that because their parents were good at it and they just and they that's just the reality for them. Like, they don't know any other way to interact with someone. Right. And, and so it takes time and energy to work work through help them first off, they have to see
it. They have to understand what it is. The the hard part for a materialist, someone maybe with a Darwinian worldview, like, if if, like, if if you're the survival of the fittest, I mean, this is just another technique, right, to get what you want. I mean, this is a stipulation that just just gives you an edge up on someone. Yeah. Why wouldn't you eat your neighbor? Yeah. Right. I mean It's fine. Right? I'm trying to I mean, I'm in it for me. And so, like, if if you're a secularist, you're
you're worried about today. That's what secular means. It's a todayist. It's a presentist. Right? I mean, there's I don't mean to worry about the future. I'm just trying
to get what I need for the day. I mean so, you know, I I to your point, I just I I I I would say that that, that empathy is is definitely a tool that a leader needs, but you you you can stray, and and you can be played and you can stray away from that and get into core leadership and be taken advantage of as a leader, and then your business or your your people suffer because of that. And that's,
I think that's the point of the book. Yeah. I think that one of the great things about Rigney's book for leaders is that Rigney, in a positive way, kind of like Saul Alinsky did in Rules for Radicals, he's provided a book where where he understands the rules of the system better than the participants inside of the system do, and thus, he can take apart the system. That's what Saul Alinsky talked about in Rules for Radicals.
And Rigney is continuing a tradition that Doug Wilson started in Rules for Reformers where he understands the nature of the system. And understanding the nature of the system means, yes, making a judgment about it because you're going to you're going to examine it, you're going to hold it in judgment. Absolutely. But it also means that you're going to analyze it, critique it, and, yes, I'm gonna use this term again, deconstruct it,
but for the purpose of rebuilding something else. And I think that this book, along with the book that we covered last week and the books that we're going to cover this year, can provide in toto a way to a way forward, for leaders,
inside of a world of emotional sabotage. Although, I do think I do think that we are returning to a public discourse, at least to a small degree, a public discourse that is a bit more, and we've already used this word feminine, masculine in its temperament because of the nature of, bad orange man Donald Trump and the way in which she communicates, which is very much a masculine temperament method of communicating. And by the way, for those of you who don't know, that method
of communicating is you and I are gonna have an argument. We're gonna tussle it. We're going to confront each other directly about what the issue is. I don't really care about your feelings. You don't really care about my feelings. Not in the global Kantian one world, we are the world, we are the children kind of sense. I don't care about your feelings. I care about solving the problem. So let's solve the problem, and then we worry about our
feelings afterward. We worry about how we feel about the solution afterward. And that is a masculine method of approaching conflict and confrontation that, Trump does very well, which, by the way, puts the fear of, if I shall be so bold, god, into those of those who have dominated the public discourse with feminine temperament currently, which is why you see so much catterwalling about Trump.
Yeah. I think I think, you know, for for the for any leader who's listening to this, you know, one thing I would encourage you with is, you know, there's there's nothing wrong with acknowledging feelings. The the thing that, as a leader, you have to do and and lead your people to do with their feelings is understand that, you know, feelings like, let's say you're on a road trip. Okay, and you're you're driving a car. You've got yourself maybe you've got your spouse in the car with you,
and you've got your kids in the car in the back. Do you have kids? Okay? Maybe a pet, something. I don't know. But, you would never let your kids drive your car. K? Especially if they're, like, little kids. You would never do that. Okay? There's gonna be 2 results. Either either, you're gonna crash the car, it's gonna be a terrible wreck, or you're gonna get
there late. Okay? And feelings are the same way. When you let feelings drive your life, k, when you let your feelings drive your decision making, drive how you respond to certain situations, you inevitably crash your life or you get where you need to go too late. Okay? You take a wrong turn. You make a mistake. You end up saying something you shouldn't have said. A whole bunch of things. Okay? You become passive. Whatever it is.
But, and so feelings are great because they can tell us that something is wrong, but they can't tell us what to do. And as soon as we start letting them tell us what to do, that's when leaders begin to fail. And so so I think this, you know, feelings are fine. It's fine to know them and be and acknowledge that they're there, but don't
take direction from them. And I think that's where I hope the resurgence of this, you know, as you think of this masculine temperament and leadership, whatever, you know, I I hope that that's where it takes us. You know, that, because I I I don't wanna say we, you know, completely ignore feelings. Right? They they are helpful. They are useful. They're they're there to tell you something's wrong. They just can't tell you what to do about it. I would add to
that. We also need to and and I've been saying this for many years in a lot of different contexts, in leadership development work that I've done with clients. We need to be able to very calmly and very quietly when emotional sabotage shows up, recognize it, call it out for what it is. Mhmm. And then, here's a word that leaders need to have in their quiver. No. The word no. Now you could follow that up with whatever you want after that. However,
no is a sentence. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end. It's got a subject object. Subject. Yeah. Subject and a verb. Done. Subject subject verb. Done. Done. You yeah. It implies subject to you and then the verb is no. No. That's right. And and by the way, female leaders can use no. Male leaders can use no. Oh, really? You know, people with a feminine temperament can use no, but people with a masculine temperament can use no. Anybody can use no. No is available to every leader out
here. And because 2 things can be true at once, too many leaders equivocate on their nose. They want room to negotiate later on because no, while it is also while it was a sentence, no creates boundaries and puts you and puts the other party sometimes in a box. When emotional sabotage, however, has occurred, when emotional manipulation is occurring on your team, a box is exactly the spot where that manipulation sabotage needs to go so that it can be exercised and, and dealt
with. I would also say that leaders need to appeal to an objective standard, an objective standard outside of themselves. Now Brian and I think the Bible's pretty good. You may not wanna bring that to work. Okay. That's fine. You may wanna bring the Bible in your heart to work. That's fine too. But bring an objective standard, rules, regulations, something that exists outside of the participants in the conflict, something that exists outside of the participants in the confrontation or the really
rough communication interaction that's occurring. An objective standard, the word no, these are tools that will allow you to be successful, as a leader in the face of anxiety, which we didn't even touch on. But the face of anxiety, the face of emotional sabotage, the face of emotional manipulation, and, of course, weaponized empathy. Alright. It was a short book. I don't feel that we did it short shrift. If anybody knows Joe Rigney, get him a get him a link to, this audio right here. I would
love to have him on the show, talking about the book. I'm sure I could reach out to him directly. But if anybody who's listening could find him, go find him and tell him he needs to send me an email. Otherwise, Brian, do you have anything else to add before we close today? No. I would just, encourage encourage your leaders to to pick up a copy of that book. I think it's, it was very helpful. And, yeah, Joe's a great guy. Excellent. Yep. And it's only a 100 and 8 pages. Six
chapters. It's like an hour and 12 minutes to read, something like that on, on Audible, but it's a good, a good use of your time. Alright. With that, well, we're out.