Leadership Lessons From The Great Books - Sonnets by William Shakespeare w/Christen Horne

Hello. My name is Jesan Sorrells, and this is the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books podcast, episode number 120. In this episode today, we will cover a

collection of poems. Almost all of them love poems that, and I quote, philosophize, celebrate, attack, plead, and express pain, longing, and despair, all in a tone of voice that rarely rises above a reflective murmur, all spoken as if in an inner monologue or dialogue and all within the tight structure of the English sonnet form, close quote, which that was according to Barbara Mallett and Paul Wurstein, editors of the Folger Shakespeare Library Editions.

Now I will preface our conversation today by saying upfront that I am not a quote, unquote poetry guy. I don't know poetry. I think the greatest poetry probably ever written was the rhyming poetry of Ogden Nash. Doctor Seuss drives my kids crazy, and the the only point is that I remember. So I am not a poetry guy. I am a prose fellow. And by the way, we're gonna be recording an entire episode on Tennyson coming up here in a few months, and I'm already working my way through

that. But I do recognize poetry as a literary form. And I think we have to talk about poetry as a literary form, but also as a form that can impact leadership. Now when I think about these poems, I was supposed to read them in high school, and I assiduously avoided it at all costs. As a matter of fact, part of the collection of this author's works had all the the sonnets in in the in the work. And it

was a giant white book because because of Bible. And I I literally read everything else other than that, and then I put it away back on the shelf. And that is a perfect example of my approach to this content, at least in the past up until this point, is the perfect example of what I talk about in the opening to all of our episodes where I state that we are reading books and plays and poems that you fell asleep trying to read in high school.

Perfect example of this. But and Muhammad Ali, I think, made this point years ago, although he might have ripped it off from somebody else. If you are the same person 30 years later that you were in high school, you probably haven't grown at all. And by the way, I'm coming off of this, I'm coming to this podcast recording today, having watched both 21 Jump Street, the movie, and 22 Jump Street, the sequel with Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum. So I've got that floating around in my head as well.

And don't worry, this podcast episode, while it may need more Tatum, isn't going to get any Tatum beyond what I'm going to mention here. The point of this podcast is to push me and you, of course, to be open to other content that may not traditionally be considered to be classic literature. And this collection of poems and how we talk about this collection of poems is going to do that today. Leaders, push yourself into different genres and into different areas and grow as a

leader. Now to help us wrap our brains around all of this, and we've we've already heard her chuckling along as I have been doing my open here, my cold open, such as it were, to help us wrap our brains around this content, and help us think about this, in an interesting kind of way. We have invited back to this podcast our guest from episode number 112, where we dissected or barely began to dissect the count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas, Kristin Horn. Hello.

Back to the podcast, Kristin. How are you doing? Thanks. Thanks for having me. I'm very excited. I'm like kind of the complete opposite. Not complete opposite. Sorry. I definitely fell asleep reading some of these books in high school. Mhmm. We all did. I loved the poems though. Like, and I actually got my start in writing as a poet. Like, I won, like, even I

think I was, like, in 4th grade, 5th grade, something like that. I won, like, a little prize, like, a little local prize for a poem that I submitted to a competition. And so I was just like, it's funny now to be coming back around and being like, oh, I love poetry. I don't like a lot of modern poetry because I'm like, I don't think that's a poem. Like, just because you spaced it out funny on the page, I don't does is that what makes it a poem? I

don't know. I think that might even be offensive to say or ask. So but I love the old stuff. My brother, for my birthday, bought me, like, a stack of poetry books that I had asked for. So I loved going through these. And in high school, just to, like, kinda actually brought that back Yeah. It was like sonnet 90 just rocked my world. And when I got back around to it after reading it for this podcast, I was like, this is still a banger. This is still my favorite song.

So it just it was it I'm I'm I'm thrilled. I love I love poetry. It's like, I can't wait. Can't wait. Well, maybe I should bring you back for the poetry episode. Like I said, we are going to be covering Tennyson, with another cohost. And, he is a poetry guy, weirdly enough. And he but he also writes prose. So he he's

kind of Yeah. Talented in all those spaces. That's one of the reasons I started getting back into it, is I don't know if I can consider myself a poetry person yet because, like, I haven't I'm not I'm not very well read on it yet. I'm going back into it. But, I started getting back into it on the advice of of, like like, he just he it's an he's a he's a fantasy author, and he just writes and writes and writes and writes. Prolific. That's the word I was looking for.

And he's like, before I read or sorry. Write before I write every day, I read poetry because it helps make your prose better. And I was like, what? That's amazing. I already love poetry, and it's gonna make my writing better. Okay. Deal. So Well, when I should, I shouldn't. And we'll get into the we'll get into the sonnets here in just a second. I should probably like it more. I mean, like, I remember lyrics to, like, songs, and songs and poetry are pretty basically the same thing. It's just set

to music. Right? I get it right. I remember rap lyrics from the early nineties when I was bumping to whatever degenerate rap music I was bumping to in the early nineties. And so I I remember those kinds of things. I remember a rhyming structure, but there's something about it sitting on the page. It doesn't up until this point and honestly, I'll be I'll be I'll be honest. Like, the the the even how I consumed this, I'll talk about a little bit about that here when we get into, like,

the literary life of William Shakespeare, a little bit. But, like, how even I consumed this, I needed to put it into a bucket where I could relate to it. And the bucket that I relate to it on, and this is probably a negative on my part, is not just reading it on the page. It doesn't it lays flat for me. Because I'm like, okay. What is what are we doing here? How are we doing this? It has to sort

of be lived in order for me to wrap my arms around it. And I'm still carrying that from high school, so I should probably let that go. I should probably let that go. I should probably be the bigger man or whatever. I don't know. Older man. I did post on my Facebook page one time. Yes. I am on Facebook. If you want to go follow me, that's that's fine or not. You don't have to. But, I did poke post one time that I'm growing old, but not gracefully. All right. Let's kick it off with the

sonnets by William Shakespeare. We're gonna read directly from Sonnet 2. Now, for most of these sonnets, and I'll just tell you this for you who are listening today, these sonnets are mostly short. Right. And so you can go get an audio version of the sonnets by William Shakespeare. They're not long. They're not laborious pieces. Right.

But they are meaningful. And they do sit, as I stated in the the introduction there, they do sit inside of an English literary tradition of short form poetry, particularly short form love poetry. We'll talk about here in just a moment. Alright. Sonnet 2 by William Shakespeare. I'm gonna go down to a murmur here in a moment. When 14 winters shall besiege thy brow and dig deep trenches in thy beauty's field, Thy youth's proud livery, so gazed

on now, will be a tattered weed of small worth held. Then being asked where all thy beauty lies, where all the treasure of thy lusty days, to say within thine own deep sunken eyes were an all eating shame and thriftless praise. How much more praise deserved thy beauties use? If thou could stand stir, this bare child of mine shall sum my count and make my old excuse, proving his beauty by succession thine. This were to be new made when thou art old and see thy blood warm when thou feelest old.

I think I did a pretty good job of reading that, actually. You did. I I was yeah. I'm gonna pat myself on the back. I mean, I'm not happy to read this. Yeah. Not that guy, but I think I did okay. In the literary life of William Shakespeare. Let's let's talk a little bit about this because we've talked about Shakespeare before, and this episode sort of wraps up our month of Shakespeare. We did not get to Macbeth this year. We'll bump him, to next

year. But, there we we, as usual, have access to the Folger Shakespeare Library, which you can get online at folger.edu, the largest sort of public domain available repository of Shakespeare and Shakespeare and writing about Shakespeare and analysis of Shakespeare probably on the Internet. And it's a it's a great resource for the podcast, and we'll have links in the show notes to where

you can go and grab all of that. But from the full quote, the Folger Shakespeare Library Editions introduction to Shakespeare Sonnets by Barbara Maude and Paul Wurstein. I'm going to quote directly again because it sort of lays the foundation for what we're talking about here today. And I quote, yet it is not just the beauty and power of individual well known sonnets that tantalize us, but also the story that the sequence as a whole seems to tell about Shakespeare's

love life. The 154 sonnets were published in 16/09 with an enigmatic dedication presumably from the publisher, Thomas Thorpe, end quote, to the only begetter of these ensuing sonnets, mister w h. Attempts to identify mister w h have become inevitably tangled with the narrative that insists on emerging whenever one reads the sonnet sequentially as they are ordered in the 16 09

quattro. The narrative goes something like this. The poet, I e William Shakespeare, begins with a set of 17 sonnets advising a beautiful young man, seemingly an aristocrat, perhaps mister w h himself, to marry and produce a child in the interest of preserving the family name and property, but even more in the interest of reproducing the young

man's remarkable beauty in his offspring. These poems of advice modulate into a set of sonnets which urge the poet's love for the young man and which claim that the young man's beauty will be preserved

in the very poems that we are now reading. The second set of sonnets, sonnets 18 to 126, which which in the supposed narrative celebrate the poet's love for the young man, includes clusters of poems that seem to tell of specific events as the young man's mistreatment of the poet, the young man's theft of the poet's mistress, the appearance of, quote, unquote, rival poets who celebrate the young man and gain his favor, the poet's separation from the young man

through travel or through the young man's indifference, and the poet's infidelity to the young man. After the set of 109 poems, the sonnet concludes with a third set of 28 sonnets to or about a woman who is presented as dark and treacherous and with whom the poet is sexually obsessed. Several of these sonnets seem also to invoke, or involve the beautiful young man who is, according to the sonnet's narrative, also enthralled by the, quote, unquote, dark lady. Close quote.

So that gives us a little bit of idea of what we're doing here. There is a narrative structure to the way these sonnets are put together and that the way they have been collected and even the way they've been read and consumed, over the last now, 400 and, what, 18, 400 and 17 years, give or take a few years here or there. And so this is why I wanted to get Kristen on, because Kristen's a big fan of poetry. I did not know she was an award winning. Oh, gosh. I

was like like I said, 5th grade man. So Well, you've made more money from poetry. Look. You made more money from poetry than I ever have. So you're award winning to me. You're award winning to the audience of 1. Award winning poet. I'll make sure to put that in our little bio when we publish our novel. There you go. Award winning poet. That's right. Hey. Look. I put on my LinkedIn profile of a 3 time least selling author ever. I'm I've sold the least books of any author you know.

We all have to stand on our accolades somewhere. Otherwise, no one else will talk about them. Yeah. Right. So tell us about the impact and the importance of the of the sonnets on you and your life and your creativity. Let's start with there, Kristen. Yeah. Sonnet 90, I think, like I said earlier, was the first one to really, like, stand out to me. Especially in high school, I was pretty depressed, but I was a high functioning depressed

person. So nobody blinked an eye. I was, like, I was fine. I had straight a's. I was well adjusted. Everything was fine. Inside, I was dying. And so when I found Sonnet 90, I was like, somebody understands me. And they By the way, do you wanna read Sonnet 90 so we get a full Oh, I guess I could. Yeah. You know what? Let me see. What the heck? Why not? Let me 90. Yeah. We're breaking the format of the podcast. It's fine. Sonnet 90. Okay. I did not practice this, so I apologize. I I read it cold.

Not Patrick Stewart. Listen, Kristen. I read it cold. You'll be fine. Okay. Okay. So this one, then hate me when thou wilt if ever now. Now while the now while the world is bent my deeds to cross, join with the spite of fortune, make me bow, and do not drop in for an after loss. Do not, when my heart has escaped this sorrow, come in the rearward of a conquered woe. Give not a windy night, a rainy morrow, to linger out a purposed overthrow. If thou wilt

leave me, do not leave me last. When other petty griefs have done their spite, but in the onset come, so shall I taste. At first, the very worst of fortunes might, and other strains of woe which now seem woe, compared with loss of thee will not seem so. And there's, like, for me, there's, like, this ringing sensation all throughout that that was just was my existence in high school. Yeah. And as, like, influence on, like, my life and my creativity,

there was something bright. Like, you know, remember inside out with those core memories? That's like Oh, yeah. That's like a Mhmm. Very bright blue core memory for me. And it was, like, it was almost an anchor point. Mhmm. It was like, okay. Someone understands. That was really important to me. It is still really important to me. It's, like, this idea of understanding. Yeah. And and I didn't, like, think this cognizantly at the time, but, like and

what I am feeling can be expressed. Mhmm. Which as an artist, it's very important. Very important. Yeah. So that that was just that's that's that's the that was the core. That was the core for me. Back in high school when I was, you know, falling asleep at, like, what is it? The Scarlet Letter. I was just like. Yeah. Or persuasion or That one yeah. Right? But this just like it felt like it left off the page Mhmm. At me. And, you

know, to you mentioned about, like, how you consumed the sonnets. Like, I even me, I'm not practiced at reading Shakespeare anymore, so I had to listen and read at the same time. And I still had to listen to some of them multiple times before I was like, okay. I think maybe I understand maybe. And some of them still, I'm just like, I've I don't get this one. Yeah. But for my creativity oh, I can't remember if we were recording when I mentioned this.

The the the author that recommended reading poetry, before writing, I definitely felt like as I was just, like, immersing myself in these sonnets, I could feel it almost like almost what was it? Like, one of those big puzzles? Not not really the Rubik's cube sort of thing, but you can just almost feel your brain, like, clicking, clacking, and and shifting. And I was like, this is so cool. I can't wait to do more poetry.

That's awesome. And now when I go through and I'm editing, because right we're we're in the middle of, like, heavy rewrites for our books. I'm going through it. I'm like, oh, we don't need that. Delete that. Oh, we don't need that. Delete that. Oh, gosh. This is delete that. Delete that. All of a sudden, I'm seeing my writing in a almost in a completely with completely different eyes. And it wasn't that long ago that I was writing them. So,

normally, it takes much longer. Mhmm. You know, people say, like, put it away. Like, even freaking Stephen King, he's like, yeah, just put it away until it looks like a brand new book. You've never seen it before. Yeah. We're still working on getting published. So I'm like, I I I don't have time to do that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I gotta get paid here, Steven. But

immersing yeah. Right? So I'm in so but but it's weird that, like, immersing myself in these sonnets almost seems to have accelerated that happening because now I'm just like, oh, I'm looking at it with a diff completely different perspective. Yeah. I'm like, oh, this is that's not as effective as I thought it was gonna be. Okay. Did you know, delete that. I'll, like, switch this over here. And it's just like, it's

so cool. It's so much fun. Well and it's it's it's interesting because neurologically speaking, the way our brains work and, again, this is something that I've learned over the last 30 years. The way our brains work around things that are prose based, narrative structures versus something that's more rhythmical or lyrical, it it activates 2 different parts of our brains. That's that's one of the one thing I do understand

now. So I understand why. I mean, I understand why I remember song lyrics versus remembering maybe the entire opening anymore to the Gettysburg Address, although I do kinda remember chunks of that. Right? Because it it activates a different story center in your in your head. Right? Which is what you're talking about as a writer. But, also, it's interesting how the structure and I noticed this one with all of the sonnets, actually. The structure of them is, here's

our setup. There's a weird sort of muddy middle, and then there's a stinger at the end. Oh my gosh. I can't tell you how many couplets I wrote down. And I was like, okay. This couplet is amazing. This couplet is amazing. I just wrote them all down on my phone. I was like, these are so cool. Yeah. And and and I I am fascinated by the idea that, number 1, we we know a bit about Shakespeare, but we don't we don't know as much

as we would like to know. Why we don't know as much as we would like to know in a sort of a postmodern, I got to know everything about children down to your bottom of your psychology kind of thing. Like, we don't know anything about Shakespeare, that kind of thing. And by the way, that's good. That was actually probably one of the better things that he did other

than dying. Not one of the bad things that he did, you know, because what it does is it creates mystery and then you can fill that bucket with whoever or whatever you want it you want it to be. But there's clearly a mind back there, not only behind the plays, obviously, but behind the sonnets most particularly that understands something about couplet structure that is very, very sophisticated and is

very, very demanding. And it's almost as if and I look at it, of course, you know, I look at it through a martial arts lens because, of course, why not? But also through a business lens or an entrepreneurship lens where once you get to a certain point, you've seen enough and you've been through enough to where you can now begin shaving away the excess. Mhmm. And that's what he did in his sonnets, apparently. He shaved away the

excess. And, you know, really good poetry writers will eventually wind up in a space of a haiku where you know, and I don't understand the haiku structure at all. It doesn't rhyme at the end, and so I'm, like, frustrated. But, you know, you know, you're gonna have, like, what is it? What is the high school? Haiku structure is, like, 3 words and then 6 words. It's syllables. I believe it's 575. 575. Okay. Alright. I'll I'll take your word for it. You go ahead and Google

it and look it up, while I'm rambling. To make sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. While I'm rambling. 575. Yeah. Okay. Cool. Three lines, 5 syllables, 7 7 syllables, 5 syllables. Yep. Right. So I look at that, and I look at that as like, okay. That's a Japanese sword master kinda deal where, like, you're killing somebody just by slicing an ear off and they, like, fall down. Like, I'm looking at it like that. Whereas Shakespeare is more like medieval, I'm gonna hit you with a bunch of

things, but it's going to be the right things in the right area. It's it's a fundamentally European versus a fundamentally sort of Asian sort of approach to to lyrical structure. I don't know if anybody like, y'all watched the shogun? I have heard immense things about it, but I refuse to get Hulu because I'm not bundling anything for Disney. That's fair. That's fair. But I might rip it off. I might So ride the pirate waves. It's so good. I mean, we all knew that was coming

back. Like Yes. As soon as yeah. Yeah. But, there is a there is there are a couple of episodes that start to really focus in and and zoom in on the poetry, and it's just amazing. Yeah. Like and I don't pretend to fully understand Japanese poetry. Yeah. I think the haiku is also supposed to this is not like everybody's like, oh, haiku, 575. It's also supposed to have something to do with, a season. Like, that's like a that's like an underlying a true haiku has, like, a seasonal reference

or something. And it was like, oh, I never knew that. Well, that's that's interesting, you know, particularly for this podcast because, you know, we do focus on the idea, and we'll get to it at the end of this episode as well. We try to focus on solutions to problems at the end of the 4th turning, which we I fundamentally believe that we're at the end of that. We're in the last bit of chaos before last bit of chaotic winter before spring shows up, in the West

again. And, you know, leaders have to have to have to I think that leaders need to be tied in more to the cyclical and the lyrical versus and we'll talk a little bit about this today with the ideas of romantic love, which, of course, lay underneath the sonnets. But, I do think that leaders have to be tied into the cyclical and the lyrical in a deeper level than than they really are. Right? Because leaders are very much

tied into the mechanistic. And that really sort of happens with capitalism and making money and sort of figuring all of that out. But there's a whole other unexplored world that exists underneath there that if you're ignorant to it, I do believe that there are dragons that can come out of that water and

eat you. And and and you won't have any defense for a mechanistic mind has zero defense against something that's cyclical and lyrical and is and is and is fundamentally sort of confused when it shows up, and then then everything falls into chaos and, like, you know, When you're talking, what what came to mind was being reactive versus zooming out and understanding that there's a big arc.

Right. Yep. Right. Yeah. Well and even so When I look at the sonnets, the sonnets are written in a Shakespeare is sticking to a particular structure. Now he's doing art inside that structure. He's peeling away. Like we just said, he's peeling away the meaning inside of that structure, but he is inside some boundaries. Right? Now I do think it would have been interesting, and this is one of the one of the sort of mind games that I do sometimes when I read stuff like this.

What would it have been like if he had been able to travel to Japan and read a haiku? Like, how would that have blown his mind? Right. Or or what if a great haiku master from Japan had been able to go to England and be able to access sonnets, you know, in the in 17th century? How would that have blown his mind? Right. And that's what you're getting with the Internet right now is all this cross pollination of ideas. Yeah. And that's why it feels like a chaotic a chaotic mess a little bit,

because we're coming up with new forms. Alright. By the way, why don't you tell the story of how you sort of consumed this with that that not Oh, yeah. Yeah. But, yeah, then tell tell a little bit about that and a little bit about the Patrick Stewart piece because I think people wanna hear about that because Yeah. They go like, what what was that reference? So don't so if you decide you wanna read the sonnets, don't feel bad if you can't just sit down and read the book because

I couldn't. I'm I'm out of practice reading Shakespeare. And so I knew that in order to get through these in time for the podcast, I was gonna have to listen and read them at the same time. And thankfully now, like, audiobooks are like, they're everywhere. So I was like, sure. Surely, there will be an audiobook. But I actually feel like I found something better. So during the COVID lockdown, sir Patrick Stewart read a sonnet a day. And that that playlist is on YouTube. You can

go find it. Just put sir Patrick Stewart sonnets. There you go. And it's just it's it's amazing. And don't get frumpy. I will I will tell you right now. Frumpy. Sorry. That's a word that I use all the time. There are sonnets that he just skips, and I was very irritated about that. But then, like, sometimes he'll he'll, start a video and he'll be like, I'm sorry. I have to apologize. I'm going to skip that one because I don't like it. I find it rather offensive and no one's going to make me

read it. It's like, okay. And so there's a handful that he just doesn't read. I think in, like, the seventies or so, he just skips, like, 4. Mhmm. And I'm like, okay. So you you'll have to go find someone else to read that. There was another playlist. I don't remember what it's called. But it looks really bad because it's it's a video of someone pushing a tablet, to, like, pull up someone else reading the sonnet. But those are actually amazing reads. Okay. They're

those are amazing reads. So whenever Patrick Stewart just skips a sonnet, go see if you can find that playlist, because that some of those are are better. Like Nope. Nope. Oh, I No. That was sacrilegious. I know. So You know, we all can't be, we all can't I mean, Captain Picard can't hit every I mean I know. The president Xavier can't hit all the he can't he can't hit all the the president Xavier can't hit all the he can't he can't hit all the marks, so

it's fine. Well, also, you know, he's preparing them in, like, an hour and casually. So it's just like it's all good. When you listen to the one that he has memorized, you're like, oh, this is a completely different level. Right. Because it's actually embedded into into his Yeah. Yeah. Soul such as it

were his his psyche. Okay. Awesome. And then Ian McKellen through Ian McKellen makes a a surprise appearance for sir Patrick Stewart's birthday, which is just like, oh, we're all benefiting from this is amazing. And off came. Yes. So just Awesome. Just such it's a great playlist. Excellent. Well, we will be sure to put the link to that in the, in the show notes, underneath the player for,

for this episode. So go click on that link and listen to that playlist back to the sides, back to the Folger Shakespeare library translation or version or publication of the sonnets by William Shakespeare. I'm gonna put my NPR voice on now as we read sonnet 18. Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate. Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, and summer's lease hath all too short to date.

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, and often is his gold complexion dimmed, and every fare from fair sometimes declines by chance or nature's changing course untrimmed. But thy eternal summer shall not fade nor lose possession of that fair thou's nor shall death brag that wanderst in his shade when in eternal lines to time thou growst. So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, so long lives this and gives and this gives life to thee. Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?

Now I'm not Pablo Neruda, although I do have a book of Pablo Neruda's love poems floating around somewhere in my house. And I've been married a while now. I won't get into the specific number of years, but I've been married a while now. And when you've been married a while, shall I compare thee to a summer's day takes on different kinds of meaning than when you're first in the throes of a relationship when you're like 18 or 25 or 40.

So while I'm not going to get into that aspect of this because this sonnet has been often quoted in romantic in a romantic context, right, for romantic novels, romantic films, you know, the kinds of movies you see, like that silly movie serendipity back in the day, hate. But, you know, where, oh, each other and, oh, we're gonna fall in love. And then

there's gonna be this tragic middle thing that happens. And then the day new bond, everybody gets together and she loves him and he loves her, yada, yada, yada. Okay. We've seen this structure before. Right? I'm not dismissing it. There's relevance for romance. As a matter of fact, we're gonna talk a lot about romance today, in philosophical, moral, and even leadership terms because there is a role for romance, I believe, for leaders. And, no, it does not mean having

romance with the people that you work with. I would strongly reject, putting the line, shall I compare thee to a summer's day in any communication that you're having with your team members or employees? And don't tell them that they are more lovely and more temperate. Don't don't don't do that part either. However, reading this and understanding what we talk about when we talk about love has to begin with an understanding of sort of where Shakespeare was coming from, in medieval

times. Right. Or, well, not even medieval post medieval times in that weird moment that happened between the end of the medieval era in Europe, historically speaking, and the beginning of the Renaissance. There's the low Renaissance and there's the high Renaissance. And high Renaissance is what everybody thinks of, like, Michelangelo and David and Raphael of the great paintings. That was the high Renaissance, which was also a time, by the way, of

Martin Luther and Christopher Columbus. Everybody forgets that. That's a lot of dynamics were happening in Europe all at the same time and globally. Right? But Shakespeare was writing in that weird middle moment where the transition was being made. And in medieval times from the 13th 14th century up to Shakespeare's day, love was considered to be a secondary or even tertiary or minor consideration when it came to marriage. As a matter of fact, romantic love is a driver for marriage,

and you can Google this and research all this yourself. And lifetime partnering really didn't start until in full force until around 18th century. As a matter of fact, it became industrialized during the 20th century and led into all the kinds of current issues and challenges that we have right now, which we'll talk about some

of those today. So Shakespeare was sitting in a weird cultural shift that was happening where the mediaevils who were concerned, quite frankly, about business arrangements and property where the status of women and by the way, feminism was not a thing, okay, in the 13th 14th century, where the status of women as property and women not being able to hold property was indirect contradiction and was in direct challenge to Christian ideals of egalitarianism. There were also rule in

Europe throughout the medieval period. And, of course, we're influencing Shakespeare. And so this idea that you would marry for love, this idea that a woman was more than just a piece of property. She was a romantic object with her own, yes, a romantic object. I did use that term with her own ideals and her own emotions and her own needs to be fulfilled.

Right? And here's another practical consideration that was going in that was also being considered in Shakespeare's time that somehow romantic love would act as a, I'm gonna use a different a challenging word here, an ameliorative barrier, right, to the very real, very real challenges of infant mortality,

disease, poverty, and death. I mean, when Shakespeare was writing in the 7th the early 17th century, you know, a quarter of Europe's population, a little more than a quarter of your population, had been carried off by the black death in the previous 150 years. And so that wasn't something that was sort of a back of the

mind consideration. It was still very real. He was surrounded by people who would actually have relatives that had you know, died of the bubonic plague, and they wanted to I think one of the even mentions, like, common cure or, like, something for the plague. So Correct. Right. And then you put all this in the milieu of Western Europe where they

are in the hangover from Roman and Greek paganism. Right? So the Roman and Greek ideals of love, and of platonic love versus romantic love versus agape love, which is the love that Jesus talked about in the New Testament. These ideals, while they were supposed to be spread throughout the gothic not gothic, throughout the medieval world, by monks and priests and and and Catholic, yes, Catholic, folks, it had sort of gotten into being more of a business, which is

how all systems eventually run too. It had sort of gotten into being more of a business of religion in Western Europe and in England at the time, which was in contrast or intention with the actual religious practice of religion. So people were getting married for a whole bunch of different reasons just like now. People had a whole bunch of cultural or numerous cultural challenges around marriage and mating just like

now. But romantic love was not the primary driver, And then Shakespeare dumps sonnets like this into a culture indicating that a sea change is beginning to occur. A key change, maybe? Yeah. Maybe. Maybe. Sorry. Well well, let's let's start there. So why is love a powerful motivator for people to engage in romance? And I, you know, I'm fascinated by the idea that that marriage used to be more of a business arrangement and you went and got

your love someplace else. Like, your marriage was not the one that was supposed to be. Okay? Yeah. That was fine. Like, nobody nobody cracked it. The only people who couldn't afford to do that, by the way, were the medieval peasants who had no money and no access. Right? But if you which, by the way, we had all lived during medieval times, I wanna just even the people who are listening here, let's just be real. Without industrialization,

all of us would have been medieval peasants. We would have been living on lands of feudal lords regardless of race or gender, whatever. We would have been living on lands of feudal lords and working those lands and dying in wars. The industrial revolution, the American revolution, all those things matter, free speech, the constitution, the declaration of it, all those kind of the Magna Carta, which was getting ready to come up, all that kind of stuff

matters to get us to where we are at now. It didn't just sort of pop out of the woodwork. And it's not guaranteed, by the way, to last. Okay? So we have to like actually hold on to that stuff. Because you could easily the default the default for humanity is service for somebody else because the default is slavery, and you just live and work and die. And if you fall in love, well, that's nice, I guess, maybe, but no one cares. That's the default. So having romantic love is great. I'm

fascinated by the idea of it. Again, you get your partnerships, you get your romantic love over there someplace else, and I'll gonna bring up an article that I just saw the headline for in the Atlantic, like literally before I came on this podcast that I wanna bring up to this. But it's interesting that as we are arcing through the early part of the 21st century, we're now talking about the difficulties of romantic attachment, infant or infant or not infant. Sorry.

Fertility is down everywhere across the west. Replacement weights are down all the way across the rest, all across the west. And because of our technology now, almost no one can hook up. Although everybody can hook everybody can hook up. Everybody can hook up to do everything to do everything, but almost no one can engage in romantic love. But everybody still wants that. We're in this weird conundrum just like in Shakespeare's time. And so that's what I connected with on this

Thoughts that you may have. Thoughts, ideas, you're you're brimming over. I'm not Yeah. Yeah. It's a lot it's a lot. It's a lot. It's fun. As usual. You know, Hason sends me this, the the the kind of the guideline for the podcast. And it's like, why is love such a powerful motivator? It's like, we don't have time. We don't there is not enough time to talk about this. We've only got an hour. Yeah. Right? I think people have written their dissertations on this. So, like, they're just written and

Yeah. It's fine. Anyway, so I I but I wanna point out something. This might feel like nitpicking, but, like, just almost breaking down this question. Love is different from romance. Okay. Right? So that well, I mean, that's that's how the question's written. Why is love such a powerful motivator for people to engage in romance? Mhmm. So people, I think, get confused. Mhmm. And they expect love to be

and feel like romance. Mhmm. And that causes a lot of pain and strife in relationships when you go into a romantic relationship, and then you're in it for long enough that the romance it doesn't like, you have to actively keep it up. I think that's what shorter lived relationships don't they don't understand. You like, that has to continue to be an intention. You have to set it, your husband, whatever. Like, you you you have to work at that because otherwise, you fall into a rhythm and

then the relationship goes stale. That's that's that's just kinda how life goes. So you could you could apply that to kinda everything. But love, one of my favorite shows used to be Doctor Who. I love the old seasons. Please don't find me and send me hate mail. I can't stand the new seasons. The the writing is just atrocious. But back when they first revived it, you know, you've got Christopher Eccleston. You've got David Tennant. Matt Smith was not my

favorite, but whatever. It's fine. Peter Capaldi gets in there for a couple of seasons, and I still didn't love those seasons. Capaldi was an amazing doctor. But, anyway, all that to say, there's this punch line at the end of one of his seasons, and it's absolutely amazing. And he says, love is not a feeling. Love is a promise. And that just, like, boom. It's like, oh my gosh. That's that's the the like, talk about a compact way of expressing something that I feel like I've always known.

Mhmm. So love, like, but back to, like, the actual question. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. It's okay. Love is a many splendor thing. We're gonna talk about that too. Because and I think the because like, why is love such a powerful motivator? Because we know I think all instinctively, we all know how powerful love is. Mhmm. Like, true, deep, crazy love. Like, it's it's I mean, I'm Catholic, so I believe, like, love doesn't end. Like, love like, Guru really is. You know, God is

love. Mhmm. Right. It is everywhere. It permeates all things. It is, like, it is all powerful. Mhmm. So is there a better motivator? Like, what's that? I don't I don't know. It's it it is it's divine. So we but then engaging in romance, I think we almost think that romance is love. Right. Romance is not love. We have 2 different words for it for a reason. Well, and I think what the other thing that and maybe you can address this as well. The English language has only one

word for love. Yes. That too. And so And love is like multifaceted. It's like, it's way more than just like physical attraction. Right. Like, I I I mean, I have I have talked about my kids on the podcast. Like, okay. I'm not gonna talk about them. Like, I have friends. I do, actually. I have people that hang around me and like to hang around me, and I like to hang around them. I know it's shocking. But, like like yeah. Like, I I you know? But I will use the

term love. I love hanging out with this guy. Right? Or Yeah. I love doing this particular thing with this particular person. Right? But then we'll also use that same term to to make it about business and leadership for just a minute. I love doing I love standing up on stage, right? Or I love, talking with my employees, right? Or I love starting a new project, or I love feeling as though I'm being recognized for my,

my unique gifts and talents and skills and competencies. We're using that word love, but the context changes the container that that word sits in, but it's still just one word. And it's this one word covering a multitude of sins in the English language. Now in other languages, in other language groups, in other language forms, love, that word is split up as I believe it probably should be in in English because, you know, you talk about the difference between romance and

love. Romance is much more to me much more of an intentional act. And then it gets that gets me into trouble a little bit sometimes. But it's an intent well, it it does because you have to put some people people want romance to be spontaneous. And and and and, that's not the reality of life. The reality of life is that I'm busy, you're busy, everybody's busy. And to your point, if you don't work on romance,

by the way, the work implies intention Uh-huh. You're not gonna get the thing you wanna get on the other side of romance, which is deep, meaningful physical, spiritual, material, emotional connection. You're not gonna get that. You're gonna get a big fat 0 because you have to be intentional. You have to put in work. Romance does have an element of work to it. It has an element of intentionality. Now it also has elements of and I would be remiss if I did

not admit this. It does have moments of spontaneity, for sure. But just like Denis Leary said in his great comedy album in the 19 nineties, no cure for cancer, you eat the chocolate and you feel good for, like, 5 seconds, and where you, have the orgasm and you feel good for 5 seconds. Right? Like, these things happen for 5 seconds, and then you're back to your crappy life. Like, that that that that's it. Like, you're back to the thing that

you're always doing. And the spontaneity and romance happens for and then you're back to talking about like, when are we gonna get how are we gonna deal with the grocery list this week? Because those things also matter, right? So I think the struggle in the west has been how to how to and it's been a 500 year long struggle, and I don't think we're out of it yet. I think we're

deep and technology just made this worse. But the 500 year long struggle in the west is how to have both those things at the same time between 2 people. And none of us knows the answer. Nobody knows the answer. We're all just, like, blind people groping around, trying to figure it out in the dark. We don't know. We have no idea. Like, I'll stand in line. I'll

use a Louis CK example. Right? I'm standing in line in the grocery store. This has actually happened to me, and I'm just watching people's marriages fall apart. Just all over the place. And it's not because it's not for lack of romance. It's not even for lack of love. I think the 2 people probably do love each other. I have to presume the best modus for everybody. But, like, he's on his phone and the kid's screaming, and she's staring, you know, 10,000 yards daily. She's got PTSD, like a Vietnam

vet. And, like, just what's happening there? That's a relationship that's like the sound that it's making is it's disintegrating. And if you go and ask either one of those two people, they will inter they will intertwine the words love and romance together if you ask them honestly. And so this is the thing I think we're struggling with, and this is what this is what the the ideal is what Shakespeare delivers to us. He delivers us the ideal from the top of the mountain. Interesting. I

thought it had some legs. It was a thesis. Yeah. Yeah. It's, my my thoughts about that was that, you know, reading through, especially all the ones that were about the beautiful young man Mhmm. Is it felt like they were poems about a love about someone he couldn't have. Right. But to your point, that might be that might be what that might be the point you're making. It's like, yeah. Yeah. The Shakespeare is delivering the ideal. None of us can have it. It doesn't really exist.

We just can't. Like, we can't get there. Well, on the ideal, we'll judge you because that's what an ideal does. Like, it it it judges you, and you're always found wanting. You are always wanting in comparison to the ideal. You're never meeting the ideal. You're never meeting your potential. Not happening. Like, for instance, here's an ideal. I live in a community where the average age of the individuals in the community is 55 to 75. A lot of retirees, a lot of folks who are on the downhill

side of life. Matter of fact, I just went to a barbecue this weekend that had like 6 couples there. And my wife and I, we're in our mid forties. We're the youngest couple there with our 2 children who are 7 14. And they were all fascinated by the 7 year old, and he put on a good show, and he did his job. He did exactly what he was supposed to do. And my 14 year old, she put on a show. She did her good job. She's starting to understand, like, the social stuff, like, how

that works. She's 14 till, like, it's it's sort of starting to begin to happen. Right? Right on time, by the way, developmentally. But we were the youngest people there. And it's just fascinating to watch these, you know, 4 other couples or 6 other couples who have been one woman said, I've been married to this man for 45 years. I've already heard this story. And I was just like, okay. Alright. And you still have romance after 45 years. 45 years with the same person. This is what we struggle

with in the west. Was that a question? Can you have romance? It is a question. It is absolutely a question. This is the question that all the Gen Zers who are between the ages of 2535 now are asking, and they don't believe the answer is yes. This is the question that all the millennials who the oldest of them are now 44

are struggling with. This is the question that all the boomers, many of whom worked on their or or on their second marriage, just hanging on for dear life, and the Gen Xers who are on their second marriage hanging on for dear life can't answer. This is the challenge question of the west in particular or the west in general and America in particular right now. How do you stay with 1 person for 45 years and still have romance?

Because what everybody seems to want in survey after survey after survey from Cosmo all the way to, you know, the Gallup organization, what everybody seems to want is that field that ideal. Everybody seems to want that ideal, but no one has a clue how to get it. I'm only 34. So so I I have I like, thinking about this, I wonder my my my my proposed answer. I know nobody has the answer. But Yeah. Nobody knows. Is so I've been with my husband for

almost 20 years now. We haven't been married that long. But something that I wonder is if the answer is growth. Just keep growing as a person. I know people think they look at that. They were like, we've grown apart. That's that's the most, like, common, use of that word in terms of the the context of relationships. Like, I'm grown apart. I just don't love them anymore. But if you both keep growing and you both keep your intentionality of, like, building this relationship,

strengthening the relationship Mhmm. You just kind of keep finding new reasons to fall in love. You can also Yeah. Can also find reasons to fall out of love For sure. And go apart. You can do both. Both, I think, both pads Mhmm. Are available. But that that was what popped into my head. Keep growing Yeah. As a person. Because I am like you said earlier, like, if you haven't grown in 30 years or if you're the same

person you were 30 years ago Right. You haven't grown, like, you don't wanna be the same person that you were when you started the marriage. And the person that you are now, if your husband is the same person, then there might that might be where that discrepancy is, maybe. Mhmm. I don't know. I just, like, that was the thing that popped into my head. It was, like, oh, I wonder if growth is a factor. So just keep finding reasons to grow as a person and grow closer together. I wonder.

Yeah. And I yeah. And, again, I'm saying I I I don't know what the answer is. This is one of those areas where I think the questions are a bottomless pit. And yes, I want you to put that image in your head. It's a bottomless pit of questions because, and I'll use an example here. I once had a business conversation with somebody, interestingly enough, on a networking platform, which I won't say the name of. And it was during the business day and we had her having this conversation. And I

don't remember how we got into this. It was a 45 minute long sort of interaction. And she was talking about how her and her partner, which by the way, anybody who uses that term in the modern context, I'm like, oh, my my my radar starts to go the back little thing in the back of my head goes up, because I don't know where I don't know where they're going. Right? With this. I don't know if that means they're cohabitating. I don't know if that means they're cohabitating in

the same sex, you know, relationship. I have no clue. So now my radar goes, okay. What are you talking about here? And she says her and her partner, decide not to get have decided not to get married. And, you know, they've been together for almost the same amount of time that you've been with your husband, right, 20 years. And she said it works for us. I wouldn't recommend it for other people. And I thought, that's an incredible insight.

That's incredible insight because what we say very often is I've been married for X number of years, or I've been with this person for ABC number of years. And then we go around using shoulds after that. You should, we should, he, she, or it should. Now, is there an ideal? Yes. There is an ideal. I was gonna say because you could go around interviewing. I'm sure it's been done. Like, there's gotta be through lines of the people, like, who have been married for forever and has still

have romance. Like, they have to exist. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Like Oh, absolutely. Information has to be out there. This is the information age. It exists. Oh. Yeah. And you can actually weirdly and interestingly enough, you can go to the, national it's the National Research Council. They have a ton of graphs. And I did some of that looking into for this particular podcast. They have a ton of graphs on divorce rates, marriage rates, cohabitation rates, same sex

marriage rates, black, white, Hispanic, Asian. Like, they bring it all down, and they've got graphs and charts. It's it's it's great. You can go look at the National Research Council and find out all of this information, more data than you could possibly, know. And Yeah. But I'm talking about, like, qualitative data. Right. And this is my point. And yet when you dig into the bottomless pit of

data, you have to find individuals. And the point that she was making, and this is why I thought it was a good insight, is when someone decides to break from the ideal, in general, what we do in our culture, and this is a lesson for leaders, in general, what we do in our culture is we say, well, my break from the ideal should be the thing that everybody else does. And so let us go let us go mold state policy so that it will be the ideal.

Because it made me it worked for me, and I see all this other dysfunction, so it must be something that I must have the solution. I must have the silver bullet that everybody else needs in order to solve this problem. When in reality, what she was saying was, and she didn't really know this, what she was saying was the ideal didn't work for me. And so I found a compromise, but I don't want this to go to scale for everybody else. That's incredibly insightful. That's maturity. That's looking at

forget romance and love. That's looking at the specifics of their situation and saying, we figure out our negotiation around this. Do what you want. And while I may not agree with that because I want people to pursue an ideal. Right. I do. I want people to pursue an ideal. I'm a partisan for an ideal. If you can't get there from here, to be intellectually and and more morally honest with yourself about that and with the other person that you're engaged with, to me, is hugely important. And

and that's another failure of our time. We don't have people who are intellectually and morally honest with themselves or with the other party that they're involved with. Right. So, okay. We're gonna talk about marriage here in just a second. Is it possible to take a very small break? Oh, absolutely. Yeah. We can pause right here. Absolutely. We'll pause here. We'll go cut right here. Right back. Yeah. Yeah. We'll pause right here, and you'll come right back.

Alright. Yeah. We're back from break. That's good. Alright. Well, we'll actually put a we'll actually put an ad right there. So we'll do it. Perfect. Actually, we put an ad right there. So there we go. Yeah. Back to the sonnets. Back to the Folger Shakespeare Library edition of the sonnets by William Shakespeare. We're gonna turn the corner here. We're gonna talk a little bit more about marriage, but then we're going to

get into sort of some solutions to problems. And how do you how can you be a romantic right in our culture today? Because I I think there's there's romance, there's love, and then there's being a romantic, which is a totally different kind of thing. Alright. We're gonna pick up here with Sonnet 116, and I quote, let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments. Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds or bends with a remover to remove. Oh, no. It is an ever fixed

mark that looks on tempests and is never shaken. It is the star to every wandering bark whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken. Love's not time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks within his bending sickles compass come. Love alters not with his brief hours weeks, but bears it out even to the edge of doom. If this be error and upon me proved, I never writ nor no man ever loved. Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments. Interesting.

Love is not love, which alters when it alteration finds or bins with the remover to remove. Interesting. And the point here, I think, that Shakespeare is trying to make is this. And let's talk a little bit about marriage. So the practical container well, practical. One of the many containers that we decide we're gonna cram love and romance into in our in our and I'm only gonna talk about our American culture.

If you are listening to this in another country, we have fans globally. So if you were listening to this in another country, just know I'm speaking out of an American context, and you can see all of our dirty laundry live on TikTok and YouTube. So you know what's going on because that's where we put it. Oh, we do. We we do a really good job of exporting our dirty laundry to literally everywhere. There's no one who is not who did not know what is going on here.

All in the name of authenticity. Oh my gosh. And transparency. Yes. There. Yep. Yes, ma'am. So in case you didn't know, in other countries, 44% of millennials, 53% of Gen Xers, and 61% of boomers are married as of 2020. Now, there's an interesting thing that happened during 2020 called COVID. And during that time, divorce rates actually spiked because of lockdowns. I fundamentally believe because of lockdowns and people couldn't leave to go to work. And I do think that absence makes

the heart grow fonder in weird kinds of ways. And then when people were locked down and could not be absent, well, marriages fell apart. And by the way, the most famous example of this is Bill and Melinda Gates, who were in a 6,000 square foot home in Seattle and couldn't stay married. There just wasn't enough space between Bill and Melinda. I'll leave you to wrap your brain around that one as Kristen's mouth just drops open.

Oh, it wasn't the Epstein Island thing. It wasn't that. It wasn't the the it wasn't she didn't have a problem with any of that. It was a lockdown that killed that marriage. Now the long standing feet. 6,000 square feet. I'm trying to think of how many how big the apartment that I was stuck in with 3 other men, one of which was my husband. Sure. One of which was living in the living room. So I didn't have any

space. And I like, if my friendships and marriage made it through that, and she what are you gonna see? Your your hashtag winning. That's all you gotta put in your hashtag winning. We did it. We did it. Yeah. There's a long standing idea about marriage rates, the 50% of them end in divorce, and

that's not actually proven out by the numbers. And people, by the way, from Bill Maher, famous people from Bill Maher, all the way to academicians and professors who you've never heard of make this claim, and have, by the way, been making this claim culturally since the 1970s. Now, the reality is that among people who are working class, poor, and increasingly middle class, yes, divorce rates up until the point of the 2020s, were up, particularly through the 1990s. But guess what?

If you make more than, I believe, combined, it's like $75,000 a year. If you make more than that, you're not getting divorced, which tells me something, by the way, about marriage. Marriage is still about property, not primarily or maybe even almost exclusively, about love. Now You just People do split up. People do I mean, I've known people who have gotten divorced in my life, for what I think might be the thinnest of reasons. And

there has been a rise. I would be remiss if I didn't say this on this podcast because everybody can see it around them in cohabitating and dating, particularly long term cohabitating, and long term dating even without cohabitating. And I think personally, and this is just my opinion, not the opinion of the place where I got the statistics from, which by the

way, was the National Research Council. You can go look them up yourself. I think the cohabitating and dating are far stronger drivers for reduced marriage rates in America than anything else. And, again, I have no numbers on this. I merely have observations of note. And I'm sure that I could find some numbers that would bear these observations out. There's another factor that has occurred, which has opened up options, and that's the factor of technology.

And this has opened up options for both men and women in the world. And you combine the availability of individuals who want to titillate both men and women, as well as I believe fundamentally, and this is an unpopular opinion, but it is opinion that I hold. Nonetheless, I do believe that the opening up of workplaces to women and the integration of spaces that were formerly men only has also driven some of this. Now, my more feminist listeners, both men and women will object

and that's fine. We can have that discussion. But I do believe that it is a factor that putting all the motion aside, we do have to admit has done something. It's not a value neutral fact. It's not a value neutral advancement. Particularly if we're to claim the technology that has done all these things, we have to look at all the human factors

as well. So I do think those areas have contributed to how we think about marriage and divorce in the 21st century and the milieu that we are in, which we just came off of discussing before the break, where love we would like to have as a primary driver. But then there's all this other stuff. There's all these other things. And I'm gonna use myself as an example. Actually, no, I won't use myself as an example. I'll use a couple I know. So they were married. They got

divorced. And the biggest impediment to the divorce in the state that I live in was how the property was going to be divided, specifically the home and who was going to get most of the profit from the home sale. That was the biggest impediment. And by the way, that's not unusual. Did someone get divorced, though? No. How does this relate to leaders? Because I know all of you who are listening to this have been listening for an hour, and you're like, okay. The

sonnets, love poems, marriage, romance. Got it, Pason. Okay. Can we get to something on the other side of the break here? Yes. Let's get to something on the other side of the break here. When leaders are leading in workplaces, if the marriage rates are to be believed, at least 44% of their millennial staff, the millennial age staff will be married, but at least 60% of them will not be will be in some sort of cohabitating dating relationship. 53% of gen xers will be married, but somewhere around

40 some odd, 47% of them will not be. And then 61% of boomers will be married, and they will probably working on their 2nd or third marriages, but they are graduating or graduating, retiring out of the system and out of the team. If I am leading a team of Gen Xers and millennials, which more likely I will be Ryan and Gen Zers who will not be married, by the way, they will be primarily cohabitating and

dating. And they come to me with the state of their personal relationships, which they will, because we are now transparent about everything. What do I do about that as a business leader? And by the way, I just saw a story the other day just to layer on one more thing. I saw a story the other day on LinkedIn about how organizations are now hiring coaches and mentors to get Gen z's to be more loyal people in the Gen z generation to be more loyal to

workplaces. And by the way, if I'm coaching or mentoring, what am I going to be talking about? It ain't gonna be all about work. Thoughts. Because this is a real problem for real problem for modern leaders. Boomers never talked about any of this stuff ever. They thought it was all private over there. Don't talk to me about any of it ever. But what we've seen because of technology, because of cultural changes, we are now seeing the c shift, and leaders

have to address people's personal relationships. And this makes leaders, particular leaders of a certain generation, extremely uncomfortable. And I get this question quite a bit. Matter of fact, I actually got it last week when I was working with a client, a variation of this question. So I'm gonna ask you, Kristen. Go ahead. Well, as someone who's been working as a freelancer entrepreneur for 12 years now, which, you know, is it isn't a lot, depending

on how you look at it. But one of the things that you have to figure out as a freelancer is to and I have a coach is how to process and be mentally healthy, mentally and emotionally healthy with all the personal stuff going on and still show up for your business. Because if you don't, no one else will because you are the business. Right? So part of me is like, if I can do it, so can the bosses. Be a boss, care about someone else, have a heart.

Because that's the thing. Right? I think there's a lot of language out there in in What's the name of the lock down? The wholesale culture. Right? That's like, lock down the the feelings. Shut up. Show up. Shut up and show up. That didn't work for me. Right. That that that was a recipe for disaster. It led to a lot of burnout, kind of re recurrences of depression. It was just like, oh, I'm regressing. This is wonderful. Yeah. But but so

there is I think there's a both and here. Right? So if, you know, you're a a leader and you're running a business Mhmm. Then have the resources for them to to care for your people. Mhmm. Like, care about your people. Their their their their lives. But but but but so that they can get back to work. Because that that that I think that has to be the boundary or not the boundary, the balance. Because it's it's like, hey. The we're not just friends. We're not friends, actually. I'm your boss.

Mhmm. And while I do care about you, get back to work. I and the trend that I'm seeing is almost like you can't fire people anymore because anything like, if they're not showing up, oh, it's because my boyfriend broke up with me. And I was like, well, but you're still not doing your job. It's like, oh, but if you fire me, it's because I'm you know? I don't know. It's a personal attack on me. I'm like, no. Not that either. You just are not you're not doing your job. So I I I don't I

don't know if I have, like, practicals. Do a b c. I I don't but that that's the The the overall strategy. The word vomit. Yeah. That's the word vomit. There you go. There's the word vomit. Find something in there. Right. Well, I think of so I think of here's here's how I here's here's the pushback on this. I think of the and it is floating around Instagram reels, and I see it occasionally, not as often as I used to, but I see it occasionally in the last year when I dip into

Instagram and then dip out again. My Instagram is all about Dungeons the Dragon, so I don't see anything else. You don't see anything else? Okay. Great. It's great. The d and d memes are the best. So, the the the real clip that I see is the one from Mad Men where Don Draper is yelling at the female individual or whatever. And she's like, you don't say thank you for any of my ideas. And he's like, the money is the thank you. Like, you're young.

You should just take the money. Your ideas will be honored at a certain point, but just take the money and get out. Now, that's very much a boomer attitude, by the way. That's very much a baby boomer attitude. The money is the thank you. The money is the thing I pay you in lieu of having a relationship with you. And so the pushback on that is, and this is the pushback and it is legitimate. Here's legitimate pushback. Inflation

is at 2.9% in the country. Groceries that used to cost me, you know, $400 a month now cost me $800 a month. Yep. This money isn't the thank you ing. If I'm going to keep showing up for your BS job where you're only paying me $15 an hour and I'm scraping by and you want me to be grateful for that, there's a word that I could say, and you're not gonna fire me because you can't get anybody else. So what are you going to do? Well, you're going to care. And by the way, you will be

made to care. You will be made to bend. I'm not the organization. That's a different thing. I will make you manager, you supervisor bet. And I'm going to make you bet by just deluding you with my personal problems because I don't have I can't give it to my I was raised by parents who allowed me to delude them with personal problems and they solved many of them. And now you've stepped in para familias because you're paying me. Well, paying me means you're mom and dad now.

That's the pushback. Fascinated. That's the psychological, I think, the sociological pushback to your to your assertion. Now, do I think that everybody within a particular generational cohort believes that? No. There's individuals. Give me a break. You know, there's something like, what, like 85,000,000 millennials, and there's something like 65 or 70,000,000 Gen Z ers. Like, it's it's it's insane. There's too many individuals inside of

that that those 2 group cohorts for it to be everybody. Right? However, there is a media driven, potentially, idea that the industrial revolution boss, boomer, is the greatest thing to be overcome, and the only way that you can overcome that is through a deluge of feelings. By the way, this is where you Why are we overcoming the boss? Well, because the boss What does that mean? Because the boss is the avatar for the man. You know how in the sixties

seventies, when they were young, they talk about the man? Yep. We've bumped out the man for corporations. We've bumped out the man for big pharmaceutical companies. We've bumped out the man for climate change. We've bumped out the man for all these other things that stand in for the man. But it's the same idea. There's this system that has to be overcome. Yeah. And so we have to use tools to overcome it so that the glorious revolution can come that we as

the youth believe that we are responsible for bringing forward. Except the problem is there is no glorious revolution, and you're all gonna get old, which, by the way, the older millennials now understand this. Once we're closer to we're in their mid forties, they now get it. They now get that there's no glorious revolution, and I might want to buy a house. I want to get out of that I want to get out of that 2 bedroom apartment I'm sharing with 4 people. People. Right. When I was 35. Or 25 even.

Sorry. When I was 25. But, you know, like, I gotta leave now. Well, but kind of back to your point. Like, you you were mentioning, you know, that the not boomers. I hate that phrase. I do too, but I'm just using it because it's whatever you got. Baby boomers. Yeah. The baby boomers are retiring. Something that I don't read, like, the news. I don't do any of this. Like, I just kind of off in my my own little world. And I know people are like, oh, you should be informed.

Like, that's fine. No. You shouldn't. My my husband stays informed. You're doing you're doing fine. You're not missing anything. Right? And so well, but somebody some one of the things that I keep hearing, and I don't know if this is accurate, is that boomers aren't retiring. And it's harder to find promotions. So it's it's to your point where, like, $15 an hour. Like, how with prices skyrocket is how are we supposed to buy a house? Right.

How are we supposed to do this? Which is which is also where the Oh, and that's not even talking about student debt. Yeah. Yeah. We whole another conversation. It's a whole another conversation. The the challenge that we are seeing for leaders, and it is one that I see articulated when they come to me, is leaders feel as though and I'm talking about managers and

supervisors at the mid level in organizations. They feel as though they are already in a deluge between demands and pressures placed upon them by the upper echelon folks of the organization that they can't meet. And then all of the knock on effects of COVID and all the bad behavior we opened doors for during the last 2 to 3, I would even argue 4 years, because there are certain bad behaviors that are just continuing that are among folks who are

below them in the structure. And so they are squeezed in the middle and asked to do an impossible job. And to compound it, the folks who are rising up from the bottom are not exactly folks that are mentally strong Right. In order to deal with the nonsense

that's going to occur at that level. And by the way, probably the most mentally strong generation is the Gen Xers, probably, individuals primarily between the ages of 46 and now 64, right, or 46 and 58, somewhere around there, who grew up in literal who have grown and worked literal in the last 20 years of chaos. It's just been chaos all the time. And so it's like pressure, fizzy it's fizzy, fizzy water all over their brain all the time. And it's just how you live. Right? This is

just it. Whereas, generations subsequent to them, the impression is that that pressure is a new thing. This economic pressure is a new thing. And it's not because people don't understand history, the cycle thing. People don't understand the cycles of history, much less the cycles of romance. People don't understand the cycle of history. And so because they don't understand the cycle of history, they have no anchor point for what this is. Like, everything that we're looking at Life is hard.

It's so much harder now. It's unfair. It's like, no, life is just hard. This is too hard. Right. Like, I I I tell young people that I talk to who are in the 19 to 34 year old age range, it was just as equally hard to people in the 19 seventies when inflation was on par with what it is now. But they'll be like, oh, but this thing and this thing, this thing. I'm like, but you're judging it through now's lens. Right? If you had to go back to like 1974, it would be just as hard to buy a house then.

This is hard. And by the way, they were getting paid less. They were gonna pay, like, $2 an hour, 2.50 an hour, where and and a loaf of bread, which used to be 15¢ and was made in, like, Wisconsin somewhere at some white bread factory, is now immediately skyrocketed to being a dollar a dollar for a loaf of bread, and you're making 2.50 an hour. And you're gonna tell me that it was better back then? The whole reason that house values went up is because when you could grab a house, you stayed in

it as long as you possibly could. Yeah. You learn those skills that now we all have to learn off of YouTube. As the older leaders who understand this and have historical knowledge are going, I don't know what's wrong. What are we doing here? Like, you're coming to me and you're telling me that you're having a you need a mental health day? Why? For what? Like, life? Which is which is to your point, you know, if you don't show up because your boyfriend broke up with you okay.

I'm gonna go a step deeper here. What does the leader do with the person who is solid? This is a challenge question. The person who is solid, they show up every day. They've been doing the work. They appear to be solid family people. And then, like, they show up one day and they're like, my I gotta move out of my house. I'm getting a divorce. Oh, and by the way, I'm gonna need to work more hours. I'm gonna need to pick up a second shift because,

yeah, this is gonna suck. Lawyers and everything. This is gonna be terrible. What does a leader do with that? I'm probably the wrong person to ask. I don't know. Right. Right. Well, but but you're the person on the We're like, well, can can you give him more hours? Is that even a possibility? Do you have the coverage? Like, sometimes the answer is no just by the numbers. Like, sorry, dude. Can I help you get a second job?

Well, and on the female side, no, that's the dude side. On the female side, it's my husband's moving out. I've got to go get childcare now, and I'm going to need to be I'm not going to need to take on another shift. I actually need to do less work so I can go pick up my kids now. Yeah. Because I actually have less coverage. That's the practical consideration on the female side

Mhmm. Of the equation. And I don't know what what and and increasingly, we've seen calls from government, not just in this country, in the United States, but all across the world for paid maternity, paid paternity, these kinds of leave policies. But the leave policies don't actually address what happens in the event of a divorce. They don't actually address that. No nation state currently is even remotely interested in addressing that challenge. Oh,

interesting. At least none none that I'm aware of. Most nation states are desperate to get men and women together to have babies. Please get together and have babies. We don't care whether they're in wedlock, out of wedlock. Just have babies. And if you won't have babies, then we'll import people who will. I mean, that's I mean, I hate to be that direct, but I mean, that's the policy of the World Economic Forum and

all those people who go to the Klaus Schwab meetings every quarter. Like, that's that's the policy. If you won't have babies, we'll import people who will because Oh. We need live bodies to work. Oh, wait. What happened? Okay. You're back now. Yeah. That was strange. Yeah. My mic cut out a little bit. Yeah. I bought my I bought my mic. Anyway, so we need live bodies. Like, we need people who will do the act of increasing our population. Not to be prurient or salacious. We just we need taxpayers.

Yeah. Right? Because how else are the social programs gonna get funded? Where else are we gonna get the money from? We can't print our way out of it. The United States tried that. Didn't work. So we can't print our way out of it, so we're gonna need more bodies. And by the way, in the United States, we now have an immigrant population. We're not gonna talk about how they got here. We have an immigrant population that is increasing and that immigrant population does what? They have babies.

Most nation states are focused on how to get people to have babies. They don't really care what happens at least not at a national policy level from what I'm aware of what happens when that relationship breaks up. They don't really care about that. And, fundamentally, I think that's a blind spot in leadership. By the way, I've been a freelancer. I haven't worked a regular job in, like, 15 years either, so it's fine. Right. But I've but I but I've

your world. So you But I've led other people. Right. I I've met other people, and I've put put teams together. And I have had team members come to me and say, I need to work a few hours because I gotta pick up my kid. Or, I'm thinking about a particular individual in person in particular where, like, he did break up with his girlfriend, and it was a lot of drama for him, and he brought that drama to work. Yeah. See, that's not that that's that's what can't I feel like can't be okay.

You gotta oh, that that was the you you said, you know, I need to work less hours Mhmm. Because I have to go pick up the kids. Something that I really admire about a gal that I coached with for a long time, she coached me. Mhmm. And her company, she doesn't, like it's it's it's the idea that you your the value that you produce is not tied to the hours that you work. Mhmm. So as long as you're doing the thing that I need you to do, I do not care

how long it takes you to do it. Right. So and that's how she structures her company. She doesn't pay people, like like, I think, like, obviously, I think she pays everything. Everything's above board. She's not doing Right. Right. Anything shady or anything, but she she she talks about paying people for the value of the job that they're doing Yep. Versus and she's like, I don't care what hours you clock in. So as long as you're doing the stuff that I need you to do.

Mhmm. And so that's kind of how I think about that that quandary. We're like, well, I okay. As long as you get your job done. Yeah. I know that's not, like, a perfect solution, especially for, like, a lot of our structures right now. People are paid hourly. But I I would love to see that's an ideal. And I know we'd we'd we'd we we move into that later. Yeah. The idealistic and romantic and, like, ideally, romantically, like, I would love to see us move away from the hourly,

like, paid hourly. Ideal structure. What's the format? Well, what I wonder if part of what I wonder is happening is or I wonder the no. Let me frame it this way. I think that we are in the mid, the midst, the cusp of, and I I'm not gonna use the term 4th industrial revolution because it's used by the World Economic Forum, and it implies a whole bunch of different things that I don't think will happen. And some that I do if if people in power and organizations in power get their way.

But I think underneath there is a core conception that is true, and the core conception is this. The industrial revolution that brought us everything that we are looking at, including, by the way, our modes of leadership and our modes of marriage and habitation and family raising, because it's all even schooling, it's all part of it. That no longer works. And it's not because we aren't getting the same outcomes that we were getting from it previously. It's because those outcomes are matching

and aren't useful in the reality that we live in. So I talk about sometimes I went to the schooling. Right? Why did the kid have to go to school from K through 12 in America and sit in rows and be educated from the sage on the stage at the front of the room? Does it make any sense? And so COVID broke open that. And I believe that fundamentally we should have a basket of educational options that people can take advantage of. And the state, quite frankly, should be agnostic about which

option a parent picks. Just like, by the way, the state should be agnostic about who the parent marries or doesn't marry or whatever. The state should have zero interest in any of this. But I understand at a taxation level why the state does. On an educational level, I understand that an ideologically an ideological level why the state has an interest in that. Right? But education is

just one area. Right? And so we've noted, but what we would do, we don't have enough, what do you call it, will, maybe it is, political will, small p political will, to break the structure and go through to the other side, which is part of what's happening,

I think, or part of what's building in our time, right? So while you're correct in outlook at current events, I believe I believe fundamentally that there are fractures in the system and in the structure that everybody can see, but no one has a clue what this is gonna look like on the other side of the structure breaking apart. However, there are some people who are proposing ideas, like a basket of

educational options or like like in health care. Like, why would we go to this one hospital in this one town when I can do this basket of health care options, right, that are available to me? Which puts more power, by the way, distributed power in the hands of individuals, less hands in the power of a centralized state, which is why the state pushes against all of this. K? Well, when we talk about marriage and child raising, I'm opposed to the state issuing marriage certificates for

anybody, by the way. I think marriage certificates should be issued by religious institutions. Religious institutions should be left alone by the state, be done. Now that doesn't work for everybody. It doesn't work for same sex folks, it doesn't work for folks who have more progressive ideologies, it doesn't work for folks that believe in glorious Marxist revolution, it doesn't work for them. And I get it. It doesn't work for you and where you want to your outcomes and things that you want. I

get it. I understand. It doesn't work for you. Cool. But the state should be neutral on this. By the way, the state should also be neutral. Or not, it should be neutral. The state should be as neutral on this as it is on divorce. Now, if you go look at divorce laws in various states, divorce laws tend to favor women and children over men because the state steps in in the role of protector and provider

that a man would traditionally be in. If the state got out of caring about that, I think more men and women would make I think men and women both would would shift in how they make their choices about who to cohabitate, have relations with, have romance with. And I think it would be much more transactional in a way where it's not transactional now. It's it's sort of a faux romantic kind of thing versus a transactional

thing. Because, look, if I'm getting married, I should be looking at whoever it is I'm going to be married to, yes, as a person who I can grow with, to your point earlier, who I can grow with and and all these kinds of things. By the way, grow within a practical kind of way across all spectrums of agreement, understanding that that person may grow into something that I might not like. And so I have to be okay with that over the long term. And by the way, I may grow into something that they

may not like. I have to be practical about this. But if the state is the backstop to me making a bad decision, which by the way it is in divorce, and it is in divorce laws, the state's the backstop for women, well, then I can just be romantic because there's no what's what's the downside? And, by the way, this is a very red pill argument. It is. It is a very red pill argument, and the red pill community will probably be clapping for me and be like, hey. You didn't

go far enough. Shut up, boys. Sit down. And then I got problems with you too. You're not making decisions based on romance. You're basing decisions based on sex, which no one wants to talk about that out loud, but that's true. You're making decisions based on how this woman looks, you know, in a tight dress, which is great, except here's the

problem. When you get what it is you wanna get from that woman and she has a baby, her body ain't gonna look like the same way it looked in that tight dress when you first got her. It's just not. And are you willing to live with that? You're not. Because you have this weird ideal in your head and the ideal judges you, and the ideal stop. So stop it. And so I think if you've got the state out of part of that process, what would happen is men and women would adjust naturally.

And by the way, it would happen organically. And in 5, 10 years, we have a totally completely different system and structure because it'll happen quite quickly. Men and women are gonna make those negotiations quite quickly at a very practical level. Women would start withholding sexual favors, all for all kinds of different reasons, they would make up the 10,000 reasons women have in their heads for withholding. They would make up all those reasons, and men would

come on. And men would make all the reasons for why we gotta storm the castle, and history would move on. Right? But the state would be agnostic. And by the way, I think if Russia did this, Russia's fertility rate would go up. If Vladimir Putin stops talking about this and just got the state out of the way. Does Russia ever get the state out of the way? Well, you know, this is a challenge. Right? This is a challenge for nation states. Right? China, perfect example. One

child policy. The state explicitly made a made a policy about fertility and, quite frankly, in areas even they didn't touch on, marriage, cohabitation, divorce. They made they made a by making a one child policy, they made a statement about all those things and look at how well that worked. They don't even report their population numbers anymore. They'll probably be at 800,000,000 people by the end of this century, maybe, we think. For what?

Because you're trying to prevent overpopulation? You're trying to prevent whatever is gonna happen naturally between men and women who couldn't negotiate it, by the way, on their own without the state interrupting. And that's my objection. I do not think the state has an interest in this. Just like I don't think the state has an interest in or should have an interest in education or health care. All these areas, the states involved in why why are you there Right. When people who just

negotiate those things independently. My word vomit over. There you go. Okay. Rant over. Just push the box out of the room. You may all send me don't bother, Kristen. She's the guest. You can send me all your dirty emails at I don't really care to hear your feedback.com. No. No. It's fine. No. No. Please tell me that I'm wrong. Really? I mean, mark it up in LinkedIn, wherever it is. You get this, my guest. Tell me if you've made it this far, tell me that I'm wrong. Tell me that I'm like, this is

not correct. Because I think at the root of this is that ideal of romantic love, like we've been talking about with the sonnets, but then it grows into all these other areas because people are trying to scale their experience, and I think it's a real challenge for leaders. Okay. Back to the sonnets. Less of me and more William Shakespeare. Sonnet 73. From sonnets by William Shakespeare from the Folger Shakespeare Library.

And I quote, that time of year thou mayest in me behold when yellow leaves or none or few do hang upon those bows which shake against the cold, bear ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang, in me, thou seest the twilight of such day as after sunset fadeth in the west, which by and by black night doth take away death's second self that seals up all

in rest. In me, thou seest the glowing of such fire that on the ashes of his youth, not lie as the deathbed whereon it must expire consumed with that which it was nourished by. This thou perceivest which makes thy love more strong, to love that well which thou must let you leave long.

That's a good one. It's a very good one. Being a romantic in a cynical, skeptical, as I just ranted, mechanistic age, surrounded by the results of and and by the way, they are the plentiful results of a scientific materialistic aesthetic is a real struggle. When we talk about being a romantic, we're typically referencing

the culture and ideals of the Romantic period. And the Romantic period in English literature was a direct response, a revolutionary response, such as it were to the Age of Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. The Romantic period began in 1798 and continued into some will say 18 37 or even 18 50. And that famously covers a time that encompasses the American Revolution, the British Industrial Revolution, and the French Revolution, as well as Napoleon.

And it was also a time of the painters like Eugene Delacroix, who painted in a particular kind of way, and the poet William Wordsworth, who wrote in a particular kind of way, and of course, the writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the German who wrote in a particular kind of way.

Now, in our time, almost no one is a romantic anymore due to the fact that romanticism requires a connection to the land as opposed to a connection to technology, a love for the individual rather than a love for the revolution of the masses. For the romantics, the critic Isaiah Berlin says this, and I quote, in the realm of ethics, politics, and aesthetics, it was the authenticity and

sincerity of the pursuit of inner goals that mattered. This applied equally to individuals and groups, states, nations, movements. This is most evident in the aesthetics of romanticism where the notion of eternal models, a platonic vision of ideal beauty, which the artist seeks to convey, however imperfectly on canvas or in sound, is replaced by a passionate belief in spiritual freedom

and individual creativity. The painter, the poet, the composer do not hold up a mirror to nature, however ideal, but invent. They do not imitate the doctrine of mimesis, but create not merely the means but the goals that they

pursue. These goals represent the self expression of the artist's own unique inner vision to set aside, which in response to the demands of some external voice like the church, the state, the public opinion, family, friends, or even those arbiters of taste, is an act of betrayal of what alone justifies their existence for those who are in any sense creative,

close quote. But, Berlin also notes in his essay from which I pulled that quote that in the 20th century, the Marxist revolutions, Hitler and fascism, and, of course, all of the communist revolutions that killed almost a 100,000,000 people in the very bloody 20th century knocked the hell out of the innocence of the romantics. And of course, the moral and political power of romanticism has declined over the last declined

precipitously over the last 100 years. I would assert that in our era in our era, it might be time to resurrect the power of the romantics yet again, where the artist seeks to convey, however imperfectly on canvas or in sound, a passionate belief in spiritual freedom and individual creativity. I think at the end of the 4th turning, where we are surrounded by the benefits of technology I mean, heck, look at this podcast. Right? I would not be talking to you without mechanistic

engineering technology. And I think that artificial intelligence is going to prove that we've kind of hit dead end on some of this. Not that there won't be technological wonders on the other side. There will be because people are creative, but I think we've currently hit a dead end.

Peter Thiel, the investor, invested in Facebook and owns Palantir, and who also was part of the PayPal mafia along with Elon Musk and Reid Hoffman infamously has said, and I'm going to rough quote this, we were promised houses on the Moon and vacations to Mars and instead we got Facebook and tweeting in 280 characters. A mechanistic mind gives you tweeting in 280 characters. A romantic mind gets you to Mars, no matter how

mechanistic that mind may be. So I would argue that Elon is probably a romantic. By the way, he's got he's got 12 kids and 4 marriages, I think, and 5 relationships under his spouse. So, I mean, he's doing his job. He's doing his part for I'm doing my part. Increasing the increasing population of the country. He's doing his part. But I think we

need to resurrect the ideals of romanticism. I think we need to set aside the the demands of the external voice, church, state, public opinion, family, friends, arbiters of taste, in exchange for a perception of not a perception of pursuit of quality first, a romantic pursuit of quality. Not idealistic, not in a John Lennon kind of imagine there's no heaven kind of way, which by the way is a terrible song. But a oh, it's terrible. Everybody knows it's terrible. Come on now.

But but I think we need to set it I think we need to pursue quality in opposition to a merely mechanical mind, a merely evolutionarily driven AI produced automaton vision of the future, which I think a lot of people want to push us towards. As we close here, because it's time for me to let Kristen go. She's been with me long enough today. How can romantics operate in our mechanistic time? And I ask you this as a writer specifically, but that's

kind of why I came up with this question here for you. Well, I have been thinking about the definitions. Like, how how are you defining romantic? Because you did you did just distinguish it between romantic and ideal. Or just you did did just make the distinction between romantic and ideal. So I'm trying to figure out what does it mean to be a romantic? Well, I think I think to be a romantic is to acknowledge that there are

eternal models. Right? And I think that that there are, I think it is also to acknowledge and to pursue quality. I think that that is a romantic pursuit and not quality in sort of a, again, a mechanistic conception of quality. But quality in terms of we are pursuing a platonic vision of, of, of, of an ideal, a platonic ideal of beauty or a

platonic idea of capital T truth. And we're going to do that, with spiritual freedom and with individual creativity in direct opposition to a mechanistic, framework. And we're going to do this ruthlessly, and we're going to do it with a smile on our face, or maybe we're gonna do it frowning, it doesn't matter, But we're going to do it ruthlessly. And, by the way, I think there are romantics in our time. I think we've got or people who have a romantic bent

in our time. So I mentioned Elon Musk already. I think, Jordan Peterson is probably a romantic. I think that, weirdly enough, the writer Jack Carr is a romantic. I think that as far as directors go, like if we're talking about film directors, you'd be hard pressed to find a romantic film director in our time. I think Christopher Nolan is probably about as close as we're going to get right now. You're with del Toro? Yeah. He just doesn't do enough work, but, yeah, I would throw Del Toro in

there. He just doesn't. He just doesn't do enough work, you know? I mean, you're muddling around Pinocchio on Netflix. Like, what are we doing? Did you watch that? I I so I've I've seen the trailer for it, and I kinda go, well, okay. I mean, I see what you're doing. It's amazing. It's amazing. Okay. It's amazing. Okay. Amazing. It's amazing. Okay. Alright. I loved it. I loved it. I will take it up on

your recommendation. Yeah. But I also see it in Craftsman. So there's this show I watch on, oh, on HBO Max, which comes through either TLC or the Discovery Channel, whichever property they own, called Restoration Road where this guy named Clint Harp, and it was on for about 5 seasons, where basically he goes around the country working with people who are trying to restore barns and restore, and restore, what do you call it, old buildings, right, and literally taking

them out of the northeast. Like, he'll take a barn out of upstate New York, where I used to live, where they don't care about it. It's just rotting in a field somewhere because it doesn't fit the mechanistic mentality of our current time. And then he takes that to, like, Idaho and turns into a cheese factory where people are being taught how to make cheese and do weaving and and do, you know, handcrafts and all these kind of amazing things. And he does this repeatedly. He's on 5 years of

content, you know, on this. And it's not just Barnes, it's also silos and things like that. He's getting into the history, and he's understands that. And you can tell when he shows up that he cares about the Platonic vision and the ideal of truth, and his carpentry skills that he brings to the game are secondary to pursuing that with quality. That's what I'm talking about as being a those are people who I believe are romantics. Those are examples that I would that I would call on in our time.

So how do you do that? Yeah. How do you operate? How do we get more of that and not less of that? How do we get more of that? That's really the question. How do we get more of that? How do we squeeze more of that juice out of the body politic? Because I think we need more of it. Yeah. Well, my brain just went all the way back to, like, child formation. School. You just have to completely change the format of school because right now, like, what gets pushed in school? Oh,

nonsense. Science. That's physics and But even there, it's not good STEM. It's the most basic level STEM stuff because because And kids are doing calculus before high school now. It's just like what They're doing they're doing calculus before high school so they can think like computers, but they're not being taught literature in high school. That's They're trying. Yes. It is. It is. It is. And so, yeah, start there. But but but that doesn't really answer the question.

That that's, like, long term. Right? You have to you have to you have to shift things, when when children are forming. But how like, romantics because I consider myself a romantic. Mhmm. And how do I my my first thought was that, well, I have to have my needs met first. Mhmm. Right. So it's kind of like, well, how do you do that without forcing yourself into the the utilitarian mechanistic system? Mhmm. That's that is one of those questions I think

the answers will be different for everybody. I think I I've said this before on the podcast. I feel like I gotta get lucky where, like, I had to have a couple. I've, you know, multi passionate. Like, I'm I'm I'm a classically trained musician, and I can travel pretty closely to a fairly affluent neighborhood and teach private music lessons there. But wait a minute. Wait. And that doesn't take a whole lot of time. So now I can work part time for a pretty full time

income. And then But let me push back on that a little bit, though. I don't think that's luck. I think that's a series of tiny decisions that you made based on your talent, skills, and competencies that I couldn't have made. If I tried to make those exact same decisions, I would not have wound up in the same clearing at the end of the path that you wound up at. Just like if you had made the same decisions that I had made, you would not have wound up here. There's no

way. We were different people. So people what we call luck or what people call fortune, I really think we need to use an older term, and it is a religious term, so it's a term of the romantics, like, particularly the American romantics,

providence. Mhmm. It's this idea that there is this entire superstructure called God that cares about who you are at an individual level, at a microscopic decision making level, and is pushing you and or or in some cases, you are you are allowing yourself to be taken down a particular path that's going to wind you up at a particular clearing, but no one else can go can go on that river other than you. The guy across the street can't. And by the way, it's brutal

because the guy across the street might be homeless. He missed his river, and we can have compassion for him and we can wanna feed him and take care of him, and Jesus said the poor you will have with you always, which is a brutal truth, by the way, that no modern nation state wants to hear. But that person rode down the particular river they were on and they wound up in a clearing at the end of the path. There's no guarantee that you would have

wound up there either. So we call it luck. I would push back on the luck piece. I I I No. That's fine. That's fair. I that's just usually it's, like, the easiest turn of phrase. We like Sure. Through all of this craziness. Sure. I never would have guessed that this is where and now I'm like so kinda to your point about being a romantic, I, back in November, I, purchased the music store that I teach out of. Mhmm. And the model that that store runs on is not was it mechanistic? Util like,

it's it's in terms of profit, it's terrible idea. And when we were trying to raise money to preserve that model, everybody kept calling in. They were like, you have to change your model. You have to change your model. And we were like, no. We're not gonna do this because this model, romantic, ideal, whatever, like, this model serves music education the best. So we're going to figure out a way to preserve it. So I think it's like

sorry. The phrase both and comes to comes to mind again. Mhmm. Because, like, we don't like, we we are adjusting our model and that we are taking ideas that people suggested to create revenue in a different area so that we can support and keep the model that supports our teachers, our music teachers, and therefore, our music students, and therefore, our entire community so well. So there's a chance a romantic vision. That's a romantic vision. 100%.

100%. Because the other like, the the the suggestion that we got was turn all of your teachers into w two and pay them less. And I was like, what? I wouldn't have like, I wouldn't be at this store Mhmm. If that's if that's why if that's how the store operated. So, like, we're not doing that. Right. But that is the best way to, like or not best way. Sorry. Some would say that that's the easiest, most efficient way

of getting to higher revenue, of making the business more sustainable. Well, in part of what the Romantics historically between 1798 and 18 37 did right around 1848, 18 50, what they were pushing back against was capitalism. They were pushing back on the growing accumulation of capital via industrialized mass. And the response that you're getting is the hangover from that ideal. The problem is on the other side of the industrial revolution that we all now live in,

we've gotten to the edges of that model. We financialized all the way out to the edges of that model. This is what this is why when MBAs run Boeing Airlines, engines fall out of planes in the sky and you can't get astronauts back from where you put them on a

space station. This is why. Because the MBAs are running things and they financialized out the system, all over the system, the organization, all the way out to the end to drain the last piece of capital from it for shareholders or for, or for executives or whoever or even for just regular people. And, by the way, people like to bag on executives. Usually, those executive compensations are usually stock options, usually not salary. And by the way, most of your salary utilization also

goes up. Yes. Not as much as the CEOs, but also goes up every time the stock price goes up. So I don't even wanna hear about it. But, please. It's everybody in the ship together. Okay? But they financialize all the way out to the nearest to the to the nth degree, And a romantic view says we can leave something on the table. Yeah. That's okay. But and as you were talking, what came to mind was, like, what is the point of accumulating all of that? Like, could people literally have more

money than they can spend? Right. And it's not us, but it it doesn't matter. Like, it I think part of clinging to the romantic view is realizing that before you scrape and fight to get there and you realize this wasn't worth it. Right. Like, what am I going to do with the resources that I have now and, like, the training in my brain and, like, what what value can I give to people? What's what's meaningful to me? So maybe that's maybe that's a a decent answer. Like, find figure take the time

to slow down. Go walk at a beach or in a forest or next to a river, because I do. I go to the beach once a week at least just to walk and listen and pray. Mhmm. Yeah. Absolutely. I get lots of ideas. See, that's part of riding that river that the transcendent is sending you down. It's providence, not luck. And so that providence is carrying you to the next thing too. And and I think I would I can hear the cynics being like, I don't have time. Like, I have to work. I

am so exhausted. And I'm like, I was there too. Mhmm. So the hard part is, you know, doing all the math, making all of the making sure, you know, your bills are paid or or crashing with mom and dad for a while because we did that. Mhmm. Just it's kinda doing what you have to do to get to what's worth doing. Well and what

is what is doing with less look like? Does doing with less look like does doing with less so you can homeschool your children look like, you know, all the weight of, making money falls on one person, and that other person takes on all of the weight of the other pieces of running the household. Period. Full stop. Period. And

there's no resentment, by the way, in that. There's no room for resentment in that because what is happening is occurring at a particular quality level that could not have occurred in order to pursue a platonic vision of truth to educate the next generation. Most people think that and I I think this is a tragedy. I think many people, not I think most, many people I believe are operating on the idea that a child's decisions that they make when they're 19 20 are a reflection on them as

a parent. And the reality is the decisions they're making at 19 20 after you've dumped $375,000 for a year, every year for 20 years into them, the reality is and by the way, that's at the top level. Like you can raise a child on not $375,000 a year. Like, please give me a break. But if you've done that, if you've bought into that idea, then the decisions that they make are a return on your investment. But the reality is the decisions that they make have nothing to do with

you. And the romantic ideal, which by the way is very practical, not soft, the practical romantic idea is we will, for less than $375,000 a year, put into this child the ability to make decisions that will impact the 3rd 4th generation down rather than worrying about how much money we're making or not making right now. Because this is temporary and we are temporary and we will not be here forever. We have to continue somehow. That's a romantic aesthetic that now we can link back

to practical considerations of marriage. Who do I marry that's going to have the same aesthetic as I do? And if that person doesn't have the same aesthetic, which by the way, I should probably be asking this by them on like date number 3, and after date number 3 probably should be like move on. If their non aesthetic isn't matching, then I'm not going to be engaged in the immediate hedonistic gratification of my base

desires, and we all know what that is. Instead, we're going to wait till we actually have some meaningful connection on all of these levels. Whether or not the state agrees with us is irrelevant. We're going to have some meaningful connection on all these levels because we're actually in charge of creating the future state, not the current state that the state is in. But that's a romantic ideal all wide to marriage and family and childbearing and

all of this. So with that Kristen, do you have anything you'd like to promote today? Yes. I know you're working on a book. We are. You're grinding towards the end of it. What what would you like to say about that? And, of course, we we would love to have you back on. I keep I said this last episode. I'll say it again this other, though, we would love to have you back on when you have the book and talk all about that and the process and Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. How all that came together. And so those those where we're at with the book and what's happening with that. Give us an update. If you like if you like the conversation on romantic love or love in general, it that our first this the novels that we're working on right now is a trilogy, and it is a romance. So it's we explore a lot. I've had lots of thoughts about relationships and love. And so it's I think it's very interesting and very

different. It's very different for a romance, because I think a lot of romances focus on the will they, won't they. And then, kind of a spoiler. We we we ditched the will they, won't they. Not not not halfway through really, but, like, buy book 3. It's like, no. We're into, like, hey. How do you make 2 very different people to have fallen off? Like, how do they make their relationship work? Mhmm. So it's just been so much fun to explore that psychologically. It is fantasy though,

I will say. I'm just I grew up playing or not playing, sorry, reading fantasy. Mhmm. I love fantasy. I play D and D. So if you like that sort of thing, we are posting our chapters. They are the rough drafts. But if you would like to check them out and just see, hey. Do I like this? Please let us know. Also, if you like, this chapter sucks, we're like, cool. Why? Why does it suck? Please tell us. We are at world of Orda. So world of Orda is urda.com. And we're also

I've I apologize for the state of our website. We're trying to update it. I threw it together, a couple years ago, and now I look at it and I'm like, oh my gosh. It's so bad. My websites can be updated. I might have a look at that point. Yeah. Yeah. So can be updated. We do need to update our website. But the posters are posters. The chapters are there. That's probably the easiest place to go find them unless you're on, like, Wattpad, which

who's on Wattpad? Not I. There's a lot of people on Wattpad, but probably not your audience. They're probably not. No. They don't know what Wattpad is. That's okay. That's alright. I know a Wattpad is, and I'm not even on there. So Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Alright. Awesome. Well, we will post a link to world of Urda. Right? Did I say that correctly? Awesome. I mean, I think I put, like, a German pronunciation, not, but it's fine. Yeah. Urda. My coauthor says Oder. It's

fine. Urda. I cringe a lot. We'll we'll have a link to where you can find it. Yes. We'll have a link in the show notes where you can go and check out all the chapters of her new book. And, of course, when she has her book out, we will invite her back to talk about her book and the writing process because I'm fascinated by all of that, and I think that you all should be fascinated by that too. And so, well, with that, we're out.