Because understanding great literature is better than trying to read and understand yet another business book, on the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books podcast, we commit to reading, dissecting, and analyzing the great books of the Western canon. You know those books from Jane Austen to Shakespeare and everything else in between that you might have fallen asleep trying to read in high
school. We do this for our listeners, the owner, the entrepreneur, the manager, or the civic leader who doesn't have the time to read, dissect, analyze, and leverage insights from literature to execute leadership best practices in the confusing and chaotic postmodern world we all now inhabit. Welcome to the rescuing of Western civilization at the intersection of literature and leadership. Welcome to the leadership lessons from the Great Books podcast.
Hello. My name is Jesan Sorrells, and this is the leadership lessons from the great books podcast, episode number 134. There are some books in the world that are so difficult, so deep, and that bring up so many complicated and important ideas that they require us as readers and as leaders to taste, chew, and swallow them
slowly. Some such books, some types of those books we have covered on this show, and we will revisit, this year as time and temperament permit, including War and Peace, About Face, by, Colonel David Hackworth, and Crime and Punishment, and, of course, Sitting Bull, his Life and Legacy. By the way, we'll also be revisiting the Count of Monte Cristo this year as well. However, the book we are introducing to you today is one with which I had little
familiarity initially. This is not to say I didn't know the title of the book. I'd actually had it sitting on my bookshelf in my library for at least, I think, 4 years up to this point. And I had heard about the author. I'd heard his name pop up occasionally floating through the circles of reformed theological thinking on Twitter or x that I sometimes still run-in. But this author, at least for my particular position in the universe, hadn't really made a dent.
Once I cracked the book open and began to read it, I discovered, that it was a book that is so relevant for leaders and for leadership. I wondered what exactly it was that had put me off from reading it for so long or put me off from reading it up until this particular time and this particular moment.
Other than Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Piersig, I am unaware of other books that so artfully, clearly, and masterfully describe in philosophical and pragmatic details the intersections between manual labor and the challenges of an increasingly digitized narcissistic and solipsistic
national culture. What this book we're covering today offers a way out of our current predicament and provides pragmatic solutions to the challenges inherent in the existence and in us existing in what is still deeply a material world. After all, I'm still walking around in a body just like you are. I'm still sitting in a studio behind a microphone recording this podcast, and it's cold where I'm at, so I still have the heat on. By the way, I'm sure you're still dressed while you're
listening to this. The hard, cold material world won't go away. No matter how much the tech bros of Silicon Valley and the Madison Avenue marketers would desire to will it to be so. So today, we're going to read a book that's a that's a direct punch in the mouth to all those folks. Today, we will be covering the introduction and a little bit of the first chapter and summarizing the ideas within those two sections of Shop Class as Soulcraft, an inquiry into the value of work by Matthew
b Crawford. Leaders, take hold of the material world around you. Build something with your hands. And so we're gonna open up today with the introduction to Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matthew B. Crawford. Now just so that we can get this, off the table early, this book was published by Penguin Press in New York in 2009. And as such, we will not be reading directly from the book. Instead, what we are going to do is we are going to go through,
the introduction. I'm going to summarize some of the core ideas from this book, and then we are going to discuss those core ideas, break them down, and give some pragmatic conclusions that you can take from the
book as a leader. So when you open up shop class as Soulcraft and inquiry into the value of work, you, of course, hit the introduction, and he opens the book Crawford does with an anecdote about a good friend of his who used to teach, a shop class in Richmond, Virginia, called Noel Dempsey, who is, well, who was rescuing at the time of the writing of this book, was rescuing tools being sold off by high schools that were getting rid of shop class in across the country in favor of turning students
into, quote, unquote, knowledge workers. Crawford moves very quickly through a description of Sears catalogs and, how consumers back in the past used to be able to access their material goods in order to fix them and repair them with their own
hands. He also laments this idea of a wedding of futurism to what might be called virtualism, a vision of the future in which we, and I'm quoting directly from the book the introduction here from Matthew Crawford, quote, a vision of the future in which we somehow take leave of material reality and glide about in a
pure information economy. Crawford posits that building things in the material world is an antidote to the ways in which the scientific managerial structure created around this type of virtualism, this type of fantasy, and and and is it serves as an antidote to that. He also, asserts that material work in the material world creates a
different kind of moral structure around work. And he's going to talk a lot about the moral structure around work and what that actually means in later chapters, which we'll cover in later episodes of the show this year. But it's an important point to remember from Crawford. Also, in the introduction, Crawford, states that he believes the ideal of manual competence is an antidote to, quote, unquote, more ghostly kinds of work. He, he doesn't degrade
knowledge work. He doesn't degrade the working of the mind, but he definitely favors it. And by the way, we'll talk about the background of Matthew Crawford here in the next section. He is not an unintelligent person himself, not a person who, is ignoring the cognitive load. But he is a person who believes that cognition and manual dexterity must go together.
Finally, he predicts that many of the challenges we're going to have at scale in the future of artificial intelligence software, that completely disintermediates the scientific manager and provides the ability at an even deeper level to, as I already said, glide about in a pure information economy. He predicts that those challenges are information economy, he predicts that those challenges are going to
increase. One of the reasons why I think, we needed to read this book now and cover this book now on the podcast is because we are at this next technological revolutionary moment. I've talked a little bit about technological revolutionary moment. I've talked a little bit about AI on this podcast. I have not focused on it necessarily. And, yes, I have spoken about it from what may be interpreted as a doom and gloom perspective, but AI is
just a tool. Crawford would assert that it's yet another tool, a now computational tool built on top of electronic
tools. That's a term that he used back in 2009, which were built on top of scientific tools in the 20th century that were designed to delude and to create phasma to phasmatagorical worlds for the purposes of separating a worker from their work and at a deeper level, for the purposes of separating a human being, men and women, but a human being from this idea of competence, creativity, and here's a big one, agency in the material world. So who is Matthew B. Crawford?
What type of literary life has he led, and why should we bother caring about his book? And by the way, Shop Class as Soulcraft was his first book. He's written 3 others focused on the intersection of work and virtue, talking about, vehicles and the power of driving in America and what it means to actually have a vehicle in America. And, and he's written another book. I can't remember the topic, the particular topic of that one, but you can go and, you can go and find that book on,
on Amazon. He seems to be a thinker that is living at an intersection that has been abandoned by many thinkers. Crawford was or is an American writer and research fellow at the Institute For Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. But before that, he was a physics major as an undergraduate and then turned to political philosophy
in the early 2000. And in Shop Class as Soulcraft, he chronicles his journey from being in a graduate and PhD role, a graduate student role pursuing his doctorate, and applying for and thinking about the moving into the academic world more deeply and the sense of, dysfunction is not really the word, disconnection that he had from that because from that particular world, because alongside his physics understanding and his political philosophy graduate work, he
had been working as an electrician, and he'd always worked with his hands. He'd been interested in mechanics and in automotive work and, had been supporting himself as electrician working during the summers while in while working as an undergraduate. I'm not sorry. Not working. While matriculating
as an undergraduate and matriculating as a graduate student. So he'd been doing that, and he'd also begun to develop, ever since he was a teenager, an interest in motorcycles and, in particular, cars, in particular, a VW Beetle. As of the year 2020, he, was a contributing editor at the New Atlantis and had continued to be a motorcycle mechanic with a shop, Shockoe Moto in Virginia. Matter of fact, in Richmond, Virginia. So if you Google
Matthew Crawford, you'll find Matthew B. Crawford. You will find, a whole bunch of different things on him, including a very interesting interview that he did with NPR back in the day. Matthew B. Crawford is one of these folks who came from humble, humble origins. He was, he was raised in a commune, from, the time he was born until he was about 12 years old. He learned how to engage with manual competency
and learn the power of agency that went along with that. His father had a background in physics, and he talks about his father in Shop Class as Soulcraft and how his father's conception of the world didn't really help him when he had to fix a material problem with a vehicle he was frustrated with, that aforementioned VW VW Beetle. I believe probably that would have been in the late seventies early eighties because Mr. Crawford is, is, getting into his, into
his sixties by now. So that's a little bit about Matthew B. Crawford, a little bit about his literary life, his background, and his influences. I strongly encourage you to check him out. And, well, check out his work because the intersection that he lives at is an important one for us to get to as leaders with our own unique backgrounds. Alright. Back to the book. Back to shop class as Soulcraft by Matthew B Crawford.
So we're gonna pick up, where we left off, and we're going to jump, from the introduction, which is all kinds of full full of all kinds of good stuff, to chapter, to chapter 1. Now I mistakenly said there that the introduction started off with a story about the gentleman, buying things on eBay from, from old, from old shop classes. And, actually, the introduction, really does start with and I, again, I need to correct this, a dealer of a machine tool
warehouse, in Richmond, Virginia. Chapter 1 of Shop Class's Soulcraft, a briefcase, for the useful arts, that's a subtitle of the chapter. The title of the chapter begins with Tom Hull, who used to teach welding machine shop, auto shop, sheet metal work, and computer aided drafting at Marshfield High School in Coos Bay, Oregon, who says, and I quote, a lot of schools shut down their shop class programs in the 19 nineties when there was a big push for computer literacy.
And he's right. They did. Matter of fact, I graduated high school just to make this a little personal. I graduated high school in 1997. I had to think about that for a minute. Anyway, I graduated high school in 1997, and I did not take a shop class, actually, during the course of my high school career. Now I did learn how to, pull an engine out of a vehicle and drop a new engine in to a vehicle, but I learned that from my, from my stepfather rather than from the public school system.
So in chapter 1 of Shop Class's Soulcraft, Matthew was making a case for the useful arts, and he he delineates, he separates, the useful arts as those that are tied to manual labor, this idea of craftsmanship, and how he characterizes it. And I love this characterization. A brute understanding of the character of the material world.
So just to make this really simple, every time a natural disaster shows up, the hurricane that hit North Carolina last year, the fires currently burning Los Angeles, in Southern California, when a hurricane strikes New York City or when a earthquake strikes San Francisco. When a volcano goes off somewhere in the world, or when a winter storm shuts down our very fragile, in the United States anyway,
electrical grid system. When these systems collapse in the face of brute nature, we are reminded as sophisticated urban oriented individuals. Even if we're rural, we still many of us have cell phones, and we're still on Instagram and on TikTok, and we can still see what people are doing in other places.
The urban and the rural have merged together. So in this world where everyone knows everything about everybody or at least can find it out, where the world has flattened, where the distinctions between urban and rural, between the work that is flashy, like that of being an influencer, and the work that is practical, like that of being a plumber, where those lines have attempted to be blurred, the useful arts deal with the character, deal with the brute character of a world
that is natural, a world that is material. Think about it this way. When a mudslide happens, an Instagram influencer isn't going to show up to your house with a backhoe. Now, the guy who shows up to your house with a backhoe and clears the mud out of your front yard might, matter of fact, probably is on Instagram. But they wouldn't identify themselves as, at least not probably
primarily as an Instagram influencer. And this is the point that mister Crawford is making in the first chapter of or the first part of the first chapter of Shop Class's Soulcraft. He states that, quote, craftsmanship means dwelling on a task for a long time and going deeply into it because you want to get it right, close quote. I can't think of a better description for what leaders
are supposed to do. Not managers. If you're a manager listening to this, you can become a better leader, not by becoming a better manager, but by actually dwelling on the task of leadership for a long time and going deeply into it because you actually want to get leadership, not management, right. Crawford addresses as well the cognitive demands that are required, that are placed on us as human beings by the
doing of manual work. I already mentioned plumbers and the guy who runs the backhoe, but construction workers, carpenters, automotive, not technicians, but mechanics, the people who lay road, and the people who lay brick. There are cognitive demands to all of that work that in an
information and in a more technological age, we actually dismiss. And, by the way, in the world of AI, world of large language models, the work that is done in those areas defies large language models because that work creates experiences in a material world that the LLMs are still shut off to. The cognitive demands of manual work create a certain species of wisdom,
Crawford continues. And he points out that the original idea of wisdom began with a Greek root, a Greek word that focused on the acquiring of technical skill through disciplined perception. Matter of fact, in a quote, in the tradition that developed in the west, wisdom lost the concrete sense it originally had in Homer. In religious texts, on the one hand, wisdom tended towards the mystical. In science, on the other hand, wisdom remained connected to knowledge of nature.
But with the advent of idealization, such as the frictionless surface and the perfect vacuum, science too adopted a paradoxically otherworldly idea of how we come to know nature through mental constructions that are more intellectually tractable than material reality, hence amenable to mathematical representation. By the way, he doesn't dismiss mathematics, but he merely says that it can only take you just like software so far. So does god or nature really like a
builder? And how does god or nature define a builder? Well, I'm of the personal belief, and that was actually sort of the subheading of this particular section of our podcast today, this particular moment that we are going to have together that god does like builders. One of the things that obsesses parents and children alike, and Crawford talks about this much later on in his book, and we'll talk about this as we go through
the book this year. But one of the things that obsesses parents and children alike in America is this idea or the idea of getting a, quote, unquote, good job, making a good living, and living a, quote, unquote, good life. As a matter of fact, I have people in my life who are older than me, and I'm in my mid forties, who are still concerned that I'm not making a, quote unquote, good living. But what does that actually
mean? What does that mean in the context of a K through 12 system and, later on, a college system consisting of graduated undergraduate work that no longer aligns with the world of work that is misaligned, or or as Crawford would assert, that is too overly aligned with the world of work.
What is the point of the K through 12 to college to quote unquote urban employment in a large global city funnel if the people produced by that funnel, if the product of that funnel are unable to even know, identify, or fix what's wrong in their own material world. Sure, you can read an Excel spreadsheet, but can you mount a door on a hinge if it falls off in your house without having to call somebody to do that?
Sure. You can edit really, really fast using an AI program, or you can make really cool looking videos for YouTube, but you can't hammer a nail. Sure. You can, go ahead and order a really cool latte from a really cool coffee shop in town with really cool people in it. But when that little check engine light comes on in your car, you don't even know what it means, much less what to do if you're ground out in a 102 degree heat in Texas or negative 15 degree cold in the mountains of Colorado.
To paraphrase from a movie from the 19 eighties, when you get in trouble in the material world with all of your degrees and credentials that your parents encouraged you to get, who are you going to call? These are increasingly important questions to ask, and they were beginning to be asked in the early 2000. I know I was there. I was in college in the early 2000 as an undergrad
and then as a graduate student. And I worked in colleges and universities for about the first 15 years of what is nominally considered to be an an adult life attempting to make a, quote, unquote, good living. And I've spent a lot of time around academics, and I've spent a lot of time intersecting with the academic institutions that make this country what it currently is.
And none of these questions that I've asked can be answered by the academic institutions because they don't consider them to be part of their purview. They consider those questions to be part of the purview of, quote, unquote, private institutions or, quote, unquote, larger society or, quote, unquote, individuals or, quote, unquote, systems. They don't consider those questions to be
even relevant. But parents do consider those questions to be relevant, or at least they should, and so should students, particularly students in their late teen and early twenties. Does autonomy, agency, and competence mean anything in a world where everything is a distraction, consumption, and the globalist universal message of a post Cold War political and economic system still doesn't have all of the shine quite off of it just yet? I think autonomy,
agency, and competence mean everything. Matter of fact, during COVID, and I'll go on a little bit of a rant here, during COVID, we saw a decline in competency, not in the plumber or the road builder or the garbage man or the automotive mechanic. We began to see a decline in competency in the service person, the delivery driver, the waiter or waitress. Isn't that interesting? A decline in competency where people are serving people in the material world because we still need to
eat food. But there was an increase in competency in interactions between people around objects in the material world. I think autonomy, agency, and competency mean quite a lot. I think Crawford would agree with me about this. And ShopClass' Soulcraft makes that assertion as
well. Look. We've been asking these questions at a higher and higher level since the early 2000, and we've been asking these questions and demanding answers more and more insistently, not just from academic systems, but overall from the western culture in general and, of course, the educational systems of the United States.
And we haven't been getting good answers. And so parents and children have been wandering away from these institutions, not in mass, not in gigantic flood like deluges, but in small drips. The pitter pattering of little feet as they go out the door to
explore other options. The COVID 19 crisis of 2020, 2021, and 2022 fully revealed, fully lay bare the assumptions that we've been operating and laboring under in the United States anyway for at least the last 100 years, Assumptions about a quote unquote good living. Assumptions about living in a quote unquote urban environment. Assumptions about the value of an advanced degree and assumptions about the work that goes in to delivering you that latte. Reality,
reality likes material reality. And we are seeing a bifurcation in America and globally between people who really, really, really like living in the virtual machine, the virtual electronic machine of pretend, where we can be avatars with voices and faces and bodies that are not, well, that are not real.
A bifurcation between that world and the world of, well, natural disasters, the world of fires and floods, mudslides and earthquakes, the world of pandemics and roads, the world of plumbing and homeless people, the world of buildings that are no longer maintained and fall down, and bridges that cannot be rebuilt because we do not have the knowledge to do so that has to exist in people who operate with autonomy, agency, and competence against or maybe with the people who live in a virtual world.
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class as Soulcraft. We remain in chapter 1, summarizing, talking, asserting. Flipping forward or flipping through chapter 1, a brief case for the useful arts. There's another piece in here, where Crawford talks about arts, crafts, and the assembly line. And this is something that, I am very much, oh, gosh. I shouldn't say in favor of talking about, but I wish more people knew the history of. You can read writers, marketers,
or no. Sorry. You can read writers like, Seth Godin, the marketer, but others who Doug Wilson, the theologian, who have talked in-depth about one of the most dynamic inventors of the early 20th century, a man named Henry Ford, and how he constructed not the car. Everybody thinks that that was his big insight or his big innovation. And in reality, the big innovation, the big insight was the
assembly line. And Matthew Crawford takes apart the assembly line, and he opens with talking about how, quote, early in 20th century when Teddy Roosevelt preached the strenuous life and elites worried about their state of over civilized spiritual decay, the project of getting back in touch with, quote, unquote, real life took various forms. 1 was romantic fantasy about
the pre modern craftsman. It was understandable given changes in the world of work at the turn of the century, a time when the of economic life was rapidly increasing the number of paper shufflers. As TJ Jackson Lears explains in his history of the progressive era, no place of grace, the tangible elements of craft were appealing as an antidote to vague feelings of unreality, diminished autonomy, and a fragmented sense of self that were especially acute among the
professional classes, close quote. So Crawford begins opens up this chapter on the assembly line by talking about the progressives. Right? Most people don't understand the history of the progressive movement. As a matter of fact, I would encourage you to go back and listen to the episode that we published at the beginning of last year, 2024, when we talked about Woodrow Wilson's book, with Libby Unger, and, his little screed that he wrote.
Woodrow Wilson was the classical Democrat progressive, By the way, his great grandchildren are Alexandria Okashia Cortez, and every blue haired progressive that you've seen on Blue Sky. But on the right wing in America, there is also right wing progressives. Right wing progressives progressivism began politically with Teddy Roosevelt, and we also covered some of his writing and thoughts on the podcast. I would encourage you to go back and listen to some of those.
His great grandchildren came down in the form of, or in the visage of everyone from John McCain to Mitt Romney to Liz Cheney. Anyhow, I'll leave out the political implications of this. You can think through that on your own. You're a you're a smart and erudite listener. If you weren't, you wouldn't be listening to this show. But Crawford's point is that progressivism really looked at craftsmanship as a romantic escape from paper pushing, a romantic escape from bureaucratization.
And the elites pursued this, fiddling around on their boats, having their properties at their estates, riding their horses, these kinds of things. But the average person in the early 20th century still worked on a farm. And most farm workers had not transitioned into the urban environment that basically was going to be built out because of, well, because of the technology known as the car.
This sense of a bureaucratized economic life, and diminished autonomy and human agency in a material world was looked at as a loss. In our time, it's just looked at as the way things, quote, unquote, are. But in the early 20th century, this was looked at as a real loss. And Crawford points out that institutions used the decline in craftsmanship to create a new work order. Not a new world order, a new work order, a new
scientific order. And even because progressives starting all the way back with the abolition of slavery really like this project, a new moral order, but a moral order divorced from religion, a moral order divorced from the fundamental realities of the material world, a moral order around technological fantasies first brought to you by the assembly line and later sold to you by the marketers on Madison Avenue.
In chapter 1, Matthew Crawford makes the point that bucking the quote unquote moral weight of egalitarianism, that this sort of idea of the assembly line applied to k through 12 education implies bucking that moral weight of egalitarianism would take courage for high school principals, to push students towards the cognitively rich work of manual labor.
So what do we do with that idea? Right? What do we do with the idea of the assembly line being taken from making cars in the early 20th century to making a new type of man, to selling that new type of man to the new type of man, to inculcating the young through the k through 12 educational system, and to the decline of manual competency in an increasingly difficult material world.
What do we do with all this? How do we stand athwart history as William F. Buckley would have infamously said back in the day, a product of the k through 12 system himself, as well as the Ivy League Educational Elite Institutions that produce the thinkers and the philosophers who come up with the justifications for this new progressive order? What, he would say stand to thwart history? How do we stand to thwart history and yell stop?
And how do we do such yelling in light of the fact that we are at the end of or approaching the end of an 80 year cycle of history known as the 4th turning and that we are about to embark on another 80 year cycle of history that will take us all the way to the end of this 21st century, an end that I will probably not live long enough to see. What do we do with all of this? How do we change the systems? Because here's the thing. The material world isn't going anywhere. Right? Manual
labor still has meaning. You still have to deal with the land. You still have to move the trees and move the rocks and move the dirt and build the houses and build the buildings. And by the way, you have to do it competently so the buildings don't fall down, the roads don't crack, the trees don't fall over on the kids, and, of course, so that everyone is safe physically so that they can all go run around and be unsafe, virtually.
How do we manage this next transition of man from what Crawford described as electronic back in 2008, 2009 when he was probably writing this book, to digital, to now algorithmic, which is the current transition we're in? Well, if you're a leader listening to this, you're probably wondering
when I'm going to get to the point, and here is the point. I've been looking for a strong antidote to the utopian level of marketing hype from the usual suspects technologists around what is now being called artificial intelligence. This book, Shop Class as Soulcraft, along with a couple of other books, including and I've already mentioned Seth Godin, but Seth Godin's great book, Lynchpin, and Doug Wilson's book, Productivity. These three books together represent an antidote to that marketing
hype. Matter of fact, I would encourage you, if you're listening to this as a leader and you have a student who's getting ready to return to college for the spring semester or you have a senior in high school or even a junior who is wondering what to do with their lives and they're not exactly excited about going to college, but they don't have the skills or manual competency because you didn't have those skills and you couldn't give them to them, and no one in your
family could either, I encourage you to get them those 3 books. Shove them in their hands and then send them off to maybe trade school or maybe apprentice them to a plumber or an HVAC person or an auto mechanic in your local town. Don't worry. They'll make a good living. These three books are an antidote to that marketing hype. Such utopian hype, I worry, will only widen the chasm further
between human thinking and human doing. And Crawford talks about the difference between those two things, and we're gonna cover that later on as we explore this book more this year. We just did the first chapter here today. By the way, that chasm, the chasm between human thinking and human doing didn't just open up during the 4th turning.
It actually opened up at the end of the second turning in the United States and continued to open up during the 3rd turning unraveling in the 19 nineties when the Internet was turned on. And, of course, just like most things during a time of force turning chaos, that chasm has only grown as more and more white collar work even, not just blue collar work, but white collar work, has disappeared into the gaping maw of the computer algorithm.
One of the things that people don't understand is that the computer will eat your job if you allow the technologist to do that. As I said before, college students need to read this book. And, yeah, there's been famous people who have banged the drum in the years between when Shop Class as Soulcraft was published back in 2009. And now, on the same things that Matthew Crawford was writing about back then, folks like Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs
and other folks. Andy Frisella, I'm thinking of him as well, banging the drum and banging the drum and banging the drum. But the problem is the problem is that up until about the COVID crisis, too many people were still too invested in the system thinking that, of course, if we just throw more money at it, if we just throw more people at it, if we just throw smarter people at it, it'll all
work out in the end. By the way, that's the conceit of scientific managerialism brought to you by Frederick Winslow Taylor, the guy who brought Henry Ford, the assembly line, and made it better. This year on the podcast, we are going to talk about solutions to problems in pragmatic ways. And I know I promised a lot of that last year, and we got to very few solutions, I feel, with many of our books that we covered. But this year, we really are gonna talk about pragmatic solutions.
We really are going to talk about how to begin with the basics as we go into a cyclical spring. So let's, let's address that. So solutions to problems. Right? REM back in the day infamously said or sang in their great song, it's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine. Offer me solutions. Offer me alternatives. And, of course, as being avatars of generation x during that period of time in the nineties, they intoned, and I declined. Anyway, I am gonna offer solutions
right now. I'm gonna offer some some ideas. And there are ideas that you could find in shop class's Soulcraft by Matthew b Crawford. There are solutions, but we have to begin with the basics. And here's some of the basics. We can't return to manual competency without someone to train people in actual
manual competency. By the way, the people who will train people in manual competency, the people who will train people in how to do that work and how to do the work that requires autonomy, agency, and competence well in a in a in a world that is real, where there are upper
boundaries and limits to what can be achieved. The people who are going to teach that kind of work, the people who are going to insist that people take on that cognitive strain are probably not going to be, and this is part of the basics, they're probably not going to be nice people. They're probably not going to say the right words or put them in the right order. They're probably not going to be people that are going to make the right jokes or or avoid inappropriate innuendos.
They're not going to talk the way that Hollywood writers writing for people on Twitter, who will give them claps, would write them as characters in movies. They're going to speak roughly. They're probably going to use slurs. They're probably going to have retrograde attitudes towards minorities and women even if they are a minority and especially if they are a woman. They are probably not going to be nice people in terms of what we mean now in the world as nice, but they
will be wise. So here's one of the basics that we're going to have to begin with, the kind of people that we're looking for to teach these sort of skill sets, the people who will have acquired these sort of skill sets will be people who will be competent but not and wise but not nice. They will be hard, but not loving. At least not squishy, warm. You can get away with fuzz balls loving. They're going to be hard. They're going to be not nice. They're going to
be difficult to get along with. They're probably going to be taciturn and not tell you or tell their students everything all at once. And they will probably be people who would rather show than tell because too many words can sometimes block out intuition. We have to begin with the basics. We have to begin with the kind of
people we are looking for. Leaders, if you wanna be one of those kinds of folks, you're gonna have to go and get information and competency and skill and spend time with the kinds of people who probably you wouldn't pick to work with and you wouldn't pick to lead.
With the ruthless expansion of intellectual technology, building things in the real world with real people helps increase autonomy, agency, and competence way more than working in services or manipulating consumption through the exegesis of finance or through the mysticalness of marketing.
The other thing that we're going to have to understand is that the acquiring of manual competence requires us, all of us, myself included, to put down our narcissism, put down our overweening self regard because we can successfully manipulate an algorithm or we can get an LLM to do what it is we want it to do, or we can navigate Instagram really well. But this person who can hammer a nail, well, they can't they can't manipulate the Internet, so they must not exist.
We're going to have to put down our narcissism. We're going to have to put down our overweening self regard. Narcissists tend to become uncomfortable in the presence of manual competence because their presence means that there's actual friction in a place that a narcissist basically has no foothold in. The material world. A place where, as I said before, there are boundaries, there are barriers, and there are borders.
At a basic level, leaders in organizations of all sizes, but let's start with the small ones and then move into the medium sized ones because as you go to scale, this becomes infinitely harder. But leaders need to push back on the myth of a coming singularity. There is no and will never be a digital electronic or virtual eschatology that will be able to successfully compete against the brute reality of the facts of the material world.
Let me be blunt. If you build your AI computing data banks on land next to a hurricane prone coast and a once every 20 year hurricane comes, it's going to kill your server houses. And you're going to have to find somebody to pour the concrete to rebuild them. And that person better be competent the first time. Leaders need to speak this out to their organizations, their networks, their
families, and their communities. If they don't, they'll have no one to blame but themselves when competency and agency or as competency and agency continue to drain out of the world. By the way, the kinds of people that you're looking to teach these sort of basics in the useful arts to the young, the unwise, and even the incompetent. The kinds of people you are looking for are people who are serious. Maybe not necessarily intellectually serious,
but they are intuitively serious. They know a valuable idea when they hear 1, and they know what is not valuable when they hear it too. By the way, they have a not nice word for things that are not valuable. It is time to lay the cornerstone of a new world right around the corner that will look geopolitically, and this is at scale now, like the world before World War 1, economically, like a return to real gold backed material currency.
And psychologically, this new world will look like a return to a humble acknowledgment of the practical limits of hard material reality. What you can do and what you actually can't do. And saying no to what you can't do while fully exploring what you can do. But in order to do all this, we have to continue to explore pragmatically and understand pragmatically where to go ahead from here. And, well, that's it for me. Thank you for listening to the Leadership Lessons from the
Great Books podcast today. And now that you've made it this far, you should subscribe to the audio version of this show on all the major podcast players, including Apple Itunes, Spotify, YouTube Music, and everywhere else where podcasts are available. There's also a video version of our podcast on our YouTube channel. Like and subscribe to the video version of this podcast on the Leadership Toolbox channel on YouTube. Just search for Leadership Toolbox and hit the
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I've heard. Alright. Well, that's it for me.