Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil by Hannah Arendt - w/Tom Libby and Jesan Sorrells - Leadership Lessons From The Great Books

Episode Transcript
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(00:18):
Hello, my name is Jesan Sorrells, and
this is the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books podcast,
episode number 154.
This is going to be kind of a long intro, so bear with me
on this show. We have discussed the writing of
Alexander Solzhenitsyn and talked about

(00:41):
gulags. We've addressed the long, dark night of persecution
brought to us in the documentation of Eli Weisel.
We've talked about the importance of leadership from Rabbi Jonathan Sachs.
We have talked about war and peace, slavery and
ethnic cleansing, freedom and conscience, tyranny and
totalitarianism. And we have done it all while groping

(01:04):
towards what those things may mean at a practical level for leaders
in their real lived leadership lives.
But we've never to this date on
this show asked or attempted to answer this
disturbing core question. Who
exactly are the types of people, the types of leaders

(01:27):
who would perpetuate bureaucratic orders
without evincing a conscience of any kind?
And what can possibly be done about them?
The post World War II Nuremberg Trials of members of the Nazi government
of Germany sought justice for the outcomes of the bureaucratic acts of

(01:49):
such leaders without addressing the basic psychological and
spiritual question, what type of people were these?
Without fixing such justice within a shared religious, Jewish or Christian
framework. The secular humanist modernists who won the war
by leveraging all the tools at their disposal, including the frightening new weapon of the
atomic bomb, attempted to reassemble a world broken by war and

(02:12):
shocked into silence by the evidence at Auschwitz, the
Buchenwald and all the other Nazi concentration camps at
Nuremberg. And they succeeded
for a time. The reassembly of
the world and the justice delivered at Nuremberg reinforced
unambiguously, at least for a little while, via popular

(02:34):
culture and education, and convinced a couple of generations of
Americans to accept that such reassembly was, quote, unquote, just
the way things are. This was assumed as part and parcel of the
secular humanist ethic for most of the remainder of the 20th
century. However, in our contemporary
era, 80 plus years later, this is being

(02:55):
deconstructed or forgotten. Take your pick. As
the post World War II secular liberal world order is falling
apart everywhere as far as those with eyes can see in the
West. The COVID 19 pandemic. It weighs both
great and small, but brought this question and many others to sharp relief
in the minds of many people in the United States, including

(03:17):
for the last three generations of people, most notably the Gen Xers,
Millennials and gen zers.
These three new generations of post World War II Americans never
stared the atrocities of concentration camps directly in the face.
Generations whose connection to that World War II world is only through grainy black
and white films like the one I just watched the this weekend

(03:41):
or via Baby Boomer generated film hagiographies produced in the
last 30 years like saving Private Ryan,
hagiographies that extol the Greatest generation and seek to
reinforce the importance of seeking justice in a
secularist, humanist society.
However, confronting the terror of blank bureaucratic

(04:04):
disinterest, governmental insistence on legal and social compliance, and the
application of state power to those who rebel or would rebel
feels new to us living right now.
But these dynamics would have been very familiar to the pre World War II generations
who fought in the trenches, freed the concentration camp prisoners,
and prosecuted the war's losers.

(04:27):
Today on the podcast we will be talking about an
author who wrote most of her work in direct and vehement
opposition to totalitarianism in the forms of both fascism
and communism. She was unapologetically
politically philosophical during a post World War II era where women were just
finding their feet in the space of political and social philosophy and

(04:49):
where the individual was being gradually morphed into
becoming just another one of the masses.
By the way, the themes that we're going to be exploring on the show today
dovetail quite nicely with the themes we explored our previous
episode on 1984.
Orwell would have quite a bit to say to this woman. I think

(05:14):
today on the show we will look at the major themes and explore the
controversies within Eichman in
Jerusalem, the report on the Banality of Evil
by Hannah Aaron Leaders.
I am personally convinced, and this is why I'm doing this book on the show
today, I personally convinced that we are forgetting the moral and ethical

(05:35):
lessons of Nuremb, and that is to our detriment
in the West. And today on the
show I'm of course joined by our regular contributor Tom
Libby. How you doing today, Tom?
I am ecstatic to be here today.
Jesan, I,

(05:58):
I thought that would get a reaction from you. Well,
it's, it's going to be a thing today. This was a book I read
probably about a year ago
and I wasn't going to do it on the show because we do a lot
of heavy books on the show that are similar or that are in this vein.
And then current events, you know, started catching

(06:21):
up with me a little bit. And I started thinking about some things that I've
been seeing online. And I thought, this book is a book that leaders need to
at least consider reading, and we at least need to consider offering some of our
thoughts on it to them. Um, and then I went and looked at Hannah Arendt
and I looked at her life and I looked at her. Her opinions on
things. I. I sent you, actually, a. A YouTube video from her. Her

(06:43):
foundation or whatever, and I watched that whole interview, and it was
fascinating to. To listen to how she had grown up and what she thought
about herself and especially what she thought about this book,
particularly as it generated so much controversy when it was initially published and
continues to generate controversy still. So I think
there are valuable lessons for leaders around that question of what kind of people.

(07:07):
Well, what kind of people just follow orders?
And how, as leaders, do we. What responsibility do we
have for not allowing that to happen on our watch? So.
So let's pick up with Eichmann in Jerusalem. I'm going to read a
couple of pages from this. By the way, you could pick up this book, a

(07:28):
PDF version of this book online. Okay. So there is a publicly
available copy. And while I'm not reading from the publicly
available copy today, you can also pick up
and download the original New Yorker
correspondence, the original New Yorker article that she wrote that
eventually became this book back in the early

(07:50):
1960s. And I
quote from Ikea to Jerusalem. This is from the postscript. This is her wrapping up.
This is Hannah Aaron wrapping up. There is, of course, no
doubt that the defendant, and that was Adolf Eichmann. And the nature of his acts,
as well as the trial itself, raised problems of a general nature which go far
beyond the matters considered in Jerusalem. I have

(08:12):
attempted to go into some of these problems in the epilogue, which ceases to be
simple reporting. I would not have been surprised if people had found my treatment
inadequate. And I would have welcomed a discussion of the general significance of the entire
body of facts, which could have been made all the more meaningful the more directly
it referred to the concrete events. I can also well imagine that an
authentic controversy might have arisen over the subtitle of the book.

(08:33):
For when I speak of the banality of evil, I do so on the
strictly factual level, pointing to a phenomenon which
stared one in the face at the trial. Eichmann was not
Iago and not Macbeth, and nothing would have been
farther from his mind than to determine what Richard III quote to prove a
villain, except for an extraordinary diligence in looking

(08:55):
out for his personal advancement. He had no motives
at all. And this diligence in
itself was in no way criminal. He certainly would never
have murdered his superior in order to inherit his post. He merely, to put it
the matter colloquially, never realized what he was doing.
It was precisely this lack of imagination which enabled him to sit for months on

(09:18):
end facing a German Jew who is conducting the police interrogation, pouring
out his heart to the man and explaining again and again how it was that
that he reached only the rank of Lieutenant Colonel in the ss and that it
had not been his fault that he was not promoted in
principle. He knew quite well what it was all about. And in his final statement
to the court, he spoke of the quote re evaluation of the values prescribed
by the Nazi government, unquote. He was not stupid.

(09:41):
It was sheer thoughtlessness, something by no means identical with
stupidity, that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period.
And if this is banal and even funny, if with the best
will of the world, will in the world, one cannot extract any diabolical
or demonic profundity from Eichmann, that it is still
far from calling it commonplace, it surely cannot be so common

(10:04):
that a man facing death and moreover standing beneath the gallows should be able to
think of nothing but what he has heard at funerals all his life, and that
these quote unquote lofty words should completely be cloud the reality of his own death.
That such remoteness from reality and such thoughtlessness can wreck more havoc than all the
evil instincts taken together, which perhaps are inherent in man.
That was, in fact the lesson one could learn in Jerusalem.

(10:26):
But it was a lesson neither an explanation of the phenomenon
nor a theory about it.
Seemingly more complicated, but in reality, far simpler than examining the
strange interdependence of thoughtlessness and evil is the question of what kind of crime is
actually involved here. A crime, moreover, which all agree, is
unprecedented. For the concept of genocide, introduced

(10:48):
explicitly to cover a crime unknown before, although applicable up to a point, is not
fully adequate, for the simple reason that massacres of whole peoples
are not unprecedented. They were the order of the day
in antiquity, and the centuries of colonialization and imperialism provide plenty of
examples of more or less successful attempts of that sort.
The expression administrative massacre seems better to fill the bill.

(11:11):
The term arose in connection with British imperialism. The English deliberately
rejected such procedures as a means of maintaining their rule over India. The phrase has
the virtue of dispelling the prejudice that such monstrous acts could be committed only against
a foreign nature or a different race. There is
the well known fact that Hitler began his mass murders by granting mercy
deaths to the incurably ill and that he intended to wind up his extermination

(11:33):
program by doing away with genetically damaged Germans heart and
lung patients. But quite aside from that, it is apparent that this
sort of killing can be directed against any given group, that is that the
principle of selection is dependent only on circumstantial
factors. And it is quite conceivable that in
the automated economy of a not too distant future

(11:56):
men may be tempted to exterminate all those whose
intelligence quotient is below a certain
level.
We talked in my introductory episode to this episode I would go back and listen

(12:19):
to that was episode 153. We talked about Hannah Arendt and her political
philosophies and her background and where she came from. We also have
a link in the show notes to the video where she talks about her own
background. I would recommend going and watching that
either after you finish listening to this episode or before

(12:41):
in that. In that episode 153 I did mention
this that Erin constantly prioritized political
over social questions and that this got her into trouble
over various years as people insisted on pushing her
towards a political understanding rather than a social understanding
of things like, well, evil.

(13:05):
Aaron is of course remembered for the controversy surrounding her reporting on the trial of
Adolf Eichmann, particularly the conclusion that she wrote
there. I think she was attempting to explain
to herself as a German Jew who had been arrested by the
Gestapo and had just barely missed going to Auschwitz
herself.

(13:28):
She was trying to look at Eichmann and explain who
this person was in a way that seemed in a Post World War
II context, rational without converting or
reverting to a spiritual explanation. And she had
nothing but spiritual language to describe what she was seeing there.

(13:49):
However, her explanation was seen as an apologia, an apology
for totalitarian systems and for how ordinary people become actors in
those systems and for the phrase the banality
of evil. Some thought that she was robbing
evil of its power by claiming it or making the claim
that because Eichmann was thoughtless

(14:12):
he could also be evil. She wasn't saying
those two things at all. She was saying that thoughtlessness led to
his evil. And this paraphrases or this goes along with something that we read
about in our episode nine covering 1984
and talking about Orwell in the English language. Back in the
1940s, Orwell made the point the British Orwell made

(14:33):
the point that we are lazy in our thoughts and
thus our Speech has become lazy. And when our speech becomes
lazy, our thoughts become lazy. I think Arendt would
agree. And lazy speech and lazy thoughts
leads to bureaucrats who just
comply thoughtlessly and commit

(14:55):
evil. As
usual or not as usual. I often
send Tom resources on the books that we are reading. And I don't think Tom
had read this book before or even knew of its existence.
So I'm going to ask Tom the typical question. I don't know
if you watched the video. I know you clicked on the other link and read

(15:17):
the other thing and we'll talk about that in a minute. But what did you
think of what was your first impressions of Hannah Arendt? And I know we just
read that little piece there from Eichmann in Jerusalem, but what do you think of
her, some of her ideas here that I've sort of laid out so far?
Well, I think, I think interestingly, first of all, I
tried, I did watch some of the video. I didn't finish the whole thing, unfortunately,

(15:40):
because I just ran out of time. Yeah, it's long. It's an hour.
It's long. Yeah, it's an hour. And I played it on 1.25
speed, even though you have to read the whole thing. So I was even trying
to get through it faster by trying to speed it up and reading it was
fine. I had no problem reading it at one point to five speed. But.
But I find.

(16:02):
I, I had a. Lot of mixed emotions watching and
like hearing the. She.
She seemed ahead of her time. First of
all, number one, and I don't mean that in a negative or positive way, just
in the sense that being a woman back then,

(16:23):
being involved in like being at one
point labeled a philosopher was unheard of for a woman back then
being. And then trying to pigeonhole her. And even
in the conversation you can tell by the, the person doing the interview
is trying to like kind of force her to answer things in a kind of
certain way. She wasn't having it. Which again, for a woman back then

(16:47):
was pretty strong willed again. Oh yeah. Whether you like her or not or disagree
with or agree with her or not, I do think for the time
she was relatively unique. She was relatively unique in the
sense that she didn't worry about
voicing her opinions. She wasn't concerned about repercussions
about her thought processes or anything like that. And, and to your point

(17:08):
about her, you know, with the evil scenario, and
I'm just paraphrasing one of her more famous quotes and I don't know the
quote well enough to Quote it, but paraphrasing it basically saying,
you know, someone who, who performs an evil act isn't inherently
evil. That just means they just did some stupid stuff. Like, you know,
like, but, but like we don't view that the same way

(17:31):
anymore. Like we look at like a single
act could basically
classify somebody for the rest of their life. Again, like we look at
even psychology today. You have a, you know, an eight year old kid that, that
purposefully goes out of his way to harm a small animal.
And now all of a sudden that kid is being followed by,

(17:52):
you know, people so closely because they just think he's going to become a serial
killer. Right. Because he's evil. Right. He hurt some little animal when he was 8
years old, so now he's evil. And in her philosophy that one act
does not necessarily make that person evil. That
it's, you know, you have to be an evil person to be considered evil.
You can't just perform an evil act. So. Right. And that, that goes

(18:13):
back to like to your. When you were talking earlier about
some of our disassociation with, with,
I mean, let's face it, that was pure evil. Like what happened.
So, but we're, we're so removed from it now that
we don't view it the same way. And we're starting to see

(18:34):
the, the,
you know, again in films we're starting to see the, the
glorification of the outcome. Right. Like, so the
glorification of the outcome downplays the seriousness of the
actual like, which I think, which I think is what, why we're
desensitizing to some of this stuff. Right. We're losing some of that,

(18:57):
that guttural. Most of the
World War II veterans are starting, they're dying off at like a 15000
a day clip or something like that. They're not very many left. Yep.
I remember growing up listening to their stories thinking, oh my good God,
I hope this never happens again. Our, our next generations
are not hearing those stories from real life people who were there.

(19:19):
Like, you know what I mean? Like, so that they're not getting that direct,
that, that direct impact like my grandfather, my gr. You know,
whatever had to live through this, my GR had to fight this
evil. Like they don't have that. They're getting this glorification of
it from cinema and, and books that people who
weren't there are writing and they're not going back and reading her

(19:42):
stuff because Hannah's stuff because it's not modern and
popular anymore. So they're just reading Today. I don't know. I. I know I'm going
off on a tangent here, but. No, no, no, I don't. I think you're onto
something. I mean, look, as much as I'll use an example, because we always talk
about film eventually. So I'll do it early. Always. Always.
I like the Dark Knight, the Batman movie from like the mid

(20:04):
2000s. I liked the Dark Knight. Right. The main character of the Dark Knight was
the Joker. The Joker is a sociopath. Yeah. He's an element.
He's represented there as an element of chaos. And
because it's a movie and because to your point, we've been
desensitized. You know, he blows up a hospital building,
you're a sociopath. Right. Like. Like

(20:27):
the, the constant pushback or challenge to Batman as character.
Even going back into the DC Comics,
the constant question is, if you have the ability to kill that guy, why don't
you kill that guy? Because every time you let that guy go or let that
guy get locked up in Arkham Asylum for the mentally insane, he's going to escape,
you know, this, and he's going to kill more people. So, what. How.

(20:49):
What, What. What culpability do you have, Bruce,
which was my father's name, interestingly enough. What culpability do you have, Bruce?
Mr. Wayne. Right. And. And. And we don't deal with
any of that. And of course, you know, the. The Dark Knight ends with, you
know, the Joker getting. Getting locked up, of
course, because, you know, if Heath Ledger hadn't died, I think he probably would have

(21:11):
been in the sequel. But my point is
that that desensitization
leads us to. In an attempt to
deconstruct everything or find truth everywhere.
We're trying to find truth in villainy,
and there's no truth in villainy. There's no truth in. To

(21:34):
your. I'm going to use the word. There's no truth in evil. But to your
point, we've been desensitized to it. Plus, I have younger kids.
And then you do, too. Your kid. Your younger kids are
probably older than my younger kids. But I look at my younger kid,
my youngest kid, who was born in the mid 2000s,
and I just go. I think I was thinking about the other day, I was

(21:55):
like, he's going to live to the end of this century. He's going to be
so far away from World War II, it's going to seem like ancient
history to him. Yeah. And
so how do we pass along. This is something I'm obsessed with, which is one
of the reasons why I do this podcast, one of the many reasons. How do
we pass along the lessons from the old things to people so they

(22:16):
keep that visceral pull. You just read it in the passage you
were talking about. Here's the lies. The biggest problem in
my opinion. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter.
Listen, World War II and the genocide of the Jewish people was not the first
time something like this has happened. No, it was not. And by the way, it
also wasn't the last. No, it was not. So. So

(22:39):
it, it. What frustrates the absolute
bonkers out of me is that we have not figured out
a way to actually learn from the past and not
reproduce it and not go and, and do this stuff all over
again. We've had genocidal act actions
throughout the course of history. Go look, look, in the course of history, it doesn't

(23:01):
like pick an era. It doesn't even matter. Pick an error. And I,
I'm gonna be bold and say within 60 or
75 years of any date you pick in history, there was some form of
genocide. I'll challenge people on that. Because
even within the, the history of
the United States alone, 250 years, whatever it was, I think we

(23:23):
just know. Sorry, 400. We just celebrated the.
Actually so where I live, the town of Plymouth,
Massachusetts just celebrated a few years ago
its 400th anniversary. 400 years.
Yep. Let me just remind everybody that
from 4. Even in our own 400 year history, you cannot put a

(23:45):
pin in within 70 years, not find a genocidal act
in our history. I'm not talking about on US soil, I'm just saying in
the world's history and just in the, in the existence of the United States
from 1620 to now, it doesn't happen. There's
been the Kumar Rouge, there's been World War II, the Jewish genocide, there's been
Native American genocide here in the United States. There's been the Cambodian genocide. There's

(24:08):
been. It repeats itself over and over. So until
we figure out a way. And by the way, I'm just, I'm gonna throw
cinema back in there again because we don't even
learn our lesson in movies. One of the largest grossing movies
of our, of our time right now, Avatar.
If you. The little blue, you know the giant blue on the planet.

(24:30):
Yep. Did you, does anybody ever stop and wonder why
the blue people, if you listen to their act,
if you listen to their accents, they sound either African
or Native American. There's a reason for that.
There's a reason that they picked those two cultures to be

(24:51):
represented on that movie. And by the way, just
where it happens to turn out the other way, where
they win. Great for them. But that didn't happen so much here in the. On
our planet. But, but the. But, but, but that's what I'm saying. When we
glorify some of these things in movies, right? Like, so we're glorifying
evil. And. And by the way, in that movie with Heath Ledger,

(25:12):
everybody I know, Heath Ledger was their favorite character in that movie.
Yeah. Oh, yeah. So, yeah. So we're picking our favorite
characters as the. As the personification of evil in that
movie. We're picking a movie and giving it the most amount of
money any movie has ever made for the
annihilation of another planet. And another.

(25:34):
Why, until we start learning these lessons of, like, we shouldn't be doing this
stuff, we're gonna continue. So I. I hate to say it this way, Hasan. This
is what I'm getting at. I know it's long winded. No, no, you're fine. Your
son is going to see this happen again.
Like, he's going to see it. Whether. Whether he remembers World War II or not,
whether he learns it in his history books or not, it's going to happen. He's

(25:55):
going to see it live. He himself is going to experience this, because we all
have in one form. And it frustrates the hell out of
me. So the last piece of this is where I think my son
and people who are born in his generation will see it. This is why I
sent you the. The one article I did. And we're going to talk about this
in the next section, but I'm gonna. I'm gonna. I'm gonna put it right here.

(26:15):
It is quite conceivable. This is from Hannah Aaron. It is quite conceivable
that in the automated economy of the not too distant future,
men may be tempted to exterminate all those
whose intelligence quotient is below a certain level.
Yeah. Yeah. That's where we're going,
kids. So it may not have anything to do with the color of your skin

(26:37):
or the place you were born or whatever, but. But that's still the. It's
a genocidal act either way. When. When the guy who's running
the World Economic Forum or was slated to run the
World Economic Forum, Yuval Noah Harari, who wrote a book
called Sapiens and believes that there's no such thing as free will.
Right? When. When he says that most people

(27:00):
on the Earth are. And again, this is a direct quote from him. You can
go to Google and find it. Are quote unquote, useless eaters.
And he's merely thinking bureaucratically.

(27:22):
Okay, so I'm useless eater and my kids a useless eater, and
Tom's kids are useless eaters and Tom's a useless eater. But you, you've all,
somehow, you've ascended
to what? And really Yuval is not really the problem
because he's the tippy top of the mountain. The, the problem

(27:42):
is all the little Eichmanns, all
the little bureaucrats that are going to help him get where he
wants to go. And those are the people, I think, that have to be
disrupted. That's where we have to go. And so the question that
lays before us today, as I said in my very long opening there is
what kind of people,

(28:05):
what kind of people are these? So I'll use, I'll use a, I'll use a
modern example. So the Sacklers, right?
Sackler family, who created, well, not created, but
they were the ones that owned the pharmaceutical companies that
allowed the opioid crisis to develop. They
were sued to the tune of

(28:26):
several millions, billions dollars, whatever. It's a large number.
Okay, we're going to drain the
Sacklers of their money. But that, the money is
not the thing. Because eventually after you
spread the money out to all the victims and the states get all their cut
and the taxes get taken out, you still

(28:48):
get less money than the life would be
worth or the value that would be created by a person
who, to your point, you use the word genocide. I would not use
that term with. I think a term has to be kept very
specially for certain specific things. Sure. But when a high
school student gets on an

(29:10):
opioid for pain medication,
then can't get off of it because it's so addictive, then gets into
heroin and fentanyl and then OD's, you know, 10
years later or five years later. And the Sackler
family is paying out billions of dollars
in aggregate. But what will come out to be merely thousands of

(29:32):
dollars of the life of that dead high school student, and by the way, hundreds
of thousands of other dead high school students across the United States in the last
15 years, just at minimum, 15 years.
Where was the administrator inside of the Sackler
foundation that said, this is evil, this has to stop.

(29:55):
Where was the little Eichmann in there that needed to get
checked? Heck, I'll go a step further. Where was the leader
who should have checked that middle manager and said, we're not doing this
anymore and it doesn't matter if we're fired and our whole division is gone. We
can't be a party to this because we know what's happening. By the way, we
did this with the nicotine, we did this with the tobacco companies back in the

(30:17):
1990s. We said the tobacco companies were so
evil that tobacco itself
needed to be quote unquote sued. And yet
Philip Morris still exists. RJR
still exists. Sure, they're called Nabisco now, but they still exist. And
it's easy, by the way, for us to point at corporations for this kind of

(30:39):
evil. I did mention the Sackler family and the tobacco companies.
Those are private corporations because you don't have to get on opioids.
Okay? You could just gut it out. Sure, okay.
But government, you can't escape government.
Government takes my taxes and rjr, Nabisco's
taxes and Google's taxes. Government takes all

(31:02):
of our money. Government's supposed to, in the liberal world
order, understanding of government, serve all of us. And yet,
and yet we saw bureaucratic
thoughtlessness that would rival, particularly during COVID 19. That's
the most recent example. But we've seen bureau, I can name other examples during the
course of the last 40 years. It's just the most recent one where government

(31:25):
bureaucratic thoughtlessness that was at the level of
Adolf Eichmann killed people, led
directly to their deaths. And yet we all sort
of shrug our shoulders and we go, well, what are you going to do? You
can't fight city hall. And then we walk away. It
might be worse than Eichmann. Honestly, Hasan, because think about

(31:46):
it. Eichmann being, I mean this. So, so the World War
II situation, what Hannah's referring to, I mean, she's talking about
that it's like our current military, right? You're taking an order from
an order from an order. You're, you're doing, you're doing your, your job. You're
disconnected from the top of the ranks far enough that you
don't question that order because you have no idea what they know and what they

(32:07):
don't know. The government, the government bureaucracies and the government,
people that should be fired or
prosecuted for being evil is
different because they know, they have first hand knowledge and they do nothing
about it. That's, to me, that's different, that's more evil than
Eichmann. And I'm not suggesting Eichmann wasn't evil, you know, yeah,

(32:29):
anything that, that happened. But there's, there's a level, there's a level of
consciousness that happens that, that, that a bureaucrat that a. That
a politician looks at and they make this decision based on, do
I want to do what's best for the country and the best for our people,
Do I want to do what's best for my constituents? Or do I want to
do what's best for me and take that lobby money and vote whatever

(32:50):
way they're asking me to vote on and protect that bureau, that
corporation from prosecution over X, Y or Z,
whatever. That's how the tobacco companies were protected for so long. We eventually
got. We eventually got politicians in office that weren't in their
pocket. But quite honestly, that's. To
me, that's more evil. You are making a. That is not an

(33:11):
unconscious decision that you're making that you are not just following orders. You are not
disconnected from the upper ranks of the military so that the order came down so
many times that you just. You can't. You can't question it because it's
different. To me, this is. This is way more pure evil where
the lobbyists and
the big corporations can spend enough money on a

(33:33):
politician or a group of politicians to circumvent or
even better, change the laws in their favor so they don't even have to circumvent
the law. They can have the law changed to benefit them. And now I'm
voting that. I'm not voting my conscience. I'm not voting the constituents. I'm
not voting the country. I'm voting money because it puts money in my
pocket. How many politicians do you know sit in Washington that. That are not worth

(33:55):
millions of dollars? Zero. I don't know a single one that is
worth that is not millionaire. So these
people and, and we can claim all we want that we have
control where the. We're the. We are the people. We can vote them in, vote
them out. But do we really. We don't really, because when they get down to
the nitty gritty in our. In our local constituents and they. They take their tie

(34:16):
off and they look human and they're talking to us like we. Like they're the
same kind of person as we are. We vote for them and then they go
do whatever the hell they want in Washington anyway. It's like. It's so
frustrating to me. Like this whole. Frustrating. No, no, no.
This is, this is. This is something where.
Well, well, I. Go ahead. And by the way, I. Because I. I just had

(34:39):
this conversation this morning. I was talking to somebody. It's so funny about your article
because it brought up a conversation this morning. I was talking to somebody else about
AI in, in our, in our work environments and that the
whole concept of the conversation was AI friend or foe. Like do you
think AI is great? Do you think it's bad? Whatever, right? So we had this
conversation and I brought up another conversation I had with my daughter over the

(35:00):
weekend who happens to be in her early 20s. And she, she
was telling me about, about a
post that she saw. I believe it was on Tick Tock. It was a,
it was an, it was an AI
newsreel, 100% fake.
And they, by the way, I'll give the, the person who created it credit

(35:23):
very like told everybody it was fake. He just wanted to show
everybody how cool it was that he could make AI look real.
My daughter flat out told me that this newsreel could have, could
pass as real if they, if they just posted it and didn't say anything. People
would have bought into the fact that this was real. And by the way, it
was an image of Washington D.C. getting bombed from

(35:44):
what's going on in the Middle east right now. Like somebody in the Middle east,
it doesn't matter what it is, just sent over a missile. It blew up one
of the buildings in Washington before the US could react. And now the US
is on full alert and we're going full steam ahead with our military
that if that looks that real. You think that the American public
are, you think they're going to go fact check that Anyway, I bring that up

(36:07):
because I think what you're talking about with the article that you sent me, at
some point, do we not realize that we have to have some sort of
governing body for this? Somebody has to stand
up and say we've got to, we've got to put our heads
and our hands around AI. We have to start thinking about governing
this. And I'm not talking about censorship and I'm not talking no

(36:28):
creative liberties, go for it, whatever. But there should be some
sort of foundational knowledge that it is AI. When you're looking at something
on a screen, screen like, right, so something, so somebody has to start
the process of, of making sure that we know
what's real and what's fake. Once it starts getting so real
that we can't tell the difference with our own eyes,

(36:53):
it's craziness. And by the way, that what I was getting the whole. Now wrap
this up in a little bowl for you. Because the problem
again, these bureaucrats and these and these politicians,
they're not doing anything about it because they're making money off of It,
So they have no. Because until people start dying over
this, we're not doing anything about it. And that's because that's a tragedy in.

(37:15):
Itself or because they don't understand it. Which
part of the. Some of them don't understand it. Just in case you
don't believe me. Just, just look at the last time that, that Mark
Zuckerberg was dragged up in front of the, in front of Congress.
And you know the youngest senator there was ted
Cruz at 50 something. And he was the

(37:38):
only one that knew how to ask Mark Zuckerberg the correct questions
about the algorithm because he was the only one that didn't need
notes from his 20 year old staff members who no
longer use Facebook. Right. And everybody else on that
dais, if you go look at the video,
was over 60. Yeah, yeah,

(38:01):
right. They don't understand what they're looking
at. They really don't. And they don't understand the
implications of it. And then the middle
managers below them
are thoughtless bureaucrats. But let me, let
me, let me make my point. I'm going to let

(38:23):
Tom hang on this one for just a minute because I'm going to bring up
something else. There's another thing that we need to bring up. Kind of been talking
about this other article. Let me, let me introduce this idea. So back to the
book, back to Eichmann in Jerusalem. We're going
to pick up with chapter eight, Duties of a Law Abiding Citizen.
I'm going to read this short piece.

(38:44):
So Eichmann's opportunities for feeling like Pontius Pilate were many. And as
the months and years went by, he lost the need to feel anything at all.
This is the way things were. This was the new law of the land based
on the Fuhrer's order. Whatever he did, as far as he could see,
was as a Tom's point, law abiding citizen.
He did his duty as he told the police and the court over and over

(39:06):
again. He not only obeyed orders, he also obeyed the law.
Eichmann had a muddled inkling that this could be an important distinction. But neither the
defense nor the judges ever took him up on it. The well worn coins of
superior orders versus acts of state were handed back and forth. They
had governed the whole discussion of these matters during the Nuremberg trials for no other
reason than they gave the illusion that the altogether unprecedented could be

(39:29):
judged according to precedents and the standards that went with them.
Eichmann, with his rather modest mental gifts, was certainly
the last man in the courtroom to be expected to challenge these notions and to
strike out on his own. Since in addition to performing what he conceived
to be the duties of a law abiding citizen, he had also acted upon orders.
Always so careful to be covered, he became completely muddled

(39:51):
and ended by stressing alternatively the virtues and the vices of blind
obedience or the obedience of corpses.
Cadaver gorshom, as he himself called it.
The first indication of Eichmann's vague notion that there was more involved in this whole
business than the question of soldiers carrying out orders that are clearly criminal
in nature and intent appeared during the police examination

(40:13):
when he suddenly declared with great emphasis that he had lived his whole life according
to Kant's moral precepts and especially
according to the Kant definition of duty. This was
outrageous on the face of it and also incomprehensible. By the way, let me pause.
Hannah Arendt knew a lot about Immanuel Kant, who was a German philosopher.
She read him quite extensively and studied him quite extensively in college,

(40:37):
where Martin Heidegger and
Carl Jaspers were two folks that she was
intimately two other philosophers giants of the 20th century.
Although Heidegger did have sympathies with the. With the Nazis
and was a member of the National Socialist Party,
a fact that Hannah Arendt actually critiqued him about and

(41:00):
critiqued him over, over the course of many years in a post World War
II concept or construct. Sorry. All right, back to the
book. Since Kant's moral philosophy I'm going to
pick up with the sentence is so closely bound up with man's faculty of judgment,
which rules out blind obedience. The examining officer did not press
the point. But Judge Rava, either out of curiosity or out of indignation at Eichmann's

(41:22):
having dared to invoke Khan's name in connection with his crimes, decided to question the
accused. And to the surprise of everybody, Eichmann came
up with an approximately correct definition of the categorical imperative
quote I meant by my remark about Kant. The principle of my will
must always be such that it can become the principle of general laws.

(41:43):
Which is not the case with theft or murder, for instance, because the thief or
the murderer cannot conceivably wish to live under a legal system that would give others
the right to rob or murder him.
Upon further questioning, he added that he had read Kant's Critique of Practical
Reason. He then proceeded to explain that from the moment he was charged with carrying
out the Final Solution he had ceased to live according to Kantian principles,

(42:05):
that he had known it and that he had consoled himself with the thought that
he no longer, quote, was master of his own deeds, close quote, that he was
unable to change anything. What he failed to point out in court was that
in this period of crimes legislated by the state, as he himself now
called it, he had not simply dismissed the Kantian formula as no longer
applicable. He distorted it to read act as

(42:26):
if the principle of your actions were the same as that of the legislator or
of the law of the land, or in Hans Frank's formulation of the
categorical imperative of the Third Reich, which Eichmann might have known,
act in such a way that the Fuhrer, if he knew your action, would approve
of it. Kant, to be sure, had never intended to say anything of
the sort. On the contrary, to him every man was a legislator the moment

(42:47):
he began to act. By using his practical reason,
man found the principles that could and should be the principles of the law. But
it is true that Eichmann's unconscious distortion agrees with what he himself
called the version of Kant. For the household use of the little man.
In this household use, all that is left of Kant's spirit is the demand that
a man do more than obey the law, that he go beyond the mere call

(43:08):
of obedience and identify his own will with the principle behind
the law, the source from which the law sprang.
In Kant's philosophy, that source was practical reason. In
Eichmann's household use of him, it was the
will of the Fuhrer. Much of the horrifying,
painstakingly horrible, painstakingly thoroughness of the execution of the

(43:30):
Final Solution, a thoroughness that usually strikes the observer as typically
German or else as a characteristic of the perfect bureaucrat, can
be traced to the odd notion, indeed very common in Germany, that
to be law abiding means not merely to obey the laws, but to
act as though one were the legislature legislator of the
laws that one obeys. Hence the

(43:52):
conviction that nothing less than going beyond the
call of duty will do.
I think we're there in America, we just don't know
Kant. I think we've been there for
a while and I think what scared the hell out

(44:13):
of all of us, people who are outside of the legislative or
bureaucratic systems, whether they are corporate or governance. I think
what scared the hell out of all of us with COVID was just how far
that thinking has gone. And it has never been critiqued
or exposed in the way that Hannah Arendt just exposed that.
Because how many public intellectuals do we have that are even smart enough to

(44:35):
explain it to us? Which is of course, one of the
declines that we are experiencing or have experienced in the last 40 years
in the West.
Eichmann, you've brought this up before on this, on this podcast too. Isan.
It's. It's also a lack of, it's also a lack of new,
young, observant writers. Like, yes,

(44:58):
so, so, like that era that you're talking about, there was so much
going on and people, people were writing about it to
the depths of like, like she's coming up with her own
theories and pro. Like, we don't have that anymore. Like, we don't. At least
not to my knowledge. Like, I don't know anybody coming out with. Even today's
journalists are even kind of. I was gonna say a joke. I don't want to

(45:20):
make. I don't want to. I mean, they're still in danger, like in, in war
zones and stuff like that. So I'm not suggesting that they're. They're not doing. But
they're not. It's not the same. Like, you're not, it's. They're not coming
at it from a, a perspective of like,
you know, this, this, this shouldn't happen. Or why. Why are we doing that? Like,
they're just reporting. Yeah. Another bomb went off.

(45:41):
Look how destructive this is. We have or, or even children
dying. In the streets over here. Like that's okay. Or even, or even
worse. They want to be influencers. Yeah. Or they want to like, they want to
like, they want to like, tell me what their inner thoughts are on blue
sky or on X, wherever the hell they're going.
Sub stack, of course, is also becoming popular, is a place where they're going to

(46:04):
like, spat off about
whatever. Look.
But they're not intellectuals. They're not intellectuals. Right. They're not doing
stuff like this. They're not. They're not. They're not looking at it and dissecting it
from a, from a philosophical, political, analytical
standpoint. They're, to your point, they're just spouting off stuff to get

(46:26):
likes and clicks. It's like, it's crazy to me.
Well, and what we need is what we require for the
safety of a civilization. To your point earlier, that you were making
about doing about, about human beings
performing genocidal acts once every 60 to
75 years. What we need if we are

(46:50):
going to break that cycle, here's what we need. We need
people in roles. And I wrote this down.
We need people in roles who have the moral courage to say
no and have the
intellectual. And I'm going to go a step
Further, the spiritual language

(47:13):
to talk to other people in real terms and move
them so that they don't do the thing. Look,
look, all you need
to stop a genocide, all you need, and we
see this repeatedly, all you need is a bunch of
people to basically just quietly

(47:36):
and confidently, with courage, say one
word, and that word is no.
Yeah, that's it. And now if they said now, now here's all the
consequences, because people now want to engage in consequentialist thinking. When you start talking about
this, well, what if they send drones to my house? What if they kill my

(47:56):
kids? What if they lock me up? What if, what if, what if, what if,
what if, what if you get hit walking
your dog crossing the street?
What if those are cowardly
considerations? Now, now, you may question my
bonafies on saying this, and I've never

(48:19):
gone public about this, but I'm going to go public now.
I resisted masking during COVID for a whole variety
of reasons. I just did.
I resisted the thing underneath it, the initial
explanation underneath it, because I thought the science was nonsense. I

(48:40):
absolutely did. People are gonna argue with me, that's fine. Argue with me all day.
I thought the science was nonsense, by the way that's been proven later on.
I thought the reasoning behind why we were social distancing was nonsense,
by the way that was proven later on. You can go, look, I also
resisted getting the COVID 19 vaccine.
I have never gotten it and I will never get it for a whole

(49:03):
variety of reasons, partially health related, personal
health related, but also because the way
that was pitched to me, the way all three of those things were
pitched to me, looked and sounded
far too much like echoes

(49:23):
of the categorical imperative for the little man. It
sounded far too much like, to my ears, not for anybody
else. I wasn't running around advocating. And by the way, by me disclosing
this, I'm not telling you what you should do. You do what you need to
do for your own family and for your own household. And I do know people
that went in a bunch of different directions. And that's fine. You do whatever

(49:44):
you do. I'm not going to judge you. I'm not saying what you should have
done or shouldn't have done. That's another thing for Kant, by the way, shoulds and
odds. And I know the difference between the shoulds and odds,
okay? Oughts are based on things that can go back to
tradition, like, I don't know, we ought not commit, as
Hannah Arendt brought up, we ought not commit murder. That's an odd.

(50:06):
I shouldn't get the jab. That's a should.
Shoulds are flexible, oughts go back in
tradition and can appeal to something that's bigger than
myself. In order to think about that effectively and
guide my family through that, I had to actually be able to engage in critical
thinking.

(50:29):
And then, and then, and then I didn't give a bunch of excuses. I just
said no. I, I actually like the way you're, you're talking about
that to your, to your point, right? So the, I think the, the
main point to that is whether you did or didn't or should or should.
The critical thinking part to me is the most important because so my experience
through Covid was a little bit different than yours, but not by

(50:52):
much. So like, so again, again, you got to think of
access to information, right? When we first, Absolutely. When the information first
hit us, it was, it was, it was
just fear. It, Fear and fear mongering, like,
just like information overload and all the negative. So my initial
re was like, okay, I'm gonna put the mask on.

(51:14):
I put the mask on. But to your point though, as I started
understanding and I started watching the science come in, I'm going, okay,
what, what, what, what are we doing here now? Like, right? I take it off
and I'm going, something doesn't seem right here. Like,
how is this a, like, I, I, I started even
like, understanding definitions of pandemics, epidemics,

(51:35):
like, starting, I started researching, like, what does that mean? And like I'm saying, so
I take the mask off and I went, no,
I'm not doing this. So now, so, but again, in fairness,
my initial reaction was to put it on because of all of the information that
came at me all at once. And it was all fear mongering right?
Now, as for the shot, I got it. But

(51:58):
there was a, there was a very selfish reason for that.
Okay? They wouldn't let me go on vacation unless I had it. So
I was like, I was like. Listen,
just, I'm going to, I'm going to the Bahamas. Just stick it. I don't give
a crap. So there was, there was a, there was a, there was a gain.
The pro and con of gain from my family was that we all went on

(52:20):
vacation and nobody else was going on vacation at that time. So sure, we had
an awesome cruise. There was nobody on the boat.
And because we had that, that card that said, said we had been
vaccinated, we didn't have have to wear masks on the boat. We, we were able
to walk around the Boat free and clear of the so again. But it was
calculating, it was critical. Think to your point. Exactly your point. We

(52:42):
used critical thinking and, and pros and cons and weighing the, the
risks for our family based on
the information that we had. Right. So again to your point about, and by the
way, I, I, I, I, I feel
kind of sheepish like I followed the sheep in the beginning of that because like
I said, I just, I fell for the, the fear mongering that happened.

(53:06):
It only took, it took me. It took us a couple weeks once we got
through all the, of the, all that initial wave of like, oh crap,
this is like the world is ending like that. Because that's the information we got.
All the news media, every, the world is ending. You're all gonna die.
Everyone's gonna die. Like this is gonna kill everybody. This is gonna be the next
Spanish flu that kills. Oh, this is the next bubonic

(53:26):
plague that's gonna kill X. That's all we heard
for weeks on end. So anyway, so I,
it's not that. No. And then by the way, I'm not suggesting you made the
wrong, like you were saying, like I, I don't feel like I made the wrong
choice because again, once I realized the facts
that off and throw it away. Yeah. Excuse my language. But I was like, forget

(53:47):
this, this is dumb. Like what are we doing here, people? Like, this is, I
think, I think. I only wore a mask once and that was because
somebody who I personally knew and trusted
ask me to do so in an environment to protect I believe
was their, their mother in law. Okay. And because
that person asked me directly, not the state

(54:09):
compelling me. Yeah. Not a bureaucrat on TV
saying stuff. Right. That I could then go back check
on this great sampling tool we have called Google.
Not because of any of those reasons, but because somebody who I knew and
trusted said, hey, go do this. I

(54:30):
said sure, because I trust you and because I value our relationship
with you. Yeah. I don't care in
this environment, in this moment, to your point about fear, when
the entire narrative is being pushed through a fear based
lens and we're not letting go of that. And then of
course it's going to spiral out into a bunch of other different things. We don't

(54:50):
need to get into all that. I'm just keeping this very narrow. Yeah. Yeah. I.
And maybe it's my temperament, I'll admit that. And temperaments are
different among people. Maybe it's my psychological makeup.
Maybe I'm just designed to be more rebellious. Whatever. Maybe.
But I just Said no.

(55:12):
Now, if you ask me during that time why I was saying no, I
could give you the, the meanings and the understandings all the way down. And by
the way, I talk with my family about this. And we made decisions all the
way down, some of which, by the way, cost us money.
There was, there was no consequence free decision here, by the way. That's what
adults understand. There's no consequence free decision. Leaders understand

(55:35):
this. Every decision has consequences. Do I know people who died of
COVID Absolutely I do. Do I know people who got the.
Got the vaccine or got the jab, however you want to frame that, and then
had problems later? Absolutely. And do I know people who got
it and we're just fine. Absolutely. Yeah. There you
go. Got it. And we're just fine. Absolutely right.

(55:59):
And went on vacation because of it. And went on vacation because of it. Actually,
I know a guy who he. He couldn't get his pilot's license
in a, in a branch of the military that he's in.
And he was like, well, this is my job. I got to feed my family.
And so he made that decision based on that. And I've talked to him subsequent

(56:19):
to that and he said, I probably wouldn't make that same decision
again. These are the kinds of
dynamics that have to. My intro
sort of brought up all this stuff that, that, that Hannah
Aaron was talking about with Eichmann and what is
the duties of a law abiding citizen. Now we're in a

(56:42):
space and I want to revisit what Tom said about AI. We're in a
space now where the algorithm, we are
outsourcing our brains to the algorithm. If the algorithm tells us what to do. We're
already seeing this with people, though. The algorithm tells us what to do,
we just do what the algorithm says. And instead
of it being the rule of nobody from nowhere,

(57:04):
now it's the rule of an AI from
nowhere. When the AI screws up. Here's my
giant question. When the AI screws up and gives us
the wrong information and we all followed it off the cliff like lemmings and no
one, or very few say no. That's
a disaster. That's a disaster. Bigger even than Covid.

(57:26):
Who will we hold responsible? Because the AI cannot
think. And if there were no.
The 2008 financial collapse, one of the massive critiques from the left is that during
the 2008 financial collapse, no
banker was put on trial or went to jail.

(57:49):
That's a legitimate point. I have a problem with that. One
of the critiques of some of the things around COVID
19 has been, not one bureaucrat has been put in jail
are made to do a perp walk. That's a legitimate
critique. Not one. As a matter of fact, there have been
a lot of articles written from places like the Atlantic and other

(58:12):
approved outlets like CNN and MSNBC that we should all just
sort of forget this and just sort of move on. Okay.
When there is no one to perp walk, when there
is no one to blame, when it is the algorithm, and the
algorithm does not think, what will we do then?

(58:33):
I don't think we have an answer for that question. Matter of fact, I don't
think we're conceptualizing it. No, we don't. But that's kind of what I, I. Said
earlier, and that's what you said earlier. Yeah, somebody, somebody has to
put some guardrails up. Somebody has to start governing
this. Like it's like, it is what it is. Like.
Okay, we, we, When Google first came

(58:54):
out and people were getting all this information thrown at them by Google,
nobody said we should be making sure this information
is legitimate. But somebody
did. Eventually us as consumers pushed back and said, hey, Google, why
do you keep showing me this crap like I keep asking you for, I
don't know how many, how many

(59:16):
orangutans are, are left in Borneo. I don't know, whatever. I'm just. Yeah, yeah, whatever.
No idea where that just came from. But you know,
you ask that and it comes up with some random crap and then you're like,
so eventually Google had to put its own guardrails up, but it was because
we had massive amounts of people saying, your search is giving me
crap. Like, your search is giving me garbage. Your search is giving me garbage. Like,

(59:39):
fix it, fix it, fix it. And they eventually fixed it, but it was,
but we have some, we have to start doing that now with
the AIs of the world because we're already starting to see what
you're talking about. And you just said that. So a
large language models are starting to produce content
at a, at a pace that is

(01:00:01):
unprecedented in our, in, in our history. And
it's, that's, that's not even the right way to word it. It's,
it's. I, I, I heard a statistic the other day and I, I have
nowhere to justify this, so we can fact check it later or whatever. But it's
something to the, to the point of like,

(01:00:22):
every year more data is created
than every year behind it combined. Or,
yeah, I've heard that effect. Right? I've heard Something like that. Yeah, I've heard something.
Yes. Think about that for a second. So every year, meaning,
let's just use small numbers for a second. Okay, sure, yeah. One

(01:00:43):
plus one plus one is two. Two. So the next year
it's five instead of two and the next year
it's 10 instead of five. Like that's what we're talking about here, people.
Every single year more information is putting, being put on
the Internet now. Especially now because of things like chat GPT and
Claude and perplexity and all these other AIs

(01:01:06):
that nobody's policing what the information is in
worse off, the AIs are starting to use each each other
as reference. So like, okay, again just
let's be clear here. Chachi PT produces a
document that nobody fact checks and just
gets put on on the, on the Internet. The next AI

(01:01:27):
reads that document, it doesn't know if it's right or wrong or good or
bad or, or it just uses it as a reference point for,
to produce another document. We are having bad
decisions like influence bad decisions influence
bad decisions at an enormously increased clip.

(01:01:47):
At some point, at some point you know that, that
old adage, garbage in, garbage out. Like, like you put garbage in, you're going to
get garbage out. Well, we're seeing the garbage come out right now, people.
Can we, we should, can we stop it please? Like, can we
should, we should have, we should have a logo for all the LLMs. LLMs.
Allowing you to make bad decisions faster. Yeah, right.

(01:02:11):
And I'm not saying they're all bad. Don't get me wrong. Like, is there a
place for AI? Absolutely. I think there, there's use cases for it. I think AI
is helpful. I think there's a lot of benefit to it. Blah, blah, blah, blah.
Yeah, all that stuff is right. But if we, if we
take just the good and ignore the bad, we're going to
end up in a bad predicament later.

(01:02:34):
So I guess the core question as we kind of round the corner on this
episode, there's a ton of other stuff in Eichmann in Jerusalem.
I strongly recommend you reading leaders reading it.
There's even a good. Oh, not a good. There's a, an
interesting piece in there. An interesting chapter.
Not piece interesting chapter in Eichmann in Jerusalem.

(01:02:57):
It is,
is the, the chapters on the way. Not every country
that the Nazis conquered deported their
Jews. We tend to think that every country went along
and not every country did. Matter of fact, a notable country that did not go

(01:03:18):
along was Denmark. And actually the king of Denmark
Just simply said no.
Pushed back. Right. And pushed back on the furor and said, just, no, we're just,
we're not sending you our Jews. And if you come to get them.
Oh, no, actually it wasn't that one. It was. What do you say? Because it
was the star to identify them. He's like, okay, well, everybody in the country will

(01:03:41):
wear. Will wear. Will wear a yellow star, so good
luck. So
there was leadership, courage during
World War II. Yeah. From a country that couldn't even fight back either.
Like, that's the other thing. Like, they didn't even have the mechanism to fight. If
Hitler decided, okay, fine, then I'm just gonna go destroy everybody with the star.

(01:04:02):
Like, he would have wiped out the whole country. And. And they would. They would
not have been able to do much about it. But he stood up.
You. This is again, the core lessons in here
are not about a rebel yellow and a
southern flag. You know, they're not about
rednecks or MAGA or any of that other kind of garbage that people

(01:04:25):
think of when the right people thinking. The right thinking people think of
rebellion. It's not. That's not the lessons. The lessons in here aren't even about
good old fashioned American, because those are people in Europe. Good old
fashioned American cussedness. The Patrick Henry type that we have a
strain of. I've talked about those podcasts. A strain of that runs in
our national character quite strongly and of

(01:04:47):
course came out during COVID uncritically, but did come out.
This is about humans, human leaders
looking at the people who are working for them
and saying, we're not going to have any Eichmanns here and it doesn't
matter if everybody else goes off the cliff with the AIs,

(01:05:08):
which is what's going to happen in the future. It is going to happen. Someone's
going to go off the cliff with the, with the algorithms. The ones
who don't go off the cliff with the algorithms will be led by leaders
who will do two things. One, combine a
thoughtful bureaucrat to monitor the AI
and back check it. But then number two,

(01:05:30):
will also override both the thoughtful
bureaucrat who can be convinced of something and
override the AI and say, kind
of like in the great submarine movie Crimson Tide
or, you know, the Hunt for Red October. No,
we're not going to launch the nukes. We're

(01:05:53):
just not. Well, what if we die? Well, then I
guess we die. It's been glorious.
I'll see you all on the other side, I guess. Or maybe not.
I Hope you. Hope you're praying up even tithing like good
Catholics. But this is the posture
that we have to take as human leaders, I think, moving forward into our

(01:06:15):
AI driven future. Because when we have the rule of nobody from
nowhere, to paraphrase from Matthew Crawford, we don't want
to have people in those bureaucratic positions who are like
Winston in 1984, who will just comply and say, two and
two is five, no matter what their eyes actually see.
There's a. There's a fundamental problem that I think we have too, as leaders.

(01:06:39):
So, like, okay, so let's say. Let's say you're. You're trying to build
an organization that gives people that autonomy to
say no, right? Like, you're, you're looking at it from a. You know,
again, we, We. You've seen this a thousand times where people will say,
well, I'm the kind of owner of a company, or I'm the kind of president
of a leader of a company, whatever. People can come to me with any idea,

(01:07:01):
no idea is a dumb idea, I'll listen, blah, blah, blah, Great.
If I, if I tell people to do something, I want them to push back,
if they, if they feel compelled to do so, great.
That. That's not the challenge. Saying that is easy, right?
When it happens, your reaction is
the hard part. Because here's what I've

(01:07:25):
experienced in my lifetime with, with leaders who were
saying that they accept all of what we're talking about,
what they never, what they have a hard time learning. And I, and I,
I, I would love to hear your thoughts on this and where we can learn.
How do you learn how to be better at this? When

(01:07:45):
that person tells you the idea, how do you make
them feel like it's not a dumb idea when you're not going to do it?
Like, so you're. I want you to give me all your ideas. I know. No
idea is a dumb idea, right? Okay, Hasan, you got this great idea. And I'm
thinking in the back of my head, this guy's a complete idiot. What is he
talking about? But I can't say that to him, right? Because I want this culture

(01:08:05):
in my company of willingness to say no, willingness to push back,
willingness to come with ideas to the table, all that stuff that
we're just talking about. And the first words out of my mouth are, you
know what? Hey, son, that sounds like a great idea. But. And as soon as
you say but, they shut down, they're like, I'm out. I'm done. I'm not
listening. Because you don't. You don't really think my idea is good. You don't really

(01:08:26):
like me. You don't. You don't want to hear me. You don't want to listen.
You're not really listening. Like, they go off on this
tangent in their own head. Oh, yeah, how do we not do that
as a leader? How do we take that environment that
we want to build, that we all want to build? Well, I would
imagine most people listening to this podcast, that's why they're listening to it. They want
to hear. That's good. Lessons, leaders.

(01:08:49):
I've never found anybody. Now, I'm not excluding myself, by the
way, because I try to have that open dialogue and that opens all the
time. But I am one of those people that'll say, hey, listen. And
I tried. I think I'm being good about it, right? And
I can see it right in their face. I can. I watch the micro
expressions in their face just look definitely defeated. And I don't know what else to

(01:09:11):
say to them when I say, you know what, hey, son, that's a great idea,
but we're going to go a little bit different direction because, you know,
the, the research has shown this, studies have shown us that
whatever. And, like, so we're going to go in this direction now on
a rare occasion where somebody says, but, Tom, the research is wrong,
you're looking at, you know, go check this and go check that. Okay? But that

(01:09:33):
doesn't happen often. It. I think it's the. I think what we're
asking people to do is learn and have the ability to say no twice.
Like, at least twice. Because you say no once and that you get
pushed back from the leadership and you become defeated and walk away.
If you're willing to say no twice and stand your ground on your moral
compass or your. Or your whatever, where it is. We're talking about

(01:09:56):
your thought process, your own research. You did, like, you went and
you found something for the company or whatever. If you
can say no twice. And it makes me now really check
my theory and philosophy about running the, the company being a good leader.
If you say no to the second time. And I'm like, okay, hold on a
second now. All right, let me, Let me hear the whole thing now, because now

(01:10:18):
you got my attention. Like, but leaders don't.
It's not that we don't have the ability to do that. It's just that as
soon as we say no, but, you know, or. It's
a great idea, but thanks for bringing that to my attention. But as soon as
we say the word but it's over. How do we say that to
them without saying the word but so that we can tell them that we want.

(01:10:39):
To engage you Say the word and.
Walk me through that. I like, I want to hear. I want to
hear how. Okay, so here's how it would sound. So you're going to bring me
this wild and crazy idea right tomorrow and you're going to tell me something
that's totally, completely the opposite of the vision or maybe goes

(01:11:00):
a different direction of the vision or the goals than what we, than what we
want to have or whatever. And I know what the vision and goals are. I
know that you don't have all the information. You bring me the idea
and I let you talk. That's the first thing. I created an environment where you
can actually talk and you feel comfortable to bring it to me in the first
place. So it's not a fear based environment. It's actually a growth environment.
Okay, so that's sort of the, the table stakes,

(01:11:23):
right? To begin with, I eliminate. But from my response,
I say, Tom, that is a great idea. And I would like you to go
do some more research on that, find me everything that's possible about that
idea and come up with a plan for me for how we can execute on
this in the next six months.
I didn't say I wouldn't do it. I didn't say it didn't fit. I didn't

(01:11:46):
say I wasn't interested. Even my facial expression, my micro expressions are
ones of curiosity and are ones of interest. I'm not
telling you what I don't, what I know. Because see, here's the thing most
leaders fail to understand.
This is going to be a hard truth coming out of here. But I think
Hannah Arendt would appreciate this. Most leaders have to

(01:12:09):
understand that most people don't really care what you
know, they care what they can bring
to the table. They care very much about how they feel about what they
can bring to the table. And they care very much about
the advancing of themselves coming to the table. It
is rare that you are going to find someone who can handle the

(01:12:31):
butt in that sentence and still go away undefeated.
So since that's a rarity in the beginning, we have to create the
table stakes of the environment. This is what I would do if I was advising.
This is what I would say. We have to create the table stakes of the
environment where that trust building can begin. And then we have to
continually build on those building blocks with every single word that we say. And

(01:12:51):
so it has to be intentional. So we replace the but with
an and. We replace the but with an or.
And here's the other thing we do when that person comes back
to us because they will. We
take seriously what they have brought. Brought to us. And we
say, thank you for bringing this to me and doing the research. You clearly have

(01:13:14):
looked at this. This is what I've seen. Where are the gaps?
And now we're actually collaborating. Now we're actually being innovative.
Now we're actually moving the thing forward at
scale. This defeats us because at a certain
point we can't know everybody and everybody's personalities. By the
way, Dunbar's number says that we can only keep track of about

(01:13:36):
150 people. 150 different relationships in our head at any
given point. Any given point. Most humans can't go past that.
And so scale defeats us, which is why we have to have good lieutenants
and good captains who are also trained in not saying
the word but.

(01:13:58):
And that's really hard.
So I gave you the correct answer. And I also gave you the
answer that's really hard, which is why it's the correct one.
I get it. And
Tom's gotta go. Tom's got a hard stop here coming up in about three

(01:14:20):
minutes. And we didn't really resolve anything today, but.
But we did. I'm out. You said, but I'm out.
We did successfully discuss and talk about some of the
themes, a couple of the themes, anyway. I think the core theme actually in
Eichmann in Jerusalem by Hannah Arendt. I would encourage you to pick this

(01:14:42):
book up if you are a leader and read it closely. I would also
encourage you to watch the video on Hannah Arendt and the
article that we are going to link to about AI from Matthew Crawford that are
going to be in the links in the show notes
below, the player of whatever podcast player you are listening to
this podcast on. And I would like to thank

(01:15:03):
Tom Libby for coming on and joining us today. And with that, well,
we're out.

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Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil by Hannah Arendt - w/Tom Libby and Jesan Sorrells

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil by Hannah Arendt - w/Tom Libby and Jesan Sorrells