Writing About Podcasts in Restaurants
And I quote from Seth Goding @sethgodin.com, the following observation: “There are more than a million podcasts. The good news is that it’s easy to start one. The top 1% of all podcasts account for 99% of all downloads. That means that if your goal is reach, the long tail isn’t going to help much. The short head, even in a medium as wide open as this, dominates consumption. Lots of podcasts to choose from, but most people don’t choose."(https://seths.blog/2026/06/the-relentless-math-of-the-long-tail/)
He makes a much longer point about fat heads and long tails, but there is another point Seth doesn’t emphasize, which is worth pursuing. The actions, behaviors, understanding, and thinking that make the algorithm that controls reach, give, or take away from a podcast creator operating on the fat head, are not the same actions, behaviors, beliefs, understanding, and thinking that reward podcast creators who want depth on the long-tail.
In principle, what this means is that podcast creators have to be willing to think, write, create, and distribute using the mechanics of platforms like Spotify, Apple, YouTube, and others, without succumbing to the seductive pull of those platforms' reductive logic. What has really brought this idea home has been my reading a collection of essays by the great playwright and Hollywood director, David Mamet, and his 1987 collection of essays, Writing in Restaurants.
Mamet deeply understood, even in 1987, that the theater building, the production company, the stage itself, could not be confused with the acting, writing, directing, or even the marketing of the play, the movie, or the television show. And even at a deeper level, he understands that creators must get comfortable with the philosophy of the thing they are doing, rather than confusing that thing with all the infrastructure surrounding that thing. He even parses these distinctions with regard to critics and their critical writing about theater productions. In other words, Mamet understood at a level deeper than most modern “content creators” exactly what he was creating, for whom he was creating it, and what the trade-offs were going to result in, in terms of opportunities, freedom, and, of course, money.
In our time, podcasts are probably the last pure Internet-based medium that, through its various rises and falls over the last twenty-five years, can support the kind of thinking and philosophizing that theater itself grew to support in the 1960s and 1970s in this country and globally. The kind of thinking and philosophizing that Mamet grew to a sharp point in the 1980s. This means it’s probably time for podcast creators to start writing, talking, and publishing about not the mechanics of podcasting, the vagaries of YouTube, or even the flood of commercial shows in the market sucking up audience attention; but, instead, beginning conversations about what it means to podcast. And what it requires of a creator at a real level.
Maybe these conversations are happening in places this author and podcaster is unaware of. After all, other than talking to my guests, I don’t have interaction with other podcast creators or producers. So maybe that’s on me. There is a way to do podcasting, after all, where the host/producer/creator is, for all intents and purposes a man +1 show. But if these conversations are happening, among the more than a million podcast creators in the world, they are happening in such a muted fashion that they aren’t breaking through the zeitgeist of podcasting itself in any meaningful fashion.
Maybe this is all “inside baseball.” But I think the best way to become more impactful in podcasting is to go out further and further on the long tail, reveal the inside mechanics to the outside audience, and stop chasing the seductive idea of optimizing more and more for the platforms–or the stages and the production companies, if you will–and really getting down to brass tacks.
I think guys like David Mamet would appreciate that.
Sports Metaphors With a High Batting Average
Sports and military metaphors dominate in both the business and start-up worlds. Such metaphors, stories, and anecdotes are an easy heuristic for explaining concepts that are hard for people who aren’t “in the game,” as it were. Of course, the plethora and misuse of such metaphors, stories, analogies, and parallels have diluted their impact over time. But that hasn’t stopped their use.
Because humans are inherently lazy and we like mental shortcuts.
The sport of baseball used to be the most popular team sport in the United States, until it was eclipsed in popularity by American football. Not to be confused with soccer, American football is a team game where one player can have a terrible day, and the team can still pull out a win. There’s a leader/manager in the quarterback position, and then there’s plenty of support staff who go unrecognized, unheralded, and unacknowledged. The game of American football is a wonderful metaphor for 20th and 21st-century corporate culture.
But baseball is fundamentally different. Not just in the fact that it is a different game that requires the mastery of a different set of skills, but also in the fact that baseball, as a game, celebrates individual achievement at the expense of the team. In baseball, an individual player can have a great game, and the team loses. But the team can still win a big game, even if an individual hitter can’t get on base to save his life. The game of baseball is a wonderful metaphor for the late 19th century and early to mid 20th century small business community culture that we have forgotten, or abandoned in our current corporatized and “financialized to the nth degree” era.
Which is why baseball has been fading in this country in popularity since the 1960s, and the lights may go out entirely within the next 100 years on that sport.
One of the greatest hitters of the 20th century was a player named Tony Gwynn. He was a right fielder who played 20 seasons in Major League Baseball for the San Diego Padres. The left-handed hitting Gwynn drove pitchers like the notorious Greg Maddux to absolute distraction by being able to “read” the stitches on the baseball as it was coming into the plate at 99 miles per hour and still hit the ball. He would regularly get on base and was a reliable .300 hitter for his entire career. This means, for every 10 at-bats, he would get on base at least 3 times, which is almost superhuman. The Major League Baseball average is .250, and the great Ted Williams is the only player to ever hit .400.
However, Tony Gwynn would have never gotten on base at all if he had never gotten into the batter’s box, set his feet, and swung the bat. And every time he did it, he memorized the patterns, not only of the ball and its movement toward the plate, but also of the pitchers and how they moved, pitched, and behaved. He was a student of the thing he was doing. He was a student of baseball. And he loved being a student of baseball.
A lot of us stop being students after we leave school. Our love of learning is ground out of us. And our desire to have the sure and the right answer at all times is built up in us. But the world we are building of the future is not a world of reliable football players, led by a spectacularly talented and spectacularly compensated quarterback. Instead, the world of the baseball player, the world of Tony Gwynn, is the world we are preparing to enter. A world where the passion for learning, deeply, the thing you are most interested in doing, is going to be the thing that pays the most money, because in a world of LLMs, it will be the thing that will be the most scarce.
In order to become those scarce players, we need to be guiding, mentoring, coaching, and teaching the people we are leading to love learning. To love the hard parts of becoming better at a skill set every day that may take a long time to be financially rewarded. And to build a habit of curiosity and learning that no LLM can outstrip.
Seeking an Authentic Original
Before the advent of the Internet, culture was driven by derivations. Derivations of ideas, concepts, and thoughts that were once original, but then, through the impact of other people, those ideas were watered down. This was a phenomenon most nakedly seen in the creative fields, and more carefully hidden in the more materially oriented fields. But derivation from an original idea is something that human beings have been doing for a long, long time.
With the coming of the Internet, though, this process of derivation increased in speed. Because the volume of people who had the ability to publish their ideas–original or not–increased by an exponential factor. With such an increase in speed from hard-won original thought to cheaply bought derivation, the work of being an “authentic” individual, with a unique perspective, shifted from being hard, to being difficult.
And in the future, with our LLM toys and tools, this shift will move from being difficult to seeming to be impossible. As a matter of fact, this shift is already beginning to occur. This is not because we don’t have original ideas. And it isn’t because we have an avalanche of slop derivations. And it isn’t because humans are lazy and would rather play the easy, short-term game of just copying slop rather than doing the hard work of coming up with an original idea.
The shift is happening because when humans with access to mass-scale communication technology get together, it takes a while for the humans to determine what the hard work is that is scarce, and thus creates outcomes that are valuable and worth paying for. Of course, humans tend to align to the belief–stated and unstated–that what is scarce and valuable is only what is materially beneficial. But that’s not true. Nor is that particularly an original alignment.
It’s going to take a long time to figure out scarcity in a world of seeming idea abundance. And we’re going to, all the while, be searching for an original idea.
Stepping Into the Path of Pain
Some acts are easy to commit to, and others are hard. Most of how we categorize the “hardness” or “easiness” of a particular act comes down to our own individual temperaments.
We rarely address the factors involved in structuring temperament, except in a psychological sense. And even then, we do it rarely and poorly. This is because temperament is highly individualized and particularized to how identity is structured, from our biology all the way to cultural influences. The structure of individual temperament also involves examining inputs that exist down deep inside of people that we don’t like to talk about at polite cocktail parties.
Determining that which is hard and differentiating from that which is easy is a category problem in and of itself. One that requires returning to individual first principles and questioning personal bedrock assumptions in ways that emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually cause mental pain. Unfortunately, we are deep into an era of individuals avoiding, mitigating, and side-stepping all kinds of pain, from emotional pain to mental pain, in favor of doing more of that which is perceived as easy.
Figuring out, as an individual in this era, how to step directly into the path of such pain, in order to categorize and differentiate “hard” tasks from “easy” tasks, is probably the primary challenge of our denatured times.
Weight to Carry
One of the more damaging features of the cultural, social and political chaos we’ve experienced in the past twenty-five years, has been the placing of psychological, emotional, and spiritual weight onto institutional structures not designed to carry the load. Family, tradition, neighborhoods, used to be the places that carried the psychological, emotional, and spiritual loads for individuals when they could no longer carry the weight for themselves. But over the course of the last few decades–at least two generations and maybe even three–those places have eroded. Eroded in power. Eroded in prestige. Eroded in importance.
The problem, of course, is that individuals don’t just stop needing help in carrying the loads they bear, and so, the carrying has shifted to institutions that were meant to be the last resort to carry such loads: the workplace, the government, or even the society at large. But the workplace isn’t a substitute for the support of family and friends. The government can take from one person (or group of people) through redistribution and give to another person (or group of people), but it can’t do so fairly and equitably. The society can’t take up an individual’s personal spiritual, psychological, or emotional problems while at the same time adjudicating everyone else’s unique issues.
This is the deep reason that all the interventions we’ve tried as a culture and a society, from the Great Society programs of the 1970s to the therapeutic language and social identity policing we do today, have not worked to produce outcomes of unity, stability, and social peace. They have instead produced chaos, disunity, and a fractured moral order.
Here’s a great irony: The people who were always emotionally, spiritually, or psychologically relegated to the edges of family, tradition, and neighborhoods, the people who always felt suffocated and “put upon” by social strictures and structures, don’t believe they’re doing great now. They moved their personal spiritual, psychological, or emotional problems from the edges of family, traditions, and neighborhoods, and successfully “centered” those problems in institutional spaces like the workplace, adjudicated them through government power, and talked about them endlessly in societal discourse. And the outcomes haven’t been what they long desired. Weirdly enough, there’s more social suffocation, the more open every privately held problem has become.
The solution to this is a trade-off. And a brutal one at that. Social pressure to reprivatize the personal spiritual, psychological, or emotional problems that people experience at the edges of family, tradition, and neighborhood is gradually and imperceptibly increasing. Over the next twenty-five years, the pressure to societally swing back towards what folks on the edges call “suffocation and compliance” and what the rest of us call “the center” will be enormous.
But such a swing will allow the institutions to heal from the damage of attempting to carry weight they were never structured to carry.
Searching for a Use Case
Thirty years ago, very few businesses and services built atop Industrial Revolution assumptions inherent in mass employment, mass housing, mass media, and mass markets could pivot to the Internet. A place built on oppositional assumptions clustered around long-tails, niche tastes, small audiences, and rabid tribes.
Now, we have transitioned as many businesses and services as possible to the current Internet-driven paradigm. There are still remnants of businesses and services built on the old Industrial Revolution model, and there is still rampant emotional and cultural nostalgia for the safety and seeming solidity of “the good old days.” But by and large, the assumptions of the Internet continue their relentless march across our markets, our behaviors, our psyches, and our assumptions.
The current hype cycle around large-language models and machine learning is largely similar in tone, emotional content, and perspective to the previous Internet hype cycle that existed back when Pets.com was advertising opposite the Super Bowl around 1999 or so. Just as then, we currently are so early with our large-language models that we don’t have a “use case” for productivity, service, entertainment, or markets that seems to justify the current LLM hype cycle. Just as we didn’t have use cases at the arrival of the Internet.
But the use cases will arrive.
The hype cycle will collapse.
And out of the trillion dollars of hype cycle rubble left behind (it was billions after the dot-com crash in 2000-2002), businesses and services that were built on the assumptions of niche, long-tails, and tribalism will either adapt or expire. Even as new assumptions–LLM-driven assumptions–will begin their thirty-year-long takeover of our markets, our behaviors, our psyches, and our assumptions. Rest assured, it will take about thirty years for the takeover to even be 85% complete. No matter how hot the current friction is right now around LLMs.
When humans figure out how to make a technology work, when they stumble on an appropriate use case, they move like lightning, and all of us wonder how we lived without it. The fascinating element in all of this is who, exactly, will see the future use case and have the courage to go first.
Every Man Did What Was Right In His Own Eyes
The Bible is full of wild stories.
Some of the wildest are in the Book of Judges in the Old Testament.
The book is a story of the transformation of Old Testament Israel from being a people and a country of promise under the rule of Yahweh through their ignominious decline as a nation-state as they chased–and were chased by–other gods. The struggle, ignominy, and decline are framed as a loss of cultural faith, a loss of national perspective, and a loss of focused tribal obedience in terms of worshipping Yahweh in the way that Yahweh commanded He be worshipped.
We moderns, in our own era, read the Book of Judges and are perplexed as to its relevance to our sophisticated, materialistic, technologically driven era, where Yahweh doesn’t even get a seat at the table of our epistemological assumptions. The relevance is there, though.
Read in purely naturalistic terms, the highs and lows in the Book of Judges map neatly to the period of cultural unraveling that took place in the United States, starting from the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963 and culminating in the horror of September 11, 2001. The people of the United States during that interregnum period had no earthly idea why the “center” was failing to hold, solipsism was taking hold, and “every man did what was right in his own eyes.” The seeds of the cultural chaos of that era, the unraveling, bore fruit in the chaotic cultural period following September 11th.
The period that just ended, in the United States, with the attempted assassination of our current President in July 2024.
The Book of Judges is currently closed as a salient reference point to our particular historical and cultural moment. But have no fear. It will be opened back up again in about 2060 or so.
Right around the time of the next secular unraveling.
What is Valuable?
For most of human history, the value of labor was so inexpensive that it was below cheap. This is one of the mainly unstated reasons why human slavery of all kinds flourished all over the world for as long as it did. There were a lot of extra humans, and it was too expensive to just allow them to exist. And besides, work needed to be done.
Farm work.
Building work.
Hauling work.
House work.
Fighting work.
But when the Industrial Revolution began, human labor started to become more expensive, and the value of that labor began to increase. Sure, factory labor was hard, but it was less likely to be devalued if the person running the machine knew more about how to turn out a product on a repeat basis than the guy running the business. Even if that guy had started the business by turning the product out himself.
Then, computers came along, and knowledge became specialized. And with specialization, labor tottered precariously between being expensive (after all, there are still a lot of humans around) and being cheap (after all, there is still a lot of work to be done). Add to this the fact that monetizing knowledge is hard because it tends to develop on a long timeline (20-25+ years), and you’ve got a situation where labor and knowledge have been in a weird truce for some time.
But now, since the advent of the Internet, knowledge is perceived as being cheap. And since knowledge is cheap, human labor must return to the forefront in value. Except that the LLMs combined with robotics will render both labor and knowledge increasingly inexpensive, but also unevenly.
So, how can humans differentiate themselves from both knowledge and labor in order to create value for other humans and to accomplish all the work that (still) needs to be done in the world?
I don’t have the answer to that question, nor does anyone else.
I know what the answers aren’t. And Universal Basic Income–or money for just hanging around and existing–is not one of them. I also know that human creativity, unbound from both knowledge and labor, is a petri dish in which all the old spiritual and psychological diseases that still beset us as a species will grow and flourish in unprecedented ways. I also know that the smartest people in the world don’t have any other answers to the question either.
We are all in this together now.
Selling Someone Out
Betraying a person’s confidence to gain personal advantage, and yet not being sure why you are doing it and what end it serves, is where the erosion of trust begins.
And once trust in a high-trust society, bound by traditions, family bonds, and the surety of community, is riven by such erosion, the beginning of social chaos is not far behind.
But a society that is eroding in trust can survive chaos, adapt to it, and emerge on the other side with a different sort of trust schema altogether by individuals refusing to play the game of selling out their principles, their values, or their relationships. It’s a lot of psychological, moral, and emotional weight for individuals to carry during times of chaos, when it seems as though every bond around them is fraying, tearing, and breaking.
But it’s only the act of buying in that works to preserve, not what was in the past, but the circumstances–fragile though they may be–for a different, and potentially better, future. Otherwise, the Hobbesian war of “all against all” breaks out and then nothing worth preserving remains.
And it’s monstrously difficult to cobble together a high-trust society again out of nothing.
The Limits of Witness and Understanding
When we observe an event, whether the observation occurs in real life or online, we cannot truly be sure of what we have seen. Over the last quarter-century, we have built a genuine, skeptical panopticon online, where everyone knows that everyone is seeking to market to everyone else. Thus, we live–with increasing comfort–the conclusion that there cannot be truth from the systems in the box in our hands and on our desks.
There are people who will claim that both the panopticon construction and comfort with a lack of belief in reality have always been with us and are nothing new and nothing to be alarmed at. These same people blithely declare that “Technologies don’t change people. Technologies just reveal who people always were.” I believe the marketer and social media hustler, Gary Vaynerchuk, once loudly declared that in some video I saw of him on YouTube.
What is missed in such superficial analysis is the erosion of witness and the erosion of understanding. If we cannot understand what we are seeing, how are we to make any critical decisions, engage in critical analysis, or make an impact if our internal ability to discern the external discourse is constantly in question? The answer is, of course, we can make those decisions, and we then outsource the decision-making and the hard parts of witnessing events in the world to people with titles, positions, and authority. Many of whom aren’t any better at observing and analyzing than you or I are.
Sure, there are experts. But collectively, we have built a social panopticon that may have started with the best intentions of opening up all of our eyes to see more. And has wound up closing our eyes to the things of value that needed to be observed to be maintained by everybody, and not just “experts” with titles, degrees, positions, and fancy PR firms.
We live in a time where everyone has more data points about everyone else than ever before, and yet, we know much less than people who came before us about each other than ever before.
That’s not just a problem of technology.
The Word 'Secular' Means Now
The word secular comes from a root that means “age,” “generation,” or “lifetime.” When it is put in front of another word, it indicates the power of the present and the immediacy of now.
For instance, the terms “secular traditions,” “secular morality,” or “secular thinking” are all indicative of traditions, morality, or thinking that is focused on the present time, without reference to the past.
If we are doyens of progress, and most of us, even the most religious of us, are, then usage of the word “secular” shouldn’t give us that much pause. But if we are doyens of tradition, family, community, or of ideas, themes, or myths that are from the past–and that have proved to be useful regardless of which time they come from–then perhaps our language should shift away from secular terminology and toward language that is more eternal.
Old Ideas
There are old ideas—and “old” just means “ideas we don’t think will ‘work’ in whatever cultural, economic, or political ordering is in vogue now”—that sometimes need new traction.
Ideas fall out of favor for a variety of reasons that reflect cultural evolution. When this evolution reaches a standstill (or when going forward seems scarier than standing still), old ideas from the past tend to return.
Unfortunately, the speed of the Internet has convinced humanity (at least in some places on the globe) that the speed of cultural evolution should match the speed with which an individual can order a latte from their phone. That’s never happened. Cultural evolution may seem to be faster in our time because of the ever-present nature of Internet communication, but in reality, cultural adoption of new ideas still takes at least twenty years. Or, the time it takes for a new generation of people to be born, raised, and mature enough to begin to assert themselves on reality.
Here’s a list of some old ideas that are still relevant, regardless of how quickly we all may think that society is culturally evolving:
Love your enemies.
Do good to (and for) those who would seek to do wrong to you.
Practice humility and grace.
Live your life according to a set of values, ethics, and morals that you can explain when the rubber meets the road.
Help others who are not as fortunate as you to get what they need to live..
Be interested, open, and caring about another person’s story so that you can grow as they grow.
Listen more than you talk—either with your hands or your mouth.
There are a few others, but you get the idea. When an old idea returns to prominence, we often say that it is “an idea whose time has come.”
Of course, for ideas as old as the ones above (and many others, I’m sure that you could think of), their time never really left.
Universal Basic Conflict
Granting every working-age member of a population a stipend of money per month, per year, for the rest of their lives will do little to mitigate the two states it’s designed to relieve: human avarice and envy, and a lack of meaningful employment opportunities. No matter how much the AI technologists promise that such schemes will, in some utopian future society, we will never arrive at.
Jealousy (of people), envy (of things), and avarice (the desire to acquire more) are human emotions that aren’t often acknowledged as the darker motivators for people to engage with work. All of these emotions, along with vanity and pride (all emotions grounded in negative storytelling), are typically at the bottom of many people’s motivations to chase money, status, titles, honor, and respect. And because they’re all lurking in the basement of every human heart, the materialist rationalist utopians among us are inevitably surprised when they manifest as genuine, but irrational, resistance to the desire for a Universal Basic Income-driven future.
A fellow named Dostoyevsky, however, put words to what the technologists can’t seem to name, around 160 years ago, in a pre-Industrial Revolution, agrarian monarchial society:
“Now I ask you: What can be expected of man since he is being endowed with such strange qualities? Shower upon him every earthly blessing, drown him in a sea of happiness, so that nothing but bubbles of bliss can be seen on the surface; give him economic prosperity, such that he would have nothing else to do but sleep, eat cakes, and busy himself with the continuation of the species, and even then, out of sheer ingratitude, sheer spite, man will play you a nasty trick. He would even risk his cakes and would deliberately desire the most fatal rubbish, the most uneconomical absurdity, simply to introduce into all this positive good sense his fatal fantastic element.” ~ Notes From Underground, Part One, Chapter Eight
In our post-modern society, the era of “make-work” is over. And it’s been over for a while. But the thing is, we have also arrived at the end of the hangover from the end of the Industrial Revolution, so the era of “we financialize human effort in just a little bit better ways” is also about to be over with the dominance of LLMs that can do all that average make-work better and financialize it faster.
This is a real problem because, under the scheme that has built the last 125 years of scalable economic systems, meaningful employment was typically not found at the beginning of the employment ladder in minimum wage positions for many people. But now, even those rungs of the ladder are being hewn away. Without addressing both a lack of meaningful work opportunities for people at the beginning of their careers and the inherent built-in drivers toward accomplishing goals and earning money, all the Universal Basic Income in the world will only serve to exacerbate conflict, providing enough impetus for people to engage in conflict en masse. Because without work, idle hands will surely “…play you a nasty trick.”
Work provides spiritual, psychological, and emotional meaning for many people. But because those intangible outcomes don’t appear anywhere on a spreadsheet, they are either discounted as being meaningless or not even considered in the first place. A universal basic income does nothing to address any of those needs, emotions, or drivers in people. As a matter of fact, such schemes spit in the face of human motivators and dare the human being to do something about it. History proves that’s a negotiation human beings are fine with accepting the consequences of. And just declaring “Game on” doesn’t quite do justice to what will surely result from such schemes.
Human truth and what lurks deeply in the dark human heart are fundamentally what defeat all UBI schemes, whether from the State, from businesses, or even from our current crop of techno-utopians, drunk on AI outputs. Such proposed schemes really come down to giving people money, hoping to cure the deep disease of the human heart and the human spirit without ever engaging in performing the uncomfortable surgery of examining–and acknowledging–much deeper and darker motivations. You know. Those ones that have always lived deeply in the human soul, where even the state and technology cannot reach.
This is a sure recipe for universal basic conflict. And at scale.
Wizards Searching for Backdoors
The wizards, diviners, and soothsayers of the ancient world were invited into royal courts, penned scrolls that held the keys to gnostic knowledge, and were placed at the center of ancient societies. Many of them were hired to educate the elite of their times.
As the Middle Ages closed, and the rationality project at the core of the Enlightenment really took hold of the imagination of the West, the magicians, diviners, and soothsayers were pushed to the edges of the culture (eventually to be joined there by the various religious types, but that’s another post altogether). And–to add insult to injury–their lofty claims to being able to open spiritual backdoors into a mystical world were deemed to be the irrational ravings of “humbugs,” “scammers,” “con artists,” or even “marketers.” Case in point: recall the character of the Wizard in the Wizard of Oz. He was eventually exposed as just a flim-flam dude pulling levers who couldn’t make his hot-air balloon work well enough to get back to Kansas, where he came from.
In our technological era, though, the atheist rational materialist technologists have won the day. They’ve defeated the natural world, backburnered the spiritual world, and declared, hubristically, that “we will build our own gods” by building backdoors into reality and making epistemological claims without acknowledging–or even realizing–that they’re making those claims in the first place. They continue to pursue the same gnostic path of attaining secret knowledge that their forebearers attempted through spiritual means. And of course, they all declare that they’re going to get to the same place as their forebearers–for the good of humanity–through manipulating “intelligence on silicon.”
All that lands for me like a whole lot of humbug from a bunch of flim-flam dudes at the center of the post-modern royal court of attention.
What's on Offer?
The thing that’s on offer—the thing that’s being negotiated—is rarely the thing that we are fighting over.
Our conflicts rarely get to the core truth of what needs to be resolved. This is why management of a recurring conflict situation is a better posture toward conflict than one of trying to persist in getting to a resolution. It’s also another reason why we are all terrible negotiators.
The issues that we are fighting over—and the options for resolution that should be on offer—must be sold, managed, persuaded, and packaged for other people’s consumption in the way that they want them to be on offer.
Not the way you want it to be offered.
This core truth is what unites marketing and conflict management. Human beings like being persuaded, marketed to, and talked to, in very specific ways, and if you violate conventions in the pursuit of getting to a deeper truth, you run several risks, but the biggest ones are as follows:
Being unheard.
Being ignored.
Being unfairly (or fairly) maligned.
Being marginalized when another more persuasive party comes along.
The counter to the question of “What’s on offer?” is the equally compelling question “What’s the truth of what we are fighting over?”
Moral Clarity in Confused Times
If we begin our thinking about an issue with what objective things we can know, the seduction of moral subjectivity is reduced in rhetorical power.
But, when we are bereft of moral clarity about what constitutes a lie, we are unable to individually, much less collectively, determine whether it’s a lie worth confronting (a big lie) or a lie worth letting slide (a small lie) for the sake of social lubrication.
Now there will be those who object. They will point out that “sin is sin, and a lie is a lie,” but these are the same people who don’t get invited back to Aunt Ruth’s house because they pointed out her obvious goiters and the warts and missed the larger importance of just hanging out and keeping silent. They confuse pointing out objective truths to elide truth from lies with what, in more polite times, would have just been called rudeness.
The liar always hates and fears one person most of all: himself. This is why he can’t keep his lies to himself. He has to share them with others. He also has to build a society based on lies to survive. The people who want blanket statements of truth in all circumstances also hate and fear themselves, but for reasons other than a lack of moral clarity. They simply lack moral critical thinking.
Free speech, moral clarity, and candor are the disinfectants for the scourge of lying in our times. But the tools have to be used to disinfect the culture of viruses while leaving behind the good cultural bacteria.
Obnoxious and Competent
At a job you’re typically going to do better if you’re competent at the work you’re hired to do.
If you’re lazy and incompetent no one at work will be inclined to help you or do you favors. Also, your supervisor, management, and leaders will be less inclined to preserve your job when someone better comes along.
If you’re competent and obnoxious, and no one likes you personally, but you get work done at a high level of competence, supervisors, management, and your co-workers will deal with you. And they’ll defend all manner of obnoxious behavior as long as your competency continues to increase.
Where people fail at work is that they neglect to increase their moat of competency.
And they grow their moat of obnoxiousness.
Or they grow their moats of incompetence and laziness.
None of which are going to help you when better technologies, better people, better ideas, or better systems come along to disrupt, remove, or replace you or your job.
Relevant to the Vision
In business, leaders are often tasked with selling a vision. Sometimes it’s a vision they can see because they had a hand in designing it, brainstorming about it, or attending the multiplicity of meetings it usually takes in a bureaucratic system to get a vision onto a piece of paper.
Later on, when the vision works, the leader is hailed as a visionary and is then invited to stages, platforms, and boards to tell others about how they accomplished the vision, led teams through the seeing of the vision, or wrangled support from recalcitrant others to make sure the vision stayed coherent. Of course, if the vision doesn’t work, those same leaders are castigated, criticized, and critiqued from stages, platforms, and boards by people who believe they could “do it better.”
But here’s the thing: The critics can’t do it better. That’s why they’re critics. If they could lead a team with a vision better than that of the leader, they’d be doing those acts of leadership. And the same can be observed in the opposite direction: The supporters can’t do a better job either. That’s why they’re supporters. If they could lead a team with a vision better than the leader’s, they’d be doing those acts of leadership.
If you’re in the arena, both the boos and the applause are irrelevant to the thing you’re doing.
Liars' Poker
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, a deeply pessimistic Russian writer with a streak of Orthodox Christianity that he could never reconcile with the 19th-century ideals of a mythical European rationalist utopian project, was also an inveterate gambler. This habit gave him a unique view on risk, loss, victory, and the thrills that can only emanate from the depths of resentment, envy, and anger. It also gave him insight into how individuals lie, how we lie to each other in social relationships, and how even the apparatus of the state can be corrupted by lying.
Dostoyevsky wrestled with all of this in a time before Freud’s insights into human psychology really got a hold of the Victorian mindset. His writing was positioned during a transitory era in the mid-19th century, before what we now know as “the modern world” began truly seeking the transcendent. Mostly self-published, Dostoyevsky was the anti-Tolstoy, penning The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, and, notably, Notes From Underground.
The problem Dostoyevsky put his finger on in Notes From Underground, a rambling volume profiling the resentments of a dyspeptic and unreliable narrator, is that, while the individual liar needs a society to operate in (1984), a series of distractions to fool and narcotize himself and others (Brave New World), and the totalizing force of the state to ensure no one gets out of line and maintains the absurdity of the lies (Invitation to a Beheading), the liar can never fully escape the one person he hates and fears the most—himself.
And, since the moral courage to face himself is lacking, the liar–gambling on escape, social control, or command structures to do the work he cannot fully do himself–instead of abandoning his lies, spins the roulette wheel of philosophy and lands on nihilism, existential dread, or even a species of pet rational cynicism. Dostoyevsky knew that moral courage was the antidote to despair in a modern rationalist world, but he couldn’t figure out how to get people from the comfort of their intractable lies, or their adoption of alternative facts to soothe their moral turpitude, to the uncomfortable place where ultimate, knowable Truth resides.
We have the same problem with liars playing poker in our era. Except the liars are playing poker at a technological, social, and cultural scale that would be unfathomable to Dostoyevsky. And the problem can only be solved by each of us, individually, adopting the moral courage to say the Truth. The economist, author, and researcher Thomas Sowell once noted that, “It’s amazing how much panic one honest man can spread among a multitude of hypocrites. ”
There’s no surer way to spread panic among a multitude of liars than to bet on the Truth.
Jazz for a Golden Age
The core idea behind the blues genre, what is commonly known as jazz, is that disparate people can come together to express their deepest emotions through a cooperative act of organic orchestration, while also improvising, picking up from each other the rhythmic thread, and grooving right along. This practice is, at its bottom, the entire American experiment, from 1776 until now, set to music. This is one of the many reasons why jazz is a uniquely American genre of music. Other countries have picked it up, but they’ve got to work at it.
But through the cultural flattening brought on by institutions at one end, and your neighbor endlessly posting highlight reels of their lives on social media, the last twenty-five years of culture in America have convinced us that we need to conform rather than stand out. Losing our collective jazz tuning and only hearing the music that the technological gatekeepers would rather play.
We are on the cusp of a new Golden Age, and it’s one where the soundtrack will be based on the blues. But in order to recover that soundtrack, in order to recover the blues–or jazz–in service of a new Golden Age, we must go back into the mid-20th century and revivify the musical bones of our long-dead, modernist grandfathers. The myth of return is indeed that, just a myth. But as a practical matter of course, the myth needs a soundtrack, and the toe-tapping improvisation of blues—or jazz—provides that.