 May 40 here, back to talk about my favorite novel, Middle March, and I think I want to look at it through the theme perhaps of recovery, which so much of my life revolves around through looking at it through perhaps the Prism of the Twelve Steps, through Prism of religion, growing up as a preacher's kid, and then converted to Orthodox Judaism. Then my friend Richard, who grew up Jewish and converted to evangelical Christianity. So Richard, one of the themes in this novel that grabs my attention right off of which applies particularly to me and to many people I know is the need for a grand life. So ever since I was a kid, I have very much needed to have a grand life. I needed to have some awe-inspiring, higher purpose. And when I see people like myself, I usually think that the bigger the desire for a grand life, the more intense the need to be a thought leader, the more intense you need for admiration, the deeper and the greater the wound that you're trying to heal through this grandiosity. And that's certainly true for me. And it was through Twelve Steps work that I was able to kind of calm down my central nervous system so that my need for constant admiration and other people telling me who I am has slowly diminished to something that's much more manageable. But I also, I enjoy an exciting life and I still very much want a grand life. And in my subjective sense of self, I think I'm so amazing that a million people should be watching me right now. But let's just say that I came to you as my spiritual guide and I told you, Richard, I'm 54 years of age and my desire for leading a grand, exciting, dramatic, important life where other people admire me is effectively a 10 out of 10. And my desire for leading a grand life is ruining me. But it's still the single most powerful force in my life. It's the greatest source of energy and enthusiasm in my life. Perhaps give me some counsel as someone like Dorothea Brooke, but just make it me, 54 year old dude is coming to you and say, Richard, my desire for a grand life has ruined my life. Any thoughts? Wow. That's a big question, but I'm glad you bring Dorothea into it because that was totally motivating her. And of course, that's the tragic underpinning of the novel is what she did and how unfortunate in some ways it was for her to do that. That's such a great question because there was a song in the 80s called Everybody Wants to Rule the World. You know, and I think we're all wired to want significance. I think that just comes with the human package. I don't think anybody gets off the hook on that. The question is, how many relationships are you going to destroy in order to get it? You know, I mean, we know, you know, you want to climb the corporate ladder and all these heads you're going to step on to get up to get up that ladder, you know, to have that grand life, to get that brass ring as we sometimes call it, you know, for me. And I've certainly had that. My dad was a really successful businessman. You know, he's a millionaire with, you know, account, you know, private accounts in the Cayman Isle and stuff like that. So he kind of, he kind of lived that. He kind of had that. He was not happy though. His best friend used to call him Gloop, short for gloomy. Wow. That he had that moniker ever since he was a little kid. And he was always like that. He was always, you know, he was quiet, but there was always this dark cloud of anger over him. And I think it was, it reminds me a little bit of that line out of Tombstone where White Herb is about ready to go and face Johnny Ringo. And he's asking Doc Holliday, well, what, you know, what does this guy want? What's he about? He's trying to figure this guy out to figure out if he can, you know, if he can beat him. And he says, what does he want? You know, and, you know, what makes a man like Ringo take? He said, well, man like Ringo's got a big hole right through the middle of him. He can never kill enough or steal enough or inflict enough pain to ever fill it. And what does he want? And why his next question? Revenge is Doc Holliday's response. And then puzzles, you know, or puzzles on that for a few seconds, he goes, for what? And then Doc Holliday says, and you know he's projecting this, but it's also true. Because earlier in the film, you see, well, he's, you know, he looks at Johnny Ringo and says, you know, I looked something about the eyes. I don't know, he looks like me. So he's totally projecting, but it's still valid. So what does he want? Revenge for being born. My dad had a bit of that. He just never made his peace with life. And I think that's what a spiritual path leads us to is making our peace with life. You know, I was looking at one of the questions here, the first one you have, can one, should one enjoy the finer things of life, such as horse riding if there are poor suffering people around? And of course, when you put that in context with the question you're asking, well, I want to have this big grand life. Well, are you going to do that at other people's expense? And if you have that, are what's going to be your emotional wiring? Or how are you going to deal with the fact that there are a lot of people out there who don't have that, who envy you? And maybe who resent you? And maybe you don't like them because they resent you. And so that just sets off a string of terrible things. So I can speak from my own personal experience and what my faith teaches me. It's that my value doesn't come from what I do. It comes principally from my connection with God, my connection with my higher power, from a recovery standpoint. And that when I have that, then everything else that comes out of that, you know, there's the basic emotional needs that I have for significance, for peace, for just being okay with myself and being okay with other people. All of that stuff's already there. Cause my guess is, and my experience tells me, that most people, like you said, who go after all these big things, they're wanting to feel something that's missing. And most of the time, that's what's missing that all the time. It's relationships, having relationships that are fulfilling, satisfying, and nurturing. If we have those, everything else that comes out of that's overflow. And if you have that, then you really have, I think, what we're all chasing. Cause, you know, most guys who wanna have a million bucks or two million bucks or 10 million bucks, wanna do so so people will like them and respect them. First, they're not, they may or may not be willing to treat other people with that same kind of respect or that same kind of, you know, appreciation. You know, they may just wanna use them to get what they want, so that the people they want them, they want to like them, will like them. But that's a recipe for misery. And I've seen it over and over again, I know you have too. Well, let me challenge you here. So let's say that you were speaking to me as the governor of California, would you really try to tell me that a zero of your self-worth and feeling of value comes from your work? That's, I appreciate that question. That's a good question, it's a good way to phrase that. The thing is, am I doing the work in order to get that value or do I already have a sense of value and am I expressing it through my work? I think that's different than it's, it may sound like a subtle difference, but I think it's all the difference in the world. Okay, so, because when you said that you don't get any of your value from what you do, I'm not going to endorse that. I mean, I'm not gonna oppose it either, but I think that there's nothing wrong with getting some of your value from what you do, from what you produce, what you contribute to the world. If you were running a movie studio or even if you had your own small business that you were passionate about, I see absolutely no downside to you getting 50% of your sense of worth from running your small business with the understanding that it could disappear, you could get a stroke and all business trends could change overnight, that could be taken away. It's only if someone's getting 80, 90, 100% of their self-worth as a man from what they do, then I see trouble. But if a man is getting half of his sense of worth from what he's able to contribute to the world, then I say God bless him. Any thoughts? Well, I'm gonna agree with you and we can slice this up a little bit and maybe we can bring in some of the middle marks characters to help illustrate that, because I think we can. Absolutely, when we're expressing who we are, connecting with other people and bringing value to other people, it feels good when we do that. And I think we ought to feel good when we do that. But I think, and I think there's, where is really the gap between or the fine line between how much you value yourself based on what you do and how much of your value is just based in the, you know, you're a child of God and you know that God loves you and you don't have to struggle to get the love and acceptance that you would want from being famous or from being rich or from, you know, from being competent and recognized as competent. And I think that's different for everybody. Also, there are some people who don't have a religious impulse, who don't have a relationship with God, who don't believe in God, they just don't speak that language. Yet, if they have significant relationships in their life, they're quite likely to have a life that works. I think that's true. You know, being someone who practices his faith and I'm very committed to it, I'm not blind to the fact that there are people out there who do not practice that faith, but who live by principles that look very much the same and get a lot of the same results. I mean, pragmatically, you can't ignore that. You know, when you treat people decently, you know, that's gonna show up in your life. So, you know, is religion a requirement for that? I don't find evidence for that. Is religion a clear path that most people can find with the help of a community? I think that's one of its great values. Of course, that's the value of 12 step too. It is that that kind of maturity, that kind of well-being in terms of how we relate to each other, how we relate to the world and how we relate to a power greater than ourselves, which I think is a beauty of 12 step, is that though they had certainly the founders of AA and their mentors, the Oxford group, had a very clear and very decided idea of who God was. They referred to him as he. So, you know, they had a very clear idea of that. But they also recognized that the principles of that the program certainly presents can work without religion, don't require religion. And part of the reason for that, I think, is because the steps really access the structure of reality in terms of how we are emotionally designed to operate in relationship with other people, emotionally, physically and all those other things. I think it accounts for that in a quite remarkable way. So, I'm gonna turn the show over to you in about half an hour so that you can take it where you wanna go. But meanwhile, I'm gonna drive the truck here. So, I just love this. You can drive the truck the whole time. I'm fine with that. So, I love this topic that I introduced, in particular because it speaks so deeply to my need for significance. And I absolutely love appreciation and I don't say no to adulation. Like, I'm totally down with adulation and appreciation. But I don't wanna depend on it to feel happy. Yes, and I think that's a good balance for you. And I think different people find that in different ways. And I think we're all individuals. We're all snowflakes. But the thing about a snowflake, and I don't mean it in the pejorative sense that we talk about people of perhaps certain political persuasion that they're snowflakes. I don't mean it that way. I mean that human beings all fit into this particular pattern. Every snowflake fits into a six-pointed star geometrically. It fits into that geometric shape. And every snowflake is entirely different by its crystal and structure. And I think we're exactly the same way. So that there are some things that apply to all of us but we individualize that in remarkable ways. And I think it's important to acknowledge. Right. So, this topic of a need for significance and a need for some feeling of grandeur, I wanna keep drilling on it. And it's a need that I think can be approached in many different ways. It's not like the only answer to this need is Jesus. And it's not like the only answer to this need is the Torah and the Talmud. And it's not like the only answer to this need is psychotherapy. And it's not like the only answer to this need is 12-step work. There are many different ways but what all these different approaches have in common is that they calm down our central nervous system. And if our central nervous system is out of whack, they start to reprogram our basic instincts. So whether we get into meditation, some kind of other spiritual practice, some type of yoga, whatever we do if we can kind of calm down the central nervous system. Because I know I've gone through most of my life with this deep aching need for adulation from as many people as possible. And that was not a fun way to go through my life. And I also know over the past five years that this deep aching need has receded from like an eight out of 10 to something like a three out of 10. And so my life is much better. But in my understanding, in my experience, there are many different ways that are effective for reprogramming the central nervous system so that it calms down. And to me, that's like to take a completely secular approach to what we're talking about, what all these things have in common from the religious to the spiritual to the psychological is that they reprogram our responses to stimuli so that our responses start serving us rather than hurting us. Do you have any thoughts? Well, I wholeheartedly agree in terms of that. You know, there's this part of the brain right behind the middle of this area behind your eyes is called the orbital frontal cortex. And basically what that is is the switching station that tells the input that's coming in whether it's gonna go to your lower brain autonomic functions or whether it's gonna go to your cerebral functions. And that gets trained. That's directly connected to your amygdala and some other things. And we know that little amygdala is that it's that little surge beacon that's going on 24-7 looking for threats. And when it's trained to perceive what a threat is and we do train it to perceive what a threat is, there are some things that are inherent like loud noises and bright lights and other things that we just naturally have a reaction to. But in our life experience, we get a lot of things traumas and so on that go into that mechanism and that we respond to things as a threat when in fact, they may not be. And that's when our central nervous system gets all whacked out. That's what you're describing. At least from a neurological standpoint, that's actually what's going on. And precisely what, I'll save them from a 12 step standpoint, but I know there are other ways to accomplish this. What you're doing is reprogramming those responses. First, you're going back and examining very carefully those responses with a paradigm that you're analyzing your instinctive responses. It's like, what happened? Who is the person you're angry at? What happened? What instinct did it threaten? How did it threaten you? And that's taken directly to that mechanism. And then, what was your part in it? What was driving that? And then over time, and I mean, if you do a thorough moral, fearless and thorough moral inventory, you're gonna come up with a lot of different incidents that you're gonna be able to look at and get a pretty good idea of what's going on with that. And that helps to, that clarity helps to really calm down the central nervous system because you begin to see it for what it is as opposed to having it be completely unconscious. And when it's unconscious, it can be very dangerous and it can lead to addictions and other destructive behavior. I remember before I ever realized I had a problem. My empirical experience was that when I had friends, just one good friend, this ache in my heart would significantly diminish so that I would essentially become normal. But the more disconnected I felt from other people, the more intense the ache would be. So even one good friend can go a long way to calming down your central nervous system. Any thoughts? We're social creatures. You know, at least the way that it's talked about in 12th, and I talk about it from that standpoint because I'm probably most familiar with that paradigm. Although you can take it into other areas and I'm interested in those. But you have a gift-free basic interest, your social instinct, which is the instinct that connects you to other people. And there's a balance between the competitiveness and the collaboration and the desire for those things. There's just a pure instinct for survival, physical survival of your body. And that's your security instinct. And then you have a sexual instinct to reproduce. Now, all of those instincts and human beings have very complex expressions. You know, the sex drive isn't only about reproduction. It's about reproducing our reputation. It's about getting, it's about, it's tied to this very thing you're talking about of being significant. Because if we are significant, we are a more desirable mate. And something in our wiring knows that. And in the chat, Josh Randall, there's down a $20 super chat. Thanks for your support of the show, Josh. He says, over a year ago, I gave up nicotine vape for a month or more. I was struggling with an internal condition, metaphysical practices were the only way through it. So meditation went from a biohack to a mandatory daily discipline, also serving others, treated the condition better than anything else. Yes. So if you can get a feeling of significance from being of service to other people, that's about the greatest hack around for coming down your central nervous system. Because one, you get a feeling of significance. Two, you might even get a feeling of grandeur. Three, if you get into some sort of volunteer position, it will inherently start connecting you to other people. And so that's a great way to start to calm down. Any thoughts, Richard? Well, you know, there's a neurotransmitter called oxytocin, which has tremendous calming effects. And what they're discovering is that the kinds of things that causes that release are very often acts of altruism or being kind to somebody are the very things that release that neurotransmitter. And that neurotransmitter has a profound calming effect. Yeah. And I know, for example, in my traditional Orthodox Jewish community, many bachelors say once they hit age 40 or so, they feel very uncomfortable going to synagogue because Orthodox Judaism revolves so much around the family. But if you have a volunteer role to play at synagogue, it takes away the anxiety. If you have a volunteer role to play in your community, it reduces the anxiety, it gives you a sense of purpose. And it's also a great way to meet people, to make friends and to reorient other people's picture of you, like people who have, say, a negative perspective on you, but then they work with you in some kind of volunteer capacity. It can rewire their perspective on you. I know people have gotten married from volunteering. Now, on the other hand, this is the problem, particularly for the addictive personality, you find something that works that makes you feel good and then you end up volunteering 30 hours a week. So Dorothea Brooke, she very much wants to do good in the world, but her notions of grandeur and doing good in the world, I mean, she seems to spend much of her spare time drawing cottages. And I'm skeptical of how much actual training and ability and what she can actually contribute in drawing cottages. So it's not enough just to volunteer, it needs to fit in a proper balance because you can certainly do an excessive amount of volunteering. Richard? Well, if we're gonna bring Dorothea into that, which I think is a good thing, something you mentioned, and we've talked about this before, I think self-awareness is a collaborative activity. In other words, we understand who we are in relationship to the people around us, both by our contributions and by the response we get from people. So we learn things about ourselves and I don't think we can have an accurate view of who we are until we're out there receiving that feedback. And of course, part of the problem of being a healthy human being is being able to interpret that feedback in a healthy way. And quite frankly, my experience is you have to be trained to do that. It doesn't come naturally. People get offended, people get insulted even when those things aren't meant, but just because of what they think or what the other person is thinking or what they believe the other person said, which other person may not have said at all. But there's a lot of work in that. But Dorothea, as you see that, there's a powerful intention in her. And later on in the book, after Edward Cassauvin dies and she inherits that money, she starts acting on some of that. She starts having the opportunity to realize some of that. And even the cottages, she gets to do some of that. Maybe she's not highly skilled, but her willingness to do that, driven by her idealism, which is fraught with delusional problems and very strange ideas about how life works, which blind her to a lot of things. And she gets high from renunciation. For example, renouncing horse riding, which she enjoys, but she gets a high from renunciation. So renouncing legitimate pleasures in the Talmud, one of the questions that God asks anyone in the next world is why did you not participate in all legitimate pleasures? So certainly from a traditional Jewish perspective, there's the notion that you should enjoy all legitimate pleasures. Now, what's your thought on people who get high from renouncing perfectly legitimate pleasures such as horse riding, that don't do any harm and even do a person good? Okay, I like the way George Eliot puts it. Riding was an indulgence, which she allowed herself in spite of conscientious qualms. She felt that she enjoyed it in a pagan, sensuous way and always looked forward to renouncing it. That busted a gut for me. Because I mean, she just nailed how she is and how we are. To me, Jesus said, you gotta go the narrow way. And we have a very limited idea of what he meant by that. Because I think what he was getting at was that everybody's life has a spectrum of possibilities. We have pleasure and we have pain. And there's a spectrum that, but somewhere there's this narrow range where we live a balanced life. And I think that's really actually what he was getting at. And that many of his teachings point people to how to achieve or how to live in that kind of way and find all the pleasure and all the enjoyment out of it. My wife and I choose to have a very simple frugal kind of life, but we do not deprive ourselves of anything. We're not feeling a lack or missing of anything. We go places, we're planning a trip to the Grand Canyon and a number of other things that we're really excited about doing and we can do that. And we get a lot of enjoyment out of very simple things. And I think part of that for me is just I let myself enjoy them. Because I'm not trying to prove something. It's funny how as my compulsive need to prove through my recovery really diminished, what I find enjoyment in greatly increased, the spectrum of things that I became grateful for and able to enjoy a lot more gave me so much of that enjoyment that I was trying to just force out of this thing where I was pouring all my energy into to be barely good enough, you know what I'm talking about? Yes, absolutely. I mean, it could be just as simple as like what you want to watch on Netflix. I just love sports documentaries. I mean, that's like the greatest joy in the world. It's not something highfalutin just give me a good sports documentary and I'm as happy as Larry. And what's funny for me is I'm not a sportsman. I have no negative feelings about sports. I think they're wonderful with, you know, if a friend invites me to go to a baseball game, I will go and I'll have a wonderful time. It's just not something I personally seek out. You know, I sort of put things in three categories. Things I actively seek out, things I enjoy when they're there and things I choose to avoid. Yeah, those are three basic categories. And you know, marijuana is something I choose to avoid. Baseball is something, you know, I enjoy when it's there. Interestingly enough, 12-step meetings are something I just seek out and I get tremendous enjoyment out of it. And I'm not trying to manufacture that. That's just, you know, I just noticed that I have that experience and I went, oh, okay, great. I have that experience and I, you know, life finally is here to be experienced and what we want is it, and what we want is an experience that we enjoy. We want an enjoyable experience of life. Now, you know, life presents a lot of challenges and pain and difficulties that we want to avoid. And of course, you know, if you live in the expectation that those things aren't supposed to be happening, that is the greatest fountain of misery I've ever found. Because if you don't, if you're not willing to take life on life's terms, you are going to be miserable. And life is going to present wonderful things and difficult things. And I think part of spirituality is the resilience to deal with the challenges in a healthy, you know, in respond to them in a healthy way. You know, whether that's, you know, a loss, like the death of a spouse, parents, something like that, or if you had a child or loss of a job or anything like that. You know, how do you, how can you respond to that? How do you, how do you stay resilient in that and not just dive into, you know, a ditch in your life? If I had to give someone one novel about under-owning or financial solvency, this would be my choice. I can't think of anything else that comes as close with its wisdom. Any thoughts? Oh, that's the vein of gold in this book. I agree. You have so many different cases. You know, let's take Edward Casaman first. You know, if we want to put the filter of, you know, under-owning and under-being, which means somehow or other, you don't live up to your potential or you choose to hide and not be visible and restrict people from seeing what's really going on with you. Well, he's a classic, you know. Now he inherited the money he has, you know, and it allowed him to sort of live this very rarefied life where he was very self-satisfied and had this idea that he was doing this wonderful thing, but he never put it out in the world to test it. And whenever anybody, like his wife, Dorothea, sort of said, well, why don't you, you know, collect your book and publish it? He just like, he was indignant. Like, how dare you, you know? And, you know, that's classic because he's living in a delusion. And look at all the unhappiness he created and happens to creating him because at the, you know, in the last, you know, days of his life, he was desperate to try to get something out and then he died and we got a chance to do that. What a horrible thought. I mean, what a really horrible thought. Yeah, and it's true for all of us. I mean, everybody dies disappointed though. It was particularly keen in his case. I heard this great summary of mental health and addiction in the 1998 book by psychoanalysts collection of essays called relational perspectives on the body. So this one guy, Sheldon Bach, suggested a great deal of narcissistic and borderline pathology, as well as addictions, perversions, eating disorders and psychosomatic disorders are best understood in terms of the patient's inability to maintain inappropriate tension between two perspectives on the self, the subjective and the objective. So in my subjective self, that's where I have all my wants, my desires. That's where I get my pleasure, my energy. I'm just seeing things from my point of view. Now, from an objective point of view, then that brings me back into reality. So for example, if I have a resentment, let's say I have a resentment against my father, but he didn't listen to me. And so I got this, I got this burn against my dad that he didn't listen to me. And as a result, this negatively affected my sense of self and my ability to navigate the world and my ability to be a successful human being. And if I just write this all out, suddenly the resentment starts seeming really petty because I have moved from the subjective resentment to objectively writing it out through the fourth step format in the 12 steps according to the big book. And suddenly it's just lost all its potency and power. Now it just seems, yeah, you know, so what? It's just part of reality. Everybody lets us down in some way. Now the person who listens to you really well is likely to be the person who can't show up on time. I mean, everyone's got a downside. So this need we have to be able to oscillate between a subjective sense of self and an objective sense of self is essential for mental health and for staying out of addictions because I would think that almost all addiction spring out of someone who's unable to see things objectively, they just see things from their own, you know, childish, subjective pleasure principle. Any thoughts? Well, that's, I agree with that. And I want to add to that. Again, coming back to the statement I made earlier that self-awareness is a collaborative activity. You know, we have an idea of who we'd like to be. And, you know, we're gonna go actively out in the world and try to convince other people that we are that. But now let's go back to Middlemarch for a minute. Let's go back, let's go to Mr. Bullstrode, okay? Here was a guy who was tortured by his past, but he managed to bury it, you know, with all sorts of, you know, opportunities that he was able to do, the fact that he had money, although that when it was discovered that that was gained by rather nefarious means by a fortunate marriage, and partnership, you know, he was completely rejected. So he didn't earn it honorably. And, you know, but when he, when the truth of that, when the truth of who he was, or what he had done, and the threat of its exposure, you know, in raffles, you know, the voice of his past, the ghost from his past, comes and shows up and says, you know, I'm gonna start telling people. And of course, you know, there's that incident with Caleb Garth, which I just thought was wonderful. Caleb Garth was a perfect example of principles before personalities. And he chose that, and that was really interesting how that was done. I like the way it was portrayed. But, you know, we begin to see the power of those intentions when we see this guy bullstrode when raffles is sick and when he's in his care and where he brings lidgate and he gives him, you know, a prescription of what to do. But he also says, hey, I don't know if my prescription is gonna work or my prescription is gonna kill the guy. And it's very clear that what bullstrode wants is this guy dead, because he wants his past dead and buried. He doesn't want his past to be exposed. And so he's honest enough with himself to know, okay, you know, this individual being here is really uncomfortable for me and I wanna get rid of this, you know. I'm not gonna take a hand in it. But, you know, it's like, it's really a question whether he did or whether he didn't. You know, because lidgates, the doctor's instructions, you know, for him, what happened for people who may not have read the book? There's this, you know, a couple of chapters where this fellow raffles who comes from the bullstrode is the hated town banker. It's a guy that everybody loves to hate. You know, they put up with him because, you know, he's got money and because he's supposedly religious, but, you know, it turns out he's got a dark past that he wants to hide from and this guy raffles shows up and, you know, is a threat to everything he's built and everything he's done. And so he wants to shut this guy up and when by some chance, this guy raffles gets sick and it appears it's, you know, alcohol poisoning like delirium tremens and, you know, it happens that he's brought to his property and left there. And so all of a sudden this guy is in his hands and so he brings the doctor and the doctor, you know, gives this, you know, Dr. Lidgate his prescription. And there's a lot, there's a lot of story here so I'm not gonna get onto too much of it, but, you know, as the patient becomes sicker, one of the doctors prescriptions is he should have no alcohol, but when Bull Strode's, you know, one of his, you know, his maid comes in and says, hey look, this guy's really freaking out. Can I give him some, sink him some liquor? And he just, he says, okay. And he rationalizes that saying, well, you know, the doctor wasn't sure whether his treatment would help him or kill him. So he said, I don't know. So that's a really fascinating, it's a really fascinating problem that when we're confronted by, you know, other people who threaten what we want in our life, who threaten what we most value, how do we respond? That tells us about who we really are. Yeah, if I had to recommend one book, one novel to teach the basics of morality that most people will encounter, because most people are gonna be caught upon to risk their lives to save Jews in a genocide. But this book seems to me about the wisest work affection in instructing and helping people to understand day to day morality. Any thoughts? Well, it does that because it goes into people's heads. It goes into their thought process. It goes deep into their intentions in difficult circumstances. Let's take Fred Vinci, another, you know, classic example of someone who's living in a fantasy. I mean, he believes that he's gonna inherit this money from, you know, from this fellow. And he gets into debt. And in fact, the girl he's in love with, you know, Mary Garth, he basically ends up being in a situation where he has to take money that they've saved that would allow their brother to go to school in order to cover his debts. Because his dad, because, you know, her father, Caleb Garth was willing to, you know, and co-sign a loan for him. But he said, oh, it's gonna be fine. He assured him it was gonna be great. And it wasn't. But that's an immoral act. And one of the, I'll see if I can find the quote where it says something about how he really didn't take into account how the effect it would have on the people around him. George Elliot, the pen name of Mary Garth. I'm not gonna let him go there, but she wrote, but basically he had this realization that, and it was humiliating to him that these people who he actually really cared for suffered because of his carelessness. But the good thing is he comes around. He's actually in this story, he's a character who with certain difficulties goes through a recovery process, goes through coming out of that and starts to, you know, settle down to have a life that where he's willing to produce value, where he's willing to work for Caleb Garth, you know, and actually live a productive life. And he actually ends up winning the girl of his dreams, you know, which I think is a beautiful story. But it makes the point is, you know, if you're gonna live this, you know, try to be bigger than life and you have no way to do that, you know, then that's gonna cost you. And it's gonna cost the people around you, too. I'm thinking that so many of the idealistic characters in this book would be so served by just having, perhaps, 0.1% of their time devoted to trying to see an objective perspective on the situation. So from Dorothy Brooke, so this intelligent, wealthy woman with great aspirations and it's Wikipedia to Tertius Litgate, the idealistic, talented, but naive, young doctor to Reverend Edward Kasorban, the pedantic selfish elderly clergyman to Arthur Brooke, who's running for parliament. A lot of people would have been far better off if they'd never run for public office. And Arthur Brooke would be one of them. Rosamond Vincy, if she just had a little bit more of a sense of reality, Fred Vincy, her brother, who is so irresponsible with his money and with his choices, that the, and Nicholas Bullsrow, the wealthy banker, if he just had a little bit more humility that his secret may well be revealed one day. And if he had gotten along with people, they're much more likely to be forgiving than if he was this popper's righteous... Right, they were looking to take this guy down. He had made so many enemies by basically farting people and by dominating them and by bullying them and all of those things. And the consequences are, we all make mistakes and you're exactly right. The way he handled it was he was trying to hide it. And of course, when we try to hide those things, there's a great cost to it. And in this case, the cost is the murder of another human being. Or what could certainly be interpreted that way. It's a gray area. Because I mean, he didn't go out and do it, but if he had followed the doctor's instructions and he could have put it on the doctor, instead, because his intention clearly was to have this guy go away because he wanted to hide. It's when we want to hide who we really are that we get into trouble. And Nicholas Bolster is a great example of exactly how that works in that scene where there's gonna vote on some expenditure, I forgot what it was. But, and he said, well, we can't even talk about them till we talk about the fact that we want you, Nicholas Bolster, to retire from these positions because we're really concerned about things we hear about you. And how he deals with that is gets completely defensive and starts basically blaming other people. Yeah, speaking of blaming others, I would, my life experience, probably half of people, if they'd undergone something akin to what Nicholas Bolster went underwent at the hand of Raffles, but even something one-tenth as impactful would blame their troubles on Raffles. Well, really, Nicholas Bolster's troubles are of his own making. It's just Raffles brings them to light. There was a great American philosopher, James Burnham, who instructed his son, always act as though everyone knows everything. And so many people are always trying to hide things. But if you just go through life with the attitude, everybody knows everything. It's a great relief and it really helps to nudge one towards a coherent life rather than a life where various aspects of your life are constantly at war with each other. Anything there you want to comment on? I think that's maybe presented as a proposition like an act as if it was true, but I think it is fundamentally true. I think people always know. They may not be able to articulate it. They may not recognize it consciously, but I think they always know. I think ultimately those things aren't hidden and they show up in the quality of our relationships. They show up in the quality of our work. They show up in a lot of different ways. They show up in a lot of different ways. So yeah, but just, I like slogans and in a program you like slogans. That's a great slogan. They always act as if everybody knows because sooner or later they're gonna, if they don't already. Yeah, you don't want one aspect of your life at war with another aspect. I mean, you don't want to be pursuing hobbies that everyone at church would be aghast to hear that you're doing. I mean, you don't want to be conducting yourself at the bar on Friday night in ways that would get you fired if it was only widely known by your employer. Even though it's off hours that it's not in my employer's business, but still you don't want a life that's at war with itself. You want a life where it doesn't mean that all the different aspects of it need to complement each other, but you certainly don't want them at war with each other. Yeah, I'm thinking of that. There was a journalist recently who was attending a Zoom meeting and decided to also attend a 900 call and it was caught on camera in a very, in a very... Advancing state, yeah. Yeah, and it's like, boy, talk about that. That's such a clear example of that. It's like 28 years of his life and career just went down the drain for 10 minutes of enjoyment. Yeah, and then what about the notion that the nature of the human being is if someone brings to light something that you've done, that you then blame them for your troubles rather than taking account of your own role and your own misery? I mean, that's the essence of recovery is that willingness because you can't get rid of resentment. You can't get rid of any of the problems if you're not willing to take the responsibility for your pardon. Now, you may not be 100% responsible for it, but what you find, or I find, and I take responsibility for my part, that frees the other person to maybe do the same thing if they're so inclined to. And of course, I can observe whether they do or not. Most cases they do. Most cases, people don't like the mess as they get themselves into by their, and I'll put it the way King Solomon put it, he said, God created man upright, but man chooses many schemes. By going off into those many schemes that we pursued because we think they'll do better for us. So a lot of the idealistic characters in this novel are short-sighted and they're short-sighted both literally and figuratively. So one of them is Dorothea Brooke, the beautiful young woman who's probably the protagonist of this novel. And she simply cannot see anything beyond her own vision of how the world should be. And not only is this verging on mental illness if this is the way you go through life, and not only is it going to make you ineffective, it's gonna make you unhappy. And I don't like being around people like that. Like, no matter how beautiful they are, and no matter how stellar their qualities, if they insist on living in a world of delusion, I just wanna back away. And if I can't back away, I just wanna minimize, I'm not going to invest much in relationships like that, but it is so wide and it's so common a problem. The people simply can't see anything beyond their conception of how the world should be. That it seems wide in the human being that essentially we can't see anything that contradicts our sense of self. And for many people, their sense of self entails a particular vision of how the world should be. Well, when you start getting into consciousness and how we construct our interpretation of all of the input we get from our senses, from our experience, from the information, the data we take in, the way we're designed is to construct a narrative that explains all that. That we experience that and then we have a story about that experience. That's what we do. And to me, spirituality is about getting a sound basis for that interpretation, for those interpretations that allows you to base it on the reality of who you are, who the people around you are, and what the greater reality around you actually is. So that we have a healthy relationship. I like what Celia says to her sister. Well, I'm sorry for Sir James. I thought it right to tell you because you went on as you always do, never looking just where you are and treading in the wrong place. You always see what nobody else sees. It's impossible to satisfy you, yet you never see what is quite plain. That's your way, Dodo. Yeah. And that captures it right there. It's like, you're living in your own little world and how about joining the world with the rest of us? But to me, that is the art of living right there is learning how to do that. It's learning how to take what your unique experience is because there is value in that. You can see that in Dorothea. Part of it, her idealism does bear some really good fruit in her life and it's helpful to other people as well. But only when it starts to merge into the way the big book puts it, the stream of life into the reality of the world around her in a way that's meaningful to them and somehow satisfying to her. When it's just up in your head and you're trying to do this, if you're some college student and you think you're gonna become a 10 million follower, you know. YouTube sensation. Twitter thought leader, you know, and all your classmates think the same thing. You know, the Pareto principle tells you, well, maybe one of you somewhere might do that but the likelihood is very small. You have a very small group of people who are gonna do that. The rest of you just get, you know, is the 80-20 rule. And that distribution follows everything in life, everything in life and people don't wanna accept that. Now, Freud had a great insight that's related to this on transference that we don't tend to see other people as they are. We see them through our own past experience and through our own hostilities, resentments and fantasies. And this is most dramatically true in falling in love that you fall in love usually not with the person as she is. You fall in love with your fantasy about who she is. Now, there gotta be degrees and levels of this. I mean, surely healthier people are able to see much more of reality and so not be just continually seeing people through the lens of fantasy and resentment. I would think that if you do a strong spiritual practice where you work through your resentments, your fears and you're just interfering thought patterns that you have to become much better able to calibrate to the reality of who people are. Because if Dorothy and Brock was able to see Reverend Edward Gosorbin for anything close to who he really was, she never would have made this disastrous marriage. If Fred Vinci was able to see his situation relatively close to reality, he would not have made his devastating decisions. If Edward Gosorbin had been able to see reality, he wouldn't have wasted his life on an unfinished book. And if Arthur Brock had been able to see reality, he would have spared himself the humiliation of running for parliament. So are we fated to only see people through the lens of our resentment, fears and fantasies? Or are we able to calibrate to increasingly see people as they are? I like that word calibrate. I think that's a really accurate choice of words because it is a calibration process. And I don't, you know, there are some people who perhaps have a more advanced intuition about that to begin with. You know, some people who seem to have a higher degree of emotional intelligence are, you know, but I think that's something that has to be cultivated and developed over a long period of time. I don't think for most people that comes naturally. It certainly didn't for me, you know. I mean, when I was Dorothea's age in the book, I was just like her. I was like, off in La La Land. I mean, I really was. And, you know, I slam into a lot of walls because of it. So I relate to her in that way. Well, I've never been married. I'm a 54-year-old bachelor, but you've had the experience, I assume, of falling in love and you've had the experience of a marriage that's lasted over two decades. Is there anything that you can talk about in that transition from falling in love with a fantasy to the day-in, day-out reality of a marriage that lasts more than 10 years, more than 20 years? Well, it's gonna be 30 in August. So, now that's a really interesting question because there's some aspects of it that my wife, Mary, is a combination of many women in my life. She's like my mom. She's like my dad. She's like my first real girlfriend and her voice. So interesting. And I've told her this and this is true. Whenever I used to fantasize, have my fantasies about a woman that I would be married to, there was a voice associated with it. My wife has that voice. And that was not something I saw coming. You know, when we met each other, I had gone through a divorce. I had just split up with my many years ago ex-wife. And, you know, she, well, I wanna say this appropriately. She apparently had a crush on me, which I was completely oblivious to. And, you know, when that became clear, I was willing to explore that. But as I got to know her, and I got to know her, and she was a package. There were some things about her that were very difficult. You know, she gets up in her head a lot and thinks a lot of crazy things. But, you know, she'll go through whatever process she goes through. And when she's done with that process, she comes out with the right thing. She almost always tends to do what's right. My ex-wife, for example, just alienated my mom. Mary, she made a, when we first got together, she made a beeline for my mom and she became my mom's little daughter. I didn't tell her that. She just did that on her own. And as I looked at these things, so for me, you know, I love her now more than I did when I first met her by orders of magnitude. And the process of that, you know, I like to call it, you know, the nine-legged sack race, you know, what we do with all the different things that we have to deal with. And, you know, this messy process of getting along with other people, trying to go through life together, you know, in the race of life down the field. And we have to, you know, put our legs in a sack together and, you know, surrender some of our, you know, agency, surrender some of our freedom in order to get along with somebody else. It's uncomfortable. And we don't like it, but the fact, but what's interesting, what's really interesting about that. And I think whenever I talk to people who are thinking about marriage or people who are, you know, just married or anything else, you know, there's two things that I really emphasize. Number one is, in my first marriage, I was focused on what my wife was like, what she was doing for me. And it was never good enough. And I never shrunk from a chance to let her know that. And I was a terrible husband, really terrible husband. Because I was so angry and grumbling and ungrateful that I didn't have the wife I thought I should have, or she wasn't doing this right or she wasn't doing that right. It's like, you want to destroy a relationship? That's how you do it, right there. And, you know, the best way to have a good relationship. And I'm talking about a long-term marriage, but this applies to other relationships too, is to, you know, I, my first concern is the kind of husband I'm, that's number one. Cause that's the only thing I can really ever do anything about. You know, Mary is the way she is. I can't, I can't really change her. I can't control her, I can cause the way she is. I, I can't, if she has problems, I can't cure them. She has to come to terms with it. And I can't control it either. I can't control those things. But if I want to, if I want to love somebody, I make a decision that I'm going to accept those things and deal with my own discomfort. The other thing, and this is, you know, this is a, one of the 12-step traditions. It's, you know, our leaders of a trusted servant say do not govern. You know, for a group purposes, there's but one ultimate authority. The loving God is he may express himself in our group conscience. And the way that, that expresses itself in a, in a, in a, in a relationship, like a marriage is to prefer the thing that after talking it through, bringing all the details out, the thing that you can both look at and go, yep, that's what we're going to do. We have done that from the very beginning, we chose that. And time after time after time, the choice to do that. And it's harder, by the way, that's the hard way. It's very easy to say, hey, I want to do it this way and try to force it when you, when you get the opportunity, that'll destroy the relationship. And also it'll make both of you unhappy. You know, one of the things I learned in 12-step was that, you know, when I would go into, you know, committee meetings and stuff, when I was in world service, you know, I would come in with an idea of this is the greatest way to do that. And, you know, I make the motion and do that. And then I'd listen to what people would say. And after I really listened to what other people said, there were times where I voted against my own motion. Because after listening to everyone, I was like, you know, maybe that's not such a good idea after all. And so I carried that, you know, into my relationship. But we'd always had that idea that this idea of unity, and that doesn't mean, unity is not the same as conformity. Most people reject unity because they think it means conformity and it doesn't. Unity means taking all the diverse pieces, accounting for them and finding, you know, a course or a solution or, you know, an intervention that honors as much of that as possible, if not all of it. And I think in many cases it's possible to honor it all. And not move forward until you find that. Now that's hard because in order to do that, you have to be willing to be honest. And you have to, you know, you can't really have self-seeking dishonest motives and have that work. That won't work for people who do that. But if you come at it with honest motives and you approach it that way, that there's so much power in that. Those two things, the kind of husband I'm being in, choosing to prefer what we agree on together as opposed to what we'd otherwise, you know, try to force on the other or compromise to or, oh, all right, you know, we don't do that. We do not do that. So many of the people in this book short-sighted the people who are unable to see reality for what it is and just extrapolating from that. I found that if a person consistently is unable to see reality or navigate reality in a certain area of his life, it's very likely to have some level of an addiction going on. So addiction doesn't have to mean that you're homeless and eating out of a dumpster. So if you consistently make bad decisions with regard to food and to your weight, then you've probably got some kind of eating addiction going on. If you can't build up your savings, but you feel compelled to spend not just everything you have, but also to get into debt, you've probably got some kind of debting thing going on. If you can't consistently earn enough money to lead a good life and you have some abilities and some skills and some intelligence, then you've probably got some kind of under-earning thing going on. If you're consistently making bad decisions with regard to relationships, with regard to your sex life, you probably got some kind of addiction going on. So addictions aren't all 10 out of 10. You can have an addiction running at a two out of 10 level. You may only have an addiction operating in a certain time of your life. For example, I never had a debting problem until after I was really sick for six years and then I came out of it with, I gotta live for now because I might relapse into illness again. And that live for today is suddenly, for the first time in my life, I had a problem with debt. So don't think of addiction as all or nothing. Don't think of addiction as 10 out of 10. Don't even worry about whether or not you literally have an addiction. Just perhaps consider whether a 12-step program in a particular area of your life where you're consistently having trouble, just check it out and see if it might help you. Any thoughts, Richard? Yeah, I actually have a lot of thoughts about that. You know, there's just another quote from the book, change in our way of life is no small thing. We mostly fail to count the cost. We don't know ourselves as well as we ought to. And I think that is one of the strongest statements in the book because I think that is the heart of the problem of the human condition is that we don't know ourselves as well as we ought to. And I think, you know, I like to say, we need to get a PhD in our humanity. Each one of us needs to do that. You know, when I look at, you know, I just had a sponsy finish all 12 steps, four and a half years it took us. He spent two years, actually two and a half in his fourth step, and then took it. And part of that was because he went in and out, you know, he's like, if you go back off and then, you know, because I had him signed an agreement, you know, he finally came back around and said, okay, I'll keep trying. And I was able to tell him and his whole life has changed. He went through a lot of unfortunate circumstances. He went through a divorce and some other ugly things. But now he's like, he's living a very balanced, con, proof of life. And, you know, he's kind of rebuilding himself. The word addiction is a word that has a lot of baggage in our society. In our society, when you say addict, there's a connotation to that. That connotation is, you know, a bum on skid row or heroin addicts jamming a needle into their arm or, you know, a guy hanging out, you know, online, watching porn 10 hours a day and ruining his life. When we think about addiction, we think of that. Of course, not most of us who don't do those things aren't gonna look at that and go, well, I'm not an addict. So I think, and I know we may have talked about Johann Hari before, but he said, everything you know about addiction is wrong. He's got a great TED talk about it. And I think he hits the nail on the head that addiction isn't the problem. Disconnection is, disaffiliation is, being out of relationship is the issue. And so addictions are the things that we substitute for healthy interaction and healthy relationships. And that's a very wide spectrum. You know, the far end of that spectrum is the guy jamming a needle into his arm or, you know, drinking two bottles of whiskey and passing out and not being seen or heard from for days. You know, that's the extreme end. But like you were saying, somebody who just is having a recurring pattern of, you know, low level destructiveness and disappointment that seems to be mounting because it seems to happen more and more, that costs something. That costs relationships. That can destroy relationships. That can destroy your happiness. That can destroy the experience of life that you might otherwise have. And, you know, in the Christian community, and in the Christian community, and I don't really count myself an evangelical because I think that has also a lot of connotations and baggage that I actually reject. I just say that I'm a follower of Jesus. In other words, I wanna do it the way he described it. That's a better description of what's important to me. And of course, what that means is, you know, to live by the golden rule, you know, do unto others as you would have them do unto you. And damn it, if that isn't one of the hardest things in the world to do. It sounds really simple, but it's not easy. And you have, I'm a firm believer that you have to be trained to do that. And, you know, I see a lot of people in that community who go, oh, I'm just gonna pray and God's gonna remove all my problems going. You can't pray your way out of something you behave your way into is really the way that works. Now, there are some situations where I think, you know, that you can have this sudden spiritual shift, you know, William James talks about that in the varieties of religious experiences. That stuff does happen. That stuff is real. What the source of it is, how it operates, and all those other things, you know, that's why he was very curious and examined that. And I don't think the jury's, you know, I don't even think the jury's out on that case yet. There's a lot more to be understood around that. And I think that the current trend towards really starting to understand what is human consciousness, I think is a very fascinating domain in science. And I think it's gonna yield some interesting fruit. But the bottom line is, I think the time we live in is like, you know, the more we live in cities and are pressed together with a lot of other people, you know, one of the weird things about that is the more pressed together with other people, the more you're gonna create distance between you and them. And that, that's a problem because we have to have, we have to be able to relate to people, but there's this, you know, drive to be separated from them just because there's so much of it coming in. And, you know, our psyches are designed to, you know, kind of limit the amount of input and focus only on certain things. And so in order to accommodate that and to integrate all the different input and all the different complexities of the human, of the human psyche and how we're built, you have to be willing to spend the time to come to terms with who you are in some form. Now, I happen to, you know, I have chosen the 12 steps and it is probably one of the most practical accessible ways to do that. Therapy can work for some people, it didn't work for me, but I know it does work for some people and that's great. You know, meditation is very helpful, like you said. There's just a lot of ways to do that, but we're at a time in human history where we all need to do that. And we all need to, you know, get on to ourselves. You know, we all need to really start to understand where we're really coming from. And so that when somebody says something, we don't just get offended. We go, well, why would they even say that? Is there something I need to look at it? Are they handing me a gift? You know, was it Robert Burns who said, no greater gift could God give us than to see ourselves as others see us? I mean, you know. Yeah, you see in this book that many of the most disagreeable characters have the most accurate perceptions of reality. And the most winning characters, the most appealing characters are the most removed from reality. So that also matches my life experience. Often some of the most evil, repulsive, repellent, disgusting people I have encountered and known have frequently seen me far more accurately than both I see myself and the way the people who love me see me. So the repellent characters in this book like Fred Vince's father and even Nicholas Bulls Road and Raffles and many of the people in this book who are unlikely to like, but they are often far more attuned to reality than the appealing characters. So truth will frequently, in fact, more often come in my experience from people I don't like. Yeah, you know, honestly, that's free therapy. Honestly, you know, that kind of feedback is worth its weight and gold. The problem is, my experience is I've had to go through some fairly extensive training in order to be able to receive that, you know, not ingest the distortions that might accompany that or even the malice that might accompany that but just recognize that they're seeing something, they're communicating that to me and that that's a gift. But I think it takes practice to learn to be able to do that. You know, sometimes the greatest gift we get is set in a crumpled brown paper bag that's particularly unappealing but it could be the most important thing we ever get. Yeah, one of the great pleasures in life is to encounter people who are not reactive. So if one can get to that state where some repellent person makes a incredibly vicious criticism of one and one just doesn't react and just, hmm, I might need to think about that. I mean, that is a beautiful state to aspire to. Yeah, well, you know, for me, one of the things that helps guide me toward that is I believe all of us are made in the image of God. And what that means is we're all made to be loving, caring, and good. However, we don't see ourselves that way. We don't practice that and we certainly don't see other people that way. But I think the more that we're able to do that, that's I think in many cases, the source of that non-reactiveness is that we can look at the other person and go, wow, there must be a lot of pain to say something like that. And is there something I need to take note of at the same time? It's having that kind of mindset that makes that possible. At least for me, I can't answer for other people but I can't answer for me. And that's certainly what does it for me. So I love this book because it reveals me to me. I mean, this is a book that gets down to brass tacks, to what this book reveals the people I know, to me, more succinctly than any novel of which I'm aware. This book reveals life to me. This book reveals the daily moral challenges that I face and that the people I know face in a succinct and also entertaining and compelling fashion. This is why I love this book. It just speaks to my soul. It speaks to my brain, speaks to my emotions. It speaks to my lived experiences. It reveals more depth to both my own experience and to the lives of the people around me. That's why I love this book. You also love this book but what are your reasons for loving this book? Well, many of them are the same but I particularly like Georgia Elliott's insight and sense of humor in the way she just describes people but I actually like the last paragraph of the book because she brings out something that's really important and this kind of speaks to something that the thing we started on is about significance. Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues though they were not widely visible. Her full nature like the river which Cyrus broke the strength spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth but the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive. But the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life and rest in unvisited tombs. I love that. And Caleb Garth is a character who carries that message more than any other individual in the book. He's, because that's him and it says it. He builds stuff that nobody will ever know who built it but he built it good and it makes a difference in everyone's lives. And to me that's a source of value that we have to other people whether we get recognition for it or not. And I think that that's a point she makes because most of the people who struggle struggle because they want significance. Caleb Garth could care less. And yet I mean Caleb Garth wants to do because he wants to do the right thing and do good work and do things in a way that comport with his understanding of how to be a good human being, how to be a mensch. And yet he was almost undone by he devastated his own family because of his callousness in signing a promissory note for Fred Vinci. So being a good person, being a mensch being a righteous person, being a saint is not going to be enough to successfully navigate life. You can blow things up in your saintliness. No, but here, let's compare Nicholas Bulstrode to Caleb Garth. Caleb Garth tells his wife what happened. He just gives full disclosure. Yeah. Bulstrode never does. But Caleb only tells his wife after the fact after the damage has already been done. Like it's significant damage. Yes. And the truth is, we all make those kinds of mistakes. And the thing is when we make those mistakes and this is back to what you said about taking ownership. This is where that matters. You see, he made a mistake, but he took ownership. Bulstrode made mistakes, he didn't take ownership. And that's the only difference we really can make. We're all going to screw up. We're all going to make bad deals, bad bargains, promises we ought not to have made or say things we shouldn't have said. It's how we deal with them that ultimately brings about, preserves our relationship or destroys them. And Nicholas Bulstrode is a classic example of trying to keep the truth from everybody, including himself. He prevaricates on whether it's true or not. And look what happens. I mean, this is not necessarily a true story, although there's a lot of dirgeality in this because she married someone that nobody approved of and she left her family and for idealistic reasons. I mean, she's dirty. She's all these characters in one way or another. Now, Litgate faces a dilemma early on in the novel that he is to run a charitable hospital dealing with fevers that has been dominantly financially underwritten by Nicholas Bulstrode. The price for maintaining his volunteer position, running this hospital, which is a position of great prestige, is that he has to go along with Bulstrode's choice for the resident clergyman to attend people at this hospital and to go against his own friend. And if I was in Litgate's position, I'm 80% sure that I would have voted the same way that he did. I would have justified, well, think of all the good that I'm gonna be able to do in my position running this organization for fevers. I'm gonna be able to help hundreds, even thousands of people. We're gonna innovate without research. The benefits of this could go out and save tens of thousands of lives. And I don't like voting against my friend who I think is quite a capable clergyman but my friend will understand. And so sometimes you have to accommodate rich people. So I'm pretty sure I would have followed Litgate in voting against his friend and voting along with what the rich guy wants. How would you have approached that moral dilemma if you're in Litgate's shoes, Richard? Well, I had something like that happen to me. Some years back, this was back in the 80s, I had a special events planning company and we had this one associate. I won't mention her, I'll just mention her first and Lisa. And she brought us a project, it was a good project. We were doing a fundraiser for the International Missing Children's Foundation and it was really that event that really was a pivotal event in our growth as a company. It kind of put us on the map because we pulled off a very difficult event in five weeks. Something that normally takes nine months of planning, we pulled off in five weeks. And we got a lot of attention for it. Lisa was a difficult person. There were some issues with her and we were offered another project by one of the sponsors. However, the condition was that she not be involved as one of the producers. Now, the way I approached that was I said, okay, well, they don't want her as a producer so either we're gonna step aside from this and not do that or find another way. And what we actually did is, because we needed to have sponsorship sales, we said, I offered that term, I said, look, I'd like to have you be on the team. Well, that wasn't entirely true because she was terrible in follow through. She was good on getting people going but she wasn't good on following things through and as a producer, you really need to do that. And my other partner was great at it. And neither one of us cared much for Lisa's follow through but she was really good as a salesperson. She was really good at that. So I said, well, let's do the sales which actually would have been worth, which would have probably earned her more money than being one of the producers. So, but that ended our friendship. So I did have that and I think it's a very similar moral dilemma and what was best for me. And I, but I look back at it and I go, I wish it could have turned out differently. I don't think I made the wrong decision. I actually think I made the right decision but I wish it could have turned out differently than it did. I wish I could have done it without hurting this person who was helpful to us. And I, but the question is, where does my loyalties lie? And at that point, my judgment, my decision was it had to best be for my business and for the people that I was responsible to and not just one person. So I think it's similar, it's different, but it's similar. So what would I have done in Lidgate's situation? You know, I probably would have done the same thing because it was still in my interest. It's just, you know, when you, when you put, but, you know, the preemptive way to deal with that is not to get yourself in a potentially compromising situation to begin with. And, you know, back to the recovery angle of this, you know, we learn from those experiences and we learn not to do that. And hopefully we learn without, without having irretrievable dire consequences that result from it. Yeah. Okay. Is there anything that you want to discuss? I mean, I'm sure we could talk about this book for hours. And in fact, I'd like to do a future show carrying on this conversation if that's amenable to you. But is there anything that you want to bring up today? No, I really think, you know, I think I feel really good about this discussion, you know, and I love this book as a springboard. I'm very thankful that you even suggested, I was aware of the book, I had read David Brooks, you know, the road to character and he actually does a long study of George Elliott in her life and how she came to that. So I was already had sort of an awareness and an interest in it. But, you know, in the last few years, most of my, almost all of my reading has been either, you know, trade journals and or, you know, nonfiction around on certain topics. And so I just, I hadn't read a fiction book and you're like, you know, years. And so, you know, I said, yeah, let's do that. You know, I know you, we talked about some other books that weren't fiction and I went, no, I'm gonna do this because I know it's a great novel and I really haven't read those and I probably should. And I'm glad I did and I will read it again. And after I read it again, I probably can create for us to discuss it again because I think it's a, I agree with you that it is, there's two things about it that I love. One, she really kind of created that genre of what we have now as, you know, binge TV where you have these, you know, very protracted stories that can go over multiple seasons of a TV show. She really, you know, kind of established that in that book, Middle March. And so it's very rich as just an artistic achievement just from that standpoint, but her insight and the humor, especially that she brings to that insight, it's just delightful. There's this one line where there's this guy, Dagly, or Dagly, and he's arguing with somebody about the reformation, he's arguing with Arthur Brooke about it and, you know, he hits the shovel in the ground and then only to realize he can't get it out of the ground because he hit it in the ground so hard. Just little things like that are just so delightful and so funny because it just points out, you know what we're really like. And in a way that if you see yourself like that, maybe you can laugh at a little bit, which is really healthy. Now I'm putting a link to your YouTube channel in this video's description. If people mosey over to your YouTube channel, what might they find? Well, if what they're gonna find right now is, you know, some of the early chapters of the book that I'm in the process of editing, that's the majority of what's there right now over the next few months, that's gonna change, but that's what's there now. And let me just close with like a really tough question. Why would someone go over to your YouTube channel and check out chapters of a book you're writing? Like what type of person might benefit from that? I'm coming to see the audience that this book I believe is for are people in 12 Steps who want a deeper spiritual experience and followers of Jesus who also want a deeper experience and understanding and a fresh perspective on that. Unfortunately, one of the reasons I prefer not to be classified as an evangelical is because I think evangelicalism has discredited itself in so many unfortunate ways, not the least of which is that they're kind of departed from Jesus' teachings in the first place. And they don't do them, they don't live them. You know, we're not gonna change the world by changing the political system. We're gonna change the world one person at a time and that the first person you have to start with is you. So if that's interesting to somebody, if they realize that or if they have questions about that, that's probably an interesting place to explore some of the thoughts there. Okay, great. Good to talk to you, Richard. I'm gonna carry on with a solo stream. So I will talk to you another time, my friend. All right, I look forward to it. And thank you for the invitation and just thank you for the good work of you, friend. I really appreciate it. Oh, thank you. Thanks, Richard. Okay, thanks for being in my life. Take care. Okay, great. So yes, I'm a huge fan of the novel Middlemarch because it just reveals me to me. I read that book and I see myself in so many of the characters. I see myself in Starthee and Brooks because I'm beautiful, I've got a great figure. I've got a magnetic personality. I've got all these hopes and dreams. I want a life of great spiritual depth and great intellectual achievement. And I love to help other people and I love to draw cottages in my spare time. So I also see myself as Edward Kasorban because I'm old, I'm a bachelor, I yearn for some pretty young idealistic woman to come along and to become my companion. And I also can very easily tend to pomposity. I remember I was, this woman came to visit me something like 1992 or 1993. She spent the weekend and we were noting how similar I was to my father and she added, well, your father, he's not as pompous as you are. So yeah, I very easily tend to an Edward Kasorban level of pomposity and also Edward Kasorban levels of delusion about my own ability. So Kasorban, the reverend in this novel Middlemarch, he's devoting himself to a great work, the essence, the origin of all mythologies. And so much of my own life has just been devoted to delusions where I think that I can contribute something only because I simply don't know the work that other people have done. I also see myself in Fred Vincy. So he's this young man who's incredibly callous and I've been incredibly callous with other people's feelings, with causing aggravation and hurt to other people. I've just been intent on going for what I want without being in reality. So that's kind of a painful resemblance to Edward, to Fred Vincy. So his family hopes he will advance socially by becoming a clergyman. So my father was a clergyman and so yeah, it has entered my head at times that I should follow to some degree some similar path to my father. Obviously I'm not a Christian, but surely I inherited some of my father's gifts. I should start my own spiritual or religious nonprofit foundation and going around preaching and teaching like my dad. So yeah, I'm a little bit like Fred Vincy, like trying to use a nonprofit clergy type status to advance my own social status. I'm a lot like Tertius Litgate, the idealistic talented, but naive young doctor who's relatively poor, who hopes to make big advances in the world through his research. But I could very well see myself ending up in an unhappy marriage with some pretty face. Who else do I remind myself of? Arthur Brook, so the off befuddled, not too clever uncle of Dorothy and Celia Brook has a reputation as the worst landlord in the county, but was to stand for parliament on a reform platform. So someone with a great overestimation of his own abilities who often thinks, oh, I should run for Congress. Ouch. And then I remind myself of Rosamund Vincy, vain, beautiful and shallow. Rosamund has a high opinion of her own charms and a low opinion of the society around her. She marries because she thinks it will raise the social standing and keep her comfortable. And when her husband meets financial difficulties, she thoughts his efforts to economize, seeing such sacrifices as beneath her and insulting, she cannot bear the idea of losing social status. So yeah, I feel a bit of a kinship with her as well. And so the people I meet, the people I meet inside myself, they're just reflected back to me in the pages of Middlemarch by George Eliot, his little bit of an analysis. Diction, poetry and seven novels, but Middlemarch has considered her masterpiece. The novel begins with a wise, empathetic, clear-sighted third-person omniscient narrator who introduces the action of the story and its meaning and the characters who propel it. Dorothy Abrook, the primary protagonist, is an ardent and religious young woman who aspires to lead an epic life. Intelligent and beautiful, she's... That's me, intelligent and beautiful, desirous of leading an epic life. Like I'm very desirous of leading an epic life and I'm leading an epic life on YouTube. So exciting to be able to just gather here every day and talk to you about the books that matter to me, the ideas that matter to me and then occasionally walk down the street and I'll run into someone who's received some benefit from my show or I'll get an email from someone on the other side of the world who enjoys my show or a direct message on Twitter from someone who likes something that I've said or I'll get a comment on YouTube. It's like, oh, Luke, this was a great video. You should have a bigger audience, right? I love this notion of having an epic life. Another thing I love about this book is how it points out that there's no necessary connection between religiosity and being decent. So I'm a convert to orthodox Judaism and I went into my conversion to Judaism with the notion that observance of Jewish law, practicing Judaism would make people finer people and sometimes it does work out that way but there is no inherent connection between Jewish religiosity and probably even Christian or Islamic religiosity and being a decent person, being a kind person, being a pleasant person, being an honest person, there's no connection. My brother is such a better man than I am. My brother is so much more of an adult. He's married, he's got kids, he's an upstanding member of his community. He has not directed any porn films. My brother, the resolute atheist, my brother does not have a religious or spiritual bone in his body and yet I can go on YouTube and I can blather about God and spirituality all day long and let me tell you, my brother is a more responsible, more honest, more forthright and just overall a finer person than I am. My brother, the atheist. So one of the things that I've learned is I've grown older, there's no inherent connection between belief in God and anything. Like some people who believe in God are decent and some people who believe in God are indecent. There's no connection between people who go to church and those who don't and any level of ethical behavior. There's no connection between how observant you are of Jewish law and how honest you are. If there is a connection in some areas, it's in a negative direction. But there's an unfortunate element of a part of traditional Orthodox Jewish life where the more devoted you are to Torah, the less likely you are to treat, say, non-Jews with respect and good ethics and to obey the laws of the land. So that was one of the disappointments to me in my journey to Judaism, that while on the one hand, the most impressive people I knew, overwhelmingly, were Orthodox Jews. On the other hand, I saw so many examples of people who were highly observant of Jewish law and they were just ridiculous people. They were dishonest, they were Ghanists, they were thieves, they were thoroughly disreputable, they were patronizing prostitutes and yet they had all this outward observance of Jewish law. So that's another great point from this novel, Middlemarch, making the point that a lot of people might be religious or they might be secular and either way, some as a believer in God or an atheist, if they're religious or secular, it doesn't tell you anything about whether they're gonna be decent kind of standing. I love, this is the books called Middlemarch and it's about a mythical town in the middle of England and its subtitle is a study of provincial life and it nails it. That there is a certain quality to provincial life, just as there are certain qualities to cosmopolitan life. So people in Middlemarch are very proud of their aspects of their community that they think may possibly live up to the very best of what's going on in London, but they're continually comparing themselves to the big city just as I noticed in Northern California, people walk around with this kind of chip on their shoulder against Southern California of constantly comparing Southern California to Northern California and how Northern California is superior. So this is just part of the human condition, this geographic supremacy. Arthur Brooke, the uncle of Dorothea and Celia Brooke, he ruins his life and becomes absolutely humiliated by running for parliament. So how many people have ruined their lives running for parliament when there's no objective reason for them to do that. So somebody I knew growing up, he moved to another state so that he could run for political office and he just completely blew up his chances by acting like a jerk to a salesman and his tirade where he essentially said, don't you know who I am? His tirade was caught on camera and then it was played on the local news and his political career was over by his mid-20s. But a lot of other people who had no basis, no business running for political office had a great overestimation of their own abilities and just completely humiliated themselves much like Arthur Brooke does in this book. I also get a kick out of these classic 19th century novels that frequently equate marriage with happiness. So if you're unhappy prior to marriage, marriage is not gonna make you happy. Marriage I would assume is a refining school that just brings out more of what you are. So I don't think miserable people are gonna be made happy by marriage and I'm not even sure so much that marriage makes people better, rather it is the better people who get married, people who have something to offer. Arthur Brooke in this novel, he favors virtually everything like every reform, every good idea up to a point. And this is key like up to a point, specificity is essential like limits are essential. Right now we are in a liminal space. We're in a space between living under the threat of the COVID pandemic and freedom from COVID. We're kind of right in that intermediate step where we're no longer threatened most of us by COVID, yet we're not fully living life normally. So everything is up to a point. We don't yet have total freedom but specificity is everything. So percentages matter, whether it's 3% or 30%, how much you take of a medication and when you take it makes a great deal of difference. So Fred Vinci tells Mary Garth who he loves, Fred Vinci is the disloot young man. Well, I'm not fit to be a poor man. I should not have made a bad fellow if I had been rich. So many of us, our character defects aren't as glaringly brought into display unless we're thrust into particular situations such as poverty. And he tells Mary, you would have done your duty in that state of life. Yeah, this is Mary. This is Mary responding to him laughing. You would have done your duty in that state of life to which it has not pleased God to call you. So I think that's fairly common. Many of us think, oh, I would have done my duty in that state of life to which it has not pleased God to call me. And Toshis Litgate, the idealistic and talented but naive young doctor who moves to Middlemarch. He has this remark, I've not yet been pained by finding any excessive talent in Middlemarch. So many of our communities are quite dull. That's why some of us love to live in the big city because by living in the big city, I get to go to as many writer gatherings and writer parties and to socialize with other writers to an extent that I would not if I lived in a country area or in a suburb. So being in the big city, it allows us access, usually social access to so much more talent. Come to live along with her sister Celia at her uncle's estate in the English town of Middlemarch after her parents died. Short-sightedness is a symbol that shows up early. Dorothea is short-sighted, both literally and figuratively and doesn't see well beyond her own vision of what the world ought to be like or beyond her ideals, which makes her miss obvious and important information about other people and situations. Other people in the novel suffer from metaphorical short-sightedness or blindness, Kazabon, Bull's Road, while other characters such as Celia and Mrs. Cadwallader, the town gossip, see clearly with less illusion and projection. Dorothea is being courted by a handsome baronet, Sir James, but she chooses instead a middle-aged clergyman, Edward Kazabon, because she thinks he has a great mind and will broaden her intellectual and spiritual horizons. She wants to become wise so that she can know what to do in life. What will provide the greatest good? After she's married, she learns that Kazabon has been compiling notes for 30 years for a treatise he called the Key to All Mythologies. His thesis is based on outdated ideas and will never see the light of day. She also becomes friends with Kazabon's younger cousin, Will Ladislaw, a student who's not yet found his career. So I'm taking this show and I'm getting risky. I just posted a link. Anyone can join the show right now. Just posted a link in the chat, so I'm ready to end the stream if things get out of hand. So earlier in the chat, Jim Bowden said, from Australia, look, all you need to do is become Catholic, get married, and have kids. Well, if you have a problem with overeating, getting married, converting to another religion and having kids, it's not gonna cure that problem. If you have a problem with dishonesty, getting married, becoming Catholic and having kids is not gonna cure that problem. If you have a problem with porn addiction, getting married, having kids, becoming a Catholic is not gonna cure that problem. If you have certain character flaws, if you have certain substance addictions or process addictions, making a religious change, getting married, having kids is not gonna solve that problem. There are no external solutions for an internal problem. Here are some of my other favorite sections of this book. So, yeah, the inability to reconcile spirituality with the love of the finer things of life, such as fancy dress and writing. So Dorothea yearns for a lofty conception of the world, which is fine, but if you're yearning for a lofty conception of the world, blocks you from accepting and acknowledging reality that's not gonna serve you or other people well. Actually what so values to rule, we all do, right? Which is just fine, but if we're unwilling to accept reality in the limits of our own influence and power, we're just gonna cause all sorts of harm. So what happens typically when people don't get their way in life? So they start trying things or so there's been a lot of discussion on the distant right that the COVID pandemic was a pandemic and that the left is using this COVID-19 pandemic to try to enact their agenda. Well, all of us use everything we have at our disposal. Men use everything they have at their disposal to seduce women. So people use everything at their disposal to make money, to enlist people in investment scams or in solid investments or political changes. So the right has used COVID-19 to stop immigration to the United States. That's what the Trump administration, they used COVID-19 the pandemic to enact a lot of the things they wanted, such as a complete shutdown of immigration. So all of us, it's not just the left, it's not just us who use all the tools at our disposal to try to get what we want. So some of us to get what we want, we become nicer and others of us to try to get what we want become stronger or tougher or harsher or we become more charming or we become more brutal. We will try everything, every tool at our disposal to try to get what we want. So this is these techniques and manipulation are not just something that other people do. It's not just something the Jews do, it's not just something that the left does. We all tend to use everything at our disposal to try to get the things that we want. At her new home, she discovers an important symbol, a portrait of Julia Kazabon. It's immediately connected in Dorothea's mind to Will Ladislaw, since he looks like her. Julia was Will's grandmother, who, along with her children, was disinherited from the family for marrying a poor non-English man, Mr. Ladislaw. Initially, Julia represents for her the difficulties of marriage. Dorothea identifies with Julia as someone who married against the wishes of her relatives and who paid a price for it. Much later, the portrait comes to represent the absent Will, with whom Dorothea has fallen in love. Here, Ladislaw soon falls in love with Dorothea, and he's content to worship her from afar. Kazabon becomes extraordinary. So Dorothea is idealistic, but she lacks common sense and she won't see reality for what it is. So a lot of people who are not idealistic but see reality for what it is and have some common sense are gonna do a lot more good in the world than those who have the most wonderful motivations but refuse to accept reality. And Dr. Tertius Litgate, he's happy to volunteer at the hospital for free because he's once a meager, but then he falls in love, right? So he's unable to accept the reality once he falls in love with Celia and marries her, then once you get that bigger life, you're going to have to support a wife. You're gonna have to earn more money or things are going to go to hell. So one of the big downsides to having a larger life, being more social, getting out there is you're gonna be exposed to more temptation, more opportunity to make a fool of yourself. You're going to have more of your own desires ignited and perhaps more of your yearnings activated and these things can be challenging to control if you don't have some spiritual balance. So for people whose internal yearnings are so strong or might be just activated lit up by leading a larger life, that's the reason their fears of leading a larger life because they don't know what frightening urges may be unleashed if they just get exposed to more of life. And so they react to that by trying to have a small and humbler life as possible to try to tamp down their yearnings. The pompous Reverend Edward Casabarm says he has no time for modern literature. He spends too much time with the dead, but it sounds wonderful and very impressive, but he's completely deluded. So the more visible you are, the more you live life with other people if you're in the middle of the pack, less likely you are to be delusional and deluded because you're gonna have to constantly be interacting with other people and if you're full of it, other people will inevitably call you on it or you'll just experience humiliation after humiliation when you refuse to accept life on life's terms. So that's the great thing about being around other people as opposed to leading a larger solitary life. And this is a great thing for me just doing this show. I put ideas and thoughts and experiences out there and then I get back feedback. Some of it can be pretty brutal, but it helps nudge me towards reality. Remely jealous. Dorothea is not aware of lattice-loss feelings or the intensity of her husband's dislike for his cousin. Her life with Casabarm becomes more and more stifling. After an emotional scene with Dorothea, Casabarm has a heart attack. Not long after, he dies, having left a coat of silk to his will, saying that if Dorothea ever marries lattice-loss, she will lose Casabarm's wealth and estate. Worth noting here is the symbol of the peer glass. The peer glass, or large mirror, mentioned in chapter 27 is an important symbol in the way in which an ego organizes unconnected events and random experiences into a coherent story or likely narrative. A gl- Okay, I think that's going to do it for today. So, I strongly recommend this George Elliot novel written in 1870 by George Elliot.