Full-Tilt Boogie

Quality Music

2011-08-21T14:02:00.000-07:00

It is my pleasure to bring to your attention a fantastic new album by Denver-based Able Archer.

Matt Huseman is a supremely talented songwriter and musician whose career I have faithfully followed since 1994 when his first band, the Baltimore-based Greenberry Woods released their power-pop gem, Rapple Dapple.

For those of you who've seen our original movie, Finding My Way, you know Matt played a key role as one of the 7 all-star coaches for young master Jeremy (and the viewing audience). He was also kind enough to give us permission to use music from his second and longest lasting band, Splitsville, for the soundtrack. And, his new band, whose music I want to introduce you to today, Able Archer, recorded the title track for us. All of his time and material, I hasten to add, was generously donated to the cause of the movie (in league with all the performing talent featured in the film).

So, he's a friend with genuine "good-guy" credentials, but probably more important to you, my dear blog readers, is the fact that you are going to LOVE this new album. I tracked Matt down for a brief Q & A to give you a sense of what he and his mates were going for on their brand new The Way Machines See Us. Click on the album cover above to link to a site where you can sample the tunes and download the album. You can also find it (as well as all the Greenberry Woods and Splitsville) on iTunes.

This is your first full-length album since 2003's Incorporated by Splitsville. Did you take a conscious break from music?

Not really. I moved to Denver in 2004, but continued to write music for Splitsville, although the rest of the band was back in Baltimore. We just couldn't decide what the next album would sound like or how to best collaborate on it, and after a couple of failed attempts at getting something off the ground, we eventually abandoned the idea of doing anything. In the meantime, I started a band here in Denver called Sweater Set, but that petered out without getting anything recorded. I joined what would become Able Archer in 2007. We put out an EP in 2009, but it takes us forever to record and mix since music isn't the main focus of our lives and I'm a nightmare to work with. So here we are in 2011, the longest length of time between albums since I put out my first one in 1994.

The Way Machines See Us is quite a departure from your guitar-driven power pop days with Greenberry Woods and Splitsville. What were your shooting for musically this time around?

Chad Lindburg, who plays guitar and co-writes a lot of the songs, is really into experimenting with sound. He also gravitates towards discordant chords and would likely prefer to avoid normal time signatures. I take what he sends me and try to make them into pop songs, much to his chagrin. Some of the tracks were originally songs that Chad, Mike Becker (drums) and Chris Callaway (bass) did with their old band. I had them strip out the vocals so they wouldn't influence my thinking, then I rewrote them, and usually rearranged them, into something that melodically pleased my ears. And some of the songs, 'Plane Crash' and 'In Support of the Steady State Theory' in particular, were earmarked for Splitsville and were, in my less than humble opinion, too good not to record. Our original concept was to release this album as three EP's with the first being somewhat mainstream, the second being really experimental, and the third being a mix of both. But we ended up remixing a bunch of tracks and just decided to plow through and release it as an album. I was definitely shooting for less of a pop sound, though I think I failed miserably.

A few of the tunes seem to be about grappling with mortality. Not an easy subject for a pop tune.

Actually, I think it's an easy subject for a pop tune. Most pop songs are about big themes like love and loss or happiness. Death is the ultimate loss, and something we will all face in our lives.

A few others take up recent or current events - the rise of fundamentalism, the Iraq war, and the financial meltdown. You really seem to be challenging yourself lyrically.

Thanks. I consciously try to avoid the word 'love' in all of my songs these days, merely as a writing exercise. I also write to themes or ideas, often suggested by Chad, that don't necessarily fit the preconceived notion of a pop song. So that's an additional challenge. Paul from Splitsville suggested the title 'Rex 84', and I tried to incorporate what I read about that program into a song. Chad titled a song 'Soyuz 11', so I tried to make a song out of it that incorporated the tragedy of Soyuz 11 but could also be construed as a love song. I don't want to write lyrics that people can't connect with, but I do want to avoid the obvious. I still see plenty of room for improvement on my part, but I'm pleased with the lyrics on this album. By the way, speaking of potentially challenging subjects, the project you, I, and my brother are working on now may be the most challenging yet. Gulp.

My Life as a Lifespring Trainer (Part IV)

2011-03-15T17:01:00.000-07:00

The training department was in almost constant flux, moving people in and out. We went from Bettie Spruill as the director of training to Jim Cook and finally to Terry Nelson. Along the way Jim Cook went to work for Robert White in the Orient and then came back for a time before starting his own Asian operation. Bettie moved on to focus on corporate consulting and training. Terry stayed until the end. He continues to lead the Basic for a few of the Lifespring spin-off companies in the US.

In my opinion, Terry is the best overall trainer working today. He is a consummate professional who combines a strong presence with clarity, compassion, and fun. Terry prepares more for each training than any other trainer I know. He diligently writes up his whole introductory two-hour talk the night before he begins every training. It has to be going on two hundred plus times he’s done this. It’s no surprise he consistently achieves excellent upgrade results. He would definitely be one of the more sought after trainers but he prefers to stay home these days.

I like to be prepared but I go about it in a different way. I look at my reading as a kind of training preparation. I like to read a lot of interesting philosophy, history, and literature. It’s not so much the content of the books that grounds me for the training, although sometimes I’ll definitely steal a nugget or two. For me the important thing is a kind of dance I do with the writer. If it’s a good book, we have a wonderful conversation together. Sometimes he or she educates me on a point of fact. Other times I’ll be more critical and questioning whether the writer really does have it right or maybe is missing some crucial element. This process trains my mind for the give and take of the conversation between the audience and me during a course.

During the training itself, I enjoy taking chances, powering home a point or going with the train of thought someone else in the room wants to start. There’s an exciting improvisational aspect to the process I enjoy greatly. There’s not much that’s more thrilling and ultimately gratifying than getting in sync with the folks and continue deepening the point to a crescendo of insight and, if we’re lucky, mutual glee.

One last thing on Terry. He is the proud owner of one of my favorite metaphorical trainer anecdotes. As the story goes, some years ago Terry was on a ski vacation in Tahoe with his family. He’d been a good skier for a while, but he wanted to improve his skills and learn how to downhill ski like the big boys. He went ahead and hired an instructor to go with him up the lift to the steepest run in the resort. Upon exiting the lift and maneuvering their way to the edge of the mountain, Terry was ready for his first lesson. He stood there anxiously gazing down on a sheer steep drop wondering what he had got himself into. Fortunately he had the wisdom of his expert instructor alongside to give him the magic boxful of tips.

Finally the instructor spoke up.

“So you wanna learn how to downhill ski, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“Great. You wanna know the secret to downhill skiing?”

“Yeah.”

“All right, here it is: You gotta wanna go downhill!”

With that the instructor jumped off the rise and raced down the hill.

Terry followed, keeping in mind the secret. Sure enough it worked.

I keep that morsel of wisdom in mind whenever I embark upon a possibly perilous task. If I want the project to work out, I better want to do it. Seems elemental but I find it quite easy to forget.

Although it didn’t pay especially well, the trainer job with Lifespring was an attractive one, all things considered. For one thing, it was steady work. You received your schedule for the quarter and you were all set. The corporate training business always loomed as a potential grass is greener proposition. Many a Lifespring trainer has gone on to the corporate side.

By the time I made the move in ’97, I didn’t find it so easy. In ’97 I moved from full-time trainer to working for Lifespring on a contract basis. During my time off I looked for a compatible corporate training gig. I finally landed one near the end of the year. I began 1998 working for a Palo Alto-based consulting company. I worked there for a year before going back to contract trainer status. It was a great learning opportunity. I met some great people I still remain in contact with.

The tough piece was moving from the semi-glamorous training only job, to sometimes leading a training, and working at the office the rest of the time. Working nine to six or seven didn’t suit me well. Moreover, I had a hard time initially matching up with what the corporate audiences expected. I didn’t have the same permission to coach as we had in Lifespring. And I wasn’t actually that excited by what I taught. Going from a transformational breakthrough focus to teaching communication skills was a big step down as far as I was concerned.

I’ve since learned how to merge the two worlds. I love nothing more than using whatever subtlety and nuance is required to bring the world of transformation to the world of modern business.

As things stand now in 2010, trainers are largely on their own. We’re all independent contractors now, hired guns by the various independent entities using the trainings as their primary business service. There’re a couple handfuls of us at most in the US and many more in Mexico, China, and Russia. The centers in the US usually have well trained facilitators. Each center has their favorites they’ve grown accustomed to. I’ve worked with most of them at one time or another. I go in and out of the favorites lists.

When you move out of the US, apart from Cook’s operation, things get quite wild and wooly with trainers being self taught or haphazardly trained by low tier trainers who couldn’t cut it in Lifespring. All in all I’m grateful to do the work I do.

There are times I question myself and the training. I look at my own life and my personal travails and wonder what I’m doing standing up there coaching others about their life. Other times I think I'm doing quite well and feel very confident. If I get too down on myself, I think about football coaches like Bill Parcells or Buddy Ryan who were terribly out of shape old men, but had no shame in exhorting their teams to be in tiptop shape. You don’t have to be the perfect model of what you teach. In fact, being cognizant of my own doubts and insecurities might help me as a trainer to more easily relate with what the students go through. Anyway, I'm not trying to set myself up as some guru or hero. I don't go for that approach. I just enjoy seeing the light go on for people. I'm happy to be a part of it.

When I question the validity of the courses themselves, I only need to remember the many folks I meet on the road or by email who go out of their way to tell me what a profound difference the trainings made for them in their life. When someone sits there telling you they never would have reconciled with their parents or had the confidence to start their own business without the personal work they did with me or some other trainer in a workshop, it tends to wipe away most of your doubt.

There they are, right in front of me telling me what I’m doing has had a direct impact on their lives. Who can deny that? Not me. It’s a privilege to play a role in so much positive forward movement. What’s more is the fact that I end up getting as much out of leading the training as those with whom I’m working. Leading the training reminds me of the way I want to live my life. Even though I continue to forget the lessons and make plenty of mistakes, the training is always there for me to help get me back on track.

My Life as a Lifespring Trainer (Part III)

2011-03-15T16:55:00.000-07:00

Trainer meetings were at least reliably interesting if not always our idea of a good time. Each meeting was different. We usually began by going around the table and sharing about our recent trainings. With all eyes on us, we definitely wanted to come into the meeting on the heels of a great training. Those pesky statistic sheets were always out and about to either show off your talent or laugh in your face.

Sometimes the managers arranged for a special guest to come in and work with us. Over the years the trainers worked with Tim Gallwey, famed author of the classic, The Inner Game of Tennis, George Leonard, author of numerous books on life mastery and an aikido expert, and Michael Zimmerman, a philosophy professor from Tulane University. He excelled at making the finer points of existentialist philosophy clear and applicable to our work.

Usually the managers came to the meeting with a set of points they wanted to make with us. These points usually centered around empowering us to deliver more effective trainings. We put our heads together and knocked around the dilemma to see what new ideas we could foster. On occasion the artifice of the conversation bothered us. We all knew the managers wanted us to "get" something. Understandably, rather than simply come right out and tell us what they thought, they tried to steer the conversation so that we came up with the “right” answer for ourselves. The trainers were a wild bunch to corral into any given alignment. Everybody was used to running the show during her trainings. We were tough to manage.

In the midst of one big powwow sometime in the mid-nineties, the managers were circling around toward something they wanted us to see and, finally, we collectively snapped. One of our main ringleaders, Ray Blanchard, started the ball rolling by announcing, “Look, if there’s something you want me to understand, just come out and say it straight. Let’s stop this useless song and dance where you’re trying to get me to come up with it myself. Just tell me. I can take it.” The rest of us joined in with good-natured support.

You had to be there, but it was pretty funny to watch. Still, I think the management continued on as before. Our little rebellion didn’t last long. I don't recommend trying this at your job! For the most part the trainers all got along. We each certainly related to what the other was going through in times of crisis. We all had them. We were the only fifteen people on the planet who were out there being Lifespring trainers.

By the way, I notice more and more people on the internet claiming to be Lifespring trainers. We always made a clear delineation between those of us who led Basic and Advanced and everyone else who may have led some stuff, but really weren't considered trainers.

Most of us in the Basic trainer department were a little proud of ourselves in comparison to the Advanced trainers. We always thought any experienced Basic trainer could learn to do the Advanced. However, we couldn’t see most of the Advanced gang turning around and leading the Basic. They might have a hard time, as far as we were concerned, getting up in front of the highly skeptical general public and patiently enrolling them forward.

The Advanced trainers loved telling us Basic guys how the folks we sent them usually acted like they had never heard of basic concepts like personal responsibility and commitment. I’ve since learned to lead the Advanced and I can attest that Basic is more difficult to pull off. The participants are usually so ready to work by the time they get to Advanced. They’re predisposed to be open and listen carefully. Basic requires a great deal of finesse to enroll participants at every stage of the training to authentically open their minds and embrace the process.

Anyway, the rivalry wasn't too serious; we were just teasing each other mostly.

To be continued...

My Life as a Lifespring Trainer (Part II)

2011-03-15T16:43:00.000-07:00

Over the course of the next twelve months I led something like thirty-two trainings in all, twenty-five Basics and a few other graduate weekend courses. Other than the first one, two other trainings stand out for me from that first year. One was in Los Angeles and the other was in New York City.

LA and New York were considered the toughest markets for a trainer to handle. The audiences tended to be quite savvy and ready to be high maintenance. The LA training was mid-year sometime and it was a blockbuster.

To this day I’m not able to exactly put my finger on what makes or breaks a training. There’s some kind of intangible alchemy that occurs between trainer and participants, along with the volunteer staff, that’s indefinable. I know it has a lot to do with the participants’ level of personal commitment to change as they walk in the door. When the graduates who enroll their friends and family take the time to have them get committed to some personal breakthroughs, the trainer’s job becomes a lot easier. Beyond that, with the trainings that really shine, the trainer and participants establish a strong mutual affection and regard.

This particular Los Angeles training worked spectacularly from beginning to end. Students were extremely open to my input; they worked hard in the experiential exercises; and they simply insisted on having a good time.

One memorable moment occurred on Saturday afternoon of the training. Usually at some point on Saturday we pumped some dance music for a few minutes and most everyone joined in and started dancing. Except the trainer, usually.

I was over by the music system doing my typical swaying when a gigantic group with big smiles on their faces came my way. Before I knew it they picked me up and carried me horizontally lying on my back out to the dance floor and plopped me down. What could I do at that point? It was boogie time.

On Sunday one of the big players from the class was sharing on the microphone when he picked up a two foot ceramic Greek style pillar. He proceeded to share that this item somehow represented who I was for him. He gave it to me as a gift. Later the whole class signed a giant three by three foot card with little personal messages of thanks. Again, first and only time something like that has ever happened. That will always go down as my finest training.

My first New York experience is right up there, too, in my pantheon of memorable trainings. My manager, Jim Cook, wouldn’t let me even sniff New York for most of the year. Finally in the fall, I was on. The thing that struck me so hard that week was how vocal New Yorkers can be. I had heard about what it would be like. As usual, hearing about it and experiencing it turned out to be two totally different things. There was this one guy, a real prototypical New Yorker, who must have asked for the microphone at least a couple times every session. Sure enough, every single point he wanted to make was something that contradicted or at least questioned some phase of the training. I made a point of being patient with him and just trying to reason with him. Finally by the end I had won him over and we had a good laugh together.

The other thing I remember about that training was learning some new slang. Thursday night we were discussing something, probably the concept of responsibility, and someone directed a comment to me in jest. I couldn’t hear what they said so I asked for clarification. It was all lighthearted, lots of laughter. Someone shouted out that they were “dissing” me. Huh? I had never heard that term before. They kindly explained it. I’ve been getting dissed and dissing others ever since! All in all it was a great training. As I said before, the key is mutual affection. By Sunday the New Yorkers and I were in a joyous groove together.

I had a very good year as far as the company was concerned. Trainers were judged on two critical criteria. Of lesser importance was the number of guests attending the post training event. As a Basic trainer, I led the Wednesday, Thursday, Friday night sessions as well as Saturday and Sunday. Eight or so days later, the group was scheduled to reconvene for a three-hour Post Training Guest Event. This event was half Basic Training completion and half introductory enrollment evening for the guests. My job as a trainer was to do what I could to ensure a decent number of guests came to the event by inviting the training participants to invite their friends and family.

Why was this the trainer’s job? Well, the idea was that if the training was effective enough, students would be enthusiastic about sharing the training with others. This seems pretty straightforward to me. It’s basically word of mouth advertising. It’s very similar to what sells a movie. With a big enough name on the movie trailer, a movie can get a huge opening weekend. To propel it into major blockbuster status, however, it better be a good enough movie to generate sufficient buzz on the street. In our case we looked at it like however many participants graduated the training, we ought to be able to have a guest event with close to that same number of guests. We called it having “one per” guest attendance.

While guests were an important criteria, our biggest task was to produce a decent upgrade statistic into the Advanced Course. The participants agreed to attend a ninety-minute personal interview session on Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday of the week following the initial five days. The trainer was expected to give a thirty minute marketing lecture at some point during Sunday of the training, encouraging people to sign up for the Advanced. A forty percent upgrade into the next available Advanced Course was considered a decent upgrade stat for a Basic trainer. Usually we varied between thirty and fifty percent. By the end of the year, I was ranked in the upper two or three Basic trainers with a forty percent average.

Upgrade to the next course was a very important indicator for how the training worked. I didn’t have any misgivings about that aspect of the business. It was: here’s the standard; where are you in relationship to the standard? I think it’s one of the things that made the organization go for as long as it did.

We took some heat from our own people on how forceful we were with the phraseology “based on results.” But we felt, hey, what you’re doing is either working or it’s not. There’s no gray area. It was consistent with what we were teaching. I’m not saying I walked the talk every day because I didn’t, but I did all right. We were all about asking people to make promises in the training and live up to the promises and honor themselves as their word. If we asked the students to do that and it worked for them, well, why not ask ourselves to do that?

We had an interior competition where we tried to do better than we did last year and last month. I don’t think there was any downside, because that was part of the training. The trainer actually showed the students how to be transformative while in the process of sharing the next step. The students learned from the trainer how to open up a possibility where there is none and handle people’s objections. In order to get any venture off the ground, you must get people’s agreement, get people enrolled, get their objections handled, and so forth.

After my first year, I was happy. My manager was happy. Everybody was happy. I received a little bump in salary from thirty-five to forty thousand dollars. What could be better? One thing that was of some concern to me was how tired I was. I was exhausted. All the travel and all the energy expended in front of the room really took it out of me.

As you get older you learn more about yourself in terms of personality. One thing I now understand is that I’m not a super expressive guy. I’m not super quiet either. I’m somewhere in the middle. I do enjoy my quiet time though. Many a training I have so looked forward to taking off my suit on a Sunday night, crawling into my bed and watching ESPN. Ahhh, now that’s happiness. By contrast I know other trainers who thrive on the action. When Sunday hits they’re looking for the party. The next morning when I’m dead to the world, they’re rocking and rolling. I usually need three or four days of down time after a training before I even think about getting up front again.

I don’t know if the workload caught up to me or if I just lost the plot somewhere along the line. Whatever it was, my second year was not nearly as good. By the end of the year I was at or near the bottom in measured statistics. While I could still make it work well on occasion, I could also go four or five trainings in a row not making it work in terms of the statistics.

I’m sure people still created value in the courses, but too few of them were turned on enough to jump into the next step. I ended up struggling, with occasional winning streaks for the better part of the next few years.

A turning point finally came when I accompanied Terry Nelson at a training he led in Atlanta. Although he was an experienced Advanced trainer, center manager, and business manager for the company, he was relatively new to Basic. In fact I had helped train him only a year or two earlier. He turned out to be a valuable mentor and friend for me.

By that time I believe we had transitioned to the three-day Basic Training model. Sometime in the afternoon of the first day, Terry sat with me at the back table on a break. We got to talking about how the class was going. I mentioned that he didn’t seem to be working very hard and that the room seemed fairly flat.

He smiled and assured me things were going great. “I don’t need them to change. It’s fine with me if they do. I will even encourage them from time to time, but I don’t need it.” We talked about how I sometimes operated as if I needed people to change. My method had the opposite effect I desired. Sometimes you get what you resist. Some students experienced that I didn’t accept where they were. They resisted my resistance. I’m not saying people didn’t get value from the training. There was a certain percentage of the class, though, that I wasn’t able to reach with this approach.

I’ve never really looked back since that coaching from Terry. I started doing better. By the last couple of years I was close to the top. Part of it also was pure ego. I was sick and tired of being bested by others in the department. I knew I could do better. By the end of my tenure, I can safely say I was one of the more respected trainers. I often played a big role in our monthly trainer meetings and people generally looked to me for advice and coaching.

To be continued...

My Life as a Lifespring Trainer (Part I)

2011-03-15T16:13:00.000-07:00

I came to work full time for Lifespring in the fall of 1988 upon graduating from New York University with a Master’s in philosophy. My dad and I both agreed to bring me in as a resident philosophical expert. I think I was called Curriculum Development Coordinator or something like that. I was twenty-three at the time and in a pretty awkward situation. The trainers as a whole were not overly interested in what I had to say. I don’t think it was personal; they just didn’t want their training approach to be meddled with.

At the time Lifespring was a few years into a contextual shift from basic personal growth thinking to more overtly existentialist thinking. I had studied Heidegger fairly significantly in school culminating in my master’s thesis. I loved it and believed it could help the trainers and other staff. I worked on writing papers that would make the philosophical concepts understandable and applicable for the staff.

My dad and I collaborated on one called “The Ontological Framework of the Lifespring Trainings,” which was required reading for all staff. I wrote a few others offering existentialist perspectives on topics like science, religion, and the meaning of the word “possibility.” The best one I ever wrote is probably “A Philosophical Guide for Lifespring Trainers,” which several trainers have been kind enough to tell me they read often to keep themselves grounded on what they teach.

On occasion I sat in on trainings in order to observe ways to make things clearer for our students. I also conducted one-on-one tutorials with each of the trainers, although it was difficult to track them all down on a regular basis. About nine months into all this, I began to wonder if I was doing what I should be doing. In fact I was excited about the goal of my current position, but it felt like walking uphill all the time. In retrospect maybe I should have persevered a while longer, but instead I chose to be yet another member of the “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em Club.”

My first instinct was to work for the San Francisco center as an enrollment coordinator. This sounded like a good way to get into the belly of the beast and learn the business from the inside out. There appeared to be an opening for an Advanced Course assistant enrollment manager. I spoke with the center manager and the enrollment manager and they seemed to think it was a good idea.

I drove out there to South San Francisco to finalize the deal, only to find out upon arriving that the corporate officers decided the center couldn’t afford to have two enrollment people in the Advanced Course department.

My dad and I talked about it and agreed the next course of action was to become a Basic Trainer. I sat down with the Director of Training, Bettie Spruill, and she was willing to get behind the idea. We were all concerned about my age. Most trainers came on board in their mid-thirties. But there was some precedent for it. Doug Perasso and Jack Zwissig, a couple legendary Lifespring trainers, came on board soon after graduating from school. I would have preferred to have had a little more life experience, but I decided to go for it.

For whatever reason, Lifespring at the time was under the impression it needed lots more trained trainers ready to go. Within a month or so of my coming on board, they hired eight more trainer interns. The powers that be decided to get us started by putting us into a two-week trainer intensive program. This was a fourteen-day straight training meeting from nine or ten in the morning until nine or ten at night.

We were sworn to secrecy about the specifics of what happened in there, so I can’t be too forthcoming about what went on. It wasn’t anything too outlandish. They more or less put us through an elongated and expanded Advanced Course again.

For the next eight months I played the role of full-time apprentice. Two or three times a month I traveled around the country and sat in the back of the room of the Basic Training. Although I worked a bit with each of the Basic Trainers, the Basic manager, Jim Cook, eventually took me under his wing and brought me along to most of his trainings. In addition to learning the training as a practitioner, Jim and I collaborated on creating an updated version of the trainer guide. After a few months, Jim gave me more and more responsibility in the training, until eventually we were true co-trainers.

What I observed with myself and all subsequent trainers who came in during my time with the company is that there comes a point when the existing community of trainers just “gets” you as a trainer. About seven or eight months into my internship, I started to hear rumblings that I was close to ready. I think I closed the deal during a particular trainer meeting where the new people had to get up and deliver a section of the training to the rest of the trainers. I chose to do what we called a “wrap-up” of a big course-wide game we play called the Red/Black Game. This is usually a fairly heated talk where the trainer takes the participants to task for how they played the game and how their game play mirrored their participation in life.

I made a deal with myself before I went to the front of the room that I was going to go for it. I was going to treat the trainers as if they had, in fact, just played the game. I went after them with a good deal of bravado mixed in with a smidgeon of clarity. A couple of them tried to test my mettle and I gave right back. I knew when I was done, they were impressed. Before long my name was on the schedule as a lead trainer. I can’t recall where they were going to send me, but it was going to be a relatively small training, about seventy.

Good old Jack Zwissig would have none of that. He set it up so that I accompanied him to Washington, D.C., where they had a more established center and would likely have 125 or so participants. This was quite considerate of Jack. He’s like that. He had always looked out for my brother and me since we first knew him. He went out of his way years earlier to try and pull some strings to get me into his alma mater at Santa Clara University.

Jack enrolled me in taking the red eye night flight out east. We agreed I was to be the lead and he would back me up as necessary. Needless to say, I was excited about the opportunity. After months of watching and backing up others, it was fantastic to be able to put my own spin on the training. I enjoyed a couple firsts right at the beginning. It’s a dumb little thing, but it was an unwritten rule that whenever we were driven somewhere, the lead trainer got to sit in the front passenger seat. When the time came, I didn’t have to say anything. Jack took the back and I got the front! Ah, sweet joy.

The other thing was that I opened the training myself. I eventually led a lot of the training sections as an intern, but there were a few that were off limits. At the end of the day, the lead trainer was responsible for getting the job done and there were some pieces they simply refused to hand over to anyone else. One of those completely off limits sections was the hour or so introductory lecture we started the training with.

I spent considerable time at home prepping and practicing my approach. Finally the moment arrived. The clock struck six-thirty on a Wednesday night in early January 1990. I strode to the front of the room to look out at a vast sea of 125 vaguely interested faces. My heart pounded so fast it’s a wonder it didn’t jump out of my chest. It’s the most nervous I’ve ever been in a professional setting. Jack had to send me a note telling me to get on the stage. I guess I didn’t want to stand out that much. It took about fifteen minutes to calm down a little.

At the end of the night, I was on cloud nine. Actually the whole thing went great. Jack stepped in when he needed to and provided a little extra oomph (a “that’s bullshit!” here and there). I think I must have created a nice bond with the folks. I’ll always remember a spontaneous standing ovation they gave me near the end of Sunday, the one and only time that has ever happened to me as a trainer.

(To be continued...)

Matt Huseman Interview

2007-06-05T20:28:00.000-07:00

Matt Huseman is an independent songwriter and musician best known for his work with the Baltimore-based Greenberry Woods and subsequently with Splitsville. Currently a member of Denver-based Able Archer.

Hanley: Let’s talk about the art of songwriting. When you sit down to write a song is there like a creative space that you get into, or is it just something you push yourself to do? What’s it like for you?
Huseman: I’ve been writing songs for so long now that I just kind of set aside a little time, and I noodle around mostly on guitar and just kind of focus on the melody. I know it’s different for other writers. I understand Elvis Costello will actually write the lyrics before he writes the song. And Elliott Smith was the same way which astounds me. I’ll actually just babble stuff to a melody and find melodies that I like and then I decide whether the melody I’ve written is a chorus, a verse or maybe even a bridge, and maybe I haven’t even written a song yet. Sometimes I’ll go back into some older pieces that I have and maybe rip a melody off, and what I thought maybe was a chorus before it becomes a verse. But typically when I’m doing that, like I said, I spend a lot of time just kind of babbling lyrics. And sometimes one of them will catch where I’ll have an idea. I’ll see something like the word “emoticon” struck me just recently, and I thought that was a great title for a song. So actually I have a ton of song titles based on words or phrases that I like. And then I’d maybe try to fit the lyrics to fit that.
Hanley: What you just said reminds me of how Neil Finn describes his writing process also.
Huseman: Really?
Hanley: Yeah, he also says that when he’s going through that - like every time he gets on a major songwriting bender he’ll go through hours and hours of just nothing. He feels like he can’t write anything good and he’s never going to be able to write another song again. Then finally something will hit him. Do you relate to that?
Huseman: Oh, absolutely, no question. And honestly I think Neil Finn is probably one of my three favorite songwriters ever. I just think he’s fantastic.
Hanley: Same here.
Huseman: Especially because I listen to a large variety of music. I don’t try to just listen to one genre. So I’ll hear something by a band and it might be something that I would never even consider writing. Maybe I’ll try to challenge myself to do that and fail miserably. I’ll write it in that sort of style and fail miserably. I could go weeks and weeks, months even, without writing a good song. And then just two nights ago I was kind of playing around with a chord pattern. What I’m really trying to do now more is write different scenes in songs. I’ve been trying to do that ever since the Greenberry Woods days. I’ve always been a fan of doing abrupt scene changes in songs. And so it just became one of the things. There has to be some cohesiveness to the song. You just can’t do it for the sake of doing it. And I just happened to come up with one of those songs last night from something that’s been going through my head for like two days. And that’s the other thing. I know when I’ve written a good song, for myself at least, when it does what I know when I hear a good song does which is two or three days later the song is going through my head ad nauseam. So if it happens to me with one of the songs I’ve written, then I feel like I’ve probably done my job.
Hanley: Now when you’re really in the middle of composing and you have a sense that something good is happening, what does that feel like as best as you can describe It? Is it somewhat euphoric? What feelings are associated with that?
Huseman: It is a natural high. It’s the same natural high you could get from, I’m sure, winning a game, a sporting event, something like that. It’s a euphoric feeling that you get where you’re just like, “Wow, look at what I just did,” especially when the pieces kind of come together, especially if I can get some good lyrics on top of it too. Sometimes I’ve listened to my older material - I don’t really do that too much - but when I do I’m sometimes kind of re-impressed by some of the songs as well. Believe me, there’s plenty of times where I’m like, “Uh, did I write that? I can’t believe that. Or did I sing that, or were those my lyrics?” But sometimes you do sit back and you go, “wow” and kind of get a little bit of that feeling again. You can kind of revisit that feeling. It’s part of the reason why you end up doing this.
Hanley: Well, since you mentioned it, what are two or three of your songs you’re most proud of?
Huseman: I think as far as the sort of classic pop rock kind of genre that I wrote both of the songs in, “Trampoline” for Greenberry Woods and “Yearbook” for Splitsville, are kind of two naturals. When I wrote both those songs, they came extremely easily. You struggle a lot with songs and sometimes it’s a real struggle. “Trampoline” I wrote in five minutes and “Yearbook” I was lying in the back of a van one night on the way home from a gig and wrote it all in my head, which is pretty rare for me, too, without a guitar. I think those two still stand up. The more obscure ones, I like “Oh, Janine” off the Greenberry Woods album, even though those are not the original lyrics to it. I like the song itself. I think off our last Splitsville album I really like the song “Sasha” about my dog but probably about me and my relationship with my wife and stuff like that too.
Hanley: I love that one.
Huseman: Oh, cool. Thanks.
Hanley: I have such a hard time discerning your voice from your brothers. I’m not sure which ones are yours. But I also like “Hold On” a lot.
Huseman: Yeah. It’s me.
Hanley: Did you do “Super Geek”?
Huseman: Yep.
Hanley: That one’s a killer.
Huseman: My wife loves that song.
Hanley: I’ve probably played that one more than anything.
Huseman: I also thought that was more of an obvious single off that album, but c’est-la-vie.
Hanley: Now you mentioned getting inspiration riding in a van one time. So you have that unexpected inspiration. Do you get woken up in the middle of the night sometimes and you just have a good idea?
Huseman: It’s funny you say that because with “Sasha,” that song, I had the main part of that song literally for five years probably. And I’d just revisit it every now and then. I just didn’t know where to go with it. And one night I woke up and I just came up with chorus, “I see in your eyes.” I ran downstairs. We lived in a row house in Baltimore at the time so not a lot of private space. I clicked on a tape machine. So you hear at the end of the song me kind of singing into a tape recorder? I re-recorded it so it sounded better, but I wanted to capture that spontaneous feel of actually writing the song. That’s why I put that at the end of it. Anyway, yeah, inspiration can come at any time. It sometimes will just hit you in the middle of the night. And the worse thing to do, John, honestly is when I have a song going through my head in the middle of the night and I’m too lazy to get up and the next morning I’ve lost it.
Hanley: Well, do you have the old tape recorder nearby where you can at least hum it?
Huseman: Oh, yeah. I used to do it on like a boom box that recorded. Now I’ve got this little guy. I’m sure you’ve seen them. It’s like the size of maybe half the width of a cigarette pack and about that length as well. And it’s a digital recorder.
Hanley: That’s what I’m using for the interview.
Huseman: There you go. I mean it’s great. It’s perfect. And it’s easy to travel with. If I bring a guitar with me on vacation or something, I just pop it in the guitar case so I have something to record with.
Hanley: Perfect. So if you take your favorite songs of yours as a guide, are there any general things you can say about what works about those songs? What makes them so pleasing to the ear?
Huseman: Well, theory-wise I’m sure you could. I read a book on the whole Beetles catalog and the author actually kind of put all the songs in context and he’ll ascribe some music theory to it as well as in, “Isn’t it pleasing the way that you go from a D minor to, I don’t know, E 7th,” or something like that. Well, I’m not that bright. I didn’t really pay attention to any of the theory that I learned so I can’t really say from that point of view with respect to my work. I just think for me there’s an emotional resonance to certain chord patterns and more likely certain melodies over chord patters. And in fact with the song that I just wrote a couple of nights ago, that’s what struck me most is that it’s haunting.
And, John, I’ve been doing a lot of writing with some other people recently, which is kind of a fun challenge for me because I normally in both the Greenberry Woods and Splitsville would typically bring almost solely realized songs to the band. Just the other day I had written some lyrics to someone else’s tune. The chord pattern and the melody that I wrote on top of this chord pattern I really felt was haunting. But, the lyrics that I wrote were a little too mundane. I actually went back to the guy and said, “Look, I’ve got to redo these because I’m not doing the song justice.” And that’s kind of my way of saying that there are certain melodies that you could put on top of a chord pattern and automatically I could just hum the melody to you, and instinctively you’d say, “That sounds like a driving song, or that sounds like a great song to dance too,” even if I just hum the melody. So I think that you can base some of the songwriting around that idea. Like I said, I can’t theory-wise tell you what makes a song work. I just think it has to be pleasing to the ear and have some emotional resonance.
Hanley: I remember listening to Todd Rundgren talk about songwriting years ago. And he was saying when he was younger what bothered him is that he got in a certain pattern. He says it was just so easy to write these songs. He would just start with I think he said he like F major 7th and off he was. And in 20 or 30 minutes he’d have a song. First of all, do you notice yourself going into a pattern? But maybe you’re not against it like he is. Maybe you don’t think there’s anything wrong with it. What do you think about that?
Huseman: That’s another great question. Honestly, it’s been a while since I’ve done an interview because I try to kind of get away from them. I wish people would ask me these kinds of questions in our career. These are really insightful questions.
Hanley: Thank you.
Huseman: But, actually you’re right. In Splitsville there were songs that I would bring up and the guys would be like, “No, it’s too much like x, y, or z.” I find myself doing the D minor to G 7th thing probably more than I should. I can tell even when like Paul or Brandt will bring up a song and it will automatically trigger one of their previous songs because you do end up writing in a pattern. And I’ll tell you, kind of go back to that last question, or at least my last digression, that’s what’s so exciting about writing to other people’s stuff right now. They will bring up chord patterns that I might never have put together. Even when I’m with this alt country project that I’m doing, sitting around and the drummer might have a drum pattern or the guitar player will goof around, I’ll just try to put a melody on top of it. It’s much more of a challenge in a way, and it’s a blessing because it does take me out of my comfort zone and makes me have to try to stretch my songwriting muscle. And I think it’s great.
Hanley: Now, another guy that I love is Paul McCartney. And he talks about how he’s tried a bunch of different things, of course, millions of pop songs, but he’s also some classical and some experimental stuff. He says that no matter what, it always sounds like me. “There’s something about the way I’m wired that it’s going to sound like me.” Do you find that there’s a Matt Huseman sound that you can’t get away from and wouldn’t want to?
Huseman: I think that if you listen to the canon of my material expanding seven albums or eight albums, you’ll definitely see that. Getting back to Neil Finn, I remember getting “Together Alone” and thinking, “Wow, it’s such a departure from his stuff. I don’t know if I’m really into it.” And then listening to it a handful of times and I realized that, at the core, it’s still Neil Finn. It’s still fantastic songwriting. In fact, I think I might at this point like that album more than any of the others. If you take three albums removed from the Crowded House first album which is keyboard based pop because producer Mitchell Froom was all over that one, but still it’s that same Neil Finn sound and it bleeds onto his solo albums as well. And you could tell his stuff from Split Enz too; you could tell it’s him as a songwriter. It kind of shows. So I’d like to think the same thing happens as you listen to songs that I wrote. Earlier you asked me if I wrote a few tunes and, sure enough, you guessed correctly so clearly there is a sound. I find this to be the case a lot. When people would list their favorite Splitsville stuff, quite often they’d all be Brandt songs or they’d be Paul songs or mine. So I think people recognize those patterns and they kind of identify with them. Does that make sense?
Hanley: Definitely. I think I tend to gravitate toward your tunes. Like did you do “Joan of Arc?”
Huseman: Yep.
Hanley: Did you do “Master of Space and Time?”
Huseman: Yep.
Hanley: Those are my favorite from that album.
Huseman: And like I said, that’s not unusual. I kind of see that pattern all the time. I appreciate that you do like that. And some people say that they like the Brandt tunes more than mine. It doesn’t really bother me because I know he’s a frickin’ talented songwriter.
Hanley: Just a matter of preference.
Huseman: Exactly. I mean it’s tough to describe, but there’s got to be some sort of innate, whether it’s the timbre of my voice or just the chord patterns that I use or even the melodic structure that I use, which is slightly different from the other guys. There’s something that is just more appealing about that for some listeners. And how do you pinpoint that? I don’t know.
Hanley: The one that I really thought was you was the “The Next One.” But I guess that is…
Huseman: It’s Brandt.
Hanley: Do you know what I mean though? That kind of sounds like one of yours.
Huseman: I agree with you. I think it actually does. And I used to sing it in practice sometimes where I tried to get him to let me sing that one.
Hanley: That’s definitely a great song. Now, I guess I love reading these rock n’ roll interviews so I’ve got all these references here. I remember Keith Richards talking about how every rock n’ roll writer is a thief. And we’re all taking stuff from other people. Have you ever had a specific song in mind from the past and said, “Ok, I want to write something like that”?
Huseman: Oh, I do it all the time. I mean shoot, again, I think it’s pretty obvious. I heard through the guy who directed the video for “Trampoline” that Norman Blake from Teenage Fanclub apparently heard our song and identified that I’d nicked a piece of “Alcoholiday” from it. I mean, I’m not going to lie. It’s a very similar chord pattern at least. I’m not saying melodically the song is, but the chord pattern itself was reminiscent of Teenage Fanclub. So, yeah, we do it all the time. It happens all the time. But I don’t actually set out and say I’m going to write “Alone Again Or” or something like that. I’m not going to go and write my “Penny Lane.” But production wise sometimes sure. I mean, well look, let’s face it, the Complete Pet Soul was kind of a goof but we took it very seriously. And you can identify the ‘60s tunes in that album.
Hanley: When you’re sitting there writing the song and it could be lyrics, it could be the melody, I wonder how much does emotion play into it? For example, like if you’re writing about love, do you feel that? Even going back to “Sasha,” some people might think that’s, I don’t know, a little strange, but I don’t think so. It really comes through that you do love your dog in that. So I’m wondering like did you feel that when you were writing that? Or if you’re writing a more angry song, are you feeling the rage as you’re doing it?
Huseman: I think any good songwriter does. I think you can tell when they don’t. You can tell a top 40 hit that was written by a bunch of professionals and you can tell a Kurt Cobain riff. There’s just a difference to it. I don’t care how much people put emotion into the singing. I’m saying the actual song itself. And I totally agree. What I try to do with just about every song I do is tap into some sort of vein, whether that vein is indifference, which “Trampoline” was really just about indifference. And again “Sasha” is not just about the dog. I’m not going to go into psychoanalysis 101 in my brain, but it was definitely about more than that. So you just tap into those feelings. I dated a girl for about six years in my 20s and wrote a lot of the stuff in the late Greenberry Woods, early up through Splitsville and I probably still do. It was a relationship that was just really volatile, so, I’m able to still go back and tap into that sometimes, those feelings, with bad relationships or whatever it should be. I think it makes songs a hell of a lot more emotional, resonant, and more interesting.
Hanley: Definitely. So like if we take “Sasha,” the line “You run away from the people who love you,” was that a main theme you wanted to bring out?
Huseman: Yeah, and you don’t have to know it’s about…I mean it can obviously can be about a human being too. And in some ways it is.
Hanley: I think we can all relate to that. I think it’s a brilliant line. It speaks to me in a lot of relationships I’ve been in.
Huseman: Sure, absolutely. I think it’s rare that both people enter a relationship without at least one person with at least a toe outside of that relationship ready to turn tail. In most relationships I’ve been in, at least one of the parties was always hedging their bets. I called that song “Sasha” because that was my dog’s name. If you know it’s about a dog, you can ascribe the lyrics to the dog, but it’s not only that. It’s really not. In fact a very good friend of mine called me up right after she heard the album for the first time and she said she cried during that song because she said that song is about you, which is something that I felt. I know again it’s a big digression there, but that’s what songwriting should be about. I don’t like putting songs in a box. I can tell you what “The Next One” is about. It’s actually about two stories in Brandt’s life that he juxtaposed together. It’s a poignant song because he actually tapped into two different kind of pains. One was the pain of unrequited love and one is the loss of a good friend of his who died at a young age. And that’s why I think that song is so frickin’ brilliant. He kind of pulled it all together. I mean that song has real emotion. He could have delivered it deadpan or something like that, but even then I think the emotion of the song is still going to be there.
Hanley: That’s interesting you said that because that helps me with that one because in a way I couldn’t quite figure out what he’s saying there. But, then, on the other hand, I like that. It leaves me to think about what do I make of this? What is this “next one” that he sings about referring to? There’s a nice mystery to it.
Huseman: I agree. Not every song has to be linear path. I love songs that are stories. The Kinks used to do that all the time. Ray Davies wrote a lot of songs with a story to it. That’s what I really liked about the Fountains of Wayne first album that in a sense it was very Kinks-like in the way that a lot of their songs are kind of like little mini-stories. Elvis Costello, on the other hand, his stuff would be--I love Costello; I’m a huge Costello fan; I always have been--he’d be singing about “Oliver’s Army,” and then there’d be a line or two about a girl, and then it would be about, I don’t know, about being in Palestine. I try to do that as well as I’ve matured as a songwriter. I can be singing on something entirely different and then slip in a line or two about something that is poignant to me, something that has some emotional resonance to me and that will make the song for me that much stronger. And unless I actually explain it to you, you’d never figure out what it was. You inherently, I think, recognize that there’s something to those lyrics. There’s something behind it. A different approach is like Lenny Kravitz, who I like. But I get the feeling that he does what I do which is sits around sings gibberish to his songs. “I like to love and rub it up”. But he actually just keeps a lot of it as the song. You know what I’m saying?
Hanley: Yeah.
Huseman: I don’t really get that emotional resonance from a lot of his stuff. And I’m not cutting on the guy. He’s obviously had a good career. And the stuff that he does where he actually spends times writing lyrics, you can tell he does it.
Hanley: Let’s just talk for a minute here about the Beatles. I’m assuming you admire them a lot?
Huseman: Yeah. I could even joke. When you say you like Paul McCartney. I thought, Paul McCartney, hmmm…who’s he?
Hanley: That British guy going through a big divorce.
Huseman: No kidding.
Hanley: It struck me, I was listening to the new Beatle compilation album, Love, that they came out with and there’s like, I don’t know, 25 songs on there or something like that. And I had this conclusion. I want to see what you think of it. If you take any one of those songs and a band puts that on their album but imagine there was no Beatles, ok. Imagine somebody just wrote “Blackbird” or just wrote “Come Together” or whatever. My sense is any one of those songs would be the best song on pretty much anybody’s album that they came out with. I mean, they’re that good. Now, you don’t have to agree with that specific conclusion. But what can you say about just how good they were as writers?
Huseman: I think I’d have a hard time disagreeing with that. I think I was telling you earlier about a book that I have. I can dig it up. I’ve got quite a few books on them. I’m a huge Beatles’ fan.
I probably have it sitting in here. It’s Revolution of the Head by Ian MacDonald. And it’s every song they’ve ever recorded from obscure ones that I didn’t even know they recorded from their first sessions even before they had Ringo in the band. He goes through and in various degrees tells you about the history of the songwriting, maybe even what the impact the specific song might have had on pop. And it’s just a fascinating read, I tell you. He’s highly critical of a lot of the stuff. “It was lazy songwriting,” and stuff like that. Some of the stuff is really lazy. One thing I remember from that Beatles Anthology that came out 10 years ago or so was Beatles’ producer George Martin sitting there going, “Man I wish we had made the White Album just a single album and cut out all the fluff and all the stuff,” then they cut to McCartney and he goes, “But, it’s the flipping White Album.” I’m with Paul on that one. If you think about, especially all the stuff on the Love album, which I think were all singles of theirs, a ton of them, you put it on someone’s album today and you’re right. It would stand out as one of the, if not the best, track on the album. Their songwriting was that strong. And a lot of it was due to the competition between Lennon and McCartney. I have no doubt about that, and that there was a healthy amount of competition between the two that allowed them to do that. I totally agree with you. I mean, they were that strong as songwriters. When you talk about any of their foibles, you have to put it in the context of, well, it’s still the Beatles.
Hanley: And it’s funny. I enjoy some of the lazy stuff. I think that has its own charm to it.
Huseman: Oh, I agree, plus the fact that this was 30, 40 years ago now. We’ve heard a ton of music since then. And (a) this stuff still holds up, and (b) when they were doing some of that stuff, it was pretty new at the time.
Hanley: Let’s talk a little bit about what makes a hit song. Now I know you have to think about the marketplace and America seems to like dance songs and all that, but tell me if I’m wrong. I still like to believe that something like - let’s go back to Neil Finn and his classic, “Don’t Dream its Over.” I just cannot believe that would not be a hit. It just has to be. So is there a certain magic around certain tunes that maybe you can’t even describe, but it just leads to mass appeal?
Huseman: There’s no question. I can certainly tell when I’ve written something special, and I’m not saying I’ve had any sort of that success, that mass appeal success. But, in my world it would be the ones that people consistently say, “Oh, that’s my favorite song,” or it’s the catchy ones. So, yes, “Don’t Dream its Over,” I still hear it to this day and I still enjoy hearing it. Another song that I’ve heard more times than a human should hear it is “Every Breath You Take” by the Police. And any time I still hear it on the radio, I listen to that song and say, “Now that is a single.” “Don’t Dream it’s Over,” that is a single. It’s just an innate thing about those songs that just have an appeal on the first listen and an appeal on the one hundredth listen. It’s incredible if you can capture that. And that’s the thing with the Beatles is that they could capture that on eight or nine songs on an album.
Hanley: I know. It’s crazy.
Huseman: And everything else they put on the album would help frame the singles to sound more distinctive. Let’s take Rubber Soul as an example. You can’t have an album full of ten “Got to Get You Into My Life.” You have to have a “Tomorrow Never Knows” and a “For No One” even. I mean a “For No One” is a forlorn sparse piano ballad that offsets the “And Your Bird Can Sing” which is more trippy. If an album had ten songs line “Every Breathe you Take” on it, the actual “Every Breathe you Take” would have a less impact on that album.
Hanley: I get what you’re saying.
Huseman: So you have to have that diverse songwriting which you certainly have when you have three and occasionally four songwriters like the Beatles did.
Hanley: I want to ask you some questions on performance in a minute here. But one last thing in terms of creativity. If you could extrapolate from songwriting and give some advice I guess or counsel to the every day person who’s creative in whatever they do, whether it’s writing or in business, are there some keys you’ve identified that help creativity and others that get in the way?
Huseman: The thing is it’s probably different for everyone. But I have to have privacy when I do it. Like if my wife is listening I can’t write. I just can’t do it. But that’s just me. I remember reading about Elliott Smith writing X/O and he apparently wrote a lot of it in a bar in New York. So privacy is just what works for me.
Hanley: What about something like I heard somebody talking about creativity once said the killer of creativity is “should” and “shouldn’t.”
Huseman: Oh, there’s no question that you have to take yourself mentally to places that you might maybe not even want to go sometimes. I’d say that, and it’s a risk for you to stretch yourself. And it’s a risk that you have to allow yourself to take. So, yes, I agree with that assessment. Beyond that, I don’t know. That’s a tough question for me.
Hanley: It’s hard to say. When you say risk that also brings up that there’s a vulnerability involved just in a willingness to create anything because, when you create something, you’re identified with it and you’re going to get critiqued. So you have to have that willingness to put yourself out there to the world.
Huseman: I agree. I don’t even think you realize it a lot of the times while you’re doing it--but, if you record something and you put it out there, you’ve now just set yourself up for critique and especially in today’s day and age where it’s very easy for people to have their opinion known to a lot of people. But I don’t think you can think about that when you’re doing it. Some of my favorite stuff is when people completely go outside of their comfort zone. I think that makes them more interesting as an artist. Let’s face it, the people you’ve named, Neil Finn, the Beatles, they didn’t just write the same album over and over again. They went to a lot of pretty different places as they progressed. You’ve got to do that. That’s what I’m trying to do right now in a couple of the things that I’m doing, and it’s rewarding for me. I think I’d be really depressed if all I was doing was kind of Greenberry Woods over and over. You hear sometimes, “Ah, why can’t you do another one of those?” I keep thinking, “I’ve kind of been there, done that.”
Hanley: Well, alright, speaking of risk, let’s talk about being up in front of that audience. How do you handle nervousness?
Huseman: It’s funny you say that because like I said I’ve been playing with this new band. We played our first show on Tuesday night. I don’t really get nervous anymore, it’s more of a nervous anticipation. But, I’m sure if I were to start playing big clubs again I’d probably feel a little bit of that normal anxiety. For me, in general though I get kind of jazzed about the opportunity to sing or to perform in front of people. So for me it’s kind of different. It doesn’t really make me nervous. It makes me more excited.
Hanley: Do you ever feel embarrassed up there just like there’s all these people looking at you and you’re looming over them? Do you sometimes feel overexposed?
Huseman: Not really. I mean, it’s weird. When you’re playing live, a lot of times you’ve got lights in your eyes. And what I do when I’m onstage, I’ve really established in my head that I kind of own the stage. It’s my place. It’s my workplace. So I don’t ever get self-conscious about people staring at me. But I do go through a range of emotions while playing. If you’re having a bad night you can get pissed off. I’ve been bored playing before where we’re all laconic during a show. It’s just not working for us. It’s just not happening. That’s an awful feeling. Or if you’ve been on tour for a while sometimes - maybe it’s due to something that happened that day - but there can be shows where you’re sitting around before hand thinking, “I don’t want to be doing this.”
Hanley: Do you like to improvise during shows or do you like to stay on a set schedule?
Huseman: I’m not a very improvising man. I’m a pretty OCD kind of guy anyway. So I prefer to have sort of everything figured out before I go onstage. I don’t like a lot of surprises. I’ll be honest with you, I’m not that talented of a guitar player. I’ve never been a jam band kind of guitar player. It’s just not me. I can’t do it. And it’s not really the style of music that we do. That said, we’ve taken some chances while we’ve recorded before and while we’ve been onstage, we’ll go into new songs and try songs out and stuff like that. But, in a sense of like “jam bandy” kind of stuff, nah. That’s not my scene.
Hanley: Well, since you mentioned the guitar playing, let’s talk about that for a moment. I tried to learn guitar when I was growing up. And the thing I came up against is I could never transfer what I was hearing onto the guitar neck. My brain doesn’t work that way. Now, I assume you can do that. But, what do you think separates you who I think is a very good guitar player from somebody you would consider better than you. I don’t know, I mean even back to Neil Finn because I know he improvises a lot on stage or there’s the real flashy guys too. What is that extra something that makes them better?
Huseman: It’s tough to say. I think honestly as stupid as it might sound it can come down to something as simple as hand-eye coordination. I agree, I think Neil Finn is a better guitar player than I am. I don’t even think there’s any question about that. I’m kind of a hack to be perfectly honest. I think it could be like asking why can someone write a book better than someone else or why can someone shoot a basketball better than someone else. I just think some of it is just innate talent because I’ve been playing guitar for a long time. I tell you I’m also my own worst critic. I’ve also played in bands where I thought that the people that I was playing with were really good guitar players and then I realized I was at least as good as they were. But, I’m realistic about it. I’m never going to wow someone. No one in their right mind stands by the stage and watches me play guitar unlike Tony from Splitsville. The guys just a natural talent. He’s a fantastic guitar player.
Hanley: Do you like to solo or do you like more the Townsend rhythm?
Huseman: I’m actually much more of a Townsend power chord kind of guy. That’s kind of my forte. I’m not a good lead guitarist. And the funny thing was I was the lead guitarist for Greenberry Woods so we were only going to ever be so good on our instruments with me as the lead guitarist.
Hanley: Well, we have some time left. Let’s talk about band relationships because I think everybody can kind of relate to this. I know music is its own thing, but essentially you have a team there. So I want to talk to you about what works and what doesn’t work from your experience. The nice thing is you’ve had some varied experiences there.
Huseman: No kidding.
Hanley: Here’s another reference for you. I remember Michael Stipe from REM was saying that in his opinion the only way bands really work is that you have to grow up together and you just kind of fall into it. I know that was the case with REM and a lot of great bands. Do you think there’s anything to that?
Huseman: Maybe some. But I mean I thought Zeppelin was pretty good. They didn’t do it that way. And, shoot, Ringo was added to the Beatles and he was a hired gun. So I mean, is there some truth to that? Sure. I think you just have to have an affinity for the people in the band for it to work. Let’s face it. You’re going to be hopefully touring with these people. So you learn about people. That’s what happened with Greenberry Woods. We got on tour with each other, and we realized, “Ok, we don’t like each other.” Maybe that’s too strong of a word, but there was some truth to that. We realized that we had a different mindset about everything essentially. That was a real negative experience with us, and I think if you got all four of us in a room, we’d admit it now.
There was a lot of healthy competition. There was also a lot of unhealthy competition between us in that we really just didn’t manage our internal relationships well. It got to the point where my brother and I were writing letters to each other towards the end of Greenberry Woods. We were living in an apartment together, a really small apartment, and we were communicating through letters. We were writing things like: “I respect you as a person and a songwriter, but we’ve got to stop going on in the same way. I would rather not be in this band and not pursue this any more if we can get our relationship back on track.” It was really that bad. And then with Splitsville, it was a completely different thing. It was Brandt’s idea to put together the band as a side project. And we got Paul involved. So the dynamic worked really well. We actually set up the dynamic from the start so it would work better. Paul is a friend of ours. He was a bartender at a bar that we used to go to all the time. We knew he was a talented musician. We liked him as a person. We knew he was a likeminded soul, someone who read a lot, and had a lot of same interests. It was like night and day. We would tour with Splitsville and the three of us in the van, we didn’t have a crew then, and we would just tour around and talk for hours. It was amazing to us because when touring with Greenberry Woods we were picking on each other all the time. It was just different. I don’t necessarily think that you have to have known each other since childbirth or whatever, be childhood friends. I’m enjoying the people that I’m playing with right now and we met here in Denver. But we’re all likeminded people. Another thing I’ve learned with bands is that I think you have set the ground rules early. Democracies are great and every band I’ve been in has been a democracy of some sort. But at some point someone’s got to be able to be the ultimate decision maker or else you’re screwed. With the dynamic of Splitsville when there were three members it worked well because you could always be two against one, majority rules. I also think you need to assign responsibilities early. If someone is better at booking shows than the other person, have them book, or whatever it’s going to be. But in the creative process you’re going to typically figure out who is the stronger songwriter or whatever the case might be and each members strengths and weaknesses as a musician.
Hanley: Lot’s of good stuff there. I’ve got a couple of more questions for you. I live out in California. I haven’t ever had a chance to see you live, but I first heard about you I think, when Greenberry Woods were in the Billboard magazine in the early 90s. Were you guys on the cover of that? There was a big article before your album even came out, Greenberry Woods.
Huseman: I think we were. I think there was an article on pop. I can’t remember what it was. But, I seem to remember something like that. I know we’ve been in there a handful of times. We did make the cover once.
Hanley: They talked about you guys as maybe the next Beatles and all that. When that was first happening, were you just thrilled and excited and just riding on a high with such great hopes? So that’s one thing. And then juxtapose that with the kind of disintegration within and also the lack of support you got from your company. Was that really deflating because of the initial high?
Huseman: I’d be lying if I told you it wasn’t. But it’s interesting. When you put it in context, we were 23, 24 years old. So I was fairly young and obviously had never had any experience like that before. So it’s not like I had anything to relate it to. And I kind of always assumed, “Hey, we’re good. We’re going to be successful.” But, early on in our career in Warner Brothers, we went played on a flatbed truck right outside of Warner Brothers Studios. We were fired up so we toured the building after that. And, as we walk through, we noticed something interesting on their computer screensavers. There were all sorts of screensavers and posters and everything of Green Day. See the problem? We were the Greenberry Woods and we were at the same label as Green Day and their album was coming out right at the same time ours was. And we were like, “Well shoot.” We figured it out pretty early that we weren’t going to get that level of support. I think we did pretty darn well for our first single on the East Coast, especially. But, we kind of knew it was going to be an uphill battle early on. It didn’t make us happy, but it was what it was.
I don’t know, John, it’s tough to say. Yeah, we were euphoric, but you’ve got to understand. Ok, so we recorded an album in the summer and then it didn’t come out until February or March the next year. In fact, it got delayed because there was an earthquake I remember in California. So there’s a lot of time where you’re just kind of sitting around and you’re not doing anything. We weren’t doing anything. We weren’t really touring. They were waiting until the album got released to tour us so we just kind of sitting around. I think Brandt and I were both temping at the time. So you still felt like some normal 24-year-old schlub that doesn’t know what’s going on. Along the way there were some brief moments of brilliance, like playing on Conan O’Brien’s show and doing some stuff with MTV. But ultimately pretty early on we realized that it was going to be an uphill battle for us. Plus the fact the music we were doing, let’s face it, especially at the time, wasn’t exactly timely. We were doing pop in the era of grunge. So it was a tough nut to crack.
Hanley: Going back a little bit in your answer there, it’s interesting you say that you just had a confidence that you were going to be successful. So like when you and your brother were teenagers or young 20s you just knew or had a really good sense you guys were going to make it big?
Huseman: Yeah, almost as soon as we started writing our first songs. If I would go back and list them now, I’d probably be horrified, but, on second thought, I can’t even say that. I mean “Oh, Christine” was one of the first ones that we wrote, which I still like. But, anyway, back then we just knew we were good. I guess you just have to innately believe in your ability. If you approach anything and you don’t have that, you’re not going to be a success. There’s a lot too in that visualizing and the power of positive thinking and all that. You know as well as I do. You conceptualize your own success. But again it wasn’t like I was actively conceptualizing my own success. I just naturally assumed that, “Hey, we’re talented. We’re going to be rock stars.”
Hanley: Now, in this world of everything’s indie, let’s talk a little bit about how do you balance everything now? You’ve got your every day job. You have practice in music. You’ve got to market your music. You’ve got family. How is that working for you?
Huseman: When I moved out here to Denver, we were still doing some Splitsville stuff, but not really. I mostly stepped away from music. I was still writing a lot. It was great because I was writing an awful lot when I came out here, but as far as doing anything really productive, I just wasn’t doing it. So I’ve just started really over the last six months deciding that I want to get back into doing it. It’s different now. There’s a lot of free outlets for you to put your music out. We didn’t have anything like MySpace when the Greenberry Woods started out. We didn’t have anything like iTunes even or the web.
But now it’s fairly easy for you to market yourself and that’s what you have to do. Now what you have to worry about is getting at least heard out there. But I think if you have a good product, being the songwriting, you’ve got a better chance than others. Plus I think people are more tolerant of the indies. People listen to iPods. I can tell a vast difference between the sound of an MP3 and a cd. So people are a little more tolerant of maybe production that is not pristine, 48 track kind of stuff. And again it’s just like anything you do. I’m actually recording an album with Able Archer right now and I’m sure I’ll put it out. I just approach it positively, that’s what you have to do. I don’t pretend that I think I’m going to sell as many albums as Britney Spears or some people.
Hanley: Right. Any Splitsville later this year?
Huseman: We keep on talking about it. So stay tuned.
Hanley: Alright.
Huseman: We keep on saying it’s going to happen so I believe it. I tell you, I’ve got the album written if we ever do it.
Hanley: Well, cool, man. I think we got a great interview here. I think we covered a lot of great ground.
Huseman: Good.
Hanley: I really appreciate your willingness to do this.
Huseman: It’s an absolute pleasure for me. And I hope some day you actually get a chance to come to see us play.
Hanley: I’d love to.

Lou Marinoff Interview

2007-04-03T21:07:00.000-07:00

Lou Marinoff is a professor of philosophy and best-selling author. He is a pioneer in the field of "philosophical counseling."

Hanley: Dr. Marinoff, in looking at your bio it looks like you got started in theoretical physics. What drew you to that?
Marinoff: Oh, we’re going back a ways. Yes, my first degree was in theoretical physics. I actually enjoyed it because the world is a very imperfect place as a rule, and we’re all subject to the varying opinions of others. And our own opinions are quite changeable, too. What I liked about theoretical physics was that most of the problems have definitive answers. It’s really nice that you could actually solve a problem and get the right answer. It gives you kind of a false sense of security about the world. It was also a beautiful way of thinking. On a serious note, physics is a very beautiful way of understanding the world and describing it in fairly precise mathematical language. And I enjoyed that for quite a long time.
Hanley: Did you get to a point or are you at a point still where you feel like you grasp the whole relativity and quantum physics and all that?
Marinoff: Some of it, anyway. I mean, as far as early 20th century physics goes, that’s now very passé compared to what’s happened in the interim. I actually was doing a Master’s degree in theoretical physics when I switched into the philosophy of science. So I had done advanced courses in quantum theory. And I know relativity and thermodynamics and all that good stuff. So I was fairly comfortable, yes, for a long time.
Hanley: And do you think it’s possible that physics can get it “right” about the nature of the universe or let’s say the causal properties of the universe?
Marinoff: Well, I’m not so sure about the causal stuff because you may recall that Steven Weinberg, a Nobel Laureate in physics, wrote a wonderful little popular book about 25 years ago called The First Three Minutes in which he had pieced together the state of the art knowledge of the day about what had happened in the first three minutes after the big bang. And he actually extrapolated that into a very nice little book with no mathematics. It was clear that he could describe it without mathematics. But he said, and people have always said, that if you want to know how the big bang itself originated you’ve got to go talk to the theologians. I don’t think that physicists are really doing causal stuff. The Newtonian model is certainly very causal: one billiard ball strikes another and all of that. But it still goes back to Aristotle’s prime mover, doesn’t it? There is a first cause. And I think that’s still pretty much up for grabs. It’s a metaphysical question, to me at least, what the first cause was. And I don’t think that physics is going to tell us this. I think that physics is going to tell us a lot about what happens given a first cause.
Hanley: I’ve read a bit of Heidegger on this. And in a lot of his later writings he seemed to be, to some extent, undermining science because he felt like they were presenting themselves as having the complete answer and the only answer. I mean he’s obviously very complicated, but if I read him correctly, he seemed to be saying that there are always some assumptions that you start with. And it’s the same thing in physics. There are certain assumptions they start with that you can’t really prove. You’ve just got to start with those. Have you hear of that? And do you agree with that?
Marinoff: Yes, of course. I mean this is very common knowledge in philosophy of science. And it’s not just Heidegger who espoused this. Many philosophers have pointed out more or less the same thing, Imre Lakatos in the tradition of Karl Popper who says that we progress not by verification of our theories, rather by falsification of our theories. So, in other words, we learn from our mistakes. And science progresses only in a sense by understanding which of its assumptions are flawed and replacing them with better assumptions. So for Popper there is a word called ‘verisimilitude’ which means an approach to truth. And I think that most confident philosophers of science as well as most scientists are not so arrogant as to suppose that we have the whole or complete truth. But on the other hand we do have certain reliable knowledge. There’s no question in my mind that a lot of what science has discovered is indeed reliable knowledge and therefore very close to certain kinds of truths. We are, though, very much like Neurath describes it as a ship at sea which has to kind of replace its old planks without the benefit of going into dry dock. So this makes science a very interesting enterprise. And it really is self-correcting much like probably democracy can be. As long as it remains self-correcting and doesn’t fall prey to politicization or to too much dogma, then it has a chance to continue on this project. So, I’m very much a realist in this way. And I’m rather dismayed, of course, since you mentioned Heidegger, I must also retort that on the continent followed a rather devastating wave of deconstructionism, the postmodernist wave, which has deconstructed truth and reality and which stands completely opposed to some of the things that Western science actually posits, such as an objective reality about which we can discover fundamental laws.
Hanley: And what’s your take on that? Where do you come down on that?
Marinoff: I’m anti anti-realism. I’m a realist. I believe there is indeed a reality out there and that each of us perhaps grasps some of it in our own way, but that when we arrive at consensus whether on Platonic universals, or whether indeed on the weight of the proton, or the mass of the proton, or whatever it is, we are really finding out things about reality. I do believe that there is a real world. I do believe that there are truths. And I think only that the human being has this remarkable capacity to be deluded to such an extent sometimes that the delusion even takes the form of denying what is real and replacing it with what is unreal.
Hanley: Now, you’re going along learning physics, what drew you to the philosophy of science?
Marinoff: Oh, I’m glad you asked me that, John, because what moved me away from the pure physics or the theory and into the philosophy of it was really a lack of moral content. I mean actually I just got tired of solving differential equations, a thing which really drew me in the first place, mainly getting good answers to questions and so forth, getting precise mathematical answers and solving equations, and deriving formulae which is a lot of what physics does, was wonderful. It was a wonderful exercise. But in the end, I got tired of it because it had no moral content. And I was just as a human being not addressing those aspects of my own life and of the wider human world. So, of course, as we all know philosophy deals, grapples, not only with issues in the sciences but, of course, traditionally with issues in ethics and morality. And so I was a little bit happier swimming in philosophical seas.
Hanley: Philosophy of science, does that sort of critique science? How would you describe philosophy of science?
Marinoff: Well, I’m going to dodge that by saying there’s no consensus to my knowledge about what philosophy is or indeed what science is, so if you compound this and say what’s philosophy of science, then you find that there are different schools, there are different ways of doing it. And it really depends on what one wants to understand by philosophy and what one wants to understand by science. In Britain, for example, in the UK where I did my Ph.D., it’s really a very separate enterprise, and it’s not an adjunct of philosophy at all. There are separate freestanding departments of history and philosophy of science. And these are populated by people who really understand something about science as well as something about history, or as the case may be, philosophy. So it’s done in a certain way. In America philosophy of science is done by analytic philosophers who, I must be very candid here, and say most of them, have never taken a science course. So it’s utterly preposterous for a lot of them to be doing philosophy of science because they don’t know any science. They certain know more than enough philosophy, but they end up critiquing theories. They’re doing what we call meta-theory. And it’s nothing that any scientist would find interesting, whereas on the other side, I think that in the early days, especially of 20th century physics, the quantum world was so weird. It was so strange and so challenged our assumptions about this thing called reality that a lot of the scientists, a lot of the physicists themselves, had to be philosophical. They had to be philosophers in order to do this. So I think that in that tradition there’s a much stronger interplay between philosophy and science.
Hanley: Who are the two or three philosophers you’ve read the most?
Marinoff: Gosh, you just changed gears on me. Well, I recently read the Complete Works of Aristotle quite closely. And that’s quite a number of words. I did that for my new book which is coming out. I guess maybe we’ll talk about that later. So I’ve recently acquainted myself with all of Aristotle’s works in a fair amount of depth. And I’ve drawn from many of them. I think there are 22 books altogether, something like that. So that would probably count. If you’re asking me who I tend to reread it’s a lot of the Chinese stuff. I go back a lot to Indian philosophy and Chinese philosophy. I reread the classics of Indian philosophy, the Bhagavad Gita to some of the Buddhist sutras. And I also read quite a bit of Lao Tzu and occasionally Confucius and so forth.
Hanley: Since you brought up Aristotle, let’s go back to the Greeks here and starting with Socrates, I know his work is entwined with Plato since he didn’t write anything himself, let me ask you maybe, I don’t know, an unusual question here, but there’s been some debate as to whether Socrates was antidemocratic or not. What’s your take on that?
Marinoff: Well, I think in some sense that the only true anti-democratism could be in a democracy. The Greeks were performing all kinds of political experiments. And our legacy of democracy today is certainly one that the Greeks have to take credit for virtually inventing. I think that I would come down on the side of Socrates as more of a democrat and Plato as more of an anti-democrat. That would be the direction of my answer to you. Socrates got himself into trouble by being an individualist and following his principles and making enemies during the Peloponnesian War and a number of other things. But it seems to me that of the two, Socrates was the guy, if our understanding of history is correct, who went into the agora and who basically took people as they came and was willing to discuss and debate with them almost any question they wanted to raise. And that seems to me to be essentially a very democratic thing to be doing. It was Plato in his Republic who presents to us more of what Popper, post-second world war, called the roots of totalitarianism. It’s Plato who wants to censor art. It’s Plato who wants to tell noble lies and so forth. And all of that seems to grate a little against our perceived notions of how democracies function. So I mean this could be just pure fantasy. We don’t know these guys. We’d have to have a time machine to go back there. But I tend to think of Socrates as much more the quotidian philosopher, the philosopher in the streets, the man who took it right into the public marketplace. And that seems to me more cognate with democracy than Plato and Aristotle whose academies were more elite and in fact were definitely concerned with political controls.
Hanley: I remember reading some of him in college and I just remember being truly blown away by the mind and imagination of this guy. I don’t know if there’s been anybody else quite like him. Would you definitely say he’s up there in the pantheon of just mind-blowing geniuses?
Marinoff: He’s gotten my vote. In fact in my new book, which will be out in the United States in 2007, I called him one of three greatest teachers who ever lived. I’ve kind of resuscitated the ABCs of virtue ethics for the postmodern world. And the three virtue ethicists are literally Aristotle, Buddha and Confucius. Those are the ABCs. Aristotle was the philosopher. I mean he was called the philosopher in the west for almost 2,000 years. Remarkable! He invented most of the curriculum of the contemporary university. He didn’t get appointed to be Plato’s successor because he famously diverged from Plato on various important philosophical issues. But nonetheless he had enough credibility and clout to establish his own Lyceum in which he really began, that is in terms of the curricula, if you read the books of Aristotle. I mean he wrote on physics. He wrote on biology. He wrote on logic. He wrote on rhetoric. He wrote on zoology, on just an unbelievable number of subjects, not to mention his better known works on politics, on economics and on, of course, ethics, and the Nicomachean Ethics is one gem of his collected works which has the most beautiful geometric theory of balance and proportion in ethical behavior and also has a very, very moving essay on friendship and the virtues of friendships in life and so forth. So I have to agree with you. I think that he basically defined intellectual life for Western civilization for a good long time. And his influence on the West is still being felt. Although many people may not realize it’s his influence, his hand is there. So, yes, he was a great genius.
Hanley: Well, whatever your advance was for that book, you should have gotten double for having to read the Metaphysics again.
Marinoff: Well, thank you very much. I’ll put you in touch with my publisher and see if you can persuade them. But I did this voluntarily. I mean I planned this book long before there was any talk about publishing contracts. I mean I am supposedly a philosopher and should not be daunted by reading classic works after all.
Hanley: That’s a particularly tough one.
Marinoff: I take everything with a grain of salt too, John.
Hanley: Yes. I understand. Now you mentioned Buddha there. A lot of my understanding of Buddha probably unfortunately comes from reading Joseph Campbell of all people. And I do respect a lot of his work. He posits two different approaches to life. There’s the Buddhist. I think he would call it the detachment approach. And then there’s sort of the Western passionate involvement approach. I want to ask you about this. First of all, do you buy that basic construct or would you put it differently?
Marinoff: I’d put it differently. I’d say all of us are at times detached or dissociated, and all of us at times are passionately engaged. And the Mahayana Buddhists that I hang out with are more engaged with life than anybody I know and more passionately. So I think Campbell as great as he was, as powerful as his understanding of the unification of mythology and all of that, was not a Buddhist scholar and probably in fairness to him did not have a chance to learn much from Buddhists in person who have brought the teachings to us from Asia.
Hanley: Well, let’s go into this a little bit. I think this will be particularly interesting to my readers also.
Marinoff: Ok. But if we’re going to do, let me just interrupt you, if I may, if we’re going to do…we’ve done A so now we’re going to do B. Then we’ve got to do C too for completeness, ok?
Hanley: Sure.
Marinoff: We’ll go to Confucius, too. If we need to adlib a couple of questions, let’s do it.
Hanley: Sure.
Marinoff: Great.
Hanley: Now, the Buddha is saying that reality is an illusion and therefore the self is an illusion.
Marinoff: No. Stop. I’ll stop you right now. No. The Buddha is saying there is a reality and we can know it. But we can only know it if we recognize the illusions that we carry around and manufacture, including the illusion of personhood, or self, or ego. That’s illusory and impermanent. But there is definitely a reality. Buddha asserted most strongly that there is a reality.
Hanley: And was he talking about physical reality there?
Marinoff: All! There’s no difference. There’s no difference, material, nonmaterial, physical, nonphysical, it’s all one. It’s all part of one thing, one reality, one undivided reality.
Hanley: Alright. Well, let’s go to the personhood thing then. So he’s saying there’s no self. There’s no individual self. So if that’s the case then how do you, for example, fall in love? How do you have true love with somebody if you buy into that?
Marinoff: You never have true love with anybody. What you have is when you say “I love you” to someone in a possessive or erotic way what you’re saying is “Gee, I feel good in your presence so I need you around to feel good.” And that’s all it is, I’m sorry to say. We make great tragic tales out of it because we’re very romantic and sentimental creatures. And we love to be attached to it. But Buddha was very, very clear about a lot of things. And there are higher forms of love incidentally. He’s not denying love at all. But what he’s saying is if you love in a selfish way or an unwise way then the pleasure of love will soon be dwarfed by the pain that the foolish attachments bring us. Love is a form of attachment. And really what Buddhists are most concerned with is suffering and how to alleviate it, and like the Tibetans are very fond of saying there are only two kinds of suffering in the world: the misery of having and the misery of not having. So, half the world is pining away. People are pining away because they don’t have true love and they’re looking for their soul mates. And the other half are pining away because they’ve found true love, found their soul mates, married them, and now they’re in some kind of hell world in a power struggle with marriage, familiarity being, as Balzac said, the monster that devours everything. So some people are miserable because they’re married and some people are miserable because they’re not married. The real art of Buddhism is to be happy no matter what you are. And the way to be happy no matter what you are is actually to relinquish your unwholesome attachments to things, be it any notion that you have about true love or careerhood or how great you are, what the newspapers say about you, and so forth. I’ve given you a lot now. You’re getting the whole broadside, ok?
Hanley: This is great. Now Campbell says that Carl Jung, for example, traveled to India by boat and that he wouldn’t get off the boat because, well Campbell’s explanation was, he didn’t really want to go for all this release yourself business really when it came down to it. He wanted to keep the Western self. Do you buy that?
Marinoff: I probably do, although Jung at least took the boat ride. Freud never did. I would say this of Jung, and I think it’s very important to note that Jung was much more of a Sinologist or at least a Sinophile (that is, fond of Chinese culture). Jung wrote the definitive introduction to the Wilhelm-Baynes edition of the I Ching. And Jung also, notwithstanding what you’re saying about Campbell, which may be perfectly true, Jung wrote the definitive introduction to the original Tibetan Book of the Dead published by Oxford University Press, edited by Evans-Wentz. And so Jung wrote a psychological commentary on the Tibetan Book of the Dead. So he was willing at least from a distance to immerse himself in some of the profoundest Buddhist thought to come out of that region. I think that a lot of Westerners, including for example Elie Wiesel and long before him Erik Erikson who wrote Gandhi’s posthumous psychoanalytic biography, and myself too, for that matter, are appalled by the chaos and the contrasts of India. India is a more severely, I think, polarized nation in terms of extreme wealth and affluence and extreme poverty than any other. But India is a very spiritual place. And, of course, it reabsorbed Buddhism too. But Indian culture is not primarily Buddhist. Indian culture is primarily what has become known as Hindu as a misnomer. But now even they use it. So it’s ok to say. It’s Hindu and Muslim and Sikh and a lot of other things. And Buddhism was reabsorbed there. But the principal sources of Mahayana Buddhism that are now coming to the West are really Tibet and Japan. China transformed Buddhism and then it went to Japan. And now it’s coming here. But Indian Buddhism is still there. But you have to kind of wade through Indian culture to encounter it.
Hanley: Now your new book, I think is called The Middle Way. And you’re going to contrast Aristotle and Buddha and Confucius. So I look forward to reading that. Now, do you reckon that you lose anything if you buy into the Buddhist way completely? Is there anything good that you lose?
Marinoff: I’m not a Buddhist, ok? I’m a friend. Buddhism has been a friend to me. And I’m a friend to Buddhism. I would say that there’s absolutely nothing to lose, everything to gain. My experience with Buddhism tells me this. And I practice personally. I’m not proselytizing. I’m not saying you should do this John, or anybody else should do this. I think that all of the religions at their heart have esoteric teachings which purify the heart and which open the mind. And that Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, all people of religions, great and small, if they follow the true inner way of their religions will in fact purify themselves in some spiritual sense and be really good people. That’s the purpose of it for me, ok? Things get a lot more complicated when people start doing things in this world for the sake of the next. And that’s where they part company with Buddhists who do everything for the sake of this moment because this moment is all there is. But I have no regrets at all about anything that I’ve ever had to do with Buddhism, and it’s a source to me of incredible wisdom, energy, creativity, compassion, and everything that one could hope to aspire to as a human being. And that’s really just even on the intellectual side. The practices are really unbelievable for those who want to devote more time to them.
Hanley: And now how about Confucius? What does he have to teach us that is relevant in the 21st century?
Marinoff: All kinds of lessons. It’s really interesting to me, as this book unfolded I must tell you that they were almost contemporaries. Buddha and Confucius were contemporaries. Aristotle came along a little bit later. But the thing is the three of them each taught ethics. Buddhism is, of course, also known as the Middle Way. But Aristotle’s Golden Mean, his moral Golden Mean as he describes it in Nicomachean Ethics is also a middle way for moral behavior. And Confucius talks about harmonious coexistence, balanced social order and so forth, and also advocated very, very similar principles, each of them from a different tradition. So that’s what links them. And they’re all in a way virtue ethicists. I’m now taking Buddha out of a religious context, ok, and putting him into a philosophical one. He was also a virtue ethicist. And the three of these guys gave us the three greatest systems of virtue ethics ever propounded in the world. And they’re very relevant to the 21st century precisely because the 21st century is so far characterizable as a century of extremisms. The USA is--I don’t have to tell you--politically polarized. The world is economically polarized. The gap is growing, notwithstanding globalization, between the haves and the have-nots. There are religious conflicts based on clashes of extremisms. There’s every possible kind of extremism in the world. So what my book is doing is looking at about 10 or 12 different versions of extremism on different axes, be they political, religious, economic, educational, and so forth, and applying the wisdom and traditions of the ABCs to help reconcile these extremes for people in everyday life today. So it’s really very live, a very live version of what Aristotle, Buddha and Confucius taught us. And it attempts to apply their wisdom to trying to manage some of these problems of extremism in the 21st century global village.
Hanley: In your reading of the New Testament do you see Jesus as a virtue ethicist?
Marinoff: Well, now I have to say that since I don’t believe in Jesus as the Son of God--although this may antagonize believers, I don’t disrespect their beliefs --I do believe that Jesus was probably a very, very enlightened man. And certainly he was an enlightened healer, a hugely compassionate being, probably fully realized, egoless, and endeavored to do only good for those around him. And so I think he was a great, great teacher. As far as virtue ethics is concerned I’d have to be more skeptical about this because the end of virtue ethics, the goal of virtue ethics, whether Aristotle’s, Buddhist’s or Confucius’ version, is fulfillment, awakening, compassion, and leading a meaningful life now, here and now, always. You know, Aristotle talks about happiness in the Nicomachean Ethics, happiness through the life of contemplation and through balanced action. This is the goal. Confucius also talks about achieving a certain kind of serenity, a certain kind of wisdom, and this also comes through the practice of ethics in the here and now. And Buddha, of course, famously took on both religion and philosophy saying that the questions they asked were totally profitless and that it was just not worth debating about whether there are souls or not souls, whether there are future lives or not. What’s really important is what we do now. So the ABCs are not providential, ok. They’re not telling people to sacrifice this life for the sake of the next. They’re saying you can all do something important and meaningful now and become fulfilled human beings now if you follow the right path. And this I’m afraid puts them squarely in conflict with the Abrahamic faiths, whether you’re, you know, Jewish, Christian, or Muslim. And, of course, we know there are any number of conflicts within those religions. They’re more like sibling rivalries because they’re all the same family. And the one thing that they have in common, especially Christianity and Islam, is they are what Freud called providential. Yes, they are hoping or believing that there is a God who looks after everything in a very personal way. And that if we do the right thing in this life we will more or less be rewarded in the next or be punished if we do the wrong thing. And that is very different from the aim of virtue ethics.
Hanley: Well, let’s switch gears now and talk some about philosophical counseling.
Marinoff: I’m relieved. Back on more comfortable ground, perhaps.
Hanley: Well, for the benefit of the readers, why don’t you say a little bit about an overview of what philosophical counseling is?
Marinoff: Yes, I’d be very happy to. And the first comment I want to make to you and your readers is that philosophical counseling is only one part of a much bigger whole. And that whole is called philosophical practice. And it’s only in the United States of America thanks to the media fixation with psychology and a thoroughly psychologized population that people are unable to conceive of the practice of philosophy in any context other than the one that the media has sensationalized for us, which has done probably more good than harm. But nonetheless it is very harmful in its distortions. And people think, oh, philosophical counseling is something new, some kind of new form of therapy. And it isn’t. It’s, in fact, a very ancient form of therapy. If it is therapy, it’s the most ancient form we have. As you know, it goes back to even the pre-Socratics. So, that’s one set of issues. But let me just say then in summary, the executive summary is that we recognize at least three ways of practicing philosophy outside the academy, outside the classroom, and outside the scholarly publication circuit and conference circuit. And one way is indeed philosophical counseling which is one-on-one interaction with philosophers who apply great ideas to the management and hopefully the resolution of everyday problems. That’s philosophical counseling in a nutshell. We also work with groups. And we do group facilitations of many different kinds, both formal and informal. And we also work, a number of us, with organizations, corporations, governments, professions, and so forth, in a consulting capacity, not only as ethics compliance people and applied ethicists, but also more proactively bringing various kinds of philosophical exercises and modalities into the corporate culture, into government culture, and helping people to become more functional, and therefore organizations also to becoming more virtuous. So those are like the three dimensions of philosophical practice, ok?
Hanley: Alright. Now, you’ve run into some resistance in the States from I guess your university and maybe other psychiatrists. Where does all that stand?
Marinoff: Well, I think that in a most generic way it all stems from a phenomenon we observe very widely in cultural evolution and that is all innovations, all pioneering efforts, are initially resisted by a kind of inertia, a resistance to change that people are so fond of, that they so stubbornly sometimes cling to. But on the whole I’d have to say that the resistance to change and intellectual inertia are sometimes good things because they create time and space for us in which we can winnow the bad ideas from the good and discard what is not sound or not valid or not useful and eventually retain what is. So I think that resistance per se is not a bad thing and that obstacles, in fact, sometimes make us strive harder; those of us who want to surmount them, at least; they encourage us in certain ways to do more than we otherwise would do and to test, I guess, the authenticity of what we’re doing.

So I think all of that is good and a certain amount of resistance is only healthy. What I’ve encountered at the City University of New York goes, of course, well beyond that. And my best information is that in around 2000 or something I was invited by the previous administration to provide philosophical counseling services at the Wellness Center. You must realize that City College where I work is part of CUNY which is a gargantuan kind of political prison as in gulag. I call it the American gulag. But anyway, City College had virtually no health services for students for 25 years. I mean ever since the New York City budget crunch of the ‘70s they basically eliminated the Wellness Center. The students were just on their own. So they resuscitated that in the late ‘90s. And a very, very good administration, President Yolanda Moses, she’s now history, but her administration, reinstated the Wellness Center. And the Vice President for Student Affairs knew of my work. And at that time they were favorable. And they invited me to provide services. And we had a whole plan set forth whereby APPA certified counselors would be available to students. We already had students seeking this. I had funding for it. It wasn’t going to cost anybody anything. We had philanthropy. So it was all going to be a wonderful three-year project. I gather that the clinical psychologists caught wind of it. We have a very dogmatic Freudian community of clinical psychologists on campus. And they want everybody to be mentally ill. This is their bread and butter. They’re part of a diagnostic culture. They’re part of the culture that has psychologized Americans and, in fact, which keeps them unwell. And so they caught wind of this. And they went ballistic. Our best information is that they actually went ballistic. And I never know because you have to understand that I’m not using these terms lightly. The American gulag is a place where there is no due process, where the constitution of the United States does not apply, and where if you are accused of being guilty you have no right to confront your accusers, no right to defend yourself, no right even to know the nature of the accusations levied against you. Everything is done by fiat.
So one day I was simply called into the Dean’s office and told that I would have to cease and desist from all philosophical practice activities on campus. Basically, they placed a moratorium on me. They shut down my research, which was a federally approved research protocol which had run without incident or complaint. That was shut down without due cause, without due process. All activities in fact pertaining to philosophical practice have been banned on campus for the last six years. I was unable to obtain a remedy in Federal court. The university prevailed with the egregious argument put forward by our psychologist friends that people, I’m quoting now from their attack, “that people who seek philosophical counselors are likely to develop psychological problems.” These are the grounds. So they panicked a stupid and ill educated and heavy-handed administration into believing baseless accounts. There’s not one, not one client, to my knowledge worldwide of philosophical counseling, that’s ever, ever suffered psychological problems because of it. On the contrary. So this is the sort of thing that I’m up against. And it’s really quite impossible to make any headway there at the present time. This may indeed change. But they also did me a favor in a way by preventing me from developing not only my own program, John, but also more importantly a graduate program on campus. I mean I am inundated. The APPA is inundated with requests, as you can well imagine, from graduate students and not just in philosophy. We have psychology students. We have all kinds of students from across the country and around the world who would like nothing better than to do a MA in philosophical practice. And, of course, we have a phenomenal faculty of practitioners in the USA. I have designed a program which can deliver the premier graduate course in this field if some university administration would be enlightened enough to actually put it on. But it doesn’t look like this. We’re living in Rome, not Greece. Americans want circuses. They don’t want to think.
Hanley: Right. Well, so it’s an ongoing battle.
Marinoff: It surely is. If it’s not quick and easy, I’m afraid this culture has been conditioned not to make too much effort.
Hanley: Now, I want to ask you some things about modern psychological practice. But before that, let’s go back to sort of the beginning which is Freud. And I’ve read quite a lot on him, mostly skeptical works, I must say. And it seems like I don’t even know if he ever helped one person, really. What’s your take on Freud?
Marinoff: Well, ok. That’s complicated. Now we’re going into another minefield. Before I stray into that minefield, ok, I have very few even left now from the last one, but I will stray into it. And I will tell you what I think of Freud. But before I do so, just let me preface it ok? The APPA has members who are psychologists or psychiatrists. And it is not the case, I repeat, not the case, that there is any kind of unified or unanimous front allied against philosophical practice in this country. In fact, many, many psychologists are very brilliant and philosophically brilliant people, Irvin Yalom for one. There are many, many psychiatrists, too. I mean he’s actually a psychiatrist.
Hanley: I love his work.
Marinoff: Yes, so do I. And you see he’s very philosophical. He’s done his homework on Nietzsche. He’s done his homework on Schopenhauer. And he understands Freud’s work better than most. He’s kind of a living heir to that tradition. And he’s not thrown out the baby with the bathwater. That’s part of my answer to you. There are things in Freud that are valuable. We certainly say that the APPA has a lot of friends and supporters from psychology, from social work, from psychiatry. I personally have many psychiatrists who are friends and who support this in their own way too and realize that we’re not practicing psychology without a license. We’re doing what we should be doing. And they understand this. But as for the larger sort of political forces of psychology, they definitely are fighting perpetual and perennial turf wars. And behind the scenes I’ve seen very many educational initiatives that they have destroyed because they feel that these somehow would intrude on their psychologization of the human being. And I think it’s really sick. They’re sick. That notion of a human being as a sick animal is what is sick. And they have captivated the American imagination with this. They have tremendous political power. And behind the scenes a lot of legislators are regretting that they were ever licensed to do anything. So there we have it, ok, in a nutshell. But there are many, many, I think, very philosophical beings among them who are definitely our friends and not our opponents. And also it’s up to people themselves. We have in civil law, I believe, we have in civil law still a presumption of innocence. Even in criminal law we have a presumption of innocence where you know you’re presumed innocent until proven guilty, although the criteria for proof differ a little between civil and criminal actions.
But in the psychological world I think that largely, unfortunately owing to Freud, people are really deemed to be insane until proven sane. This is more and more the norm now. And in fact, John, the pressures of the insurers, it’s mostly the insurers and the pharmaceutical companies who have colonized medicine and also pseudo-medicine, who have now driven psychologists to make compulsory diagnoses if they want insurance payments. I mean any third-party insurer now will not pay a counselor unless the counselor makes a diagnosis and finds something wrong. So to go to a psychologist they have to find something wrong with you if they want to get paid. This is crazy, right?
Hanley: Yeah.
Marinoff: So what we’re seeing now is a presumption of insanity, basically. Everyone is presumed to be mentally ill in some way or another.
Hanley: I want to get more into that. Do you want to say a word on how is Mr. Freud himself as a counselor?
Marinoff: Well, his batting average, I don’t know. And I think that what Freud did really well, so let’s go back to Freud, ok? I’ve also read his complete works, also another 22 volumes or so. I studied these some years ago. I think that Freud was very brilliant, ok? Freud is certainly another genius. In fact, he’s one of the smartest people never to win a Nobel Prize. He wasn’t a Nobel Laureate. And clearly his insights into human nature tower head and shoulders above many others who did win the Nobel Prize. And I think that he didn’t precisely because he drew people’s attention to matters that they were not willing to contemplate in the day. The repression of the Victorian era is what made Freud possible. He was reacting really I think against a culture that was so sexually repressed that it was obvious to him a lot of people were walking around with unresolved psycho-sexual issues, which he then universalized into a grand theory of the human being which I don’t believe is accurate in its entirety. And I think that we have to certainly go beyond Freud in order to become whole. And I believe that the failings of psychotherapy are precisely those which I alluded to when you asked me about Buddhism. The whole notion of maintaining a healthy ego is contradictory. The ego is not healthy. The ego is what makes us sick.
And so when psychologists are constantly trying to get people to maintain healthy egos, applying some kind of balance, this is precisely why people are in constant need of psychotherapy all of their lives, including Dr. Yalom. There’s no question this man is a brilliant psychotherapist, a brilliant psychiatrist. And he also has needed psychotherapy lifelong because he’s also been in a perpetual struggle to maintain a sort of balanced ego. And I maintain as Buddhists do that it’s only by the dissolution of the ego that one can actually be at some kind of peace and obtain actually a lasting or a deep serenity. But that’s another story. Freud, nonetheless, gave us deep insights into a certain kind or a certain set of problems definitely that afflict people, ok? But I just don’t believe that his theory is universal any more than for example Newton’s theory is universal. It’s operative in certain domains. And as a philosopher of science I think that’s a creditable way to talk about Freud. Let us say there are certainly a lot of people in the world who suffer from Freudian-like complaints and symptoms, their complexes and neuroses. And there are certainly a number of people who can be helped by understanding those in a kind of psychoanalytic way. But it is not a panacea. And it is not a model for the human being, its totality, just as Newtonian mechanics do not apply to quantum domains and do not apply to relativistic domains, so too do Freudian psycho-mechanics do not apply to other kinds of domains of human existence.
Hanley: Now, let’s talk about the medication of today. I know you wrote some about this in your book, Plato not Prozac. For example, you talk about how the official list of diseases changes number every year. Anyway, people seem to be just put on this or that medication almost nonchalantly these days, almost as a matter of course. And, sure, we want to say that it helps some people and all that. But if all these chemical problems, imbalance and all of that, do you think that is real? And if so, has that been happening for six thousand years and we just didn’t know about it?
Marinoff: It hasn’t. And what’s real is that the human being suffers. Ever since there were human beings on this earth there’s been some kind of pain of existence. Existence is painful for us at times. That’s how we’re made. We’re very highly complex, very emotional, some also very rational. We’re constantly at war with ourselves and others. It’s a Hobbesian thing. By the way, I wanted to say that Freud should have read Hobbes--he would have saved himself a lot of trouble--and Hobbes’ Leviathan. The three pillars of psychoanalysis are actually anticipated by Hobbes in the first six chapters of his Leviathan. So there’s an aside for you. But what I believe is happening is this. We have a society of absolutely uncritical consumers. We have the most successful consumer society in the history of the world here. But it’s also going to be our own undoing if we consume unreflectively and uncritically.
And now this is precisely for the last 20 years what’s been happening. Americans over consume junk foods and they over consume junk thought. And they have had their education system deconstructed in the process. So they’re no longer capable of carrying the torch of Western civilization. They’ve been turned into zombies. They’re obese. They’ve been made stupid by a culture of bad television. And they have absolutely no conception of what to do or think or say until they’re told. And they’re told take this, take that. Most of the drugging of school children with Ritalin is a scandal. It’s an absolute scandal. These ADHD problems in the young are being caused by a culture of television. Television destroys attention span. The written tradition has been deconstructed. You can thank our French postmodernist friends again for that. Nothing is being taught. I inherit students in City College who are products of the New York City public school system. They go through K-12 and don’t read a book many of them. It’s absolutely appalling. It’s the greatest scandal. In my new book I call it the greatest educational fraud ever perpetrated on Western civilization. And Americans are paying the price. School taxes are spiraling out of control such that people can’t even maintain their own homes any more because of rising school taxes. And the education system is in freefall. We’re losing our lead in mathematics, science, technology, all of that, to Asia principally because they haven’t indulged in what we’re indulging in which is an orgy of extremely poorly thought of consumption. So any time anybody has any problem in life immediately it’s diagnosed as a symptom of some bogus malady and it’s drugged. And that’s really symptomatic. It’s very, very sad, very sad, tragic.
Hanley: Well, we have just a few minutes left here. What about the notion of depression? What do you make of how people think about that nowadays?
Marinoff: Well, I think once again, just as Freudian language, a lot of Freud’s terms found their way into popular culture today. People reflexively use terms like ego and superego and id, and neurosis seems to be still fashionable, complex used to be more fashionable. But a lot of Freudian language found its way into common parlance because of Freud’s importance as a contributor to the culture and understanding of human psychology, certainly. And similarly, this D word, this D word is now, it’s almost like a mantra. And what people really need to think about is whether they’re depressed or whether they’re just unhappy. And certainly there’s a lot of unhappiness. But treating unhappiness as though it were depression is what pharmaceutical companies and psychologists capitalize on. But it’s also a species of fraud. People have lost entirely in this culture the capacity to will things for themselves. The inner resources of a human being are so powerful. There is so much that we can do if our own resources are mobilized in order to make us feel fulfilled, in order to make us feel that life is meaningful and indeed to obtain a kind of happiness. This has not been encouraged in the general culture. What’s been encouraged is dependence on externals. Oh, if I get that job or that house or that car or that spouse or that trophy I’m going to be happy. No. We know this. The Stoics knew it in the West that attachment to externals only brings problems and not the thing that you think it’s going to bring, mainly happiness. So that’s my short answer to you. That, of course, there are people who have depression in a very real and very tragic sense.
Of course there are people who are, for example, clinically depressed, and I know some. I mean there are people with bipolar disorder. We used to call it manic depression. And they get so down during their down phases there really is very little they can do except perhaps take some medication. But a lot of them commit suicide just because the pain of existence is more than they can bear. And for those unfortunate few, John, philosophy can offer very little consolation. But on the other hand, if your teenager comes home and says, “I’m really depressed.” And you say, “Why?” And she says, “Well, I just broke up with my boyfriend.” It’s a big mistake to treat that with drugs and psychology because a lot of unhappiness is a part of growth, a part of life. And there are much better philosophical ways for coming to terms with such normal kinds of patterns.
Hanley: What about those very serious cases? Is that just hardwired into some people’s brains? I mean were people dealing with that 3,000 years ago? Or is it a particularly modern symptom?
Marinoff: We don’t know this because unfortunately the fossil record doesn’t leave the soft tissue. It doesn’t leave the brain and the thoughts and the chemicals, just the bones. But I suspect and my own leaning is that human beings have probably not changed much biologically for several thousand years. We’re bigger now because we have better vitamins and better nutrition. And our life expectancies are longer. We have in general better resources, although we’re contaminating those at a rapid rate. So we get other diseases that the ancients probably didn’t get. But just as you read Hippocrates and you find out people had kidney stones in those days. And they do today. So I’m quite sure that people had depression. Only it wasn’t called depression. It was called melancholy. Or it was called other things. And almost always a small fraction of the population had literally problems with not having enough serotonin or having some other condition in their brain chemistry which caused them to feel very, very depressed and almost certainly this has been with us since we were a species. But it’s only recently that medical science has tried to imitate physics and classify every possible state of mind as though it were a real physical malady.
Hanley: Just a few minutes left here. I know you greatly have enjoyed and gotten a lot of value from the I Ching. When people ask you, let’s just say in the Western literary tradition, let’s even say for philosophers, let’s say somebody coming to philosophy new but wants to read something that could maybe open their eyes to new possibilities in their life, what are a couple of things you’d tend to recommend?
Marinoff: Well, it’s pretty leading question. So right back at you, the I Ching definitely. You know that I have done philosophical consultations using the book as a basis. And I’ve done this believe it or not with other professionals. I’ve had clients who are psychiatrists and psychologists and doctors who have wanted to work with the I Ching because they actually respect what it can do. And Confucius was deeply influenced by it. It was one of the few books that he had access to. And he was deeply, deeply moved by its metaphysics. He understood exactly, I think, what was going on in the I Ching. He studied it all his life. So I find it to be great. With that said, there are many, many translations and they’re sometimes mutually unrecognizable. So I stick pretty much with the Wilhelm-Baynes. And there are some other pretty decent ones around as well. What I think it does functionally, for me it’s the philosophical equivalent to the Rorschach test. You remember the Rorschach test, the inkblot test that psychologists are fond of. And they show people these patterns which have some symmetry because the inkblot is folded and you have a kind of symmetric pattern of the inkblot. And then they ask people what they see in it. And it’s a very beautiful device for just fishing out of the shallow subconscious what people are really thinking about because they will see, they will project onto this inkblot which is just an inkblot after all, but they will project on to it whatever happens to be in their minds at the time, and usually and very often at least something that is a little bit deeper in the mind. And this is a great way of probing the unconscious, if you happen to believe in such a thing. And I do.
So I think the Rorschach test is very good for psychologists because it gives people that opportunity to voice something that is deep within them, articulate something that they didn’t know was there, but nonetheless which is having an influence on their behavior and so forth. So that’s valuable. And the I Ching does this in spades because the I Ching is actually doing philosophically for us what the Rorschach test does psychologically. When you obtain a hexagram from the I Ching and you find one or two or three sentences of it to be absolutely and vitally meaningful in the given situation of your life now and your circumstances, those which prompted you to consult the oracle in the first place, then you’re getting back the same kind of thing you’re projecting on to it, some extremely deep meaning sort of coming from you and which can be used therefore as a clue to the resolution of your situation.
Hanley: So I’m going to press you here. That’s your greatest hit in the Eastern tradition. What do you say in the Western tradition? Like, for example, I recommend to people The Present Age by Kierkegaard. Do you like that one? What other kind of quasi-accessible works do you recommend?
Marinoff: Well, I don’t work so actively with Western works because most of the works of Western philosophy are not interactive in the way that the I Ching is, you see. But if you’re asking me what are some of the popular works that I recommend when people say, “Ok, what should I read?” or “I like this idea,” then if that’s what you’re asking, then it’s all over the map, John, because you may know from my books, my popular books that in my practice I’m not trying to sell a particular philosopher to anyone. I’m rather trying to get them to work philosophically with what already resonates with them. So if someone who has existentialist inclinations walks into my office and wants to do more reading, then, yeah, I would probably nine times out of ten recommend to them if they like existentialists and they seem to be headed in that direction, then absolutely Kierkegaard is good. Or if they are atheists, Sartre or de Beauvoir or Camus are good. You name it, what one could obviously recommend for lots of works in that tradition. But on the other hand, some people are romantic capitalists, in which case Ayn Rand is their cup of tea. Other people are Platonic in which case we have another tradition. So myself I’m not cleaving to a particular philosophical school and saying well, these are books that I recommend over and over again. What I’m trying to do, more broadly stated, is to awaken the philosopher inside the client, ok. I think that everybody has a philosopher inside. Most people at least have a philosopher inside. And very often that philosopher is sleeping and needs to be awakened. And which particular philosophical tradition that one actually awakens is of smaller moment to me. What I’m more concerned about is to get the client to be more philosophical. I’m not going to dictate to them which philosophical school they’re supposed to represent. That’s their choice. My job is, as I see it, is to get them to be more philosophical. So that could entail a lot of works, right? That could entail a pretty broad spectrum.
Hanley: Alright, very good, Dr. Marinoff. I think we’ve got a tremendous interview there.
Marinoff: Well, thank you. It was very interesting and a bold line of questioning. So I was only trying to respond. And thank you very much, John.

Larry Wilson Interview

2007-02-20T11:13:00.000-08:00

Larry Wilson is a legendary management coach/consultant/guru and best-selling author. His Wilson Learning is one of the longest-standing and most respected management training firms.

Hanley: Larry Wilson, how do you think America is doing competitively these days?
Wilson: I think that we’re loosing ground in a number of areas, and we’re gaining ground in others. If we look back to the automobile industry in the ‘50s and ‘60s, America dominated. Now, General Motors, Ford and Chrysler are all in serious trouble. Recently somebody told me the net market value of Harley Davidson is bigger than that of General Motors. Automobiles represented the key industry that defined the USA business superiority. Yet, as Tom Friedman tells us in his book, The World is Flat, the world beyond us has caught up to us. This is especially true in the hard steel manufacturing industries.
Friedman started off his book with the startling example of the Olympic basketball team from the Unites States losing in the Olympics. How could we have lost? We invented basketball. We were the best. We had the pros. We were dominant. And we lost. He uses that as a metaphor for “Look what’s coming; they’re catching up; the world is flat.” It’s no longer that we’re on top and everyone else is behind us. No. It’s a flat world. So, are we getting hurt? The answer is yes. And the story behind the story is that we’re not responding well to this new reality.
Hanley: What would you say is the main source of our difficulties? Is a lot of it our education system?
Wilson: Yes and more. John, let me repeat a statement I like to make when I’m speaking in front of a bunch of leaders, just to get their reaction. Here it is: “I believe most, if not all of our institutions, have ill prepared us to live in the world we’re living in today”. What do I mean? The metaphor for me is that we’re now living in the world of Oz, yet we’re still behaving as though we’re living in Kansas. And that gap is biting us in the butt and the bites are getting bigger and more frequent. Certainly a big part of the gap lies at the feet of the educational system. And those feet include all the toes from kindergarten through college.
Hanley: Say more about all of our institutions having ill prepared us to live in Oz.
Wilson: Daniel Pink recently wrote an interesting book called A Whole New Mind. As we look forward to the future, he’s telling us is that we’ve lost our past advantage. We all know that accelerating change has dealt us a new world of globalization, increased competition, and increased complexity. The question is, how prepared are we to deal with these new realities and how have our institutions helped us? In his book Pink goes right to the point of how unprepared our brain is to take advantage of these changes. But first he reminds us of the two sides of our brain, our left and our right brain. Each of these two sides of our brain has a different primary function. Our left-brain handles the details, takes care of language, works more at the tactical and detail level and generally processes information in a linear way.
The right brain utilizes imagery, sees the bigger picture and connects the dots of possibilities by processes data through a more holistic mind frame. Of course this is not new news. But here’s his point and the big “Aha” that ties back to the idea that most of our institutions have ill-prepared us to live in our new world. We respond best when there’s an ideal balance between both sides of our brain working in collaboration and harmony. For the majority of us that perfect balance doesn’t exist.
Hanley: Why is this so?
Wilson: Some of this is genetic. Yet most of this imbalance is culturally driven by our institutions that have heavily favored our left-brain’s predictable logic over our right brain’s creative unpredictability. Or so it would seem.
Hanley: So, what‘s Daniel Pink’s point?
Wilson: Here it is, and it’s big. Pink makes the case that our left-brain, everyone’s left-brain, has become a commodity. Much like Tom Friedman’s point that the world is flat, meaning the world beyond ours has caught up to us. Yet Pink is more specific by saying that they’ve copied us and caught up with our “left brain” competencies. Of course, commodity means there’s increasingly plenty of supply and thus the price keeps going south. The translation here is that many if not most “important” left brain jobs can be done by competent people from anywhere on the globe at vastly reduced prices. Ouch!
Here’s an example and a pretty compelling metaphor for the new level of competition in this new game. The fact is, anything we can make, think or deliver can be done almost anywhere else in the world and delivered to your house, office or factory on time and inexpensively. It’s not just electronics and cars; it’s also services like your tax form being prepared by a CPA in India and your MRI being interpreted by a Doctor in an Indian hospital just a few blocks away from that CPA.
The Indian accountant likely has a USA CPA certificate, probably an MBA as well. Your tax firm may be in the US, but the bulk of the work of processing your return is done in India. Let’s say the CPA in the United States who in the past has been doing the tax detail work makes $10,000 a month. The CPA that’s doing the work in India makes $1,000 a month. So, the guy that owns the CPA firm in the USA is going to send the bulk of the work to the CPA in India, and get it back quickly and accurately. The owner will do the last 10 percent of your tax return and hopefully at less cost to you and more profit to his firm. And the same example is parallel regarding the MRI you were given by your doctor in the USA.
Now those are just a couple of examples to shake us up because when we think of outsourcing jobs to another country, we mostly think manual jobs, right? But these are not manual labor jobs. These are examples of highly sophisticated work, engineering, accounting, analysis, and so on. And, these are examples of mostly left-brain dominated work. Remember, Pink’s point is – the left-brain is becoming a commodity. Again commodity means lots of it is available and the price is low and going lower all the time. Also remember, all of this includes quality standards set in the USA while costing about a tenth of the cost at home. The list goes on and on. The impact of this new competition alone is profoundly changing our world and demanding new responses from all of us. For the most part, we’re just not responding fast enough.
Hanley: How does education fit this commodity situation?
Wilson: Well, for starters, our education system is highly tilted to the left-brain learning. Most of what’s measured as learning is our short-term memory, hardly a true measure of how well we use what we learned. For example, if you want to go to college, you’re going to have to take the SATs and all those various and sundry tests they have for you. But none of those, at least the SAT, has any reference to anything that has anything to do with the right brain. So here lies the problem, that our left-brain has been over developed and our right brain underdeveloped. In the new world of Oz, our left-brain competencies have become a commodity and our right brain competencies have become the new area of opportunity. The problem is that our intuitions have failed to prepare us for these right-brain opportunities.
The problem behind the problem is that our institutions are simply behind the play. And the problem behind that problem is how stuck and difficult it is for these institutions to change themselves. It’s the metaphor of the generals always planning for the last war. So if your education system is primarily teaching left brain oriented commodity competencies, and you pay a fortune to send your daughter to college, when she graduates all she’s ready for is to compete with the whole world of commodity graduates who are willing to work ten times cheaper, and harder, than what she expects.
Pink is saying if you’re really thinking about your daughter’s future, or the country’s future, then education ought to be focusing more on competencies that are not a commodity. These would be the right brain competencies that he says are harder to commoditize and represent the advantages of future opportunities.
Right brain competencies open us up into the whole arena of creativity and innovation. In our world of accelerating change, what could be more important that learning how to make change a friend and opportunity rather than an enemy to be feared? Making that kind of attitudinal major mind-set change is, for the most part, a right brain process. Yet it’s our institutions that are resisting change by attitudes that see change more as a threat to be feared than as an opportunity to be gained. With these current negative attitudes it’s hard to see how they should the ones to teach our youth how to prepare for their future.
Nothing says this more than our basic K through12 school system. In 1982 a prestigious presidential committee presented their finding on the status of the school system. The title of the report said it all. It was called “A Nation at Risk”. The headline spoke to the fact that our world had been changing at a rapid rate, yet our school system was changing hardly at all. The committee gave the system a D- on its report card.
That was 25 years ago. How much change has happened to our world in these last 25 years? How much has our school system changed in these last 25 years? The questions and the answers say it all. We’ve got a broken system that’s hardly committed to fixing itself, much less preparing our children to survive, thrive and live a great life in pursuit of their own happiness.
Yet, we should be asking ourselves what might happen if our educational system put more emphasis on developing more of our right brain potential. The right brain is filled with interpersonal empathy and creativity. What we have discovered is that co-operative learning, pioneered by David and Roger Johnson from the University of Minnesota, gets great result such as: students learn more, faster, and apply and sustain more of what they learn. And, as a bonus, or perhaps as the primary outcome, students learn right brain collaboration skills they’ll be using for their lifetime. Yet, even with all the research collected over 40 years, co-operative learning is still not even close to being in the main stream of education.
This is true even as businesses of all kinds are changing their work structures toward more team based group work with less supervision. The paradox is that the biggest obstacle to people collaborating at work is they need to break the competition habits they primarily learned while going through the school system. Here’s something we could have learned in school: how to adapt more to what’s changing in the world around us? This opportunity is looming large because many jobs, mostly left-brain jobs, are being lost. And, the number of jobs being lost overseas is insignificant compared to number being replaced by technology.
To make this point Warren Bennis, a professor at USC, tells this story. In the near future, a manufacturing plant will need only two living beings in the plant, a man and a dog. The man’s job is to feed the dog. The dog’s job is to keep the man from touching anything. If we, all of us, don’t want to end up becoming dog feeders, we’ve got to prepare ourselves, grow ourselves and be accountable to and for ourselves. For a lot of us, a least for our current culture, that accountability factor has been replaced by an entitlement mentality that can be at odds with the accountable mind-set.
Hanley: How do we move past this approach?
Wilson: The political world is saying – “We’ve got to do more for the middle class.” And it’s true. But the “doing” too often looks a lot more like giving them their daily fish rather than teaching them how to fish, or if you will, helping them learn to do more for themselves. What might the help look like? Well, we’re supposed to be entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. A lot has been said about life and liberty, not so much about the pursuit of happiness. Recent research found the two most important causes of happiness are: 1) Great relationships and 2) Meaningful work. Helping people pursue these two outcomes to happiness ought to be the priority function of all of our institutions who have the most influence on our culture. And, it’s our culture that has the greatest influence on us.
Yes, there is an economic disconnect between the haves and the have-nots. Yet, it’s not just about money. That same happiness research put the USA at 13 compared to other countries in degrees of happiness. Want to guess who came in first? It was Mexico. How can that be, especially with all those Mexicans trying to jump the fence to get to the US? Let’s think about it. What are they looking for? But first, what did the research say about their highest values? It was the overwhelming value of family. That was the factor that got them to #1 on the happiness scale. When you read the stories behind the motives of the fence jumping, you’ll see that a lot of the motivation is one or two people coming north in order to send money back to their families.
Of course, they too are motivated to have more meaningful work, but will do less meaningful work to satisfy that first value of providing more financial security to the family. It is also the prime reason they try to bring their families north. Why? For a better education, more opportunities, more meaningful work, for a better life, for more happiness, that’s why. Sounds a lot like us.
The biggest cause of the economic disconnects is the different thinking and behavioral competencies that people have learned or not learned. The most helpful of these were not learned in our formal school curriculum, but in our “school of hard knocks” curriculum. Many of these are right brain focused and are highly valued and relevant in our new world of Oz. There’s no perfect category or definition of these competencies. The closest I can think of would be entrepreneurial thinking and doing. And it’s not new news that most true entrepreneurs didn’t have a perfect fit with our educational system. The good news is that we’re beginning to see a huge increase in new entrepreneurial starts. And that’s a great start on the yellow brick road to OZ.
Hanley: Well, that’s some reason for optimism.
Wilson: Well, I hope so. What our new company, The Wilson Collaborative, is up too is creating more right brain curriculums that are steeped in competencies like learning to learn, learning to choose, learning to relate, learning to create and learning to integrate. Again, important competencies we didn’t learn in formal school classes. Yet, these are the competencies that most entrepreneurs somehow learned in their school of hard knocks. These competencies directly apply to leadership and innovation, and to customer relations as well as self-motivation and accountability. All of these competencies tilt more to the right brain and certainly are critical factors for people wanting to become more entrepreneurial.
Hanley: Let me ask you this. I don’t know if this is more philosophical thinking, but if somebody has a global consciousness, why should they care if America loses market share? I mean, if it’s good for the world as a whole, then maybe that’s ok. What do you think of that?
Wilson: Well, I think you have to look at it from two different points of view. It’s okay if everybody is playing a game of collaboration or interdependence where when the tide goes up all the boats go up. Yet what happens in every kind of significant change is that somebody is going to get hurt in the transition time. The people who are going to get hurt are mostly those people who are not doing anything to change themselves. Actually it’s that whole insanity thing, doing what you’ve always done while expecting things to be different or expecting things to stay the way it always was. I remember a quote from the philosopher Eric Hoffer who told us: "In times of change learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists." My version of his quote is: “Knowing is the enemy of learning.” If the world changes and we don’t change our thinking, individually or as a country, we’re going backward and we’re seriously threatened.
And that’s what’s happening to the unprepared “learned” majority. Now the question is, “What are the changes that people have to make?” This is subject you and I have always been interested in. And the answer is, “Changes in how we think,” because how we think affects everything we do. My business, just like Lifespring’s business, is to help people bring about changes by helping them change the thinking that’s causing interferences to their being able to access their full potential. Our formula is: Performance is Potential Minus Interference. Your dad and I have always had the same objective in what and how we thought. Although I funnel most of my work through businesses, our real leverage is with business leaders who want to empower their people to “grow themselves.” These leaders have to believe, “If I want to grow my company, I’ve got to grow my people”.
Yet it’s not about the business; it’s about the people who work at the businesses. I’m not an economist, but I’ve worked with lots of companies and lots of leaders. I’ve seen the good, the bad and the ugly. The biggest quality gap is in leadership effectiveness, those people who have others reporting to them. This includes the foreman and supervisor right up the CEO.
Hanley: Sure. Well, tell us a little bit about how you assess how this is going. You’ve been in this consulting business 40 odd years. I picked up Tom Peters’ book some time back. His latest one is called Re-imagine and he’s been at it for quite a long time, too. He’s pretty angry that guys like you and he have been out there laying it out for businesses and managers – “Here’s the changes that needs to happen”. And he doesn’t see enough action being taken. Are you skeptical or optimistic?
Wilson: I share his disappointment and I share his frustration. At the same time, our collective thinking has been so influenced, mostly by those major institutions I talked about that have ill prepared us to live in Oz, that we’ve all created deeply embedded self defeating thought-habits that keep us stuck. Again, it’s this “stuckness” that holds us back from manifesting all the great possibilities that surround us. It’s our leaders who have the greatest amount of stuckness. We’re not talking about fifty years or so of stuckness, we’re talking about…well, at one level you can say, at least 10,000 years of evolution that has gotten us to this point.
Now, the reason for Tom’s frustration – “Why don’t they, meaning the leaders, get it”? Well, here’s our take on it. Almost always it’s because the people who are trying to lead the change, that are trying to influence, insist or demand that people change, are seeing the task as an intellectual challenge. And it’s truly not an intellectual challenge. There’s some of that, but the majority of the forces at play are really emotional resisters, not intellectual. I’ll say to you I agree to change, and I may believe it. But I don’t make the change. Why not? Because intellectually I agree with you, but emotionally I don’t. Why, because I’m emotionally stuck. Now, I’ve just introduced a word that’s extremely critical to the whole scenario behind Tom Peter’s and your and my frustration of people’s resistance to change, even when the people intellectually know it’s best for them. And the word “emotion” is not a favored word in the world of business. Emotions at best are suspect by most leaders and our emotions get little respect from them as well, right?
Hanley: Right.
Wilson: In fact, most often emotions are played out at work as: “Leave your emotions at home for god’s sake, this is a business” - which is the most insane statement anybody could make. Yet that statement tells us that most leaders are fundamentally flawed in their understanding of the nature of human beings, the very human beings the leaders are expecting to follow them. So, what is the problem we’re trying to solve? Again it’s stuckness, emotional stuckness. We’re not talking about people who are sick and need to get well. We’re not talking about people who are broken and need to get fixed. We are talking about people who are emotionally stuck and need to get unstuck in those patterns of their life that are not serving them well. And, by the way, that category includes all of us. It’s stuckness. So how, where and when did we get stuck and what kind of help did we get to help us get un-stuck?
I realize I’ve been using this word stuck a lot because I really think it most accurately defines the human condition. Let me give a little more depth to the word.
Let’s go back to Pavlov and his discovery of the conditioned response. His most famous example was with dogs. He knew that dogs began to salivate in the presence of food. So, he began to connect, over and over, the sound of a specific bell with the presence of food. At some point, with enough connections of food and bell sounds, he could ring the bell without the presence of food, and the dogs salivated as though they were in the presence of food, even though no food was present. The dogs had “stuck” two separate things together that in the future were each defined by the dogs as being one and the same. To the dogs, bell was the same as food and food was the same bell. He had fooled the dogs into believing that illusion. The joke here is that if we believed this way, we’d go to a restaurant, order a meal and then eat the menu. But, its no joke, and we do it all the time.
Most of our self-defeating delusional beliefs are rapped up in conditioned responses that are leading much of our life. And, for the most part, we’re totally unconscious to what’s happening. Most of us were never taught how we got conditioned to repeat self-defeating responses to what life hands us. And, more important, how to get unstuck from that that conditioning. What a missed opportunity for our education to connect those dots.
Hanley: Give me an example of a self-defeating illusion that’s trapped in a conditional response.
Wilson: Sure. Here’s one most of us can relate to. It’s our sense of Worth, or Worthiness. It’s sometimes called our self-esteem. It really has to do with our ability to love ourselves, which is then connected to how much we can truly love others. So, starting in a competitive childhood, we begin to access our worth as a human being. But we really didn’t have an objective way to accomplish that task. So, most of us used the assessment tool of comparison, that is - comparing ourselves to other people or even to other things.
The other people might be our siblings, our friends, our classmates or others we hear about or see on TV. The things might be our toys, those things we “must have” or we’ll be lesser than those that do have them. We’re constantly getting feedback on how well we’re competing from our surroundings or our culture. So, our disease is constant anxiety that we’re “not enough.” Not smart enough, not rich enough, not pretty or handsome enough, tall enough, slim enough, sexy enough, and well, the list never stops. And now we’re an adult that has practiced this comparison thinking process thousands and thousands and thousands of times. The result is we’re not making choices in the present; we’re following the conditioned responses we’ve been practicing most of our life. It’s all automatic, we don’t think about it, we’ve been conditioned to salivate at the sight of people, places or things that if we could be or have, would close the gap between my “not enough” fears and the worthiness I seek.
The illusion is that I am what I have or I am what I do. If I buy that new car, house, vacation home, airplane, boat, shoes, shirt, dress, then I’ll be more worthy. My salivating hungers for worthiness gets feed, but not for long. Soon my anxiety returns and my hunt for worthiness continues to drive me. The result is that I end up leading my life to prove myself, instead of leading my life to express myself, two totally different paths to Oz. The fact is I’m stuck playing a game that I cannot win.
The good news about the word “stuck” is that it implies that which is stuck can become unstuck. And it can. Here’s a question that has to be asked. If all this is accurate, then why oh why didn’t we learn how to get unstuck as a primary competency of our educational system? To a great degree the answer is, “It’s been the blind leading the blind”. Start with the parent leading the child. Ponder this. How we got to be a parent has nothing to do with the competencies of being a parent. So, how did we learn to be a parent? Yes, from observing our parents. And, how did they learn how to be a parent? Sure, the same way. This goes all the way back to Adam and Eve, and remember what happened to their children. Not a perfect process, right?
The same is true with how people learned to be a leader. It’s not that different from being a parent. I believe there are more less-effective parents than there are effective parents. Yet I know there are more less-effective leaders than there are effective ones. There’s a whole lot of leadership stuckness going on out there.
Look, we started this interview by you asking me, “How do I think America is doing
competitively these days?” I said; “I think that we’re loosing ground in a number of
areas and we’re gaining ground in others.” I think what’s primarily causing the losing ground or gaining ground rests on squarely on the shoulders of leadership. So, let’s focus in on the specific subject of leadership as being at cause of loosing or gaining, and how leadership plays out as being the problem and/or the solution to our future competitiveness. Also, let’s look at how leadership’s willingness to change or not change relates to their degree of stuckness and therefore our stuckness.
Hanley: Great, let’s talk about what makes a leader effective or ineffective.
Wilson: Okay, but let’s start with some mutually defined words. First I believe the phenomena of leadership is someone following someone else, because they want to, not because the have to. The word “phenomena” suggests it’s not happening that often, or it’s not the norm. It also it says that true leadership is determined, not by the title, but by the followers. This is much the same as quality is determined, not by the company, but by the customers. Next, I believe that the function of leadership is to bring about change, and especially so when the world is changing at an unparallel rate of speed. Obviously a big part of bringing about change is the leader’s ability to enroll other people to wanting to change. But again, most often leaders view this task as an intellectual challenge, when it’s much more an emotional challenge. And, they can’t understand why it isn’t working or it takes so long.
Hanley: Why does it take so long, intellectually or emotionally?
Wilson: Let’s look at a case study of a leader that failed big time and then succeeded big time, Edwards Deming, the change agent of the quality movement. He changed a whole county. I’m pretty sure you know his story. But let’s summarize it quickly. Not surprisingly, Dr. Deming spent his youth on a farm learning a “can-do” attitude and how to fix and improve things. After he got his PhD. from Yale, he was drafted during World War II and was involved in getting companies to quickly shift from consumer products to war-time products. That’s where he started learning about quality. When the war was over he had learned a lot about quality and wanted to share it with the same companies that had made that quick shift to war-time work. This time, they didn’t really want to listen. Why? Well, there was a five-year pent-up demand. They didn’t care about quality. They just wanted to get their products out the door. People wanted to buy and the companies were making money hand over fist. Strategic planning was adding 15 to 30 percent to last year’s profits knowing that half would come from inflation. Deming was preaching his gospel of Quality and Productivity to an audience who wasn’t interested in either quality or productivity. Arrogance and egos played a large part in their deaf ears to Deming’s message and most leaders were convinced they were already great. Remember, knowing is the enemy of learning. So, Deming failed to change the thinking of leaders in the USA. But Deming did find an audience – halfway around the world. He went to Japan.
Now what was the situation there? They were defeated. They were humiliated, which was the worst thing that happened because humiliation in that culture meant you might as well kill yourself. So they were open to new and different things. Before the war, the rap that was tagged onto anything that came from Japan was “Made in Japan” and it was a code word for “junk,” meaning no quality at all. So Deming found a very excited audience, excited enough to get over the pain of their humiliation and a willingness to be open to serious change. I call this change by crisis. Deming was a Game Changer and their savior. They didn’t challenge him. They totally accepted what he espoused. It was totally different than what they’d been doing, but they realized what they did before didn’t work. So they became great champions of Deming’s 14 Points of Quality.
Now of course it took the USA a long time to let go of their old belief that “Made in Japan” was a joke. But the joke was on us. The Japanese commitment to quality and improving productivity gradually, but forcefully, became the gold standard for leadership throughout the world. Finally the realization of how far we had fallen behind required us to let go of some of our “ego centeredness” and start looking into “what had really changed with our former enemies.” Thus the search began. Now the question was: “What can we, the US, learn from them, the Japanese, and apply to our companies”? In a typical western way, we thought we could just go over there, get the information and tack it on to whatever we were already doing. We imported and tried to copy Quality Circles, Continuous Improvement, and Just on Time Manufacturing ideas to make them our own. But we only had part of the equation. We imported the right seeds, but we didn’t realize our potential because we planted them in a soil of fear and mistrust. The expectation of the harvest was disappointing to say the least. We thought we could simply tell our followers to implement these secrets and expect to get results as good as, or better than, our Japanese teachers. Why didn’t we get those results? Where did we go wrong?
Again, the answer to both questions is about leading or, if you will, not leading. It’s the difference between “want to” and “have to” – between leading from a mindset of fear-based Control and Command or, leading from a trust-based Developmental Leadership mind-set where it’s understood that people are the organization’s most valuable asset. Developmental Leaders also understand that people do things for their own reasons, not ours. Deming warned us, as he had warned the Japanese. They listened, we didn’t. Even if you remember his 14 Points of Quality, you might not remember the content of Number 8. Why pick out that one above all the others? Deming told us that if Number 8 isn’t implemented, the other13 points won’t work. Perhaps it should have been number one. Number 8 is: “Drive fear out of the organization.” Though he never said this, the implication is clear. When you drive something out, you have to bring something else in. In this case, that something else is Trust. And creating Trust is what I believe to be the biggest challenge for any leader.
Hanley: So, trusting the leader is the primary reason people are willing to change?
Wilson: Yes, that’s the beginning. Yet there’s more, which is the motivation to change. I mentioned that the big motive for Japan to be so willing to commit to such a major change was crisis. They had hit bottom. Crisis is the road most traveled when it comes to a reason or motive to change. This is true for us as individuals or for an organization, which of course is made up of individuals. When you find yourself in an alley at 4:00 AM having thrown up all over the place and the police are leading you away, it usually occurs to that maybe you better take a deeper look at your life and start making some changes. The same is true for any organization that’s hit bottom or is moving quickly in that direction. The basic strategy in this situation is to hunker down and pull out our best survival skills. Yet, I believe there are two other primary motives for a willingness to change. I call the second one evolutionary change. This occurs when there’s a clear recognition that things are changing around us and we better learn to adapt to these changes. So, we adapt. The third motivation to change I call anticipatory change. This is where an individual or an organization looks into the future and attempts to predict what’s likely to happen and then create a best possible response to that happening. This is a strategy of trying to get to the future first and claiming the prize of being who it is that others are trying to copy.
So the three big motives for change are - crisis, evolution and anticipation. I’ve already said that crisis is the road most traveled to change and it’s the easiest to motivate, but it’s also the most costly. Anticipation is the least road traveled and the most difficult to motivate because of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” thinking. Yet it always creates the best results. These motives represent different situations for leaders and leaders ideally should be masters of all three situations.
So lets stay with the story of how Deming changed the business and leadership model of a whole country by changing the mind-set of the business leaders in Japan. One way to tell the story is through the evolution of the decline of the automobile business in the USA. Remember, I started this interview by saying that General Motors, Ford and Chrysler are all in serious trouble, and it was the automobiles business that defined the USA business superiority. Yes, today the world is flat and our automobile business has gotten seriously flattened in the process. I want to make the case that had we listened more to Deming and made many of the changes he suggested in how we lead people, we would still be king of the automobile hill and likely a lot less flat in others important areas of how we define ourselves.
Let’s play out what happened by comparing General Motors to Toyota. Toyota has already passed Ford. It’s already passed Chrysler. It’s going to pass General Motors any day now. Here’s a simple example that helps me understand why we’ve missed the mark because we didn’t really hear Deming’s message. At Toyota, 90% of the employees make at least one suggestion a year to improve the work they do. Most of these suggestions are acted on. At General Motors, 5% of the employees make at least one suggestion a year. Most of these suggestions are not acted on. Why is this so? I suggest two reasons. First, in Japan, critical thinking skills are a central component of all curriculums being taught in the schools. You’ll find it very difficult to discover any serious critical thinking skills taught in any part of our curriculums. Second, I believe Deming’s eighth point of his fourteen points of quality is being violated every day in most of our organizations and institutions. Remember, his point number 8 - drive fear out of the organization, or, the other 13 points can’t work.
Hanley: And fear abounds in our culture, doesn’t it?
Wilson: Absolutely. Let’s start with our major institutions, education, religion, business, the media and the government. What has been the primary motivational message of most of these pillars of our culture? The first message is: “We have all the answers.” The second message is: “Do what you’re told, or else!” That “or else” message creates lot’s of fear. And, what has been our leadership model for motivating others for thousands of years? It’s been control, command, fear-based. Clearly the Japanese had plenty of their own brand of fear-based institutions. Yet Deming’s influence has made a difference in how leadership works in Japan or, at least, in Japanese businesses. We’ll all familiar with their concept of consensus leadership. They take the time to bring most everyone into discussions of pending decisions or changes that are being explored. This takes valuable time. In our western world, we pride ourselves for making fast decisions, thus with little time for discussion. The difference is the Japanese get fast implementation while we get agonizingly slow implementation. The cost of slow implementation is much greater than the time cost of collaboration. This extra collaboration time is also a major factor in people’s motivation to support that in which they had a voice.
Yet, all that being said, in 1972 General Motors was the most profitable corporation in the world by sales and profits. What were they, the top 300 leaders, thinking from that place of being the best in the world? That’s a question that profession James O’Toole of USC wanted to find out. So, he asked them. Not directly, but by interviewing a good representation of the 300, he was able to get under their conscious thinking to ferret out what he called the 10 operation assumptions of GM in 1972. Here’s the summary of his report of their operating assumptions:
1. GM is in the business of making money, not cars.
2. Success comes not from technological leadership but from having the resources to quickly adopt innovations successfully introduced by others.
3. Cars are primarily status symbols. Styling is therefore more important than quality to buyers who are, after all, going to trade up every other year.
4. The U.S. car market is isolated from the rest of the world. Foreign competition will never gain more than 15 percent of the domestic market.
5. Energy will always be cheap and abundant.
6. Workers do not have an important impact on production or product quality.
7. The consumer movement doesn't represent the concerns of a significant portion of the U.S. public.
8. The government is the enemy. It must be fought tooth and nail every step of the way.
9. Strict, centralized financial controls are the secret of good administration.
10.Managers should be developed only from the inside.

Now you can use your own imagination to “ferret out” what impact these leadership assumptions played in the slow devaluation of this former symbol of our business superiority.
Hanley: It’s hard to believe they were so off the mark. These had to be smart guys at that level.
Wilson: Often being smart leads to thinking you do have all the answers. That was in the 70s. Here’s what was already happening in the early ‘80s. General Motors had 31 plants spread over the country. Its worst performing plant was in Fremont California. So GM closed the plant down for two years. Then, two years later Toyota and General Motors formed a partnership to build cars together in that plant again. The plant was re-named the NUMI plant. The reason for the partnership was that General Motors wanted to know more about Japanese management. Good news, right? The Japanese wanted to know more about US distribution. That was both sides of the quid pro. And they did it. The Japanese were given full responsibility for running the plant. All the cars coming off the line were the same, the only difference between them were the labels, one for GM, one for Toyota.
So what did the Japanese do? Well, the first thing they did, unheard of in the US, is they brought all the supervisors of that plant, about 400 people, to Japan for somewhere between three and six months. Not to tell them what to do, but to teach them what they do in Japan. The Japanese approach was, we’re going to teach you everything we know, everything we do. Now, we don’t know your country. We don’t know your culture, so what you’re going to have to do is choose, or select, or decide, what to take back from here that you think will work in the US. The next thing they did was to hire back everyone they could who had been there before except the top management. Why not the management? Because they deemed the management would to be too difficult to change. And, when did they hire these people? They hired most of them three months before the plant was to be opened. And they used that entire time to train the people in the new system. Now as you know, a plant goes on the books as an asset, but the people are debited as an expense. So in the US we don’t do things that way. We build the plant, and then as close to the opening as possible, start hiring the people. That always causes a shake out time that results in early low performance and poor quality. Fix it on the fly or have the dealers “deal” with it was the normal GM mantra. The Japanese didn’t think that way. Deming taught them to be obsessed with quality, an obsession highly valued by their customers. So at Numi they hired the employees months before they were to open the plant and trained the hell out of them. And when the plant opened, on the very first day, it was the most productive and high quality plant of all of the other General Motors plants. And, every person in the Numi plant was thrilled.
Hanley: That’s quite a goose bump story of success. Did GM get the lesson?
Wilson: Well, you tell me. Certainly that was the chance General Motors had to get what they said they wanted out of the partnership. But did they learn about Japanese management? I had a friend at the University of New Mexico School of Business. He was the only professor permitted to do research at the Numi plant. A year after his research was completed he was asked by General Motors come to Detroit and share his research with that same level of top executives that James O’Toole interviewed. He did it. And he told them about all the changes that were made and why. He explained the new team processes to making cars. He told them about the Numi Values and the new Code of Conduct that all associates, including all management, agreed to and signed and upheld. And, he shared the very impressive major financial results. What this audience heard was quite different than what General Motors was doing in the other plants. He said they seemed interested or a least polite. Then he told me the third act of the play. He said: “I was in a stall in the bathroom and a couple of guys came in and I overheard their conversation. One guy said to the other, ‘What did you think of the speech?’ And the other guy said, ‘Well, it was ok. But if he thinks I’m giving up my private parking space, he’s nuts.’” That simple statement and that simple response…
Hanley: Sums it all up.
Wilson: Sums it all up, exactly. It’s leaders saying, “I’ve got mine. I’m not moving, I’m not changing, I’ve worked too hard and too and long to get where I am, the hell with them. In three years, I’m on the beach. Let someone else come in and fight the battles”. Totally stuck in their comfort zone. That stuck mind-set has cost GM billions and billions if you’re just talking about wasted money. It’s cost untold billions in unrealized future opportunities. And, what’s been the cost to all those loyal employees who really believed if they just kept their head down, did their job, didn’t rock the boat, and served the boss, they too would have a happy ever after ending? No, this wasn’t the thinking of everyone, but it was the thinking of the GM culture. As things got worse they finally realized they had to do something different. Change by crisis. Maybe the Numi experience was a necessary first step GM needed to find its courage to attempt to re-invent itself. In more technical terms, this re-inventing process is called a bifurcation. In more simple terms it means a new or different path.
So, GM funded a 5 billion dollar commitment to create a new pathway to the future by inventing Saturn. John, in the early 80s our Pecos consulting team had done a lot of work with GM of Canada. Canada was a microcosm of GM Detroit. In Canada we learned every aspect of what made GM tick, or not tick. As Saturn became a reality it was in dire need of new and different thinking. Voices from Detroit heard about some of the “new and different” things that we were doing at GM Canada. The short of it is that we were brought in to help Saturn with its mission of becoming a “Different kind of Company” that was building a “Different kind of Car.” Saturn had a two-part charter: 1) Learn how to build a low priced car to compete with the Japanese. 2) Become the “learning organization” for all of General Motors and then teach the rest of your brothers and sisters companies what you learned. For Saturn this was permission to learn new things and do new things by getting out of the box of GM limitations and feeling free to innovate.
This permission didn’t sound anything like the regular GM. But it did sound good to a lot of people, a few of whom actually worked at GM. But there was a lot of whispering going on, especially from those sibling brothers and sisters companies who couldn’t believe why or how this “newbe” Saturn, who, by the way, had never built a car, could have come into such a powerful position of telling us anything about cars we don’t already know. And, 5 billion dollars going to this up-start, why didn’t we at least be given a shot at some at that? This was really the story of Cinderella and her jealous sisters all over again. The part about Saturn being the learning organization for all of GM was established, but to no surprise, it was never implemented. The history of the jealous sisters is that Chevrolet wouldn’t ever listen to Pontiac or Buick much less to this new little creep called Saturn. So the good intention of sharing best practices to the rest of the family lost out to the ugly power of stuck egos.
Hanley: You were just talking about the ego as maybe a fundamental blocking point to leaders making real progress to improve. So are you suggesting that in business and particularly in leadership, there’s a need for an overall transcending of our egos in some way? If so, I mean, that sounds huge. That sounds like a Buddhist enlightenment project. Is it possible?
Wilson: Well, what would the results be in our country if we were all taught how to change our minds to change our lives? What if we were all taught to be competent in doing this the way you taught it in Life spring? Lives did get changed, didn’t they, big time, right?
Hanley: Yeah, we saw it happen all the time.
Wilson: But was that change sustainable? Not necessarily and why not? It was mostly because our culture didn’t support it? A few sustained the change, but that’s a small percentage, 2 percent maybe. But sustainability means that the new change has to be the new norm. This requires that the new beliefs are surrounding us. It’s has to be “the way people think around here.” I mentioned that in Japan they are obsessed with quality. We need to be surrounded by the belief that each of us can create our own quality of life.
Hanley: That sounds great. How do we get to that point?
Wilson: Well it has to start with our leaders. Do you remember the Trim Tab concept brought to us by Buckminster Fuller?
Hanley: Sure, he was a giant of a thinker. He gave us the Geodesic Dome.
Wilson: Right. Back at my Pecos days John Denver was sponsoring a conference at his ranch on the future of business. I was lucky enough to hire a very special young lady at Pecos who I met at that meeting. Her name is Amy Edmondson. As I was walking around the ranch, I saw a young lady facilitating 30 or 40 people who were sitting on the grass seemingly enthralled with what she saying and doing with triangles. I got there about 10 minutes before the session was over. When it was over I asked her who she was and what was this session all about. She told me her story. She had gone to Harvard for three years majoring in math, gotten high grades, and coming to her 4th year, had taken most of the required classes. They asked her what she would like to do for her senior year. Her answer was, “Well, I’d love to become an intern for Buckminster Fuller.” And they said, “Well, if you can pull that off, just give us our tuition and you’ve got it.” And she did. In fact she stayed with him for three more years beyond her graduation and became his right arm until he died. She wrote a book about him called The Fuller Explanation.
I really lucked out because I enticed her to join our team at Pecos River Learning Centers and she became my right arm. She was fabulous, brilliant and wonderful. She used to tell me all these stories about Buckminster Fuller. Four years later she got a call from Harvard that said: “Look Amy, if you’ll come back to Harvard, we’ll pay for everything if you’ll work to get an MBA and then Ph.D. All you have to do after you get those degrees is promise to teach at the Harvard Business School for four years.” Obviously I couldn’t compete with that, nor did I want to compete with that. It was the greatest opportunity in the world for her. She’s now Dr. Amy Edmondson, a tenured professor at the Harvard Business School.
Now back to the question of how we change a culture. Amy told me a story of someone asking Bucky, “How do you change the course of the Queen Mary steaming over the ocean at 30 knots with all that mass?” And Bucky said, “Well, the obvious answer is the rudder. But that was the wrong question. The real question is - How do you change the rudder?” And Bucky said, “You change the rudder with that little sliver that goes down the side of the rudder.” Called the what?
Hanley: The trim tab.
Wilson: Yes the trim tab. And he said, “If you turn that trim tab to the left side, that makes the rudder changes to the right side, and that change in the rudder makes the ship turn to the left side. And that’s you’ve start a change process.” Because Bucky was a mathematician first, he put all this is mathematical terms. He said no real change will begin until you’ve collected a 5 percent critical mass of the total group. That 5% represents the trim tab, the tipping point. Now you’ve got something to work with. The next task is to enroll the next 15%. He said that once you’ve got a 20 % passionate group aliened, the change is unstoppable. Later at Pecos, we put the players into three groups - saints, sinners, and savers. So when you’re going for the 5 percent trim tab, enroll only the saints who already believe. These are the people who’ve been looking for a way to make things happen. When you get that 5% critical mass of saints together, their job is to recruit the next 15% from the ranks of more saints and many savers. At this point you try to keep the sinners out because they’re going to resist altogether. This is part of the politics of creating change.
Hanley: Did you say saints, sinners, and savers?
Wilson: Yes, savers are the people who can go either way. They’re savable. The sinners are those who are not likely to ever be willing to change.
Hanley: Got you.
Wilson: Sinners are going to fight you all the way, tooth and nail. It’s the bell shape curve, Saints on one end, the sinners on the other end. But the mass in the middle, that’s the 80 percent of Savers. I said earlier I believe the primary job of a leader is to bring about change, but leaders go first or most won’t believe the change is for real. Few people will do anything different until they see the leaders change. Leaders have to be the role models for everyone on the ship. Unfortunately, too often that’s seldom the case.
Hanley: Now, hold on. When you go to these executives and tell them, “Look if you really want to compete and be successful what needs to happen here is that you and your people have to get past your own egos to make the changes necessary to save the ship” - Are you finding some interest in that?
Wilson: Absolutely, some interest, but not universal. Again, it’s not that they intellectually disagree; it’s that they emotionally disagree. It’s the stuckness factor again. Some, no matter what, are not going to change. They’re the sinners, right? You have to find the saints who are willing to lead. Forty years ago there were maybe 3 to 4 percent of enlightened leaders who thought like this. Today there’s probably 10 to 15 percent that are moving toward this new leadership thinking. And as more businesses are becoming more successful by empowering their employees and giving them a voice, rather than controlling them as replicable cogs in a machine, we’ll be getting closer to hitting that trim tab tipping point and things will move much faster.
Hanley: Do you have any current examples of a time leadership change process happening that most of us could relate to?
Wilson: Do I ever. Did you watch this last super bowl?
Hanley: Of course. I love football.
Wilson: Right. Well, I think you and millions of us were witnesses to a big time example of leadership change happening. Yes, a big part of the story was that each team had a black coach refuting the unspoken myth that black coaches can’t be head coaches, much less able to win a super bowl. Yet, just as important was the “different from the NFL norm” style of coaching that was displayed during the game. Here’s a quote by coach Dungy right after the game: “I think now, with two guys coming to the Super Bowl with maybe different personalities than most people perceive of an NFL coach, a different value system, maybe a different way of expressing themselves, people say 'You know what? Anything can work if you get the right person.' "
Did you get those word descriptions that Dungy used? He said “different personalities, a different value system, a different way of expressing themselves”. To me, he was describing the difference between the “normal” NFL Control and Command leader/coach and the new Developmental leader/coach. The difference is in their personalities, their values and their way of expressing themselves. I loved it when Dungy told the story of the message he gives his players at the beginning of each new season. He says in almost a whisper, “I want you to listen to me now so you hear that this is as loud a voice you’ll hear me use as I speak to you all season long”. What a simple and powerful message that clearly makes the point of a different personality, a different value system and a different way of expressing one’s self.
Hanley: Yes, that is a powerful message. You said a “developmental leader.” Say more about what that means.
Wilson: Here’s one way to explain the differences. Some leaders believe their main job is to get work done through people. Other leaders believe their main job is to get people done through work. The first group represents more of the control and command leadership style. The second group represents more of the developmental leader style.
Hanley: Ok, say more about getting people done, what does that mean?
Wilson: Done means developed, ideally, reaching their full potential. It’s what Maslow called Self-Actualization. Here’s a clip from the Chicago Tribune about Peter Drucker’s view of leaders growing their people that was written shortly after his death: William Pollard, chairman emeritus of ServiceMaster Co., remembered Drucker appearing before his board of directors to ask a trademark question: "As leaders, what is your business?" One by one, the directors told Drucker how the company cleans floors, kills bugs and makes grass nice and green, Pollard recalled. "You're all wrong," Drucker told them. "You're really in the business of growing and developing people." I rest my case. We really believe that if you want to grow your company you have to grow your people. But that priority can only be understood by developmental leaders who really believe that people, their people, are their most important asset and thus their ultimate differentiation. This goes directly to the belief system of leaders, or better yet, the motives of the leaders.
Hanley: Say more about the motives of leaders.
Wilson: The problem is, too many leaders are still holding on to the illusion of Control and Command. They still haven’t fully grasped that seldom in this day and age are people motivated to “want to do things for other people’s reasons.” And “have to because I said so” does not a Leader make. So what’s the solution to this Leadership Challenge? One thing we do is have them say these words, “I am the problem and I am the solution” then saying it and thinking about as though they really mean it.
“I Am the Problem, I am the Solution” does not allow anyone to get off the accountability hook. Since Leaders go first, they, by definition or job description, must be the ones who raise their hands first and say, “I am the problem and I am the solution.” Now that we know who is the problem and who is the solution, what do we do next? It’s time for some deep down leadership reflection. Deep down means at our very core, our very being, reflecting by telling ourselves the truth even when it makes us miserable. What is it that we have them reflect upon? It’s this important question, “Why do I want to be a Leader?”
In the mid-80s for a year I facilitated a monthly 2-day session on leadership. There were about 80 people in each session. I started each session by asking the participants a slightly different question than, “Why do I want to be a Leader?”
My question was, “Why do you think most people want to be a leader?” At that moment in this session, I didn’t want to ask them why they wanted to be a leader. They seemed more spontaneous and truthful with the phrase “most people.” Let me tell you what the answers were. The most popular answer from that question from over a thousand people was “power.” Does that surprise you? It didn’t surprise me. We’ve had thousands of years of control and command to emulate the lust for power.
The second most popular answer was “control” because what do you do with all that power? The third most popular answer was an ecliptic one; status, recognition and pay. We combined those three and called them “To be served.” So, what the majority of these leader “want-a-bees” were saying is that most people want to be leaders so they can have the power, be in control and be served. Isn’t this the American dream? Or is it? Here’s an insightful question. Would most people want to follow someone who’s motives are power, control and being served? Aren’t these the ego-centric motives we‘ve been talking about? Let’s check it out.
It was at this point in the session I asked them to recall a time in their own lives when they decided to follow someone, because they wanted to, not because they had to. That someone could have been a parent, a teacher, a boss, a friend or someone no longer living. I asked them to write out a scenario of why they decided to follow that person. The most popular answer was that this person they chose to follow had seen something in them, some potential, some talent that they themselves had not yet recognized. Does this sound like getting power, or empowering others?
The second most popular answer was, “I was stuck in a rut and couldn’t see a way out, and that person I chose to follow helped me see options and possibilities that I had been blind to.” Does this sound like controlling people, or setting them free? The third most popular answer almost always came spontaneously from the participants. It wasn’t to be served, but to serve. Wouldn’t you be more likely to follow someone whose motives are to empower you, free you and serve you? That question needs to be asked and thought about, even though the answer is obvious. Here’s something else that’s obvious. Each of us is consciously or unconsciously on our own hero’s journey. We’re all trying to grow to rediscover the hero we’ve always been, but may have forgotten. It’s a journey from our false self to our true self. I believe the true self is the spirit that is truly who we are, and it’s waiting to fulfill its purpose.
Hanley: How do we grow our self?
Wilson: I think that Michelangelo answered this question for all of us. He was often asked, “How did you create that magnificent statue of David out of a large block of marble?” Michelangelo always replied: “The perfect David was always there. All I did was remove everything that wasn’t David.” We normally think of growth as adding on and there is some of that. Yet most of our growth is done by Letting Go of all that is not who we really are, letting go of our fearful ego-centeredness. LET GO. Only then can we add or remember the new Thinking and Doing competencies that are the answer to “Being Prepared” to thrive in Oz. Rules that worked in Kansas just won’t work in Oz. In Kansas, leaders are expected to “control and command” others to do what they’re told. And, the others usually do just that, but no more. In Oz, leaders trust people to “Do what’s right.” And the people usually do just that -- and more. In Kansas, it’s normal that people are expected to serve the boss first. In Oz, it’s normal that people expect to serve the customer first. In Kansas, since we’re doing what we’re told, there’s no need to be accountable for what we do – just do it. If we make a mistake, we hide it, bury it or blame others for it. In Oz, everyone is accountable for their thoughts, their feelings and their behaviors. And, they’re expected to keep learning to “Do what’s right” that includes making mistakes going forward. They’re also expected to learn from and share their mistakes with others who can benefit and learn from them. In Oz the mantra is: Fail Fast, Learn fast, Grow Fast.
What motivates leaders in Kansas is to have power over others, control others and being served by others. In Oz, what motivates leaders is empowering, freeing and serving others. Most people don’t realize that these Kansas and Oz motives are polar opposites. Why? Mainly because they’re stuck in their “Kansas” thinking while their world has moved on to Oz. Future Shock indeed! Again, here’s my bold statement that’s not entirely true, but more true than false: All of our institutions have basically failed to prepare us for the world that’s upon us, and the rut is getting deeper and at warp speed. So, every organization is being faced with the same question to answer and challenge to solve: Does it pay us to be the best players in a game that’s no longer being played? Well, assuming that’s an easy question to answer, lets move to the challenge: What are the new Oz rules? And, how do we learn to use them?
I like to use metaphors to help us understand this challenge. The computer is part of what got us into Oz, along with the Internet and its untold implications, so let’s use it as our metaphor to face these challenges. We know that the computer has applications, lot’s of them. Most of us know of or use only a few of these applications in our daily lives. Now we may or may not know that the computer also has an operating system. We don’t visually see this operating system but without it there would be no applications. In fact, the applications are totally dependent on the operating system and cannot exceed the potential of the operating system. When we (or the computer manufacturer) choose to “upgrade” the computer’s operating system, more stuff is “added” because that’s the way the computer creates more potential. This added potential allows us to do more things faster, easier and with higher quality. We upgraded the computer; it’s better, it’s grown, we’re happy, and life is good in the computer department of our lives.
But… adding more “stuff” is not how human beings upgrade their operating system’s potential. Each one of us was already born with the “right stuff” to begin with. Plato told us “Learning is remembering what we already know.” The word “educates” means: to bring forth that which is already there. So, this brings us back to Michelangelo’s answer: “The perfect me is always there. All I have to do is remove, let go, of everything that isn’t me.” Doesn’t that sound somewhat familiar John?
Hanley: Oh yeah! Well, it’s exciting that you’re out there doing it and getting the response you
have. And you’ve gotten a lot of response over the years. We can always lament the lack
of progress. But then again, I’m sure we can see the progress too if we want to look for it.
Wilson: We can be disappointed and wish to hell things would go faster, but that’s not the point. The point is, it is what it is. All we can do is give our best shot and learn from whatever happened. It’s a ready, shoot, aim adventure we’re all living through, so we might as well choose to have fun on the ride.
Hanley: I know one of your most important mentors was the famous psychologist, Abraham Maslow. Tell us about how you two met.
Wilson: Yeah. I started thinking differently at age 23 by reading Victor Frankel’s book Man’s Search For Meaning. I changed how I looked at myself and that was the biggest influence I had in becoming the youngest lifetime member of the life insurance Million Dollar Round Table by age 27. That gave me credibility in that little world and started my speaking career inside that world. Then an insurance company asked me if I would be willing to create a training program and I said yes before I really thought about it. I didn’t know what it was going to be about, but I knew what it wasn’t going to be about. It wasn’t going to be about the way people were trained to sell at that time which was basically an adversarial relationship. It was win-lose, me against you. That hasn’t all gone away. But that was so conditioned in our culture that nobody ever thought there might be a better way. It was “buyer beware.” That’s the deal. I didn’t know where I was going to go until I met Maslow. Here’s what happened. I was running past the University of Minnesota bookstore to an appointment. There were about 20 tables outside the bookstore and each table had 100 to 200 books on each table. And they were all priced at a dollar. I reached into a pile of these and pulled out one book on psychology with articles written by different people. I opened the up to one page. The intriguing title was “The Hierarchy of Relative Prepotency.”
Now who could deny that that wasn’t an exciting title? It came out to be Abraham Maslow’s article on the Pyramid of Needs. I stood there and read it. I got it. This has something to do with what I was looking for, though I didn’t know what it was, but I just knew it was something important. So I paid the dollar, went home and read the article three or four times. The next morning I called Maslow up at Brandeis University. I didn’t know he was the head of Humanistic Psychology and all I said was, “I’m an insurance guy and I’m trying to write a training program and I read your article and I’d love to come out and see you and talk about how your thinking fits into what I’m want to create.” And he said, “Well, come on out.” He gave me a full day of his valuable time. It was an amazing experience for me. I felt like I had every right to be there. He made me feel as though we were equals. I was 32 years old. Anyway, so he told me about his dream, about an imaginary island that he had created on which a thousand people lived, all of whom were totally self-actualized. He said, “What do you think it would be like to live on that island?” And I knew he was going to tell me. So I leaned forward and said, “I don’t know, what?” He learned forward and he said, “Why don’t you go find out?” It was like a spear to my heart. It’s hard to describe. I was visibly shaken. I didn’t fully realize it at the time, but that’s the day I found my purpose, which became, “Helping others become all they can be” shortly after that I started Wilson Learning. By the way, the name of his imaginary island was Eupsychia. Euphoria is the good feeling. Eupsychia is the good mind.
He wanted me to call my new company Eupsychia. But nobody could spell it and nobody could understand what it meant. And of course my ego was such that I wanted to call it Wilson Learning. But then Maslow turned me onto Carl Rogers. Carl Rogers is great. He had written two books, one, On Becoming a Person. And it’s about leadership, or at least leading your own life by becoming who you really are. And he wrote another book on Client-centered Therapy. It could have been called customer-centered businesses. Anyway, Maslow introduced me to Carl Rogers and he introduced me to the counseling process. I looked into that model and realized it had a philosophy, a discipline and a set of skills. This was the model I wanted for my new training program. We started Wilson Learning with the counselor selling program and in just a few years became the 2ed largest training company in the US.
Hanley: Please say your purpose again.
Wilson: Helping others become as much as they can be.
Hanley: And was that something you worked out on that day with Maslow or after?
Wilson: No. We talked around the “why” of purpose. He said, “Go back and figure it out.” And that’s what I came up with. And I sent it back to him and he said, “Perfect, that’s perfect, go with that. And as your going, keep looking to find Eupsychia.”
Hanley: So do you recommend that everybody craft a personal purpose?
Wilson: Totally. I believe that’s the most significant thing that anybody can do to lead a great life. But Maslow, Carl Rogers and Victor Frankel were my heroes. By the way, in the middle 70s I not only met Dr. Frankl; I shared the platform with him in Vienna.
Hanley: That must have been a real thrill.
Wilson: Well, I know I’ve been very lucky and very blessed. And it’s a good day when I’m still on the right side of the grass.
Hanley: Well, you’re way on the right side of the grass. I think we covered a lot of territory. This will be an excellent interview.
Wilson: I hope this is what you wanted.
Hanley: Thank you very much.
Wilson: All right, do what you want with it. It’s been my pleasure.

Barry Strauss Interview

2006-12-26T17:37:00.000-08:00

Barry Strauss is a professor of Ancient History and best-selling author of popular histories.

Hanley: Professor Strauss, what attracted you to the ancient world?
Strauss: I got interested in the ancient world when I was a freshman in college. Some very good teachers, and I loved languages, started taking ancient Greek. I remember it was 1970, and I started reading Thucydides. And I was amazed at how germane it seemed to the Vietnam War and the controversies of the time as if it had been written yesterday. I wanted to learn. I wanted to understand.
Hanley: When did you make the transition into, “Not only am I enjoying this, but I’m going to be a scholar of this subject”?
Strauss: Well, I guess I always took scholarship seriously, but it competed throughout my college career with journalism. I thought I wanted to be a newspaper reporter and an editor on the student newspaper. And then I actually got an internship, got to be a newspaper reporter for a long summer and realized it wasn’t for me. So I thought I’d try graduate school.
Hanley: Talk a little bit more about that transition. There you are reading these guys and you are loving it - and I know you were especially inspired by Professor Kagan at Yale. And here you are now, you’re one of those guys that other people are reading and enjoying. Was there a moment when it occurred to you, “Well, I can do this?” What was that transition like from student into “Now I’m going to be an author myself?”
Strauss: That’s a good question. I always wanted to be a writer ever since I was a kid in elementary school. I apologize if this sounds arrogant, but I never doubted that I could write books. It was more a matter of learning what I had to learn, acquiring knowledge of a field, of the specifics of the field, of the details. I guess I always thought I’d end up writing books about it.
Hanley: I can imagine that most people would have a hard time fully understanding the amount of work that goes into putting out a scholarly work of any note. Talk a little bit about that. Were you surprised by the effort that it took, or did it just seem a matter of course to you?
Strauss: Maybe I was a little surprised. I think it’s one of these things where you think, “Oh, it’s not going to be that hard. And then you start peeling the layers of the onion and there’s still something there. It just keeps going deeper and deeper and deeper. I think that probably between books, as a matter of self-defense, I deny just how much work there is. But it’s a lot.
Hanley: Was picking up the languages fairly easy or hard? How was that for you?
Strauss: It’s always hard. I think that I’m lucky in that I’m reasonably good at languages. I probably had an easier time than some people. But it’s not easy. Greek and Latin are not easy. The need to constantly be reading things in French, German, Italian, Modern Greek…it’s not difficult if you’re spending a few months say in Italy to pick up stuff in Italian. But, when you haven’t looked at Italian for six months and suddenly you’ve got to read a book in Italian, it’s not so easy.
Hanley: I can remember the civil war historian, Shelby Foote, talking about his method. If I remember correctly, he would read and read and read tons of books on the subject and then when it came time to actual writing, he would just do it from memory and wouldn’t really even have a book open. How is it for you when you set to the task of writing a book?
Strauss: Oh, I’m different in that. I do have notes and I do write with notes in front of me constantly. I’m constantly looking at books and constantly checking my own notes. I would agree with him to this extent that when you actually sit down to write a book, you have a pretty good idea of what you want to say. Generally the things that you’re going to go back and check are going to be the smaller things, not the bigger things. I usually find that I have thought through what my arguments are going to be, my big arguments. It’s only the small things I need to just rethink or redo. But certainly I need those notes in front of me.
Hanley: Well, certainly, everyone has their own talents and abilities. When you were going to school, did you have a sense that if someone wanted to apply him or herself they could be a professor, they could do what you’re doing? Or did you find there was some just inherent talent in certain people for that kind of life?
Strauss: Oh, I think the latter. But remember people aren’t generally lining up to be professors. It’s not as popular a field as law school or med school or business school. Usually it’s a small self-selected group of people who want to go get Ph.D.s. It’s certainly not for everyone. You have to enjoy academic life and enjoy research. In the case of what I do, you have to enjoy learning foreign languages and traveling to often kind of dust off the beaten track places.
Hanley: I can remember it was my Greek professor actually at USC, he was talking about the life of a professor, and he said that he finds quite often people are intimidated by this, whether it’s just a social function or just generally in meeting people. Do you find this to be the case?
Strauss: Yes. It’s a real conversation stopper. If someone asks, “What do you do?” And you say, “I’m a professor.” They say, “Oh, ok.”
Hanley: And then it must stop further when you say ancient history.
Strauss: Yeah. Ancient history, they think well, you know, of course, ancient history is an expression for “not important.” They just think, “Gosh, it must be so obscure.”
Hanley: So do you find yourself making a case for it or you just generally go on to something else?
Strauss: I generally go on to something else. One thing that I certainly did not expect when I went into academe is I never realized how lonely the life of a professor and a writer is. It’s not a very sociable profession. But myself, when I’m talking to people, I usually want to ask them about them. I know all about me. I want to hear about them.
Hanley: Exactly. So you must enjoy the teaching aspect of it then?
Strauss: Oh, yeah. Teaching is great. And especially at a good place like Cornell, you get very bright students. They can be very challenging. I love lecturing and when you have a good discussion going in a schoolroom, I love leading discussions. So I feel very lucky to be able to get paid to do it.
Hanley: My degree was in philosophy and I got a Master’s degree at NYU. One thing I remember being struck by was when the professors would work with each other, there were often extremely heated arguments. And then when it was over, they were like nothing had happened and, you know, let’s just move on. I find in ordinary life it’s not like that, right? People have a hard time separating that we’re just talking about a subject, and it’s nothing personal.
Strauss: Yes. When professionalism works, that’s one of the good things that you can abstract from your personality and just think about the subject. You must be very good if you did two degrees in philosophy.
Hanley: Well, I guess. I guess just like you with ancient history, I just really liked it. I went in thinking I was going to be a psychology major and then I took my first philosophy class and just loved it, and just never wanted to learn anything else.
Strauss: That’s great. It’s a great subject and I may say it attracts very intelligent people.
Hanley: Well, I hope so. Have you found yourself in the middle of sort of heated academic or back and forth journal articles? I mean, have you taken any what people consider to be controversial positions on anything?
Strauss: Well, some. I got very favorable reviews on my last book on the Battle of Salamis. But I also got some really negative reviews because of my methodology which comes close to creative nonfiction. In Salamis as in the Trojan War, I do a lot of speculating and a lot of saying, "We don’t know exactly what it was like, but it might have been like this for the following reasons.” I think most people like that, but quite a few said, “Well, you can’t do that.” That’s going way beyond the evidence. We just don’t know.” And that’s raised some eyebrows. And I think it will with the Trojan War book as well.
Hanley: Well, going back to the relevance of ancient history, to you it must seem so obvious and I’d like to think it’s pretty clear to me, too - but for the person new to the subject, what are the main arguments you make as far as why should the every day person be interested in ancient history?
Strauss: Well, first of all, there’s some awfully good literature: Thucydides, Herodotus, Tacitus, Livy - these are just spectacularly good writers. And although they’re not easy writers, to read them is an education in and of itself as to how to think, how to express yourself, and how to communicate. I think that we need antidotes today to our, well, I hate to say it, but kind of slovenly and thoughtless manner of communication which just gets worse and worse all the time or maybe I just get more curmudgeonly as I get older. I think ancient history is a wonderful antidote to that. Secondly, ancient history is written, by and large, by pagans who come from a very different world view, a non-Judeo-Christian world view. They tend to be more matter of fact about the realities of power. They tend not to sugarcoat things, to be blunter. I think reading ancient historians forces you to think about some not very pretty but very important aspects of the human condition, such as political power, military power, and looking at societies that cut their economies very close to the bone. They weren’t subsistence economies, but they had nothing like the kind of wealth and luxury that we do today. I think it is an education for people to see what human life was once like. It’s humbling, I think, in a good way to realize that we are no more intelligent and arguably no more self-controlled than people were five thousand years ago. It’s just that we know more. We have more experience. We have modern science. But the basic intellectual apparatus and world view of humanity has not changed and I think you can get that very clearly from ancient history.
Hanley: Absolutely. Now, do you have a particular favorite period? And if you could go back in time, what period would you go to?
Strauss: There’s so many, but I guess my first choice would be Periclean Athens when Athens was at the height of its power, when the Parthenon was built, Sophocles and Euripides were active. Socrates was on the scene. Aristophanes was a young man. Thucydides was a young man. The sophists were arguing. Pericles was a leading politician. Athens ruled the seas. I think it would be amazing to see.
Hanley: I sometimes think about that and I wonder just how shocked we would be if we were thrust back there with our modern sensibilities with everything from the way they treated young boys on occasion…
Strauss: Oh, yes.
Hanley: And women, and all the sacrifice. What do you think would be the most difficult transition for you?
Strauss: There would be many shocking things. I think we would probably be shocked at the state of sanitation, people’s diet. I think we would be shocked at simply the human smells everywhere. These were societies without deodorants and without toothpaste. And we’d be shocked by slavery, the status of women, and the status of sex of all sorts, both pederasty and the predominance of prostitution. There was an enormous amount of prostitution. A lot of people were abused.
Hanley: That brings up Greek religion. It seems like it didn’t really have an ethical dimension to it. Would you agree with that?
Strauss: No, I wouldn’t. I think Greek religion had a strong ethical dimension to it, just different than our ethics. For instance, I think Greek religion is very concerned with the question of justice, very concerned with the question of how to treat other people, hospitality, who are your friends, who are your enemies, and how do you treat a guest - very concerned with questions of family, of honor, of vengeance, of obligations. I don’t think Greek religion has the world’s most sophisticated answers to those questions, but I think it was interested in ethical questions.
Hanley: Would you say by and large they were more focused on what’s going to bring me honor rather than trying to be a good person?
Strauss: Well, certainly in the early period of Greek history, they were a remarkably shallow people and not all that interested in what was inside. They were not very interested in any intentions. They were a results culture and an honor and shame culture. You’re absolutely right. They cared more about appearances than about essential goodness and evil. I think as the civilization matured and developed, critics like Socrates and Plato, the philosophers, moved Greek civilization on a different path.
Hanley: How can the modern person best understand the way an ancient Greek believed in the gods?
Strauss: Well, I think one thing is that we have to realize that they took religion seriously. We tend to say, “Oh, that’s just mythology.” But that’s what they would say about the Bible. They believed in their myths. They were polytheists and polytheism goes against the grain for most of us. One way to understand it, I suppose, is to look at other polytheistic religions like Hinduism, for instance, which is a very sophisticated and serious one. Another way is to try to translate some aspects of Greek religion into modern religion. For instance, I think the average person reads the Iliad they think, “This is ridiculous, with all these gods on the battlefield and whatnot. Come on. Nobody could ever believe in that.” But then if you think about soldiers nowadays in war, and you think about the expression, “There are no atheists in foxholes,” and you realize the importance of chaplains and religion in modern warfare, well then Greek religion doesn’t seem quite so out in left field; it does seem closer to the human experience. I think you have to try and think of the ancient Greeks as real life people who had many of the same needs that we do and think of the ways in which religion was meant to cater to those needs.
Hanley: Now, in the Christian tradition, they seem to be very focused on literal history, you know, something exactly happened this way at this time. Did the Greeks have the same kind of sense of things? Like for example, with Heracles, did they strongly believe the events occurred the way they did, or was that not so important to them?
Strauss: Well, I think that in some sense it was like, I’d compare it to saints’ lives in which there are many saints of whom there are various versions of the lives of the saints. And there’d be stories that will gather around a particular saint and people understand that not all those stories are going to be true. I think that’s probably the way many Greeks would look at Heracles, say, “He’s a great person around whom many stories were gathered. Some of them were true. Some of them were not true.”
Hanley: Do you think they put great emphasis on whether it was true or not?
Strauss: Oh, definitely. For instance, let me give you an example. In 475 B.C. - so we’re in the 5th century B.C., just on the eve of the golden age of Pericles - one of Athens’ leading generals came home to Athens from a navy campaign in the Aegean Islands and he brought with him a great discovery: the bones of Theseus, the hero, Theseus. How did the Greeks know that these were the bones of a hero? Well, they were extremely large. It’s been speculated, hypothesized, that these were actually mastodon bones or mammoth bones. In other words, they were fossilized bones, but nonhuman bones. But the Greeks took them to be the bones of a hero. Theseus was supposed to have died on the Island of Skyros. These bones were found on Skyros. And so they were solemnly buried in Athens. Athenians thought these were the bones of Theseus.
Hanley: And that was very important to them.
Strauss: Yeah, very.
Hanley: Now, some work that I’ve read speculates that the particular art of Greek tragedy was written in that specific period as a way for the Greeks to kind of work out their increasing skepticism about the gods. Have you ever heard of that? Or do you give that much credence?
Strauss: Yeah, I guess I’m willing to say that was an element of tragedy. Of the three great tragic poets, one of them might have been a skeptic and probably was a skeptic, Euripides. When you get to the plays of Euripides, you can see elements of skepticism about religion. That’s very much a part of Athenian culture in the late 5th century. In the plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles, they’re not skeptics. They’re much more traditionalists, and they’re trying to bring the public back to a more traditional view. So, yes, I think there’s a lot of truth in what you say - that one of the aspects of Greek tragedy is a society wrestling with skepticism about religion.
Hanley: Do you think that this, perhaps, increasing skepticism was at all tied to the move towards sort of a total war concept of the Peloponnesian War? It seemed like all previous rules of engagement were broken at will and just seemed like they moved much more towards absolute open warfare.
Strauss: That’s a good point. The Peloponnesian War is part of a wider process of revolution in Greek society in the 5th century. Military technology was revolutionized by the war with the Persians. Politics was revolutionized by democracy. Intellectual life was revolutionized by philosophy. Greek parochialism was revolutionized by contact with the Persians. So I think what you have in the 5th century is a society undergoing enormous shocks and changes and advances, and power and wealth are being amassed as never before. I think these are the ingredients of any society that are going to challenge traditional beliefs. So by the time of the Peloponnesian War, technology and politics were ready to take off in new and more terrible ways of killing people. You certainly see that in the war.
Hanley: What was the Greek view on death? They had this idea of the shadowy underworld. It seems like in the Iliad that Homer wants to essentially say, “Look, death is final. And the best you can hope for is that they write about you afterwards. But it’s absolutely final.” What can you say about their view of death and especially how it evolved over time?
Strauss: Well, you’re absolutely right about the Iliad, and what we see in Greek society in a number of ways are attempts to get around that. Greeks, like a number of other ancient peoples, were looking for hope and something less gloomy. So we find, for instance, in Athens the famous Eleusinian Mysteries. These were a festival celebrated outside of Athens in which the participants would be initiated into the cult of the gods and they would be taught secret things, mystika, mysteria. That’s where the word mystery is from. These secrets would be about the possibility of immortality after death, life after death. So I think there were Greeks, many Greeks, who were looking for more than the traditional belief in the underworld. In the ancient near east, there are two traditions essentially. There’s the Mesopotamian tradition which is that after death you just get to be shades in the underworld. And then there’s the Egyptian tradition which is that after death you have a wonderful permanent party living in the land on the Isles of the Blessed. And your body is preserved through mummification. Well, the Greeks tended towards the Mesopotamian view. But they were attracted by variance towards the Egyptian views and so we find this as an undercurrent in their ideas about death.
Hanley: In reading on Athenian democracy, it seems like quite a few commentators lament a little bit that we don’t have quite the same participation. Now, I know in Athens women were excluded and non-citizens, but, still, they voted on things by one person, one vote. Some people seem to lament that we don’t have it like that. But do you think that it could really work nowadays to do it like ancient Athens? Or did the founders of the United States have it right in being cautious about that?
Strauss: You’ve asked one of the most fundamental questions in the history of political philosophy. There’s this famous debate, especially in the 18th century between the ancients and the moderns, and I come down pretty much on the side of the moderns. I think that the modern solution of a weak state and strong civil society, representative rather than participatory democracy is a better solution than the ancient solution. But I do think that one thing we have to watch out for in modern conditions is going too far. It is quite possible to go too far. I think that we need to be concerned when the level of participation becomes extremely low, when the level of active patriotism and community solidarity are fairly low, when the gap between rich and poor become enormous. These are all things that would have been intolerable in an ancient democracy or an ancient republic of any kind and things, I think, that we need to be concerned about in our system. I think unreflective nostalgia for ancient democracy is a bad thing and a dangerous thing. But I think that a limited cautious sense that we can learn things from ancient democracy is very helpful.
Hanley: Even in the ancient world, you look at the oligarchic model and the Athenian democratic model, and even just in that perspective, which do you prefer?
Strauss: In the ancient world?
Hanley: Yeah.
Strauss: Oh, I prefer the Athenian democratic model absolutely. Athenian democracy whatever its flaws were produced Western literature. I mean that’s where Western culture, Western art, come from. They come from Athens. Sparta was a remarkable society that had many admirable things about it, but it was a dead end. It could not reproduce the way that Athens did. There are not many cities in the history of the world that have pollinated the world in the way that Athens has. You have Athens, Rome, Jerusalem, Baghdad, Peking - these are remarkable places. There are just not many like them and there’s no other city state in Greece that can compare.
Hanley: Let’s look at Sparta there for a moment. On the one hand, they seemed so committed to freedom. When the Persians came in and tried to take over Greece, they were big players. And then they didn’t want to be enslaved by the Athenians later. But then simultaneous to that they’re enslaving thousands of people. But there seemed to be no reflection on that. Is that right? It just seemed a matter of course that the strong take over the weak.
Strauss: Well, I don’t think they were completely without reflection on that. And the Athenians criticized that point of view. While some Athenians expressed that point of view, the Athenians also criticized it. The Greeks by and large did not question slavery. They thought that was just part of the way of the world. But they did question the way that Spartans treated other Greeks. So I think they had some sense that it was a complicated thing. But they were certainly not as egalitarian and as fair minded as we are.
Hanley: Particularly with Sparta, with them basically taking over a whole people (the Messenians), they do that, it seemed, with no problem. But they were outraged that someone else would want to do that to them.
Strauss: Yeah. That is a problem. I agree. I think the Spartans were hypocrites and there’s a fair amount of hypocrisy among the Athenians as well.
Hanley: That’s for sure. I guess there is a lot of that to go around in those times. Now, when Thebes finally came in and took down the Spartans with their great Theban general, Epaminondas, do you think that for him this was more than military quest? Did he have a moral imperative here as well?
Strauss: I think it’s quite possible. I hate to be wishy-washy. The truth is we don’t know. Alas we don’t have good biographies of Epaminondas, so we’re impoverished in what we know about him. But there’s enough in the little of it as we have to suggest that he was of a philosophic demeanor and was serious enough that it’s possible that for him it was not just a matter of power but that it was also a matter of philosophy and morality.
Hanley: Did the Greeks have any concept of a soul before Socrates came around?
Strauss: Any concept of the soul?
Hanley: Yeah.
Strauss: You ask good questions, tough questions.
Hanley: I think about this stuff.
Strauss: I think so, yes. It’s much debated, but I think that in Homer, fundamentally, in the end there is a notion of the soul. It’s not so obvious.
Hanley: Is that in the sense of the underworld business or where do you see it there?
Strauss: Well, what do you mean? It depends what you mean by the soul.
Hanley: This idea that a spiritual inner self is really my true self.
Strauss: No. They do not. They do not have much of that at all before Socrates.
Hanley: In addition to that, what would you say was Socrates’ real breakthrough? If you would consider him a breakthrough in let’s say Western thinking, what was it?
Strauss: Well, Cicero said that Socrates’ most important thing that he did was that he brought philosophy into the streets. Before Socrates philosophy had been focused on the stars and the moon and the sun and up in the skies, having to do with the cosmos. Socrates gave philosophy a human focus. He said essentially, “Human affairs are the most important thing that we need to be looking at in philosophy.” So I guess I’d have to say that’s the most important thing. He, in some ways, is the founder of political philosophy.
Hanley: With the Republic?
Strauss: Well, the Republic is Plato. Socrates is conversations. I think that’s not entirely true because even the pre-Socratic philosophers had more interest in politics than we tend to give them credit for. But maybe with Socrates, political philosophy comes of age.
Hanley: Do you think he redefined human being in any given way? Was he a turning point from ancient to modern thinking?
Strauss: Yes, in a number of ways. Socrates is a key person in the idea that there is such a thing as absolute virtue, absolute goodness, that it is not relative, that not all things are relative, and that the human being has to be guided by an absolute and unchanging standard of right and wrong. A person’s willingness to do this and ability to do this trumps the laws of Athens, the laws of Thebes. It trumps any local customs and it trumps reputation. So in that sense, Socrates is a major turning point on the road that would lead to Christianity, among other things with the idea that morality is not relative, morality is absolute. Socrates, of course, also has an inner voice that speaks to him and that is more important to him than what the laws of the state say.
Hanley: As far as the moral absolutes, or not just moral, but I guess what counts as real being absolute, many people would say that idea ended up carrying the day for the better part of two thousand years until maybe just in the last couple of centuries we’re breaking free of that. Would you agree with that sort of arc of history?
Strauss: Certainly, you find history going in cycles between moral absolutism and moral relativism. Socrates was speaking in a very relativistic age. He was a breath of fresh air in an age of skepticism, sophistry, youthful rebellion, and a society that was being torn loose from its old values. I can imagine other ages in which Socrates would be burning people at the stake and would be a Grand Inquisitor. As the Greeks would say, “Measure in all things.”
Hanley: So, is part and parcel of postmodernism about not being stuck with absolutes?
Strauss: Boy, you’re really going all over the place. Yes, absolutely. Yes, indeed, that is part and parcel of postmodernism. Postmodernism is a species of relativism.
Hanley: Now, I’ve read a couple of guys who’ve surveyed this whole arc of history, including Charles Taylor. I don’t know if you’ve read him.
Strauss: Yes. I’ve read some of him.
Hanley: He and others essentially come down thinking post-modern relativism is not going to work. We need to go back to the Judeo-Christian model or some such model that gives us some certainty. Do you have any sympathy for that?
Strauss: Yeah, well, my instincts on this are conservative. I think that by and large the time-tested truths are the right truths and that although things have evolved and changed in many ways in the West since the days of the Greeks, in certain fundamentals they haven’t. We’ve lost our way in the road and we need to go back to the basic truths of the Western tradition otherwise we’re in real danger of losing everything. One of Socrates’ arguments to the Athenians was that if you don’t have a belief in absolute right or wrong, there’s absolutely nothing to hold you in place. If you believe that might makes right, well that’s going to take you anywhere. You have no idea where that’s going to take you. That’s just not an adequate way to run a society. And I think you can say likewise that if you believe that everything is relative, then there’s nothing to keep you from saying that might makes right.
Hanley: Well, that’s true or it may be true, but the question arises: “If we can’t really base our certainty on Homer, and we’re not confident in basing it on the Bible, and we’re not even really confident basing it on science, what do we base it on?” How would we know anything’s absolute?
Strauss: Oh, I think you have to base it on a kind of enlightened Christianity really. I don’t see what the alternative is for the West. I agree with you. If you say that you can’t base it on anything, then you’re unmoored. You don’t know that anything is absolute. But I think you have to take certain things on faith and I don’t find that a difficult thing to do because I think human beings are hardwired to have faith, a degree of faith, at any rate. I think it’s a survival skill. So, yes, to a certain extent, any faith will do. But if you want to have societies that are dedicated to freedom, well, then, I think the record shows that a kind of enlightened Christianity has got a very good track record in this.
Hanley: It’s going to be very interesting because, on the one hand, I have some sympathy for the view that we need to get past all religion because religion seems to have caused a lot of conflict over the last two thousand years. And maybe if we just got past all of that, we’d be left with, “Well, we’re going to create it ourselves. So how do we want to create it?” Do you think, is it possible that could work?
Strauss: Well, perhaps, if you had very, very wise people who understood human nature very well. But I think that part of the deal with faith is that people are willing to trust in a faith because it’s traditional. I think when people are looking for faith, they’re looking for something that is tested by time and has tradition behind it. I think the problem with “new and improved” is it’s not really what people what makes faith strong. I don’t think you should simply go back to everything that’s old and say, “It’s old, so it’s got to be right” because that includes slavery and lots of really nasty stuff. But, I think if you say nothing is free from skepticism, and everything can be rethought, then I think that you’re in danger of throwing out the Western tradition. I also think it’s naive to think that people, most people, can get by without religion. People want religion and if you don’t give it to them, they’ll find some other way to get it. They’ll either convert to a different religion, or they’ll invent their own. Instead of believing in saints, they’ll believe in celebrities and then celebrities will play the role of religion. I’m very dubious that the cult of celebrities can do the work that the cult of saints does.
Hanley: Now, I think Professor Kagan came to the conclusion that human beings are wired for conflict and we really need to work hard to get past that. In your reading of history, does it seem like the more things change, the more they stay the same?
Strauss: Yes, unfortunately, I think that’s true. But I think we have resources today that the ancients did not have that allow us to be more optimistic about some things. For instance, the ancients simply did not have the means to solve poverty and they did not have the means to give prosperity to large numbers of people and we do. We have the means to give health to large numbers of people. I think what we need to recognize, though, is that we haven’t gotten past that human propensity for conflicts that are hardwired into us. I think we have to recognize and frankly admit that it’s part of the human condition and to fight against it in order to protect ourselves from the worst side of our natures. I think that denying it and saying that everything is beautiful and everybody is cool and groovy is a recipe for disaster because I think the ugly side of human nature will just reassert itself, and it’s just going to roll over people who believe that everything is sweetness and light.
Hanley: Now, this is probably an especially challenging question. If you look at the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta, are there parallels there between the West now versus the extreme Islamic extremists and if so, are there lessons we can lean so that we can have a better outcome?
Strauss: That’s an excellent question and to some extent I’ll say I need to think about it. But let me try to give you some answers. If you look at Athens and you look at Sparta at the beginning of the war, you just can’t believe that those slow folks in Sparta could possibly win. But there’s a lot to be said for “Slow and steady wins the race.” I suppose one way to translate that into contemporary conditions is saying, “He who remembers the basics and maintains the basics has very good prospects in the long run.” I think there’re various ways that can be applied to contemporary East/West conflict. I think another thing that we can learn from the Athenian experience is the need to have an appropriate balance between the leaders and the led. Athens did as well as it did and fought as hard as it did above all because of the energy of the Athenian people, but the Athenians needed good leadership. When they didn’t have a good leadership they made disastrous mistakes. One of the reasons they had good leadership was first they were led by an older generation of people who had been trained to sacrifice for the country and many of whom had experienced disaster themselves. I think Pericles was very much shaped by his experience as a teenager when he had to go into exile when his father was ostracized. When he comes back to Athens, he has to evacuate Athens during the crisis of Salamis. He sees the city destroyed. So, he and his generation had known hard knocks, and they didn’t take Athenian wealth and prosperity for granted. I think the problem that Athens faced with the Alcibiades of this world was that they were arrogant. They were shallow. They couldn’t take the abyss seriously. They couldn’t consider the possibility that they might lose everything, and they were very selfish and not thinking about the society as a whole. So I think that having proper leaders and educating people to be proper leaders is absolutely crucial in a free society. It’s one of the mistakes the Athenians made that we have to be very much concerned about today.
Hanley: Very good. The other possible learning I think of is going back to the origin of the Peloponnesian War and, if I remember Professor Kagan’s book well enough, it came down to the fact that the Spartans had acted out of the bounds of a treaty with Athens. Athens said, “We need to put this to arbitration” as the treaty specified, and Sparta said, “No, we’re not doing that.” And Pericles just decided, you know, I can’t cave in on this. If I do, they’ll just keep doing it. I think that story does have parallels today. It doesn’t have easy answers because I’m not sure exactly what the demands of the terrorists of today are, but I guess they have some. There are some who think, “Well, we just need to talk to them and give them a little bit, and then we can calm this whole thing down.” Does history tell us that that’s at all possible, or is that highly unlikely?
Strauss: Well, I think that history says that appeasement is possible when you have conditions where the two sides are in fundamental agreement or where their values aren’t that different, and neither one of them wants to take over the world. One of the things policymakers have to do is to decide is if their opponent is someone who’s really fundamentally reasonable and who you can talk to and appease, or is this someone who’s fundamentally untrustworthy. That is a basic question. Are the terrorists and their enablers, are they fundamentally reasonable, or are they fundamentally untrustworthy? The Iranian government, for example, wants to say: “What are you guys getting so upset about? We’re just a normal state, and in fact we don’t have enough energy for our needs. So we want to have nuclear energy. Maybe down the road we want to have nukes. But so what? France has nukes. England has nukes. The world’s not coming to an end. Why shouldn’t we want to defend ourselves? We live in a dangerous neighborhood. What are you getting so upset about?” The question is - do we believe them or do we believe their other voice that says, “We won’t rest until we’ve destroyed the great Satan.” Which is the true face of the enemy? And statesmen have to decide.
Hanley: There are not easy answers, that’s for sure. Well, I know time has flown by here. I just have a couple more questions for you. One of the philosophers I’ve enjoyed studying is the German Heidegger. He was actually quite taken with ancient Greece himself. He came out with a travel book called Sojourns. He visited Greece in the late ‘60s. One of the things he, I guess, complains about is that you don’t really get a feel for the ancient world, that it’s impossible to really connect with the spirit of ancient Greece. The one possible exception for him was on the little island of Delos. Was there any particular place you felt quite close to the ancient spirit?
Strauss: I hate to disagree with a wise philosopher, but I felt close to the ancient spirit in gazillions of places in Greece and all over Greece. It was part of the appeal of Greece to me. I think that when you learn the language, when you experience traditional Greek life in the countryside and you see the rhythm of the changing seasons in Greece, you get very close to the ancient life. There seem to be two classes of visitors that go to Greece. Those who think, “Oh, what a disappointment, there’s nothing of antiquity left,” and those who think, “My gosh, it’s all still here. These people haven’t changed.” I’m definitely of the latter variety. That was one of the things that made me fall in love with Greece and find it so exciting.
Hanley: And what about Delos? Did you ever check that out?
Strauss: Yeah, I’ve been to Delos. Delos is a mystical place. Among other things, it’s hard to get to. Not only you can’t go there and stay there, you have to stay on Mykonos, but that’s one of the most windy areas of the Aegean. And Delos does not have a proper docking facility so big boats can’t go there and if it’s at all windy, the little boats can’t make the trip. To give you a case in point, I was just on a cruise ship that was supposed to go to Delos a month ago. We didn’t make it because it was very windy. Fortunately I have been there another time, and it’s very beautiful and very serene and you do get a sense of antiquity there as long as you can keep yourself from remembering that at one point Delos was the largest slave market in the world. And that does detract a bit.
Hanley: Are there any other little bit off the beaten track places you would recommend to people?
Strauss: Oh, gosh, there’s so many. Off the beaten track places? Yes, there is a place near Corinth called Perachora. It’s north of Corinth on the Gulf of Corinth. It’s a peninsula that juts into the sea and it’s spectacular. It really does give you a sense of the Greek landscape and antiquity. Oh, gosh, there’s so many places. The whole area around Delphi, the plain west of Delphi, around Amphissa, that goes down to a little town called Galaxidhi and it’s just very, very beautiful. Ayia Galini is a town in Crete which is also rather magical. It’s a seaport on the south coast of Crete and it means “holy peace.” There’s so many places. Walking in the countryside around Corinth in the spring when the wildflowers are out, the poppies, and the daises - that can be just really be magical.
Hanley: I haven’t been yet. But I’m looking forward to going soon.
Strauss: Greece is wonderful.
Hanley: Alright. Last question here. I know that you are very much into rowing. Have you had any epiphanies out on the boat?
Strauss: Absolutely. Some of my very basic ideas about ancient Greece, Greek democracy, and Greek history, have come from those, precisely from those epiphanies. I really learned a lot about equality in Athenian democracy from my experiences rowing, and I think I figured out a lot about the battle of Salamis from rowing on Cayuga Lake and my experience with the winds there. It gave me lots and lots of ideas. Some of my Eureka moments, which are not always correct, but they’re always inspiring have come just from that, from rowing.
Hanley: Well, awesome. Bringing this to a close, I’ve very much enjoyed this conversation.
Strauss: Likewise.
Hanley: I think I’m sure an hour from now I’ll think of all kinds of things I forgot to ask you, but I think we got a lot of good stuff in.
Strauss: Great.
Hanley: Well, thank you very much, sir.
Strauss: You’re very welcome. Thanks for asking such great questions.
Hanley: You got it. Take care.

John Dominic Crossan Interview

2006-11-02T07:53:00.000-08:00

John Dominic Crossan is a leading scholar in the field of the Historical Jesus. He has written several bestsellers on the subject.

Hanley: Professor Crossan, I’d first like to ask you about how you conceive of God. Do you believe in a so-called personal God or how do you think about it?
Crossan: First thing, I don’t think about it in most of those terms at all in order to affirm them nor to negate them. I don’t find them helpful at all. I’ve spent 26 years at DePaul University teaching world religions. And at the end of that time I came to one empirical conclusion – not a conclusion of faith - that human beings are hired-wired for religion in the same way that we’re hard-wired for language. That does not mean we’re hired-wired for English, and it does not mean we’re hard-wired for Christianity. But we are hard-wired for religion. And by religion, I would mean some response, some required response to the mystery that surrounds us. I would not put it any more precise than that in terms of hard-wiring. In other words I take very seriously that human beings throughout human history have tried to—let me put it in the most general terms—name the holy. And whenever they’ve decided not to name the holy, they’ve named in any case usually as unholy. So I think the great experiment we’ve gone through in the last 200 years that the enlightenment has got rid of religion has simply brought in even more horrible types of it than we already knew. And most of the ones we knew were pretty horrible at their worst. So I do not set at all with the theodicy or up in heaven or whether God is a person. I do not think in all that experience that human beings can ever name the holy or the sacred except in metaphor. Therefore to imagine God as a person, to imagine God as a power, like the storm, to imagine God as a process, like say, oh, like we set up the traffic process, shall we say, an order in the universe, or to imagine God as a state. All of these are ways, metaphorical ways, in which human beings across time and space have attempted to articulate that experience of the holy. And I would draw these conclusions. It is not possible ever to do it without a metaphor and therefore any one metaphor is radicalized, if you will, and somewhat relativized by the presence of other metaphors. But the only thing sadder and sillier than attacking a metaphor like God as person is attacking it as a nonperson. You can only replace it by another metaphor, and therefore theism which thinks of God as person anthropomorphically is one of the valid ways human beings have done it. I lived down in Florida. During the hurricane season, we anthropomorphized the hurricanes all over the place. I listened to a guy on the television talking like the character of the hurricane. And hurricane is vigorous. And the hurricane is furious. And it’s none of those things. It’s just a hurricane. So I find no more or less problem with anthropomorphizing God than I do with anything else we do. But I never make the mistake of thinking that that is anything more than metaphor. And then, of course, what I want to know immediately is, ok, fine, but tell me, what’s this metaphor? In other words, it’s not totally irrelevant whether somebody thinks of God as a warrior, a killer in plain language, or a punitive judge, or a loving father. So the refinements of the metaphor God as person become very, very, very important because they will make us who we are. If we have a killer God we will undoubtedly be killers.
Hanley: Absolutely. Well, in some of your work, obviously, you say it in many pages, but sometimes you simplify it into the construction that God is justice. As I think about that, one thing that comes up for me is Darwin and evolution and the idea of survival of the fittest and this point, I suppose, that we’re just animals, and when you bring in the idea of justice that brings in a whole system of meaning. Do we deserve that? Are we making that up? How do you reconcile the justice notion with Darwin?
Crossan: And by using justice, you notice it doesn’t have to be the person of God is just. If you’re thinking in a metaphor of a person, of course, you say God is just. But justice is just fine because as far as I’m concerned I’m accepting Darwin, no problem with that at all. As soon as we become conscious and aware of our responsibility to evolution - I mean, this is why I find Darwin extremely important - we suddenly become aware that it’s going on there. And if we have the possibility, and I go beyond possibility, the inevitability, the duty, the responsibility of taking some control of it since clearly if the fittest, for example, were today those with the atomic bomb and they decided to be the fittest, we would all be “extinctest.” So I take very seriously the inaugural parable--I use that to avoid an offensive word that might be offensive to some, like myth -- in the garden Eden that we chose, not just as we say, a forbidden fruit. But we chose the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil. That’s a fairly important distinction. We just didn’t choose knowledge. We choose morality. That’s knowing the difference between good and evil. So I think we are responsible for what we’re going to do with evolution because clearly we’ve passed the point of which we can not only extinguish our life on this earth but again all human life on this earth for sure, all life at all on this world, possibly, and even the world itself. So I don’t see at this point if you never bring up God or bring up anything else, but you simply took Darwin seriously and looked at the world and at ourselves, I think we have a clear responsibility for the future of evolution, if there is going to be a future. I would say, in other words, the justice that I’m talking about is not something external to that process. It’s something that we have become aware of that we have been getting away with pretty much since the Neolithic revolutions, let’s say about 6,000 years ago, we’ve been getting away with little games like empire and injustice and violence. And what is happening is they have been escalating. If the level of violence today was the same as the level of the 1st century, you could simply say, oh, that’s the way it is. It’s like bad weather. You’re just stuck with it. But clearly the level is now escalating. Right you we have a very simple situation where if a certain gentleman in North Korea decides to go down and lob an atomic missile at Seoul, nobody knows what that might lead to any more than they would have known in 1914 when you kill an Arch Duke it would plunge the whole world into war. So I’m simply saying that built into the process of the universe, as I see it, in a totally Darwinian background, if you will, we do not get away with injustice. That doesn’t mean that I can’t cheat you and get away with it. But cosmically speaking and looking over the sweep of things in at least 6,000 years of human history, the price of injustice and its violence is getting worse and worse.
Hanley: Now, you talk about the notion of religion being hard-wired for human beings. And I can see, on the other hand, that through the enlightenment certainly quite a number of people were able to let’s say free themselves of that notion and apparently be more or less happy. And then I look at the religious conflicts through history, right up to today. Is it possible that we’d be better off without the whole system and just get past all of the mythology and get to a point where we see with clear eyes that it’s up to us to create the world we want? There’s no supernatural help. We have to do it. Now, I think your work is very subtle, and it may even lead exactly to that, but it’s still within the whole language of religion and God and so on. So is it possible we need to break free from that?
Crossan: I think that’s the, and I would say honorable, experience that we’ve conducted really over the last 200 years. And since we began with the presumption that religion explained everything, controlled everything, dominated everything, that grasp had to be broken. It had to be broken. And as far as the enlightenment did that, it was absolutely correct in the idea that there are all sorts of things that religion can’t answer. Religion, for me, has to do with meaning. It can’t tell you what happened. It can give you what it thinks is the meaning of what happened. But then when it starts telling you that you can decide, for example, history or science, or anything else by simply religious means, I think that’s what had to be broken at the time of the enlightenment. So that point is the positive side. But the negative side of it is the presumption that science is the total answer. Just for example, I absolutely the next time I go up in a plane want it to be built by scientists. I don’t want it to be built by poets or theologians, or people who tell me if I’m good Christian then I’ll be closer to God and not to worry. I want it done by a scientist. And I’d like to see it working a bit before I try it. But when I said hard-wired for religion, if somebody said hard-wired for meaning, I would have said, fine, that’s really what I’m talking about. The second point would be this. That since I believe it’s hard-wired into our brains, then like everything else it is subject, of course, to corruption and maybe the corruption of the best is worst. So I could make the same argument -- let’s abolish religion because look at all the damage it’s done. And it’s doing it more today maybe than it’s ever been doing. But then I turn around and say, now, we’ve got to work on family. That should go too. And come to think of it, the nation state better go too. So when I look at some of the mega institutions of normalcy in our world, all of them are capable of supreme evil and supreme good. And I find, as I say, after 200 years, it is now extremely naïve, and I’m going to use that word, naïve, to conclude that when we leave out religion nothing worse comes in in its place because I think it’s just another mode of religion without using that term. I’m not convinced we can do without it. And then one final point, I don’t think we human beings can get enough leverage to change civilization and its normalcy without, and I’m not using the word “supernatural,” but without some transcendental leverage point. That would apply to Gandhi just as much as it would apply to a Christ. And I’m saying that not to be polite but because I’m not certain, for example, that the nonviolent resistance which is necessary to establish justice is something we are capable of without a transcendental grounding. I don’t mean by that we’re guaranteed to go off to heaven afterwards, and otherwise we wouldn’t do it. I’m not talking about that at all. I’m talking of - Where do you get the leverage to take on civilization itself if that’s normalcy? Just as some say to me, “Yeah, violence is normal. It’s like the weather and you get used to it.” But having said that, though, John, I would insist that I cannot think of anything more dangerous to the world that we have invented than religious extremism because probably—I say this, probably—there more than anywhere else you’re liable to run into “cosmicide,” that is the happy idea that you can blow the world up because we’re going somewhere else. When that idea is in religion be it Islam or Christianity, I think it is lethally dangerous more than anything else that I can imagine.
Hanley: Now, the Buddhists seem to take it as a matter of course that the essential enlightening insight is to see all meaning as illusory, all stability and certainty as illusory. First of all, do you agree with that point? And if so, how does this notion of justice intersect or can it with the Buddhist enlightenment?
Crossan: Well, there’s a few things. And I prefer to say this in dialog with a Buddhist, but many Buddhists run into the same problem with the war in Vietnam. And say a Buddhist who incinerated himself in the streets of Saigon was operating out of a somewhat, how should I put it, different mode of being than simply “this is all illusion.” I think that was a very clear protest out of Buddhism. And I don’t think a Christian would ever do that. I think that’s one of the places where you glimpse the difference between two profoundly different religions. And that’s not a value judgment. It’s just a statement. That a Christian saint might do all sorts of things, but one of the things probably not done would be incinerate himself. So that was a form of protest that Buddhists had to face themselves and ask, you know, what is our duty to do in this case. How do we resist? And that was their mode, I’m going to say, of nonviolent resistance. But I’m not sure if I would be happy with saying it that way because I think it is dangerously close to the suicide bomber. It’s not the suicide bomber. It isn’t. It isn’t because I kill somebody else, but still it’s violence to yourself. Now, coming out of that tradition you could say, “Well, I don’t exist.” But I think that’s the point where that tradition would have to then ask itself – “What do I do when I’m up against violent injustice in this case? How do I resist it?” And that, I think, only would be one way of doing it. And my suspicion would be that that would never become normative within Buddhism, as a way of doing it I mean. The other thing I would say is that, you know, you have to figure that when the Buddha came out of the palace and saw the suffering around him, one of the questions he should have asked himself was, “Yes, everyone is going to die, the king and the commoner, but in the meanwhile, what is the king doing to the commoner?” So there’s a delicate interface and dialog between justice in the Christian tradition, which by the way, is not what is practiced in the Christian tradition, and I totally admit that, or compassion in the Buddhist tradition. In my own work, as you know, I much prefer to concentrate on Christianity itself, not at all because I’ve any presumption that it is the only way to God or the holy or justice or anything else, as I really don’t, but because it’s my responsibility as a Christian and also as a biblical scholar. It’s my responsibility to watch the things that are done in the name of the Bible. And I would, as I said, much prefer to talk this in dialog with somebody who is doing the same within Buddhism rather than speak about Buddhism as an outsider, even having taught it in class.
Hanley: Well, my background is in philosophy. So I just want to press this a little bit more just on a philosophical level, I suppose. You have this one notion of empty and meaningless, and then another notion of right, wrong, good, bad, justice. Are they just opposite ends of the spectrum and they just can’t really intersect or do you see any connection?
Crossan: If we continue to probe that one example of the Buddhist monk pouring petrol on himself and incinerating himself in Saigon during the Vietnam war, I don’t think he would ever have done that simply and say, “That’s really I don’t exist so I’m just going to burn myself.” That’s a very specific happening. And it’s a very specific example that you would have to say, well, there is a consideration of right and wrong here. Clearly it’s a protest against something. And they must be judging that wrong. They are making a conclusion of this is the way to do it, to protest it. And I think, you know, if you go back to one of the stories about the Buddha’s incarnations, when he finds that the tiger, tigress actually, is too weak to feed her cubs. And he feeds himself to the tigress. I think whether you like it or not there are statements in there about what is good. I presume it would be bad to pass by and say, “Have a nice day tigress, but you don’t exist and nor do I.” I’ve always presumed that in Buddhism, the emptying of the self is so that it can be filled with something else. And that comes remarkably close to what somebody like Paul would tell you in his language that spirit that he has as a character that he has, I might translate it as, it’s no longer his, but the spirit of God. So we can certainly, if you tried to imagine in Pauline language what I might call of the analogy of a heart transparent, a spirit transplant, it would have to be emptied first of all of the old heart. And at that point, yes, you’re getting to a depth of which the two of them could talk to one another.
Hanley: Very interesting.
Crossan: You’d only know that, I think, if you watch what the Buddhist does. Otherwise you could say, “Well, gee, if you don’t exist then you shouldn’t care about ethics or anything else.” And that’s the sort of point at which most religions can be—I’m not saying you’re doing this—can be sort of almost mocked, you know, like looking at Christianity coming out with this stuff about justice. Then you look at the history of Christianity and you say it’s all bunk.
Hanley: My understanding of Nietzsche is that he more or less thought Christianity was the worst idea ever invented for human beings. If he was here and he was his rational self, what would you say to him?
Crossan: And I presume he knows what has happened since his time to Europe?
Hanley: Sure.
Crossan: I would say first of all you know about your present experience of Christianity. You don’t know where I’ve spent my life which is in the 1st century when Christianity started and the fact that Christianity has never even before the New Testament was finished lived up to what it still proclaimed as its purpose, its function, not just its ideal, but its meaning. I would say start reading the New Testament and try to understand it against its own history, against its own time, against its own place, and see what it is saying. And I might mention to him you can see what has happened to your writings in the last hundred years. I presume you don’t agree with its usage in every case. Well, that’s pretty much what happens to anything like this because it takes on the normalcy of civilization. And I’m not surprised, for example, that even before the New Testament ends and as it ends, we’re looking forward to Jesus coming back as a violent killer which is the sort of stuff we want, somebody who will kill other people for us.
Hanley: You mean like, you know, the last judgment?
Crossan: No. I mean the last book of the New Testament. I mean the Book of the Apocalypse, the Book of Revelation. I’m talking strictly within the hundred years from the death of Jesus, you already have a book that looks forward to his return, yeah, for judgment, but first of all for slaughter. So we have a pull, the pull of normalcy for these 6,000 years which is that empire and injustice and control and domination is the way the world has been run. The Roman Empire was just the latest in a dreary line. And we in America are just the most recent in a long dreary line. And the toll of that imperial injustice is mounting, is escalating steadily, and the opposition to it, I mean, the violent opposition to it is escalating from the minor things like barbarian invasions across your frontiers to the sort of stuff we’re up against at the moment.
If people are pretty much convinced for whatever reason - could be totally honorable reasons - that religion is unnecessary, then the obvious thing will be everything I’m saying is just silly. It’s like talking about the advantages of horse drawn carriages or some early Amish, something like that. So I think there is a profound level whether we’re dealing with something which is necessary and we have to get it out there so we can look at it and examine it and see how much of it is destructive and how much of it is affirmative.
Hanley: Now, the Jews started with the notion that our God is the only God. He’s the real God. I think this was a unique point in history. Do you think it would have been better if they wouldn’t have gone to that level? If they would have left it as he’s our special God, would history be better as a result?
Crossan: I actually don’t think so because there is no profound advantage that I can see simply in going from many to one. If you announce that there is only one God, I don’t know if I’m impressed at all. I’d like to find out the character of this God we’re talking about. So what impresses me is not that the Jews are talking about one God for all the earth, which they clearly are, but that you can go through the Old Testament and, of course, there’s all sorts of stuff you may or may not find totally outdated in there. But there’s a consistent insistence that God is a God of justice. I think they got that right. And it comes, no doubt, from a small battered people. Being Irish I have sympathy for small battered people, before they become strong and learn to battle back. And so the important thing is not simply we get from many to one, which I don’t know is good or bad really, until we get a look at the character. But there was a certain complacency and a certain, honestly, too, about paganism that said, “Hey, we all worship different things. So we worship war. We should have a god of war. We worship sex. We should have a god of sex. We worship money. We should have a god of money.” There’s a tremendous honesty about paganism and simply admitting that we worship what we worship. Now, when you say there’s only one God, ok, fine. That’s no big achievement, until you say, well, and this oneness is a God of justice, then I’m interested. If you simply say it’s more powerful than all the others and it’s a bigger killer, then that’s just talking about the American military. It’s stronger than maybe all the other militaries in the world put together. I don’t see how that’s any sort of a moral advancement. It’s simply a matter of raw power. But the important thing for me would be whether you’re going to insist that God is a God of justice and that the world belonging to this God, now in their language, simply will not work any other way. It seems to mean right and totally in evolutionary terms, forget theological terms.
Hanley: Do you think that the Muslim god Allah is a god of justice?
Crossan: Well, yes. But once again, the primary responsibility of each religion right now is to name its own extremists. My primary responsibility is the rightwing Christianity in this country which on a Bible basis is supporting what our government is doing and pushing Israel into probably an insoluble situation. Once again, if I’m talking to a Muslim I know the first thing a Muslim is going to say to me correctly is: “You guys are all talking about justice. Let me talk about Christian history. Let me talk about what you guys have been doing in the Middle East for a hundred years since we discovered oil.” And I’m going to have to admit, yeah, that’s right. The British did it before us. And we’re doing it now. And the only reason we care about you and not Africa is because you’ve got oil. So I know that whether we are talking sort of in an abstract thing about Islam versus Christianity -- in the theory you could say, well, in the theory, Mohammad accepted from the beginning that you could go to war. That was not accepted in Christianity in the theory. In the practice, I think it’s touch and go which has the worst history.
Hanley: But theologically speaking you would say that there is enough of a similarity between the two systems that we could find a lot of common ground?
Crossan: I think so, John. But again, I would really want—and I’m not just being polite—I would want some Muslim who is capable of doing to their Koran – I can’t do it, I really can’t -- what I can do to the New Testament because for example if I as a Christian went into the New Testament and simply focused on the Book of the Apocalypse, the Book of Revelation and said – ‘Well any day now Christ is coming back and he’s going to kill all you evil doers and that’s my position,” I doubt if I’d get much of a response from the Muslim except – “No, Allah is going to do it to you people.” So we need somebody in Judaism, in Christianity, and in Islam, who can read their traditions with the same critical self-consciousness that we’ve used to ours to, in a certain sense, separate the wheat from the chaff. And the chaff is just the normalcy of anyone hearing something radical and saying to themselves, “Oh, yeah, I’m going to tone that down a bit.”
Hanley: Well, let’s go now into your main subject which is the historical Jesus. I know you’ve written thousands of pages on this and I’ve read most of them. In a nutshell, who was this man Jesus of Nazareth?
Crossan: Well, first of all, he was an absolutely valid human being in any way, shape, or form we can designate it. Stick a pin in him, he’d have hurt. So that’s the first thing to say. And the second thing is that he’s living as a Jew in a world in which the titles of Caesar were Son of God, and God, and lord, and savior of the world, all of which made sense to millions of people because he had saved the Mediterranean world, I suppose if you want to be cynical, from Roman civil war, but at least from civil war and destruction. And when these titles are then taken from Caesar, and I mean taken from Caesar, and applied to Jesus, and I’m trusting that the Romans understood it correctly, that the Christians weren’t just all saying, “Well, he’s our little savior, you know, we’ve got a couple of little Son’s of God, he’s just our little local fellow.” That they’re saying Caesar isn’t God because ours is. Then the 1st century question is, “Ok, what’s your program? We know Caesar’s program. We see it all around us. It seems to be highly successful, working very well. What’s your program that you dare to use those names”” It’s really not more profound than if I announced tomorrow, alright, I’m going to be president. The first question anyone, when they finish laughing, is going to be, “Well, what’s your platform?” What’s your program? That’s the 1st century question to Jesus. Think of a world in which human beings could become divine, whether we like it or not after the enlightening, in a pre-enlightenment world like the 1st century that was taken for granted it could happen. So the only question was, “Well, ok, if you’re claiming that this human being is divine, what’s he going to do for us? Or what has he done for us? And why shouldn’t we roll over laughing?” So the big question for me is - What kind of a program is incarnated in Jesus? And I mean incarnated and I’m not using that really as a theological term but to distinguish it from simply a philosopher talking about it because Caesar was not a philosopher talking about it. He was doing it. So the 1st century pre-enlightenment question is not the post-enlightenment questions that you and I might get into such as: Do you think Jesus really was the Son of God? Do you think Sons of God can exist? Do you think gods can create human beings? All of which as far as I’m concerned is simply their way of saying that this guy, Caesar or Jesus, incarnates transcendental possibilities for the world. And I have no problem taking transcendental and referring to it as “radical” if “transcendental” bothers anyone. But I mean, that vision of that kind of staggers our imagination. So as far as I’m concerned, you cannot understand Jesus without knowing that every silver coin in the world he lived in said that Caesar was the Son of God.
Hanley: And Jesus’ program, if I understand you correctly, was about creating equality in the world in a very radical way where social divisions were flattened and everybody was appreciated. Would you agree with that?
Crossan: Well, I’d put it in a slightly more physical way where everyone got a fair shake of God’s world - where a slave might be appreciated. But if we’re coming straight out of the vision of Torah and the prophets, the world does not belong to Caesar and does not belong to us. It belongs to God and must be administered fairly like any steward would administer an absentee master’s domain as it were. So how does everyone get a fair shake out of a world that belongs to all of us? And in one sense the key parable for me, and I’m insisting it’s a parable, is the scene between Jesus and Pilate where Jesus says my kingdom is not of this world. And we usually tend to think, “Oh, that means it’s in heaven or the future, or the interior life.” But, of course, it continues by saying that if my kingdom was of this world, my followers would be in here fighting to get me out. So I couldn’t find anything clearer than that. “Pilate, your kingdom is based on violence. My kingdom is not.” He doesn’t even mention justice. He mentions violence. So the kingdom of Caesar, no matter how peaceful it is, how orderly it is, how prosperous it is, is based on violence. It’s based on the legions all along the frontier holding everyone else at bay for as long as he can do it. The kingdom of Rome is based on the injustice of violence, and the kingdom of Jesus is based on the justice of nonviolence. So you’ve got a radical clash of two visions. And quite frankly, I don’t have a third one. I still can’t see much difference in the world I live in between the clashes of those two visions. The only difference is that the violence is escalating, I mean, exponentially.
Hanley: Now, it seemed like Paul came along and he wanted to focus on Jesus’ death and resurrection and the idea that faith in him as your savior brings you everlasting life. And it seems like that became the dominant idea for believers. And I would say it still is and that Paul kind of obscured Jesus’ main point about actually changing the way things were. How do you see it?
Crossan: John, I don’t know if you’ve ever got a chance to read In Search of Paul, the book that I wrote with the archeologist, Jonathan Reed. It’s very recent. I don’t know if that’s in your reading list.
Hanley: I didn’t get that one yet.
Crossan: It’s fairly important if you get a chance to look at it for a couple of reasons. I spent the last, well, five or six years, since 2000 taking a group into Pauline territory in Turkey every year except 2001. And when you read Paul against the Roman background sitting in the Mediterranean sunlight, you begin to see a very different Paul than the one that’s been mired down in the Reformation. So in the subtitle of that book, In Search of Paul, we called it “How Jesus’ apostle opposed Rome’s empire with God’s kingdom.” And we deliberately wanted to say immediately that the thesis of this book is that what Paul is doing is taking Jesus’ vision of the kingdom of God out of the small world, even of Palestine, out into the great big Roman cities and capital cities and putting it into the language that they would understand and doing it highly successfully. Now, two problems, one, he’s writing letters. And you only understand the letter if you can recapitulate the situation and make it into a story. But secondly, when he focuses on the death and resurrection, that is simply another way of saying: “Ok, he didn’t just die. He didn’t, you know, get his feet wet walking in the water and die of pneumonia and is dead. He was executed.” And when Paul says death, he always means that. It would be totally different in Paul’s theology if Jesus had simply died the normal way, just died of old age, and rose from the dead and all the rest of that stuff. That would gut Paul’s theology like gutting a fish because the point is that Jesus was executed officially and legally and formally and actually properly from their point of view by Roman authority. Pilate was not having a bad day. And if he was resurrected by God, then the judgment of Rome is being reversed and that puts God on a collision course with Rome. So whether you take the resurrection literally or metaphorically, it is a statement that a legal execution by the highest authority of his time was reversed by God. So I can either focus on the life of Jesus and see a vision of the kingdom of God as anti- Rome, an alternative kingdom, and I can’t really bracket the life because otherwise I wouldn’t know why he was executed. And I think if you pushed Paul and said, “Well, wait a minute, Paul, now you’re saying Jesus was executed officially. Then he must have been a criminal, right?” Paul would have to back into his life whether he liked it or not. But basically for him taking it for granted that Jesus was not a criminal or a murderer or something, he can focus on he was executed by Rome, raised by God. God’s on a collision course with Rome. Which side are you on? So then if you are with Christ, you’re in danger and if you’re with Rome, you’re not with Christ. So it’s the same kind of either/or with these two visions. It just comes out in different theology.
Hanley: Very interesting.
Crossan: He doesn’t accept the whole Pharasaic background of the general resurrection. All of that stuff, I could see a Jew in the 1st century becoming a Christian and not even knowing anything about the resurrection and not particularly caring. Just figure that Jesus spoke for God. He’s the revelation of the kingdom of God, the presence of the kingdom of God. What happened to him? He got killed. Of course he got killed. That’s what happens to most of the prophets.
Hanley: So where was the major shift then because, I mean, eventually a thousand years later they’re in Jerusalem, not they, but I mean Christians are in Jerusalem slaughtering thousands of people in the name of God and believing that what’s important is that they’re going to get everlasting life. Was that Nicene or where did this shift occur? If Paul was more or less close to Jesus’ vision, although putting a different emphasis, where did it all go wrong?
Crossan: To understand why it went wrong it is necessary to go back a little bit and repeat again the radicality of what is being asserted. It went wrong in the air between the mouth of Jesus and the ears of people who heard it as he said, “Blessed are the poor" - "Blessed are the poor? Oh, my God. Oh, he must mean poor in spirit. And we’re all poor in spirit.” If you recognize what you’re up against, one shouldn’t be surprised at what went wrong. But, for example, to specify, you’ve got Paul insisting on equality. You’ve got Paul in the authentic letters—I’m talking about the seven letters that the scholars agree were written by Paul—insisting for example that Philemon as a Christian cannot have so much as a Christian slave. And by the time you get to the post-Pauline, pseudo Pauline, and anti-Pauline letters, like Colossians and Ephesians or Timothy and Titus, you’ve settled down quite happily for Christians to have slaves and for man to be running the church and not women. So even in the use of Paul, first of all, you can already see in the letters attributed to Paul but not written by him, and I’m just going with the consensus of the scholarship there, you can see they are already trimming him back to Roman normalcy. The huge, huge one is that when Jesus comes and announces that the kingdom of God is here and it’s a matter of taking it, entering it, it’s available, it’s not coming in the future, it’s available right here and now, you’ve been waiting for God and God is here waiting for you, that’s why nothing has been happening, we immediately invent something, a second coming. And the second coming is going to be violent. So we have the parable, and I do think this is a historical incidence of Jesus almost lampooning Pilate by riding into Jerusalem on a donkey and possibly even a female donkey on what we call Palm Sunday about the time that Pilate would be coming in from the western side of the city with his extra soldiers for Passover. When Jesus does that, we have him coming back in the Book of the Apocalypse on a warhorse. And he’s going to slaughter his enemies, which is everyone else except us good people. So before you even get out of the New Testament you’ve already settled down to, “Ok, we Christians are not going to kill,” which is at least better than the left behind theories which announce when Jesus come back the Christians are going to cooperate with them to kill. But at least in the New Testament you have got to the point of ok, I’ll just turn the other check stuff. That was great. That was great. Now come back and get it right. Come back as a killer, and not to kill us, of course, but to kill others. So we’ve already acclimatized. Now by the time you get to Constantine, and you raise the issue, then, well, if after all Jesus is going to come back as a killer to kill evil people, why can’t Christians at least have a just war? So we make a move to just war. And then by the time you get to the Crusades, of course, just war has been used to explain something which is execrable, going to Jerusalem to tack back the holy sites. So it’s a process that is not something that I see unique to Christianity. It is that again and again at the heart of great religions is a radical impulse which would, if it was followed through, give us a world of peace before it’s too late and which then immediately—and that’s what I meant by the crack about “in the air”—immediately somebody listening to Paul that, “We’re all equal inside the Christian community, so a Christian master or mistress can’t have a Christian slave inside the Christian community - That’s what he’s talking about, he’s not about outside -- and I’m listening to that saying, “Well, what you really mean is that I must consider that before God, me and my slave are equal inside before God, on the inside, but on the outside I’m the boss and he’s the slave.” So, even as Paul is saying this, you can see him wrestling with his communities because they’re already saying, “Oh, come on. Equal? Well, yeah, inside before God, spiritually.”
Hanley: Very good. Now, I want to get into a little bit of, I guess, inside scholarly baseball here. I’ve read a couple of Bart Ehrman’s books. And he’s very entertaining and seems very knowledgeable. He takes you to task for your view of Jesus in the sense that he claims the evidence shows he was an apocalyptic prophet which means he was imagining the world was coming to an end within a few short years and so his message was just that we need to prepare ourselves for that end. And he argues that your reading just doesn’t have a basis in the evidence. What’s your response to that?
Crossan: Well, first of all, he hasn’t read me. He’s glanced through some stuff. He doesn’t do his homework. Let me put it very clearly what I’ve said. I said that from the very beginning Jesus is an eschatological figure. And you have to explain that. That means that he’s part of the Jewish tradition that God is going to clean up the mess of the world one of these days, to give it as a big word. Secondly, “apocalyptic” means a claim that you have a revelation about what I would call this clean up. Thirdly, nobody, no Jew or Christian in the 1st century imagined the end of the world. Ehrman is flatly wrong to ever use that expression, “end of the world.” That’s something you and I can imagine because we can do it. We were talking earlier about we know how to end the world. In this tradition you would never have imagined God ending the world because only God could do it. And God had certified after the flood game that he’d never try that one again. So what they talk about, and this is exactly what they talk about, is “end of this eon.” Unfortunately the King James Bible translated that as the “end of the world.” That’s where the problem came from. They talk about the end of this eon, and this eon is, even in the phrase “this world,” is what we have done to God’s creation, the mess the world is in. That’s what, for example Jesus meant by saying my kingdom is not of this world. So it’s not the end of the world. It’s - How do you end the normalcy of injustice and violence and everything else in this world? The idea that the world is going to end and we’re all going off to heaven or something like that is simply not in the New Testament. It’s not even in the Book of the Apocalypse where, when you get the whole thing fixed up, it comes down from heaven to earth. So he is flatly wrong and so is any other author who says “end of the world” as anything to do with apocalyptic eschatology. It’s just wrong. It’s not wrong in the sense of a different interpretation. It’s just wrong. So we’re not talking about the end of the world. We are talking about – “How is God going to end this evil control of violence and injustice and how soon?” Alright? So that’s what we are talking about. The difference say between John the Baptist and Jesus is that John the Baptist said God is going to do it soon. And Jesus said it has already begun. Now, if you want to call that apocalyptic eschatology, I have no reason to bother fighting it. It just depends. It’s a different apocalypse. Apocalypse means revelation. So the use of apocalyptic eschatology to mean that the end of the world is coming soon is simply bad history, not just bad theology. And part of Bart Ehrman’s problem, if you read his Misquoting Jesus, is that he’s lost on La Salle Street in Chicago. He’s never got over the Moody Bible Institute. He’s still trying to fight his way out of it. You’ve read Misquoting Jesus?
Hanley: Yes. Explain that a little further.
Crossan: Well, you have to look at two sections. The middle chapters of that book, all seven chapters--and this I’ve said in reviewing it in public with him there so he’s had a chance to respond to it—the chapters of that book are all first rate. They’re clear. They’re right. They’re correct. I don’t think there’s a thing I would disagree with in all of those chapters. They are talking about how scribes have intentionally, not just by mistake, changed the text of the scriptures. No problem. I would only say that we’ve been saying for years that Matthew and Luke changed Mark. And that’s even bigger changes. And that John came up in a totally different one. So what the scribes did was Mickey-Mouse compared to what the gospel writers did to one another. But leave that aside. Then in the prologue, and the epilogue -- I don’t know -- he may have called them introduction and conclusion -- but in the chapters before and after he tells this whole story about starting off as a fundamentalist, and all the rest of it, trying to get out of that, and how all of this scribal alterations means that the Word of God can not be normative or whatever it is for Christians. But that phrase “the Word of God” is a theological phrase. It’s not an historical phrase. An atheist can talk about the words of the Bible or the words of the scriptures. “The Word,” singular, capitalized, “of God” is a theological phrase for the message of the Bible so far as you can figure out what it is. And therefore whether changes in the words change the meaning of the Word, is a whole theological issue. And he doesn’t seem to even know he’s moved from one register to the other, in the same way that if you’re going to quote me now from what I’ve said - and I take it for granted you’re not going to quote me word for word in everything I’ve said in an hour - you understand that you summarize it. And I take it absolutely for granted that you get it right. And you could call that the word of Crossan, if you will, or the message Crossan, or whatever. And the fact is you may have changed the words. I don’t see how that’s going to invalidate that. So, his book is historically excellent on textual criticism, and theologically, I’m going to use the expression, “naïve,” because anyone who wants to debate whether the Word of God is still valid in the Bible despite all the changes -- just like the fact there’s four different versions of the gospel and just like the fact Paul has changed all the stuff we’ve been talking about -- is entering a theological debate, not a historical debate in the sense that you can say, “Well this is not the first word, and the word has been changed.” You would have to say, “Yeah, this word has been changed without a doubt, but has the capitalized “Word” then been lost?” It’s a theological debate. I would say without any doubt that the Word of God had been lost in the Book of Apocalypse, that the Book of the Apocalypse is the last great refusal of the Bible to accept the challenge of God’s radicality by coming up with a violent god. So it’s not that I won’t make the judgment, but I know I’m making a theological judgment. If somebody were to say to me, “Well, it says Jesus is coming back and it says that Jesus is doing it and it’s in the Bible, so, it’s got to be right,” I say, “nope.” It’s already trying to get back to the normalcy of human civilization by de-radicalizing God and making him just like us, violent.
Hanley: So just to be clear, what do you mean exactly when you talk about he’s trying to get out of Moody Bible Institute?
Crossan: Well, in the overture to that he says that he was trained in verbal inerrancy of the Bible so that every single word in there is accurate. We’re not talking about the general message exactly or anything else. It’s every single word is perfect. Again, suppose you were transcribing me, when you tape me, and you transcribe me and you claim that every single word is what I said. And I get into an argument – “No, you misheard me. Don’t, you know?” He’s claiming that the Bible is every single word. And I don’t know how the hell you do that when you’re translating into English. But I suppose that they probably would say the King James Bible every single word in it or something. But he then fights his way out of that with, wait a minute, we can’t trust the words. The words have been changed. That’s a fact. Therefore the Word of God is not relevant. How can Christians trust the Word of God? If you read the seven chapters—I think it’s seven chapters—you will never find the expression “Word of God” used in the chapter. I think it’s quoted by somebody quoting somebody else using it. But he himself never used it. So he wrote, obviously, the introduction to his, whatever it is, before and after. And that’s where he introduces the whole thing that the changes in the words of the Bible has invalidated the Word of God. I find that silly. I don’t have a use for it. And it’s not at all that I’m afraid to say it. I just said that the Word of God has been absolutely invalidated by the Book of the Apocalypse on a more profound level than he could ever even imagine. And if that’s the last word, if I were to think that the last word of the Bible, the climax, like you know, in any story you’re watching the last great message from God, is that I’m going to come back, be it distant or imminent, I don’t care, and I’m going to slaughter all the evil doers, which is everyone except, you know, my own little group, I would say to that God, what Mrs. Job said “Curse God and die,” you know with as much dignity as he can muster because that’s a God I would not worship. That’s a killer. It might scare me. But it’s like living under Hitler or Stalin and you might keep your head down and your mouth shut, but I hope the hell you know it’s a monster.
To conclude one thing. What I am insisting on is what Jesus is saying is not that it’s coming soon, even the end of this evil eon, but that God has already begun to do it. So the kingdom is already here. And, therefore, of course, you would have to say, - if anyone is going to say the world looks just the same today Jesus as yesterday - he’s going to say, “Yeah, you were expecting God to do it all and what I’m announcing is”—this is my phrase now—a collaborative eschaton in which we have to cooperate with God.” Wait a minute. God’s not going to do it? Yeah. We’re not going to do it without God? Yeah. God is not going to do it without us? Yeah. So it’s a collaborative eschaton. And I find exactly the same thing in Paul because he’s claiming that the general resurrection has already begun with Jesus. So in other words, we’re in an in between period and I’m going to give them the integrity of their mistake of thinking that the end of the beginning would be soon. They’re insisting it has begun and it will be over soon. That’s the difference between you and I saying “Well, we’re going to take a degree, started a degree and it will be over soon.” If Jesus said it will be over soon, he was wrong. That’s, I’m saying “if” because that’s debated among scholars, depends on what you attribute to Jesus. Paul certainly said it would be over soon. But what he’s saying is “over soon” is not the coming but the ending of what has already come. I’m not surprised that they blew that one because they’re announcing a huge unexpected shift in expectation from it’s coming soon to it has already begun and it will be over soon, -- kind of reassuring you that don’t worry about the shifts, it won’t change too much. That’s the way I see it. And I have the evidence for that. I have the evidence that Jesus and Paul are telling their people that the kingdom is here, that they have to live in the kingdom, that Paul is telling people they are in Christ, and they’re being changed every day into the likeness of God. The language is there. What he is seeing is a quite correct thing that many of them are expecting it all to be over soon. But that’s right. But what they are expecting is that the arrival of the kingdom, which is already here, will be over soon. And they were simply wrong on that. And the Christians who are still talking today I presume to be wrong on that. We’ve been wrong now for two thousand years on “over soon,” so I’m taking it for granted that we’re still going to be wrong for a long time.
Hanley: So just to be clear, so you’re saying that Jesus and Paul were telling people that the kingdom is here and the end of the old way is soon and this new way is here for evermore?
Crossan: Yes. The difference would be John the Baptist is talking in classical apocalyptic eschatology. Any day now God is going to come to clean up the mess of the world. It’s not “the end of the world.” That phrase is out for me. And any scholar who uses “end of the world” is mistaken. Ok, just keep it short. Because that’s not the way they thought. That’s the way we think. But no Jew or Christian thought God would end the world because God made it. That would be saying the creation had been a mistake. They’re expecting to clean up to create a just world, a peaceful world, and a world that is not nonviolent. John the Baptist saying – “Any day now God is going to come and do it. All we have to do is wait, you know, be faithful, pray, we don’t have to do anything.” Jesus arrives and said, “No. It has already begun because we are being called to cooperate with God to enter ‘the kingdom’.” Paul says the same thing in different language. Now, maybe Jesus does, and Paul certainly does say “and this program of the kingdom as a temporal span, could be short.” Paul certainly says it. Jesus as I said, I can’t be certain of it. That’s not just, you know, trying to make him right. It’s because some of the phrases attributed to him like Mark 9:1 ‘There’s some standing here that shall not taste death before they see the kingdom of God coming in power” may be from Mark rather than Jesus. But for the argument, I would simply grant it, Jesus and Paul say it has already arrived. Get with the program. And it will be over soon.
Hanley: Well, then what would happen? I mean, if they’re talking about this worldly transformation and the kingdom is going to come, but it’s only going to last a short time, well, then what’s next?
Crossan: What you get then is a wide open question. Paul is nice and vague. He says, “Well, when Jesus has established the kingdom, we hand it over to the father.” Ok. Because they don’t have a clue. And they’re making it up as they go along. I mean, if the only thing that Christians including Jesus were saying is that it will be over soon, Christianity should have lasted maybe about two generations, at the most. But if it’s saying “It has already begun, get with the program and see how better the program is than say the Roman Empire,” then people could accept that. And then as they see the meaning of what they are doing, they can kind of rest easy on “Yeah, I guess so, whatever, some time in the future, sure, eventually.” They don’t even bother opposing it. They just tuck it away safely into the future, you know. My example would be if Martin Luther King said everything he said about civil rights and everything because in the year 2000 Jesus is going to return and we have to get it all right before he arrived. And let’s say we did what we did. And comes the year 2000, and we say, “Well, I guess he was wrong on that. But this is the right way to live. This is what our constitution says. This is really what our Declaration of Independence is about. This is the way to live. So, ok, he was wrong about that. But we were right to do this.” So that’s pretty much the way I see it. This is why I have no problem saying they kind of just let it drift away eventually.
Hanley: So Jesus and Paul were emphasizing the shortness of it to make it more palatable like, “Well, you won’t have to be this radical for very long but if you do it for this short amount of time, that will be good enough - You’ll have everlasting life?”
Crossan: I honestly don’t think that’s the way they were thinking. That’s the way we’re thinking. I think it’s much more that when you have a giant mutation either politically or religiously… For example, when you invent the automobile, it’s easier to think of it as a horseless carriage, you know, no big deal. We just won’t have horses anymore than to really try and imagine that this is going to change the world in ways that we still haven’t a clue how it will all end and the day may come where we will curse the fact that we ever invented oil and all the rest of it. So whenever you get a huge mutation like that, just very personally, I had no problem moving into a computer because I thought it was just a real smart way of correcting all your mistakes on a typewriter. I thought this is a newer typewriter like the Selectric III and you can make all these changes and I moved overnight into using a computer. Now, if I had gotten a glimpse of what this revolution was going to be like, it probably would have scared the living daylights out of me to move. So whenever you get a huge mutation, you’re going to say things like, “Oh, it’s just, you know, the kingdom has arrived and it will be over soon. Don’t worry.” I don’t think it’s a—how would I put it—a design to seduce people into compliance by telling them it wouldn’t be long because they recognize immediately that it could be very short because the Romans might kill you for this. I think at that stage they couldn’t imagine it any other way than simply a minor blip on the old idea that God’s going to come soon and clean up the world. And ok, God has arrived to do it. And we’re supposed to help and get with the program, but it’ll be over soon. I see it almost as the inevitability of any huge mutation in human experience -- an attempt to say it’s really not as radical.
Hanley: I don’t see…why would that motivate people, though? I mean, why go to all this trouble to change it and then it’s just going to revert back?
Crossan: Well, the magic of that very often would be if you really followed it and you emphasized the proximity then you might say, “Well, we just wait, you know, we just wait.” So in one sense I think it is the positive aspects of an alternative universe. I kind of see how we’re living, see how much better life would be if you belonged to a small Christian community in the huge anonymity of a Roman city. You say to yourself, “Yeah, that makes sense to me, yeah, I can see how this is better, and, fine, whatever about the future.” But, you know, I don’t find that the most rabid people in this world who are rightwing Christians and are certain it’s almost over have stopped taking out life insurance, have stopped taking out mortgages, have stopped doing all the things that would tell me they really don’t believe they’re going to be around and their children are going to be around. So I figure, ok, if there’s a fair inconsistency in any of these things, and it will probably make more sense if they simply said, “Well, we’ll just wait then.”
If you get a chance to take a fast look at In Search of Paul because that also brings this to Paul. And I don’t know if you’ve seen Marcus Borg’s book and my book on The Last Week.
Hanley: I have it right in front of me.
Crossan: Ok. That would bring some of this stuff up to date too in terms of Mark, at least.
Hanley: Great. So let’s go back to try to describe as best you can the apostles. Jesus is dead, and in that ten year period after his death, what happens?
Crossan: The first thing we know for sure is that they all seem to get out of Galilee and go to Jerusalem because within three years Paul is looking for them and he doesn’t go wander around Galilee, and knocking at Capernaum and Nazareth to say where are they. So this is a crucial thing for me. I think the reason is that they are expecting Jesus to return. And they don’t think that anyone in their right mind would return to Nazareth. So it must be to Jerusalem. So I think it’s a crucial step that they decide to go to Jerusalem. I think that puts them into the middle, first of all, of a great pilgrimage city. In other words they go urban in plain language otherwise all of this resurrection and everything else could have died out in the hills of Galilee in two generations. They go urban and within a couple of years we know that they are in Antioch and Damascus, within three years at least. So as soon as they are in Jerusalem there are on urban grid. And they’re moving into the cities of the Roman Empire. So that’s one thing that is happening. The second thing that is happening is this. I think it is historically true that followers of Jesus had visions of him after his execution. In fact that wouldn’t surprise me, a priori. If we didn’t have evidence of it, I would say from psychological anthropology the existence of visions of the beloved dead, especially of somebody killed brutally or suddenly or somebody who has disappeared and no bodies are found, it is almost inevitable. I think there’s cases of something like 70 to 80 percent of cases like that and even more so among women than men that they have visions of the beloved person as real to them as if we were sitting across the room from one another either in dreams or they see the person going down the street. So I take it for granted that there were visions. Now, I do not take for a moment the stories that we find in the New Testament about the competition between who had them, or whether it Peter or the beloved disciple. I do not think those are stories of what happened immediately afterwards, but that they were visions. That sounds right to me. Therefore I think what they have to put together is two things. Jesus has told them and they have experienced that the kingdom is already here. Ok. That’s the first absolute thing they’re holding on to. They’ve experienced the power. So there’s a pull from simply saying to themselves, “This was all a terrible mistake; let’s go back to Galilee and forget it.” That’s one historical event, whether it’s right or wrong, but that Jesus has told them all of this and they’ve accepted it; that happened. And put that together with the apparitions, visions -- I’m using that in exactly the same sense as if you had a vision of anyone who is not defrauding us and lying has had a vision. When you put those two things together, then you’re ready to make an interpretation. Then if the kingdom has begun, and if Jesus has appeared to us, then the general resurrection which was expected to be the first part of the great clean up within certain strands of Judaism, Pharasaic strands especially, has already begun. So when you get to Paul, for example, his argument is not simply that Jesus is exalted to sit at the right hand of God and be lord of the universe. That’s exaltation. It is that the resurrection of Jesus begins the general resurrection, which is a different theological way of saying the clean up has begun if you’re especially in the Pharasaic strand of Judaism. So that would be my explanation as an historian of how do you explain their resurrection faith. I mean you could simply say of course they were totally wrong but you still have to explain how did they come up with such a weird idea. They could have said, this is staying strictly within Judaism that like Enoch had been taken up to God or Elijah had been taken up to God, that Jesus had been taken up to God and you could even say he is now, you know, Lord of the Universe, sits at the right hand of God, all the rest of that stuff, and that would simple be called exaltation. You’d never use resurrection for that. It would be a unique special privilege for Jesus, even if you wanted to say body and soul and everything. That’s just special. That’s for Jesus. But to use the word “resurrection” in the 1st century context is to claim that what some people expected to be the first element of the clean up, the resurrection of the dead, especially the martyrs, begins with Jesus, is another way of saying the key word for me in early Christianity “already” as in the kingdom has already begun. The general resurrection has already begun or in our book, The Last Week, the Son of Man is already here. The claim of Christianity they think as essential can be distilled down to that one word, “already.” And then what’s going to happen next and all the rest of it is pure guess work, no matter who it comes from, including Jesus.
Hanley: Do you think that his main disciples practiced what he wanted them to – as you explain it in your books, open commonality and free healing? Did they travel around and try to break down social barriers or did they already very soon after he left just become more institutionalized?
Crossan: Well, the evidence you have, for example, is that James, brother of the Lord, James of Jerusalem, seems to be conducting sort of a common life group in Jerusalem. I don’t think of him really as being sort of the pope ahead of time or the head of the church or anything. But I see him as the leader of a sort of an ideal group called “The Poor.” They’re living not so much in poverty as in shared possessions, exactly similar like the people down in Qumran are doing, presumably the Essenes. They are living a shared life. I see Paul’s community as trying to do the same thing. That’s why he’s having so much trouble with them. And all of the problems that he’s having with them, he wouldn’t be having if they weren’t trying to do that or if he hadn’t been promoting the ideal of a shared life. The problems of the Eucharist at Corinth is some people love more than others. Are we all going to share the best food? Are we all going to share the cheapest food? Do some of us take good stuff and the rest take ordinary stuff? And do you have a common meal that they all eat together but each bring your own? All of those problems only come up because they’re trying to live a shared life in the normalcy of Roman hierarchy. So, yeah, they are definitely trying it. And they are pulling against the drag of normalcy as I call it, as best they can.
Hanley: What was the name of the group James started?
Crossan: They are called “The Poor,” and that’s the collection that Paul is taking up for the poor in Jerusalem and sometimes misunderstood like he’s taking up a collection for the street poor of Jerusalem, you know, like we might talk about the poor or the homeless or something like that. I think “the poor” is the name of what would later be in the monasteries would be called the vow of poverty, that he’s really having a group of shared possessions. I don’t know whether it is celibate. It may well be celibate even- it was already there at Qumran so it’s not something that Christianity invented. It’s already in Judaism. It’s already in Philo and in Egypt. So the idea of what we call a monastic life in plain language did not start in Christianity. It started in Egypt for men and women.
Hanley: Was this group of the poor the Ebionites or is that different?
Crossan: It may well be the group that we call Ebionites or they may be variations on the same thing, or they maybe somewhere in between. But once it’s clear that the matrix is already there in Judaism for this type of life, then the margins of whether this is Jewish Christians I would think it’s probably the same phenomena. It’s an attempt to live a shared life is the way I would put it. The vision is not just social welfare, the vision is if the world belongs to God and the stuff of the world is God’s, then what we’re saying is not it’s mine or yours - rather that we share it, like they did at Qumran with the Essenes when after one or two years of trial, they turned all their goods over to the community.
Hanley: Last question here. I know for you worrying about the afterlife is just really not something you’re interested in. And I tend to feel that way myself: (a) maybe it’s obviously, but let’s just say it, why are so many people consumed and obsessed with this idea, and (b) why would it be better for them to let that go if you are willing to say such a thing?
Crossan: Oh, yeah. I mean, I would be willing to put it this way. The focus should be - when Christians say the Our Father, the Lords Prayer, they talk about God’s kingdom coming, they talk about God’s will being done on earth, right? That’s what interests me. I take it for granted that when anyone has talked about the future ever, they’ve usually been wrong so far as we’ve been able to check it. I am interested is what I’m going to call the other life. That is the alternative mode of life to what we have right now which is the possibility that’s right here and now of a just world which we see in—how would I call it—the flip image of what we do normally every day. But it’s not an afterlife. It’s not a future life. I guess it’s future in the sense that we haven’t got there yet. But the afterlife totally disinterests me. It’s up there with the leprechauns as far as I’m concerned. I can’t tell you why there are so many television programs or movie programs about ghosts. It tells me the total failure of the enlightenment to enlighten people about this because what we’ve got now is more movies about ghosts and “supernatural”--I’m putting that in quotation—beings. And nothing seems to sell as well. So I’m not interested in transcendental snake oil at all. But I wouldn’t even want to say what I’ve just said because that immediately for most people shifts the emphasis to an argument. And I say, fine, whatever. I’m only interested in how is this world to be taken back from the thugs and given back to God. So that’s what interests me. And that’s actually what I see Jesus is interested in, Paul is interested in. They don’t say what I’ve just said. But anything they’ve said about the future has been wrong. Why would I presume that the answer is right? It’s when they say it will be over soon and it will be like this, well, they were off by two thousand years. But it will be still like that. I’m willing to say the second coming will not be soon. The second coming will not be violent. The second coming will not be literal. The second coming is what will happen when we Christians accept that there was only one coming and get with the program.
Hanley: Well, I think that’s incredibly well said and a great place to bring this to a close.
Crossan: Ok. Thank you, John, very, very much.

Herb Tanzer Interview

2006-09-12T10:22:00.000-07:00

Herb Tanzer is a legendary Forum Leader and Lifespring Trainer. He is a leading consultant in the areas of corporate leadership, teamwork, and culture change.

Hanley: Herb Tanzer, one time when we were doing a training together you mentioned that you learned at lot from your dog. Can you tell us what you learned from your dog?
Tanzer: Oh, my god. You’ve got a lifetime? I continue to learn, you know. I look at my dog, which, I’m sitting at my desk while I’m talking to you, and I’m looking at my dog. And my dog is just standing there, just standing there. She’s not going anywhere. Do you know any human beings like that that are not drugged or intoxicated?
Hanley: No.
Tanzer: Nope. You want to get an experience of just being, just watch a dog who is unperturbed by external stimuli. She just stands there just being, not doing much of anything until she is perturbed by some stimulus which she responds to at a very automatic level. So it’s really fascinating to watch the ability to just be in the dog. There’s not a lot of noise that’s going on when they’re just hanging. So one of the things I’ve learned from my dog is the phenomenon called just hanging. It’s perfect if you live in California, especially Southern California.
Hanley: So how long have you been trying to learn this from animals?
Tanzer: Oh, well, actually it’s just something that, you know, I practiced veterinarian medicine for twenty-five years. And, you know, that’s just one of the things I’ve learned. I’ve been learning forever from animals. I just have a connection with them. And what I’ve learned from the four-legged phenomena I have able to transfer to those that walk on their hind legs, mainly human beings. So somebody asked me once, you know, what do I do. The name of our consulting company--do you know what the name of our consulting company is John?
Hanley: Yes, I do.
Tanzer: Ok. Shall we mention it?
Hanley: Sure.
Tanzer: Ok. It’s called Killer Dog Consulting. Now, that’s a weird name for a consulting firm, isn’t it?
Hanley: It’s definitely unique.
Tanzer: Yes. And we have a Jack Russell terrier which my wife refers to as our Jack Russell terrorist because she is nuts. But, you know, when we were naming the company, we didn’t want to get serious because I don’t think very much in life is serious. So we decided to name the dog…name the company after the dog. So we named it Killer Dog Consulting. And our first business card--you know, this goes back some years—our first business card had a picture of KD, the little Jack Russell sitting in an attaché case. It got to a point where we started getting involved with some rather imposing Fortune 500 clientele and it’s kind of difficult to hand them a card when you walk into the boardroom with KD’s picture on it, etc. etc. So we went underground, and are now known as KDC & Associates.
But mainly, if people ask what it’s about, I would recount something that happened to me when I was traveling, oh, several winters ago coming across the country, and we got…landed in Chicago, weathered in in Chicago. And I was in the Admirals Club and there are two lines of people waiting to get their reservation fixed and not a very pleasant energy that’s there. I come up to my turn and everybody’s just waiting and being as patient and some being inpatient as the situation seemed to generate the frustration of not being where they wanted to be. I looked up and I handed her some paperwork or my tickets or what have you and she asked me for a credit card for something. On the credit card it says, the name on the credit is Dr. Herb Tanzer, Killer Dog Consulting. And she looked at it and said, “Hum, Killer Dog Consulting. That’s a very unusual name for a company. What kind of a doctor are you?” And I said, “Well, what do you think?” And the first thing she, you know, she got to the point, “Oh, are you a veterinarian?” “Yes.” “Oh, do you train attack dogs, one of those?” I said, “No, no, no. What I did is I travel around the world. I don’t practice veterinarian medical anymore. I travel around the world trying to train people in organizations to be as nice as dogs.” And she looked at me. I said, “Yeah, wouldn’t it be great while I was standing here in line and my turn came up, instead of saying, good morning, I’m Dr. Tanzer, I just went (licking sounds) and licked you?” And it was like, you know, people were listening on either side of me on the other lines. What is this weird conversation? And when I said that you could just feel the whole space shift, you know, the energy shifted. People got for a brief moment that it ain’t serious. You get the point?
Hanley: Yeah, I think so.
Tanzer: For a long time when I was involved in the personal transformation world, the message was there was no purpose. Life was empty, meaningless. People, of course, want to use that. They go, “Oh, well, if it doesn’t mean anything, then why should I x?” So they take the thing that life is empty and meaningless and assign a meaning to it, as many people will do with religious stuff. And of course the god goes out of the religion. And the value goes out of finding out that there is no inherent purpose in anything. But then what do you do then? So I realized that really what I do since I’ve got to do something to keep me off the street is in all of this there’s empty and meaninglessness that I’m living in, I make things matter. So when you make things matter, now you’re in motion. You’re leaning towards something. You’re engaged in the game. And then I have a choice on how I want to play the game. So I can play the game at the level of acceptance, or, oh, god, I don’t like this very much. But this is what there is to do right now. And that kind of lightens things up for me. Or I can play it at the level of being just totally joyful and enjoying my life. And really what that comes from that I’ve discovered as I’ve gotten a little older is nothing out there is going to provide joy for me. Nothing makes me happy. And I train people that I coach that way. There’s no reason to be happy. And they look at you like you’re nuts until I go, “Well, that’s the bad news and the good news because if there’s no reason to be happy, you can be happy for no reason.” So I’m not waiting for anything to make me joyful.
Hanley: So do you believe in this whole point that it’s empty and meaningless that it’s empty and meaningless?
Tanzer: Yes. Yes. So there’s no inherent meaning in anything because if you and I are really connected, there’s only one energy which is the way it occurs for me most of the time. There’s no separate me. The only meanings come from a separate me who makes things mean something. Now, I can do that, you know. Look, when I’m driving in my car, I play by the rules because it just works to go down one-way streets the way the sign is pointing. But it doesn’t mean anything, but I make it matter in order to play in the game called drive my car. And the same way with doing business or anything, I play by the rules. I don’t resist them. I don’t need anything. Mostly the way people are living in this supposed transformed way of being is most people then make that another egoist phenomenon only now they’re being transformed, you know, but that’s being something. If you just said I am and stop right there anything that comes after that you’re going to put in form. And then what happens, this spirit or this universal intelligence or this consciousness which gives rise to the form, gets lost in the form, descends into the form, and becomes consciousness we get unconscious about. So we’re a bunch of forms, a Herb form, and a John form, with a spirit buried inside us, an energy buried inside us, a connectedness buried inside us, a godliness buried inside us, if you wish. And we have forgotten. So it’s you’re trying to survive against me trying to survive or all of that silly game.
I just got back from doing some coaching work on a 65 foot sailboat sailing around the Hawaiian Islands for six days. Oh, god, there were four of us on this incredible J-65.
Sailing around the magnificent splendor of the Hawaiian Islands, I came back very altered because you smell the flowers blossoming and the fragrances overwhelming. And it has no survival value. But it does put me in touch with the ability, that inner ability, to appreciate the magnificence and beauty of a flower. And then you sail around from island to island and go swimming in waterfalls and, oh, it’s so magnificent that you get back in touch with the spirit that gave rise to the form. So there’s a whole other wave coming, John, as I see it. There was initially in evolutionary process this consciousness gave rise to form. And then the consciousness got lost in the form. And the form thought it was about the form. And now, there’s people waking up again. And they start to infuse this form with a whole other level of consciousness. It’s like there’s a whole part of our brain that’s going to get to be used which has been developed, you know, the forebrain that we haven’t fully inhabited. I think that’s what’s going on these days. There’s much more of a hunger for people, you know, looking for this phenomenon beyond transformation. Mostly I’m not doing transformation these days. For me, transformation is just that. It’s altering the form. It’s moving the piece called John or Herb around in the form we’re playing in. But there’s still a John or a Herb. What I’m interested in is the phenomenon called liberation which actually gets you to vertically ascend out of this phenomenon that we’re living in called life into a place called liberation. And then there’s no you left. There’s just the totality of it all. It’s like returning home to being one with it all, etc, etc, all that good stuff. But you get a sense of what I’m saying?
Hanley: Yeah. Very exciting.
Tanzer: For a log time I thought it was the information that I had to transfer that made the difference until I realized there are times I said it wrong and it still worked. You’ve had that happen, right?
Hanley: Oh, yeah.
Tanzer: I think what’s so is the way I look at it, it’s like if you took a banana, John. Let’s assume I was working with you, and you’re this transformed being, ok. So, you’ve got to get a certain level of consciousness before we can move you out of this Johnness, so to speak. But if we took this John that was transformed enough so that we could look at who is this John, and we could get you to put your business card away, then something more powerful opens up. You know what I’m saying?
Hanley: Yeah.
Tanzer: And then I spoke to you with my language, with my conversation, and I transmitted or transferred a particular type of information on one side of you. Let’s assume you were like this banana, ok. And on the other side I transferred a particular energy while I was being with you and that pressed against the other side. The two of those things pressing together kind of vertically squeezes on you and you ascend into this vertical ascendant place called being, this sense of just pure energy of who you are connected to it all. That is this, when you’re working in that place, and I know you’ve experienced it because we’ve been on platforms together dealing with groups where you’re so turned on you don’t ever want to be anywhere else or do anything else. You’re not looking for anything to make you joyful because what you’re doing is just expressing your true self, this universal energy connected with it all. When you’re in that place that is the third way of being that goes beyond joyfulness into enthusiasm. And I know when you’re that way and I’m that way there’s an intensity about us that may look like we’re stretched or something. No. It’s just we’re so turned on that we want more, more, more, more. That is the state of just choosing where you are moment by moment and knowing it’s all just going in a particular direction that I mostly can’t see unless I’m ascended beyond this transformation into this liberated space where I had kind of an accelerated awareness so I can look down from that place of altitude, so to speak, and see how Herb is functioning in this stuff called life. At that particular moment I can really become aware of the flow of things, get connected to the flow, appreciate the flow, get into the flow and interact with the flow of things and people in the universe, going with it. And that puts me in the mode of acceptance and I’m right on up the scale into this enthusiasm which means theos or god. I experience the godliness within me.
For me, god is totality of it all, that we are all connected in the matrix, so to speak. I’m actually working with some great companies that are up to making a difference in terms of sustainable energy and working with some individuals that are all different walks of life, with teenagers that are producing miracles. I have one guy that’s just finishing his first year of college, and is kind of eighteen and thinking, “What’s the big deal going to college?”- not very excited. He just finished with straight As. I coached him throughout his first year and iIt was like going to college all over again. We created a purpose for him. And his purpose was for his first year was to have fun and produce results. Now, you remember how you and I went to school? It was produce results and have fun if you’ve got any time left over.
Hanley: Right.
Tanzer: No. The way we did it this way, have fun. And you have fun by producing results as long as your results make a difference in the world. So this kid is doing exactly what he wants. He’s a computer nut. He’s learning how to do animations and stuff while he’s going to college, turned on. So what I actually am doing with people is having them express their magnificence which is kind of buried in all of this unworthiness that human beings seem to get attached to. But as soon as you can see you’re not your unworthiness, you may have thoughts about it, but there gets to be a little space around the story and the stories kind of disappear. More and more I’m realizing that happiness and sadness are just emotions. In order to produce happiness it has to be attached to the story. I’m having people more and more these days see their stories so that they can get enough altitude so that they can look down and see how they’re playing in the story. And then I have a whole bunch of what I call transformational tools that are in a transformational toolbox that allow people to alter their moods in nothing flat to actually get ready to participate to change thoughts or to give up their attachment to negative thoughts. I like giving people tools so that they can apply this. Then the most important thing is that it ends up really altering how people are playing in the game.
Hanley: Excellent. Well, I want to take you back to your dog here for a moment.
Tanzer: Okay.
Hanley: Why do you think it is that the dog is different from the human? Somehow they’re not making life significant? Is that the major distinction?
Tanzer: Well, I think for example the way they’re organized they don’t have a sense of time for the most part. If you walk out and you forget your keys and you come back, the dog gives you a greeting like you’ve been gone for three months. And you’ve been gone for sixty seconds. You get what I’m saying?
Hanley: Yeah.
Tanzer: Now, I don’t think the dog has a future, therefore no stress.
Hanley: Why do you think that happened?
Tanzer: Because I think we’re trained, we’re trained to have a future. We got lost in this. It goes back to, at least in this lifetime, that everything was wonderful. You were living in paradise, weightless, you know, timeless. There was no rush. You wanted to take a bathroom break, you just did wherever you were. You were living with food coming in, waste matter going out, everything just extraordinary, quiet, peaceful, and then suddenly, womp, after nine months of bliss, womb service got canceled and you got squeezed out. I think your natural conclusion when you came out is there’s something wrong here. Why did she get rid of me? Why did source dump me out? I think the natural conclusion at least at an energetic level was there must be something wrong with me. Ok?
Hanley: Yeah.
Tanzer: And I think that’s what we come in with. And then it’s how we become. And then we either suffer and prove there’s something wrong with me and have that kind of life. Or we achieve, achieve, achieve, and yet it’s never enough. We got lost in this mind.
Hanley: Now, presumably the animal goes through a similar birth process.
Tanzer: Yes.
Hanley: So somehow they’re not getting caught up in the same story. Is it a function of biology, you know, brain size? If you had to say, speculate, what do you think is?
Tanzer: I think it’s just they don’t have the organization in their nervous system to do assessments the way we do. They just don’t have the complexity to make the elaborate stories that you and I do. They’re mostly stimulus response mechanisms. My wife Elizabeth never had a dog until I brought KD home seventeen years ago. And incidentally my dog is seventeen and a half, going strong, you know, and just amazing to watch her. Elizabeth never knew about dogs so when she got KD she thought all dogs were loving like KD. So we’d go to Starbucks and she wants to put her face right in the dog’s face and give it kisses. And I go, wait, stop, stop, you know, because I looked at the dog’s face and I can read energetically what’s in this dog. And I can tell if he’s frightened he may just bite as a reflex like if you put…you know what reflexes are?
Hanley: Yeah.
Tanzer: Automatic. There’s not much thinking. Or there may be some primitive thinking. And it will attack. And so there are no nasty dogs. There are just trained dogs. And mostly they get trained…we train them.
Hanley: Now, one hears about research with say dolphins and chimps and so on. Do you think they approach our, I don’t know if it’s intelligence or just our way of life?
Tanzer: You know, the truth is, the answer is I don’t know. I remember when I lived in Connecticut years ago, I kept some bees. Ok?
Hanley: Yeah. Bees.
Tanzer: I got all in, very much into the whole thing. Do you have any idea of the folklore associated with bees?
Hanley: No.
Tanzer: Oh, people ascribe intelligence to bees like you wouldn’t believe. I mean, it’s just amazing all of this folklore that exists about how bees interact and their intelligence and what they’re doing, and the curative powers of honey, or propolis or all of that stuff. About bee stings, they’re people who think there’s value. Now, bee venom is about as potent as rattlesnake venom--I don’t know if you know that--except it’s at very small quantities. Now, bees are very fascinating to watch as a culture, you know. There’s a magnificent division of labor. The queen does her job. She just lays, you know, two thousand eggs a day. Then the worker bees, the females, they go out and they get the nectar and the pollen and everything, and they come back. And then there are other bees that take the nectar and the pollen and they put a little in each cell. And then there are wax makers that fill the wax cells. And then there are nurse bees that help them. After twenty-one days the bees start to chew their way out of the thing. And then the nurse bees come along and clean their eyes off and get them ready. And then there are bees that do nothing but glue things down with propolis all day. And then there are guard bees which stand and guard the entrance and don’t let wasps in. And then there are bees fan air through the porch, sit at the front porch and fan like they’re air conditioners. They evaporate and concentrate the honey. And if there are too many nurse bees, they will shift and become wax makers or wax makers will become workers and da, da, da, da. There’s an amazing division of labor and it just shifts depending upon what the culture needs for its survival. You know what the males do? The males are called drones. They have no stinger. They don’t go out and work. All the do is to mate with the queen once a year. One of them mates with the queen so she’s now laying fertile eggs. And then they keep them around until the season is over and then they throw just about all of them out. And the males die out in the cold except for a few that they kept for next season. So, you know, it’s the real life of a gigolo. It’s so fascinating. All of these beliefs about bees you could really go bananas about if you believe them. So people believe a lot of things. And they ascribe a lot of meanings and belief to animals. They anthropomorphize all over the place. And I love watching Flipper, etc. etc. And I know they use the, you know, they use them to recover deep water mines and stuff. If you read the, what is it, the Space Traveler’s Guide to the Universe, then you would, of course, be of the belief that the dolphins were highly superior in intelligence to us and said thanks for all the fish and so long and left the planet. Just kidding.
Hanley: So who knows?
Tanzer: It depends upon whether you’re a hippie or a serious scientist.
Hanley: Now, chimps and humans, the genetic similarity is what, like 98% or something.
Let’s just look at with primates. The higher gorillas and the chimps they do seem to demonstrate a lot of qualities. Could it be something as, like, I’ve heard they just don’t have a developed larynx, you know, something like that, and so therefore they just can’t develop a very highly developed language with all kinds of symbols because they don’t have this ability to talk like we do?
Tanzer: Ok. Well, I think that may be. If you get into the biblical aspect, god gave man dominion over all the other animals that came upon the ark. And maybe the dominium was language. Maybe without language you can’t have a future, therefore you don’t have stress. Unless you live in a culture where you start to “osmos” energetically the stress from the human population you’re living with.
You osmos it. You take on the energy, the pain, the worry, the stress of the human family that you are immersed in as the dog or the pet.
Hanley: Oh. So they can sometimes do that?
Tanzer: Absolutely. When I was in practice I would take a look at the animal on the table and knew what I was dealing with standing on the other side of the table, whether they were trusting or mistrusting or nice. You know what I’m saying? And vice versa, I could look at the person and know what they expect from the dog. I grew up in an environment when I was a kid where we had enough, John. Only I remember my parents doing the budget on Sunday night when I was six years old and I could hear them arguing. And my dad would say, “Bella, where’s the money for the rent I owe? We’ve got rent coming on.” She said, “Well, I had to buy shoes for my brother Marty, blah, blah.” Oh, my god, I was scared to death. But the truth is we had enough, John. My wife, Elizabeth, grew up in a family where they didn’t have enough. Her father was a problem, couldn’t earn a living. But you know what, her mother was a very devout Christian and kept saying to Elizabeth, “Don’t worry; god will take care of us.” So she grew up with an abundance conversation. Now when we got together, I tried to enroll her in my scarcity conversation. She wouldn’t enroll. I enrolled in her abundance conversation. Guess what I have, John?
Hanley: Abundance.
Tanzer: That’s the question of what you’re choosing, but you’ve got to be conscious as to what you’re enrolling in. What’s the conversation you’re going to live in? And you and I because we have consciousness available at this level, can see how we’re acting. The dog doesn’t have that kind of consciousness where he can…see dogs don’t…you see if I punch you in the nose, I will apologize and explain how come I did that, you know. A dog’s not going to apologize nor is he going to explain anything. It’s just pure mechanics.
Hanley: Now, how does this fit into the title of your book?
Tanzer: You mean about Your Dog Isn’t Sick?
Hanley: Yeah.
Tanzer: Yeah. So all disease, all disease, all disease begins in the mind.
Hanley: Ok. I’m with you.
Tanzer: Ok. So therefore…I’m going through some interesting stuff with my dog right now, scratching herself to pieces, biting, chewing, carrying on, disgusting. Ok, you ever have a dog do that?
Hanley: I haven’t been around a lot of dogs.
Tanzer: Ok. Well, you know, if anybody is reading this who’s got dogs, chances are a lot of them are going, “Yeah, my dog too, does the same thing, especially during the summertime.” Ok. When I was in practice in the summertime on the East Coast probably about 50% plus of the patients I saw during the summer months were from dogs mutilating themselves, biting, chewing, raw spots. It was called hot spots, allergic dermatitis, you know. And look I went to Cornell, you know, graduated, you know, with honors and that great stuff. I knew all that stuff, and treated and blah, blah, blah. Only, you know what, John? I knew there was something more involved than simply organism A causes disease B which, you know, you treat with Preparation H. But I didn’t know what the hell it was until I started getting into the whole business of how the mind works and transformational stuff. And holy mackerel, I saw what the heck was going on. So common skin disease, allergic dermatitis, flea bite and, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah. Now, in the summertime, yeah, a dog may have fleas and stuff. I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about my dog doesn’t have fleas on her yet she’s sawing away at herself especially around the backside. Ok?
Hanley: Yeah.
Tanzer: So here’s what goes on with that one. That’s a common disease. If you called up any veterinary hospital in San Francisco right now and ask how many patients they have treated in the past 24 hours with dermatological problems, you would be shocked.
Hanley: Go ahead.
Tanzer: Ok. Now, and it’s very seasonal. It gets worse in the summertime and almost abets in the winter. Ok?
Hanley: Yep.
Tanzer: So here’s what happens. What I realized is holy smoke, the problem with this dog is she was born. That’s why this condition is so common in the dog population because they’ve all shared the same experience of being born. Now, what am I talking about? Well, have you ever seen a puppy born?
Hanley: No.
Tanzer: Well, do you know what happens when a puppy gets born? It comes popping out. And what does the mother dog do?
Hanley: Licks them.
Tanzer: Yes. The first thing she does is licks the dog all over, chews off the umbilical cord and then licks the dog especially around its backside and its genitalia. Ok?
Hanley: Yeah.
Tanzer: So the dog’s first experience, the puppy’s first experience in this lifetime involves going from an environment which was very secure and safe, suddenly got detached from source, fired down this tube. Didn’t know where it was going. It was painful. Got squeezed out like toothpaste and finally made it out and survived. Whew. What’s the first thing that happened to it?
Hanley: It got licked.
Tanzer: It got licked all over by a dog’s tongue, right? So its first experience on this planet involves fear of surviving, and then surviving, and then having a dog’s tongue lick it all over. And that gets stored in this phenomenon called the mind, ok, which is really a storehouse of experiences. And that we can say is number one in this lifetime. It could also have been stored in a previous lifetime and inherited in the genetic numbers. Ok. But in any case we got that. And we’ll start with day one this lifetime: fear of survival, then surviving, having a dog’s tongue lick it all over, especially around its backside. Then the dog nurses. What happens while the dog is nursing? What’s the mother dog doing?
Hanley: Not sure.
Tanzer: Licking it.
Hanley: Still?
Tanzer: Licking it around its backside. It’s cleaning up any excreta so that it won’t…that’s a throwback to when they were wild animals so that they wouldn’t attract predators with the odor. They would ingest the puppy’s excreta and stimulate the puppy while they licked to have a BM and urinate, etc, etc. So the dog’s experiences now, its first experience about fear of survival, and surviving, having a dog’s tongue lick it all over, and now while it’s nursing and getting more of what it needs to survive, its now getting the dog’s tongue licking it all over. Then dog gets to be eight, nine weeks of age, or seven to eight weeks, and it gets wrenched out of its familiar environment and sent to John’s house. Ok?
Hanley: Yeah.
Tanzer: And it says, “Oh, I love John,” you know and you replace the mother. You give it its food. You give it its water. You give it its acknowledgement, physical contact, your whole being. You got the picture?
Hanley: And then it wants to lick me.
Tanzer: Yeah. Oh, yeah. Because it takes a licking from home. But then you have the audacity to leave the house and go to work. The people the dog could depend on our gone. They’ve gone to school or to work. And the dog says, “Oh, my god, I’m not going to survive.” Fear of surviving comes up and wanting to survive, the dog programs those things into his computer and what gets selected is a tape called a dog’s tongue licking me all over especially around my backside. The dog takes the first available dog’s tongue which it can find which is his own and starts licking at this backside. And since its doing it to survive, it licks and licks and licks. And since it has a rough tongue it now has raw spot on his backside, and it gets worse and worse and worse. And then you come home. And the dog comes over to greet you, is so happy, and turns and shows you its backside. And you go, “Oh, my god, what is that?” And you start fingering it, looking, parting the hair. And the dog goes, “ha, ha, ha, ha. I picked the tape. That is in fact the way to survive.” You see how the game is off and running?
Hanley: Yep.
Tanzer: Well, now, you know, you’ve got to do something about this. So you go to the doctor. What does the veterinarian do in this game? He’s got to do what he does for survival. He has to put a name on it. So he says, “This here dog has a severe case of Eucalyptus of the blow hole. And I want you to rub this bite cream on his backside three times a day. So John is now coming home at lunchtime to put this white stuff on the dog’s backside. You think this dog is getting more and more trained that the way to John’s heart is through raw spots on his backside? He’s going to give it up?
Hanley: No.
Tanzer: No. But now, you know what? You must find a specialist, or you go back to the veterinarian. “It’s not helping.” And he says, “Well, we’re going to have to give the dog the magic injection.” And he gives him an injection. And the dog stops scratching dead in his tracks for two weeks. Drinks more water and urinates more. He’s bright and chipper and stops scratching. He has given him a long acting steroid which will allay the allergic response long enough for the itching to stop. And the dog will let the skin heal. He may put a collar around him so he can’t mutilate anymore. But the dog stops scratching. So you know he’s got the right diagnosis. Right?
Hanley: Yeah.
Tanzer: No. Wrong. Here’s what’s really going on. The steroid produces a side effect, a feeling of euphoria. So the dog goes, “Ba boom, boom. Who the hell needs John anyway,” and gives up the survival pattern until the drug wears off, and boom, it’s right back again. Got the picture?
Hanley: Yeah.
Tanzer: So we call that allergic dermatitis. And then you say, “Now, wait a minute. It’s only present in the summertime.” Why is it? Well, because in the summertime when the dog was born, he was wet and he was warm when he first came out. His survival was associated with being wet and warm. And what happened? A dog’s tongue licked him. Ok? In the summertime, how is it? Wet and warm. It reminds him unwittingly to go back to that tape called having a dog’s tongue lick him because when anything in your current environment is in anyway similar to an incident in the past, the whole thing will come in on you. And at that moment you are used by it, taken over by it. You have the disease. Got the picture?
Hanley: Yeah.
Tanzer: I just got an email this morning. It says…it’s a woman that’s writing a book that I’m involved in. It says, “Additional chapter is on hold for the next week. On this past Wednesday I was diagnosed with chronic lymphatic leukemia. It’s extremely rare in someone my age, but helps to explain why I’ve been so susceptible to infections. This Tuesday I’ll have a bone marrow biopsy. And Wednesday or Thursday will begin treatment with chemotherapy. The short term prognosis is good. I’ve been told to expect to be terribly sick for the first week or so,” blah, blah, blah. This is, John, if it wasn’t so tragic it would be hysterically funny. This woman spends her whole life about being sick because she’s been sick and survived. So what’s the way to survive?
Hanley: Stay sick?
Tanzer: Got it. And you know what? She really is. Her body is doing what her mind says. What’s not present is consciousness. Now, consciousness is conscious of itself. But we are unconscious of consciousness. But consciousness has got lost in the mind. The being, the spirit got lost in the mind. And we think we’re this record and this form that is being run by it all until you get to wake up and go home. I’ve worked with some people who have had some pretty nasty diseases. One guy right now who is a veterinarian on the East Coast had a brain tumor diagnosed a year and a half ago right after he retired in Panama on 17 acres on an island that he bought. He couldn’t handle retirement. And after three months down there, his wife calls me. He’s in the hospital with convulsions. And they diagnose a brain tumor. And they couldn’t fly him back here to do surgery. They had to do it down there. They took one out on the outside of the brain, another one on the inside of the brain. I have spoken to this man every day for a year and a half. He went through the surgery. He got flown back here. He went into Yale. He had chemotherapy for a year and not one side effect because I just laughed with him. I’d call him. What they do is you go in every month or two and they poison you. And they recover you. So I’d call and say, “Hi, David, this is poison control calling to find out if you’re sufficiently close to death so we can try and save you.” He would get to hysterical laughing. They thought he was nuts. But this guy is cancer free. This is not the only person I’ve had those kinds of things happen with, John. If I can just get them to get beyond the thinking. See, this email I got this morning, this woman is her patterns. There’s no altitude there. Where her attention goes is where her energy goes. And she’s been sick her whole life. You know people like that, the way they survive.
Hanley: Well, we only have a little time left here. I want to cover some other basis. In the ‘80s you became a famous EST trainer.
Tanzer: Yes.
Hanley: And I suppose you learned about the light side and the dark side of transformation and life itself. Looking back on it, how do you contextualize that experience?
Tanzer: Oh, my, that’s a tough one. Let’s put it this way. In looking back, in hindsight, there are things I would change. I think could have made life a little easier for a lot of people including everybody involved in the game. But I wouldn’t trade it for the world, John. The time I spent doing public transformation work, you know, with EST and some time with the Lifespring trainers was one of the most exciting, amazing times of my life. And the gift that people gave me by allowing me to be as intimate with them as they did it just altered my life. It was like smelling the beautiful flowers that returned me to this spirit within me. It was a great gift. And I’m, you know, I’m very thankful to have had the opportunity to play at that level with people.
Hanley: How did you deal with the whole submission to the organization kind of mentality?
Tanzer: I was so committed to making a difference that that’s what I kept my eye on. I kept my eye on that seam on the ball and was not focused on having enough.
I was focused on making a difference, having fun, and making a living. And I was earning a living. I had been a success in the world before I became a trainer so I wasn’t doing trainer in order to anything. You get what I’m saying?
Hanley: Yeah.
Tanzer: But I was just playing the game full out. I was in because I chose to be, John. And therefore there was no suffering. So acceptance is a really a choice. I knew I was right where I had chosen to be. And I was very thankful for it. And I loved what I was doing.
Hanley: Awesome.
Tanzer: There are several things I would change. But hindsight’s always 20/20. But if I had to live my life over again, I would do it again. I would choose that one.
Hanley: That’s a hell of an experience.
Tanzer: Absolutely. We had more fun. You know, when I think of some of the advanced work that we did, John, what a gift people gave us letting us in at that level.
Hanley: Definitely.
Tanzer: No kidding. And we got to see what jerks we were.
Hanley: Well, it’s a great school for us, absolutely.
Tanzer: No kidding. Now, what do they say about you teach what you need to learn. Boy, have we been in an intense program.
Hanley: Exactly. Now, I want to ask you, I guess, philosophically here, one of the main things I’ve been teaching for a long time is this idea that life itself because we live in time, is going to involve a certain degree of pain and suffering.
Tanzer: Yes.
Hanley: And there’s actually great joy in surrendering to that and even celebrating it.
Tanzer: Yes.
Hanley: Rather than trying to, you know, always avoid it or make it go away.
Tanzer: Yeah.
Hanley: So what do you think of that? And especially in relation to your spiritual work which sometimes sounds like transcending that.
Tanzer: Yes. So the Buddha said a long time ago, people are suffering because of three things essentially. One, they don’t accept impermanence; two, they think there’s a separate self; and three, they think there’s a heaven to get to. So pretty much these days for the most part, I don’t feel much like a lot of Herb here. There’s a form called Herb. I’ve been sailing since I was, you know in my teens. And I’m seventy-four. And I’m a good sailor. I know how to be on a boat. And we’re on this boat recently. There were four of us. There was the captain. There was a forty year old guy. The guy who owns the boat is sixty-two and in very good shape. And another guy who is a coastguard auxiliary enthusiast. And we all knew how to sail and I just sat there and said, “You know what, I’m not going to chase around this boat and hauling sheets and pulling on ropes. They don’t want me here to show my physical prowess. I’m just going hang and once in a while I’ll say something that’s intelligent. And we had a blast. If I had to go zipping around and up to the bow to untangle something that was caught on a cleat or something, I would do it. But that wasn’t what I was there for. I realized as I get older, we have a tendency to treat elderly people like useless. You know what I’m saying? In this culture. But I realize, no. I don’t have to do the physical stuff quite so much anymore. Look, I want to. But I’ve got this wisdom if you will that I can bring to the party merely by having made seventy-four years of mistakes. So I can coach people, that is to share my experience that may create some new openings for action, or new freedoms to be in the same kind of circumstances that I may have already walked through.
Hanley: Absolutely.
Tanzer: So that’s pretty much what I do
And therefore I’m not suffering, John, because you know what, here’s what’s so. I’ve actually accepted dying. And it’s really amazing. I’m not intent on doing that. I’m having too much fun living. But I know that I’m not going anywhere. This form will go. You know, I may end up in your garden. But energetically I ain’t going anywhere. I don’t what’s next. But I just don’t have any fear. I suspect dying is like letting go of the fierce struggle to maintain the viability of this form. It may be an incredible sense of freedom or relief when you return to the totality of the energy, the universal intelligence, the consciousness that gave rise to this form. You know, the fall from grace was when we thought we were John or Herb.
Hanley: But how do you connect that with, for example, I’m sure, well, I know, that you have very let’s say, for example deep love for your wife.
Tanzer: Yes.
Hanley: And so that I think involves some, well, a certain degree of vulnerability there and, you know, you love her so much and yet you know it won’t last forever.
Tanzer: Yes.
Hanley: Doesn’t that actually add to the intensity of the love? Whereas if you always focus on well, I’m not this ego thing, that would dissipate it. I mean, if you dissipate the pain, don’t you dissipate the love too?
Tanzer: No. So I don’t dissipate. No. It’s more free. I’m free for the love even more.
Hanley: Talk about that.
Tanzer: Well, so first off, forget about my wife. What about I’m going to lose this thing that’s talking now? And man, I don’t like the thought of that. I’m having too much fun. But what’s the alternative to playing full out? Would it be to try and conserve it? It’s going to go and the same with my relationship with my wife. Every once in a while, I get really sad at the thought about my dying. You know what I get sad about? That she is going to be left without me. And how sad she’ll be because we have so much fun together. But then I get over that and say, she’ll find somebody else or do something else. Maybe she’ll get another dog. So when we got married, given that there’s eighteen years difference, that I’m eighteen years older than her, I have a friend of mine who’s a physician said he’s a little concerned about the difference in our age could be dangerous. And I said, “Look I’ve thought about it. I got what you’re saying. And here’s what I’ve come up with, you know. If she dies, she dies.”
Hanley: You’ll live somehow.
Tanzer: But the truth is, do you get what I’m saying, so I will love her freely and use up every moment of being here playing full out because I don’t know much else how to play. There are times I will say, “I’m going to be a slug today.”
Hanley: Sure.
Tanzer: Yeah. And very often on Mondays. I don’t like working on Mondays because when I was a kid on Mondays you had to go back to school. And as I’ve gotten into my seventies, I’ve essentially declared Mondays a holiday.
Hanley: That’s cool.
Tanzer: Isn’t that good. Like today, I had a seven o’clock call because I couldn’t resist. But, I’m screwing off. That’s why I had Monday available to talk with you.
Hanley: Cool. Alright, well, now last thing here. I don’t know how much you do it now, but I know for a while you were very much into surfing.
Tanzer: Yes. I still surf. And I work out five to seven days a week for about an hour. I do a half hour of aerobics and some light machine work for I would say 20 minutes.
Hanley: So there you are. You’ve just caught a wave. You’re on this surfboard. And you’re headed towards the beach, what is Herb Tanzer experiencing?
Tanzer: Flying. It feels like flying. Like I’m balancing on this absurd thing that’s zipping over the waves, and I can see down on the bottom the reef and vegetation and when the water’s clear, it’s just the best. And then I get knocked on my ass.
Hanley: A perfect ending, huh?
Tanzer: That’s the way it ends. I started enjoying surfing when I realized it always ends with falling. So I started to create really inspiring ways of falling. And then I wasn’t surfing resisting falling anymore. And it got to be fun.
Hanley: I think that’s an awesome metaphor for life.
Tanzer: Ain’t it the truth. And what they used to do is just let the good times roll. So I keep saying to myself, it ain’t serious. It just isn’t serious. That doesn’t mean I don’t get intense. But that’s choicefully, cognitively. But it ain’t serious. You know, you and I, you’re a couple of years younger than I am, John, but you’ve made some mistakes in your life, yes?
Hanley: I’m sure I have. Yes.
Tanzer: And so have I. And you know what? You notice, here we are. So, life is a rip off if you expect to get what you want. Life works if you choose what you’ve got.
Hanley: George Harrison sang life goes on within you or without you.
Tanzer: That’s right. And here’s the best part of it, John. You can lose what you have. But you cannot lose who you are. Therefore there’s nothing to worry about.
Hanley: Well, with that I think we’ll bring the interview to a close.
Tanzer: Sounds good, John.

David Gerrold Interview

2006-07-11T09:35:00.000-07:00

David Gerrold is a bestselling and award-winning science-fiction author and screenplay writer.

Hanley: Well, thank you for doing this. Let me first ask you, when you were younger, what do you remember drawing you into the world of creative writing?
Gerrold: That’s a good question. It’s a great question. I think the earliest memories I have were…I used to love animated cartons, and not just the Disney stuff, anything that had drawings moving. It goes back to before television. I grew up in an age before television was commonplace. So going to the movies was the only place where you saw pictures that moved. So I was totally enchanted by drawings that moved. I couldn’t understand pictures that moved, so how could drawings move? And so animated cartoons fascinated me from the very beginning. And then everything that was out of the ordinary like rocket ships or aliens from space -I started getting interested in everything that was futurist simply because I wanted to live in fantasy land. I was impatient with where we were. I wanted to live in the next step.
There was a point where I was maybe nine, ten years old, devouring every book I could get my hands on and I think that accelerated my education because it was so much reading. But there was a point where I began to get frustrated around, let’s say, twelve or thirteen. They weren’t always telling the stories I wanted to read. So if I wanted to read the stories I wanted to read, I had to start writing them myself.
Hanley: So when did you start writing original stuff?
Gerrold: I think I actually started writing in grammar school and got serious about it in junior high school. I had classes in junior high school that encouraged me to write so that by the time I got to high school I was already signed up for journalism and creating writing classes. I was on track very early.
Hanley: And by the time you pitched your first idea to the Star Trek producers, how old were you?
Gerrold: Twenty-three.
Hanley: What had you done in the field of creative writing between the time you got out of high school and at that point of twenty-three?
Gerrold: Well, I submitted a few stories to one of the magazines, and they were all uniformly rejected, probably lucky that they were rejected, otherwise they’d be on my resume today. But mostly, I wasn’t thinking of writing as a career at that point. I was thinking more about directing and producing. And at USC Film School I became critically aware that the single most important aspect of any movie or television show is the script. The script is really the instructions for the movie you want to make. If it’s not on the page, it’ll never be on the stage. So, once I got how critically important the script was, that was where my focus went.
Hanley: So, how did you enjoy USC?
Gerrold: Well, they don’t call it the University of Spoiled Children for nothing. I loved the classes. I wasn’t all that thrilled with some of the classmates. But the instructors were uniformly excellent.
Hanley: And so you started watching Star Trek when it was originally airing?
Gerrold: That was the big irony. I was out at Cal State University at Northridge studying theater arts. When the first episode aired on Thursday, September 8th of 1966, I watched it eagerly. I was amazed that something this imaginative had made it to television. And I sat down immediately and wrote an outline and submitted it to them the following Monday. The big joke is that the following week we went into rehearsals for the show I was in so I didn’t see any more episodes of Star Trek until we finished rehearsing and finishing all of our performances. So it was maybe three or four months before I could watch Star Trek again. But by then, the studio had said, “We like your writings. You understand the show. Please submit more stories to us when we get renewed.” So they were renewed around, I think, February or March, somewhere in there, NBC announced the renewal. And I immediately turned in five more stories. And by then I was watching episodes as fast as I could.
Hanley: Well, let’s talk about Trouble with Tribbles a little bit. Can you remember when you first had the idea for that? And how did that idea come to you?
Gerrold: Well, I thought there’s a lot of different things you can do on a show like Star Trek. It’s such a perfect show because you can go anywhere. They had had a conversation with me about, “Remember our limits, you know. We can only spend so much. We have to sell our story in an hour. And we can’t build a lot of special effects on a television budget.” So I started thinking about what we call bottle shows - you tell it entirely on the starship and so it’s about relationship stories. But there was one thing that caught in my mind, had been stuck in my mind for about ten years, and it was the rabbit in Australia thing. This was before the word ecology was invented. But I was so fascinated by the interaction of the species, so I thought wouldn’t it be fun if you had something like rabbits breeding like crazy on the Enterprise? And, of course, you’re not going to use real live animals, because you can’t. And then I thought, well, let’s have an alien creature. And then one of my classmates, this girl that I hung out with a lot, had a fuzzy ball on her keychain. And I looked at it. And I said that’s it. It was green. And I said if this were a living creature and we had a lot of them, there would be the creature that could infest the Enterprise. And you could have a lot of fun with that. I pitched it for Star Trek. And the first time I pitched it to Gene L. Coon (the line producer), he turned it down. But I went back and wrote an outline on it anyway. I pitched it again showing how the story would work. And Dorothy Fontana, the story editor, she wrote a memo, “You know, this one might be fun to do. We haven’t done a lot of funny stuff. This might be fun.” And so this time Gene L. Coon looked at it and said, “Yeah, this is workable.” So he called me in for a meeting. And we went with it. I wrote about it in my book, the Trouble with Tribbles. Eventually he took me step by step by step. And as long as I could climb each step of the ladder, outline, first draft, second draft, polish, I got to keep going.
Hanley: Now, looking back on the inception of the idea, I want to know if you think there is a certain disposition that you have that allows you to be open to creative ideas?
Gerrold: I can only tell you how it is for me. I’m a voracious reader. I mean, I read everything. I read computer magazines, camera magazines, and hi fi magazines. I read the science magazines. I used to read the news magazines regularly, but that got depressing. And I’m all over the internet. And, if somebody says something that seems oddball or curious, I want to know what it is - I can’t stand not knowing. And it makes me a bit of a know it all, I know, but what happens is I see a different map.
For example, if I’m driving on the freeway, I don’t always see just the cars. I see how much pollution is pouring into the air from these channels of transportation. Or I see the way traffic flows as a fluid in the pipe of the freeway. Or I’m looking at how many cars have only one driver and what the underlying economics of that are. I’m looking at different things other than just traffic. Wherever I am, it’s that map of all the other information that gives me other things to think about. And I start thinking about how they fit together.
So I don’t think that creativity is making stuff up out of nothing. I think it’s putting things together in ways that other people haven’t, it’s more synthesis than creation.
Hanley: It sounds like you’re making distinctions as you go through the day.
Gerrold: Absolutely. It’s kind of like if somebody says how do we reach new markets, and I start thinking well, where do you find the groups of people? Where do you find new demographics? I took note of an article I read last week in Discover magazine about how retired people don’t live as long unless they have something interesting to do. And then, well, how about the demographic of senior citizens who are looking for something to occupy their time? And suddenly, that’s a market that somebody who is looking for new markets can look at. Can we go there? So it’s a question of what do I know that fits the question but it’s a few steps outside the box. Where can I go outside the box because we know what’s inside the box? I think creativity is going outside of the box of what we know. And to get there, you have to expand the map of the territory. You have to add more things to your map. That’s my sense of it -I think other people have other answers.
Hanley: Well, let’s consider some of the possible barriers to people’s creativity. It strikes me that one of those would be walking around in a lot of “should” conversations and “shouldn’t.” Or, “This is the way it has to be.” Would you agree that that gets in the way of creativity?
Gerrold: Absolutely. The “should have” or the “should be” conversation is a barrier. It’s a major obstacle. The minute you get locked into “this is the way it has to be,” you obliterate all the other possibilities. I used to write programs for my own computer. This was a long time ago. I wrote a lot of my own utilities. I remember one of the things I learned about programming is I would get stuck, and just absolutely stuck. I’d walk away from the problem for maybe a few hours, and then I would realize where I had gotten stuck because I was trying to hammer a square peg into a round hole and that there was a better way or another way to get the result I wanted. But I had to stop looking at one particular way of solving it. I had to, again, get out of the box.
Let me give you an example. There was an exercise I had to do a couple of years ago which was go take a walk, find an object, and write something about that object, what meaning it has. And other people were finding things like flowers. But I found a piece of charcoal. And it suddenly hit me that the piece of charcoal represented the life of a whole tree. It started out as a seed, a seedling, it became a tree. It was a home for birds and animals. It provided food and shelter for small creatures. Eventually, it became wood that was used for building a house or furniture. And after that, the wood was burned. So its entire life was service. Even as charcoal it could be used to save people’s lives or it could be used to make gunpowder. But its entire existence had been one of service to the creatures around it. Most people would just see charcoal. You can use it to draw on a piece of paper or to cook with and that’s it. But I saw the whole history of it simply because, not because I know anything better than anybody else, but because of all my reading and research, I had a different map to look at, so I could see where it had been and where it was going.
Hanley: Now, when you were back there at 23 and you were on fire with all these science fiction ideas, do you remember being in a happy place in your life? And if so, do you feel like that helped you or were you even going through maybe some difficult periods and did that help or did that get in the way? What do you remember about that?
Gerrold: Parts of it were happy. And parts were very difficult. At age 23, I was a slow developer. I was always a couple of years behind everybody. So I was always figuring things about intellectually and then experiencing it later. So working on Star Trek was very happy. It was a great adventure of learning and discovery. And there was just a chance to really live up to the potential that everybody had been telling me about. All of a sudden I was not just living up to it. I was exercising it and stretching it. So that was exciting. I think for me the most exciting parts were when they would say here’s the challenge, here’s the problem we haven’t solved that I got to sink my teeth into. Well, let’s try this. Or let’s try…and it’s the problem solving aspect that was so exciting to me. The frustrating part was that as a human being, I still didn’t know who I was. I didn’t know how to have relationships or relate well with others. So I was still fighting all this self esteem shit that I had going on. I didn’t know if I had any real friends in the world. I was just a weird kid. (I might still be a weird adult. I haven’t asked anyone for a reality check recently. But it’s not like I really care any more, because I’m not going to stop being weird if I am.) This was the middle of the ‘60s where the culture was redefining itself and nobody knew where they fit in, so it was a difficult time to find solid ground on which to stand and say, well, this is who I am. That was tricky. But after I had the credit under my belt, after I had the Star Trek writing credit, I had something to feel good about. Look what I accomplished. And I think that was a major thing for me because no matter what else happened in my life, I always had this one thing I could stand on and say, I have accomplished something.
Hanley: Absolutely. Well, you hear this notion that really great art is created out of struggle and strife and sometimes depression and despair. Do you remember ever coming up with something you thought was really topnotch and you attributed it somewhat to the fact that you were in this difficult space?
Gerrold: I don’t think all great art comes from struggle and despair. But I think that for someone who has any ability, then any intense emotion, whether it’s love or hate or anger or rage or fear or sorrow, or passion or enthusiasm, any intense emotion is going to result in somehow channeling this energy into a story or a song or a movie or a play. One of my turning points happened when somebody who was very close to me was murdered, and it really just drove me crazy for a long time. I mean crazy, despair, anguish. I couldn’t talk to anybody, couldn’t tell anybody, didn’t know if anybody in the world would understand. It drove me into a shell, and I think my typewriter saved my life because I sat down and wrote a number of stories into which I just poured a lot of energy and devotion and feeling. Two of the books I wrote out of that period, I remember specifically I was writing out of that rage and grief, and so the intensity of the emotions were heightened. The intensity of passion and enthusiasm in the books was so present for the readers that people would come up to me and say the most amazing things to me because they’d been so touched by the books.
Hanley: Which books were those?
Gerrold: One was called When Harlie was One which was a love story. And the other was called The Man Who Folded Himself which was about somebody who is really all alone in the world but has ultimate power. And what do you do when you are all alone and you have ultimate power? Well, what he discovers is that without other people, it’s meaningless. Other people don’t exist for you if you’re all alone, and at the end of the book, he takes responsibility for his power.
Hanley: And you won some awards for that one?
Gerrold: No. I got the nomination. If I had let them push me into a different category I probably would have won the award. But I was a little arrogant and self-righteous and said, no, it was sold as a novel; it has to stay in the novel category. I got my ass whupped by Arthur C. Clarke. I was like, yeah, I mean, if you’re going to get beaten for an award by Arthur C. Clarke, there’s no shame in that.
Hanley: What was the other category it could have gone in?
Gerrold: Novella, which is short novel. I also felt that I didn’t want to look so hungry for an award so much so that I would let people push my book into another category just because it would have a better chance of winning there. As much fun as it is to get up and thank people who give you an award, I came to a realization out of that experience that it’s not the award. The award is just this block of lucite that sits on a shelf and gathers dust. The truth is it’s the quality of the work, that’s the real award. The real victory is when somebody writes you a letter and says, “I read your book at the right time in my life; and it saved my life because I had been thinking of suicide; and your book showed me I didn’t have to.” And I’ve got a few letters like that in the last 30 years. I mean, who needs an award when you’ve got a letter like that?
Hanley: That’s priceless. Now, I’ve been reading a little bit recently on the Beatles and their creative process. And Paul McCartney says that he thinks one of the secrets to their success is how they really would pounce on what he called accidents. If something randomly occurred, he thought most people would just say, “Well, that’s wrong. That didn’t work. Come on, guys. Fix that.” Whereas the Beatles would see something go wrong and say, “Ooh, we like that. Let’s do that again. Let’s do more of that.” Do you find that accidents are helpful to you too in your creative process?
Gerrold: Oh, absolutely. If I mistype a word - and I type 120 words a minute or faster - the natural thing to do is back up and type the correct word. But, sometimes I just stop and look at that and say, “Well that’s interesting. What can I do with that?” And sometimes I leave the mistyped word in and use it. So, I mean, that’s the little accidents. The big accidents are even more precious. The Beatles are a great example because somewhere in there they decided they would never write the same song twice, that every song would sound different. That’s a challenge that I took on years and years ago that every story I write has to be different from every other story, so that I’m never going to be typecast. I’m always looking for a new voice, a new style, a new thing. What can I try next? I got that back when I was back in college taking art courses. It’s “Let’s try a different style this week.” So I inherited that thing of, “Ok, I’ve done that. I might have done it right. I might have done it wrong. It might have been good. It might have been bad. I learned something from that. Now I’m going to try something else.”
I remember I’d be driving along listening to the radio and there’d be songs, new songs coming out, but I wouldn’t know for two or three days it was the Beatles because I wouldn’t recognize it because the song, Hey Jude, was so different from what everything they’d done before, or Come Together, I didn’t realize it was the Beatles until the DJ said so.
Hanley: You can’t beat those guys. The other thing that they were known for is they were very hard working. I mean, yeah, they might sleep late, but also they’d work 'til the early hours of the morning as well. I guess it’s kind of an obvious virtue, but still, what would you say about the necessity in the area of creativity of just simply extremely hard work?
Gerrold: Yeah, well, that would seem to me to be obvious. I’m arrogant on this one, I admit it. People who have determination but not a lot of ability are usually more likely to succeed than people who have lots of ability and no determination. See, I’m absolutely convinced that being a workaholic is the best service for your ability that you could have because all of the work that you do, you learn from it. The more you write, the more you learn. You might write a hundred bad stories, but you’ll learn something from every one of those bad stories. You’ll learn to recognize your own bad habits. Like there are clichés that might not be obvious to the reader, but along about the hundredth time you’ve typed that phrase, you start to recognize that this is a familiar phrasing. It’s hackneyed and it’s a bad habit. The hundredth time you type it, you say is there another way I can say this. And pretty soon after five or ten years of doing that you get to the point where every sentence you type, you don’t want to type something that you’ve ever read before. You don’t want to type the cliché. So I’m a stickler for hard work. I believe in sleeping late too, but once I’m up, the first thing I’ll do is sit down at the computer. And I will be at the computer approximately for the next ten to twelve hours, taking breaks for food, and occasionally just to stretch and think. But mostly I’m there at the keyboard until I hit my daily target. If the target is 1,000 words or 2,000 words a day, I’m not getting up until I hit it, because it forces me to keep asking the question, what next, what next. I know people who don’t write unless they feel like it or unless the rent is due. I don’t think that’s real discipline. I think discipline is that you write because that’s what you do. That’s who you are. I even keep a spreadsheet that measures if I make my target, did I go over my target, what’s my effectiveness, because I want to know if I’m really getting the job done. Like I said, I’m a stickler for discipline.
I don’t think that being an artist excuses you from self-discipline. I know a lot of people who go to these airy-fairy conversations about well, the muse and “I have to be in the right mental place. I have to have a toke off a joint or whatever.” They talk they can only write when they get themselves in the right space, and my attitude is, well, “Why cripple yourself?” Why argue for your limits? I have this little portal computer. You’ve seen it. I carry it with me. An idea occurs to me, I make a note of it. I can be sitting in a restaurant and suddenly I’ve found I’ve written 500 words which is the equivalent of two pages or until the waitress comes and says, “I need the table.” Wherever I am, I can write.
I took a vacation up in Canada and on that particular trip driving up to Canada and back I wrote two different stories. And it was a vacation because I really enjoyed writing those short stories. They came out of something I saw while driving. It made me start thinking of a story - I got off the freeways and drove back roads. There was a sign that said Private Hunting Preserve. What occurred to me immediately is I wonder what they’re hunting, and, of course, most people would say, deer, and I immediately thought, no - They’re hunting the fabled mysterious green people of the Northwest forest. And I wrote two short stories based on that notion. I sold them both. They’re both coming out in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction some time later this year or early next.
Hanley: Oh, awesome. Well, let’s push this a little bit here. I want to get your opinion on this. Definitely you’ve got to be open to ideas. You’ve got to be curious about how things work and how things go together. And you have to look for interesting new patterns to things, and then apply a tremendous amount of hard work into that. And from what we’ve said so far, if you do that with extreme due diligence you ought to be able to come up with something. Now, do you think there is any kind of other element in there like, I guess, it’s kind of mysterious to say, but talent or maybe genius?
Gerrold: I don’t know what talent is. People used to tell me how talented I was when I was a kid. And I said I have some talent. But as I really started to work and really started to gain control of my craft and I’m talking ten, twenty years of internal looking to see just what it is I’m doing, I’ve never been able to identify what talent is. When I started teaching writing, I trained people to think like a writer and ignored the question of talent, and for most of my students that seemed to work. They produced great results. I had a couple of people who sat in on the class because they were driving their other teachers crazy. And I said, well, as long as you’re here, do the work and see what happens. They wrote some wonderful stories and I thought, see, it’s not talent. It’s all of the other pieces.
If I had to say what talent is, though, if you were really going to, you know, chain me and duct tape me to a wall and whip me to find out what talent is, I’d say I think there’s a certain amount of internal looking, being able to look and see what’s going on inside your own head and your own heart and being able to channel that, that in some sense you’re going to the edge of the human soul and reporting back what it looks like. Because every soul is unique and different, every person has his own report. That’s the clearest answer I can give you. Other than that, I don’t believe in talent.
Hanley: That’s very clear. Now, do you believe in genius?
Gerrold: Yes. I do believe in genius. I can’t define genius except by pointing to what it accomplishes. And I think true genius is an act that transforms the world, changes the way the world thinks about itself. Einstein was a genius because he changed the way we think about space/time. By the same token, let’s say all of the people who created trainings, Werner Erhard and your dad are geniuses because they created things that changed the way people think about themselves in their relationship with the world. In the science fiction realm we have Robert Heinlein. He is a genius because he changed people’s perception of what’s possible. He was a marvelous human being.
Hanley: He wrote Stranger in a Strange Land.
Gerrold: And Starship Troopers, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Have Space Suit--Will Travel. He wrote about 50 great books. And in later years he was writing to please himself. He wasn’t writing to anybody’s specifically formula. But he was always challenging the reader’s perception. He was always asking the reader to think about something from a different point of view. To me that’s genius in that you walk away from that thinking about things differently or seeing things differently.
Hanley: Now, in the early ‘80s you got on fire with your “Chtorr” trilogy. Please tell us a little bit about that experience. I mean, do you remember just kind of being on a massive creative roll? What was that like for you?
Gerrold: If I had known it was going to be a lifetime effort I might have reconsidered. It started about 1972 doing the conversations I had at science fiction conventions about what alien species might really be like. I started designing an alien species, and I wanted to evoke a sense of wonder but also fear that I had gotten from the 1953 version of War of the Worlds and also the 1954 movie Them. I had this insight that a real invasion is not invasion. It’s colonization, and when you colonize something, you go and blow up everything that’s there. You take your chickens and your corn and your cattle and your flowers and your dogs and your cats and you take all of the things you need to set up a working ecology. I started thinking about how to design an alien ecology.
I thought at the time that it was just going to be one book. And there was just one point to make about aliens. As I started writing, it started growing. So I realized, oh, good - I’m going to have a trilogy - There’s an ambitious project.
But over the years, this whole thing started growing, and I realized the more I wrote the more there was to discover and the more there was to invent. I think it was more a process of discovery. Once I came up with the initial premise of here is an alien species and this is what is alien about them; this is the way they think; and this is why they think this way. What makes them alien is that they don’t have individual members of their society. It’s all one great big mind, and the individual members are just keepers of that mind. Once I got that, then I started thinking, well, what would it be like to be a part of that? How would that ecology function? How would it take care of itself? I made some interesting discoveries along the way. I think the whole thing was this enormous process of discovery. So for me now I’m almost done with the fifth book, maybe another 30 to 40,000 words, it’s kind of like I don’t want it to end. I don’t want to stop discovering. I want to keep exploring this thing because it’s not what I’m discovering about the Chtorr ecology. It’s what I’m discovering about ecology in general. It’s also what does it mean to human beings? What is the discovery when you bring this back to human beings, what do we see different about ourselves? See, that’s what science fiction is all about. Science fiction asks the question, what does it mean to be a human being? By considering this way far out alternate possibility, what do we learn about who we are and what’s possible for us?
This whole trilogy that grew out of control, but I don’t mind that it’s taking a long time. I’m having a great time with it. I’m just excited about the discoveries.
Hanley: Now, what year did you take the EST training?
Gerrold: May of ‘81.
Hanley: And what impact did that have on your writing?
Gerrold: The most immediate impact was I got the definition of bullshit which is anything that you use to avoid accountability. So it’s rationalization and lies and excuses and justification and explanation. I was struggling with the Chtorr at that time, and I went through the manuscript with a big black marker and crossed off every sentence that was an explanation or a justification or a rationalization, every sentence that wasn’t experiential. And the book got cut way, way down, but what was left was really compelling reading. So right there I got a very clear sense of communication – that it’s about creating an authentic experience. I wanted people to feel it. I wanted them to experience it. So the most immediate effect was what I now call experiential writing. In the process of writing, I am creating experience. First, I create experience for myself then I find the words that would evoke it for the readers.
Hanley: Very clear. Now, what year did you decide to adopt your son?
Gerrold: About 1991. And the way it happened was very simple. I’m always cutting articles out of newspapers and putting them in files. This was before you could just scan them into the computer. I had been cutting articles out about homeless children and unwanted children. I wasn’t sure where I was going with that, it was just something that kept chewing at my consciousness. I hadn’t been seriously thinking adoption until one day the LA Times had an article about an adoption fair. And I thought, gee, I wish I’d gone to that. I wish I could have been there. And that evening my neighbors came over for a barbecue and I asked them, “What do you think? Do you think I’d be any good as a dad if I adopted a kid? And she practically grabbed my arm and dragged me down to the Children’s Services and signed me up. She said, “You would be such a great dad. Just go for it.” And so I put myself into research mode for the next two weeks or so and by the end of that two weeks, the commitment was a living commitment for me. I shifted from “I could do this” to “I am doing this. I’m going to make it happen.”
Hanley: And obviously that’s been an incredible journey for you over the years?
Gerrold: Oh, yeah. Somewhere in there, in that journey, I said, you know, I’ve done the training. I’ve done a lot of training. I know how to create a game plan, and I know how to formulate a vision. I know how to declare it and share it, all that jargon. So I’m going to apply that. I’m going to have this whole thing be this great adventure. I’m going to have it be fun. I’m going to have it be about family building. I’m going to not see any part of it as a chore. Everything is going to be fun no matter what. If they ask for blood tests, great. Alright, it’ll be a blood test. If they ask for full medical exam, great. It’ll be a chance to take me to see how healthy I am. If they ask for a financial report, no problem. I’ll find out if I have any money in the bank. Whatever they ask, I decided to approach it with enthusiasm. And when it came time to actually meet Sean I approached it with the idea that all I wanted to do was just be with this child and find out if he had an open heart. For the first couple of minutes I was just terrified. But then I remembered “be with him, just open up and be with him.” Then we started laughing and having fun. And I realized, yeah, you know, the training works and it wasn’t like I was this training junkie, well maybe I am, but I realized that the skills and the tools that I got out of the training from ten years earlier were paying off now.
Hanley: And your experience with your son was the basis of your book, The Martian Child. Tell us a little bit about that one.
Gerrold: Oh, that’s funny. My case worker had asked me, “Are you planning to write a book about adoption?” I said, “Not really, but, I know how my head works is that if something interesting happens, it’ll end up in a story because I use everything in my life as source material.” For example, we had an earthquake, and I’m walking around saying, “Wow, what great source material.” My neighbors are going, “Oh, hell.” And I’m saying, “Wow, what great source material.” So I wasn’t planning to write a book. But, you know, I recognized very early on that my son’s relationship with me is that we’re great playmates. I made a promise to myself that every day when he came home from school, we would have some kind of special moment. Whatever it was, it would be something playful and happy each day. I wanted to create happy memories for him to overwhelm and overload the bad memories he had. It was a very simple game plan. There was always little games going on. And one of the games happened when we were coming back from Arizona. We’d been at a party. I overheard a woman talking about this little girl at school who believed she was a Martian. I said to Sean, “Are you a Martian?” He said, “No.” And my immediately reaction is “damn” because that would have been a really funny story. And so I just started playing the game with him. “I don’t know. You look like a Martian to me.” And he got it. And it just became the Martian game that we played for a while which was actually a pretty good game for him because he did feel alienated from other children because of his past experiences. Suddenly he had a way, a game that he could play that allowed him to experience being an alien learning how to be a human. So it was a good game for us to play. One day I realized it was a funny story, and I really wanted to write a story about how much I love my kid. That’s all the story is about, about how much I love my kid. The punch line is I don’t care if he’s a Martian or not. He’s my Martian and I love him. That’s all the story is about. That confused the first six editors who saw it. They said, “Where’s the punch line? Is he a Martian or isn’t he? What’s the problem here? I said the problem is all internal. It’s the problem is this guy is worried that the kid might be a Martian and the real punch line is ultimately he doesn’t care. He just loves the kid too much. The story was really a great big love story about that first couple of years that Sean was with me and all the fun stuff we did together and how I went from being enchanted by having this wonderful little kid in my life to actually moving to that space of I just love him for who he is. I’m in love with my family. I’m in love with my son. I think that’s why the story works so well for so many people because it’s about family.
Hanley: That’s awesome. Now, of all your book materials, what has been your best selling?
Gerrold: The best selling? There’s two answers to that question. The two books I did about Star Trek were clearly in terms of numbers, they were the best selling. And they were good books. But they weren’t mine so much as they were reports on my experiences with Star Trek. But I would say that my best selling books are The War Against the Chtorr. Those are the books that I believe have had the biggest impact. My two books about Star Trek are pretty much forgotten because there are so many books about Star Trek. But The War Against the Chtorr, Book Five, is probably the most thoroughly anticipated science fiction book that hasn’t been published yet. I mean, not just mine, but overall.
Hanley: What do you look back on so far and say, damn, I nailed that? That’s my single best work.
Gerrold: I’d probably point to two books. One would be The Martian Child because it’s so much of my heart onto the paper. And the other one would probably be A Rage for Revenge which is the third book in The War Against the Chtorr, and that’s the book in which the hero does some very deep work. It’s a big action story, I mean, with some horrible things going on, and then interweaved with it is the training that the hero goes through to recover from what he’s been through, and his healing process. I would say that that’s probably it, you know, I aspire to brilliance. I think I touch it once in a while, and that’s about as arrogant a statement as you’re likely to get out of me because most of the time if I talk about my work, I’m talking about my enthusiasm and excitement for the story. But with A Rage for Revenge I think that’s the book that stands well above everything else I’ve done.
Hanley: I’m going to have to reread that. As I told you, I loved all three of those books like 20 years ago.
Gerrold: It’s hard to find copies of. It’s very hard to find copies of.
Hanley: I know. Well, we’re nearing the end here. I really appreciate your generosity with your time. Let me ask you, has it been a challenge for you or has it just been natural to keep up your enthusiasm for your work through all the years?
Gerrold: There have been down periods. I’ve had down periods where I just felt frustrated and haven’t written for a while. But they don’t last very long. I think I’m good for about two weeks of feeling sorry for myself or getting cranky or getting distracted. I think when I have those down periods, I apply my energy elsewhere. It’s like, alright, let me work on cleaning up the files. Or let me rip this set of CDs to the hard drive so I can use my computer as a jukebox. I find something, some other project that doesn’t require a lot of brain power. It’s more busy work to keep myself busy during what I call those down times. But the excitement always comes back. There’s a point at which I sit down and I start getting curious or interested. And there’s a technique I use for remembering the original passion and enthusiasm for the idea. Somehow in remembering it, I recreate it. Usually when I get stuck, I say, what did I feel like when I started? Oh, I felt like that. Ok. Well, can I get back into that feeling? And that usually works.
Hanley: That’s great.
Gerrold: I’ve got a sequence right now where I have to write this thing where the hero does something that isn’t immediately comprehensible, but it’s really kind of shocking and a little bit horrifying. I just haven’t had the time to type it which is an advantage because it’s giving me time to think about what it’s going to feel like emotionally.
Hanley: Do you think novel writing is one of the more difficult art forms to do?
Gerrold: Absolutely. But then again, I have a bias. I have a vested interest. Let me recontextualize the question. Anybody can sit down and type 400 pages. But nobody ever writes a good novel by accident. Ok? It just doesn’t happen by accident. So I think writing a good, readable, worthwhile novel is an act of commitment and to some degree, even an act of love. To write a great brilliant heart stopping world changing novel is an act of incredible…there’s no word for it. It’s like giving birth.
Hanley: Alright. Well, listen are there any simple recommendations you have for people to spark their own creativity, whether it’s in business or in the arts, or just everyday life?
Gerrold: The best advice I have ever heard is follow your bliss.
Hanley: Joseph Campbell.
Gerrold: Yeah. Follow your bliss. If you’re not happy doing what you’re doing, why are you doing it? If you’re not making a lot of money doing what you’re doing, why are you doing it? And if the answer to both those questions is, “no,” this is crazy. I mean, if somebody offers you lots and lots of money to do something that you really don’t want to do but the money will give you an access to do what you do want to do, I could see that justification. But if you’re not making a lot of money doing it, and you’re not happy doing it, you’ve got to be crazy to keep on doing it. People put themselves in the trap of saying, “But I can’t quit. I can’t afford to quit.”
One of my political science instructors once said, “This is America. Nobody starves to death,” which I thought was an interesting thing to say because that wasn’t true. But what he was saying is that if you think of yourself as somebody that’s capable of producing results then you’ve got to get results no matter what.
Hanley: So it’s a mindset.
Gerrold: It’s definitely a mindset. There was this commercial years and years ago that said, “If I only have one life to live, let me live it as a blond.” Stupid commercial, but a great point. If you only have one life to live, what are you going to do with it?
Hanley: Very well said. I think we’ll leave it there. And thank you very much for your time.
Gerrold: Absolutely. My pleasure. I learned some stuff from you. Let me share this one last thing. When people ask me to speak stuff I get to figure stuff out. So I learn stuff by speaking it. That’s one of the things…that’s why I write is I learn stuff by putting it on paper.

Robert Hargrove Interview

2006-05-18T12:39:00.000-07:00

Robert Hargrove is a leading expert in the area of corporate coaching and a highly successfull executive coach and coach of coaches.

Hanley: Robert, how did you get started in the coaching field?
Hargrove: Well, I’ve done a lot of transformational training. I really like transformational stuff quite a lot. But I was also very interested in business. And I was working both as an organization called Relationships where we did our own transformational seminars. And at the same time I started working with Peter Senge, the guy who wrote The Fifth Discipline and his consulting company. So I was interested in both of those things.
So then about, I don’t know, maybe 1994, about 10 years ago, I got a request for a company I was doing some consulting with, Novaris, the other big drug company, in Switzerland to do a couple of days on coaching and I said, I’ll do that. I really didn’t actually know what I was doing because the coaching takes place in a very different kind of set of premises than training. If you look at the outcome of a public transformational training, you are looking for some kind of transformational experience together with other people and create a new mindset, a new shift in thinking or attitude that would result in a new quality of experience. In traditional corporate training, training is usually about trying to build and transfer skills which I think is basically impossible. I don’t think you can build any skill in three days unless it’s something like typing on a computer. So I started thinking about coaching. Instead of providing an experience, I started thinking about what a coaching program was about was helping people to accomplish something. So whereas training takes place in a domain of building skills and capability and experiences, coaching takes place in a domain of accomplishment.
So I presented this coaching workshop in which I had to make the distinction between training and coaching. And, for me, training was about a shift in mindset, building new skills and capabilities. But, again, you cannot achieve a result in a 3-day training program, can you, or a 4-day training program?
Hanley: It’s pretty tough.
Hargrove: You can get a shift in mindset. I think it’s about the most you can do. You can begin to outline skills and capabilities. But you’re not going to achieve a result like winning a downhill ski race or shooting under 80 in golf or achieving a billion dollars in sales. You can’t achieve those in a training. But training is kind of maybe like preparation for that kind of thing. So this work I did 10 years ago was based on the premise that coaching takes place in the domain of accomplishment. And the end product of the coaching was accomplishing something that was previously difficult or impossible. Or accomplishing something that was possible but doing it with a lot more power and velocity. And I talked about this at Novaris 10 years ago. And this idea seemed to make a lot of sense to people because people were used to going into these corporate training programs--I’m making a distinction in training, consulting, and coaching--and they walk out of there with a blue binder with the 10 points of leadership or marketing or finance or whatever. Or they go to a consultant and they get a report on what to do with their business. My thought about the coaching was that coaching is about---you give me…let’s decide whether it would be some high goal or aspiration for you. And then let’s work together over the course of a year or more to actually achieve that aspiration. And that seemed to ring in everybody’s ear at Novaris. And after that people suggested I write a book on coaching which basically at the time I didn’t really know anything about.
Hanley:And that book really took off for you?
Hargrove: That really took off. Then I got a call from a big---shortly after I wrote the book and still hadn’t really done that much coaching, if you follow me, I got a call from a big search firm and they were interested in buying Masterful Coaching out when at the time Masterful Coaching didn’t really exit. It was just the name of the book. And they said how much would you charge to do a year long coaching program? At that time I didn’t have any idea. They said, we charge about $100,000 for that. So I said, I think that’s probably what my thoughts would be as well. In a funny serendipitous way that gave me the idea to do a year long coaching program. And it also gave me the idea to charge big bucks. I got--let’s talk candidly between us--I got sick of doing these enrollment things for $300 or $400. You get a hundred people in the room each paying $300 or $400, that’s a hell of a lot of work. And I got sick of supporting the kind of volunteer organization you needed to do that.
Hanley: So how’s the book done for you over the years?
Hargrove:I do a lot of business on coaching.
Hanley:How many countries is it in?
Hargrove:It must be in at least a dozen countries by now. We just got a copy from Japan. I recently got one from Russia, now Saudi Arabia.
Coaching seems to be an idea whose time has come. And when I first was just doing my transformational seminars and working with Peter Senge, I thought coaching was a little idea. Now coaching has really superseded what Senge wrote about in his book, The Fifth Discipline. Those things he wrote about have become great content when people do the coaching. So, anyway let me just finish that story. So later I got a call from a guy that did a leadership seminar with me in Montreal about 5 years earlier. He said I’m now CEO of the biggest cell phone company in Canada. It was called Fido and he said that he was interested in some leadership help or whatever. I said, well, we have a new coaching program. It costs $100,000 for 1 year. So he goes, well, can you give us a better break in price because the Canadian dollar is worth less? So I said, I’ll charge you $85,000. And then we were off and running. And then we had other customers.
Hanley: Now, with all your experience coaching and also I know you’ve coached other coaches a lot, what are some key values that you think are important for the coach to display?
Hargrove: Key values, well, I think one of the things of a key value--I’m not sure exactly what my answer to this question will be--but one of the things that I do is standing for the person’s success. You’ve got to make their agenda your agenda. So whenever I’m in a coaching relationship, you know, they pay me the amount of money that I…they agree to engage me in a coaching relationship. My job is about standing for their success no matter what. I stand for their greatness. And I stand for their greatness even when they fall from it because people make mistakes or make errors in judgment. So as a coach you’re standing for people’s greatness. When I meet someone…one of the things that I’ve done…I don’t know, it’s just in my basic orientation, is I see potential in people that maybe they don’t see. I think maybe that’s one of the values: look for potential that people don’t see themselves. As a coach you’ve got to more excited about people than they are about themselves. Secondly, stand for people’s greatness even when they fall from it. Three is, one of the other values is to take the taxi meter off. Be available to people 24/7. My clients can call me any time. When I make a commitment to someone, I’m a hundred percent there. Be available. I think another one is when I say stand for people’s greatness, I think one of the things I do as a coach when I recognize someone’s potential, the second thing I do is I start to raise their goals and aspirations. A lot of people have very small aspirations. I remember I was coaching the Assistant Secretary of the Navy. And I asked him, “what’s your--he was a guy of 41 years old--I said, what’s your goal?” He said, “well, my goals are realistic. My aspirations are realistic.” And then we did some 360 feedback. And I talked to about at least 10 admirals in the Navy, Secretary of the Navy, and various others in the political realm, CEOs of big defense contractors. Everybody came back and said this guy could become the next…he could become Secretary of Defense. He could do Rumsfeld’s job one day. And all of a sudden I got him instead of looking at himself as a direct report of Secretary of the Navy, he started seeing himself as someone who could become Secretary of Defense of the United States of America. But I said, “In order for you to do a good job doing that, you have to really start to show up as a leader. Right now you’re showing up as a deal maker.” And I did some 360 feedback. And he showed up like a deal maker but not a leader. So I got him to aspire to be a transformational leader. And at the same time I got him to be someone who could transform the military, and I got him to see himself…to develop a big personal ambition for himself. So he said to me, I want to become the kind of leader who can transform the military, number one. And then I want to become Secretary of Defense. I raised his goals and aspirations in light of what was happening. So you stand for people’s greatness and raise their goals and aspirations. Then show them how they can win. That’s, to me, another very important governing value in coaching is that sometimes people have goals and aspirations but they don’t know how to win. And I think one of the jobs of a coach is to show people how they can win. Is this making any kind of sense to you?
Hanley: It sounds great. Do you make any distinction between coaching and motivating?
Hargrove: I look at motivating as just a small aspect of coaching. I help people discover the source of their own motivation. Like the guy, someone who wants to become the CEO, but he never admitted it to himself. He wants to become a great leader, but he never admitted it to himself. He wants to become the number one company in his industry, but he’s never really declared that. So I kind of uncover people’s motivation rather than try to motivate them.
Hanley: What parallel do you see between the kind of coaching you do with executives and sports coaches for example?
Hargrove: When I first started working on coaching, I kind of tried to stay away from sports coaching. It seemed like kind of superficial. But the more I thought about it, there’s a lot of parallels. What does a sports coach do? Mainly what they try to do is build a winning team that accomplishes something that people thought was impossible. The sports coach has to go there with an aspiration of building a winning team. You have to find the right players, and you have to show those boys how they can win. Interesting enough, if you go to people who are management trainers, they won’t tell you anything about that. They’ll tell you about, well, here are these 10 leadership attitudes you have to have or 10 team attitudes or 5 shared skills. With coaching, let me put it this way. The proof is in the pudding. You know whether some of the coaching was successful by whether you went to the Super Bowl - by whether you delivered a virtuoso performance with the orchestra - by whether a person went from being an average player on a sports team to being a great player - that is measured with real statistics and locker room behavior. Everything else I see in management training and leadership development is just all soft, soft stuff.
Hanley: How do you explain the success of coaches like Bob Knight, a Bill Parcells who seem to have very dominating approaches, but they still get the results?
Hargrove: Well, the first thing is…what’s interesting to me about Bill Parcells--I don’t know Bob Knight as well, but I did read some stuff about him--but Bill Parcells is an interesting guy. Whatever team you put him on that team starts to win. You put him on any team and within one goes by, they do maybe 30 or 40 percent better. The next year they’re contending for the playoffs of the Super Bowl. It happens every single time.
Hanley: But he challenges guys' manhood and he seems very manipulative.
Hargrove: He told a guy, “Why don’t you fall down on the field like a piece of dog shit. At least someone might slip and fall down. You might do some good that way?” The acid test for an effective coach--and this is a new comment coming from me which I never really thought it before--it’s not what your style is, whether your command and control style is very dominating. It’s not whether you’re empowering. It’s not whether you’re old or young or how many practices you have, whether you make people practice hard or soft. It’s whether you win or not. That’s the acid test. I think all these…I hate all this stuff with this behavioral management, leadership management development programs. They’re basically trying to have people have good behaviors. So you can have all those good behaviors and still flunk out as a leader. I remember I was working with a guy that was…I was doing consulting for the CEO of Philips Corporation. That’s someone who makes TV sets and whatnot. And there was a guy at Philips who was the head of Philips USA, all their products. And we did some 360 feedback on the guy. And he showed up brilliantly. He was an enlightened leader. He was empowering. He was inspiring. But you know what, his results stunk. Right after the 360 feedback, he was fired. But on paper he looked better than anybody else in terms of his leadership style. But he couldn’t achieve the result. He wasn’t a good enough coach to get results from his team. So the acid test of the coach is not the style. It’s the results. And you gave two very good examples. Bill Parcells is a great example. Bob Knight. But Bill Parcell’s protégée, coach Bill Bellecheck has a very different style. He’s very much more empowering, listens to the players, very focused, still very focused and very disciplined, but he passes the same acid test.
Hanley: What I’m wondering though is there some ingredient that the winners all share that if you don’t have at least that, you’re not going to be effective?
Hargrove: Some ingredient? Well, I’m not sure exactly what that is. But from my experience in working with managers and leaders one of the things, the role of the coach is to be a grounded observer. See, the coach is not on the playing field. You’re off to the side so you can see what is happening on the field that the people on the field don’t see. And I think that the best coaches are the best observers. And I work with people…and what I do when I’m doing a good job, is I help people see something that people don’t see that if they saw would make a difference.
Hanley: That’s very well said. And that may be “it” because you can do that in any number of different styles. But if you’re not doing that, there wouldn’t be much coaching happening.
Hargrove: You can have the greatest leadership and coaching style. You can have the best series. You can have the best practice drills. But you have to see something that other people don’t see. And you have to be able to tell it to them in a way that makes a difference. I’ll just give you an example. Have you heard about that formulation called the five phases of breakthrough?
Hanley: I think so. I don’t have them memorized.
Hargrove: Formulation, concentration, etc. Formulate them to break through, concentrate between the get go and get into action; build momentum is the third phase. The fourth phase is break though. The fifth phase is stability. So I was working with a group. And they were working on trying to produce a breakthrough in terms of oil exploration. And they kept coming up with more and more…they were doing more and more brainstorming and more and more formulation of the goals and the plan and the action steps. And at some point, I said, all of this sounds like brainstorming. And you guys are doing great. But you’re not moving forward. And you’ve got to move from this planning formulation to concentration which is intense, disciplined action. They couldn’t see that they were stuck in the formulation and needed to move from formulation to concentration. I saw that. Once I told them that, they were off and running. They started executing like hell, but it was just theorizing or strategizing. So I think a coach has a very good eye. Let’s put it that way.
Hanley: How would you compare coaching to therapy and counseling?
Hargrove: To me coaching is distinct. Coaching takes place in the domain of accomplishment. Coaching is not training. It’s not consulting. And it’s not therapy. See, none of those things are really actually intended to accomplish anything. The end result of a training, of consulting or therapy is not the same thing as a measurable, tangible, extraordinary result. Now, counseling…what is the objective of counseling? I think the objective of counseling is to make people feel better. Coaching takes place in the domain of accomplishment. But the best teams have players who are what? Are they sick people? Are they losers? The best teams have players who are winners. Great coaching takes place…you take people who are already winners to some degree. Or let’s say you take the people who are the most talented and you show them how individually and collectively they can win. It’s a generative process rather than a remedial process. Do you see what I’m saying?
Hanley: Well,it’s interesting that those most accomplished seem to be the most eager to be coached.
Hargrove: Exactly. Whenever I hear, well, you ought to come into our organization and coach Joe, he really needs it. That’s a sure sign to me that Joe isn’t the guy to coach. I found the most curious thing was the people who are most interested in coaching are the ones that on the surface least need it. The people most interested in coaching are the most talented, smartest, most driven, most accomplished, have the highest emotional intelligence, often times the best team players. And then they’re missing one or two things and if they had that they could be absolutely brilliant. So, coaching takes place in the domain of accomplishment. It’s generative. It’s creative. We’re creating something together. What we can create together, what we can achieve together, we couldn’t achieve individually or by ourselves. But therapy is remedial in nature. It’s about fixing…you need to go work with that person and fix them. Sometimes when you’re coaching you do need to fix something on a person. But the context of the coaching is achieving in a possible future. It’s not fixing the person even though you may need some therapy. You may need some behavioral change. You may need some attitude adjustment. You may need a different managerial leadership frame of reference. Do you follow what I’m saying? Maybe the best way of putting it is this. If you look at the tip of the leadership management development programs and you think of a boat, what they put in the bow of the boat is 3 day training classes, shifts in attitude and behavior, beginning competency that every leader should have, etc., etc., etc. With me, the bow of the boat with coaching is results, what results you want.
Hanley: What do you do when you find yourself coaching somebody and it becomes clear to you they’re not committed to being coached?
Hargrove: I don’t really have too many people like that because I screen them out. I choose my customers. They don’t choose me. So I start by asking, “Does this person have a big personal ambition?” That’s one question I want. Abraham Lincoln wanted to become president of the United States and he wanted to be respected by his fellow citizens. Do they have a big organizational ambition? Abraham Lincoln wanted to create the emancipation of the slaves.
Hanley: So you could have coached him pretty good?
Hanley: You could have coached him pretty good?
Hargrove: I don’t know. But, maybe. He had a lot of depression and stuff like that. He may have needed some remedial coaching too. Anyway, I ask if they have the willingness to be coached. Do they show up as a request for coaching? Do they have that attitude of learning, humility, curiosity? And I think one of the most important things is how we manage the coaching calendar because if I have to chase a guy then I don’t want to be his coach. I want him to chase me. So one of the best signs of successful coaching is the guy is calling me all the time. One of the red flags the coaching is not going well is I feel I’m chasing him. He’s not taking my calls. So one of the first things that will show up if the relationship is going sour or the guy doesn’t have the willingness to be coached is one, he doesn’t really listen to you. And two, he starts missing coaching phone calls and coaching meetings or finding excuses. But maybe the most important thing to keep a coaching relationship going is you have some goal that the person wants to achieve, some goal or aspiration that they’re very motivated to achieve. Two, they have a listening feel. This thing for you is very big. When I talk in a room of people, their heads turn and look at me versus look at their email. Do you know what I’m saying? Or look at the newspaper. There’s some people who I talk to, they won’t listen. So that’s a sign of the relationship going sour or there’s no action. How you know whether they listen is whether they did what you told them? Some guys may fight with me but then at the end of the conversation they go and do what I told them. But the ultimate breakdown is when you find you’re chasing them. You disengage. So I tell people…I remember telling one guy who worked for a big oil company, Conoco Philips--I said, “I’m going to tell you how this is going to work. I’m going to meet with you once a month. I’m going to talk to you once a week. That’s how the coaching process works. We’ve got to operate on this. We’ve got these goals that we want to achieve. And to do that we’ve got to operate in the same universe. If you don’t take my call or if I wind up chasing you around to set up meetings, then I’m not going to continue this. And I’ve already took all your money in advance. So you’re not going to be able to do anything about it.” That guy never missed a call.
Hanley: That’s a good set up.
Hargrove: Calendar integrity is very important. Get coaching on the schedule. Don’t leave it ad hoc.
Hanley: Now, as much as you obviously know what you’re doing, I would think we all can get off our game a little bit. At those times if you do notice it, that you feel like you’re off your game, what happens? What captures you? What triggers you? In other words, what do you struggle with to maintain your high level of coaching?
Hargrove: Let’s see. What if I get off my game? I’m not brilliant. At times I must be a 10. And at times I must be a 1 or a 2. It’s always been a discipline for me to try to add value with everything that I say. I want everything that comes out of mouth to be something that adds value. And if I get to a time that what I’m saying is not adding value, or I’m not sure how they add value, I call up and go and get some coaching myself. I might call someone up like you and say, I’m coaching this guy and he’s got this big meeting with the Board coming up. And I want to be able to say something that really makes a difference. This is what I’ve been thinking of talking to the guy about. What do you think? And I might do that with two or three different people that I know that they kind of like…I call them coaching colleagues or just plain colleagues. And they give me some ideas. And I get reinspired and off I go. One of things I do is I try to make sure…I tell people who I’ve hired as coaches, I say that you can get away with one bad coaching session. But you can’t get away with two. And a lot of times I’ll ask a customer. I’ll say, on a field of 1 to 10, how did you like that coaching session? They say it was, well, it was about an 8. I say, really, I thought it was a 2. And they say, no, it was an 8. Well, how can I make it a 10? I might ask for feedback like that. Those are the kinds of things that I would do.
Hanley: Do you think a parent can be an effective coach with their kids?
Hargrove: I don’t think I was very successful there. Kids don’t have that kind of listening field. Kids see you as an authority figure who is trying to control them rather than someone that’s knows their goals and aspirations and ideas of success and helps them to achieve them. I think as a parent, I’ve come on too strong. It’s like if you asked me if a husband can be good coach of a wife. I think you can do it. But I don’t think most people have the discipline to come from the empowering place with their kids. A lot of times, kids don’t even have goals and aspirations. I remember I talked to my kid, I said, “You should maybe think about being an entrepreneur, having your own business.” He said, “Dad, I just want to be a kid. Leave me alone.” So one of the things about coaching is you have to get inside people’s agenda. You have to get inside people’s goals and aspirations. If you do that, then people allow you to coach them. But if the kid’s agenda is only to have fun with his friends, it’s kind of hard to do that. Of course, I think a parent is always supposed to provide good values - character building stuff.
Hanley: You obviously see a lot of value in the independent coach. Do you think a manager can be effective as a coach with their team? What are the challenges there?
Hargrove: We, as managers, all have to be coaches. I think one of the fundamental roles of a manager is to be a coach and teacher. Now, one of the big challenges that managers face is…why, why when his manager comes to coach him he shows up as an asshole. And I finally realized…and also when I coach, I may coach, manage, some of my people show up as an asshole too. So I think the big difference is that when you’re coaching you’re standing for their success. You’re making their agenda your agenda. When you’re managing, you’re trying to get them to make your agenda their agenda. This is what I want to accomplish. And this is what I want you to do. Do you see what I mean? Versus what are you trying to accomplish. How can I help you be success?
Hanley: So when you’re coaching managers do you encourage them to…
Hargrove: I encourage them to make the people in their group successful in their terms consistent with the needs of the organization. If you’re all working in this organization, this organization needs to be successful. That’s a given. But my second phase…I always say, “What are your goals and aspirations?. What are the leadership challenges, your business challenges, your career challenges? Maybe I can help you be successful. And at the same time, make your organization more successful.” Go back to that example of Abraham Lincoln. Abraham Lincoln, his goal, his ambition, was to make his fellow citizens remember him for the contribution he made. So now then he had to figure out…and there was one point where Lincoln--I was reading a book about him--was very depressed. And he said something like he’d commit suicide except that nobody would have remembered anything that he’d done to prove that his life was worth anything. So he developed an ambition to be respected by the other people. And he then had to concoct a vision for first for his own self and then the nation which was freedom. But personal ambition can drive organizational ambition that makes a difference in the society.
Hanley: What do you think is the greatest challenge in corporate culture today?
Hargrove: I think leaders need to provide inspiration. And you need to create a climate of inspiration, possibility and opportunity. And corporate cultures seem to kind of break down into a culture of resignation. Most companies if you go around, you don’t find people excited. You find them resigned, frustrated, turned off. And probably because…that problem exists because leaders…many business leaders - they don’t know how to build a business. All they know how to do is to control it. So I found that in companies where there’s more inspiration are companies that are growing and where the leader has an inspired vision of what’s possible for the company. And people see what’s possible for themselves within that, and they’re given opportunities. And they are saying, “If you’ve got a way to grow this business, I want to hear about it.” But the other guy is just saying, “No, you can’t do this; you can’t do that. They’re creating too many loops for people to jump through – bureaucratic hoops. And then people just get frustrated, turned off, resigned, why bother. So I think that ‘why bother’ attitude is probably the biggest problem of corporate culture.
Hanley: Let me try a kind of a philosophical point on you and see if you think there’s anything to this. I wonder if some part of what’s creating the resignation is this underlying premise that we’re trying to convince people that the work we’re doing is important. Now what happens, I believe, is that people eventually begin to question that. And there you have resignation.
Hargrove: Me too.
Hanley: Now what if you adopted a different stance like I don’t know if this is important. Now, why don’t we just play like it is important because that will empower us, we’re learn more, we’re have more fun, and we’ll make a bigger difference. Do you think there’s anything to that?
Hargrove: I don’t really register that. But I don’t disagree with it. It’s not something I talk about. But people have to find meaning in what they do. I think people need to feel that their work is important to be involved with it.
Hanley: But do you think there’s a value in…
Hargrove: In taking a stand that something is important even though it wasn’t?
Hanley: It becomes meaningful because I declare that it’s meaningful to me rather than trying to find the reality of its meaning.
Hargrove: It’s actually always amazed me how people can find meaning in all the most dreary kinds of work. People find work meaning…people’s work is inherently meaningful to them generally speaking. I have to find very high grandiose…I have to feel like…for work to be meaning to me, I have to feel like I’m transforming an individual, an organization, or the world. A lot of other people, they don’t need all that inspiration. They can find meaning in just cleaning something up.
Hanley: I mean there’s some meaning there. But if you really want to turn on a department or a whole organization, you may need more than that. You want to inspire them.
Hargrove: You’ve got to inspire people with something that raises their goals and aspirations. That why I said it’s one of the most important things to make people feel like they’re part of something bigger than themselves that makes a difference.
Hanley:Is there an author or certain philosophy that underlies the work you do that you keep coming back to and reminding yourself of?
Hargrove: I guess I don’t really think of anybody in particular. I’ve become more interested in historical people. I gave you examples of Lincoln, Washington, Jefferson. I’m interested in what leaders have dreamt about. I like to see leaders who have passed the acid test that made some kind of difference. What I’m talking about is basically pretty simple. Coaching takes place in the domain of accomplishment. But you need to accomplish something within a vision. Then you need to help people figure out how to do that. We don’t really look like we have that much competition as most of the time when we talk to people what they do with coaching it’s just shifting. They start with lists of behaviors and attitudes and try to get people to change those things. So I don’t have a particular author in mind. There’s a guy I like. His name is James McGregor Brunch. He wrote a book called Transformational Leadership. I like him.
Hanley: For someone who aspires to be a corporate coach, what do you suggest for them? What do you recommend for them?
Hargrove: I think they should read my book Masterful Coaching.
Hanley: Yes. Absolutely.
Hargrove: And I think they should coach people to achieve a result and shift their attitudes and behavior consistent with that. But focus on the accomplishment not on the behavior.
Hanley: Do you think anyone can learn to be a coach if they’re committed to it?
Hargrove: Everyone is capable of giving pretty good advice if they get themselves out of the way. But with the coaches we use at Masterful Coaching we say you have to have these four qualities. One is…you have to have gravitas You have to be able to walk into the room and have enough natural authority that the CEO will be impressed enough with you that he will want to talk to you or the middle manager or whoever. Two is you have to have some kind of track record of business results. If you don’t know how to produce a result you’re going to fail at being a coach because coaching is about results. Let’s take for example you were talking to me about your father. I don’t know that much about your father. But he’s obviously…he’s run an organization. He’s produced results. He’s still in business. Do you see what I’m saying? He may not be a billionaire. He may not have run a multibillion dollar company. But he’s had some track record of getting business results with some bottom line responsibility. And then three, I think people need to…they need to have some transformational results. They need to be able to transform human attitudes and behavior, human thinking, attitudes, behavior, a paradox, shift paradox, attitudes, behavior. You can be someone that’s going to get results but you don’t know how to shift people. Four, I think you need to have…I don’t know exactly how to call it--wisdom, compassion, and humor. Or you could call that emotional intelligence. You’d have to be able to respond to situations without just react to them. And then lastly, five, you have to pass the airport test. If someone is stuck in the airport with you for three hours they would enjoy your company versus wanting to run away.
Hanley: Thank you very much for your time.
Hargrove: My pleasure.