How To Win The Right Friends And Influence The Right People

Dan Sullivan: Hi, everybody. This is Dan Sullivan, and this is another episode of the podcast Anything and Everything with Jeff Madoff. And Jeff, it always surprises me what we're going to talk about, which I think is consistent with the title of the podcast series.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yes. Where we start is no indication of where we're going to end up or go along the way. That is true.
 
Dan Sullivan: That's right. Jeff, last time we were just ending the podcast and you brought up a whole issue of archetypes, and I was noticing that Meghan Markle has a new podcast series called Archetypes.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Oh, really?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. And I was looking at Jung, the famous psychiatrist, psychologist, I'm not sure what he was, but he is responsible for, I think, really bringing this back into the late 19th century, early 20th century, because it had started, and I remember it very clearly because I went to a college where we actually read Plato, not textbooks about Plato, but Plato I think may have been the first person where we have writing to save it, where he talked about that everything that you see around you is just a watered-down version of a universal archetype, and that the archetypes exist as a separate reality, and that what we actually see is a pale representative, that real life is actually just a shadow of an ultimate reality that lies above us. And that was a big breakthrough at the time, because he was the first one who talked about that there's actually a higher reality that we strive to get to, but we're not actually in it.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, I would posit, as a matter of fact, I will posit, that archetypes have been with us since early communication.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: And before the written word, there was the oral tradition of stories. You can go back to the Bible, and I think David and Goliath are archetypes.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yes. Homer with Odysseus. Yeah.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: And so I think that probably the person that modernized it in the storytelling is Joseph Campbell in The Hero's Journey, where he talked about the hero and the archetypes along the way. And the interesting thing I think that we started to touch on last time was how these basically, if you will, to use modern vernacular, the avatars, the online avatars for those archetypes, I think that social media has allowed the idea of an archetype to spread in a way that of course no one could have foreseen. Because then, the ultimate social media archetype is also transactional interchange, which I think changes the whole nature of what an archetype is. What do you think of that?
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, I think it's true. I think all the media starting with radio, I mean, if you talk about the first where you had electricity involved in it, were the early movies, then radio came in, and then television and theater has always made use of archetypes. I was reading quite a good essay the other day on Hamlet, and how much Hamlet is the architect for the tortured person who understands what's going on but can't take action, and there's the long monologue. I mean, the character of Hamlet I think has more stage time than any other theatrical character in history and oftentimes just talking to himself.
 
Freud said that he thinks that Shakespeare himself is a crossover point where individuals in the audience are let in on what's going on in a character's mind. He goes off, monologues goes off, and he's got lots of characters who do this, especially the tragedies. In the history plays, there's always this Falstaff goes aside and has a discussion with himself. The word Hamlet-like is very much used in politics of someone who clearly has great capability but overthinks things and then doesn't take action.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: How does an archetype become an archetype? What is the defining characteristic and how does it land on that particular archetypal of character, if you will?
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, I think the hero, obviously someone who's a hero, that's one of the major archetypes. The hero was needed just because virtually so much of human history, both oral and written, is about an individual takes on personal responsibility for dangers that are threatening the tribe. My sense is that it was very, very important from the very, very beginning if you had a gathering of people who faced all sorts of external dangers, that there was certain individuals in the tribe who took it upon themselves to protect and also to solve problems that nobody else in the tribe could do, so I think the hero emerged very early.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: But I wonder if that hero emerging is that also were some of these... How can I articulate this? You can't have a hero without a villain, and the hero's journey is not a hero's journey if there's no obstacles along the way. In some cases, it becomes a cautionary tale. And I'm wondering if those early archetypes were more to keep people in line rather than inspire action.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, I think first of all, there's a structuring that had to take place in any community. So I think that there's a series of expanding groups. I think everything started off basically with the family as being the basic organizing group, and that comes down to today. It comes down today that there's a very, very interesting side, but since we're talking about as something, but we can talk about anything else, that in wealth and inequality in the United States, it's always talked about that the greatest division in income and wealth is actually between families, but it's not true. The actual greatest inequality is actually within families. You'll have family with mother, father, and a group of siblings, and there'll be one of the siblings who just succeeds and achieves in a very, very disproportionate manner. That would be true in my own family. I've just gone way, way, way beyond, not only anyone in my family, but anyone in all the relative networks that I know that I've done more.
 
And I know because I helped finance the grandchildren of my siblings. I have six siblings, and at the grandchildren level, I've paid for half the tuition now for a dozen of them. And I think Uncle Dan is seen as a real hero. He's seen as a real hero, but it's only half the tuition, so I say I'll pay for half the tuition. And the reason is there's so many grants. I mean, literally there's so much money for college that's available in the American public, from government, from foundations, from other funding bodies that literally everybody, if they were a bit of a detective and actually thought things out, literally everybody could go to college and university.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: I mean, I imagine finding one's way through the bureaucratic thickets of grants and everything else, that's a pursuit in and of itself if you have that capability.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Well, it was my case. I borrowed every cent except for living expenses. I borrowed every cent to go through college in '67 to '71. And when I was finished college, I owed... This is 1971, I owed $16,000, and I paid it off for over about a six-year period. I paid it off. But the living expenses came from the fact that I served in the Army and I had three years. They gave you a month and a half GI Bill for every month that you were in the service. So I had three years, 36 months of a living expense money. It just perfectly handled my living expenses when I was at college. So, the borrowing and the GI Bill were what got me through college. I couldn't have afforded to go to college if I hadn't had that. But I sense that the challenge is a lot bigger these days than it was in the 1960s.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah. I think that the percentage of one's income that goes towards school is substantially higher now than it was back then. And I remember it also used to be the rule of thumb was one week's pay, one month's rent. And that's a much higher percentage now than it used to be.
 
Dan Sullivan: Oh, yeah, yeah. Well, and the other thing is that it was a bit like Fannie Mae, that once the government guarantees debt, the private sector takes advantage of the fact with Fannie Mae, and I forget what the other large lending organization is. The universities have done the same thing. If the government will guarantee loans, then they just raise the tuition.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, and as you and I both know people that make a very good living facilitating student loans and getting a part of that.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yup. It's part of the deal.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: But going back to archetypes, I want to-
 
Dan Sullivan: Heroism can take, if we're just talking about heroes, I think it takes a lot of different forms and it changes from age to age. What constitutes a hero.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Actually, that's what I was going to bring up because now one could argue that Steve Jobs was an archetype.
 
Dan Sullivan: I believe. Totally. And I think the proof of it is Elizabeth Holmes.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: In terms of her imitation of his presentation and just...?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: I think that replacing him, and it's interesting how we always seem to have this need to hold to somebody up as the archetype of brilliance, whether it's in finance or whether it's in invention or whatever. I mean, Edison marketed himself as a solo genius. He was far from it, but he marketed himself as that.
 
Dan Sullivan: He's remembered so much simply because he pioneered all of the modern structures of technological progress in the sense that he had a vast research lab in Menlo Park in New Jersey. And he had a hundred technicians, engineers, scientists who were on the payroll, and they were expected to bring out so many new patents. The other thing is he really understood the power of intellectual property law, and he also understood marketing in a way. And I think that Elon Musk has borrowed archetypal qualities from Steve Jobs.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Absolutely, absolutely.
 
Dan Sullivan: But he also went back to Tesla himself. It's not a mistake. It's not a coincidence that the name of his car is the Tesla. I think he was picking up on an archetypal image. I don't see anything wrong with it. It's just part of our inheritance that we have these archetypes. They're outside reference points that if you imitate to a certain degree, it communicates a lot right off the bat.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah. I don't know how accurate necessarily that communication ends up being. I think it becomes more mythic than actual, but I don't see anything wrong with it either. Unless there is a deception that is going on that costs people money or well-being or something, then you're a con, you're not an archetype. But you could be an archetype con. I mean, Fagin in Dickens's novel, is an archetype con, right? Madoff was an archetype con, probably even more so was Ponzi from Massachusetts.
 
Dan Sullivan: Charles Ponzi?
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah. So they were archetypes in terms of conning people. And we tend to compare things, which is really interesting, because the archetype for computers, our brain, although our brain doesn't really function like a computer does, but that's our computer.
 
Dan Sullivan: That's my next book. You Are Not A Computer. My next little quarterly book.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Is that true?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, yeah. You Are Not A Computer, because the computer is held out by certain individuals in the big tech world that, at a certain point, the computer will replace human intelligence because speed is very, very deceptive. I mean, movies seem magical, but what makes it magical is the speed at which images seem to come alive. I think the archetypes can be either positive or negative. I mean, anyone who shows the least bit of authoritarianism is immediately called Hitler-like. It's like Hitler-like. Hitler is an archetype. He's an evil archetype, but it's called Godwin's Law. There's actually a law called Godwin's Law that the first person to lose an argument is the first one who mentions either Hitler or Nazi. Well, the Nazis are... I mean, they're just a permanent evil archetype.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Right. No, absolutely, yeah.
 
Dan Sullivan: Joe McCarthy. McCarthy is an evil archetype.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Right. And yeah, it's interesting. I think Hitler ruined that little Chaplin-like mustache and the comb over for everybody since. You really aren't going to think about, "Maybe I should grow a little mustache like that or comb my hair over."
 
Dan Sullivan: No, no.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: That's just gone.
 
Dan Sullivan: No, no, no. Don't go there.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: That's right. That's right. But I think it's really fascinating because the question arises, it's an epistemological question, which is what is real, and what is that real archetype? I mean, the Superman is an archetype, and why do certain things stick? And I believe there's something that I call the myth of replication where other people try to do it. But I don't think that Elon Musk called himself... I think his ego is way too big for him to think that he got it from Steve Jobs. He is who he is. Right?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: But the public, the way the public-
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, I think it's ascribed. I mean, I think Elizabeth Holmes was intentional.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yes.
 
Dan Sullivan: I mean, it was such a big hit when people thought it was legitimate because here's a woman version of a high-tech male archetype.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Right.
 
Dan Sullivan: And I think she consciously developed it. I mean, she even took voice lessons to lower her voice so that she had this sort of husky voice, which she actually doesn't have, and you could tell at the trial that she didn't have it anymore. I mean, it's more of what you would consider a woman to have that type of voice. And then, she took on the victim architect.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: The archetype, yes.
 
Dan Sullivan: Then, it was her partner who manipulated her and that she was innocent, so victimhood has become a great archetype in our time. To be a victim, it's got a ranking. There's a race to the top of the victimhood.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: When you mentioned Elizabeth Holmes, interesting character because, in my surmising, her attempts to emulate Steve Jobs from the black turtleneck to the way she modulated her voice and everything else, what that said to me was she was a con. And she was a con and raising money against a product that she knew didn't work. And without getting into the weeds of all of that, I think that what's interesting is that the public, I think you're right, ascribes that, and I think people can try to be that. But in her case, as in the case of many, there's that myth of replication that I call it, which is you're not going to come across like that. I don't think her intent was to con, but I think the con was a means to an end.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, she was a risk taker in the sense that if she could get enough upfront money, I think there's stages that a con artist goes through. And the first one is that you hope that the constant info of new investment pays off the previous investments.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, especially in a Ponzi, that is a Ponzi, right? What you just said?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Well, it is a Ponzi. It was like Social Security. Social Security was a government calculation because it was introduced in 1936, but it paid off at 65. But the average lifespan when it came in was around 50. As a matter of fact, the first 60 years from 36 to 96, a 60-year period, the average payout was 29 months after retirement age. But the vast majority of people didn't even make it to retirement age, 65, so it was a calculation on the part of the government is that the new investments coming in from new workers would always pay off the growing demands from those who entered into social security. And what they didn't figure on was a really remarkable extension of lifespan during that period of time. And now, they're talking, I mean, there's a serious talk of raising retirement to 70. Structurally, that's a major change.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: But it makes sense. I mean, look at us. I deferred my social security till I was 70 because it was advantageous to do so, but you're waging a bet, right?
 
Dan Sullivan: Mm-hmm.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Your calculus is that, "I would have to live to be..." I don't remember what the years are, but yeah, "I would have to live to be X plus in order for that waiting for five years to pay off." So you get a higher rate, but you don't net more until four years into it or something, so it's kind of fascinating. But why do we need heroes?
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, I think to a certain extent, people don't sense it in themselves. It's very clearly needed. History sort of proves, who does history record as some of the most important people? They record heroes. There's no question that without Lincoln, the whole issue would never have been solved. The growing apart of two parts of the United States in a very fundamental way would not have been solved except for Lincoln. Jeffrey Madoff: So how would you define a heroic act? What is it that makes a hero?
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, I think part of it is an articulation of the present situation that's really better than what anyone else is doing. I think it's partially a communication power. Everybody's suspecting that something's not right, but every time their thinking starts to approach a decision or a decisive action that would bring things to a head where it had to be decided one way or another, I think that's part of a hero's power. There's a power there that they can say what everybody else is sensing, but nobody wants to think it through completely. They don't want to think it through because at a certain point you have to line up on one side or the other of the issue. You're going to be either courageous or you're going to be defined as cowardly. In a general sense, the society is. Yeah.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: So does courageous behavior, in order to be courageous, would you say that's a condition of heroism?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, I think it's swimming upstream. You're not going with the flow. You're saying, "Nope, I'm going to take a stand here." There's a taking of stand. That's certainly a thing, and it's when the person takes the stand. I remember there's a speech that Lincoln gave, and I think it might have been before his election or it might have been shortly after his election. And what he made was a prediction that the United States had the potential to be the greatest economy in the world and the greatest society in the world. He was looking forward a hundred years. He was looking forward essentially to 1960 when he made it. And he went on, his speeches were very short. I mean, a Lincoln speech was never more than 10 or 12 minutes, and he just said, "It's going to happen." But he said, "Everything I'm predicting here will not happen if we don't decide this right now. We have to decide this right now."
 
And the attack on Fort Sumter, South Carolina, the attack happened as soon as Lincoln was elected. It happened within the week after Lincoln was elected. And so it was very, very clear that he was the catalyst that started the Civil War. Catalyst, I think another thing you're a catalyst, it takes a very complicated, complex situation, and it suddenly simplifies it. It makes it binary. And I think architects make things binary. In the personality of an individual, all of a sudden the issue is assembled. I think... What's his name in the Ukraine?
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Zelenskyy.
 
Dan Sullivan: Never in his worst nightmare would Putin think that his biggest enemy is a five-foot-five Jewish comedian.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Right. That's for sure.
 
Dan Sullivan: But think about that from the Jewish standpoint, the Ukraine would not have... They would've reacted, they would've responded to the invasion, but they had had an invasion for eight years previously of the eastern part of their country, and he was the one who basically became the public face for not giving in. That's heroic.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: And in a way an archetype.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, he's an archetype.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: But the question is... So, you brought up two interesting examples. One, historic with Lincoln. And Lincoln made a calculation, and part of that calculation was a risk that he was aware of. Zelenskyy, if you will, heroism was foisted on him. He had to behave in a certain way in order to be heroic. There was risk all around him, but none of that was his choosing. Heroism was foisted on him, which, he could have crumbled under that weight, but he rose to the occasion. Is there a difference when committing a heroic act? What if it's somebody that runs into the burning building and saves somebody's life? Are they a hero? And they had to act like that [snaps fingers] in order to-
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, I think there's considerable risk. I think that the person is speaking and then acting in a way that entails personal risk. If the Russians had actually captured the government in Kyiv, they would've been shot. They would've been shot. And I think if Lincoln had ever been captured by the Confederates, it would've been bad news for him personally. And he was very unpopular. I mean, everybody acts as if the full force of the Union was with him. They weren't. Now, I mean, he won the election by I think less than 40% of the vote. There were other candidates there. I may be wrong on that. I don't know the exact thing, but he was not popular. And throughout the war, there was danger that he would be...
 
Certainly, he would be defeated in '64, and a lot of people think it was the not-loss. It wasn't a complete victory, but the not-loss at Gettysburg was the first thing that actually started to turn things. And I think Vicksburg, when he got the right general in there, and the great hero of the war from a military standpoint was Grant. He was just very, very simple in his thinking. He says, "We always outnumber them. We always have more supplies. We always have more firepower than they do." So he said, "We just utilize our strengths and overpower them." And he just kept doing that over and over and over again.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: But is there a distinction between thinking a strategy through and making the action decision after you've thought through the strategy as best you can? Like what you're talking about with Grant, that was a strategy with Lincoln and so on. And someone who has to act quickly against imminent risk, is there a difference in the kind of heroism, if you will?
 
Dan Sullivan: Sure.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: And what that requires-
 
Dan Sullivan: But I think that's determined by circumstances. I was talking to some people who have very strong ties with Israel, and Israel really sat on the fence with this whole Ukrainian-Russian thing.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, for economic reasons.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Well, they do business with both. But the other thing is, I said, "You're the Prime Minister of Israel, and it's hard because you look at the number of the Jewish people killed by Russians. It's about 1.5 million and by the Ukrainians it was about 1.5 million. So it's kind of hard to decide." And so, the whole point was that there's lots of ambivalent dimensions in almost any historic situation. History is the record of everything we weren't expecting.
 
And if you had given Ukraine, knowing what the image was of the Russian army, where they have massive numbers of soldiers, they have massive amounts of weaponry, and they had taken over the eastern part of the Ukraine, they had the wars with Chechnya. They had been very influential in Syria. And you said, "Well, this is going to be over in a week." And everybody was betting it was like a week, maybe a week like this. Well, we're past six months now.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Right, right.
 
Dan Sullivan: And right now, the most offensive part of the war right now is on the part of the Ukrainians.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: And how so?
 
Dan Sullivan: The Russians are outthought, they've been out-strategized, they've been actually outshot to this point in the war, and they just have far better intelligence. I said it's the world's first global live action weapons trade show because everybody who's got brand new weapons is giving them to the Ukraine to test out. The Swedes and the Swiss are shipping them their latest weapons, and they're getting rid of old inventory. Everybody's getting rid of old inventory. But there's an individual at the center, this why Churchill, you can say anything you want about him, and he had a very checkered past as a politician—he was in one party, then he switched to another party, and then he switched to another party. And he was responsible for some colossal disasters in the First World War and a lot of missteps.
 
But both from a standpoint of articulation about the fact that under no circumstances would Britain come to any agreement with the Germans. And then withstanding the Blitz, this is before the Americans are in the war, it was just basically his articulation for everybody to understand where they were, which I think actually turned the tide, and people hated it. They said he was imperialist, he hated labor, and everything else. And they said, "Yeah, but at crucial moments, the right person has to be there at the right time to do it." And he had prepared himself his whole life for this. I mean, he had thought about this as a child and a teenager. He was going to be the great hero who saved the British Empire. As it turns out he did, but he preserved Britain.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: So that raises an interesting question regarding-
 
Dan Sullivan: Questions, questions, questions. What am I going to get an answer out of you?
 
Jeffrey Madoff: I know which fountain to drink from. Are there new archetypes? Are there new archetypes that are being formed because circumstances in some ways are so different? Or will it always be narrowed down to the hero? The transformative character? The things that we've come to learn from like Joseph Campbell and so on? Or are there new archetypes because our world is different?
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, depending on whether the times are optimistic or pessimistic, I think the nature of the hero would change. But right now, we're in a pessimistic era, and it's much more of a subjective than an objective time right now. And what I mean by that is that the period of the late 1800s, probably from mid-century, the great heroes were the ones who created new technologies. The railroad, the telegraph, the telephone, electricity, the internal combustion machine, and then the chemical revolution. What you could do with chemicals in terms of dyes and all sorts of solutions. And I think that that went from...
 
First of all, it was a relatively peaceful century after the defeat of Napoleon in 1815 until the outbreak of the First World War, which was 1914. You had virtually a century where the world was fairly peaceful and there was a vast expansion of people's lives being improved by technological breakthroughs. McCormick, the inventor of the reaper—not so much the inventor, but he was the mass producers of reapers—allowed one person in the wheat fields of America to equal the working power of 15, 16 men who would otherwise have to do this by hand. I think it was a very optimistic world, the end of the 1800s, right up until the First World War. I think since the first World War, things have been very pessimistic.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, I think that there's some interesting things behind that. I mean, the McCormick reaper and the cotton gin.
 
Dan Sullivan: The cotton gin, yeah. Which actually saved the Confederacy. They would've fallen apart without the cotton gin. I mean, it was on both sides. And that was the problem, is that everybody thought, at the time of the founding of the country, they thought that slavery would just die out because the new industries at the northern part of the country were already pioneering and exploring or importing from elsewhere. The economy of the union was incredibly more powerful than the economy of what turned out to be the Confederacy. And the cotton gin was actually the game changer that I think it brought it to a head because they said that they're not going to collapse because it made cotton so cheap. And cotton was one of the great breakthroughs in the 19th century.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, it's how Lehman Brothers got their start, was this cotton brokerage.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Well, I mean it's really told well in The Lehman Trilogy.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah. Brilliant.
 
Dan Sullivan: They supplied the plantation owners. Everything plantation owners needed, the Lehman Brothers provided it. It was interesting, their sign—they made a big thing of how the Lehman Brothers sign changed over. Well, it lasted till 2007, I think. 2007, 2008, right?
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Something like that. Yes.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: It's fascinating. It's also interesting to think about the fact that two of the major innovations, the cotton gin and the reaper, these technological, if you will, innovations happened in agriculture and the innovations that have been happening have been happening in tech. And there really hasn't been that much innovation in the past 10 years or more, actually, which is also kind of fascinating to think about why is there innovation in a particular area? What makes the ground fertile? Not to use another farming metaphor, but what is it that makes it fertile for innovation? What causes innovation to kick in?
 
And arguably, I don't even think it's arguable, the cotton gin led to mass production in weaponry, and it led to mass production in automobiles. And I love looking at these antecedents, like what came before and what was the technology? How could you adapt that to an entirely different area like that? Which I think is amazing. The Civil War, basically it was breaking the back. Well, initially, Lincoln did not have a strong anti-slavery bent. He didn't want new slavery to continue, but it wasn't like he wanted to abolish slavery. We also realized the way to defeat the South was to destroy the economic engine of the South, which was slavery.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: So, kind of the fascinating-
 
Dan Sullivan: And the other thing, the Emancipation Proclamation did not free the slaves that were in the Union states, Kentucky being a good example, because Kentucky was a Union state, but they had slaves. And he didn't free those slaves. He freed only the slaves that were in the Confederate states. I mean, everybody talks about that freed the slaves. No, it was a strategy of war to end the war. I think his assassination delayed things enormously because Johnson, who was the vice president, who became president, was a confederate. I mean, basically his sympathies were with the South. And the job of reconstruction was haphazard.
 
Slavery came back in another form pretty well. Blacks in the South were technically free, but tried to vote. It was hard to vote. Tried to get credit to create your own farms. That was very hard. And there was a great flood in the Southern Mississippi that went inland 30, 40 miles on both sides of the river. This was one of the greatest floods since the United States has been a country in the south part of Mississippi.
 
And the southern states were back in the Union, but the southern states were all given bailout loans by the state governments, but they gave no bailout loans to the Black farmers. So they went to Washington, and Hoover was the president. Hoover was... He was kind of an engineer. I don't think he had much political sense. And they appealed to him. And he said, "It's the state responsibility. It's not the federal government's responsibility."
 
And so Roosevelt, who really tested the win every morning when he got up, so he said, "Well, if I'm president, we'll make this a national federal thing." And after year election in '30, there was a shift. And then by '32, they shifted completely to the Democrats, but that was a phenomenally important bad decision on the part of Hoover, but he wouldn't have gotten any support for it.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah. It's really interesting because as you're recounting this history and certain presidents, Washington being the father of our country, and then you probably have to wait till you get to Lincoln where you have another archetype, which is a great emancipator, right?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Exactly.
 
Dan Sullivan: And then Roosevelt... Those are the three.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: That's right.
 
Dan Sullivan: There isn't a fourth, so far.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: That's right. I mean, I think it could be argued, I don't know how successfully, but yeah, was Kennedy an archetype. I think sometimes you can be an archetype for a particular era, but the gloss goes away.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, he's certainly been an architect certainly on the democratic side that particular individuals have fashioned themselves Kennedy-like. I remember the first one that I can remember was Lindsay, the mayor of New York, who positioned himself as a Kennedy-like person.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: I mean, a particular haircut is all it took at a particular time just to be...
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. And I think Bill Clinton very definitely, there's a great picture of Clinton as a teenager, shaking hands with John Kennedy at the White House.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yes, yes.
 
Dan Sullivan: And I think that Clinton used the imagery. He certainly used the imagery. I think it hampers the Democrats that they're still hearkening back, "Was Obama Black Kennedy?" I think that the hopes for Obama, I was at the inauguration in '08, I was in Washington because Richard Rossi has these big-
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Oh, right, right, yeah.
 
Dan Sullivan: ... educational programs. And he had 15,000 teenagers, and they put him at the University of Maryland because it was a break. And the university rents out its dormitories and the conference facilities. And we went there. But I remember being in Georgetown, Bob and I stayed at the Four Seasons in Georgetown, and I remember him sitting at the corner waiting for a red light, and there were three Black women in front of us. And they were saying, "When Obama gets in, he's going to pay off everybody's mortgages." And then the other one said, "Yeah, and free education for everybody."
 
But you could tell that Obama was being positioned as a Kennedy-like avatar. And I think there were a lot of hopes that he was going to be a very action-oriented president. It's a heavy burden for anybody to do that because Kennedy himself didn't turn out to be Kennedy. He was snuffed off.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Right.
 
Dan Sullivan: But then there, his brother definitely took on the mantle. Robert did. And then he was snuffed off. And I think after two assassinations, I think Teddy got the memo.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: It's really interesting because, again talking about these archetypes, and there's a difference between being a hero and being an archetype because I think an archetype is essentially a representation that a person embodies and that representation of the day embody, there's a lot of concentric circles around that. And I think there can be things that for an era, someone can be, but it doesn't last like stardom. And then, there are those tending more towards history. Lincoln will always be.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: And it's interesting why the light fades out or why it doesn't. And I think our appetite and need as a society for heroes and for archetypes is insatiable. Meaning that when Steve Jobs died, they had to fill that vacuum quickly, and it wasn't going to be Tim Cook. He didn't have the innate charisma to do that. Smart businessman, but he didn't have the charisma, nor did he do anything new like Jobs did. So yeah, he became more of a steward of the company than someone who was an archetype of the new technology. And I think also the fact that Jobs started back in the '70s when that was all new, harder to be an archetype.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Yeah. I think it's hard to be anything in a society that is so big compared to previous times. I mean, just the 330 million when I was born in '44, I think the population was 120 million. And it's tripled. It's tripled in our lifetime, essentially. Everybody's got cell phones and everybody's got social media. And my feeling is that I was thinking more and more people were saying, "Well, who do you think people are going to vote for?" And I said, "I don't think people vote for anything anymore. I think they vote against."
 
I mean, we have the case in Canada now that I think that Trudeau, the younger Trudeau, who was elected because his last name was Trudeau. He was a high school drama teacher, but he had this very, very loyal, almost cult-like following his father did. He didn't disabuse them that he wasn't going to be like his father. I mean, his father was a powerful figure. He's a very consequential figure, and he's turned out to be inconsequential.
 
But part of it is the times because Canada, the French were making a major play in Quebec, that Quebec would secede from Canada. And probably it could have happened except for the senior Trudeau, because he was this really, really charismatic—he spoke English better than most English people, and they spoke French, I guess, because I don't speak French. But he was a constitutional lawyer, and they finally had their first constitution, Canada's first constitution came in as a result of Pierre Trudeau, and guaranteed the French certain protections for their culture and for their language.
 
But now, I think it actually could. I think not only is there a possibility that Canada could break up but would break up into more than one province leaving. Actually, I think the province that has the biggest bone to pick with the federal government is Alberta, and Alberta is by far the wealthiest province. It's the youngest province. They've also got the main resource, the gas and oil. Right now, the powers in Ottawa are trying to squelch Alberta so that there could be breakup, and it's half-American anyway, Alberta.
 
The ancestors of a lot of the Albertans come from Texas and Oklahoma. It's the only province that's north, south in its orientation. Its orientation is to the States. It's a tough country. It's 3000 miles wide, and it's only connected by one highway and one railroad. It's a tough country to hold together, but they were held together because they were between the United States and Russia and the Soviet Union, so they were strategically important. But I think that they've faded in importance in the world. I think the Canadians are sufficiently backstage.
 
And someone's looking for a hero right now. There's a interesting character born in Alberta, but French speaking, and he's going to become the new leader of the Conservative Party. And I think there's a very strong chance that it's next week, and he'll become the leader. And there's a strong chance that in the next election that he would win the country. But not because people are foreign, there's so much against the existing government. So, I think in a internet world, I think it's harder to pull off archetypes.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: When you talk about Trudeau and his father, which makes me think about Mario Cuomo and Andrew.
 
Dan Sullivan: A Hamlet-like character, Mario Cuomo.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Yeah, yeah.
 
Dan Sullivan: But, I mean, he could have gotten the nomination for the Democrats if he wanted it.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: I think.
 
Dan Sullivan: But he was conflicted.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Right.
 
Dan Sullivan: He came across as very conflicted.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: It's interesting. I even look at George Romney and Mitt.
 
Dan Sullivan: Oh, yeah.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: To me, George was a much more towering figure than Mitt, but what's interesting is name recognition.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, that's a [inaudible 00:48:43]-
 
Jeffrey Madoff: And we're talking about Canada, but I think that that is huge-
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: ... for politicians. It's huge in the movies too. But in politics, you would hope that it would be people thinking about policy rather than, "Oh, I heard of him. I'll vote for him or her," but it's not. It's that it's familiar. I think that's one of those things, to reel it in, about archetypes. Archetypes are familiar. We know what they stand for. Even if in real life that doesn't hold up under the white light of truth, it's a construct. An archetype is a construct. And Jesus is an archetype. Right?
 
Dan Sullivan: Yep.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: So, I think it's really interesting because I think it says much more about us than it does about them.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Well, I think the archetype discussion, right at the end of our last podcast actually started from a discussion we had about metaphors. Metaphors are very necessary because life is just way too complex for anyone to understand. So it's like the climate, the main messaging of the entire climate crises individuals was that it was a greenhouse where there's the greenhouse effect. And that a particular element among the greenhouse gas, I mean, carbon dioxide is one of what are called the greenhouse gases.
 
But water vapor is much bigger a factor, and methane is a much bigger factor. And you have all these factors, but they zeroed in on this one little one that we can't smell, we can't taste, and it's lasted now for almost 50 years, that greenhouse, but greenhouse is a metaphor. It's not exactly a greenhouse-
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Right.
 
Dan Sullivan: ... but it simplifies, and I think if you take archetypes and metaphors, you got pretty much how the modern world operates in all of its communications.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Well, and if you look towards what some, such as Mark Zuckerberg, hope is the future, where we are going to be living out our lives online with avatars standing in for us-
 
Dan Sullivan: Then a metaphor, yeah. Well, avatar is a ancient, ancient character.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Right. In this case, of course, it's a technological construct to stand in for us. I don't think it's just a function of age. I find that horrifying. You know what that is and what that means. I think it's awful, but I think that online, for the first time we have that capability to identify ourselves in that way. And I think that that's dangerous.
 
I think it's also because there's so many networks now, because there's so much competition for our attention now, and because of the 24/7 news cycle when there's not 24/7 worth of news. So there's constant repetition. No matter where you're at on this political spectrum, there's constant repetition. I don't think we even know what that does to our brains, but I think hearing the same things over and over and over again does something. And I don't think that something is necessarily good because I think you stop thinking and that's another place where you then adopt metaphors, you adopt the archetypes, and you're getting further and further away from the truth of the situation as a result.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, yeah. Even what you're doing has an archetypal beginning with the Mickey Rooney-Judy Garland stories. Remember the kids get together, then they are going to create a play. They create a play, and it's a big head at the local high school or something, and somebody from Broadway is there, and he says, "You guys really have something here. I think we need to take it to Broadway." Well, that's sort of an archetypal model. The other thing is that the whole thing of opening on the road is an archetypal thing. I mean, theater is filled with archetypes and filled with archetypes and metaphors.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Right, yeah.
 
Dan Sullivan: I mean, you realize that Victoria's Secret, it plays on an archetype.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Mm-hmm.
 
Dan Sullivan: It plays on an archetype. It's really dangerous having a mistress in addition to your wife, so buy some clothes that turns your wife into the mistress.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: That's elite for many.
 
Dan Sullivan: Oh.
 
Jeffrey Madoff: Thanks for joining us today on our show, Anything and Everything. If you enjoyed it, please share it with a friend. For more about me and my work, visit acreativecareer.com and madoffproductions.com. To learn more about Dan and Strategic Coach, visit strategiccoach.com.