Glorious Tension: Why Paul Hobby Offered His Radically Moderate Book to a Divided World

In this episode of Author Hour, Eric Jorgenson sits down with Paul Hobby, author of Glorious Tension, to talk about the COVID era scribblings that became a book, the 1938 speech by his grandmother that opens chapter one, why he has never once tried to sell the book, and what still arrives in his inbox three years after publication.

Transcript

Paul Hobby: Again, find Scribe or somebody else who will lead you along the path, not just in terms of how do you get on Amazon and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, but things like, you know, they were very rigorous about fact-checking and quote-checking and almost to the point of irritation at times.

Eric Jorgenson: But- That's the job.

Paul Hobby: No, but it was good. I mean, and the way it turned out, you know, nobody has ever written anything about the book that said, well, Paul's wrong about this quote or this fact. So I give Scribe a lot of credit there.

Eric Jorgenson: Paul, thank you so much for making the time. My pleasure. Thank you, Eric. Before we dive into the book, which will be kind of the meat of the conversation, could you give us a little bit of a background on your story, who you are, where you came from before you set off on this particular part of your journey?

Paul Hobby: Sure. Well, I am a Houston guy. I'm a Texas guy, born and bred, went to school at UVA, come back to UT Law School, practiced law a little bit in the private sector and was a federal prosecutor. The only war going on at that time was the war on drugs. So I did that. We have a family media business and I ran that for a little while and ended up selling most of the properties and launching off on my own. So I've had a private equity and a private credit firm that does regional middle market buyout and growth for 22 years, something like that. So we're on our fifth fund. And it's fun because you get to make things better and you get to learn new stuff all the time.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. And this does not sound like a man who's searching for another project.

Paul Hobby: No. The other thing I should tell you is I was raised in a political family. And so I was always around the political and public process, public policy process. And my father was a state official here. And so I've always had an interest really more in policy than politics, but politics is the crucible through which policy has to pass. And so I started in my father's name, a public policy school at the University of Houston. And I'm an emeritus board member at the Center for Politics at UVA. And I ran for office. I lost the closest race in Texas history almost, well, 28 years ago, 49 to 49 and a half. And I wouldn't wish that on anybody, but you have to offer. And since then, politics has gotten weirder and weirder. So I'm a radically moderate white guy. And the only thing both parties agree is that none of those need apply, but I've been able to do all sorts of public service and school boards, hospital boards, federal reserve. I've chaired two state agencies. So don't cry for me. I've got to do, I've chaired the largest economic development association in the state, which is the Greater Houston Partnership in the Texas Business Hall of Fame. So again, no pity, and we don't regret offering, but losing's losing. You'd rather not do it. You have a choice.

Eric Jorgenson: Well, I thought you might've taken the closest election in Texas history award from Lyndon B. Johnson, who almost lost by one ballot box and then somehow didn't lose by one ballot box.

Paul Hobby: Well, that's a whole nother podcast, but we can do that one.

Eric Jorgenson: I also appreciate the use of the term radical moderate. I've been campaigning for a radical moderate party since, I don't know, since I could grok what it meant. So I appreciate the plate. That leads us to the book. When did you first get the notion that, you know, this was something that you wanted to take on?

Paul Hobby: Well, it sort of grew on me. It started out as sort of cathartic COVID era scribblings, you know, because I will do some of that, you know, I'll just write stuff not knowing whether there's an audience other than me. And I used to write a bunch of opinion pieces and local newspapers and I've written some stuff for the New York times and some other people. And I've really quit doing that now because, you know, there's no real audience. You have the people that already agree with you said, you know, some nice texts and maybe you get a few nasty grams. But I used to think that appealing to people's reason was a persuasive technique. And I'm embarrassed by that. We all now know that people think with their heart and not with their head. And, you know, that's not a whine or a complaint. It just means that's the playing field. You know, that's where we have to accomplish change.

Eric Jorgenson: How did that feed into how you chose to write the book?

Paul Hobby: Well, as I said, I'm a radical moderate. And so I'm sort of fascinated with the idea of the middle. And in everything else that we do in our nonpolitical lives, you know, we all make decisions, kind of optimize between one or two variables and that can be form versus function. And if you're a Christian, it's grace versus truth. If you're an architect, it's cost versus beauty. It is in military science, management science. We could get into all that. But in literally everything that you and I do when we're at the grocery store, when we're trying to decide what to buy, you know, we're trying to optimize between cost and value. And it's a balancing act. And that's how we live our lives. And by the way, you know, you get it wrong frequently. I get it wrong frequently. And that's good. That keeps you humble. So, you know, humility sort of is the key to a multicultural democracy. And we're in a different place right now.

Eric Jorgenson: So this started with COVID-era cathartic scribblings. I like that. When did it make the leap from sort of journal to book?

Paul Hobby: Well, I know the answer. So if you have read the book in the first chapter, I reproduced probably two thirds of a speech that my grandmother gave in 1938 to a national women's group. And a little background on my grandmother. She was not a normal grandmother. She was the founder of the Women's Army Corps. She was the publisher of the newspaper here in Houston. She worked alongside Eisenhower in the European theater. And she was a quite serious, accomplished person. And she became the first secretary of HEW when Eisenhower, she had always been sort of a conservative Democrat like most Southerners. But she believed in Eisenhower. She served with him in Europe. And so when he said, would you be my first secretary of HEW, which actually was the second woman ever in a cabinet, she said yes to that. So she was not an ordinary grandmother. She was a very high-functioning person, really of humble birth, but quite a serious, accomplished person and quite a grandmother. So when I read that speech, her speech was, if you remember The Jungle, Sinclair Lewis wrote The Jungle. He also wrote an essay called It Can't Happen Here. And so she sort of turned that on its head and made a spoof because in 1938, she was in a position to see things that other people weren't. And she could see what was happening in Europe. And this dangerous little man that a lot of people hadn't really grasped who Adolf Hitler was, she takes you chapter and verse through the dominoes that are falling pre-World War II. And in Europe, and when you read the speech, it gave me chills because you could literally replace the names and the places with names and places from today. And the sum total of the speech is that extremism is not just, it's not just lazy, it's dangerous. A lot of people die when people think that they are certain about who's the master race or who's right and who's wrong. So when I saw that, I was like, gosh, I guess I was meant to read that because literally I found it in the bowels of the internet. And I thought, I think that's a sign. I think because I'm writing about the same stuff, I think I need to put this out there. And I did it with all temerity because when you put something out there today, obviously you get canceled and cursed and accused and all these things. And as you can tell, I have been in the Hurley Burley of politics. I've been a federal prosecutor. I'm no stranger to conflict and Hurley Burley. And people saying ugly things about me, but it's still not a ton of fun. But enough for my friends who were sophisticated in these matters. I'm like, is it a series of podcasts? Is this a series of essays? Is it birdcage liner? What is it? And they're like, well, it's a book. And I said, well, it's kind of for it to be a book. And then they said, well, those are the only kind of books people read today anyway, with the shortening of the American attention span. And so I put it out there and it's been a really pleasant thing, Eric, because it's allowed me to reconnect with people from college. I don't even know how they found the book, but they're just like right on, brother. You said it for us. Thank you very much. And the reviews on Amazon have been very positive. And having said that, I've made no attempt to sell this book. I'm not a bookseller. I've done a few podcasts for the University of Virginia and the University of Houston. But I thought, I want to give this to the world because we're all so frustrated. And then you want to add something new to the argument. And if the world wants to read it and the world wants to absorb it, then that's great. So it was my offering to a divided world. And the experience has been really pleasant. I mean, more so than I would have anticipated.

Eric Jorgenson: That's awesome. What was the hope that you, the grand hope that you had for the book going into, you know, when you push the button to publish, what were you hoping would happen?

Paul Hobby: Well, the first thing is what I didn't want it to be. I didn't want it to be as a scold. I didn't want to say, go, Eric, wake up. What's wrong with you? I wanted it to be, and therefore, you know, a cheerful title in glorious tension that I wanted it to be an invitation for Eric and Paul and everybody else to have a candid exchange with the mirror about what one-way conversations and rabbit holes are doing to you and to me and to our nation and world. And so that's what it was. It was just literally meant to be a cheerful invitation for people to do some introspection. We spend some time with brain science. I don't know if you want to get into that later, but your brain and my brain are built for rabbit holes. That's just the answer. It can be, you know, cognitive dissonance, the Dunning-Kruger effect, reinforcement bias, whatever you want to call that. It's just hardwired. It's part of the human condition. And literally, you know, most of your education, whether it's philosophy or religious or, you know, education in general, is an exercise in how to police your own brain, because, you know, left to its feral primitive devices, you know, you will become tribal. And then you'll become cultish, you know, and the difference between a tribe and a cult, I think, is worth saying in today's world, you know, a tribe protects its own from outsiders, and a cult goes to the next step and starts purging from within. And again, we see this all day, every day. And it's, I don't want to say that the world has continued to affirm the problem, but the world has continued to affirm the problem. And has it seized on my solution? Has it made it better? Heck, I don't know. I don't know. You know, sometimes you think the only people that read this are the people that don't need to read it.

Eric Jorgenson: Well, you know, each domino has a way of affecting the next one. So if you help people gain the vocabulary and the conviction, you know, I find, in my personal life, that the more extreme somebody is, the less you want to engage with them. And the moderate people just sort of want to have a good old-fashioned conversation about respectful disagreement and try to find a way, you know, the outcome at the end of the day, the hope of these conversations is that we find, you know, a set of rules that we can all agree to be held accountable to and move this shared project forward.

Paul Hobby: Well, you know, you can, was it Hobbes who called that the social contract? And the social contract is badly frayed. If I can inject sort of one example of glorious tension that maybe I should have spent more time with in the book is citizenship itself. And again, I'm no Pollyanna, but citizenship, if you are a literate person, you understand that there's a balance there between privilege and responsibility. And, you know, has that gotten lost in some ways? Yeah. And how do we get it back? I think one way we get it back is to remind ourselves that gratitude is also part of citizenship. You know, you may not like certain people who don't think like you or look like you or act like you, but when you turn on the switch in the morning and the power comes off, frigging miracle. When you clutch the come up, frigging miracle. When you enjoy a night safe in your home, a frigging miracle, you know, I could go on and on, but you get the point. A lot of people before you and I have designed labor spent to provide the nation and the privileges that we enjoy. And a lot of those people who did those things, they don't look like Eric, they don't look like Paul, they don't think like Eric, they don't think like Paul. You know, they are, they might be in a foreign nation in the uniform defending our right to freedom, and they have nothing in common with Eric and Paul, but we are the grand beneficiaries of their efforts. So, you know, I do think citizenship, it's, again, something I probably should have spent more time with. And if I ever did another edition, I would, but you know, if the conversation starts with gratitude, you end up in a much better place.

Eric Jorgenson: Is there anything that sticks out that's happened as a result of a conversation or an outreach or an opportunity that's happened as a result of this book being out there that comes to mind?

Paul Hobby: I mean, I've been invited to speak to some clubs that I wouldn't have otherwise invited to speak to because they don't think I'm part of their tribe or their cult, but somebody read the book and said, you know, the guy's positive, he's awful, he's not throwing bombs or calling names. So I do think it's been, it's been a good thing in terms of people's willingness to hear the argument without the reflexive defensiveness that we find all around us. You know, I don't know what dinner parties you go to, but, you know, one of the reasons I think that I wrote the book is you go to dinner parties and these people are otherwise, you know, high functioning people and they're Deacons in their church and they coach Little League and they're fine Americans and the dinner table conversation will go on well, you know, those people that, you know, what's wrong with them, you know, and I always just flip it back to them. I just sort of say, gosh, I don't know. You know, what do you think is the answer here? And they go, well, those people are just effing nuts. And as a problem solving technique, that doesn't get you very far, but it's always amazing that otherwise, you know, people that understand trade-offs and other aspects of their lives, because it's all around us all the time, when it comes to public policy, all that goes out the window. They're certain, you know, certainty is where your mind wants to be because you don't have to think anymore and you're arrogant and you're right and you're dangerous.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, the empathy to have a, you know, a respectful theory of mind for somebody that you disagree with strongly and to believe that the world does rationally align and their actions rationally align with their view of the world. It's really seems like it's getting harder for people to hold.

Paul Hobby: You know, it's easy to say that the pendulum swings because it does, but I don't know about you, but I think in an internet age where you have this sort of cowardly one-way communication device, the pendulum swings farther and faster than it ever did before. So this is a, it's, you get a little dizzy.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. You know, the algorithms are sort of incentivized to reinforce, either reinforce or inflame, you know, whatever, to put the most engaging or enraging thing in front of you that it can possibly find anywhere on the internet. And that's not a recipe for, it increases your threat response. And then, you know, it increases the extremism. Yeah. You said it, you said it. Does that play a big role in the book that the technology of today's world, or you just kind of speak to the person about their, their behavior, their options?

Paul Hobby: Yeah, I think, you know, we do spend some time with social media and the internet and the, all the algorithms and the tendencies that you mentioned, but I didn't want it to be just about that. Yeah. I didn't, because it's just too easy to blame everything on social media, but it's hard to avoid the conclusion that that's not involved in the problem somewhere.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. Yeah, sure. Is there a succinct set of takeaways or epiphanies or actions that you hope people sort of do as a result of reading the book?

Paul Hobby: I have some tools, and one of the tools is I keep a list on my iPhone of things that I've been dead wrong about. And, you know, every now and then I'll read it to say, gosh, Paul, you know, you think you're pretty smart and pretty righteous, but actually you're, you're wrong with some regularity. And it gives you the laugh at yourself. It gives you some humility to say, I think I'm right about this, but I thought I was right about a bunch of stuff before. And the other thing that, I don't know if it landed with the audience, but the most fun, Eric, was finding these quotes across history and across discipline that say exactly what you and I are saying. And I can, I've got some of those quotes, T-Def, and I can give them to you. Please, yeah. That sounds great. Yeah. The first quote in the book comes from Aristotle, and he said, courage is the midpoint between two vices, cowardice being the best known, but recklessness being equally dangerous. So, you know, that's, that's the book succinctly. And that is, you know, too much of a good thing is eventually a bad thing. The other one that I like a lot, John Meacham, you know, is a famous historian who's a resident at Vanderbilt, and I'm a big fan of him. But he wrote a book called The Hope of Glory, and he wrote, literalism is for the weak. Fundamentalism is for the insecure. Both are sins, too. For to come to believe that we are in exclusive possession of the truth about things beyond time and space is to put yourself in the place of God. And, you know, that's the whole thing, that if you're a religious person, there is some authority out there and it gets to be certain about the truth, but it's not you and it's not me.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, yeah, I like both of those a lot. I think the courage one is important because I feel like people brandish that as a defense for their extremism rather than sort of understanding that, you know, being the courage, having the courage to disagree with the loudest and most extreme and sort of remain the open-minded middle when everyone is telling you that that's unacceptable is unbelievably important. You know, and when you're most scared to speak, that's when it matters most to speak up.

Paul Hobby: That's right. I call it that, calling balls and strikes. And, you know, I have children, I have grandchildren, and, you know, that's the example I want to set for them. And I have friends who, you know, take a hard position on one side or the other and just sort of say, gee, when your side clearly stubs its toe when they go too far, how often do you raise your hand and say so? And sometimes you get these lame answers like, well, the liberal, they do that part. I've just got to provide a counterweight, which is a cop-out. You know, that is not the example you want to set for your kids and your grandkids. And so it's, you know, it's just a powerful reminder that, you know, objectivity is hard and you have to hold your own tribe accountable. You know, I find the people that I admire most in this world right now are the people who are willing to call out their tribe when they go too far, you know, and to give those people names, Liz Cheney is one. Barry Weiss, of course, has become a controversial figure for other reasons. But as you know, you know, she had the pantheon job of the liberal left, but she had intellectual courage to say, you know what, it's gone too far. You know, this woke stuff has become less intolerant than the opposing view. And so if people have the courage to call out their own tribe, and in today's world, they lose their primary when they do that. And I could give you a bunch of examples, but it's okay to lose your primary because you didn't lose your stall.

Eric Jorgenson: There's a few, I won't be able to come up with the names off the top of my head, which feels like a shame, but there's a few sort of established Democrats that are speaking up against the DSA, the socialist movement within that party at the moment that I feel that I'm grateful for, because everybody toeing the line, you know, that's how extremism gets more extreme. People putting their career in front of their soul, as you say.

Paul Hobby: The only thing I could say that's positive or in defense of the democratic socialist movement is that they admit that they have no loyalty to the constitution or to any traditional democratic party values. They're just using the party as a vector to get in and change it and essentially do to the democratic party what Trump did to the right, and that is invade it and take it over.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. The fact that that's an open, not secret, and people are not getting, you know, and they're still getting traction is the worrisome part, because, you know, the co-evolutionary spiral of extremism continues then.

Paul Hobby: Yeah. If we had more time, we would talk about the primary system and where it's gotten us. You know, it gets us some pretty miserable choices in November.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. Some of the structural things, you know, social media is sort of one on the technology side, but the, you know, the political selection system is certainly like one as well. The feedback loops that just create greater extremism. Sorry. Yeah, I don't mean to make you recite the whole book, but it's an interesting rabbit hole.

Paul Hobby: But, you know, it goes back to looking in the mirror and when people at dinner parties say, well, why won't good people run for office? And I said, well, have you funded character assassination? Because if you've written a political check to anybody, you had probably funded slur, innuendo, and character assassination. Well, I've done that. I've done that with a small family. And let me tell you what, you know, even growing up in a public sphere, it's not a lot of fun. And so when you ask normal people, you know, why don't you put yourself out there and let people spell millions of times, millions of dollars spending vicious lies about you? You know, that's, that's a hard sell.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. And it feels less like public service, productive public service than, and even if it was, that's a, that's a big toll to expect people to pay. Let's, let's dive a little deeper if we can into your writing process. You know, did you, when did you, after you decided this was going to become a book, not just a, you know, some journal entries, how did you go from, you know, chicken scratches to, to a manuscript?

Paul Hobby: Well, as you know, it's hard, you know, writing a book is hard work. You know, I did that little thing years ago, a little fiction thing just to see if I could. And it's just hard. And that is most of what's hard for me is organizing it because it comes together in my brain in a certain way. But you have to say, this isn't for my brain. And so, you know, organizing the chapters and organizing, like these are the practical can-dos, you know, if you acknowledge the problem, maybe these are a few changes you can make in your life and in your social relationships that will, that will be beneficial. So I would say that's the hardest part is the, is organizing it in a way that the audience one could absorb it.

Eric Jorgenson: And did that just yield to, to hours and effort? Did you have people, your friends and family read it? Did you work with an editor?

Paul Hobby: I did not work with an editor, but, you know, I have a background in media. My family was in the media business and I bought Texas Monthly, which was sort of the, I don't know where you are, but Texas Monthly is to journalism as the Saturday Night Live is to comedy. You know, it's the launchpad where a lot of important journalists and it needed to be saved. You know, all magazines have to be safe because if they just, they're going to go bye-bye. And so I had some contacts in that world, you know, people that weren't professional editors that were friends of mine that were willing to give it a once over and say, maybe this, maybe not that. So I didn't have a formal editor, but I did have some sophisticated friends who were generous with their time.

Eric Jorgenson: What about the publishing decision? How did you find your way to Scribe?

Paul Hobby: Well, it was really through those Austin relationships. There was a friend of a friend who had used Scribe with great satisfaction to publish a few books. And so, you know, I reached out to Scribe and the process was pleasant and thorough and professional. And Scribe was actually going through some tough things from a corporate point of view at that time. And I did at one point get shifted from one contact to another, but they were both great. So Scribe was where I can't say enough about Scribe.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, looking at your publishing date, you got out of Dodge just before the, the real, the real problem started, but yeah, there were some real problems.

Paul Hobby: Yes, I did.

Eric Jorgenson: But we're, yeah, we're on the other side of that now. Your timing is impeccable. Well, do you, do you have any advice, Paul, for people that are sort of, you know, maybe sitting there with some, some journal entries of their own, they've done some cathartic writing and they're trying to decide whether, whether a book is, you know, the right next step for them.

Paul Hobby: I would just say, just do it. It's, it's not hard to get it out there, you know, and there's some money involved, but you know, it's not, it's not that difficult. And again, find Scribe or somebody else who will lead you along the path, not just in terms of how do you get on Amazon and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, but things like, you know, they were very rigorous about fact checking and quote checking and almost to the point of irritation at times.

Eric Jorgenson: That's the job.

Paul Hobby: No, but it was good. I mean, and the way it turned out, you know, nobody has ever written anything about the book that said, well, Paul's wrong about this quote or this fact. So I give Scribe a lot of credit there. Yeah. Thank you.

Eric Jorgenson: Do you, are you using the book for anything in your, in your life as far as, you know, are you promoting it? Are you involving it in your professional life at all, or you just kind of put it out there and hope it finds its people?

Paul Hobby: I kind of put it out there and I do realize that a lot of people, you know, that have their own speakers bureau and, you know, this is supposed to be part of the pinball that creates attention and awareness for something else they're selling in the case of a speaker. You know, my eventual speaker would be selling themselves. That's not really my situation. So it's been a pleasure, but it has also been a, you know, dare I say vanity perfect? I'll say it.

Eric Jorgenson: Go ahead. No, I think it's, I think it's another form of public service.

Paul Hobby: Well, you're nice to say so. Can I give you a couple more quotes? As I said, these are my favorite parts of the book. And when you stumble across these things, you know, everything, the, we call them God winks in our family, where all of a sudden there's this quote that comes up out of nowhere. And it's like, wow, it's just exactly. So Middlemarch, as you know, was written by George Eliot and George Eliot is a pseudonym for, for actually a female writer back in the time when female writers weren't taken very seriously. But so read this with a, a woman's sensibility, if you can do that. There is no general doctrine, which is not capable of eating out our morality, if unchecked by a deep seated habit of direct fellow feeling with individual fellow myth. So there you go. Yeah, there's the rabbit hole. And the only way you avoid the rabbit hole is you have an accountability group, or you have, you know, a family that's willing to call you to account or point out blind spots or hypocrisies. And I've, I've got plenty of that. So it was just fun, you know, so Middlemarch, you know, it's not a political book, it's not a business book, it's not anything, but you stumble across these things and then there they are. Bertrand Russell, you know, it's funny that I would quote an atheist, but Bertrand Russell, he said, one of the most persistent delusions of mankind is that some sections of the human race are morally better or worse than others. This belief has many forms, none of which has any rational basis. You know, I just love that because you're like, wow, I'm a history major, I can identify with all of that. So I think that's all I can do for you on the quotes, but the quotes were fun to find because you just stumble across them and they're like gems.

Eric Jorgenson: I mean, that's, you know, that feeling is so much of what my career as an author is, you know, I build my books entirely out of quotes. So I resonate deeply with that of just, you know, finding things that hit and trying to put the pieces together and put them in a nice frame so that they, they stick with people and resonate and, you know, remain useful long after they're first heard.

Paul Hobby: And that's just, you're just trying to connect dots, you know, because most people are rational and sane on some level, but they have a certain blind spot on a certain issue and you go, well, you know, maybe the courage to be that person at a dinner party and the tax to do it while preserving the relationship is that's no small trick.

Eric Jorgenson: You know, I've, I shoot a lot of those shots and I don't always hit the bullseye. Well, there's a quote from my grandmother in there.

Paul Hobby: I never forget that. She said this, she said, Paul, always phrase a criticism as a question because you avoid embarrassing your audience and, and you might be wrong in your premise. So you're protecting yourself as well at the same time, because that's right. You know, we've all been with the intellectual bully at the dinner party and just like the guys standing outside the world series, condemning everybody to hell with a loud speaker because they haven't accepted Christ as their risen Lord and savior. You know, I want to stop. I want to talk to those guys and go, Hey, what's your success rate here? You know, how's that working for you? You know, because whenever you smack people upside the head, you get a defensive response. You don't get introspection. You don't get, you know, an invitation to increase someone's self-knowledge.

Eric Jorgenson: Well, I don't know if you've seen the movie Inception. It's, I think it's a work of genius, but it, the explicit moral is not that this is not the explicit moral, but I've taken it that, you know, people can't take your ideas. They have to be led to create an idea for themselves in themselves.

Paul Hobby: There you go. If we're doing quotes, you remember the Carl Jung quote, and that is, uh, people don't have ideas. Ideas have people. Oh yeah. That's what I mean about people think with their hearts. They don't, or maybe with their checkbook, but they don't really think with their minds.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. Yeah. Well, maybe we can, maybe you've done, done everybody a service and pushed us a little closer to that with this book. Where would you send people to learn more about, more about you, more about the book and take a next step?

Paul Hobby: Oh, I mean, I'm, I'm kind of out there. I'm easy to learn about, but the book is on Amazon. And again, I've been encouraged by the people who find it and write a review. And literally just this morning, I got an email out of nowhere from somebody I'd never met before. I said, I found this book. Thank you so much. And you know, a couple of paragraphs about what he liked it, you know, that's powerful affirmation, but I do think as much as we want about the internet, I'm glad that Amazon and the internet are out there because people stumble onto this.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. It's incredible. The book is called glorious tension, rediscovering our sacred middle ground in an age of extremism by Paul Hobby. I really appreciate you, Paul, for, for doing this, for being you, for taking time out of a very busy and full life to write this book. I truly think it's an act of public service. It's an important one. I'm grateful for your, your, your contribution, your leadership. I'm going to, I'm going to buy it. I'm going to read it. I'm probably going to give some people some copies and I hope that's received within the spirit with which it's offered. Well, you've been great, Eric. And so tell me a little bit about you and your books, please, sir. Oh, I I've, I've just published my third. My first one was in 2020. I collect what I think are the most useful and timeless ideas of people that I've learned something from I'm in the tech world. They tend to be tech leaders. I've done Naval Ravikant. The almanac of Naval Ravikant was the first book on the second was Balaji Sreenivasan. And the third was Elon Musk. So I ended up in a little bit of the crossfire because he, when I started the book, he was not a political figure and he ended up one by the time I published it, which was just a little something to navigate. But, you know, he's been somebody that I've learned a lot from, and I think he's really stands alone. Certainly in this generation of entrepreneurs as somebody that has achieved, you know, remarkable feats and outlier among outliers. And there's something to learn from him, even if you don't agree with, you know, everything that he's ever done.

Paul Hobby: Well, you know, I don't consider myself a tech guy, but I've been around technology my whole career and almost anything that we would do would have some technology at the heart of it to meet our other criteria as investors. But back when I was younger than you, I remember reading being digital by Nicholas Negropont. You know, he was the head of the MIT media at the time and then house by Tracy Kidder where I was impactful. But I should go back and look at those because this really was the twilight of the tech era and quite amazing. The soul of a new machine is another one like that.

Eric Jorgenson: That one, people are still talking about that one as being particularly prescient. Yes, it was. Yeah.

Paul Hobby: Yes, it was.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. Thank you again, Paul. I would love to stay in touch and I'll be rooting you on as an author and a voice of sanity. Appreciate you. Thank you, Eric.