Hail, Caesar!, Tally Ho Yacht Guy, & the Dignity of Work

Andy Flattery does a solo mixtape episode commenting on the Coen Brothers' "Hail, Caesar!," the craftsmanship of Tally Ho Yacht restoration project, and Fr. Paul Scalia's lecture on leisure, the basis of culture.  In making these connections he attempts to unpack the tension between workaholism, the dignity of work, diligence, and sloth.

Episode page: https://simplewealthkc.com/hail-caesar-tally-ho-yacht-guy-the-dignity-of-work-podcast/

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Andy Flattery is the Owner of Simple Wealth Planning, a Registered Investment Advisor. All opinions expressed by Andy and guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Simple Wealth Planning. This podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only and should not be relied upon as investment, tax, or legal advice. Clients of Simple Wealth Planning may maintain positions in bitcoin and the securities discussed in this podcast.

Transcript

00:00 Andy Flattery This is the Reform Financial Advisor podcast. My name is Andy Flattery. I am a certified financial planner and owner of Simple Wealth Planning, a registered investment advisor. All opinions expressed by me and all of my guests are solely our own opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Simple Wealth Planning. This podcast is for informational and hopefully entertainment purposes only and should not be relied upon as investment, tax or legal advice. Clients of Simple Wealth Planning may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. I don't know if this is just me, but my wife and I were talking recently about how we haven't seen a good movie in like a very long time. One of the shining bright lights in the last several years though was that film, Hail Caesar, the Coen Brothers film, which I think is probably still a little bit underrated. People talk about it, but when I bring it up, there's a lot of people that haven't seen it. Great movie. There's a scene at the beginning of the film that I want to open this episode with where the main character, Eddie Mannix, played by Josh Brolin, is in the confessional with the priest.

01:16 Hail, Caesar! Here it is. Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. How long since your last confession, my son? Oh, it's been, what, 27 hours. It's really too often, my son.

01:36 Hail, Caesar! You're not that bad. I don't know, Father. I snuck a cigarette or two.

01:42 Andy Flattery I didn't make it home in time for dinner. And I, uh, I struck a movie star in anger. All right. Five Hail Marys. Okay. Okay. Well, if you've seen the movie, you know that Eddie Mannix's character in the film, he's a sympathetic character. We're meant to like him. He's a good guy. And although the scenes in the confessional, and we're meant to believe he's in the confessional all the time, are funny, he's sort of sincerely working through stuff and confessing his sins and trying to work through this broader question about his place in life and his place in his career. He's working this job. He's, my understanding is he's sort of like a fixer in the movie business, some sort of low level producer where his job is to like make sure that these prima donna celebrities stay in line, hence the line where I struck a movie star in anger. And so his job is a grind and it's a lot of work and he puts in all hours of the day into this job and to essentially working for the man and making sure these movies happen. It's what Mike Rowe might call a dirty job. And throughout the film, he's got this decision that he's wrestling with. And the decision is he could go and he could make a lot of money for the, I think it's the military industrial complex Lockheed Martin, or I think it was Lockheed is what they called the firm in the film. He'd make a lot more money. The understanding is the job would be a lot easier and he'd have a lot more time with family, which is very important for him because he actually is a good family man. And so it's sort of a good vignette for the way that we think of work today. A lot of us work a lot of hours. I know a lot of folks that are looking for ways to spend more time with family and prioritize the more important things in life over working for quote unquote the man. A lot of us wrestle with this sort of thing. If you think about in like popular culture, it was really tragic when Brady, Tom Brady's family fell apart when he, Tom sort of refused to retire and sort of transition to his next phase in life. And I think a lot of people were, were sympathetic to his wife, who I think had tried to encourage to him to do that for years. I just read the Elon Musk biography. I'm trying to figure out if I, if I like Elon or if I've been too judgmental of him in the past. I read his biography to think maybe I need to have a better understanding of Elon. And honestly, I read his biography and I'm still in the same place. I think Elon's kind of properly rated. He's sort of fairly criticized and fairly praised in a lot of respects. But my point in bringing him up is that Elon is a workaholic and his family life has suffered because of it. It's broke up his marriage. I think his commitment to his work in some sense is to his credit, but he has broke up his family because of that. And so this is the Eddie Manic story is something that a lot of us deal with. Here's the way that Father Paul Scalia explains this sort of rat race phenomenon in more eloquent terms. Father Paul Scalia, if you're not familiar, he's a Catholic priest. If the name sounds familiar, he is the son of the late Justice Antonin Scalia.

05:34 Fr. Paul Scalia And here he is. Unfortunately, we are putting a lot of them just on the treadmill. It's the rat race. Why should they go to school and get an education? So that they can get into college. Why a good college, right? Why should they get into a good college? So they can get a good job. Why should they get a good job? So they can make money. Why should they make money?

05:56 Andy Flattery So they can send their kids to good colleges. Where I'm going with this, another thing that comes up a lot of times with modern work is like we're asked to do things that we feel at least at a certain level, maybe a very small level are a bit unethical or immoral. Like I think about in my career, maybe folks have versions of this in their career, but maybe my career working in financial services is a bit more captured than maybe some other more wholesome professions. But something I struggle with is that I comply with KYC know your customer laws in my profession. And that is something that is I wrestle with a lot because I think there is an argument that KYC laws are immoral and unethical. So what I'm doing is by law, I'm required to gather certain amounts of client info. And there's a sense that that's sort of being complicit in spying for the government. And it bothers me. And yet I do it. And so maybe that makes me captured. It certainly makes me conflicted, but I don't know what to do with it. At times I've thought about ditching my profession entirely and go back to painting houses or, God forbid, become a full-time podcaster, which nobody wants to see out of me. And it is a struggle. And so I don't know if I have the right answer to that. I'm just sharing it as a sort of, what's the word, vulnerability, right? That's the buzzword we should use. A vulnerable way of saying that I'm conflicted about certain things that I have to do in my profession. And so maybe you can relate to that in your profession, depending on what line of work that you are in. So, OK, what is the answer? Well, you could start a business. You could quit your job and start a business. That's what I did. And as I just alluded to, it's not a panacea. But I certainly work more on my own terms than I was able to at prior places in my career. Maybe you heard on my podcast on confessions of a stockbroker. You could be a tinkerer. So maybe you're not ready to quit your job yet, but you start to tinker. You start to work on other projects while you are working your full-time job as a way to sort of bankroll that career. Or as we talked about on the previous episode of this podcast, True Financial Independence with Trey Sellers, a lot of folks will say, well, the thing you should try to do is return to work as soon as possible. Or maybe what I like to say is maybe not retire, but achieve true financial independence so that you could make work optional on your own terms. And I think that's a viable solution. Here, I struggle to a certain extent, too, because I sometimes wonder if the FIRE movement, the Financial Independence Retire Early movement, is also sort of built on a shaky foundation in the sense that they don't recognize the value of work, that work is a good and that is human beings. It is sort of a natural thing for us to work. And so what I'm going to play for you here is a clip of my appearance on the Catholic CEO YouTube channel, where I'm going back and forth with this idea of retirement as it's sold in the financial services industry, which, as you can tell here, I'm a bit skeptical of. So here is Henry Katarna, the Catholic CEO, and myself talking about this very issue.

09:46 Henry Kutarna Henry Katarna You know, the notion of retirement, people have, well, people have asked me, well, when are you going to retire? Well, I'm going to do what my grandfathers did. They never retired. They changed what they did. They reduced their hours. They put in work, commensurate with their energy and the health at the time as they aged. And there's no such concept as retirement in a certain way. And that doesn't make you a workaholic either. That's the accusation standard that comes from that is workaholism. And so what about the Catholic concept of retirement?

10:19 Andy Flattery Is it a Catholic concept? Henry Katarna I sort of come to this idea through my grandfather as well, who was a farmer in Northwest Iowa. He's deceased now, but he just never really retired. You know, farmers, they don't really retire unless they sell the farm. He didn't do that, which I think is another thing that to his credit, he kept the farm and the family, but he just never really retired. He sort of slowed down. And you know, when grandpa was in his 80s, they would find him, you know, out in the fields, sometimes taking naps in his truck, which scared us. But you know, he's tired. I love it. He didn't drink coffee, so he was taking a big nap in his truck. And I think that's something too, there's a more sort of natural pattern to that than what I sort of have come to believe is unnatural, which here in the United States is most people tell me that their goal is to retire at age 65. And that's what most people say. They say age 65. And you know, you got to wonder like, well, what's so magical about this age 65? And when they say retire, most people, I mean, this is maybe sort of changing, but at least probably in the modern period, the last several decades, what people mean by that is literally to quit working and go play golf or find a hobby or play cards or whatever the case may be. And so that's always really bothered me, because if you look at history, it hasn't always been the case that the natural way of things was that you have a 65th birthday and then you decide to retire for three decades, which is very realistic. Now, someone could have a retirement from age 65 to 95. And what is that? That's 30 years of essentially stepping away from society. I mean, we've we've for better or for worse, we the world that we live in is sort of aligned around our work in many ways. And I'm not saying that's the perfect way of doing it.

12:12 Henry Kutarna But but when you retire, you know, you sort of leave society. It's very interesting. I'm an economist by training. And and so I can see in economic theory, it's an it's an abrupt change. This 65, this 65 years thing. And of course, in certain countries like France, they're trying to raise it now because there's problematic funding these things, especially through the boomer generation. But it's an artificial concept to to interrupt productivity. And I'm not talking about I don't believe that we are economic units. We are children of God who have a role to play. Our job is to get our children and our spouses to heaven. And that's the first and foremost. And of course, we do that through work and through through the dignity of work. But I like the idea of pivoting, changing the plan, focusing more on the extended family. I'm a believer in the extended family model where the three generations are close

13:09 Andy Flattery together. So Katana mentioned that word workaholism there, workaholic. And I think another way of maybe unpacking that more clearly is this idea of slothfulness or sloth versus diligence. Let me define some some terms here. So sloth, you know, sometimes you think of the sloth is like laziness, but that's not the case. Sloth is not just doing nothing. What it is, is doing something other than what needs to be done. It's doing something other than your duty or your responsibility. And then diligence is the opposite virtue. So sloth is the vice. Diligence is the virtue. Diligence is doing what needs to be done. Diligence is doing what is required of you. And I think that's a helpful contrast there in understanding what we are to do with our work. You can be slothful and working. In the case of maybe Elon Musk working 24 hours a day, 23 hours a day, rather than sleeping one hour at his office and breaking up his family in the meantime. Or you can be slothful in retirement in a vacation home in Arizona, golfing 12 hours a day while leaving your community behind, avoiding certain responsibilities that you might have as an elderly person that might be needed in a certain community. And so you can be slothful in retirement or you can be diligent in retirement and vice versa as a working person. And so that's helpful. But it's still worth pointing out that work is a good. And I want to acknowledge that even if we also acknowledge that there are conflicting aspects to modern work that we have to make peace with. Here's Father Scalia once again.

14:56 Fr. Paul Scalia Work is a virtue. Industriousness. God placed us in this world to work, to keep the garden and to till it. And so work is not a bad thing in its proper place. It is a very good thing. But like every virtue, once it's removed from its proper place, it becomes a vice. Now, the opposite of leisure is not work, but sloth. What the ancients called echadia. Echadia is not just not working. It is a boredom with the world. And it's sort of leisure's counterfeit. Most people think that they are just kind of they're at leisure when really know they're being slothful. They think they're they're at rest when really they're vegging out.

15:49 Andy Flattery Sometimes you hear the case made for particularly like universal basic income where the idea is, well, if everyone had a universal basic income, then that would free people up from the perils of modern industrial work and allow everyone to sort of harness their inner creativity. And they could finally write their great American novel and become that violinist that they have deep down inside. And I'm a little skeptical that if you know anything about the author J.R. Tolkien, the author of The Lord of the Rings, so obviously a very creative person. He was a what you would call a tinkerer long before he was ever a published author. His work like this, some are some are really in. I'm going to say that wrong, was a lifelong work. The Hobbit was a collection of children's tales that he told his children as like their bedtime stories long before it was ever published. But my point is he worked tirelessly on these projects in the hours between or after his real work as a professor at university. And if you know anything about him, like oftentimes it was like detrimental to his health. He was working so hard on these projects, his doctors would like make him take time off from working. And so so even there, he's doing this sort of higher level of work. He's he's writing. He's writing novels. A lot of us recognize that as maybe a more wholesome sort of work than like, say, being a financial adviser. Right. And yet it is real work. He is putting in actual time and it's taxing on him physically. So that's Tolkien. I also have a modern version of this that I've been getting into. Somebody on Twitter had posed the question, hey, what's the best thing on YouTube? And one of the top comments was this guy that's doing the YouTube channel on the Tally Ho yacht restoration. He's a British guy. And I started watching it and it really it's probably the best thing on YouTube. I am totally captured by it knowing nothing about boats or yacht restorations or being any sort of craftsman at all myself. I find it totally captivating. So what it is, is it's it's this this young guy is probably in his 20s at the time the videos are being recorded. But if you look at the channel, it's like a multi year long process where there's this hundred plus year old yacht that is in disrepair and he is restoring it board by board, piece by piece, nail by nail. And it is so inspiring to see the work of this young man that is master craftsman. Here's a clip from the Tally Ho yacht guy.

18:45 Tally Ho Yacht Guy Hi, my name's Leo and I'm a boat builder and a sailor. And I'm on a mission to rebuild and restore the 108 year old classic yacht Tally Ho. Now, I'm doing that project in the United States. But right now I'm back in the UK where I'm from, visiting my family and friends and also doing some work while I'm back here to save some money to put back into the Tally Ho project.

19:07 Andy Flattery You'll notice there that he is to the model of work that it seems like he is is doing. He's doing this sort of old school practice of working on a project to make money to go off and fund his own project. So throughout the course of the series, he will he'll fly back to England to work at various yards of friends of his to make money to go off and buy supplies for his own. Project or as he talks about, maybe potentially starting his own yard down the line. And so that's sort of an interesting model for work as well, too. You use projects to sort of bankroll your own project or your your larger vision for your career. And I think without, you know, without sort of being a diatribe against modern work or sort of decrying modern capitalism or the fiat economy, I think that's sort of the economy or anything like that. It is very much a celebration of like the craftsman. It becomes very clear that we've lost something by losing this sort of craftsmanship in our work. And thank God that this guy exists because he's sort of a master at everything. And he's sort of a remarkable guy. You'll see that if you if you watch the video, even if you know nothing about boat building, which which I don't. And so there's really nothing there's nothing cynical about it. There's everything about it is sort of a joy to watch. I mean, the only thing you could say would be like, well, he's on YouTube. So he's just doing this for clicks. And and I think, yes, certainly YouTube gives somebody like the Tally Hoat boat guy a bigger stage and hopefully it's going to allow him to do more to do greater projects. But I think somebody like this this guy would be successful anywhere. If there's ever anyone that is deserving of clicks, it is this guy because he's getting them for all the right reasons. The only thing you could say was, well, maybe maybe this is all for naught. Maybe it's sort of pedantic or sort of overkill. The fact that he's meticulously replacing this boat board by board, piece by piece, when he could do it on a more practical scale, he could do it at a level that's less expensive. And by him doing it this way, it's unnecessary. He could just buy his own boat. And he addresses that, I think, pretty well in this clip that I'm going to play for you here.

21:36 Tally Ho Yacht Guy A few people have suggested that it might have been simpler and quicker and cheaper to build a new boat rather than restore this one. And they'd be absolutely right. It would be much easier and much cheaper. But that's kind of not the point. If this was about the cheapest and easiest way to own a boat, I'd just go out and buy a boat. You can go into any marina in the world these days and get a bargain you can sail away in for just a few grand. So this is about rebuilding a historic vessel and saving it from destruction. It's about something that I think is worthwhile doing. It's about making a good story. And it's about, more than anything else, the magic of sailing on a really old boat. And when this boat is finished and I'll be sailing on a vessel that was built over 100 years ago, that is something magic. And even if a lot of it has been replaced, to me that just adds to the magic because it'll be a mix of a vessel that's over 100 years old and one that I've built myself.

22:34 Andy Flattery And for me those are the two of the most romantic, wonderful ideas that you could have. I have to tell you the truth after watching a bunch of these videos, I thought for a minute at least about taking up the hobby of becoming a boat builder myself. And I think you will too if you watch any of the Tally Ho yacht guy. But back to Eddie Mannix, the character from Hail Caesar. So throughout the film he's struggling with this question of, do I stay in this insane job, sort of like a fixer on the Hollywood movie sets? You know, a dirty job. He's not what you might call a master craftsman in the sense of Tally Ho yacht guy. But there's a sense that he's good at it and there's a sense that he's doing good work. He's making good movies. And the movies he's making, by the way, they do like a spoof of what is probably Ben Hur or the Ten Commandments, these Hollywood sword and sandals biblical epics, which are not the greatest films of all time, maybe. But they're good movies. Like if you've ever seen these movies, they are highly entertaining despite their flaws. And Hail Caesar does a sort of a hilarious job of making fun of their flaws. And so the end of the film is Eddie Mannix back in the confessional. And this time he's trying to get advice out of the priest and this is what happens.

24:18 Hail, Caesar! May I ask you something, Father? Of course, my son. If there's something that's easy, is that wrong? Easy? Easy to do. Easy to… Like an easy job. It's not a bad job. It's not bad. But then there's this other job that's not so easy. In fact, it's hard.

24:56 Hail, Caesar! It's so hard, Father, sometimes I don't know if I can keep doing it, but it seems right. I don't know how to explain. God wants us to do what's right. Yeah. Yeah, of course he does. The inner voice that tells you what's right, it comes from God, my son. Yeah, I got it. That's his way of saying that…

25:33 Hail, Caesar! Yeah, yeah, I got it. It's still raining in Gallup, New Mexico, and the Tucumcari crew has shut all the plates we need for King in the Rain. Well, just shoot the showdown in the weather and we'll retidle it. The Tucumcari Tempest, Desert Squall, hold back the storm. The stories begin, the stories end. I don't know, bounce it off the writers.

25:49 Fr. Paul Scalia So it has been. Here's today's call list. Add a call to a Mr. Cartaghe, the Lockheed Corporation. Long call, short?

25:55 Hail, Caesar! Thanks, but no thanks. How long was that? But the story of Eddie Mannix… Who do we call first?

26:00 Hail, Caesar! …will never end.

26:01 Andy Flattery New York first. Time to check in with Mr. Skank. For his is a tale written in light everlasting. With the realization that he shouldn't do the thing that's easy, but he should do the thing that is right. He is able to proceed with a new sense of purpose and a new sense of fire and skip in his step with the freedom to sort of do what he ought. So what does Eddie Mannix and Tally Ho Yacht Guy have in common? Well, of course, Eddie Mannix is not, as we said, a craftsman. They both work hard, but they're both exactly where they need to be. They're both in the place where they can best use their gifts for the world. And it's not always easy and it's taxing on them physically. In the case of Eddie Mannix, he at times is neglecting to his family, but he knows that and he's struggling with that. He's a very human and relatable character for any of us working in corporate America today. And guess what? He also makes the moral choice of not going to work for the military industrial complex. So that's the subtext. So maybe working in Hollywood is not some sort of modicum of virtue, but at least it's not going to work for the 1950s Eisenhower military industrial complex. He is sort of doing the moral thing in that regard. So one final thought here, celebrating this Eddie Mannix character in Hail Caesar, some might view that as sort of a conventional take. We're sort of celebrating the everyman working in a regular work environment, as we would define it today. And I think sometimes people that listen to this podcast or people in my orbit would maybe want me to be a little bit more blackpilled or embracing the prepper, the prepping movement or the homesteader community or something like that. And yeah, I mean, those folks are in my orbit. I'm friends with people that are doing that. I see a lot of value in some of the things that they're doing. But clearly I'm more falling on the side of Eddie Mannix, who is wearing the suit. And I guess ultimately, I think I'm still just taking the white pill in a lot of ways. And maybe that's just my personality or the fact that I know people that are in the real world that are doing good work the best way they know how. Or maybe it's the fact that I have a family and it's sort of my obligation to more or less be in the world working in a regular career. One of the things that gives me pause, going back to the financial independence retire early movement, is that book I've mentioned before. It's called Your Money or Your Life by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin. It's one of the foundational books in the fire community. If you're hardcore into the fire stuff, financial independence retire early, you know this book. You know Mr. Money Mustache, Jacob Lund Fisker, I think is the other author's name. These are a couple of the sort of foundational works for the financial independence retire early movement. Your Money or Your Life book was written in the 90s and I think it would surprise some people. One of the main ideas of the book is that by working, we are coerced into consuming, which is bad for the environment. And I think I want to do a robot voice for this.

29:46 Your Money or Your life This robot voice's name is Ethan, so here goes. We dedicate this book to all of the people who are actively engaged in leaving our planet

29:53 Andy Flattery in better shape than they found it. So that is the intro and that theme is repeated throughout the book.

30:01 Your Money or Your life It goes on to say later in the book. Product packaging is clogging the landfills. Product manufacturing is polluting the groundwater, forcing the Amazon, following the rivers, lowering the water table, depleting the ozone layer and changing the weather. As consumers, we're becoming like a cancer on the earth consuming our host, Paul Erlich, who besides co-writing New World, New Mind has written The Population Bomb and many other books, claims that in the United States, that individual does a hundred times more damage to the planet's environment that thanks to our extravagant use of resources than an individual

30:32 Andy Flattery in a less developed country. By saving money, you are saving the planet, in essence is what it's saying. Paul Erlich, by the way, if you know anything about him, has been totally discredited. So that sort of shows you how dated this book is. The reason why I'm reading that to you is some of you like myself will see that as a bit of a false ideology and a religion. Yes, maybe there's some merits to certain aspects of this, but I find that a lot of the environmentalists, they're sort of prioritizing the environmentalist religion over just human flourishing is the way I might describe it. And so that is where I think they're a bit on false ground there. And some of these folks, whether it be the environmentalists or the social justice warriors, or even like the religious right, they sound a little bit like George Clooney's character in Hail Caesar. I'll play a quick clip for you here. And here's George Clooney, who is the movie star in the film.

31:35 SPEAKER_02 You guys are pretty interesting though. They've actually figured out the laws that dictate everything. History, sociology, politics, morality, everything. It's all in a book called Capital. Okay. That right. You're not going to believe this. These guys even figured out what's going on here at the studio because the studio is nothing

31:56 Andy Flattery more than an instrument of capitalism. By the way, I'll mention here that earlier in the film Clooney's character, the movie star, is kidnapped by communists, like Hollywood writers who are communists. And he's an airhead. He's sort of making fun of himself, which is hilarious. And he is persuaded by the communist argument. That's what he's talking about here when he's talking to Manix's character. He's talking to Brolin's character rather.

32:27 SPEAKER_02 Yeah. So we blindly follow these laws like any other institution, the laws that these guys figured out. The studio makes pictures to serve the system. That is its function. That's really what we're up to here. Is it? Yeah. It's just confirming what they call the status quo. I mean, we may tell ourselves that we're creating something of artistic value or there's some sort of spiritual dimension to the picture business, but what it really is is this fat cat, Nick Skank, out in New York running this factory serving up these lollipops to the what they used to call the bread and circuses for the…

33:11 Hail, Caesar! Now you listen to me, buster. Nick Skank and the studio have been good to you and to everyone else who works here. If I ever hear you bad-mouthing Mr. Skank again, it'll be the last thing you say before

33:19 SPEAKER_02 I have you tossed in jail for colluding in your own abduction. Eddie, I wouldn't, I would never do that. Shut up.

33:25 Hail, Caesar! You're going to go out there and you're going to finish Hail Caesar. You're going to give that speech to the feet of the Penitent Thief and you're going to believe every word you say. You're going to do it because you're an actor and that's what you do. Just like the director does what he does and the writer and the script girl and the guy who claps the slate, you're going to do it because the picture has worth and you have

33:42 SPEAKER_02 worth if you serve the picture and you're never going to forget that again. I won't forget it.

33:50 Andy Flattery You're damn right you won't. Not as long as I run this dump. Go out there and be a star. So, Berlin slaps Clooney in the face there and puts him in his place because after all, he's a movie star. He's there to serve the picture. He's not an artist. He's a worker and he's a worker like all of us. And so, that is the lesson of Hail Caesar. That's going to be it for me and this podcast. Hope you enjoyed that. I've covered a lot of ground and hopefully you followed the various threads that I sent you down. But all of the clips that I played for you, I'm going to put on the episode page, which you can find the link for below this episode. And thanks for staying with me for this episode of the Reform Financial Advisor Podcast. We'll see you next time.