The Power Bible: In Conversation with Comedian and Author Brendon Lemon

This week, Augusto and I sat down with co-author of The Power Bible, Brendon Lemon. Brendon is a comedian and with his co-author William Betweet, III, are the authors of this unique book on how to manage power dynamics in relationships. (We had some technical recording issues, so you may notice we jump a bit in the conversation. It still came out to be an intriguing conversation with Brendon, so we hope you enjoy it!) (If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/126 for clickable links and the full show notes and transcript of this cast.) Enjoy! Give us feedback! And, thanks for listening! If you'd like to continue discussing The Power Bible with Brendon Lemon from this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post). In this Cast | The Power Bible Ray Sidney-Smith Augusto Pinaud Show Notes | The Power Bible Resources we mention, including links to them, will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context. The Power Bible by Brendon Lemon and William Beteet, III The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene On the topic of pre-reflective self-consciousness, Phenomenological Approaches to Self-Consciousness Slavoj Žižek - Wikipedia Gad Elmaleh - Official Website Gad Elmaleh - Wikipedia SugarSammy Eddie Izzard interstitial journaling Raw Text Transcript | The Power Bible Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be substantial errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. The time coding is mm:ss (e.g., 0:04 starts at 4 seconds into the cast’s audio). Read More Voiceover Artist 0:00 Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a fulfilling productive life, then you've come to the right place. ProductivityCast the weekly show about all things productivity, here are your hosts, Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks. Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17 Welcome back, everybody to ProductivityCast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity. I'm Ray Sidney-Smith. Augusto Pinaud 0:23 And I'm Augusto Pinaud. Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:24 And welcome to ProductivityCast. Today, we are bringing you a special episode as we are want to do a few times per year we interview people who we think are going to be useful to you out there in your productivity world. And today, we're going to be talking about a book called The Power Bible by William Beteet III and Brendon Lemon. And we actually have Brendan Lemon with us. So just a little bit about the book. So you have an understanding. I'm just reading here from the Amazon description here. This is a quotation that James all teacher, you know, presents at the beginning of the description, it says, quote, the core of the power Bible is how to light the mastery and confidence in yourself at a deep internal level, and using that confidence outwards, to clearly see the various frames and agendas being used by the people around you, end quote. And so the the description moves on to say, to have power over another one must first have power over one's self. And so this is a book of teaching you how to really assume that intrapersonal individual and societal control and to do that, as I said, we have Brandon lemon here on the show. Brendon from his website is a comedian from Detroit, where he started performing regularly at a famous comedy castle at the age of 16. Two years later, he was filmed for the documentary funny, which featured Christopher Titus and Mike Green. He moved to Paris in summer 2013 to both write and perform stand up in both French and English. He returned to the US and live between Colorado and Chicago in Illinois, performing and writing plays as well as being featured on a TV show Sex sent me to the ER and the movie. Do you believe he lives between Chicago and Detroit currently, and so welcome to ProductivityCast Brendon. Brendon Lemon 2:08 Hey, thanks for having me, guys. I appreciate it. Raymond Sidney-Smith 2:10 It's such a pleasure to have you join us today. We have a lot to ask you and to discuss about the power Bible. But first, did I miss anything? Brendon Lemon 2:17 No, you got it? I'm I think I would the Asterix that I would say to update that bio from from my website, I should probably go do it is that I have since moved to New York. But now I'm due to the pandemic in Austin, Texas. It's about the only place you can do comedy in the United States right now. So I'm doing a lot of outdoor shows. Raymond Sidney-Smith 2:35 As a New Yorker. I'm I was raised in New York City. I'm a Brooklynite and but now I live in Pittsburgh. So you're you're in my hometown, or we're in my hometown for a while and now you're in Austin, another of my favorite cities in the country. Austin's a really good city. Brendon Lemon 2:51 It's really cool. Pittsburgh is great, though. I went to Pittsburgh, and I was like, this is a more functional Detroit. Yes, yes. Raymond Sidney-Smith 2:58 It's like the Midwestern vibe with a bunch of small towns mash together. It's really remarkable right Brendon Lemon 3:04 around the rivers dude, it's great. Very, very cool. I Augusto Pinaud 3:07 really like that description of functional Detroit. Raymond Sidney-Smith 3:13 Alright, so let's get into the power Bible. Why did you sit down and decide that you're going to write a book about power? Where did that come from? Brendon Lemon 3:22 Yeah, this is good. This is a good question. So I it should I should back up and say that it you the book came together. Because my co author and I, William petite, the third met in Chicago doing comedy. And what's kind of funny about that is that we were not when I first met him, I was like, I can't stand this guy. And we did not. We did not get along at all. Like all good marriages. We started that way and realized after getting to know each other a little bit more. We actually had a lot in common. And it wasn't just comedy. It was a lot of our background was really similar. We came from very different places. I grew up in Metro Detroit in the Midwest, from a what start would call a petite bourgeoisie family. He came from a very bourgeoisie family. He was born in Britain, raised in Hong Kong, his dad's from St. Louis. He's mixed race. He's got a very, I mean, Bill has a very and he talks about in the book, very diverse background. I have I have a very, I think white bread American background. But I think that our experiences growing up in my case is shifting sort of post colonial Detroit, in his in a in Hong Kong and all over caused us to reflect a lot on our sort of mutual alienation as like his adolescence, and I know this is really going down the rabbit hole. But that's a long winded way of me saying that, once I met him, and when we realized what we had in common, we had a common story of trying to figure out who we were related to the world of shifting sands that we kind of grew up on and you And what we began to realize when we talked a lot about it was that we had done a lot of work. We're both philosophers. He's a lawyer, I almost went to law school until I was literally talked out of it by everyone in my life. And I literally everybody I talked to, would say that I had, I have a degree in philosophy, which I joke is a degree and asking really good questions like, what's the meaning of life? And do you have any change, it basically allowed us, I think, to see how we needed to, at a fundamental level growing up, go inside of ourselves and kind of pick apart our feelings and how our feelings created beliefs, and how those beliefs influenced our identity and our person and how we worked our way out in the world. And going through that process, we developed a similar philosophy. And we realized, as we talked about it more and more, we really had something to create. And I think that the power Bible was finally created, because we wanted to produce something, we had something to share. And we wanted to produce a book that we wish we had, when we started this process out. We wanted something that somebody could take, and really try to understand how do I get what I want in life? How do I win conversations that matter? And winning conversations that matter isn't just tactics that happen in a negotiation, or interpersonally, it also happens inside of yourself, the first conversation you have to win is with yourself. And that's what we realized, I think was missing from a lot of books that we had read on the subject. And that's what we wanted to create with our Bible. That's a very long winded way of answering your question. Augusto Pinaud 6:36 But that was one of the things that as I progressed in the reading was exciting for me, because I obviously didn't know what to expect when I begin the book. But one of the things I found when when we talk about power is the power towards daughters and how we're going to control that. And that is, so what it is. But if you don't control yourself, if you don't learn how to do it inside first, then the outside it's not real. So that was as I begin progress into the book, one of the things that got me into it and got me more interest. And we'll get to my questions that I have in a bit. Was that part of how you it is in a way more about what you're? Yeah, it talks about a little bit about the others. But it's really more about how you are going to use the tools and the framework to apply it yourself. Now. It's really exciting for Brendon Lemon 7:32 me. Yeah, I appreciate you saying that. Because I think you know, I mean, there's I guess there's two things I want to say there. One is, you know, character matters....