The Far Middle episode 126 lands on the birthday of NFL legend Mike Ditka, providing a no-brainer dedication for this installment. Nick calls Iron Mike a “kindred spirit of The Far Middle,” as he recalls episode 85, which was dedicated to the Super Bowl-winning 1985 Chicago Bears, as well as episode 46 that celebrated Buddy Ryan’s 46 Defense.

Following last week’s lightning round episode, the format for The Far Middle episode 126 returns to a special singular focus on a World War II battle that’s often overshadowed by the European Theater’s bigger and more famous Allied campaigns. That battle is the Battle of Hurtgen Forest.

Nick proceeds to analyze the battle, its timeline and lessons, building upon his recently released essay, The Battle of Hurtgen Forest: Costly Failure and Lessons Learned.

“When it was all said and done, 120,000 American troops were deployed in the Battle of Hurtgen Forest, suffering 33,000 casualties,” says Nick, addressing all that went wrong in the Hurtgen. “The battle’s lessons, they should be remembered if we’re to honor those who paid the ultimate price, and thousands of Americans paid that ultimate price.”

Those lessons include:

• Leadership matters, and poor leadership negates inherent advantage.
• Preparation and homework are prerequisites to success.
• Avoid terrain and environment that neutralizes your strengths.
• Supply chain weakness will hamper success in modern warfare and economy.
• Success demands teams have the proper tools and equipment.
• Underestimate your adversary’s capacity and will at your own peril.

“The Hurtgen Forest was a battle from hell, a disaster Allied leadership should have seen coming,” says Nick before making one final connection to a lighter topic, Meat Loaf’s Bat Out of Hell, an album no one saw coming that was released this week in 1977.

The Far Middle episode 125 honors Baseball Hall of Famer and Reds legend, Joe Morgan. Nick calls Morgan the greatest second baseman to ever play the game and reflects on Morgan’s stellar career, both on the field and in the broadcast booth.

While recent Far Middle episodes have concentrated on singular topics (mentoring young adults, the wisdom of Václav Havel, effective leadership, and speculative natural gas research), this installment is a lighting round episode, catching up on several developments from the last few weeks.

Nick leads off the episode highlighting the work of John Ioannidis and his research on the issue of what’s become of science and the scientific method. Among Ioannidis’ views, Nick points out his notion that you don’t need a Ph.D. in a technical scientific field to play the role of a scientific skeptic.

Next, Nick examines the United Nations Development Programme’s iVerify platform, an “automated fact-checking tool.” Nick references author Michael Schellenberger and how iVerify fits into what Schellenberger calls the Censorship Industrial Complex.

Staying within the realm of the United Nations, Nick calls out a couple frightening quotes from Piers Forster, a professor of climate physics at the University of Leeds who has helped author Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports.

“The United Nations’ efforts these days serve as a great connection to what’s going on at the World Bank,” Nick continues. “The World Bank has a new leader, Mr. Ajay Banga…he is going to be leading the charge of an effort to expand lending capacity through the World Bank to fight climate change.”

Nick moves from the World Bank lending to nations to help their climate change fight, to the Federal Reserve’s compounded annual growth rate, to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s pursuit of a global minimum tax.

The theme of government and institutional overreach runs throughout the episode, and comes to a head as Nick reviews consumer product regulations that have come about this year; spanning light bulbs to gas stoves and home furnaces to vehicles. Pivoting off the topic of transportation, Nick addresses congestion pricing in Manhattan, to then commenting on New York City’s iconic Roosevelt Hotel becoming an asylum seeker arrival center.

In examining government inefficiency, Nick points out the 2.2 million civilian employees in the federal government. These are career bureaucrats not elected by the American people, but who are making more and more major policy decisions that are affecting everyone. “When the bureaucratic state realizes that there’s not going to be a culture of accountability or consequences for things like expanding power base or mission creep, then you start to see illogical outcomes,” says Nick.

As the episode winds down, Nick addresses our federal government investing in the Democratic Republic of Congo, climate change negotiations between China and the U.S., China’s growing control of strategic ports, and the benefits of limited government.

In closing Nick salutes the late great jazz drummer Art Blakey whose birthday falls on the release date of episode 125. Blakey, “a polyrhythmic percussion powerhouse,” passed away on Oct. 16, 1990, two months after Joe Morgan’s induction into the Hall of Fame.

The Far Middle episode 124 arrives as this year’s Major League Baseball playoffs get underway. Accordingly, Nick dedicates the episode to two recent baseball milestones that occurred on October 4, the episode’s first airing date.

On Oct. 4, 2021, Barry Bonds hit his 70^th home run to tie Mark Maguire for the most home runs in a single season. And then a year ago today, Aaron Judge broke Roger Maris’ American League single season home run record with his 62^ndblast. While the achievements were notable, Nick sees them as a product of professional baseball’s evolution—”making what was once exceptional, the home run, the norm.”

By stacking the deck for a favored outcome, Nick suggests baseball has demoted the essence and purity of the game, becoming more contrived and manufactured entertainment.

With that observation, Nick stays on the topic of optics and manufactured outcomes, and pivots from baseball to the episode’s principal topic: the recent University of Pittsburgh’s (Pitt) studies on public health impacts from natural gas development in southwestern Pennsylvania.

This episode’s discussion expands upon Nick’s commentary, “Natural Gas Development and Human Health in PA: Let’s Get the Facts Straight.”

“The Pitt studies, they left much to be desired and suffered from fatal design flaws, many of them self-inflicted by the research team, despite having the benefit of a $2.6 million taxpayer budget for the effort,” says Nick. He proceeds to examine the studies’ results that found no causation linking natural gas development to health problems, but you wouldn’t know that from the media coverage.

Nick highlights the massive body of prior health and environmental research on natural gas development from the last several years before delving into the flaws and limitations of the Pitt studies. Further, Nick addresses reactions from various parties upon the release of the studies, and how, “they provide a window into how this type of research has been co-opted to fulfill predetermined views of the natural gas industry by those opposed to it.”

The studies’ release, the ensuing media headlines, and subsequent calls from study authors for more taxpayer-funded research, is another example of the positive feedback loop that perpetuates a desired storyline.

Nick concludes by first offering few refreshing doses of truth, and then makes one final connection to Rembrandt who died on October 4, 1669.

Nick calls out Rembrandt’s masterpiece, The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp, which, “shows a doctor performing a dissection of a body to instruct other medical colleagues as they looked on,” explains Nick. “I think that this is a fitting final connection for this episode as we’ve dove deep on dissecting a process designed to create opportunity by stoking baseless innuendo when it comes to the health of residents and industries that drive quality of life in western Pennsylvania. This episode in many ways served as an anatomy lesson consistent with the Rembrandt painting and its title.”

The Far Middle episode 123 is a must-listen installment focused on effective leadership. Nick walks through a series of quotes on leadership by a range of thought leaders and some anonymously attributed, all connected in distinct Far Middle style.

And in a Far Middle series first, the full episode is also available as a video to highlight these words of leadership wisdom, which as a group, holistically define effective leadership.

The Far Middle: Effective Leadership

For the episode’s dedication, Nick honors Coach Vince Lombardi: “What sports figure has a better association with effective leadership than Lombardi,” says Nick. “Lombardi saw winning as a mindset and a habit that had to be cultivated through leadership.”

Nick goes on to quote many others, ranging from Jack Kerouac to Vincent Van Gogh and from General George Patton to Nipsey Hussle. With each quote, Nick helps interpret the lesson to be had. Takeaways include:

• If you’re looking to do something extraordinary, then it’s almost a certainty, there are going to be missteps and failures along the way.
• Effective leaders must be willing and become very good at striking a balance when it’s right to move on an opportunity.
• Just like with a competitive sports team, personnel change from time to time. Winning organizations are ones that are always looking at any opportunity to upgrade their talent level to be the best they possibly can be.
• What are initially challenges—convert them into opportunities.
• Great leaders are constantly looking to improve, to advance the state of the art, to get better, and to continually improve.
• You’ve got to go make things happen.
• Too much focus and too much attention beyond learning from a failure—to the point of obsession—can create a paralysis with respect to decision-making, achieving, and getting better.
• Your words start to lose value when your actions don’t match.

Nick closes with an adage from Steve Mehr to think about often: “You get what you focus on. So focus on what you want.”

“What do you focus on, what’s your team focused on, is it consistent with what you want,” asks Nick. “And if they’re not, then that’s an opportunity. I wouldn’t get frustrated by it as much as I would see as an opportunity to redirect the attention into the appropriate channels and onto the appropriate tasks.”

The Far Middle episode 122 begins by rewinding the clock back to the summer of 1978 to celebrate Pete Rose’s magical 44-game hitting streak.

While now 45 years ago, Charlie Hustle’s consecutive game-hitting streak remains the closest to overtaking Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game record. Despite coming up short, Nick recalls the never-short-on-confidence Rose saying during his 1978 streak that he “might go on forever.” Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case, and DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting remains one of the unlikeliest MLB records that will ever be broken.

Shifting from baseball, Nick continues his recent theme of exploring one central and significant topic in this episode. “I get to settle into one of my ideological North Stars, a person whose thoughts and impact I didn’t awaken to until a few short years ago,” explains Nick. That North Star’s name? Václav Havel.

Nick proceeds to reflect on Havel’s contributions as an author, poet, dissident, and statesman. Nick connects back to 1978 as he explores Havel’s essay released that year, “The Power of the Powerless.” Nick highlights the essay’s importance at its release, its connections to today, and defines Havel’s concept of “living in truth.”

“By deciding to live within the truth, one breaks the rules of the game and then you expose the game as the ruse that it is,” says Nick. “It becomes clear that living a lie is just that. It’s living a lie…For the post-totalitarian system, or for government run by the Left in the West today, the ultimate fundamental threat to its power will be individuals daring to live within the truth.”

In closing, Nick notes the episode’s release follows Constitution Day, celebrated this past September 17. “I like to think that the Founders in the late 1700s and their product, the Constitution, inspired Havel in the late 1970s in his product, ‘The Power of the Powerless,’ so that you, constant listeners, and I, have the conviction to be dissidents living within the truth in America in 2023,” concludes Nick.

Nick’s discussion in this installment expands upon his recent commentary, “A Dose Of Dissidence And A Pinch Of Living In Truth: Remedy For Troubling Times.”