Episode 021 Full Transcript — The Problem With One-Dimensional Success

This page contains the complete transcript of Full Mental Bracket episode 021, examining ambition, identity, and belonging through Pixar’s Cars. The discussion explores how success becomes fragile when it’s defined too narrowly—touching on burnout, zero-sum thinking, recognition without connection, and the role of mentorship and community in reshaping what it means to win.

For the structured psychological framing, thematic breakdown, and applied interpretation of these ideas, see the full episode analysis here:

→ The Problem With One-Dimensional Success — Pixar’s Cars

• How success becomes fragile when it’s defined too narrowly
• Zero-sum thinking and the pressure to win at any cost
• The difference between recognition and real belonging
• Burnout as a signal, not a failure
• Mentorship, community, and how they reshape ambition
• Cultural examples used to explore performance, identity, and growth

[00:00] Chasing success without questioning the cost

Brent: Most of us are taught to chase success, to put our heads down and grind towards a distant goal, one that will justify our efforts and satisfy our longings. And all too often, we don’t question what that success looks like, or what the wrong success could cost us. In this episode, we break down the Pixar movie Cars. not as a kid flick, but as a deep and moving story about identity, success, and belonging. We explore how ambition without community can lead to heartache, the dangers of defining success too narrowly, and why having a tribe often matters more than just winning the race. I’m Brent Diggs, and this is Full Mental Bracket, where science and storytelling meet to help you level up and tell a better story with your life. Good time, period, Bracketeers. Today, we’re coming at you with an episode about the Pixar movie Cars from 2006.

Camille: Great movie.

Brent: I mean, it’s a good movie. A lot of times, these cartoons come out, and sometimes I get a little snobby, like, oh, it’s the kids watching it, like, oh, it’s a kid’s movie. Not necessarily.

Camille: I actually first learned about this movie from a coworker.

Brent: Really?

Camille: Who didn’t even have any children. She said, this is my favorite movie. I love this movie. You’ve got to see this movie.

Brent: So all the great stories that we go over have a framework, and starting with the framework is the main character has to be a protagonist, and our protagonist is Lightning McQueen, the red race car.

Camille: With an attitude.

Brent: With an attitude, lightning bolt. Yes, sometimes our characters have to be encouraged to protag, not Lightning. Lightning’s already there, he’s already full of ambition.

Camille: He’s a protagonist on hyperdrive.

Brent: He is grinding away. He has dreams. He knows where he wants to go and nobody’s going to slow him down.

Camille: Nope.

Brent: And that there is the problem.

Camille: That’s correct.

Brent: So we see Lightning’s philosophy early in the movie. He starts chanting to himself, one winner, one winner, 42 losers, one winner, 42 losers.

Camille: I’m not going to be one of the 42 losers.

Brent: His mentality is a very zero sum game. Which in races is honestly true, there can only be one winner. But he applies that zero-sum game to everything in life, as we find out as we get into this movie.

Camille: Right, he’s totally absorbed. He’s kind of like an Olympic athlete in that sense, where everything’s about training and there’s no life outside of that goal.

Brent: And that’s kind of a problem, as we’ll get into, because in your own life, you have to define your own success. Success is a multifaceted, multidimensional thing. It’s not good enough just to be rich and alone or to be successful and burned out. You have to have a little bit of all the ingredients.

Camille: Yeah, and boy did he burn out. Talk about it, in that first race, going around, not stopping to get his tires fixed, not going in for the pit stop. He blew out. Burned out, blew out.

Brent: He blew out and the tires were gone. So he, the story picks up in the last race of the season. It’s his rookie season, no one knows who he was. He goes from being an unknown to being almost winning the big race. It’s a real ego boost for him.

Camille: Yep.

Brent: As he’s getting ready, he gets advice from the King, the number one race car in the world, encourages him not to be dumb, that he needs friends, that he needs a pit crew, that he needs a team, and he blows him off. He blows off this potential mentor. He blows off the need for a tribe and says, I can solo this.

Camille: And he does attempt the solo.

Brent: Yeah, and he skips his pit stop and his pit crew gets mad and they quit, his tires blow up, and he fails to win the race.

Camille: But he manages to tie by a tongue.

Brent: Yes, by a tongue. So his lone wolf mindset costs him the victory, but they have a runoff race.

Camille: You know, it’s really sad because when his manager…

Brent: Agent Harv.

Camille: Yeah, his agent says, hey, I’ve got some tickets that you can give to your friends, and he says, oh yeah, thanks, but he doesn’t have any friends to give them to.

Brent: Then this is the problem. He’s got fans, but he’s got no friends.

Camille: No friends.

Brent: And this doesn’t faze him at the moment. He thinks this is a great equation, but that’s really setting him up for disaster later in life, as we’ve learned, as we’ve gotten later in life. You know, with our worldwide popularity, you know, we’ve learned how to autograph seekers. No. But still, even in a regular, non-famous life, you need a tribe, you need roots, you need social wealth, you need the input. We’re always saying this, and we’ll probably keep on saying it.

Camille: Yes, we will. We started off in our married life, you had joined the Marine Corps, and we had to move far away from our families. We had no tribe, we had no friends, no family. We had a baby right away. It was…

Brent: But we didn’t think it was going to be difficult.

Camille: No, we thought, oh, yeah, we can we can do this. We’re, you know, we’re going to…

Brent: How difficult can parenting be?

Camille: It’s going to be so great. You know, we were like, you know, let’s get away from our families. This is going to be so great. We’re going to get married. We’re so in love. And, you know, the…

Brent: The dream.

Camille: The love of vision that we’ve talked about previously, you know, we were, we were steeped in the love of vision and thought we were, we were just going to be amazing and perfect and great at, at what we were doing without any help. And we were so wrong.

Brent: Nothing really kind of drives it home like when you’re hundreds and hundreds of miles from home and we were stationed in the middle of nowhere with no TV channels and no radio reception. And it was just me and you and the baby.

Camille: I mean, 29 Palms didn’t even get a McDonald’s till after we had lived there. I mean, they had nothing. They had the library, they had a gas station, they had a little drug store slash, and had some groceries in it, but it was very small, and I don’t even think they had 29 Palms. I don’t even think they made it.

Brent: Your accounting might have been optimistic.

Camille: Yes.

Brent: Yes. We lived in Death Valley. Let that sink in for you. The point of this episode was that we were very naive. We didn’t think we needed people much like Lightning McQueen. I don’t need nobody. I have speed and that’s all I need.

Camille: We had youth and stupidity on our side.

Brent: So on his way to the next race, he falls out of the truck. He wakes up in the middle of a nightmare. He’s in nowhere, America. He’s entered the Twilight Zone world of Radiator Springs.

Camille: Which was actually pretty cool if you think about it. All the rocks were different car parts.

Brent: But I mean for him, so I mean think about where he was at. He wakes up, he’s in the middle of the night, he wakes up nowhere, he’s racing around trying to find his ride, he accidentally tears up the whole town, it’s night, he’s disoriented, he wakes up in jail. He’s on his way to glory, but wakes up in jail instead. That might be what you might call there a shift.

Camille: very much a shift and a very, it’s like a not just a nightmare, but he’s so obsessed and so into, I gotta be first place, I gotta get there first, I’ve gotta schmooze everybody, I’ve gotta, he has these steps. He’s a really great protagonist because he has all the steps laid out of how he wants to be number one and how he wants to get there, but guess what? He’s got to go through some adversity first.

Brent: He does, he has the trail of adversity ahead of him. Not the least of which is Doc Hudson shows up to be the judge at his trial. The first authority figure he couldn’t just blow off because he’s locked down. He has to listen to the voice of Doc Hudson.

Camille: I love it when they take the little boot off of him, off his tire, and he’s, whew, he’s gone, and then, you know, he’s just like, calmly, it’s okay. He’s out of gas. He’s gonna be out of gas, so.

Brent: The city slickers out in the country are like, these guys don’t know how, it’s like, yeah. You’re not our first idiot in this town. We’ve done this before. So what makes it interesting for adults watching this movie is Doc Hudson is voiced by Paul Newman. And when you hear that voice, at first you don’t recognize it, but there’s that kind of growl, get him out of my town. And you realize, but subconsciously you get this kind of typecasting kind of thing, because Paul Newman is really good at playing these father mentor roles. You know, he coached Tom Cruise in The Color of Money. He coached Robert Redford in The Sting. He coached Tom Hanks in The Road to Perdition. He’s like always this mentor figure helping these people figure out their different trades and crafts. So when this guy shows up trying to help this race car.

Camille: Yeah, we already have like an inkling.

Brent: We feel like. Yeah, we already know what’s gonna happen. There could be like this father-son relationship kind of thing going on here. Yes. Because he’s so good at that. He radiates that warmth. He does. Well, it’s kind of a growling warmth.

Camille: It is a growling, but it’s good.

Brent: If you don’t have kids of your own, you may not understand the growling warmth, but it’s a thing.

Narrator: This is Full Mental Bracket – 9:23

Brent: So Lightning considers himself too important for small town justice. He says, I shouldn’t have to put up with this. But he does.

Camille: He does have to put up with it. He just doesn’t realize how much so yet.

Brent: See, he sees his value and his validation tied up in winning the race. That’s where his real value is, that’s where he proves himself. This other stuff is just an inconvenience. Obstacles in his way to greatness.

Camille: Well, and the other cars have kind of put him up on a pedestal. He has his fans, and so he thinks he’s all that because he’s in the spotlight and he’s fast. So he thinks he can do whatever he wants.

Brent: So he’s rude to the other cars, and he’s very condescending in his flirtations with Sally and stuff.

Camille: As our granddaughter would say, he’s a mean one.

Brent: He’s a mean one, yes. But in his mind, the ends justify the means. These are little people in his way. He’s got to get to greatness. They don’t really count. And that’s the lesson that he needs to learn while he’s there in Radiator Springs. So in a story, you start out in the ordinary world, and then after you answer the call to adventure, you end up in the special world where you have to learn all these skills, and then come back and apply them in the ordinary world again, the full circle. Now for a lot of people, the special world is learning to use the force, or learning kung fu, or learning all this fancy stuff, but Lightning’s already a fancy race car driver. He has to learn humanity. He has to learn how to not be a butthead. That’s the magic skill he has to learn in the special zone, how to be a friend.

Camille: I think he does a good job eventually.

Brent: He does eventually, but they set him up.

Camille: His tri-fail cycle. He had a few extra tri-fail cycles in his journey.

Brent: They set him up with a pretty steep character arc. You have a tall road to climb to become a decent car.

Camille: Yeah. And his first attempt at trying to escape, obviously, he goes off, runs out of gas, so he realizes, I’m gonna have to do this. So he’s like, well, I have to repave this road, this is taking too long. He has no patience for the process and blows through it, doing a really poor job of it, and is like, okay, I’m done, I can go now. Well, no, you have to do the job correctly. You can’t just do the job. You have to do it correctly.

Brent: And once again, for those of you who have raised children, you’ll recognize that, my room’s clean!

Camille: Oh, my gosh, yes!

Brent: Under the rug doesn’t count, everything under your bedspread doesn’t count as clean.

Camille: Or Lake Lego, it does not count.

Brent: No, no. So this is the thing with the road, so he’s too important for the townspeople, so the way he learns his lesson, he’s sentenced to community service.

Camille: That’s right.

Brent: You are gonna serve this community, even though you think you’re too important for that.

Camille: Yeah, you’re gonna fix what you tore up.

Brent: And he’s really bad at it because he won’t spend the time to actually learn. Once again, he’s impatient. Never his mind on where he is sort of thing. Yoda would be proud.

Camille: Always on the future.

Brent: Yes. All right. So Doc Hudson realizes that he’s not getting through to this kid. So he challenges him to a race and then defeats him soundly.

Camille: And I think we really all saw that coming. It wasn’t it wasn’t a shocker.

Brent: You know, he’s all like, you’re going to challenge me to a race. Oh, this is great. This is free money. This is amazing.

Camille: Yeah.

Brent: And he had to be humiliated in his own category of specialty to really be humbled enough to listen and learn.

Camille: That’s right.

Brent: He’s like he lost fair and square. It’s like, all right, you lost a race. Now you really have to buckle down to scrape up all this old bad tar and start over from the beginning. And at that point, that’s when he kind of answers the call to adventure. He’s actually buckling down to face the adversity, to try to learn some new skills. And that’s when he stops denying the call and stops denying that he’s too important for this lesson and settles down to learn the lesson.

Camille: And this is when he starts interacting with some of the other people in the town, too, and starts getting to know them. Rather than seeing them as obstacles, like he had been, now he’s looking at the different people and starting to actually see who they are and some value to them.

Brent: And in all fairness, he doesn’t really make the first move. Mater comes over and kind of starts befriending him and befriending him more and then declares to him, you’re my best friend. And it’s like, once you’re adopted to that, all you have to do is kind of live up to that. So you kind of made it easy for him. Because if it was up to him to actually lower his guard and actually make the first step, it might have taken a lot longer.

Camille: We all need a Mater in our life.

Brent: We all need people who love you and are patient with you.

Camille: Yes.

Brent: So we start to see Lightning have some growth. He starts to impress Doc with his work ethic. He’s getting the track, he’s getting the road paved. In his spare time, he goes and practices out on the dirt track.

Camille: He wants to learn that. He wants to master it. He wants to get to the point where he won’t be embarrassed again, or he’s, you know, it’s like, why can’t I do this? I’m really good at racing. Why is this? Why is this confounding me? Why am I not getting it?

Brent: You see him embrace mastery. There’s no trophy on the line. There’s no fame. There’s no Dinoco. There’s no contracts. He just wants to learn how to do this thing and be a better race car, which is healthy. This is what we encourage. You have in the internal motivation of mastery rather than the external motivation of achievement and validation of trophies and stuff. It’s much more healthy. It’s much more sustaining. It’s much more enjoyable. And he’s starting to find that he’s starting to find that. And then you see something interesting in the town, as he starts to fix up the road, the other cars start fixing up their shops, they start painting the walls, they start taking pride in where they’re at. It’s like lightning came and kind of sparked something, a chain reaction in them, and they start thinking better about themselves, to start remembering who they are. You know, we talk about how a leader invites someone into a better story. And even just by being a passive leader, just paving the road, people are like, oh yeah, this place could be a lot better. I could add to that, I could do my part.

Camille: He’s got a lot of energy too. He’s got a very.

Brent: He’s got a lot of octane.

Camille: He’s got a lot of personality. And he’s very, he’s one of those type of people that we meet in life who are outgoing and bubbly and you want to be around them because they’re, they have this positive outlook, I can do it. And so you want to be around those type of people because that makes you feel like you can do it too.

Brent: Yeah, sometimes you marry those kind of people just to help you get out of bed. So right about the halfway point of the movie, something changes. Lightning starts saying thank you. He starts appreciating people, starts being more like a friend.

Camille: Think once you’ve kind of lived in the dirt or in the muck or I mean pretty much he’s had a soft bed he’s had everything kind of handed to him and at this point he’s been in jail he’s in the impound he’s sleeping in the impound he’s not he’s he’s not getting He’s not getting the real good food. He’s having it rough. So, when he gets handed a few things that are nice, he appreciates them more because it’s not what he just came from.

Brent: He starts softening. He starts saying thank you. He starts acting like a normal person instead of a celebrity. Which is a healthy movement for him. And it’s like the halfway point is usually at a point in the story where you start seeing some progress.

Camille: Right.

Brent: Some battle’s been won and you actually start applying the lessons. And this is where it begins for Lightning. But then Lightning discovers Doc Hudson’s secret. He discovers that Doc Hudson has the piston cup that Lightning wants so bad.

Camille: Not only just one.

Brent: He’s got three.

Camille: But three. And they’re covered in dust and they’re used as cup holders.

Brent: Yeah, are they kept on a pedestal? Nope, he just puts tools in it.

Camille: They’re not in a trophy case.

Brent: They’re just an empty cup. He doesn’t respect them. He doesn’t revere them like Lightning does. They don’t have the same weight of status and validation and greatness and glory. And he can’t figure that out.

Camille: So basically, Doc doesn’t want to have anything to do with it. He doesn’t want to talk about it. He said, why are you in my space? Can’t you read the sign? Keep out. You don’t belong here. Get out of here. He’s very confrontational. He doesn’t want lightning in his space. You can tell he doesn’t want to be reminded of the past. He doesn’t want to talk about it. He doesn’t want to face it. He’s a cranky old man.

Brent: And Lightning is excited. Finally, there’s someone he can talk racing with. There’s someone who talks his language, someone who has had the same dreams, the same experiences. He finally found what could have been a kindred spirit for him. And Doc just shuts him down. And we can’t figure out why. But then when lightning tells the townspeople that Doc was a famous racer, they laugh at him. They can’t believe it. Doc has run from his past, he’s buried his past so deep that when the truth comes out, people don’t even believe it. They just laugh at him.

Camille: And that was really hurtful for Doc. You could tell he was incredibly hurt by that, that people wouldn’t believe that about, because that was part of his identity. And yeah, he buried that identity, but still it was a part of his identity. And for them not to be able to see that in him at all, that was hurtful.

Brent: It’s kind of the same dynamic. I can make a depreciating joke about myself, but if you say the same thing about me, that’s just mean. He can downplay his status and his glory and slum it with the locals, but when they didn’t believe that he ever had any status and glory, he’s like, wait a minute, that’s different. That hurts. And when you get to a certain age, sometimes you have to dust off the old newspapers and say, even though I feel like it was a struggle to get out of bed today, I’ve done some great things, I’m still able, I still have the potential to do great things. And sometimes you have to get in touch with that younger version of you and remind yourself that you’re still that same person.

Camille: Right, I used to be able to bend over and pick up something off the floor without hurting my back. It used to be something.

Brent: Those glory days.

Camille: Those glory days. Yep.

Narrator: This is Full Mental Bracket – 19:58

Brent: So then Sally invites him to a drive, a cruise together.

Camille: That’s right.

Brent: He has an opportunity to escape, but he decides to stick with the girl. That’s his first sign of responsibility. And they take a drive, and he gets a history lesson about the freeway versus Route 66, and about how the town was once thriving, but as soon as the other people didn’t need them anymore, they forgot about the town.

Camille: Yeah. It kind of got erased off the map.

Brent: Yeah. Once the freeway shifted a few miles, nobody came to town, and they were forgotten. And that’s kind of a theme that’s going to come up with Doc later. And the thing is, once you’re out of the limelight, everyone forgets about you. And it’s with Doc, it’s with the town, it could be with Lightning if he doesn’t learn some important lessons. It’s like the limelight is fickle and unforgiving, and it’s not a very satisfying pursuit if that’s the only thing that you’re after. And then Sally talks about how she left the big city as a lawyer and settled here. And Lightning can’t understand that.

Camille: He’s like, why would you leave that? Why would you come here and come to this obscure place and not stay in the limelight and not live out your dreams in the big city?

Brent: But Sally has an important lesson for him. This is Sally defined her own success. She had this cookie cutter success of being a lawyer, what everyone else thought she should be. It wasn’t satisfying. She found something way out in the country, way out in the desert that no one else can understand. But it fired up her soul and it was her own personal success. And she wasn’t afraid to recalculate and change that journey.

Camille: And she really cared about the people in the town. She wanted them to succeed. She pumped them up and said, OK, here’s what we’re going to do if a customer comes in. Everybody take your places. Get ready. She prepped them for the eventuality and gave them some hope, something to look forward to, and hey, this is how we’re gonna drill for this. We’re gonna make sure that we know what to do when the people come. Not if the people come, when the people come.

Brent: She had that hope.

Camille: Yes, she did.

Brent: Meanwhile, Lightning is pursuing like a default success. It’s like, I wanna win a Piston Cup. But he has no idea for the context. He has no idea what happens after that. He has no idea who he wants to be with, when he wins it. He has no idea.

Camille: Oh, he doesn’t care to even think about it after that.

Brent: He hasn’t considered that.

Camille: No, he doesn’t want to.

Brent: And a lot of us are like this when we’re young. I just want to be great. I want to be a rock star. I want to be this. I want to be that. And I’ll figure out the rest when I get there. And then you get there and it’s really disappointing.

Camille: It’s rare to see a younger person who is mature enough to be able to count the cost of the goal, of the pursuit, and stick to it, and still be able to have friends and a whole life.

Brent: Well, it comes back to this multiple dimensions of success. You know, you get to be our age and you’ve seen people who have climbed the corporate ladder and achieved greatness, but then they’re divorced and their kids don’t want to talk to them. You see these people, they’re great artists or great musicians and they’re horrible human beings and nobody wants to associate with them outside of business. And it’s just like, what if you could have a little bit of each? What if instead of burning out all of your other capital to achieve this one shallow goal, you actually spread out your success to where you had friends, and you maintained your marriage, and you had some financial stability, and you had some achievement, and you had some recognition at work, and you had a little bit of all of it.

Camille: Right.

Brent: Even if you prioritize one more than the other, not to the extent that you burn everything else out.

Camille: There’s not, wealth doesn’t bring happiness. Things don’t bring happiness. Happiness is when you have your tribe, your people, and you give to others.

Brent: And as we’ve discussed multiple times here, it’s like, you know, when you’re just self absorbed your own goals, it feels happy for a while, but that that’s like a hedonic thing that burns out quickly. The eudaimonic thing is more about being in the community. It’s about investing in something greater than yourself. It’s about getting outside of your own wants and your own ego and investing into the larger picture. And it’s more satisfying. It lasts longer.

Camille: I like that term investing because when you invest in other people, it comes back.

Brent: Yeah. I mean, I think of it as wealth. You can have financial wealth, you can have social wealth, you can have a health wealth, you can have mental wealth where you sleep better at night.

Camille: Yeah.

Brent: If you if you double cross and screw everybody over to get success and then you you’re twitchy and you got to be on antipsychotics to live with yourself, then what have you achieved?

Camille: Not a lot.

Brent: All right, so then Lightning wanders over and he sees Doc racing. Doc is trying to get in touch with his older self. He says, I’ve still got it. And he does still got it. He’s amazing. And Lightning wants to talk to him about it and Doc still doesn’t want to talk about it.

Camille: But he does give him some advice, and he says, hey, turn your wheels this way when you’re taking the turn. But Lightning doesn’t want to listen to the whole of the advice, so he misses the point and tries it, but he doesn’t understand how to use it.

Brent: What he told him was technically accurate, but it’s a little cryptic. It was one of these things you have to demonstrate, and he doesn’t demonstrate. He’s like, I’m not going to be your mentor. You’re obnoxious. I want you out of my town. But when he sees Doc, he sees how he’s doing it, like, oh, he’s turning the wheels the other way. And so he kind of gets a closer idea on how it works. And then he chases Doc down and he sees the newspaper about when Doc crashed. And there’s a famous line, I didn’t quit racing. Racing quit on me.

Camille: Yeah.

Brent: And then you get the source of his hurt.

Camille: Exactly. He wasn’t ready to be done, but the whole community that he was in…

Brent: Moved on without him.

Camille: …his identity at the time, that was who he was, left him, turned their back on him.

Brent: Just like the town, once he was out of the spotlight, everyone forgot about him and moved on to the next big thing. And he took that very personally.

Camille: I think anybody would.

Brent: And he keeps the newspaper on the wall to remind him to never go back. That’s his goal in this movie, is to never go back to racing. So it’d be really odd if he showed up back at racing at some point in the climax. I hope that doesn’t happen because he said his whole life about never going back. So being with Lightning seems to have stirred things up in Doc. Things he doesn’t want to face. It’s like Doc came to Radiator Springs to hide from the past and then the past showed up, said, remember me? Like, no thanks.

Camille: Yeah, he’s being called out of hiding.

Brent: Yeah, it’s like he’s receiving his own call to adventure right there. It’s like he stagnated. He went into the special world and then just stayed in the special world and never came back. He’s like boiling in the pot for decades and decades. I ain’t coming out, ain’t gonna happen. He became a doctor, he became a mechanic. It was clear that he wanted to invest in others, but now he’s left his old identity so far behind, he kind of feels like a has-been now that Lightning shows up. He’s like, how can he integrate? How can he go back? You know, when you return to the ordinary world, you become a person of two worlds, because you’ve learned, you have these original skills, you learn some new skills, and you’ve just got these great hybrid skills that help you solve the story problem. How can he come back to the real world with his racing skills and his need to help others? How could that form into a new identity?

Camille: And I don’t think he… had it figured out.

Brent: Oh, he doesn’t know that.

Camille: Yeah, he doesn’t realize what his potential is. He doesn’t have any idea what his potential is, he’s just hiding.

Brent: So this whole bitterness thing is really not fair to Lightning, because Lightning is starting to mature, he’s starting to do his part, and Doc is still mean to him. He’s just like, what’s going on? I thought maybe if I started behaving right, I’m doing the things you told me to do. I’m doing the work, I’m not a slacker. And he’s like, Doc doesn’t want to have anything to do with it.

Camille: He’s still he’s still dealing with his own issues and trying to make peace with his past and he doesn’t want that world to be integrated into this world. He wants to keep them separate. He just doesn’t really have a clue how to do that.

Brent: I guess that goes back to what we’ve talked about before like with the spotlight effect is like when people are mean we assume they’re being mean to us and we forget so easily that they’ve got their own battles that they’re fighting inside their head and we forget about that. And so Lightning’s like, hey, you want to be buddies? He’s like, no, I’m busy. I’m fighting my own head right now. I don’t have the bandwidth to be your buddy. Go away. So this is the point where we start to we start to realize that that Doc could be a great mentor to Lightning. Lightning is begging for it. He’s like, man, show me. I’m all by myself. You’ve been down the road. You’ve know a thing or two. And honestly, Doc is trying to teach him. He’s like, or I’m trying to teach you is the trophies mean nothing. The trophies are 10 percent of it.

Camille: He could have had a mentor in King if he had been willing to listen.

Brent: Yeah.

Camille: And now he’s kind of ready to listen.

Brent: Yeah. The story has beat him up until the point where he’s ready to learn.

Camille: Right. He’s ready for a mentor now. He’s ready to listen. But Doc’s not ready to go there with him. And he’s eventually, I mean, he needs to have a mentor and then he also needs to be a mentor to other people.

Brent: Yeah. In your own life, you need to have people that are further along than you and you have people that you’re further along. You need to be receiving input from your mentors and you’d be you mean to be mentoring other people. That’s right And this is where this is where you see this in the chain at the end of the movie that doc Inspired King and King inspired all these other race cars and it was this chain. It was this ladder

Camille: Unless you’re unless you’re over a hundred years old, then you may not have people further along in the journey than you.

Brent: You do, as you get older, the people that are further along tend to drop off and you kind of be a soul, which is why you got to make hay while the sun shines. Get your mentors now while they’re still young and able to mentor you.

Camille: There you go.

Brent: There you go.

Narrator: This is full mental bracket – 30:21

Brent: So Lightning completes his task and he’s ready to go back to the race, but he’s not in the hurry that he was before. He wants to have, he plans a very careful goodbye. And he goes and he patronizes all his friends.

Camille: Oh, it’s such a beautiful, oh my goodness, it’s such a beautiful scene. And the people are so happy. He goes and he gets new tires and he gets a paint job. He gets the fuel from the, the hippie fuel.

Brent: The organic gas man.

Camille: The organic gas guy.

Brent: That was George Carlin.

Camille: Was it really?

Brent: Yeah.

Camille: Oh, you know, and he goes, I mean, he just like really encourages all the people there and you can tell, like, he’s a friend to them now. He’s spent the time, he’s gone through the adversity, and now he’s their friend and he wants to show them the support that they’ve shown him.

Brent: He’s no longer in a hurry to get back. He knows the race is waiting for him, but he’s like, I don’t want to run out the door. I want to give a proper goodbye to my friends, including Sally. He convinces all of them to turn on the neon for her, and she achieves her dream of seeing this town what it looked like in the heyday. and there’s this magic scene, the lights are on, the music’s playing, everyone is going back, they’re happy again, they’re throwing a party, and then surprise, the press shows up, because Doc called him.

Camille: Right.

Brent: Lightning had this careful go away he wouldn’t plan, and it got all chaotic, and they scooped him up, and he didn’t get a chance to say goodbye to anyone, and he was gone, and it’s a powerful scene where the lights go out, all the other cars drive back to the garage, and it leaves Doc right there at the flashing light intersection all by himself.

Camille: Yeah, he’s now at a serious crossroads.

Brent: He has to really reckon with what he did. He called the press because he wanted to get him out there, but they were growing, they were happy, and he just threw a big bucket of cold water on all of it. And he’s supposedly the leader of this town. And then Countess Sally has a little conversation with him. It’s like, hmm.

Camille: Yeah, like, really? Why’d you do that?

Brent: And just lets him stew. Meanwhile, we’re back with lightning.

Camille: So lightning returns…

Brent: To the ordinary world.

Camille: …to the ordinary world. He is getting ready to race. He goes out on the racetrack, but his mind is not fully present in that race, because he didn’t get to say a proper goodbye. He’s thinking about his friends, he’s thinking about Sally.

Brent: He’s thinking about the girl.

Camille: He’s in love-o-vision.

Brent: He’s thinking about the girl.

Camille: He never got out of love-o-vision, he’s still there.

Brent: I wouldn’t know anything about that, going to work and doing important, stressful, complicated things, thinking about a girl.

Camille: Yes, and so he’s not able to really focus, and he’s, a lap behind he’s not really doing well in this race he’s trying to he’s he goes back to his old mantra and he’s trying to work himself up into it and it’s not working anymore because he’s not the same person.

Brent: And if this was a hallmark movie he would just quit the race car in the big city and go back to the country to be with Sally and raise Christmas trees or something.

Camille: No, he’d start the hotel.

Brent: But he’s like, nope, I’m not going to be Doc. I can’t run away from the past. I got to. This is my thing.

Camille: Right.

Brent: I’m clearly changing what I want, but this is still part of what I want.

Camille: Yeah. And it kind of feels like he’s he’s completely out of the race and it feels like, oh, he’s going to lose. He’s going to lose. And then…

Brent: His tribe comes to him.

Camille: His tribe comes to him and it’s such a beautiful scene and his friends come and also funny because Mater says, you know, just wanted to say goodbye. Goodbye.

Brent: No, but it was such a great scene. You see, you see lightning and he’s struggling. And then in the radio, you hear Doc.

Camille: Yeah.

Brent: If you can drive half as good as you can pave a road, you’ve got this, you’ve got this race in the bag. And there is the mentor. There’s the father figure. There’s the coach. There’s the voice of experience who’s won more Piston Cups than anybody else in one season.

Camille: Yeah.

Brent: And he’s not shy about reclaiming his identity. The famous Hudson Hornet. Right there on painted on his and his wife was like oh he’s back like like bigfoot he’s being spotted again and he’s ready and he is reintegrating those identities in a new identity for this new season going forward.

Camille: And it’s beautiful. It’s a touching scene. And you feel it. You got this energy kind of building up as you’re watching it. And you feel it. You feel the emotion and the power of it. And you’re relieved. You’re happy. Like, yes, this is how it should be.

Brent: So Lightning finally has a coach. He finally has a mentor.

Camille: And the rest of the tribe, too, man. Man, Luigi.

Brent: Luigi in the pit stop.

Camille: Man, that pit stop, he took care of the business.

Brent: Yes, he did. And so towards the end, he has to make a choice, you know, Chick Hick is the cautionary tale. He’s all ambition. He’s what lightning would have become…

Camille: Exactly.

Brent: …if he hadn’t gone to Radiator Springs and learned to be a decent human being. It’s all about winning at any cost, including knocking the King off the track and beating him up in his very last race. And he runs off to the finish line and he’s all excited about winning because winning is the only thing that appeals to him.

Camille: Yes.

Brent: But Lightning has learned something, especially with his association with Doc Hudson.

Camille: That’s right.

Brent: He’s like, it’s painful to go out and go up in an explosion and everyone forget about you. This could be his last race and he’s going to go out totally anticlimactic, all beat up. And so he goes back and escorts the King across the finish line because he has learned that there are things more important than winning.

Camille: And that scores him the prestigious account with Dinoco. He gets to be the face of Dinoco, but he turns it down because that’s his tribe. That’s the one who took a chance on him. Those are the people who have supported him. And you really expected, even in the movie, you really expected him to go with Dinoco.

Brent: You did, that was the goal. The goal was to get the account.

Camille: Well, to win and to get the account. And you were only gonna get the account if you won, but because he did this heroic thing by helping King across the finish line, Dinoco was like, no, we want you to be the face of Dinoco. You did a heroic, beautiful thing. The crowd loved it. We loved it. It was the right thing to do. You had respect and yet he’s like, no, I’m going to stick with, I’m going to stick with these guys.

Brent: The Rust-eze guys.

Camille: Yeah, I’m going to stick with these guys.

Brent: The Rust-eze guys that he couldn’t stand to be around. And that was also some beautiful casting because that was the Car Talk brothers, the guys that had the Car Talk talk show for decades and decades. Well, listen to my brother. They put them in the movie and it was, it was genius. It was a genius move.

Camille: It really was.

Brent: Because before, Lightning didn’t want to be seen with the Rust-eze guys. They had leprosy or something. He was like, I want to be cool with the people with the sexy paint jobs and stuff. These Rust-eze guys, I don’t want them. If you’re bald or whatever, you’re overweight or rusty, I don’t want to be, I want to hang out with the sexy Hollywood people. And he’s like, no, no, that was shallow. I’m going to do better. I’m going to do better. And then Doc gets his legacy back. They have a museum. The king comes and admits that he was inspired by Doc to start racing. And all the younger racers were inspired by the King. And Doc finds his place in history. But he had to leave his dysfunctional comfort zone to get there.

Camille: Yeah, he becomes lightning’s crew chief and you know, he’s got his pit crew now.

Brent: They move to Radiator Springs. He uses his newfound fame to bring life back to this town that brought him life.

Camille: Exactly. It’s just a beautiful, amazing…

Brent: It comes, comes full circle. So we have some as we come to this episode here with some takeaways for you.

Camille: The number one takeaway. And you really do, with your tribe, with people in your life, you really need to have someone who is mentoring you, at least one. Multiple would be better. Have people in your life that you can count on who are mentoring you. And also be a mentor to other people who are not as far along in the journey as you are. It’s important to be surrounded by all of these types of people in your life.

Brent: Yes. And the other question is, are there places in your life where you are resenting the process? Are you like a little lightning McQueen stuck in a tiny town thinking that you shouldn’t have to put up with this? Or are you, where can you learn to lean into the process of adversity to advance your growth and transformation? Because as we know here, No growth and transformation comes without facing adversity, without doing the work to level up. So where is that call coming to you? The call to level up and embrace.

Camille: Are you working to actively create a strong and healthy tribe in your life?

Brent: Absolutely. because it doesn’t do you any good to win the trophy if you’re by yourself. You get tickets and you have no one to give them to. You need, as we learned in the movie, he took his fame and gave back to the community. You have to have a community, otherwise your fame is lonely and short-lived. That’s all we have for this time. We’re gonna be back real soon with more episodes and we can’t wait to share with you.

Announcer: Full Mental Bracket podcast hosted by Brent Diggs. Logo by Colby Osborne. Music by Steven Adkinsson. Learn more at FullMentalBracket.com. This is the Full Mental Bracket.