Leadership Lessons From The Great Books

Hello, my name is Jesan Sorrells and this

is the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books Podcast

bonus mashup episode.

So we've we've been running these mashup episodes this year as

part of our new format. And mashup episodes are an opportunity for us to talk

with a guest about different topics from different books

that we have covered on the show and to link those topics

to future books that we are going to cover on the show. It also gives

us an opportunity to bring in elements of popular culture, including

film, which we do like talking about on this show.

Technology, sometimes politics, but other areas

that touch on or discuss other areas that touch on business

and leadership. And we always get great insights

during these episodes. Matter of fact, the first one that we did was with

Neil Kielachovsky where we talked about Lord of the Rings and its

overlap into World War I and Pink Lloyd.

I would encourage you to go back and listen to that episode

today on the show. Our mashup episode will be

pointed towards both the past and the future. We are going to

be talking about and laying the foundation for what we are going

books. We are going to be discussing the next couple of months on the show

as we close out a

interesting and dare I say,

momentous 25th year.

Huh? I'm going to say it this way. The 25th year of the 21st

century. Meaning that there's 75 more years

to go in this bad boy before this is all said and done.

And unfortunately, tragically for all of you, I will not be around

at the end of it, I don't think,

however, books will be around at the end of it. And some of the books

that we will be talking about today will be around at the end of

this century because they explore timeless themes

that aren't really going to change because they're about human nature and human

psychology. No matter how fancy our drones get or

our large language model driven robots

that will eventually do all of the. I'm going to tip my hand here,

eventually do all the fighting and living for us

because we're just about ready to outsource that. And

so today on the show we are joined by my

semi regular guest host, Tom Libby. How you doing

today, Tom? After that intro, I think

I'm doing just Ducky. And

it's been a while since Tom has been on the show. Tom did not join

us for our Sci Fi jaunt, with the exception

of. No, not even. No, not even for the episode around Philip K. Dick. We

did none of that. Did Thomas. And Tom's been out for a while and

so what have you been doing, Tom? So we'll catch up with him for a

moment here. What have you been doing this summer? Have you been just living your

best life? I mean, yeah, I've just been, I've been, I've been

constantly thinking or wondering why I haven't been on the show. And that has been

my, my summer thinking. You know, did I say something

so controversial that the audience just didn't want me back? Or

like, I understand, look, I understand. It'S been a K pop,

demon hunters driven summer for you understand. You're,

you've been all over that and, and you know, it's been a, I mean, it's

been a big film summer. Superman came out. I mean, I know you really enjoyed

that movie with the dog, and dog. Was the best

character in the movie. And that was, that wasn't even a real character because

the whole thing was cgi.

And, and I know you've been busy, you know, with whatever it is you do

around your house. I believe one conversation I had,

you, you were well on your, you were on your way to, to doing some

yard maintenance because of, well, because of a dog. I know that you,

you're here doing some of that. And, and yeah, I mean, I guess, I

mean, I don't know, I don't know what else, what else? One

huge benefit to this year, I'll just tell you. So in years

past, I, I have a decent sized piece of property and I've always tried to

have a garden that we could actually eat food out of. Not, I'm not trying

to be a homesteader or anything weird like that. I just, I just want to

grow a couple of vegetables and, and say that I, you know, grew

what I ate on my plate, so to speak. And in the past years, I'd

get maybe a zucchini, maybe a tomato or two.

This year. This year I don't know what the hell I did differently, but my

garden literally exploded. I think I was eating zucchini at least twice a week for

like a month and a half. I've got about 18 squash out there that I

don't know if I'll ever be able to eat all of it. They're gigantic,

probably twice the size of my head. I've got tomatoes.

I, I'm gonna throw away more tomatoes than I can eat, I can promise you

that. I, I, I don't know what the hell was different in the garden this

year, but all of a sudden it just exploded with

vegetables. So that, that was definitely an interesting part

of the summer for me. That's good because, you know, look, my

garden. And I am. I am one of those wackadoo people trying to be a

homesteader out here in the great fruited plain of the middle of

America. My garden did not do so well.

So maybe, maybe all of the growth went to you. That would

be. That would be just about. Would be just about correct. Yeah.

Again, I don't know what I did. I do know. I do know that I

spent. I. And I actually, now that I think of it out loud, I probably

should say I knew I spent an ex. A much

longer period of time this spring

getting the garden ready. Like quote unquote, getting the garden ready.

So I tilled the soil and then I fertilized it and then I tilled it

again and fertilized it. And I didn't do that before. I just kind of

threw. Threw some fertilizer on the top and planted some seeds and

said, what the hell, let's see what happens. The other thing I

did differently, I guess. I guess I did do a tremendous, A lot. A

tremendous. A lot more differently than I expect than

I. That I really gave it credit for. Because I also have a indoor

greenhouse that my family bought me for Christmas last year.

It's basically you put it in your basement, you plug it in and it's got

the UV lights and it's got this one. It's a. It's a greenhouse effect. So

I had all these little seed starters. I bought these little seed starters and I

planted a ton of seeds in the greenhouse

early, like in beginning of April. And I don't know if

anybody knows where I. We talk about where I'm from a lot on the

show, but being up in the New England area, you can't plant in April.

Like there's nothing you'll grow in April. So. Yeah. So but planting

them inside in April and then transplanting them outside

in the end of May were already starting to

grow. They were. Already had significant growth before I even put them in the ground.

So it. That again, thinking. Now that I'm thinking it,

thinking it out loud because I'm just thinking, oh my God, I don't know what

the hell happened. The garden just exploded this year. Now thinking,

like actually saying it out loud, I realized I actually did that.

By accident. Influen over that.

Well, it's interesting because my wife can't. So we. We tried

starters and my wife has gone off and on

depending upon which season you know, we're in

with gardening and over the last five years, I think she's gotten one good year

out of starters, and the rest of it's just been a massive frustration. And she

winds up throwing them all away and cursing and then just

like. And like, that's the end of that. I think the difference is people who

try the starters and, like, again, you get starter seed kits, and you just, you

know, throw them in your. On your kitchen counter until they start. Until they start

sprouting out, and then you transplant them. Yep. The difference

with the greenhouse is you can actually let them establish a root system, like,

and actually get a little. Get a little significance under their

belt before you actually pull them out and transplant. The other thing that I did

again, so your food for thought for your wife. The starter kits that I

bought were not plastic. I bought starter kits, actually

compressed manure. So it was actually actual

containers. All you do is you just rip the bottom off and put the whole

thing in the ground. So you don't have to actually pull the plant out of

a starter. Right. And put it. And put it in there.

Right. You just literally put the whole thing in there because the. The actual

container is made out of manure, so it just

biodegrades right into the ground. And it's also fertilizer. So there you

go, fellow. Three times. I didn't even think of that. Three times. Now I fertilize.

Now that. Now that I start saying this out loud, Han, it's actually no

wonder that outgrew. Like, I have a. I have a

squash plant out there. I swear to God, it looks like the Little Shop of

Horrors. I'm expecting it to eat somebody at any given point, because the thing is

so gigantic.

I w. Saw that. She was like, is it yelling feed me, Seymour yet?

Like, yelling. Is it yelling? Actually, it's. It's. It's

actually right behind you right now. You might want to look at

that. Green spot, that green blotch right there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's. It's

the. It's the squash. Okay. No, that's good. I. I, you know,

sounds like your. Your gardening adventures.

And it's. You know what? I. Look, I'm a big fan of

anything, particularly if you live in a more urbanized area rather than

a rural area. But I'm a big fan of growing your

own food and of growing your own or

raising. Raising a plant of some sort,

because I think there's something. Not only think. I know there's something primal involved in

that, but also it's,

you know, our food systems are all screwed up and have been for many, many

years. And our food distribution

systems are all screwed up and have been for many, many years. And

I'm not going to go down the road of whether or not that's a conspiracy.

I'll leave that for other f to do. I will merely say

that you probably would have had not probably

people before the 1950s,

health wise, had better outcomes. And

it took, you know, us eating 50 years or 60

years of processed food to get to the point where we are, where we

are right now. Everything from lower testosterone in

people's diets to apparently there's a whole thing that I

have found out about relatively recently about how much

plastic apparently people are eating. Yeah, the

microplastics. So anytime you can, anytime you can strike even

a, even a small blow, you

know, against that system that benefits you and your family, I'm all in favor of

that. Absolutely. You know. Awesome. Well, I

did. No, go ahead. I was gonna say,

I, I, I think my favorite thing out of all of it, though, to be

honest with you, was that I grew basil. Like the, the herb basil.

It's, and, and we had enough to, I mean, I think we ate

caprizi like it had to have been a dozen

times this, this fall. Well, like the end

of summer so far. Because we take, you take the tomato

basil and mozzarella balsamic, you

know, just eat it just like that. It's like a little salad, little

mini salad. Right. Anyway, yeah, I, I, I think we, we had

enough basil and we're, we're still pulling basil out of the ground to make

pesto. So we're going to be making some pesto sauce.

Might as well. I mean, look, at a certain point, Tom, you're going to be

selling the Little Shop of Horror squash to your neighbors. Yes. Like, this is the

next step. Yeah, yeah. Feed the

neighbors to the plant. Never mind. The other way around.

Well, we, we, we. I love my neighbor. Never mind. Love that. No, never.

I love that. It's love thy neighbor. Love thy neighbor on the show. No, I

mean, we had the same thing with chickens this year. So our chickens were very,

very productive with, with the eggs.

We did have a whole plan for my youngest son to actually sell

eggs like a roadside stand gets to be a little

challenging because where I live, triple digit heat is definitely a thing

between like the end of June and now. So

that gets to be a little bit, that puts a little crimp in your, in

your, in your step with that. But we have found a way to basically either

Give away, sell or eat the majority of the

eggs that have been produced by, by our chickens. And we only had six.

So you would think six chickens. Yeah. You know, you think if you're not

used to raising chickens. No. Or you have no clue, like, you'd be like, oh,

that's, that's not that many. But the average hen will produce

anywhere between if she's really well, producing two to four eggs a day.

Oh, wow. So. And a below average hand will produce

one egg a day. And that's

usually in the first year of those hens being, being, being raised. Particularly if you

have a, have an aggressive rooster the way that I do.

He's, he's a full white rooster with

the, with the red, the red thing. So he's, he's very,

he's very aggressive. Let's just say that. And we also have a couple of turkeys

who I have, I have named them Christmas and Thanksgiving.

My daughter, my daughter has named them something else.

I, I don't remember. I keep telling her I love her, God

bless her. I keep telling her. And I know I've said this on the show

before about her. Don't name your food. Stop. What, why are you naming the food?

We're gonna eat these things, but the turkeys.

And then I'm not going to go too far down this road, but the turkeys.

There's a hierarchy of stupidity in bird

world, Right. If you raise chickens, you'll know what I'm about

to say. Turkeys are dumb. I

thought chickens were dumb. No, no, no, no, no, no. Chickens are like

Einstein level super geniuses in comparison to turkeys.

And a buddy of mine once, he said to me, because he also raises, raises

chickens and has for many, many years, his kids do like 4H and all that

kind of stuff. And they were raising like bunnies and

cows and ducks and

all kinds of things. And all kinds of things. He's been down a road that

maybe with my grandchildren, I might go down that road if I feel so inclined.

But he was saying to me that, yeah, if the chickens were

smarter, they wouldn't, they wouldn't, they wouldn't be as delicious

because we wouldn't be able to catch them. Yeah, that's actually not a

bad point. That is a very good point. Very valid point,

actually. Ergo. But I did that this summer. Then

we had what we have, we had home Reno

projects. Because when you go on vacation, you come back and things are

broken, for lack of a better term, you must fix

them and you must spend thousands of dollars to do so. So.

Or spend tens of thousands of dollars and have somebody else fix them for you.

That is correct. That is correct. So because. Because you're

better at earning the tens of thousands of dollars than you are at the fixing

of the. Exactly. So that's the, that's the space that

we wound up, wound up around with that.

And so, yeah, that was, that was the summer, I think, at a national level,

you know, summer was, with the exception of a few things, this summer

was remarkably quiet at a national level, which I like.

It's probably because this was not an election year for

any national elections. So there wasn't any, there weren't any

national sort of shenanigans. One thing I will bring

up on the show, and I did a shorts episode about this last week, so

I did talk about Charlie Kirk and the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

I think as a podcaster, it's worthwhile to talk

about, regardless of the man's politics or what you may have thought of what he

may have said or how he set up his life. A couple of things I

will say, actually, three things I will say. Number one,

and this is the biggest thing that I said in my shorts episode, and I'll

repeat it here with Tom. We have been here before as a

country. We've always

had political violence. That's not anything knew.

And this is also why not to make a joke of it, but Dave

Chappelle makes a very good point. In one of his standups years ago, he

said, you know, the framers of the Constitution

understood something about the First Amendment. Government

can't stop you from saying what you want. Government

can't stop you, but

other people can. And so you're going to need the Second Amendment.

You're going to need a gun. And I'm not saying that Charlie

Kirk could have shot back or any of that kind of stuff. That's not what

I'm saying. And even he understood that, apparently for the way he lived his life.

And because two things could be true at once,

we're going to have that sort of, those sort of engagements in

our culture because people do get

upset about words. People do. And they don't

know how to control their either they don't know

how to control their thinking, they don't know how to respond, or they're emotionally

driven. Right. And when the amygdala kicks in, when the fear

centers kick in, people behave in all kinds of ways that,

you know, we're trying to tap down, but they still exist in human

nature, which ties into some of the things we're going to talk about with, with

some of the books that are upcoming. So that's the main thing. My main point

on Charlie Kirk, the other point that I would like to

make on this is that regardless

of what you may have thought about his politics, the man had

guts, period, full stop. He had

guts. Now, did he have the guts to, or the

courage, such as it were, to

to maybe argue or debate people who were maybe

at a higher intellectual level than him who were not on college campuses?

No, but he understood something fundamental about the way the college

system works in the United States. And almost no one on the political left or

the political right, which is why, by the way, there's been no imitators of him.

This is very important. And even on the left, when political left

in this country, when imitators do try to come out of the woodwork, they don't.

Doesn't work. Because the hot house of academia

is the last sort of pressure cooker for people's ideas

and future leaders of America, whether we like it or not, right, left and center,

come out of that pressure cooker. We've spent a lot of time in the last

60 years pushing people, and we can argue about the

right or wrongness of this, but pushing people into the college system.

And when you push people into the college system, what did you expect to have

happen? You know? Now

he went there because that's where in

our country, ideas about

progressivism or anarchy or fascism or communism or

socialism or

libertarianism and libertinism are all fully played

out among a hot house of people and a pressure cooker

of people who quite frankly,

lack a fully. And I'm being

biological about this lack of fully formed prefrontal cortex.

Yeah. And so of course he was going to go there. He played

the game. And that's also why I don't think

you're going to fill that hole anytime soon. Nobody else is going

to fill that hole, either right or left in this country. I just don't think

it's going to happen. That's. That's probably the only thing that you said that I

might disagree with because the, the whole next man

up syndrome is just runs rampant. Right. So it does.

Maybe, maybe somebody's not going to fill his spot.

Exactly. And maybe it. The time frame is like,

maybe we could debate time frame, whether it's in the next six months or next

six years or whatever, I don't know. But yeah. The fact of the matter is

there's going to be another Charlie Kirk come Around the corner, whether it's

tomorrow, six months from now, six, I don't know. Again, we can debate the time

frame, but that's the way all of this works. There's another,

there's somebody that, there's a next man up syndrome in every

environment that we're talking about. So I, I, I do think that's probably the

only thing that you said that I don't necessarily disagree with. Because the other thing,

like I was going to say, your, your statement about the whole college

environment, it's literally like throwing gasoline on a wood fire. Oh, yeah,

like, like, it's literally that, it's that it's that

volatile when it comes to ideologies, ideas and things. Because

to your point, they have no idea what life is about yet.

They have no inkling of how what

somebody, somebody who's 50 that says

you don't understand the trials and tribulations of a black man is different

than an 18 year old? Because quite honestly, you're

right. You don't know. I don't care what color your skin. You'Re is,

you have no idea. You're 18. You haven't gone through trials and

tribulations up. You have not. You have no idea what trials and tribulations

are. So like, you know, well, and if. You,

if you watch some of the, and yes, look,

Charlie was an editor of Instagram and he was a user of social

media. And that's one of those, when people complain

about him or use that as a critique against him, here's what I say to

them, here's my response. You're hating the player

and not the game, right? Yeah. The game of Instagram is the

game he played. And if you don't like the game,

you can either play it better than he did or

you can go play a different game. Right? Right. Just go play a different

game. Right. That's like complaining that Michael Jordan was good

at dunking when dunking's critical to

basketball. Shut up. Just go, go work on

three pointers then, I don't know, whatever. Go figure it out. Go

become Steph Curry. Right? Exactly. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

I'm not complaining about Steph Curry. I don't really like an outside game. It's not

as exciting to me. But you know what? Hey, that's the game.

It is what it is. And again. And Charlie Kirk was the same way. Did

he edit his Instagram videos? Yes, he did. Did he, did he open the mic

for people and, and, and ask them to come up? And did they? Yes, he

did. Is he going to edit that to show the most outrageous things?

Yes. And did those people say those outrageous things? Yes.

So what's your point exactly? And again, to your, to your

point, whether you agree with him or not, whether you agree with his

politics or not is not the relevant point of his death. Like, I'm sorry,

but his death was completely. And again, I don't care what side

of the coin you fall on, because death was unnecessary. There was

no reason for that. There was. No, there was. You can't. To your point,

it's that whole prime that the primalness of

emotion that comes out when people just, it's

just the switch flips. And what are you going to do to stop it? Like

the only you and somebody like him

who is bold enough to stand out on that stage again, right, left or center,

I don't care who you are and I don't care what you're. But if you're

bold enough to stand out there and stand for what you believe in, then

you're going to take that risk. You're going, you, you have to know, going

into, you're taking that risk. Now, that's the one thing I fault him for,

is I don't believe he felt his life was at risk

ever, because quote, unquote, they're just words. I, I really

believe he felt that way, that, that you could, that you can debate with people.

And as long as you keep it civil, as long as you don't, as long

as you debate people in a debatable fashion, then everything should be

fine. And that's where I think you got it wrong. Because at some point you

are going to piss off somebody enough that they're going to take

a more, a more drastic measure. And then, then

just a debate. So that's where I would disagree with you. I would say that.

I don't think he discounted that. I think he actually knew that that was,

that was the thing that was on the line. And I think

he was. Oh, I think, I don't think he

confused or, or looked at that as a

ceiling to the speech because a lot of people will look at that and they'll

say, well, I'm a self censor or I'm not going to go as far. I'm

not gonna. And he said, I think he looked at that and said, yes, that's

the price I'm willing to pay. And I have no idea when that cost

will come. I have no idea when that, when that will come due,

I will do the thing that I am. And for

him according to his own words. He felt it was a calling based on his

Christianity and how he walked that out. Okay, well, you know,

if you look at history, if you look at Christianity and what

genuine Christian belief asks Christians to do

Christ. Christ prayed so hard in the garden of

Gethsemane before he got hauled off to the cross that he was bleeding and he

went off to the cross anyway. Okay. You

have to know that that's the thing

that's at the end of the path, maybe to your point, because the

passions are so much. And once you've.

I don't want people to confuse. This is where I disagree. I don't want people

to confuse that ability to be okay with that end

with a dismissal of the end. I don't think he dismissed it. I think he

was just okay with it. It was, it was the price he was willing to

pay. Now, you and I could both be wrong because who knows what

was genuinely in his heart, right? You know, and

so we're just rampantly speculating based on what we've seen. And the thing. And by

the way, I barely paid attention to him. I wanted to go on record, I

barely paid attention to the man. Like, I was aware of what Turning Point USA

was. It was sort of on the back end of my brain. I knew

that I didn't even know. His name until he died, put it that way. Right?

I, I knew. Well, and I knew his name only because I pay attention,

I pay attention to politics. And I know that during the,

during Trump's run in

2024, in the summer of 2024, there had been

some chatter among Republican donors that

Turning Point usa, who the Trump administration had given a lot of money to,

was having trouble signing up college age men

to come out and get out and vote. And they were, they were, there were

some, some grumbling from older folks, to your point, about the 50

year old, some older folks in Republican donor circles,

there was some chatter among them about why are we spending all this money on

this kid Charlie? Like, what's he going to deliver to us? And so they

were having a real problem. And I, I vaguely remember

hearing him having to go to like, some donors and, you know, calm them

down and da, da, da, da, da. And this is all part of the game

he played, you know. And again, anybody on the left or the right, not

everybody, people who are political on left and right do this kind of stuff all

the time. Okay. This is less, again, less about the, the

particular, the less about the particular party or

the particular position. You're playing and more about the fact of the game itself.

And so that's where I had heard about him. And I kind of had a

vague idea of who he was then. And I kind of glanced a little bit

at Turning Point usa, but I'm not in college, I didn't

know. And so it was only after his death when

things started popping up more and more and more, I was like, oh, this is

what he was doing. Oh, I see the game he was sort of playing. Now

I will say this. My 20 year old daughter knew

precisely who he was. And so this is the last thing

I'll say. And we can move on from this because this is my third major

point. I think the death of Charlie Kirk for a certain generation of people

is their JFK moment. Yeah, I agree with that too.

Regardless of, by the way, which side of the politics they're on.

This is one of those things where if you're between 16 and

35, you knew who that guy was, right?

And even if you disagreed with him vociferously and went on his Instagram and

went on TikTok to like argue with him because you were in

opposition to his ideas, you knew who he was, you have to know

him to be in opposition to his ideas. And so this is just

an example of how in our culture,

and we'll talk about this with the books that are coming up, because the same

thing's happening now in a lot of other areas. Things are

shifting to a new mode of engagement,

a new way of dealing with

ideas, philosophies, positions in the

world. And it's not, quite frankly, the ways that you or I would deal with

it. You know, we're in our 40s and 50s. It's not the way that we

were raised to deal with it. Like, I would never, I would never go to

an open mic. When I was in college, I wouldn't go to an open mic

thing and argue with somebody. I would maybe go see a speaker,

right? And hang out and then I would leave and argue about it with

my friends and then go back to my dorm room and have a beer and

go to bed like that. That's the extent of it. If I'm really

riled up, maybe like, do you remember the movie PCU

back in the day? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm gonna do that. Like, they're all

gonna be with their little tables out there. I'm gonna pick up one of the

ducks and throw it at somebody. You know, it's gonna be that

kind of thing, right? But this generation of 20 year olds, 16

or 16 to 35 year olds. It's a totally different engagement

because of how the phones work. And again, Charlie understood that he was

31. He was. And he just,

he used the medium that he was offered. And the door is open

to anybody who has a phone and an Instagram account. You could do the exact

same thing. Yeah,

left or right, you could do the exact same thing. Agreed.

So. And starting a Nonprofit when you're 18,

a political nonprofit when you're 18.

Don't tell me this kid didn't have some vision of like, oh, this might not

work out well in the end. Well, again, I'm

not. Okay, so I'm, I'm just to clarify what

I'm saying here. Sure. I'm not suggesting he wasn't

willing to make sacrifices or that he assumed everything was going to be hunky

door like. Or that he was. No, no, I just, I'm saying he

didn't expect to get shot like that. Sure. Yes.

Like. Yeah, yeah, I was talking about the actual, actual. Yeah, yeah,

okay. I, I thought he was very

well prepared for all of the roller coasters of life, the ups

and downs. He could have got canceled. All that other stuff that we talk about,

the cancer culture, all that whatever. I think he was ready for that. He was

willing to sacrifice his own name even for,

for his principle. What I'm talking about. He did not expect

to be sitting on a stage like that in some. Yeah, I'm sorry, again, whether

you agree with his politics or not, some coward to just shoot him out of

nowhere. That, that's cowardice to me. That, that's somebody who, who, you know,

who doesn't have the intelligence level to go debate him, who doesn't have the,

the, the political acumen to, to stand against him. They don't have

the, the moral compass to fight

against him on an equal playing field. So they revert to violence and they just

shoot him. I think that's what I was getting at that, like, I, I think

he was ready for all of those other things. He was ready. He was ready

for the cancel culture. He was ready for. He was ready for his, his

ideologies to tip the other way. Even I, because I, I saw a few things

for him where he backed off of some of his ideologies because somebody,

again, to his credit, somebody made a valid point that, that challenged

his intellect and he was able to say, I

got you. That makes sense. Let me. Whatever, like, so I think

he was okay with some of those, those circumstances that Came at

him. He wasn't ready for a gun is all I was saying.

That's all I was saying, that he wasn't ready for that. Yeah, I don't think,

and I don't think any of them are, by the way. I don't think JFK

was. I don't think MLK was. I don't think Malcolm X was. I don't think

any of those people that sat on that vocal platform,

were they willing to die for what they believed in? Sure. Were they expecting

to? No. I think, I think as long as there is

verbal and debate, as long as the debates are peaceful

debates, you should not expect that to be a viable,

A viable outcome is all I was getting at. Well, that. And that ties

into what I, what I said at the beginning. My, my main point about free

speech. You know, the government can't stop you. And

we don't want the government engaged in a process of force or

fraud or whatever, leveraging power either

in front of the scenes or behind the scenes. We don't want government involved in

that. Somebody should let the FCC know that. Yeah, well, you know,

Jimmy Kimmel's a little bit of a different thing, but I agree, I, I do

agree in principle. Absolutely. That's the principle. I don't care about Jim either. I'm just

saying that. Well, well. And here's what I think about the Jimmy Kimmel thing. Just

as a side note on this, I was telling, I was telling somebody who I

was talking to about this. I said, listen, here's what I suspect.

I think Jimmy Kimmel wanted out of his ABC contract.

I think he did it on purpose. Very possible. Listen, so listen, I, I have

this debate in my house all the time because they're saying, Jimmy Kimmel, the First

Amendment, blah, blah, blah. And I said, listen, the First Amendment does not apply

to your employer. No, it does not. If your employer

says, don't say that and you say that, you get fired.

And whether you agree with Jimmy Kimmel or not, again, I don't give a cr.

I don't care what his politics were. I don't care if he loves Trump, hates

Trump. I don't care if he's left or right. Doesn't matter. It doesn't. It does

not matter. You are employed by a company. The

company gives you a directive. You ignore the directive, you get fired. It

happens to every, anybody who works for someplace. Like it doesn't matter.

Bill, Bill Maher was talking about this on his show real time,

24 years ago, apparently to the day. ABC also

Canceled Politically Incorrect for something that Mars said

Right. Back in the 90s when we were all cool and stuff.

So ABC and Bill Maher made this joke. He's like, they great.

Always be caving. I love that joke. You know, and I've. You know,

I. I struggle with Bill Maher politically because I think he's kind of all over

the map. And I don't know what's happening to him. He's going through some weird

evolution. But he makes a good point. Yeah. Where

it's not. To your point. It's not

Jimmy. It's Jimmy's

employer. Right. And Jimmy not. It's not a First

Amendment, and it's. Not a first nomination, a First Amendment issue.

Now, if Jimmy had. If Jimmy Kimmel had said something off the air in

an interview or whatever that his employer disagreed with.

There's a little bit of a gray area there. Yeah. It also depends on

what his contract says, because there are some. These. And this is what I get

to. That's right. When you get to the millions of dollars per year, people. These

are. These people are under. By the way. By the way, the same

thing happened. How quickly we forget in the

NFL with the whole kneeling down at the national anthem. Oh, yeah. We

forget that there were teams that were just. That just flat out said, you

will not do that. And not a single player, black, white, or any

other race knelt during the national anthem because guess what?

They're employed by those teams. They are employees

of those teams. And if those teams decided. We're not doing this. Now,

granted, there are teams that were all over the place. And you saw that. Oh,

yeah. Some NFL owners were okay with it. Some weren't. Some. Some said,

don't do this. And players responded in a different way. And I won't bring up

any particulars because we don't have time for that because we'll be here all day.

But. But employ like I. But they

all handled it and different ways. This is the same thing.

It's. It's. I. It's identical. The

employer says. If the employer gives you a directive and you ignore it, you get

fired. That is the simple thing. Now, if Jimmy Kimmel

feels like he was terminated, which, by the way, you haven't heard anything from him

yet. No, you haven't. Which is why I say it was on purpose.

That's why I think it was on purpose. Exactly. Jimmy, trust me when I tell

you, with somebody who has that kind of money and that kind of

clout and that kind of recognizability and all Those things. If he

felt he was terminated wrongfully,

there would be a wrongful termination lawsuit already on the

table. Yep, that would have happened immediately. Immediately.

So the fact that he didn't tells you something else is at play

here. Like, come on, guys, stop

reacting to every snippet of information you see on the

Internet. Come on, use your, Use the brain that's

sitting inside your head. There's a lot of folds in that brain for a reason.

Jimmy. Jimmy couldn't figure out how to get out of his contract. Jimmy wanted to

jump high. Jimmy wants to do a podcast or maybe wants to do

a substack. Jimmy wants, Jimmy wants all the money and doesn't have

to share it with abc. Whatever. Jimmy wants to go work for

cnn. I don't know. Whatever. I don't know. Whatever. Whoever. Right. Maybe, Maybe Jimmy's,

maybe Jimmy's in negotiation. This would be ironic. Maybe Jimmy's in

negotiation to go on HBO against Bill Mark.

That would be hilarious. Hilarious. Hilarious. By the way, by the

way, another, another very, very vocal person,

John Oliver. Like him or like him or not, love him

or hate him, agree with his politics or not. Irrelevant. Because John

Oliver flat out said, if HBO wants to fire me, let

them. I have enough, I have enough following, I have enough backing. I'll just

spin up a YouTube channel. I'll get all those viewers back anyway. And

he flat out said it. He goes, let them fire. I don't care. I'm going

to say what I want to say and let them fire me. And what did

HBO do? They went, we're just going to let him do what he wants to

do. Right? Because HBO's war is owned by Warner Brothers

and Zaslav over there has bigger problems than, than John Oliver.

Right? This is how this

goes. This is how this goes. And so, and

at the end of the day, here's the thing, the other thing I said to

the person when I said this is probably an on purpose thing. Not a, not

a, not a, just an utterance out of the sky,

out of all of these. So now Stephen Colbert is going to wave

the free speech flag around Jimmy Kimmel eventually. Because people are

venal in Hollywood going to wave the free speech flag around and

he's. They're both going to get hired and they're both going to get fetted and

vetted on podcasts that have more listenership than this one. Fine, go

ahead, play the game. Whatever. Out of all of them,

I want, and honestly, I don't even know who watches late night shows.

This is the Most conversation anybody's had about Jimmy Kimmel in years. Most

relevant he's been in years. Okay, I don't watch late

night shows. I think they're all garbage. I'd rather watch Alvin Hitchcock Presents reruns on

Prime Video and go to sleep, which is what I do.

But the winner out of all of this is actually not the

fcc. It's not Donald Trump, and it's not Jimmy Kimmel. The

winner out of all of this nonsense is Jimmy Fallon.

Oh, God, yes. The most milquetoast,

unobjectionable to make it about race and

white man on television right now.

Softball questions, lowballing it and hanging out

and just. He has mastered the art

of saying nothing offensive at all, ever. Which is

the same lesson, by the way, that Jimmy Kimmel should have learned from Jay Leno

but didn't, and that Jay Leno learned from Johnny Carson

and allowed him to have a 30 year career. Jimmy Fallon's gonna have a third.

What? A 15 more year career. He's gonna be on for a long.

Easily, easily. Because he's inoffensive. He understands something

about late night that I wish all these morons understood. Like 10

years ago, when Trump came down the, down the, down the,

the, the escalator and blew everybody's brains out, apparently in the

mainstream media. And that's a terrible way to

frame that with what we just talked about with Charlie Kirk. That's a terrible way

to say that. I retract. That

blew everybody's paradigm. There we go away. That's a better way to say

that. Because when Trump came down the escalator, everybody in the media lost their

mind for some reason. And I'm still not clear why. But Jimmy

Fallon didn't. Because here's what Jimmy Fallon understands.

Regular people just want you to shut up and dance. Yes.

Yeah, yeah. Just shut up and dance. That's the

entire game. Did you see Jimmy. Speaking of which, did you.

So I, I actually do. I watch none of them except Jimmy Fallon,

partly because I think, honest to God, I think he's the only one

that's actually funny. Okay. I think the rest of the guys,

when they like their, their jokes are, they, they just don't hit the same.

I, I think Jimmy Fallon does the best job. And I think it's because specifically

they have his stint on Saturday Night Live. Yeah. Like, because of his.

That, that ability to read the room, so to speak. Right,

Correct. Right. Yeah. Right. So. And I know Saturday Night Live throws

some real feces at the wall. So, I mean, I'M not suggesting that Saturday Night

Live is, is, you know, the best at this. I'm just saying that I think

that go. Seeing what he saw at Saturday Live, going through what he saw and

being, and now being able to. His monologue

after Jimmy Kimmel got fired was some of the funniest

garbage on TV that I've seen in a long time. I don't know if you

saw it, but you should go back. No, you can find it on YouTube and

stuff like that. Because to your point,

kind of to your point. And I. Again, I don't know if

I, I would. I hope and, and I hope this. And because you

brought the race into it by, by saying, I did, I did,

I did. I hope that anybody in any

race or color or creed and Jimmy Fallon's

situation would do the same thing. I, I would. Oh, yeah, I would hope.

Because I mean, think of like guys like Steve Harvey

Mack, if they had a late night show, I think they would be similar to

Jimmy Fallon. I especially like Steve Harvey, I think would

be better than Jimmy, than Bernie Mac. But I think Ron Fooks from

Parks and Recreate, he was on Parks and Rec, I think the black guy for

Parks. I follow his stuff on Instagram because he's freaking hilarious. Hilarious.

And one of the things he says about. And he stays out of politics, he's

like, I don't like talking about things that I don't understand. Yeah.

Anyway, so Jimmy, go back and watch it because it's,

it's hilarious. It's hilarious because he,

Jimmy Fallon says flat out, he's like, jimmy Kimmel gets fired for talking about

Trump. Not me, not here. I'm gonna talk about Trump just like

I always do. And he goes, here, we're gonna start with this trip over to,

to England. And he goes, did you see how he,

he. And he. It just. There's a voiceover that comes over and says,

looked dashingly in his suit and Jimmy Collins in the background. Go like,

he goes, when he met with so and so. Did you see how his skin

tone was? So. And it comes out nature like he's

freaking out. It's so, it's hilarious. And I'm like,

to your point, I don't care what color he is. He's brilliant

in the fact that he's gonna, he's gonna make, he's gonna make, you

know and understand that he is making fun of the situation without saying

anything. Exactly. Without saying anything that's going to get him fired,

get him canceled, get him terminated, get like. And I'm

telling you, if Donald Trump decides to go after Fallon because of what he thinks

and says, he's it's not going to work. People will push back on that because

they'd be like, what are you talking about? Jimmy didn't say that. Or Right. Talk

like that. He didn't word it that way. He didn't say it that way. He

wasn't political about it. Like he, Jimmy Fallon is,

is the, is the, is the Johnny Carson of this generation for sure.

So we've talked. Maybe you and I haven't talked about this on the show. Maybe

I talked about on the show with another guest, Libby Unger, probably.

She's big on, she's big on free speech. She's my free speech person. She's big

on this. Right. And one of the points that

I've made with Libby, matter of fact, I think we were talking about

talking about Shakespeare. It might have been one of our Shakespeare episodes. It wasn't King

Lear, it was another episode. Doesn't matter. Point is,

in Shakespeare, the idea of the court jester is huge. Right.

And throughout Western culture, throughout Western

leadership. Right. There's an idea that I

think a lot of modern leaders just to drag this back to leadership now that

we're like 45 minutes in. Well,

you had to cover current events. So there's this

idea embedded in Western leadership that doesn't get explored nearly enough,

that the king, the leader, such as it were, of position or title,

has to be able to handle the court jester.

Because the job of the court jester, number one, is to

point out that the king has no clothes. The emperor

is naked, whether psychologically naked, politically naked, or

even in some cases, as in that story, physically naked. Right. The

job of the court jester is to keep the king grounded

because everybody else around the king is a bunch of yes men. Even the king's

wife, even the queen is a yes woman. Right. Because every wants to suck up

to power the people that. And by the way, the king

that understands that the role of the court jester is important, demands only one

thing from the court jester. And this is what I think Jimmy Fallon gets.

And this is why Trump will never have a problem with him. This is what

Dave Chappelle gets. And this is increasingly already brought up. Bill Maher. Bill

Maher started to get this, too. It's about time. Yeah, I know, right?

It's only took him a little while, but, well, you know, slow learners.

The slowest boat eventually gets to shore. Eventually.

But the king wants the court jester to Be

clever. That's the only demand the leader makes of the jester.

Just be clever. Don't be stupid. You can't simply point

out that you're unintelligent. You have to make it seem like it. Like you're,

you're challenged in, in ways that it's not

obvious that you're, you're dumb. Right? You do not tell you.

Right? I, I agree. And it's, that's why the other thing

too is like, that's why I think we still have roasts,

right? Like the roast of Tom Brady or the roast of so and so.

Like Alec Baldwin is what I saw the other day. When the

day comes that you take yourself so seriously that you cannot fit.

Find humor in your own actions or,

or that's when that, that, that will be the demise of the human

race. Honestly, because I'm sorry

if it doesn't matter, you cannot tell me your life is so serious

that there's no room for laughter, right? You can't tell me

that you're, that you're so good at your job, you're

infallible. They can't find a hole, a single hole in

anything that you do that they can poke fun at. Because if they do,

then it's just a lie. Like, because that's,

that's where you get the, the, the, the, the balance of

power faulting, right? So when you think that you're so perfect that

any, anything somebody says against you is a flat out lie,

that's, that's a problem. Because nobody is perfect. Nobody.

Sorry, hate to tell you folks, but there is no

that. There's nobody that is perfect. That's

on. That's by design, by the way. We're not perfect by design.

Because how else are you supposed to learn, grow, like,

develop your own, you know, your own, you know, your own

personalities and in your own legacy. You cannot build a legacy if you're

infallible. Like, it doesn't. Not only can you not build a legacy if

you're infallible, there's two

sides to this, right? So there's the, there's the side of the king. The king

has to know that he's infallible and that there's problems. And I'm sorry,

ladies, it's usually a he. I'm just using he as a general he. Right?

Even the queen needs to be able to be mocked by the court jester sometimes,

which we won't even get into that. But let's be let. But let's be real

Queen Elizabeth. That just Recently. Oh, yeah, yeah. Exceptional

sense of humor. She did, she did. She,

she took the position seriously, but not herself seriously. Yes,

exactly. Right, exactly. That's, that's a distinction with a difference.

And so we tend to focus on the leader because the

leader has the more power. Has the power in that, and that clearly has the

power in that situation. But that's why the First Amendment is important, because

the other side of that coin is the jester. The

jester. There's a responsibility for the jester

to actually be in intelligent.

And this means. I'm going

to make a moral claim here. This means the more intelligent you are,

the less malicious you should probably be. Because you probably think through what you're going

to, what you're going to actually say. And maliciousness

with no intelligence is going to make the leader to the

point about Donald Trump that you just made is going to make the leader

irritable. And you keep, you keep being malicious without

intelligence, then the leader is

gonna be like, I'm cut your head off. Which is why in that bit, Donald

Trump's never gonna come after Jimmy Fallon because it's clever. He probably laughed at that

himself. At 11 o' clock at night, he's like, yeah, no, that's actually, that's actually

really good. I've actually heard worse than that from Baron, so come for me,

it's fine. And that's the sort of attitude you have to have. But when it

wanders into maliciousness and we

don't have, we don't have strong laws because of the way a First Amendment works

here against slander or defamation, we don't really have strong laws against

that. But when it gets into different

spaces of speech like news organizations and blah, blah, blah. The New York

Times is different than Dave Chappelle. And everybody knows this. Like, this is not news

to anyone. Right? Yeah. So Dave Chappelle

write an opinion column for the New York Times. That's funny. Sure,

maybe. But they're not going to hire that guy to do that. They would hire

Rod Dreher to do that or, or

what's his name, Thomas

Friedman. Right. To do that. Because it comes with a different Elon. Because

there are different status things going on. And Thomas Friedman isn't the court

jester. Thomas Friedman is the political advisor. And the political

advisor is never the court jester. Those two roles don't overlap. So

we know all this stuff, but we don't want to say it out loud. We

don't want to put it out there in public. We would just have it rather

Be, be just something that's just known. And then when people

violate the rules or to your point, or in the gray areas, we want

to punish people inside of the gray areas or let people go

inside the gray areas because it works for us. And you got to

have what people are really irritable about. I think in general, average people,

they don't know how to articulate what I just said. So hopefully what I just

said gives people some ideas. But people get irritable because they know what the rules

are. That's why people get irritable. And they would like some

consistency. So Jimmy, Jimmy Kimmel

will be fine. Oh, he's definitely not going to be poor tomorrow. So I'm not

going to worry about. Worried about Jimmy Kimmel. He's not gonna be standing outside, outside

ABC studios, you know, with a cup, you know, like hanging out. Can I have

some bread, please? Hey, I ain't worried about

him. I also am worried about Stephen Colbert. He's gonna be fine.

You know, I'm of the opinion, and this is the last thing I'll say on

this because we have switched to our books that we're gonna be focusing on for

the next few months. I'm of the opinion that all late night shows should be

canceled, period. Full stop. I think it's a dead genre. I don't know who's up.

We have streaming, we have movies, we have books, we got a

wealthy TikTok. TikTok is just killing all of this

stuff, particularly among the 16 to 35 year old

demographic who are not watching this stuff. So I for

the life of me can't figure out how these shows still remain on the air.

And they are expensive to produce. I mean, there is a budget, there's staff. I

think Sarah Silverman was one of the writers on Jimmy Kimmel's show

and Sarah Silverman's married to Jimmy Kimmel now.

Sarah Silverman hasn't been funny in years. So I don't know exactly what she's doing

in that writer's room. And yes, I did say it out loud and whatever. It's

fine. It's free speech. I say what I want.

You. I can't get canceled on my own platform. Exactly.

But, but, but there's a little bit of, to me, that's a little

bit of double dipping and some other ridiculousness that I probably wouldn't have allowed if

I were abc. But be that as it may, maybe that's the game. Maybe

Jimmy Kimmel's agent is just a better negotiator than ABC was,

yeah, that's it. So, you know, but yeah, I,

I, I don't. This recent contra Trump is a tempest in a teapot. It's

not a free speech issue. As far as the FCC chair goes, look, if you're

running the Federal Communications Commission, your only

role, whether you like it or not, is to shut

up because you're, because your,

your department shouldn't exist anyway and

you don't really want us looking too hard at that, do you?

So, shh.

FCC chair, you should have learned. And I know it's not the same FCC

chair who was in the 90s. I know it's a different person. It doesn't matter.

Go in the archives and pull out all of the,

pull out all the old recordings of Howard Stern and Rush Limbaugh from the early

90s when you were screaming and yelling, when your place was screaming and yelling,

and all those battles you lost then against both of those guys who

actually, between the two of them, whether we like it or not, again,

politics is out on this. I listened to both of them.

Both those guys saved radio in America in the late

20th century. They just did for sure. Because what else

are you going to be listening to? So if you're the

FCC chair, your thing shouldn't, shouldn't exist anyway.

So just be quiet. Even if Donald Trump told

you to do something, just shut up. Shut up. Don't say anything. Why are you

talking to people?

Speaking of why you're talking to people. That's a good transition.

It's a good transition. What was, what was this book we. Were supposed to be

talking about? So this book is up, we are going to be covering some books

about, about, about.

So October and November on the podcast is typically a six week

period between the middle, sorry, around middle of the end

of September and then all the way cutting into, into Thanksgiving where

we switch into our more holiday oriented, oriented

fare. And this year in that space, we do have a couple of holiday books.

We have a Truman Capote that we're going to look at. We have a GK

Chesterton that we're going to revisit and we also have a

CS Lewis that we're going to, we're going to try to, we're going to put

in there very holiday oriented. Before we get there, we have to kind

of go through a little bit of a, and this period always feels like a

little bit of a slog, particularly if these, because these books are about hard things,

but they're also about real things. We're going to cover

books that are about war and about warfare.

So one of the books that I'm working my way through currently,

I don't know that I'll have it done in time for the podcast is

the Empire of the Summer Moon, which is a great book

about the Comanche and the US cavalry in the

1880s and in the 1890s and even down into the

1910s and 1920s

in the American west, particularly in the part of Texas where my

studio is located and where I live. This is an area that was deep in

Comanche territory. Matter of fact, I went on a,

went on a gondola ride this weekend with my, with

my wife. And the lake, the artificial lake that we were, we were on.

That property had been brought up by one family back

in the 1860s or 1870s and has been owned

consistently by that family all the way down. And they've divided it up and it's

been developed and major city is around it now anyway,

but the gondola driver was telling us, or the gondola pilot was

telling us that apparently that area

was huge Comanche territory in the

1860s and 1870s and even into the 1880s and 1890s.

And he said that his family was one of the families that moved there

from the east way back in the day. And so he had done some genealogy

research because he didn't know anything about his family. And he's like, oh, well, wow.

We were like, we were like right. We were like right in this area.

And so that's very fascinating to me. The

Comanche as a tribe were. They were

warriors. Just. That's the best thing you could say about them. They were warriors. They

were like. I think of them like the old school samurai warriors before guns showed

up to Japan. Yeah. And, and before everything just shifted. And

now like, you're in a totally. They're like the end of the, the end of

the. What was it, the Edo period? I believe it was in Japan.

They're kind of like that. They're the last remnant of like just we're

gonna have an old school battle with each other and it's going to be a

thing. I was thinking more the old Zulu. Like the Zulu or them. I was

thinking. Yeah, I thought I, I thought they were more of a like literally a

direct one for one. But, but I think the jet, the Japan

reference is probably, again, if you think of their

swordsmanship, I don't think it's the same like. So I think the

Zulu were probably closer in the, in that respect. But again, you could probably

make. Well, in A lot of different ways. Well, the samurai could ride on horseback

and shoot with the, with the bows like they were

insane. Yeah, yeah, yeah, those guys were.

Yeah, you didn't. You left them alone. Let's just say

that you realize. You realize. So, so to your point, right

now, the Comanche were going against cavalry members that were.

That were training to shoot from horseback with a six shooter, right?

And the Comanche could still fire.

They. I heard a statistic that they could fire arrows two to

one with a. With a handheld six shooter. Think about that. So in

the time it takes you to shoot six shots on. This is all on

horseback, of course, by the way. So on horseback, because you have to balance

yourself, you fire the gun, you have to make sure, you know, you get a

clear shot, whatever, right? So in the time they shot six bullets from

a six shooter, a Comanche could fire 12 arrows.

That to me is absurd. That now, again,

I wasn't there. So if those numbers are skewed, please don't shoot the messenger here.

I'm just saying this is some of the statistics that I've read and

you know, and these are supposedly

some of the journal entries

that I've read and things like that are coming straight from cavalry members in that

era. Like they're writing these things going, I cannot keep up with the

arrows fired at me, so to speak. Right? So as you're ducking

arrows, trying to shoot your six. Shoot your six shots and

then forget if you have to reload. Like, if you have to reload, you're done.

You're done. It's over. It's over. Well, they are the. And

this is why I draw the parallel from Japan. But yeah, I'll buy absolutely the

Zulu warriors when they will go up against the. Go up against the British

or even, oh gosh,

the. The Mongols, right, When they would ride across the steps,

right, and just rip the hell out of.

Out of. Out of. Out of native

Russians in the Urals and everywhere else on that

flat plane that is Russia. One of the reasons why I'm very

interested in the Empire Storm Moon, beyond just the history of it and my connection

to it in the area in which I live is that

book represents an inflection point between

old and new ways of fighting as a warrior or the person who has a

warrior mindset and has for a long

time. That inflection point is fascinating to me because

just like with World War I, it's a space where

old things are ending and new things are coming in,

but there's an arbitrage there where learning

can happen. And sometimes the arbitrage lasts. Like in

case of World War I, the arbitrage lasts for four years, and then it's over.

The door closes. Right. With the

Comanche, the arbitrage was like 15

years maybe that they had. And I think I'm probably being

generous, I think it was probably closer to 10. But let's say 15 years that

they had where they just owned all the new things they just did. They just

owned it. And it's those. It's one of those spaces where

if you're a person who is trying to understand

how things shift from a leadership position, there's some interesting

lessons to be learned there. And we're gonna. We're gonna talk about some of those

on the show. Go ahead. I was just gonna say, I. I. Not only do

I agree with you from the. The. That whole pivot there, not how we're.

Sorry, the word used arbitrage. No, no, The. The.

It's like there's. There's a. There's. There's a time frame there. It's like a

pinnacle there. You can see things shifting from side to side

a lot. One of them that nobody talks about

extensively that I found through some research and stuff that I think is

one of the more glaring, like,

opportunities for us to learn from is how they treated captives.

There was a vast difference in the. In how they treated the prisoners,

prisoners of war, captives, all that stuff, because the. Some of the original

versions of this were assimilation, right? So, like, we would.

Especially from the native side, they would. As they were capturing people,

especially women, they would just assimilate them right into the

tribe. And there was a pivot point where they saw what captives were being treated,

how captives were treatment on the other side. And they said, we're not doing that.

If they going to treat our people like that, we're going to do something different.

And they just started torturing and. Because Native people were not

really, like. There was no real evidence of severity

and torture in any. Any. Any way, shape or form until around

that time frame. And then all of a sudden things just changed. And it was

like. It was not about. And we could. Scalping

aside. There were some scalping things that. That's. I'm talking about actual

treatment of people that they took into their camp. Not what happened on the

battlefield, but when they took people into their camp. I mean,

everybody. Not. Not everybody. I mean, probably two thirds of the planet

has seen Dances With Wolves, and there's a particular character in there, the white

woman in The. In the Lakota camp that

eventually is treated as a Lakota woman. Like that's just the way it.

And that was very typical. But to your point, I think that

that, that area, that time frame in that area of

the country showed a lot of changes in the

way that. In the way that things happen in the interactions. And I

don't think a lot of emphasis is put on it. I don't think enough emphasis

is put on that. That, that shift. That, that shift in mindset of how

the prisoner of war was going to be treated. Well, it's interesting because.

So we're also going to cover. I just. I actually double

ordered this book. I didn't remember that I had it. And so I ordered a

second copy and then I was like, oh wait, I already have this book on

my shelf. What am I an idiot? But the Earth is all that

lasts, right? And. And

this is about. It sort of

goes along with Empire, the Summer Moon, because it's about things that are happening at

this exact same time, but in the Northern plains, right

between Crazy Horse, which I don't really like that name, but okay, let's just.

That's what's going. That's what we're going to use. And again, the

US Cavalry, right, Trying to,

as I said before, navigate the arbitrage. Right. Of things that are happening.

And you can see. And this will, this will sort of

not round out, but this will sort of give you three legs to the stool

that we already had that we started off with Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.

Right. And I'm not saying this covers all

obviously opinions or ideas. Does that possible. Right.

Um, but it's three examples

of. To your point about shifting torture, shifting

psychological things that we can see happening or psychological approaches

to how we deal with human behavior that we can even see happening in our

own time. We're in the middle of a weird shift between.

And this is. This is relevant to the Charlie Kirk assassination, but it's also relevant

to the thing we were talking about with Jimmy Fallon is. Or not Jimmy Fallon,

but Jimmy Kimmel as well. We're at

a weird inflection point moment right now

where old things are passing away in

leadership, in not in human nature because that's

eternal, but in leadership and in how behavior

manifests and where the whack, a mole pops up and then the reactions that people

have to that. So the reactions that people have to an

argument online are

radically different than the reactions that people had to an argument

to my point about when I was in college, to an argument offered by a

speaker from a deus, you know, 30 years ago. We're

at an inflection point, and warfare,

you know, war is the father of us all. Heraclitus said that 33,000 years

ago, and to a certain degree he was correct.

It's where the point gets to be the sharpest. And that's what we're going to

talk a lot about, you know, coming up, coming up this, this year.

Because when all the laughing is done and like, we've all decided,

okay, this is the shooting that we're going to do, and you're armed and I'm

armed, and now we're going to, we're going to do the thing. A

lot of the dross gets, gets stripped away. A lot of the

nonsense gets stripped away. And now we're, we're super hyper

focused on, for better or worse, we're

super hyper focused on what is the thing that we need to do in order

to accomplish the goal that we've set out to accomplish, whatever that is.

And you see it in the wars between the U.S. calvary and

the Native American tribes in the west, in America. And we'll see it in

those two books. You also see it in a

book that I'm currently working through, which we're going to cover, called War by

Sebastian Younger. This is a book about the battles in the Korengal

Valley in, in Afghanistan in

2002, 2003, 2004. And that's

fascinating to me because the 10th Mountain Division,

which is the elite division of mountain

fighters that the US Military had the most elite division of mountain fighters that

the US Military has produced, could

not subdue the Afghan Taliban in the

Korengal Valley. And the guys that they sent in there after

them in 2002, 2003 and 2004 had

a ridiculous level of casualties just trying to hold a corner

of a mountain. And I

don't really know what to do with all that because I know, I personally know

people who went to Afghanistan. And it's interesting. So

in the early 21st century, we had Afghanistan, we had Iraq.

And guys who went to Iraq, they get a lot of play and a lot

of coverage and there's a lot of yapping, particularly in online spaces, if you know

where to look. But Afghanistan is real quiet. It's like the difference between

Vietnam and Korea. We don't talk a lot about the Korean War,

just like we don't talk a lot about what happened in Afghanistan. We

particularly don't talk a lot about it now in light of

Our evacuation of Afghanistan during the Biden administration,

which I personally, as a person who has had veterans in my family,

I found that to be shameful. Absolutely. I'll go on record and say that

a major superpower doesn't. You don't leave a country like that.

And we already did it once in Vietnam. I would have thought we would have

lost, learned our lesson, but apparently,

apparently not. So

at this point, I'm not sure how many times I've said this on this

podcast, but I know I've said it several

times, that the more things change, the more things stay the same. The more they

say the same. That's right. That's right. I don't.

It is at some point, at some point, I

feel like

we have. I don't. I still have no idea how we have not learned

lessons throughout history to not repeat the same mistakes, but we can

continuously do. And I don't. I've never understood this

because quite.

Because quite on a smaller

scale, it does actually work, by the way. So an

example. I have five children, as I've mentioned again

several times in this podcast. My youngest

daughter. My youngest daughter. My youngest child of five. I have four sons and

a daughter. My youngest child of five almost never

got in trouble like she. In.

From an outside perspective, looking in, she would look like the

golden child or, or like the perfect kid or

whatever. Whatever classification you want to give her.

But that is not the truth. And if

you asked her, by the way, she's an adult today, and if you ask her

today, she will tell you this. She. She will tell you this right out the

gate, that she is far from perfect and she's done some really stupid things

in her life, in her childhood, but she was a good

observer of what the other four kids got in trouble for and what they

got away with. She learned by watching them

and didn't do the same stuff. Like, she just didn't do it,

like. So again, was she perfect? No, of course not. Did she

get, like, reprimanded here and there? About some. In most times, to be honest

with you, it was her mouth that got her in trouble more than anything. It

wasn't her physical. Like, my boys would, like, they would do the

stupidest godforsaken garbage stuff,

jumping off things, destroying. One of my sheds in

my. One of my tool sheds got destroyed because one of my sons thought it

would be funny to do something that I'm not going to read. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Don't give anybody ideas. I'm not going to put it on the record Here, I'm

not going to give anybody else ideas, but my daughter saw that, saw

the trouble that he got into and was like, okay, note to self, don't do

that, don't do that. Like it. She was just a really good

observer of forward facing history. Meaning, like, right,

she's seeing people get in trouble for things. I know now not to do those

things on a global scale. We can't do this.

It's fascinating to me that we continue the same

mistakes over and over and over again. So one of the things, and

we'll cover this book as well, the First World War by John Keegan.

Right. This is probably the best book ever written, ever,

ever written about the history of the First World War. And

Keegan opens with this line, which, I mean, I've said it before on

the podcast in a different kind of context, but it is a, it is a

great line, right, Going directly to what you're talking about. And then we'll, we'll talk

about BH Liddell Hart and why we don't learn from history.

But, but John Keegan opens the First World War with this. The

First World War was a tragic and unnecessary conflict.

Unnecessary because the train of events that led to its outbreak might have been

broken at any point during the five weeks of crisis that preceded the first clash

of arms had prudence or common goodwill found a

voice. Tragic because the consequences of the first clash ended the

lives of 10 million human beings, tortured the emotional lives

of millions more, destroyed the benevolent and optimistic culture of

the European continent, and left when the guns at last fell

silent four years later, a legacy of political rancor and

racial hatred so intense that no explanation of the

causes of the Second World War can stand without

reference to those roots.

We go down the road of tragic and unnecessary conflict. And even John

Keegan brings this up later on in the first couple of chapters of the First

World. And it goes directly to what you're talking about, Tom. We go down

this road and this is one of the other areas that I want to talk

about because of generals and

politicians and their desire for the

protection of honor and prestige and

status. This is why we go down these roads.

And if we want people who will learn from

history and who will look at the mistakes and

say, we're not doing that again. We need to

pick leaders and we can do that. No matter what you

may say about the election process in the United States, we can still do that.

Unlike other places,

we need to pick leaders and we need to raise up leaders who

actually can lay aside hurt Feelings

and hubris and arrogance and

pride and say, no, you know what? We're not going to do that

again. That's the only way that works. That's the only way it works. And by

the way, this doesn't start with the presidency or with the Congress. It starts with

your freaking school board. That's

where it starts. You don't want to have any more major wars. You don't want

to have a useless and tragic and unnecessary loss of human life.

Pick better people to be on your local school board

in America. That's how it works. Now. Other places, it's

going to be different. I'm going to have different problems I can't solve for.

Authoritarian or aristocratic or theocratic. You all got different kinds of

problems. You got different picking system. But here in this backyard,

people come from leaders. Leaders come from somewhere. They don't just pop.

They don't just pop out of the woodwork. Yeah. And they're

trained somewhere and they're educated somewhere and they rise through the ranks

somewhere. And Keegan talks about all of this in.

In the First World War. Another person who

talks about this is a person who was. Who served in the First World War

and was a historian of the First World War and then was promptly ignored on

the run up to the Second World War. A guy named.

Let me show you my shocked face. Oh, yeah. And then wrote a book in

the 1960s with the. With the appropriate title

and yellow cover. Why Don't We Learn From History by B.H.

liddell Hart? We're going to start off with that.

Now, one of the interesting things that Liddell Hart points

out in his book, and I've. I've sort of

looked at this as I've been reading it,

and he. I love what he writes in his introduction here. You'll love this, Tom.

He'll become your spirit animal here in a little bit. Just based on this.

Man seems to come into this world with it in an unalterable belief that

he. That he knows best and that he can make others think as he does

by force. How else do we explain why leading men in government madly

propose the use of nuclear weapons against the people of another nation because of

a trade dispute? Nations

delight in having a militaristic leader represent them and thrive on enforcing

their will on lesser powers with a righteous view to the glory and plunder

that will follow victory. Peoples are never so united as

in the early days of war, nor so determined to overcome once

they see that a greater effort and more sacrifices will be demanded of them. Before

Success is won. All very noble and all

fantasy. Has any war in the history of the world

followed such a pattern? None on the Ship of Fools

ever asks.

And he blames the historian. He thinks it's the historian's job

to be the, to be the person on the Ship of Fools who looks around

at all the other fools and goes, shut up, this is history. And he goes

right into historians. He just lambastes them in the first

like few chapters of, of this book. Well, I mean that, that

kind of makes sense to me because I, one of the, I, I,

I recently had a, an opportunity to

talk to a local college here in, in New England

about what they're, they're trying to understand

the foundation of decolonizing higher education.

Okay. Higher education apparent

whatever word I'm thinking, I can't even think. But the, the idea or the concept

here is that, that higher education is designed

for white Anglo Saxon men. Okay. They were trying to basically

level the playing field. Sure. Okay. So, so in comes

your, your token Native American to try

to help you to understand colonization. Right. So

anyway. Oh boy. All right, well, you did take the gig.

You did say yes. I said yes. First of all,

I said yes because of several different factors. One was morbid curiosity.

Okay, all right, thank you for admitting that. I appreciate that it was an anthropological

experiment. Thank you for admitting that up front. Exactly, exactly. Because

I, I anyway, all right, so not to get into that, but, but, but one

of the things that came out from that conversation

is my, the statement that I made that,

that I, I think should not surprise anybody, but

yet still surprised a few in the room. And I said, the reason

you're having the problem you're having right now is because history is written by

the winners. Right? Like this is not

news. And to your point about the, the passages you read in the book and

why he went after the historians is because if you are a

true historian, the winner and loser is not the most important

part. Let me rephrase

this. Let me say this again. When you have a

war, the who wins and who loses is

not the most important, important part.

It's the impact and after effect it has on everything else after.

Not so. So history being written by the winners

is not imp, it's not, it's, it should not be

the only thing we should be. It should be looked at as almost like

again, we talk about having two sides of the same coin all the time.

You've even said those exact words on this episode of your podcast here.

Earlier, earlier in this, in this conversation Yep.

Until you understand both sides of the coin, you have no idea how much money

you're trying to spend. Right. I don't know

if you've ever seen trick coins. I. I've seen them in sort of tricks here

and there. Whatever. It's like the face of it is a quarter or the backside

of it's a nickel. Whatever. Right. Like you got these, but there. There's like these

weird. Unless you're playing with the same denomination of

money and you're looking literally at the top two sides of the same coin, but

now you're seeing the truth of both sides of the coin.

Not. Not. Again, going back to a phrase.

If nobody. I'm not going to shamelessly plug my book, but

if nobody knows a book that I wrote, it's all about quotes. And one of

my favorite quotes, which, by the way, is not in my book. And I did

that very purposefully because I didn't want to

commercialize my own favorite quote. But the quote is,

perception is greater than reality. My favorite quote

of all time, and the simplest version of this I can give

people is Hasan and I walk into a room.

Fact. We both walk into the room. We both sit in there for

one hour. Fact, the length of time is one hour.

We both leave the room at the exact same time. Still a fact.

Somebody asks Hyson, what did you think of your hour in the room?

And Hy San goes, holy crap, that was a whole hour. I felt like I

was in there for five minutes. Opinion. The fact

was he was still in there for an hour. His perception of that

hour is that he was in there for a very brief period of time. Same

person asked me what I thought of my hour, and I went, good Lord, that

was only an hour. It was like the longest. It was like, I felt like

it was five days. Fact. Still an hour.

My perception of it, five days. Who's right and wrong here is

not relevant. As a matter of

fact, neither one of us or both of us could be considered right.

It's not a matter of right and wrong. It's a matter of two sides of

the same coin. So again, it's. It's.

He has every right to go after those historians. And I agree with him 100.

Because the. His. If history is written by the winners, then we

are going to glorify all of the things that those winners wanted us to know

and understand about their. What. Whatever their perceived

irrationality about going to war was. We're gonna.

Everyone's gonna think that they were right because it's written by the winners, without

understanding. And I think where we first started seeing some of this

stuff was kind of around the Vietnam era, understanding what

the. The quote, unquote, the enemy was thinking. The enemy was. We had

embedded journalism which we didn't really have before. Like now

all of a sudden we're seeing, we're starting to. We're just now starting to understand

that history should not be written just by the winners, that history should be

written by historians. And they should cover both sides of the coin, the

whys, the who's, the hows, the what's. All of it should be covered from both

perspectives. But

the problem that I have with it, and I think the problem with. And that

book was written in the 60s. And I think if he were, if he were

to write that same book today, I'm not sure a lot of the book would

change. Because even with that, we still,

we still don't listen. We don't learn. We don't listen, we don't learn. And

we're allowing people's egos to make decisions. Instead of

a moral compass or rely or, or an ethical,

morals or ethics. I don't care which one you prefer to use to run your

life. But if you do not have a moral North Star, you're probably

lost. If you don't have a moral ethic, if you don't have an ethical,

an ethical, you're probably lost. And if we're letting people with no morals

and no ethics run these things, we're going to continue to go down the

same path and we're going to have the same problems we've had for the last

eon and eon and eon of human history.

Well, and the things that

I'm seeing on the horizon and the way that war fighting.

This is the last point that I'll make because we got to wrap up. But

the way that war fighting is proposed

to be conducted in the future,

increasingly, and we're already, I mean, we've been seeing this for 15

years now. Increasingly, war fighting is done

on Internet platforms with

psychological operations being run via social media. Most

of the things that you see in your social media feeds, depending

upon which platform or which company you're on,

are psychological propaganda designed to soften a

populace, whether that populace is in the United States or

someplace else, into accepting defeat.

Because it's easier to psychologically soften a populace and then go in

and destroy the material than it is to

go in and destroy the material and then try to win hearts and minds. By

the way, that's one of the lessons for Vietnam, right.

The other thing that we are going to be seeing coming up here

very shortly, again, if war fighting

projections and execution of war fighting is

correct, from the same ego driven generals who are

writing white papers right now about what will happen in the next 25 years,

in the next 25 years we will have,

for lack of a better term, robotic soldiers. Not robot

soldiers, but robotic soldiers that will either be in a support role for

human beings that may eventually, over the long course

of the next 75 years of this century, take over

the fighting on both sides. And

if you don't need a human being to stand a post or stop

another human being from surprising you or invading you, and I'm not saying that

human beings will be completely taken out of warfare. I'm not that delusional. It's

not going to happen in 75 years. But if

the F35 is being flown by an LLM

and the next generation fighters,

they're not going to need, they're not going to need a human pilot or the

human pilot will be in tandem with the machine,

right? And then eventually the human pilot and this is what the air Force wants

to do, totally taken out. So you'll have a billion

dollar plane dropping an ordinance,

dropping bombs on positions that will be

manned by, think about this,

billion dollar robots

and, and when we've outsourced our war

fighting to machines, now I'll be the first person to put my

hand up and hopefully my relatives will 75 years from now, you know,

the fourth generation down at Haison, why we'll never meet, hopefully

they will be critical thinkers enough, hopefully that gene will be passed along

far enough down the line. We're so someone among my folks will hand,

will put their hand up and will say

if we're not actually, if we're just destroying

stuff and calling it a war,

what's the point?

Because we're subduing a populace via psyops

and via psychological manipulation and then we're just going to destroy their material,

to what end are we going to move new people into that space? Because that's

traditionally what you do in a war. You clear out the old, you move in

the new. That's traditionally what happens, right? If

we don't need human soldiers to kill people and break things, we just want to

subdue a populace and then like destroy their material. What's the point?

Why are we doing this? I'll ask

a very lawyer question. This is the lawyer friend of ours on another project that

we're involved in. We Love this. Cui bono. Who benefits?

What's the point? And this is sort of what I'm seeing

because the move towards having machines fight our

wars, we're already starting to see this with drone fighting happening in Russia, between Russia

and the Ukraine, with literally off the shelf drones

just like destroying air bases.

Like, that's insane to me. But this is happening because this is the

continued evolution, that arbitrage thing I was

talking about, between the ending of an old thing, an old way of fighting, and

the beginning of a new way of fighting. But I think at

the bottom of it, because I don't think we're going to get rid of war,

unfortunately, I think at the bottom of it, even if it's

not human bodies showing up to do the war fighting, the human

psychology will still be informing the war fighting,

even if it is done with machines. But who knows? I could be wrong. Maybe

we'll all go back to sticks and stones at some point. I don't know. I

was thinking, I was thinking go back. If we go back to one

representative, like you have a tournament. I like that. Yes.

Everybody sends one fighter. Everyone

sends one fighter. Last man standing wins. Like, you know,

whatever. Like Kuma style, right? Like sign. Like street fighter.

Exactly. Like street fighter. Yeah, whatever. Yeah, Just, yeah.

Sends somebody. And by the way, we'll, we'll have a massive fight in the United

States because we're a multi ethnic, multiracial society about who should represent us.

We will have a massive fight about that. But eventually we'll pick one person

they can tell and then all the rest of us can go back

to, I don't know, eating grapes or

having strawberries fed to us while we lounge in a field

somewhere. I also think so again, the whole, the whole,

the more things change, more things stays the same kind of philosophy here, right too.

Like, what are we fighting? What are, what are we, what exactly are we waring

over at this point? Like, I, like I, not that, not that I would say

I understand, but at least you can. If you

look at, like, if you look at like the, the, the,

the, the early part of the last millennia, right? Like if you look at the

middle 14, somewhere between the

1100s and the, and the 1800s, I look at that

like they were trying to take over lands to better their own people,

right? So like, all right, we're gonna go where we found a country that

has a lot of gold, we're gonna try to take over that country so that

we can better our, our own people. We're going to take over that, that gold

we found land that's really fertile. We're going to take over that. We're going to

fight to take over that country so we can feed our own people. Like we're

going to grow more crops, et cetera, et cetera. Right. There was

not that, I guess there was more

foundational purpose behind the wars, but at some point that

stopped. Like that, that stopped. And I

credit, I definitely credit technology for that part. Right. Like

we now, we now are seeing TikToks and Facebook

posts and whatever from people all over the world. We're, we

were able to humanize each other through social media in that

sense where now when like the population

again, you go back to the Vietnam. One of the differences between Vietnam

and Afghanistan is the population didn't need those

embedded journalists to tell us what was going on. We saw it, we saw it

live on TikTok right now what's going on in Gaza and the

Palestinian. We don't need journalists to tell us we're getting video

streams straight from the people. So we're humanizing what's going

on in this warfare that we're talking about and we can visually see how

it's hurting whatever side of the coin or

hurting or helping whichever side of the coin you're, you sit on. I'm trying

to be really political here. But, but the, I, but the, the point that I'm

making is at some point you have to stop and think what exact. What are

we fighting? What, what are we, what are we bombing over? Like, is

what's it really going to try to, is the whole point

really just to make Ukraine an extension of Russia?

What, why does that matter anymore? Like, I don't need, like there's

so little like fighting, fighting over territory is

ridiculous. And, and to your point, a few minutes ago

it was, it is 100 ego driven. Like there's no other reason

for, for us to fight over territory like that. However, however

that will no longer exist once that fighting over territory is not

Earth and we start moving to, you know,

planetary, you know, colonization because then it's just going to be another

form of colonization and we're going to fight each other up there and then

it'll go back to, but we want this area because it's fertile.

Yeah, because it's fertile ground as

mineral. Rich elements to it and we're going to fight over that. But,

but we won't. We would not have learned over the right

here that we don't need to do that. Well, let me, let me, let me,

let me Give you some. Let me give you some hope, right?

Sure. Here's some hope on this.

So we, we, we read in our science fiction run through,

we read the Martian Chronicles, we were a stranger in a strange land. And

those two books struck me deeply

because the point that Bradbury makes in the Martian Chronicles, to

your point, Bradbury does anticipate in the Martian Chronicles, if you go and read that

book, that to your point, human beings will just take all their

old problems and go to Mars, right? And they'll have a new space

to work out old problems in an old container. And yet the

twist that he gives it is this.

Mars changes you more than you think.

You change Mars.

It's hubris. Human hubris and human arrogance

has a ceiling. And the ceiling might be

Mars. Interesting self. Interesting.

So, oh, this entity. Yeah, this is an interesting

philosophy because think about it, right? So like, okay, back in those colonial days,

France and England at war. France and England send colonies over to the

Americas. The, the, the,

the distance between the whole, the motherland and the colonies

starts to weaken the, the aggression of the, of each other.

Meaning, like, all right, hey, son, you're French, I'm English, we're going to trade

anyway. We just won't tell anybody because it benefits us as individual people, as

human beings. So you're, the theory that you're talking about actually

kind of makes sense, the distance apart and the time it takes

for, for, for communications to travel and all that stuff.

You don't have the luxury on Mars to fight with your neighbor

because your survival depends on your neighbor. And they don't give a crap if it's

a different country or a different race or a different whatever or different

ethnicity. You're gonna, you're gonna fight to survive over

the fight of the motherland, so to speak. Not only that,

I kind of like this idea. I hope you're right. And this is, and this

was the idea that Robert Hyland brought up as Stranger in a Strange Land. So

which is why Stranger in a Strange Land to me is a natural sequel to

Martian Chronicles. So in Stranger in a

Strange Land, human beings go to Mars.

To your point, they bring all the old container things with them. They

don't make it. It's only like six people, something like that, eight people.

They don't make it. But a baby is produced. The

baby is raised on Mars. A

second expedition goes up 20 years after a nuclear war.

And when they show up, they want to bring

the man from Mars back home to Earth. Except Earth is not

his home. Yeah, right. And he

winds up changing the Earth more than the

Earth changes him. Interesting. This is

the dirty little secret of what you're. This is the hope. See,

I said this on the episode with. With Martian

Chronicles. I'm less concerned

about aliens coming here and us changing

us overthrowing religion or overthrowing social

societal structures. Or we find out that aliens have been visiting us for

10,000. I'm less worried about that. I think we could handle it, honestly. I think.

I think probably at least 50% of the populace believes that something's

come here anyway and it's been here for a while, and they would be fine.

I think Gene Runberg's got us plenty. Plenty. Yeah, yeah, yeah,

yeah, yeah. Nobody. I'm not worried about that. I think half the populace would accept

it. At least in our country. Half the population accept it. The other half would

be trying to get away. Actually, they'd be trying to be begging, queuing up to

be taken away. And then all the rest of us would just be sitting around

going, well, all right. I don't know. Yeah, here we are.

I got. I gotta go put gas in my car. I got. I got bigger

problems. You're gonna fix the gas in my car. You're not. Okay, fine. Gonna give

me a longer lesson, you guys. Do you. I gotta go for. Yeah, you're gonna

fix it. You're gonna fix the climate. You're not gonna do any of that. Yeah.

You're just gonna walk around. I don't care. I gotta. I got bigger problems.

Exactly like. But I'm less

worried about that. And I am more worried.

And again, I said this on the show. I am more worried about how

those places, when we go there, how our neighborhood changes us.

And we know for. Not. We know for a fact. I'll frame

it this way. Mars may be dead from our

perspective. Right. Jupiter may be a gas giant from our

perspective with nothing going on in it. Right.

But that doesn't mean that those places won't have a deep.

And yes, I'm going to start with the spiritual. A spiritual impact, an emotional

impact, and a psychological impact that we are not ready

for and that we will not know how to handle. So

will that maybe push us backward and cause us to regress to some,

like at the beginning of 2001 A Space Odyssey, monkeys throwing, you know,

bones in an obelisk. Sure, maybe. But it

may also, to go back to 2001 A Space Odyssey, cause us

all to revert to being a baby and starting evolution all over again with

a different kind of mind. Right? The baby trapped in the obelisk. Right.

Which was the, which was Dave, basically,

we don't know. And so for me, I take

maybe less solace in that, but I think that that's

probably closer to the truth for what will

happen. I don't think we're going to take a nuclear war to Mars.

The moon, maybe. For sure. I could see us having a nuclear war about the

moon for sure. Because that's like. Oh, yeah, for sure. Right

there. It's right there. It's literally right there. It's like 10 minutes away. Come on.

Like, give me a break. It belongs, it belongs to us. Nobody else

deserves it. It's ours. Right. Like,

I saw, I saw it first. I called dibs.

What else? What reason would we be fighting, exactly?

So we will have territorial fights over the moon or maybe an

asteroid. For sure. I could see that. But Mars?

No, I think Mars or Venus or any of those other

planets, I think they're going to warp us in ways that we don't expect.

And we just take for granted warfare and violence because it's human nature. It's what

we're, what we're what we're used to. And we're not allowing

agency, as usual, to

exist in those other kinds of places. And by the way, agency in ways we

don't understand because it won't be human agency, it'll be

Martian agency or Jupiterian agency or Saturnian

agency. It won't be human agency. I can tell you for damn sure it

won't be that. And we ain't ready for that. We can't even contemplate

that. And that's, that was the whole point of Stranger in a Strange Land was

this guy coming back looked human, but he was

fully Martian through and through. So anyway,

just, just, just some food for thought.

All right. Again, I, I, I think my

favorite, my favorite, my favorite phrase of all time is, you know, the

more things change, the more things stay the same. I, I say it so often

now that I, I, I, I might even, I might even be getting tired of

myself saying it. Yeah, I think, I think you need trademark it and

put it on a hat.

I'll make the hat half red and half blue.

You got sell the hell out. Because to sell is

human. Sell the hell out of that hat. Sell is, is human.

I, I agree. All right, well, with that, well,

this is a great episode. Thank you for coming by, Tom. And I look forward

to having further development of these conversations around these books over

the next couple months. And with that, well,

we're out.