Leadership Lessons From The Great Books

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Leadership Lessons from the Great Books podcast, episode

number 163, Martian Chronicles

with Ryan J. Stout

in three, two, one.

Hello, my name is Jesan Sorrells and this

is the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books podcast,

episode number 163.

So I was sitting at my local Walgreens

drugstore recently, waiting for my prescription to be

filled. And as I sat there watching

people frantically moving back and forth behind

the counter, no longer four feet above everybody else, they seem

to have jettisoned that now with, with modern pharmacies,

as I was watching them, you know, go back and forth, I also was

completing the last pages of the book that we

are covering today. Upon completion

of this book, I, I put it down, or I closed the cover

and sort of in a grumble, sort of with

maybe with a sigh, I just, I, I kind of thought, or I, or I

said, well, that was very Cold War ish.

And then I got up, I approached the counter, I let a

22 year old with a nose ring hand me a bag with my prescription

in it, and I went on my merry way.

Now, I'm not objecting to nose rings, nor am I objecting to Walgreens. And why

am I telling you this story? Well, I'm telling you the story because

today's book, I couldn't find a way to talk about it, a

way to get into it without consulting a friend of mine

who's been on the show before. And

that person sort of gave me some ideas, gave

me some thoughts that I'm going to be bringing here to my analysis or

to, to analysis of this book today. Part

of what defeated my attempts at analysis of this book's themes for leaders was the

fact that this book, as do all of the books on our show, this

book comes from a very specific moment in history. It

is a moment that has passed, but the

moment's ripples, or the ripple of the moment continue to

echo down through the pond of history to us,

even now, today.

Yet despite mixing metaphors, which I just did there, I am not

convinced that this book, this quote unquote fix up novel,

won't be viewed one day, maybe 25 years

from now, maybe 30 years from now. But I'm not convinced that it won't be

viewed one day as merely part of

the mass of flotsam and jetsam pushed out by the tide

coming in on the back half of the end of the last

long 20th century.

Today, on this episode of the podcast, we will rescue from the

flotsam and jetsam of the late 20th century.

Themes for leaders from a book that is quite

frankly, I think, already fading away in our

collective wisdom in America

and our collective cultural memory in the West. A book that was once

highly influential but gets mentioned less and

less more often as time goes on.

We're going to be covering the Martian Chronicles

by Ray Bradbury. Leaders.

It is good to renew one's wonder, said the philosopher.

Space travel has again made children

of us all. And of

course, as usual today, we will be joined on our show by

our co hosts, rejoining us from episode number 143 where

we tried to make sense of the poetry of the great

American free verse genius Ogden Nash, back

from his root in service of the people as a

carrier for the United States Postal Service,

back from that that duty, such as it were.

Ryan J. Stout Good afternoon, Ryan. How are

you doing today? I could not be better, thank you kindly. Been looking forward to

this and

yeah, yeah, surprised

to fall pretty deeply into to

the book pretty readily. So

let's start off with that. Normally we would start off with, you know, maybe

some reading some pieces from the book or some clips from the book. This book

is of course, as are most of the books on our show, under

copyright. So we will be reading sparingly from it. But there are a few

stories that we do want to talk about and we do want to discuss. We

will summarize certain sections of the book. There's a couple of stories that

Ryan wants to really reference and wants to really get dig into and we'll do

that. There's a couple that I really want to dig into and we'll, we'll do

that. But to open up our show or to open up sort of where

we're going to go today or set the tone maybe for where we're going to

go today. I'd like to hear from Ryan. What do you, what do you

think about the Martian Chronicles? You said that this was, this

was a really fast read for you. You kind of moved through it very quickly.

But I'm assuming you read it at one point in time in your life and

now you're reading it at another. So talk to us a little bit about the

Martian Chronicles, about your experiences with, with Ray Bradbury

because you weren't, you were not our co host when we did Fahrenheit 451.

That was John Hill. But a man is as well

versed as you in, in reading it in literature. You had to have run

across Bradbury. Before the thing that.

So it's.

He's a truth seeker. And

a lot of times artists, authors.

I believe Stephen King

references his muse as an, an angry,

short, angry Irishman

or something wearing a derby, having a cigar in his mouth,

constantly yelling at him that his. He, he's owed

pages. Yeah, he's a. And so that.

But also a truth seeker. And so

when you're able to combine so many

themes of the human condition and

spread it literally across almost a galaxy

anyway, because they reference. It's not just, it's not just Mars,

there's. It encapsulates

Jupiter and Saturn and exploration

and like I didn't know that much

about this book. I love how it's laid out in essays. I love that

form of storytelling where you're getting the insight into.

You could go long form and you

get insight into say the macro and

then you have short snippets of these,

a paragraph or two which kind of dive into

the, the micro of

philosophy and behavior and how it fits into the

larger picture and how all those things are essentially connected.

You can't, can't really remove an

entire section of history from life and say, well,

we didn't need that. Let's just connect, you know, the

1900s to, to. To the 19, you know,

75 or something like that or 1900 to 1975. So.

And interestingly enough,

thematically we're, we're seeing a lot of things that have been

repeating I think in, in, in more recent times,

very recent times. And,

and I think

it's impossible to not

see the see self reflection in

this work. I like the simple language. I

like that it's direct, it seems the first thing.

So the cold world, the Cold war.

I think I got through the first couple of paragraphs and I was like, this

is clearly a book that was written in the 50s, right? 40s or 50s

by the language. It seemed

behaviorally that it was

just, you know, very specific to that period of time.

And you know, Bradbury excelled

at expressing that and

exemplifying that period of time as well thematically throughout the book.

Well, and so one of the things we explored on our introductory

episode, which I'd recommend you go and listen to episode 162

that's out there right now. One of the things that

Bradbury was looking for in this novel. Well,

no, so he was challenged, right, by his editor to write a novel

that would be what was called or was termed

a fix up novel. Right. And so a fix up novel is

a book that is what we would call now on the

other side of the Joan Didions and the Hunter Thompsons and the Gay Talises

and the Truman Capotes of the world, what we would call

a nonfiction novel, right, which is a collection of essays that

focuses around a particular theme or a particular set of themes

back in the 40s and 50s that sort of didn't

exist other than in fiction. And Bradbury, I believe

in the Wikipedia article about this, Bradbury was quoted as saying

that immediately the book that came back to him was

Winesburg, Ohio, by Sherwood Anderson, Right.

And he really liked that book. And so he wanted to do. He was like,

he thought in his mind, I don't know, that I could ever do something that

was. That was that good, right? And so Martian Chronicles was his attempt to do

something that was that good. The other thing that we see in Martian

Chronicles is that these stories which were published in the 40s, before

they were all collected together in the 50s, were later on

utilized in different mediums in the 50s and 60s.

So a couple of these stories showed up

on the great old time radio show called

X Minus One was one of those. One of those science fiction stories.

Dimension X was another one. And so these were radio shows,

radio operas, and Ray Bradbury would write for those or he would

adapt stories, right, that he had already published in other books

or in other forms for these radio shows.

And later on when radio shows transferred to television for some of

these television shows, and then later on he would even mine his own work

in other areas for the show that was on in the.

Oh, gosh, it was in the 80s, I believe, the Ray Bradbury Theater,

which, by the way, you can check out on Amazon prime for free.

Well, not free. I mean, if you have a Prime account, you're already paying Jeff

Bezos his money, so you might as well be getting something out of it.

But my point is, Bradbury was this. Ray Bradbury

as a writer was this font of

knowledge and information because he didn't go to college, right? He, you know, he got

his college at a local library and that's where he figured out how to write.

And so you look at Martian Chronicles and you're right, it's

written in a very simple and a very

easy manner, but it's also got some

deceptively deep themes in it. So

what would you say are some of the themes, maybe some of the major

themes in the Martian Chronicles?

You know, I probably would have said something differently

than I'm going to say right now if

I just. The human, the arrogance of

this arrogance is baked

into human nature. And

I got a lot of, it's okay for me,

but it's not okay for you.

And

there's one particular part, and I. I

mentioned it earlier in

the. The off season.

Well, Sam Park. And also one of the things I really

loved was the use

of double meanings, or double

entendre, if you will, of names. And

it's not on the nose. He could have at any point,

everyone could have been referenced as,

for instance, Father Peregrine. Yeah,

Peregrine means the tendency to wander.

And then you have the peregrine falcon and also

Spender. And so

carefully selecting who

he used as. As a character to

create more depth.

And I think that helped. It helped me

relate to the characters

or at least see them as like a

complete person. And

yeah, that chapter was really upsetting.

Well, let's pull that out. So in my edition, because there's

multiple editions of the Martian Chronicles, and so the edition that I have was published,

I believe, was put together in the late 90s.

And one of the interesting things about this novel is

while the stories are, they do read as

being in a particular time frame. Right.

They are also or can be read as being timeless. And

so one of the things that was interesting when it was first published was the

dates were all projected forward to the late 1990s and

the early 2000s. And then when it was republished

or re. Released in the late 1990s, the dates were pushed

forward into. Pushed forward 25 years to where we

are today. And so I anticipate that when Martian Chronicles is

reissued probably next year, because next year is

2026, the dates will be pushed forward

yet another 25 years.

And so that's an interesting sort of

twist, right, on this novel, which

on the one hand, does allow it to be timeless, but then on the other

hand allows you to sort of see the. Allows you to

sort of see the. The threads on the baseball. Right. Allows you to see the

thread, see the movement. The story that Ryan is

referencing, the. The short story in the Martian Chronicles is from November,

or in my version, it's from November 20, New November 2005. Twenty years

ago, the off season. And a man named Sam

Parkhill, who landed earlier

on Mars with a group of folks who.

Who came to. Who came to Mars as part of the

second exploration of Mars.

Sam is a proprietor now. He's no longer an astronaut. He's a

proprietor of a. Of a hot dog

stand on the edge of the desert where he believes the

tourists will be coming. When human beings do finally arrive again

to continue to tame Mars. And that's another theme that's

in this book. And it's one that Bradbury plays with

quite a bit. One of the ones that I find to be more disturbing, actually.

And it's this idea that we believe

arrogantly, to your point, about human arrogance being baked in. We

believe arrogantly as humans that we will just go out and shape and

mold any place into our image and it will just fall to our feet.

And Bradbury starts from the premise, and you see this in all of the

stories in Martian Chronicles, particularly the early ones where the Martians are

both there and not there at the same time.

Bradbury starts from the premise that Mars

will change us more than we will change it

and that Mars will shape us and that there are things on

Mars that will impact us rather than

us impacting them. That our arrogance is

as nothing to Mars as

an ant's arrogance is nothing to us on our planet.

So Bradbury starts from this theme. He starts from this premise and by

off season, as a story plays around

with this arrogance. And so it opens with Sam, you know, sweeping out

his. His location and ranting about

Captain Wilder, who stopped him from killing Spender all those years ago.

And, and his wife is of course

nagging at him because that's the kind of wife that Sam

would marry. And then, and then

there's then. And then the Martians try to do something that's totally and

completely illogical and out of, out of step,

right? They, they. They present themselves

to. To Mr. Parkill, to Sam, and they

try to send him, or they try to make him an emissary

from, from. From them, right, to

the other. To the other humans. And the,

the apotheosis of the story really, really

comes when. Well, when they attempt to

communicate with Sam. And so I'll read this just very small

piece right here. He says,

I'm outnumbered, Elma. He cried. They'll kill me. He threw out

the anchor. He was trying to escape from the Martians that were trying to visit

him on a ship, right? It was no use. The sail flittered down,

folding unto itself, sighing. The ship stopped. The wind

stopped. Travel stopped. Mars stood still as the majestic

vessels of the Martians drew around and hesitated over him.

Earth man. A voice called from the high seat. Somewhere a

silvering mask moved. Ruby rimmed lips glittered with the words

I didn't do anything. Sam looked at all the faces. 100 and

all that surrounded him. There weren't that many Martians Left on Mars.

100150 all told. And most of them were here now,

on the dead seas in their resurrected ships by their dead chest cities, one

of which had just fallen like some fragile vass hit by a pebble. The

silverine masks glinted. It was all a mistake, he pleaded,

standing out of his ship. His wife slumped behind him in the

deeps of the hold like a dead woman. I came to Mars like any honest,

enterprising businessman. I took some surplus material from a rocket that crashed and I

built me the finest little stand that you ever saw. Right there on that land

by the crossroads. You know where it is. You've got to admit, it's a good

job of building. Sam laughed, staring around. And that Martian I know he

was a friend of yours came. His death was an accident, I assure you. All

I wanted to do was have a hot dog stand, the only one on Mars,

the first and most important one, you understand how it is. I was going

to serve the best darn hot dogs there with chili and onions and

orange juice. And he's

from New York. He's from New York City.

And I cannot think of a more American

thing, a more New York City,

Bronx thing to do is

to go to another planet and be like, this is

mine. And how American are hot

dogs? And

his wife, Elena. Who? Elma. No,

Alma. Alma, yeah. Who?

To your point, yes, that is it.

It makes, it looks perfect sense. It makes perfect sense.

And Elma is almost. She's the voice

of reason trying to. Trying to like,

hey, dude, hey, hey, you know Sam, you know,

this is. And

the jumping to conclusions, his complete

denial

of the effect that not

only he is having on the planet and the Martians,

but the human race, you know, this land is your land. This land is

my land. And

you think when he's surrounded by the 100 Martians, you

think they're gonna behave instead they, they

hand over the deed to the land, essentially. Right,

Exactly. They, they. They do the thing that.

And the analogy or the parallel. Not the analogy, the

parallel that I draw is this, to your point about him being from the

Bronx, what if the Native American tribes in Manhattan

had understood the concept of ownership enough to have a deed

when the Europeans showed up from

England or from Denmark or from

France or wherever the heck they were coming from transatlantically

and had handed the deed for Manhattan

over to the English and then

just left? And this is the thing Bradbury's playing

with. This is, this is the. This is. And by the way, Bradbury's

writing in the mid 20th century for an incredibly well, incredibly

sorry. A culture that actually knew its

history. And don't get me wrong, there's always been dumb people in our culture who

don't know history whatever. Please. There was ever a halcyon era of this,

but the, the. Well, I won't say there was never. Yes, there was ever a

halcyon era. And it was a matter of degree. The number of

people who would have caught the allusion in that story to the

Native American tribes at Manhattan would have been huge.

Among his reading public, particularly among the reading

public that really valued science fiction.

Bradbury was the first author, along with Isaac Asimov, Arthur

C. Clarke, and of course the great dean of science fiction,

Robert Heinlein, who really

took science fiction and moved it from being a genre of mere

kids stuff like Edgar rice Burroughs or H.G. wells

to being something that was more serious and more literary without

Heinlein and Bradbury and Asimov. And

you don't have Philip K. Dick, you don't have Charles Gibson,

you don't have any of those guys. Right. Even

down to today. You don't have Neal Stephenson, who's, Who's writing

science fiction novels that are like Bibles, just

squirting them out like Chiclets. Right. You don't have that.

Right. And so these ideas that,

that Bradbury's playing with were ideas designed

to bring along. To sneak along science fiction

and move it from the bottom pulp shelf into the top, the

top shelf of, of of literature in, in the mid 20th century.

By the way, the story ends, just so you know, and this is no spoiler

alert. Book's been out for 80 years. You can go find this. But

the story ends with the first, the first major

apocalypse that occurs in the book. That's what I.

Yeah, yeah, but the apocalypse observed

not from on Earth, but the apocalypse observed for

Mars. And of course, Elma, in all her

helpfulness, picks up a toothpick, starts

picking her teeth and says, well, you know, this will be a really bustling,

A really bustling location, a really bustling place

in about a million years.

And before that, Sam is going on. He's like, I

think directly he says, think of it. A hundred thousand

Mexicans just kind of out of

nowhere and then inciting. That's the particular race.

And the only time that

it is, at least this is how I read it. Like

the godlessness of the Earth people.

Yes. And the spiritual connectivity to. To the land

and each other on Mars is.

Is why I would think people would want to go there

because they're escaping Earth because Of X, Y and Z. Right.

Capitalism or social unrest or,

you know, whatever people want their. I think there's freedom. They

talk about freedom early in the book. And,

and to leave a dying

planet to

kill another planet in

what, a. In a fraction of the time? Well,

it opens up the question for me on this book.

And, and, and, you know, the question is, and I think this is the

core question, forget, are we alone in the

universe? Forget the whole Carl Sagan, big brain, Neil

DeGrasse Tyson, are we alone in the universe? Question.

That's boring. The core question for me is, are we

alone in the neighborhood? Like, the

neighborhood has nine planets. It's a small

neighborhood. I'm not really worried about what's happening

on Alpha Centauri, just like I don't think anybody on Office Centauri is

worried about what's happening here. If there is anybody there to worry,

even if they have a conception of worry in the same human way that I

worry, why would they? Right. Okay. I'm

more concerned or interested, depending upon your perspective

on

Jupiter's not. Or. I'm more interested in the idea, and

I think Bradbury was as well. I'm more interested in the idea of,

of is Jupiter empty

or is there something there? Because the neighbor

who's the, the neighbor who's in the projects next door to

me worries me more than the neighbor that lives in Kansas that

I've never met. And this is also part of the

conceit that, that Bradbury, that Bradbury

plays with one of the other things that jumps out to me about the book.

And I don't know if you'll. I don't know if you'll agree about this, but

I'm a. I'm a science. I'm a space travel guy. I'm

fascinated by it. Star Trek, Star Wars, I love all that crap. Right?

I've talked about some of that on this podcast before.

I. I

think that the linking, the

inextricable linking of exploratory space travel to

the whims of public policy and the vagaries of geopolitics

500 years from now or 200 years from now will be viewed. Will be

viewed by people who. We will be long dead. You and I will be long

dead. And this podcast will be dust on the Internet. It

will have been taken down by Google. It will no longer be up. No one

will care. People will have moved on. Right?

But that act will be

viewed as probably one of the most fundamentally

illogical acts of the late 20th century.

The. The attaching of something so.

A vision so big to something so small. And to your point,

it dovetails with that idea of human arrogance.

It dovetails right in there. Because our geopolitics should of course run our space

travel. Of course we should be like competing with the Russians

or whatever.

There is.

So we talked about. And this is. So the first

Captain and Spender

are the redeemable characters. Yes, yes, they are.

And I mentioned

spirituality in those two characters. You see

that there is. They're not godless. No.

Whereas rest of the characters, I mean when they're yee. Hauling and whooping

and talking about drinking wine by the canal

and I'm gonna go party. I've earned it. I came here from

Texas, blah, blah, blah. And you earned. What did

you earn? It's a kind of. And

it's this like self importance

and,

and the prancing through the towns,

breaking glass breaking, all this beautiful artwork

and, and, and Spender especially seeing

the connectivity between the, the spirit connection between

the, the Martians, the planet, the Earth, how they've

integrated art into nature, into. They've combined

science, art and nature and into

a harmonious sort of collection of

really a lot of the things that. That matter

and.

Well, okay, so that, that opens up the door to this question then.

Is it, will it ever be worth it for

people from Earth to go to Mars? Like I think about, I think, I think

about, I think about people like, like my wife, My wife does not care

about Mars. Like she would be in the

Ray Bradbury story. She'd be one of those people that. He doesn't write about the

die of the nuclear war. Right. Or that

didn't get into the rockets. Like the, the most heartbreaking

story is the one.

Well, no, there's two stories. So the most fascinating story for me we could

talk about this one is, is the one where

all the black people get, get this, get their.

They get all their stuff together and, and they get the heck out of town

and, and way in the middle of the air. June

2003. That's interesting. We're going to talk about that one

because for me, as a person who has a high melanin content

and lives in the United States of America, I found that one to be quite

interesting. But the most heartbreaking story

was the one that closes out the volume

in August of 2026. The million year Picnic

with the kid who doesn't understand. No. Who

understands only that he has to hold together

his dad. Right? He feels like he has to hold together his dad.

But then there's a turn where the power shifts,

right? And now his dad is holding him together, right?

Because he. The full. The full weight of the

realization that we can't go home again. You actually

can't go home again. There's no home to go back to

because a second apocalypse has occurred, right? A second atomic war has occurred.

And now Mars is the only place you got.

There's nothing else left, Right. There's nowhere to go back to.

There are people like my wife and many others

who do not give a tinker's damn about Mars

and won't leave the Earth even if you paid them. And I think there'll always

be those people, right? But then there are the people

who do want to go and who do want to go

there. And they will come in a wide variety of

personalities and positions. They will come like Sam

Parkhill and Spender and the

Captain, but they'll also come like the senator and his

wife and his sons. They'll come like

the guy retire to retire, right? The retirees who

came there and saw their dead child. Right? Because the Martians are going to screw

with you, right? Or they're going

to come like, case in point, they're going to come like the black people

just escaping oppression. Which, by the way, one of the questions I

had, sub question underneath. We should answer this first one. Is

it going to ever be worth it to go to Mars? Sub question, did the

black people. When the first nuclear war happened and the Earth sent out

the signal for all the people to come back, why did all the black people

go back? Bradbury never answers that question. Or did they? He

never answers that. He just sort of leaves it open for you to, like, speculate

on. Because I wouldn't have gone back. I'd have been like, no, we got the

rocket, we tore that sucker down. We set up a hot dog stand. Actually, we

didn't set up a hot dog stand. We set up a soul food stand over

there. Ribs? Yeah, Martian ribs

right from the canal over there. Sounds awesome. We

barbecued and slathered those little babies. Greatest thing ever. Come

on, brother, let's have some ribs. Why would I go back home

to what? So first

question. Is it ever going to be worth it for us to go to

Mars? That's a lot of trips to Home Depot.

It is, yeah. Or Lowe's or whatever. Whatever.

I mean.

Because this is the. I mean, this is. This is the problem that everybody has

with Elon Musk talking about SpaceX. Everybody who's opposed to

him won't say this. They Won't say it out loud.

They don't have the guts to say it. But what they want to say is

we don't think that what you're privately spending your money on, along with

technology, taxpayer dollars for sure, but what you're spending your money on is worth

it. We do not think that there will be a benefit for this. You should

stop. They won't say that out loud. They coach it in other terms like,

oh, he should spend his money on feeding poor kids in India

or fixing the environment or I don't know,

making a longer lasting light bulb. Anything but this thing

that we don't think is worth anything. I was so was

watching Roman. I can't think of his name. He's a PhD. He is

an AI. You may know who I'm talking about. He's an AI.

Safety. Oh yeah, okay. And so

he was saying, you know,

so the interview I was watching, the host was holding up signs with

just little, little, little signs with dates on them, like 2035,

2045, 2070, something like that. And

the host said, what do you think it's going to be like in, you know,

20, 2027? And then

he projected a little bit, he's like, you know, of course this is just my

opinion. I can't see that. And then when

he got into like 2050, he said, I, I,

I, he said it is so far out of

the scope of what I

can even relate to because everything

might be different, Everything, people might be hat machine.

People may not be around. So to project on

how society is going to function in something like 40 years from now, 30

years from now, 25 years from now, is so far

out of the purview of what we have experience as

human beings live in an analog life primarily.

And technology is evolving. I

mean. But we have tech, but we

have technological sophistication. And yet this is where I would push back on

him. I would say we have technological sophistication, sir, you're

absolutely correct. But we have massive levels in the west of

cultural barbarity.

I think that will last with us. I think the cultural barbarity will last with

us. And so that when

I think of Elon Musk in that, I think, let's just

face it, he might be a little more intelligent than most people. Sure,

yeah. I'll grant you. And so if, if he

runs the algorithm all the way out, or he runs it all the way out,

and this is kind of the conclusion he came to.

I'm not gonna, like, I kind of have no

opinion on it as far as, like,

the success of what that mission would look like, terraforming and

colonizing another planet. But

I also don't know. And he probably

has a. Maybe has a better idea.

And one of the things I wanted to. Okay. Is it worth it? So

I think that we would have to, as a species,

almost

eliminate violence as a gratuitous

response to

any malady when confronted with something we

don't understand or. Or can't

relate to. Okay. And that would be

Martians living on Mars, living in crystal

castles and having you.

Do you know what I'm saying? It's. Yeah, I think we would

need to be more spiritually evolved or.

And because. So I have a question. So if we

were more spiritually evolved in this book and these. And they

encountered, would the Martians be playing jokes on them if they

were. If, you know, if, If a thousand

Buddhist monks would. Would

Martians be like, completely.

So. So here's an idea that we explored in our Stranger in the Strange Land

episode with John Hill. You should go back and listen to that episode. If you

haven't. I'm sorry, I sent a. I sent a link to. Sent a link to

Ryan. I don't know if you've taken a listen to that yet. But one of

the ideas that we explored because Heinlein. So I look at the book Stranger

in a Strange Land as the logical sort of.

And this is why we're doing them together, the logical

follow up to the Martian Chronicles.

So the Million Year Picnic happens.

The kids grow up and Earth

gets put back together somehow because there's always gaps

and they bring the kid back and the kid is the man from

Mars and he could do all these things and he could be all these

things. And he sets up in part

three of Stranger

in a Strange Land, he sets up a discipline which

is eventually is referred to as. Or becomes a

church in the book. Now, in that

episode, we. I, I made the point with John Mountain, with John

Hill, that, that

the. If that book were updated to today, the man from

Mars would start a political party because we've replaced religion

with politics. I know from some professional

therapists that I, that I talked to who are part of my, my inner

circle, that a child's

first political identity is forming right around ninth grade. Now, which

is absolutely insane to me. That's absolutely nuts.

But that's because we have a meaning problem in our

society and culture, which of course ties into the competency crisis which you and I

were talking about. A different kind of context, right Both those things link together. They're

not independent. Right. And so to your point about

spirituality, one of

the interesting things, if you research conspiracy theories

as I want to do, is that

there are aliens that have visited our planet, but that they are not

physical beings, they are spiritual beings,

and that they are trying to communicate with us or raise us to

a higher spiritual plane. Because the fact of the matter

is that in the material universe that we see as planets,

most of what exists on those planets are spiritual entities, not

physical ones. This is a deep

conspiracy theory. This goes beyond David Icke and the reptilian

lizard people and into a whole bunch of different things like the Grays

and then the Illuminati and the Anukai and

Egyptians and a whole bunch of like Fox Mulder X file stuff that I

can't even get into. So there's always been this tension

between the material manifestation of a planet that appears to

be dead and this idea.

You, you came to it through violence. But this idea that there is something

spiritually wrong in the human psyche,

that's beyond just arrogance that needs to be corrected

before in essence, the training wheels can be taken off

and we can join everybody else, right?

And I always say to that, and this is why I brought in

Heinlein and conspiracy theories and all this, this is, I always say

to this, I always say this.

I don't know where we're at on cultural evolution, but

I do know this on spiritual. We ain't there yet.

I mean, our pineal gland has been shrinking for the last thousand years.

I mean, there's there and, and

I mean that's, that's. I mean, were we at once, point, one point,

telepathic? I mean, I don't think it's beyond the

reason. I mean, they're starting to see in certain children

with autism that there's, there's

a, there's a telepathic quality that they exhibit

that, you know, if you see that's all. That's, that's some sci fi stuff.

But that's also same thing. It's like, is it sci fi stuff

or is it so far away from what

we think is even physically or mentally

possible that you immediately brush it out of the

well? So there's a, there's an idea and, and this goes to the second

piece of it. Prepping for a future you don't understand, right? So

you talk about predictive on AI and everybody's going crazy about AI right now,

right? And the singularity is near and da da da

da. Okay, well, the reality

of artificial intelligence is this. It's artificial and it

ain't intelligent. I use a lot of it in my day to day. I do.

I use a lot of it with clients. It's artificial, it ain't intelligent. It's only

as good as the prompts that I put in into it. And I'm not scared

of it. As a matter of fact, I'm one of those crazy people who says,

let it all out. Don't hide anything. Let everything out. And by the

way, don't just let it out to like us first, first world Americans

who have the technology and the technological infrastructure to handle it. No,

no, no, no. Let it out to everybody from like the lowest

homeless person on the street to the Pope in Rome. Let

everybody have a shot at it. Because here's the thing. I'm going to bet we're

going to break that thing in about 10 minutes

and it's going to be some kid in Mumbai. Yeah. Yes. That's gonna break that

thing in about 10 minutes. Yeah, you've seen that. You've seen the kid in

Africa who's building transistors that are old hubcaps and

wire that he found on the ground. Like it's. There you go.

Yeah. To think that we can

even really even know almost. I don't want to say

anything, but that's something that's so far out of what is

what is currently. Well, we don't. Right.

Well, we. Well, we don't. Right. Like, like one of the greatest shows. I mentioned

this in our, in our conversation. Right. One of the greatest shows that's on, that

was ever on television was Quantum Leap. And

the premise of that show is very simple. You get

into the Quantum Leap chamber and you vanish. Right?

Except here's the thing. You could travel through time, but

you can only travel through time in your own lifetime.

And there's a certain conceit in that. That's brilliant

because Scott Bakula. Great, great. By the way,

the NBC tried to relaunch Quantum Leap and it didn't work.

I watched like two, four episodes of the new season, like from like two years

ago, and I was like, yeah, forget this. And then I left.

But the, the conceit of that is genius because here's the reality.

And it goes a little bit to what the AI Ethicist was saying about predictions.

If you were born, think about your own life, right? If you were born

20 years before you were actually born, so think about your birth date and

then they could go back 20 years. If you've been born 20 years before then

you'd be a totally different person. Even with all of the things that

have happened to you in your life, everything but

you, you wind that clock back 20 years. Now you're a

totally different person because you're coming up under totally different circumstances.

Now think about the year you were born in and wind that clock

forward 20 years. You're also a

totally, completely different person. For one, you're 20 years

younger, but

you also came up in a totally different kind of social

culture, spiritual culture, psychological culture. 20 years,

we don't think as humans at 20 years makes that much of a difference.

But Bradbury understood that it did. Right? And it does make

a bit of a difference, actually makes a lot of a difference. So

I say that to say this, we've lived

through four major technological revolutions since the 1990s,

four big ones, and I can name them off. We lived through the Internet.

The Internet was going to change all of our lives. And to a certain degree

it has. I would put the Internet up there with the printing press is

probably the most revolutionary thing that we've ever done as human beings. So we've got

the Internet. Then social media was going

to change my entire life. Except the reality is it hasn't really changed my entire

life. It's really just made the parts of my life that were

interior, now exterior. And that hasn't really changed anything

for me. There's still knuckleheads on Facebook, Marketplace, the way they were on

Craigslist were creeping around on chat boards back in the day.

Yahoo. Chatbots. So like that really. But okay, Internet, social media, that

was, that was the second revolution. Third major revolution was

cryptocurrency, Bitcoin. Okay, Remember when all that started, right?

Blockchain, bitcoin, crypto. And this is gradually

starting to move its way through the system. I do think in 20 years

Bitcoin will be in crypto. Cryptocurrencies, not necessarily bitcoin, but

cryptocurrencies of some form or another will be commonplace. But it's,

it was a slow moving revolution and now we're into the fourth one.

And this is the AI thing, right, that's being plugged to

us, right? So Internet, social media, crypto and AI.

And

if I had woke up, if I had, if, if you had woken me up

and told me in 1989 when I was like 10 years old

that those are going to be the four major revolutions of my time,

I, number one, I wouldn't know what the hell you were talking about. And number

two, I Wouldn't have believed you. And number three, I would have

gone back to, I don't know, playing Legos or trying to watch GI Joe or

something. Right. So

I guess maybe the question is,

do science fiction writers have a better handle on predicting the future than the

rest of us because they're just creative? Or.

Or is it more that because they're open and free thinking,

they place less boundaries on the spirituality of the human

condition. I think that

writing and reading so much because, I mean, most.

Most writers are, you know, voracious readers

or. And are just taking notes all the time. And

I think when someone is

plugged in to history,

because so I would. 80% of

writing is research.

And through the research

is where I kind of come up with ideas and you make

connections. And so

example, when I was in college, I

figured out at some point that because of

time and the classes I was taking, this

is why I only had to study one subject.

I figured out how to combine

the crossover in subjects with whether it be

English, psychology, public relations.

There's a thread that goes through all those. And what I was thinking Spanish

in college. I mean, you could. Even if you got the right

book

to help link those things together, you can kind of study.

All can study multiple ideas at

the same time because there's so much crossover. So it's not necessarily the

details of the information. It's.

It's seeing it. It's. It's like pattern detection

and understanding how. And. And seeing how it

applies to almost each generation or

each, Each period of time that it's coming from and how it's

relevant in.

And I think that's. I mean, that's what this book does. That's what it's. There's

a timelessness to this because you see the human

arrogance. You see, you know, the displacement. You see the

disregard for nature. You see the,

the, the. The disregard for

caring, just caring almost because

it's, you know, Park Hill yells, this is all mine.

This is, you know, like, I did this and whatever. It's like, did

you. You know, and that's. Someone told me years

ago there was. And this. There's some truth. But like in

aa, you know, and I know publicly,

but it. AA is. Someone told me years ago, it's like

it works so well to help people stop drinking

that the people, like, people started to think

they did it. All right. Okay. Yeah. And so

it's like, wait a minute. You're kind of disconnected from reality, because

I need to be the center of the universe, and so I am

the master of my domain and X, Y and Z. However, the

freedom, as you know, the freedom comes in

surrendering. Right? Yeah. And so

if that's what the Martians do,

they give them the deeds. They don't surrender in

the sense of militarily. They surrender

I think because they have enough foresight

to understand that it's not going to be worth their time.

And you're talking to interplanetary. So this is. I haven't shared

this with anyone but years

ago I had a. As. As

maybe when. So I, I started doing a. I did a

paper at Rutgers on. On.

It was something within environmentalism

and global warming. Sumatra and Borneo

and that entire area of the world.

And so I started doing a lot of research

like doomsday environmentalists. There's been people since the

60s saying there's only 10 years left, there's only 10 years left.

And they're almost pissed off when they're wrong

because they're completely null and void. Their entire identity and

their worldview investing so much in something

that is impossible to predict.

And, and it gives people an identity. And once.

You'Re. Yeah, yeah, you remove an identity from someone

then it's. I mean they're grasping at straws. You see people in

this book as they're this.

There's a few characters who. They start to lose it.

They're talking to themselves, they're talking to. And it's because

the reality is not necessarily

linked to any. Any foundational. And this is where the

spirituality comes. And this is where. That's why I brought up

the Buddhists and going to. Because if Buddhists met that first group

of Martians and it was because

they seem for all intents and purposes like almost like a wealthy. And the great

ones, the spear orbs and that it seems

like they were way more willing to kind of accept people

in. And the reason that they were shape shifting and.

And doing that stuff was to help bring

light and to the dysfunction of

the society they were leaving and recreating on another planet. Although

the Martians.

Well, it's interesting that you. It's interesting that you bring up the Buddhist because you

just clicked over something in my head. So Bradbury

is writing these stories and projecting forward into the future in the 40s and the

50s. Right. And even into the 60s. And that is during a

time of particular. Particularly Post World War II

is a time of particular cultural and social

conformity that occurred at a

level that both the naive of our time who would like to

return to that era misunderstand as

well, as the rebellious of our time, who are consistently

fighting against that error in their heads, also misunderstand.

Right. So they both miss both the rebellious and the naive miss this.

And Bradbury, along with many other writers, was. Was writing in

opposition to this conformity which this

cultural suffocation came from, in

their opinion. And by the way, this is not just Bradbury. Heinlein was writing in

this MO Too, came from the

presence of American evangelical Christianity,

the consistent boogeyman underneath everybody's bed.

And the assumption, of course, that Bradbury is

writing with is that American astronauts

or settlers going to Mars will have a default of

evangelical Christianity inside of them.

And, and I want to laugh because

as I said on the Stranger in a Strange Land episode,

the American evangelicals have lost the argument.

They're not a cultural power in America. It only took 80 years.

It took 80 years of revolution and rebellion and banging on them, calling

out hypocrisy. And sure, you could talk about regions in the country

maybe, and sure, you can make whatever allusions you want to make to

political parties and whoever's in the White House, but the

fact of the matter is that with the death of the Moral Majority at the

end of the 90s, we have now been 25 years away

from Christianity having any cultural weight in the

United States. So we are far more likely to

send to Mars a

person who has the. The. The

positioning of a secular

atheist Darwinist as their default

setting without even thinking about it. Then we do a

person who has a default setting of American fundamentalist

evangelical Christianity. That's number one. Number two in

Stranger in a Strange Land, by the way, Heinlein took on this directly.

He goes, of course, directly after all this with the foster rights and all that.

But it's interesting. He picked the Muslim,

curiously enough, and we talked a lot about this on that episode, so I don't

want to revisit that. But he picked the Muslim as a person who was willing

to renounce Islam and go join the man from Mars in

his discipline. Right? Except the reality

is, again, 80 years down the road.

That ain't anyone.

That's not what's going on. And that's not. I mean, look,

hey, look, you know what? Maybe I missed it, but the

last imam I heard from in, in

the Netherlands and in London was cocking and crowing

about how they're going to be having the call to

prayer all over Europe in the next 10 years.

And, like, everybody's just going to bend the knee from

England all the way. All the way, you know, east to Germany.

So. You bring up

Buddhism. That's interesting. I don't think the Germans

are gonna. Well, they're. There's

a lot of. There's a lot of cultural. There's a. So. So what. What you

are seeing what is happening at a. At a larger geopolitical level.

And I don't want to go too deep into this because there's a part of

the book I really want to get to before we close our. Our conversation today.

At a larger geopolitical level. What you see happening with.

Particularly with migration and things like that that are happening around the world in

opposition to migration is you are seeing an equal and

opposite reaction to the position of political

elites who believe that one human being is just as good as

another human being in one place or another. It doesn't matter.

And the people are pushing back on this, saying, no, no, no, no, no, no,

no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I come from a particular

place. To your point about human arrogance, I come from a particular place that has

particular identity with particular traditions, particular duh, duh, duh. And if you try to

erode that from me, I'm going to say no.

Whether that's good or bad, we can argue that we could. That's probably a discussion

worth having. But that's the grounding force. That's the foundation,

right? That's the grounding force. Correct? Right. The grounding force for a

Martian, to your point, and Bradbury got this, the grounding force

for the Martian is something totally different, just like the grounding force for a

Venusian or the grounding force for a Jupiterian or the grounding

force for a Saturnian. Right. I'm more curious

about who's in my neighborhood than I am

about who's on, like, dark matter star number 99

somewhere. Because those people in my neighborhood, I don't

know their grounding. I don't know what the grounding is of people on Mars. I

don't know what the grounding is of people on Saturn or on Jupiter. I don't

know what the grounding is of whatever spiritual entities may be

floating around Neptune. Right. Like,

I don't know what their spiritual grounding is. I don't know what their physical grounding.

I don't know if they have any. I don't even know if I can communicate

with them in a meaningful way. And

so all of this comes in, and I agree that

if we'd sent Buddhists, if

Bradbury had sent Buddhists to Mars, maybe the outcome would

have been different. Or maybe the human grounding

that appears different to us and all these identities isn't really that

different at all. And maybe that's part of what Bradbury is getting to. I don't

know. Okay. Yeah. No, I mean that. It's. I was

watching an interview the other day and, and you know, it's, it's,

you know the argument of, like, it's, it's the, it's all the same

God. Right? Yeah. Okay. It's just, you know, it's not, it's. It

ain't me. Right? You ain't God. I'm not God. Like

there's something. And, and that's it. And, and,

and grocking that point

to not to Highland is.

That's a wonderful place to meet is like, I, I believe in a

spiritual entity. I believe in a higher power that is not me.

And instead of saying, well,

you don't work on Sunday,

I don't work on. Or I don't work on Saturday, you don't work on Sunday,

like that doesn't become a point of

contention. It's just a, A little matter

of shift in perspective or the details a little bit different.

And if it was sort of opened up a little more and that

was the start of the conversation, I don't think the differences would be so

harmful. Right, right. Or so, or perhaps even maybe so

stark. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

So there is a piece in here that I want to, I want to get

your, your thoughts on. So. Way in the middle of the air.

So in my edition, it's June 2003.

And this is the, this is the, this is the story

of. Well, it's a story of an exodus such as it were

speaking about. Leaving.

Yeah, go ahead. So the thing that I, I,

I didn't share. So

a few years ago, the, you know, the, the global warming, blah, blah.

I started to think, wait a minute.

Humans. Or I'm gonna say because humans. Because we could be, we could be

relatives of. Who knows? Okay.

Yeah. So whatever that was,

let's just say here. So humans did to Venus

what we're doing to the Earth now.

And maybe before the Earth

was terraformed and water and had an atmosphere, the

Venusians went to Mars.

Oh, yes, I've heard this before. Yes. And so. And then you

burn Mars out and then Earth is ready and we're.

Well, and in that case, I mean, I've, I have heard that before. You're not

the first person I've heard that from. And in that case, I always say, well,

we better get to Step it on Jupiter, then,

like, we better get. We forget Mars. Like that. That's. Please, like.

And that's where. Like, what is it? It's not 2001. 2000. Is

it 2010? It's 2010 where he winds up on

Jupiter, right? I think it's 2010.

It's one of those 2001 Space Odyssey sequel

books that Arthur C. Clarke wrote. It's either 2010 or

2040 where he winds up on Jupiter or they go

to the outer planets or something. Because the

original Dave with the monolith somehow

goes inside the monolith. I might be confusing the Kubrick movie with the book. I

might be. I might be merging those two things in my head. But I know

at some point Arthur C. Clarke had that

had humans voyaging to Jupiter

and either planning to put a probe on

Jupiter to terraform the planet or

trying to terraform one of the moons. Can't remember.

But it'll come back to me. We'll be on Europa in no time. Yeah, yeah,

yeah. It'll all work out. Or IO maybe. I hear that's a volcanic

planet. It might be warm enough for life. Might actually be water underneath

there. So, yeah. So I want to pick this up

again as we round the corner towards the end of our conversation today. This is

from way in the middle of the air, a story that is. That, for me,

is quite unique in science fiction. I've

read a fair bit of science fiction. I've watched a fair bit of science

fiction. And science fiction always struggles, with the exception of Star Trek, that's the

outlier, tends to struggle with, well,

race. Also class.

But primarily in an American context. Most American

science fiction tends to struggle with race. What are all

these racial groups going to do? How are they going to engage in the technology?

And Bradbury came up with a clever conclusion. And this was part of it.

So let me read. Let me just read a few pieces of this.

Far up the street, the levee seemed to have broken. The black warm waters

descended and engulfed the town. Between the blazing white banks of the town

stores, among the tree silences, a black tide flowed like

a kind of summer molasses. It poured turgidly forth upon the cinnamon dusty

road. It surged slow, slow. And it was men and women and horses

and barking dogs and it was little boys and girls. And from the

mouths of the people partaking of this tide came the sound of a river, a

summer day river going somewhere, murmuring and irrevocable. And in

that slow, steady channel of darkness that cut across the white glare of day were

touches of alert white, the eyes, the ivory eyes staring

ahead, glancing aside as the river, the long and endless river, took itself

from old channels into a new one for

various and uncountable tributaries and creeks and brooks of color and motion. The parts of

this river had joined, becoming one mother current and flowed on and

brimming the swell where things carried by the river, grandfather

clocks chiming, kitchen clocks ticking, caged heads screaming, babies

wailing and swimming among the thickened eddies where mules and cats

and sudden excursions of burst mattress springs floating by,

insane hair stuffing sticking out and boxes and crates and pictures of dark

grandfathers in oak frames, the river flowing on,

flowing it on, while the men sat like nervous hounds on the hardware porch,

too late to mend the levee, their hands empty.

Samuel T.S. wouldn't believe it. Why the hell where'd they get the transportation?

How they going to get to Mars? Rockets, said

Grandpa Quartermain. All the damn fool things.

Where'd they get rockets? Saved their money and built them.

I never heard about it. Seems these kept it a secret.

Worked on the rockets all themselves. I don't know where. In Africa, maybe?

Could they do that? Demanded Samuel T. Pacing about the porch.

Ain't there a law? It ain't as if they're declaring war,

grandpa declared quietly.

This is one of the more stunning stories in the history of science fiction.

It's. It's subtle. It's very

subtle. Yeah, even though it's, it's, it's, it seems kind of like,

like really obvious. But there's so many subtleties

within that little bit that you read.

It is. And then, you know, you go into the the one of the

men having an objection, you know, the objection of the overseer over the

slave realizing that the slaves could just leave, but not just leave and go to

the well, as Chris Rock might joke. But leave the and not

just leave the plantation and go someplace else on the same continent. No, no, no,

no no. Not just that. No, no no no. The the

slave is leaving the planet. The the

imagery that came into my head because I'm currently

in my Bible in a year reading. I'm currently, for better or

worse, trapped in the book of Ezekiel

in the Old Testament. This will be my third or fourth time

through the Bible in a year. I recommend everybody do it. Even if

you don't believe, just get the book under your belt. It's good to get the

book under your belt. But. But I'm reminded of

the Exodus, how the Exodus is described in the Old Testament,

right, where there's a great line in the

Exodus where basically the Egyptians

throw gold and jewels and baubles

and stuff at the, at the, at the Jewish, the Israelite slaves

as they literally walk out of town. And of course,

you know, just as in previous

tales referencing other things.

The. Allusions in this story are to the

exodus of the Jewish people from, from

Egypt. And Bradbury would have known that his audience would have recognized those

illusions or would have, or would have at least caught on to them because we

had a more bibly literate country at that time. Whether they, whether people

believed in it or not is a whole different thing altogether. But they, they were

biblically literate. They knew the stories. Right. As an

underpinning to make references to other things. Okay, well,

it's interesting to note that he combines this

together with his thoughts on

segregation, on oppression, on

slavery, on black and white relations.

And of course the story ends with

the rocket closing up and everybody, all the black people

just taking off and leaving.

And of course for me, the

irony in this story is Bradbury doesn't write a follow up to it. As a

matter of fact, in most of the other stories that follow on in the novel,

he doesn't even make a reference to it. Yeah, yeah, it's gone.

It's gone. It's completely gone. Well,

I mean, is that, I mean, is there, I mean the,

the like Moses was, it was a call in. Oh,

he was. And

so when you said, you know, you, you know, you personally would have stayed if

you were. Oh yeah, there. So you're right, he doesn't

write another thing. So you don't know. There could, there could have been a calling

to go back to, to go back to Earth for some,

you know, particular. Right,

but like why would you. Well, why. And I give it.

Even if. Let's, let's, let's be. Remember I said the whole thing about Quantum leap,

right? 20 years one way, 20 years the other. Okay, so I

was born

15 years. Year. No, 10 years.

10 years. I was born 10 years after the height of the civil rights movement.

10 years after

that is enough time with enough things having changed to

where now that was when I was born. To where, When I came of

age. Right. Or came into my manhood 10 years after.

20 years after that I was there. Right,

exactly. The, the, the,

the results of the civil rights movement

had, had flowed down to me.

Right. But the, and we explore this

sometimes when we, when we read books during Black History Month.

The, the, the, the I can appreciate the

energy of the folks who came before. But I got bigger

problems right now, right? I got to deal with. I don't have Eldridge Cleaver

problems, let's put it that way. Right. I got different kinds of problems, right?

And if I'm on Mars and my, my mother or my

father left Earth 20 years ago.

What are the. What's. Yeah, what's. What's that going to look like? What's that going

to look like? And of course, Bradbury is. Bradbury is mute on this and again,

curiously mute because, like, he references. So remember

the story of the man who, after the first exodus away from Earth,

he finds the one telephone that works on Mars

and he answers it. And then he goes and meets the woman.

Genevieve. Genevieve, right. It turns out Genevieve is a mess.

He gets in his car and drives. As fast

as he can. He drives 10,000 miles away.

And then later on, later on he is referenced in a

story where

like a third expedition comes to Mars and

they, they find him and he's. He's on a rocking chair in the middle of

a long abandoned superhighway. And they ask him, do you want to be picked up

and taken to the other side of the planet? And he goes, nope, I'm

fine.

Oh, by the way, I cracked up. I did. I cracked up. I.

And, and again, Bradbury is visiting something. He's visiting a

theme about male and female relationships, right? Even on

a dead planet that is absolutely, positively

abandoned. Even

if you're the last woman on Earth. I wouldn't. Or

a Mars. The last one on Mars. I would not entertain saying the idea

of. Yeah, that's. That's pretty powerful, man.

That's. That's pretty powerful. I gotta admit, I did. I cracked up

laughing. I did. I cracked him laughing.

Because it's so. It'S so raw to the truth

of interpersonal, you know, relations

between men and women. And then he

goes raw to the truth on the exodus part, right.

Of interpersonal relationships between the races, particularly

in a, in a, in a, in a historical time. That's

a historical snapshot. But then he

has no follow up to that. And I don't know why. I would love to

ask him. I would have loved to have asked him this, you know, or

maybe he did try to revisit it, but he couldn't find another way in. I

did read that when he wrote that short story, he had seen an

article about something that had happened in the segregated south that, like,

drove him crazy. And he sort of wrote it in, like,

one fell swoop and got it out and then it appeared in this

collection or he included it in this collection as part of this

fix up novel. And maybe he never really, to

your point about Stephen King earlier, maybe he was never able to really revisit that

emotional, that emotional push again. Maybe it was just a

one shot deal, I don't know. And, and you

have no idea how it could have like you were talking about, affect him emotionally,

right? It could, I mean it could have been so

devastating on some level that you know what? I don't want to, I don't want

to, I don't want to go into that place again because of how it

affected other areas of my life. Because it's, it's such, it can be such a

mirror. Right. And I mean writers generally speaking are

kind of, you know, sensitive people and

I don't know, there's, there's a lot of variables that could have been in play.

Yep. Yep. All right, well, we gotta, we've talked for

a little while. We gotta, we gotta wrap up here. I've got other things I've

got to do. You've got other things you've got to do? I gotta go, I

gotta go coach some people and teach them how to do

stuff. So

I think that. Well, no, I'm gonna let, gonna let you,

let you sort of round this out a little bit. So what, what should we

take from the Marsha. What should leaders take from the Marshall Chronicles? So I, I,

what's the point of this book? I, I look at the themes of

like I said, a lot of sub sub, but

guilt, shame, justification.

And also there's an element of when the hits the

fan, people expect, expected to be saved

and not taking into consideration that maybe they shouldn't be

saved. Maybe they've acted

so deplorably that they've kind

of like spent their, you know, pay it forward or

they spent their, you know, them being saved

and to the just like was it the

grip, the, the who's sitting in a rocking chair smoking

cigar. Oh yeah. You know what man? This is, this is maybe this is

it. And, and it's, it's wonderful that

although he broke from reality is able to kind of

like have some self reflection and say,

you know what, I can accept this. Yeah.

Yeah. I think for leaders as we round the corner

today. First off, I want to thank Brian

for coming on the show. Always a great time, always good seeing you, always good

hearing from you. I think for leaders,

a couple of different things. One, leaders have to have a robust

cultural or social vision for whatever they want their

organizations to be. I think one of the reasons why we haven't gone to Mars

the other way, we need someone as crazy or as

a person who runs the algorithm, to Ryan's point, all the way to the end,

as Elon, is because we do lack, socially and

culturally a robust vision for what space travel would look like.

We don't lack a robust imagination of what it could be,

but we do lack a vision of what we are capable of.

And this lack of vision exists because while the technological problems could be

solved, the application of scientific principles that science has

absolutely nothing to say about, the spiritual

problems and about how to solve those,

sure, science can put the Buddhists on the rocket and

science can bring them back, maybe. But science

can't tell the Buddhists what to do when they get there.

And all the training in the world won't help them. They need a vision.

They need an idea. They also need something that I think

we are finally wrapping our arms around culturally in America,

that we're missing. We. We need cultural confidence.

And that confidence and that meaning, for better or worse, emanates

from our leaders. I think accountability. And

accountability. Yes, that also emanates from our leaders. Yeah.

And. And if we don't believe that we're capable or accountable as

humans of executing exploration with wisdom, then we've

only digested negative lessons from our history of exploration,

and we have cavalierly dismissed and discarded all the positive ones.

Look, say what you want about how the Europeans treated

the native tribes in Manhattan. Without

that happening the way that it happened, I wouldn't be sitting here having this

conversation with you today. I just wouldn't. Maybe

it might have shown up in a different kind of way, but more likely than

not, probably wouldn't have shown up at all.

Leaders provide cultural and social vision for the future, both at

a family level, at a neighborhood level, but also at an organizational level. But

they can only provide such vision if they cut away the anchor of ironic

distance and carefully cultivated cynicism wrapped around

their actions and given permission to

them to have by recent history.

We got to cut away those things. We got to start caring. And I think

that that's at the core of the Martian Chronicles

by Ray Bradbury. I want to thank Ryan

Stout once again for coming on our show today. Thank you, Jason

Sorrells. Thank you, Ray Bradbury. Thank you,

Martians. And with that, well, we're out.

Have a beautiful evening. Right.