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.