my name is Jesan Sorrells and this is the
Leadership Lessons from from the Great Books podcast,
episode number 165.
So we are wrapping up our time with
science fiction books. We started off our
journey and it's been a long summer journey. We're now into the
late summer of 2025. But we began with
Philip K. Dick's book Do Androids Dream of Electric
Sheep. We wandered all the way through Stranger in a Strange Land and
the Martian Chronicles. And now we have arrived at the
grandfather of them all. The book that we
are going to cover today is one
of those books that is so much a part of the general
fabric of our lives when we think of,
well, when we think of temporality, when we think of space, when we think of
science fiction, that we tend to not remember
that this book actually came from somewhere.
It didn't just sort of show up as the background
fabric sui generis.
The book we're covering today is one of those rare science fiction novels that has
influenced actual science itself
and how we tend to think about various
physics based problems in a deeply physical world.
Now, I'm about to say something here and I want you to follow the bouncing
ball, Dr. Emmett Brown's assertions to the contrary.
According to physicists, a person cannot travel
backwards in time to quote, unquote, correct past mistakes,
past injustices, or even past traumas. You also
can't at least at this point in human history, just head
on down to the local corporate owned drugstore and buy
some plutonium. You
still even now have to rip it off.
The idea of returning to a time in the past that was better than today
via technology and science, rather than be a faulty memory or
a pastiche of overwrought nostalgia and vague happy
feelings, is a quirk unique to human beings.
Part of that quirk has to do with conscious understanding of time, temporality, and
of course, birth and death.
Today, on this episode of the podcast, we will rescue from the obscure
past and from when the deep magic of science fiction
itself was originally laid. Themes or leaders
from a book that is buried deeply,
whose themes are buried deeply, even whose, even whose
dramatic arc is buried deeply in our collective Western,
scientific, materialistic, cultural memory. Today
we will be discussing the
Time Machine. There we go. Got it on camera
by H.G. wells
leaders after the show today. I do have a few other things
going on, but I am headed out of town to appropriate some
plutonium from some Ukrainian nationalists as payment in
exchange for giving them a shoddy bomb casing
full of used pinball machine parts. So I think that
should work out really well. I don't think I'll have any problem putting that in
my flux capacitor in my DeLorean, brought to you by
Tesla that's parked out back.
And today, the person who's going to join me on my journey
before I go on my other journey
is a person who has been on our show
before, our co host rejoining us from episode number
143, Kristen B. Mort.
How are you doing, Kristin? How's it going today? Doing well.
Glad to be here. I'm very excited. Are you? I'm always
excited to be here. I love this podcast so much. Yeah,
so, so, yeah, I'm, I am. I do need to.
You need to make some preparations because time travel is a,
it's a testy thing. You know, you really. And you want to time travel in
style. You don't want to go back in like
an ugly machine or a box car or a rail car
or police box. I don't know. That's pretty stylish.
I don't know. That is pretty stylish. You do want to travel with some style.
As Dr. Emmett Brown said, as he told Marty McFly once
at the Pinewoods Mall at 3 o' clock in the morning
on October 12th, maybe it was October 15th, 1985.
So we're going to open with just a couple of
pages from the Time Machine just to sort of set where we're
going. And then we're going to ask Kristen her thoughts on this
book on some of the themes for leaders and sort of lay the
foundation for where we're going to be going today in our show. So,
oh, by the way, we will be reading directly from the Time Machine. One of
the great things about this book is that it was published in, originally published, I
believe it was 1895. And
it is open source, which means it is in the public domain because we
can read freely from it. Breathe
free the air. All right,
so I'm going to pick up with the time traveler telling his story,
his incredulous story to, to some folks in,
in 1890s London. And, and
this is picking up from chapter 10, When Night Came. And
I quote, looking at these stars suddenly dwarfed my own
troubles and all the gravities of terrestrial life. I thought
of their unfathomable distance and the slow, inevitable drift of their
movements out of the unknown. Past into the unknown future.
I thought of the great precessional cycle that the pole of the earth
describes. Only 40 times had that silent
revolution occurred during all the years that I had traversed. And during these few
revolutions all the activity, all the traditions, the complex organizations,
the nations, languages, literatures, aspirations, even the mere memory
of man as I knew him had been swept out of existence.
Instead were these frail creatures who had forgotten their high
ancestry and and the white things of which I went in
terror. Then I thought of the great fear that was
between the two species. And for the first time with a sudden shiver came
a clear knowledge of what the meat I had seen might
be. Yet it was too horrible. I
looked at little Weena sleeping beside me, her face white and star like under the
stars, and forthwith dismissed the thought.
Through that long night I held my mind off the Morlocks as well as I
could and whiled away the time by trying to fancy I could find signs
of old constellations in the new confusion. The sky kept very
clear except for hazy cloud or so. No doubt I dozed at times.
Then as my vigil wore on, came
a faintness in the eastward sky like the reflection of some colorless fire.
And the old moon rose thin and peaked and white.
And close behind it, overtaking it and overflowing at the dawn, came pale at first
and then growing pink and warm. No Morlocks had approached us. Indeed I had seen
none upon the hill that night. And in the confidence of renewed day it
almost seemed to me that my fear had been unreasonable. I stood up and found
my foot with the loose heel swollen at the ankle and painful under the heel.
So I sat down again, took off my shoes and flung them away.
I awakened Weena and we went down to the wood, now green and pleasant
instead of black and forbidding. We found some fruit wherewith to break our fast.
We soon met others of the dainty ones, laughing and
dancing in the sunlight as though there was no such thing in nature as
the night. And then I thought once more of the meat I had
seen. I felt assured now of what it was. And from the bottom of my
heart I pitied this last feeble rill, the great flood of humanity.
Clearly, at some time in the long ago of human decay the Morlocks food had
run short. Possibly they had lived on rats and such like
vermin. Even now man is far less discriminating
and exclusive in his food than he was. Far less than any monkey.
His prejudice against human flesh is no deep seated instinct. And so these
inhuman sons of Men. I tried to look at the thing in a
scientific spirit. After all, they were less human and more remote
than our cannibal ancestors of 3 or 4,000 years ago. And the
intelligence that would have made this state of things a torment had gone. Why should
I trouble myself? These Eloi were mere
fatted cattle which the Antlight warlocks preserved
and preyed upon, probably saw to the breeding of.
And there was Lena dancing
at my side.
I shouldn't laugh, but I'm. I chuckle because where
we're going to go today with this, but, Kristen, let's start off with
Mr. Wells and the Time Machine. What do you know about this book and
what, what encouraged you to read it? Upon my sending
you the list of books, why did you pick this one as one that you
wanted to talk about on our show today? Honestly,
because I wanted the. The a reason to read
it. It's one of those, like, kind of like what you were saying. It's the.
One of the foundational science, science, sci fi
books. And I knew very, very little
about it. About it. And I actually told my husband, I was like, hey, I'm
reading the Time Machine to discuss with Hayon on his,
on his podcast. He was like, oh yeah, HD Wells. And I was like, okay.
So you know, about
exactly as much as I read sci fi, you know, this one just had completely
escaped my, my notice in my readership. So I saw it not on the
list, and I was like, well, obviously, obviously to
read that. And what I didn't know is, you know, I played Dungeons and
Dragons and there's a species in that game called the
Morlocks. And so I saw the Morlocks pop and was
like, no way. That is like. So that's one of those things
that you, as I aspire to as a writer, is to
write something that becomes so pervasive in the
vernacular that it just becomes, this
is just a thing now. So it just. Yeah,
it's really cool. Well, and as a writer, when you're looking at H.G. wells
writing. So let's talk about the writing a little bit of, of the, of the
time machine. So H.G. wells was a
utopian socialist cultural writer and critic.
He was an accomplished novelist. He wrote many novels,
many stories that would still reference today, the Invisible man
among them, of course, the Time Machine and a few others.
He is credited with giving an intellectual
pastiche to the, to the, to
the genre of science fiction, which at the time
in the 1890s and in the early 20th century
was either considered to be kid stuff we talked a little bit about this on
the Martian Chronicles episode that we did when we took a look at Ray Bradbury's
work. And when we talk about Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert
Heinlein, right, Where Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke
and Isaac Asimov are considered to be the deans of science fiction, you know, the
ones who raised it from being low stuff to being high stuff. But H.G.
wells was the grandfather of them all. Without Wells, they wouldn't have
had, I think, a hope in,
well, a hope in hell and Wells who believe in hell, so that's fine,
but a hope in that place of raising,
of raising the writing in, in such a genre
to a particular level. So as a writer, what do you think of the
writing of this in this novel?
I think, I think it's interesting.
I think it's fun. I think. And I'm sure he did
not approach it that way. It's like, this is very serious,
but. And I can also definitely see how,
you know, from it sprang the rest of
our, especially our time travel thought experiments
that we like to consider and tell stories of.
But. Well, one of the first things I notice is I, you know, I'm writing
in third person and this
switches, like it goes from. I think, no, it's just
in first person the entire time. And it's like, okay, I'm writing
this down and then this is verbatim what he said. And
so that was really interesting because there's not a lot of first
person published today, but
I still found it very effective, not very jarring.
And it was, yeah, it was a fun read. Why do you
think that is? Is that because we're all doing the first person narrative thing on
social media with the cameras in our faces now, the tiktoks and the
twee or. And then like, well, is it, is it because,
you know, our first person narratives have switched to mediums and so books are no
longer the place for that, or is it because we've just run out
of like, maybe those MFA programs and those writer
retreats aren't actually training people to write? I don't know. No,
it's. I mean, it probably is. I feel like a lot of people, the teacher
that I was listening to when I started my book, he,
he was fairly, he was fairly even handed
with the different perspectives and said, choose whichever one works best
for your story. And I felt that first person was extremely
effective for this particular story. But at the same time,
he doesn't teach at university and
he tends to teach in a Very unorthodox way. So I
wouldn't be surprised at all if universities are like third person.
This is the one that sells. Write in third person. You can only write in
third person past, actually. And the reason I say
mostly objective is because this, this particular teacher really
hated on third person present, which is what I'm writing in, so.
Third person present. Yeah, it's every. It only works in ya. And I'm
like, okay, dude, well, and that's later.
Well, and that's. And that's, I think, because I, you know, I don't know why
you said this is what sells. And I think at a literary
level, you're. You're correct. Like, that's what the
agents can push, and that's what the publishers can sort of
package and market and scale and
guarantee, or at least make the assumption of a guarantee
that you're going to sell 10,000 copies to Barnes and Noble somewhere,
which is all you need, by the way, kids, to be on the New York
times bestseller list. 10,000 copies, that's
it. And that sounds like a huge number when you sold zero.
But you realize after you've written and published a few books, that actually is not
that big a number. And, and so it's kind of interesting to see who
winds up on the, on the, on the New York Times bestseller list.
Anyway, as you already mentioned, as Kristen already
mentioned, the work is generally credited. The Time machine is generally credited
with the popularization of the concept of time travel. And
Wells did coin that term time machine, which is
almost crazy to me, universally. I know. Yeah. That's. Which
again, it doesn't surprise me. So. So
in thinking about the literary life of H.G. wells. Right. The time which he wrote.
So he was writing during the second generation after
Darwin. So. So Darwin's, you know, theory
of evolution came. Was published. Gosh. I believe it was in the
1840s or 1850s.
Origin of the Species. You can, we can check on that on the, on the
interwebs. Kristin's going to go ahead and look that up. But I believe that
Origin of the species was the 13. It was the 30s or the 40s.
And so 1859. There we go. Okay, so 1860s.
Okay, so Wells is coming along and
is writing during a time when the
meteor came out of the sky, such as it were, of Darwin.
And people were trying to figure out in that second
generation after his writing sort of hit what
the new world quote, unquote, was going to look like.
Welles was also writing as an Englishman
in London. He was writing underneath the shadow of Karl
Marx. So Marxist communism was
also thought of as a. As a new way of creating a new
man. And so Wells was the guy who sort of merged these two
ideas together and not only leveraged his, not what
we would call these days, nonfiction works, his nonfiction writing, his nonfiction
novels to push ideas. He was a socialist,
utopian, he believed in eugenics. People don't know a whole lot about that, about. He
was part of the Fabian Society, which at the root of the Fabian Society
was we will, we will. We will take Darwin's
ideas around survival of the fittest
and we will apply it to, well, specifically to racial
groups and peoples. And he was an old colonialist
because at the time in the 1890s, London
was seated at the height of the English colonial
Victorian world. The sun never set on the English
empire. So Wells was raised in a culture where right
to rule was thought of as merely fait
accompli. And you comply, you combine that
with ideas around
the imperfection of species and the ideas of evolution taken
to their logical end. And then of course, we're going to talk a little bit
about this later on because this also does pop up in the time machine, this
idea of utopian schemes where men all
share everything and everything is beautiful and we're all, you know,
eating fruit off of trees, lazily falling into our mouths, and only
have to be worried about the propagation of the species, which he's going to talk
about here in a little bit. He was writing in that, in
that time. Now, with that being said, Dostoyevsky was
also writing in that time and Dostoevsky took a much more cynical view.
What human being I know. Well, you know,
so it's interesting.
And the time machine strikes you, or at least it did it strike me or
struck me as the beginning of this idea of what's called a fix
up novel. So when we talk about Martian Chronicles, Ray
Bradbury's Martian Chronicles is a fix up novel. So it's a collection of essays
or a collection of short stories together that run on a particular theme but
aren't linked through transitions from one story to the next. Time
Machine was originally published. I found this out through my Wikipedia research,
was published in response to a request by W.E. henley, the editor
of the national observer. And
Wells had written something called the. A short story called the Chronic
Argonauts. And so Henley challenged him
to develop that story or rewrite that series of
stories into a series of loosely connected and fictionalized
essays. And they were anonymously published in the National observer
from March 17 to June
23, 1894. Now, with all that being
said, the Time Machine has been adapted into two feature films of the
same name, as well as two television shows. And many, many,
many, many, many comic book adaptations of the Time
Machine do exist. It has also indirectly inspired many
more works of fiction and many, many, many, many, many,
many media productions. Matter of fact, the whole
conceit underneath, Back to the Future, which is my. The best
time travel movie ever created by human beings,
full of paradoxes and all, was inspired by
the time machine, of course. Just. I mean, if
he coined the. This is. This is what's kind of insane to kind of think
about. If he coined the term time machine,
then kind of anything that has
time travel in it with a machine
wouldn't exist without this book. It's kind of like trying to think of our
fantasy that the fantasy scene without Tolkien you can't,
right? You can't. Like fantasy doesn't exist. Well,
and think about. So in its current form, we did a
mashup episode recently where we talked about the links between
Tolkien, Pink Floyd and
one other area, I can't remember the other one that we linked together with Neil
Kalachovsky, who's a huge fan of Tolkien.
Huge fan. And I asked him a question that I'm going to ask you, which
is not in our questions for today, but I'm going to ask you. So this
is something that occurred to me when you talk about Time Machine. So
I asked him, could a book like Lord of the Rings, because series like Lord
of the Rings be written in the
next 50 years? Could we write something that
was that out of the west, out of the Western culture, that was
that powerful and that impactful? Because they'll still be
reading. We'll still be reading Tolkien at the end of this century, which is only
75 years away, by the way, but we'll still be reading Tolkien.
Could something like that be written
without AI help by a human being
in the next 75 years that will have impact for another hundred years hence
on the other side of the 22nd century? And
Neil said, I'll give you his answer before you answer this question about time
machine. Neil said, no, I don't think we can do it. He
said, I think that Tolkien was the concentration of
all of the last 2000 years of Western culture and
2000 years of British culture into one like human being.
And I wonder. Depth of knowledge is insane, right? So
could. Could we do something in the face of science fiction? So that's
fantasy, right? So in the space of Science fiction if we're bifurcating these two because
most people slap them together in their heads and move along. But in the space
of science fiction, could we get
an H.G. wells in the next 75 years?
I, I, I think so, yes. Because I feel like my brain is full
of references. Like it's not a book, but even like Star
Trek. You go back and you watch the old Star Trek shows and they're using
touch pads and they're using things and you look at, you look at our technology
today, you'll be like, oh, that's, we had that,
we, somebody, somebody thought about that. And then some
engineer went, oh, I bet we could make that now, right?
So I, I think people will just keep imagining technology and that's why
it's so funny. I was talk, talking to one of my best friends about this,
about, you know, how as, as we conceive of it
now, teleportation is impossible. And, and then the way we think
about breaking it's because we have to break down the person and break down the
soul and you can't break down the blah, blah, blah, blah.
Um, and I think I, my reference point is
always like, Ford, who was telling his very,
very intelligent engineers to do the
impossible and create this like single
block engine or whatever, it technically was, right? He's like,
I don't care that you're telling me it's impossible, do it anyway. And they
would go try and they'd be like, no, but seriously dude, it's impossible.
You'd be like, I don't care, do it anyway. We're just going to keep
doing that. So, and then I think what,
what inspires that is
creatives imagining the impossible first
and being like, wouldn't it be cool if this was a thing? And
then eventually the engineers are like, oh, you know what? I think
science has caught up to their imagination and we can make it.
And so that's not quite the answer to your question, but in that
regard, I think humans are just going to keep doing, we're just going to keep
imagining more and more and more wild things. So
I think so I think it's. Interesting you bring up Star Trek
because the reason why, and we've had conversations
on this show before about sort of the challenges and the
problems in current popular culture, entertainment, you know,
around town of Monte Cristo and other things that we talked about.
And I think the big challenge, and I see this with Star Trek,
this is why I just want to scream at Paramount, just end it, put it
in mothballs for 75 years. Just end it. Just kill
it. It's done. Same thing with. I'm looking at you. Disney, too. Star wars put
it in mothballs for 75 years. Just mothball it. Like, we're done, right?
Yeah, yeah. Put it in a vault. Be done. It's okay.
It's fine. I think. I don't know. Supposedly,
Marvel is making a comeback. So if Marvel can make a comeback, maybe Star wars,
maybe. Okay, so Marvel is in a different spot
because I think. Because Marvel.
Stan Lee created something to his credit,
and Jack Kirby and John Buscema
and all of those guys. They created
Steve Ditko, who always gets left out of the conversation
because he was a weirdo libertarian and did, like, three things and then left. He
couldn't. He couldn't play nice with everybody else. And that's okay. He.
He wasn't. He wasn't supposed to. And Joe. Well,
they were creating something that.
In a medium that is so malleable
that it just shifts and changes over time. Like, we'll always have comics with us
as a medium, which means we'll always have Marvel with us. You
might have called Marvel, but we'll always have Marvel with us as a medium over
there somewhere. And it will always be a vein that can be tapped into. No
matter how many times you decide you're going to reboot Avengers with Robert Downey Jr.
Before he croaks off. Okay, fine.
Like, whatever. Yes, I. I'm a Gen Xer. I said what I said.
Y' all come for me later.
Now, with that being said, I
think Star Trek and Star wars
also suffers from this, but Star Trek specifically. This is my bugaboo with
Star Trek. Star Trek only operates. And by the way, this goes back to the
time machine. So H.G. wells had a
conception of the future based on Marxism, communism,
Darwinian utopianism and Darwinian evolution, social
norming. Right. He actually believed he was part of the generation where all
those ideas were new and he didn't see any of the downsides. The
man went to Stalinist Russia and met with Stalin and thought Stalin was
fine. He's like, I just needs to be tweaked a little bit
here and there. He's fine. He didn't know all the things
we know post World War II. He doesn't have all
that history. So I said this on an episode where we're talking about World
War I with Libby Unger. Right. Talk about Parade's End.
Right. Great book. Right. But
I have empathy for any writer who was writing before 1940,
because they didn't know they were writing in the cultural context
of the time they were in. And they didn't know any of the horrors that
were about to unfold on the back end of the century. They had no clue.
Right. Or maybe they had some clue that they misread the tea leaves because they
just thought, ah, Stalin, you could tweak him. Ah, Hitler. You could do a deal
with that guy. Okay, okay, thanks, Joe Kennedy. Whatever,
whatever. It's fine. I made this point on. I
made this point on the podcast Before 1933, Hitler,
yes, we know now in 2025, he was a monster.
In 1933, they did not know he was a monster. Right,
okay, so, like, we got to give those people back there a break.
Well, I transpose that to Wells, right? Wells imagined a
future that was better with all these ideologies.
And we're about to read this little section here on the Time Machine that proves
my point. And he projected that future forward.
Star Trek now. Now, here's my beef with Star Trek. Star
Trek now proposes a future
based on existential dread and nihilistic
cynicism and a perception of sincerity as
naivete. Because in our current era,
the people who are writing Star Trek don't believe in the future.
They believe in Google Translate. They believe
in AI. They believe in all but the cultural things
underneath that. Wells. Every science fiction writer struggles with the
cultural stuff, except Wells started with the cultural stuff and then
went to the technology. Post World War II, we see this
with Heinlein, Philip K. Dick, Charles Gibson, all those guys,
right? Even Ray Bradbury kind of fell into this a little bit. So did Isaac
Asimov. But they start with the tech and they leave the
culture over here. And modern Star Trek
starts with the tech and then just projects Twitter
and the nonsense on TikTok forward 800 years.
So you don't have anybody in the writer's room. You'll appreciate this as a writer,
you know, maybe in the writer's room who's like, what would happen if, like,
all of the. Because it's all political now, but
let's just pretend that all the right wingers actually, like one, the fascists
actually won. Let's project that for 800 years.
What happens then? They don't have the imagination for that. They have the imagination for
Google Translate, but they don't have the imagination for projecting a better world. And
that's my frustration with Star Trek. This is why I want to mothball it. I
want to mothball it. So we get another generation of people who actually
have Hope in the future because we don't right now. And by the way, we
don't right now for very legitimate reasons. We've had 25 years of nonsense
from, you know, from you know, the, the,
the, the knocking down of the World Trade center, the terrorist attacks, World Trade center
all the way to. I'm recording this In September of 2025,
the assassination of Charlie Kirk. It's been one friggin disaster after
another. And the body politicians, because we're in the fourth
turning the body politic is in a time of chaos. And you can't
write hope in a time of chaos unless you
have religious belief. So you actually believe in something, a transcendent thing for the
future or you're just like a person
who, I believe fundamentally you're a person who's just like a Pollyanna
and you're just going to totally ignore the nonsense. And I don't see very many
Pollyannas who are creatives right now. But maybe I'm wrong. So there's my
whole rant on Star Trek that sums up everything. And so I'm,
I always admire when people bring up Star Trek but I'm like just mothball because
we just get it like I'm 4, I'm 45 years. Old, like
the only, I mean I'm gone in terms of the tech like for the, for
the tech thing. But yeah, I totally see. And you know, it's funny to your
point because I go to conventions and yeah,
one of the panels that I was at was talking
about how, where to start with sci fi if
you're not a sciencey. Not like
one of my favorite sci fi writers. His, I think his, his background
education is in like science, engineering, stuff like
that. And so the, the panel was kind of about like
well if you don't have that but you want to write sci fi, how do
you write sci fi? And they were like, I mean just start with kind of
what you were saying, like start the culture, like start like start with
an idea. And, and, and then they gave a really
helpful definition of sci fi that now I can't remember
but basically gave me hope that one day I could write sci fi.
So it's like oh that would be fun. And basically.
Well I think don't, don't, don't worry so much about the technology.
It's more about telling human stories. So that
hope is, is it wants, if it's not there,
it wants to be there. It's like it's a seed right now that
has not sprouted and it really needs some water, but there's no water
coming right now. Well, well, if you look at.
If you look at Duandro's Dream of Electric Sheep, right? So you look at Philip
K. Dick's work, right? He
had no hope for the future, and that's why Blade Runner works. That's
why, like, do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep works?
Right? Because the perspective he's writing from,
the sociopolitical. Geopolitical culture is all warped because of two.
Because of nuclear wars, right? Which he's writing in the 60s
under. In. In a. In a historical time of the
Cold War. And, you know, mutually assured. Well, mutually assured
discretion wasn't really an idea that came around till the 80s, but the. The template
for that idea was there. Right, right. And so
he was projecting forward that template, which is, by the way, science fiction does
this. It projects forward the template. This is why dystopian science fiction
doesn't work, but neither does utopian science fiction, because you're just projecting
the dystopia or the utopia of your time
forward however many years. Plant a flag here. Now
we can all critique everybody and say, how cool, right?
Okay, So I think you could
probably do Star Trek. Well, if you didn't focus on the
tech and you did focus on the culture. But my pushback to that
person would be. The writer on the panel on the dais would be,
how can you write about culture when you're not culturally confident
if you don't actually have pride in your culture? And I don't
mean sinful pride. I mean, you actually have looked at your
culture, right? Wrong and indifferent, and said, in comparison to all
other cultures, you're not rel. You're not a relativist in comparison to all of the
cultures on the planet. This is the best one. So I'm just going to project
that forward because that's what Roddenberry did. Roddenberry. And this
is what irritates, you know, Gen Zers and millennials about boomers.
Boomers have cultural confidence. They just do.
Like it drives them. They have no cultural guilt. Zero cultural
guilt. Now, should they? Maybe, maybe not. I don't
know. But they don't have any.
And you've got millennials running around with cultural guilt and anxiety. You got
Gen Zers running around with cultural guilt and anxiety. And Gen
Xers are like, I have no cultural guilt. I'm cynical. Go away. Leave me alone.
Just leave me alone. Just go away. Don't bother me.
Don't bother me with your guilt, and don't bother Me with your cultural confidence. You
know, I once heard Gen X described as a, as a veil,
a valley of humility stuck between two mountains of ego.
So, so, like, how do you write in that space
like that? And that's fascinating to me as a person who creates things. How do
you write in that, in that sort of cultural environment if you don't have
cultural confidence? I mean,
I am a religious person, so I have a confidence in a different culture.
Right, yeah, there you go. Yeah, So I do have cultural confidence. It's just not
necessarily in my country. Right, right. So
thankfully, I follow one of my. Actually, the Godfather of my children
helps me a lot with the, with the cultural guilt. He's like,
hey, when you, when you put this into perspective with the whole
American experiment. And then actually, you help me with it a lot too. Just like,
hey, because you're right. Listening to people in my generation, it's just like, it's just
all bad. The world's going to shit. Right. But it's like, hey,
get some perspective, like about this experiment. We're doing something
nobody's ever tried before. And it's still pretty young. So
all that to say that's. I guess that's where I write is
I just have confidence in a different culture. Culture. Well, and I think. And I
think you can write from that space, and that is refreshing because I do
think that people need leaders in
particular need to have cultural confidence, whether
it's in the culture of their organizations or their institutions or just
the Overall, you know, 50,000 foot culture. I do think you have
to. As Bona Serra says at the beginning of the Godfather, I love that
opening for Francis Ford Coppola, you know, the immigrant
Bonasera, the Italian immigrant, when he's going to the Godfather to ask him for a
favor, starts off with that iconic line. I love it when it opens from
the. Opens from the black. And a couple of fades in on him
and he brings him in, he says, and Bonicero says in that Italian immigrant accent,
I believe in America. I
raise my children in an American fashion,
but never to dishonor themselves. This
is how I raise my children. And this is how I was raising my children.
I believe in America. I absolutely do.
Because this is it. This is the. Yeah. And
yes, I believe in Jesus too. I've been louder now out loud about all that
too. Jesus in America. Absolutely, yes. Because guess
what? If I didn't, I couldn't do this show.
It wouldn't work.
None of this works without. Without. You've got to believe in it, you got to
believe there's something here on this third of a continent that's worth saving.
Right, right. And worth writing about. Yeah,
yeah. We're fighting for. Yeah. That reminds me of
west side Story. It's one of my favorite
musicals, kind of ever. And thinking about that in the
context of Bernstein as a person,
things that he was struggling with personally. And
then. But then there's that, the
America. Wait, what is it? Is it just called America?
Can't remember exactly the name of the number, but, you know, it's the. The
Puerto Ricans going back and forth. The women and the. And the
men. Women are like, hey, it sucks here, but it's. And, but it's
worth it. And it's better than Puerto Rico. And then the men are like, no,
it sucks here. We should go back. And they're like, okay, bye.
We'll have kids here then.
And. Yeah, and then. And both. And both sides
have valid points. Right. I'm not
saying there aren't downsides, but you know what? Like,
I don't know. I. If there's one thing I could
do with this show, it would be to use these books
that have come out of a very specific Western culture. Like Wells comes out of
a very specific Western. Yes, he's English, but it's still the
West. A very specific Western way of looking at
the world that's based on things that
matter. And the
apotheosis, the pinnacle, the
sharp end of the spear of those things comes
together. And it always has. It comes
together here. It comes together here on this continent, among us people.
If we don't get it right here. And again, I am saying this
in. In the backwash of the assassination of Charlie Kirk. If we
don't get this right here,
I don't know where else it's going to get
correct. I think somebody will try it again.
Somebody will try. I don't know that it'll work because it comes out of a
very specific. I mean, the, the next people that try aren't going to have David
Hume and Natural Law like the founding fathers did. Like, they're not going to have
that. You know, they're going to have, oh, all those guys
screwed up. We don't have to go back to the original thing
that they did that they screwed up. Instead, we'll move forward from the screw up.
And I don't. Yeah, you know, and I don't know. That that's going to be
necessarily bringing forward the good right parts of
the foundation, just trying to learn from the mistakes. But really, you need
both. You need both. You need the good stuff from the foundation and learning
from the mistakes, which actually is relevant to one of your questions. That's down.
It is relevant to one of the questions. Swinging it back.
We always do this. We always do this when we talk because we were wondering.
Okay, so back to the book, Back to the Time
Machine. Some of the themes. We're going to talk
about themes in a minute, but I want to talk about this piece right here
in chapter eight, explanation. Right.
Talking about. Talking about worldviews
and
talking about. I want to talk also about a little bit about the Arrow of
Time, but this is the model of the Eloy.
So I want to pick this up from. Again, from H.G. wells
from Time Machine. I'm reading the open source, an open source edition,
the original. The original 1895
classic. You can get it on Project Gutenberg or on Kindle
or anywhere where you download books. Okay, so
picking up from here, the time traveler again, talking in first person,
relating what he. What he has seen beneath my feet. Then the earth
must be tunneled enormously. And these tunnelings were the habitats of the new race
capital in capital R, by the way. I love that the presence of ventilating
shafts and wells along the hill slopes, everywhere in fact, except along the river valley,
showed how universal were its ramifications. What so natural then, as
to assume that it was in this artificial underworld that such work was necessary
to the comfort of the daylight race was done. The notion was so
plausible that I at once accepted it and went on to assume the how of
the splitting of the human species. I dare say you will
anticipate the shape of my theory, though for myself I very soon felt that it
fell far short of the truth. At first, proceeding
from the problems of our own age, it seemed clear as daylight to me that
the gradual widening of the present merely temporary and social
difference between the capitalist and the laborer was the key to
the whole position. No doubt it will seem grotesque enough to
you and wildly incredible, and yet even now there are existing circumstances to
point that way. There is a tendency to utilize underground
space for the less ornamental purposes of civilization. There is the Metropolitan
Railway in London, for instance. There are new electric railways. There are subways. There are
underground workrooms and restaurants in there, and they increase in multiply.
Evidently, I thought this tendency had increased till industry had gradually
lost its birthright in the sky. I mean that it had gone
deeper and deeper into larger and ever larger underground factories, spending
still increasing amount of its time there, until in the End
even now, does not an East End worker live in such an artificial land,
Live in such artificial conditions as practically to be cut off from the natural surface
of the earth? Again, the exclusive tendency of
richer people, due no doubt to the increasing refinement of their education. And the
widening gulf between them and the rude violence of the poor. Is already
leading to the closing in their interests of considerable portions of the service of the
land. About London, for instance, perhaps half the prettier country
is shut in against intrusion. And this is the same widening gulf which is due
to the length and expense of the higher educational process. And the
increased faculties facilities for. And the temptations
towards refined habits on the part of the rich. That will make
that exchange between class and class. That promotion by intermarriage.
Which at present retards the splitting of our species along lines of
social stratification less and less frequent. So in the end,
above ground you must have the haves pursuing pleasure and comfort and
beauty. And below ground, the have nots. The workers getting continually
adapted to the conditions of their labor. Once they were there,
they would no doubt have to pay rent, and not little of it for the
ventilation of their caverns. And if they refused, they would starve or be suffocated for
arrears, such of them as were so
constituted as to be miserable and rebellious would die. And in the end, the balance
being permanent, the survivors would become as well adapted to the
conditions of underground life. And as happy on their way as the overworld people were
to theirs. And it seemed to me the refined beauty
and the exfoliated pallor followed naturally enough.
By the way, I love atoliated. It just means dark love
that I'm not dark, but white. Sorry. The white pallor. The great
triumph of humanity I had dreamed of took a different shape in my mind.
It had been no such triumph of moral education and general cooperation as I
had imagined. Instead, I saw real aristocracy armed with
perfected science and working to a logical conclusion. The industrial system
of today. Its triumph had not
been simply a triumph over nature, but a triumph over nature and the fellow
man. This, I must warn you, was my theory at the time. I had
no convenient cicerone to the pattern of the
utopian books. My explanation may be absolutely wrong.
I still think it is the most plausible one. But even on this supposition,
the balanced civilization that was at last attained. Must have long since passed its zenith.
And was now far fallen into decay. By the way, Pause.
He travels forward into the future. 802,000 years into
the future. By the way, Back to the book. The two
perfect security of the Overworlders had led them to a slow
moment movement of degeneration to a general dwindling in size, strength
and intelligence. This I could see clearly enough. What had already
happened, what had happened to the undergrounders, I did not yet suspect. But from what
I had seen of the Morlocks, that by the by was the
name by which these creatures were called. I could imagine that the modification
of the human type was even far more profound than among
the quote unquote Eloi, the beautiful race
that I already knew.
That's the logical conclusion of Darwinian eugenics.
That's the logical conclusion, that the races will split.
Each race will become more and more like itself. By the
way, just side note in history,
many years after Welles passed away, it was
found out that the, the National Socialists
in Germany during World War II had been running around in India
and in Africa measuring people's heads
to determine what their genetic phenotypes were.
They didn't call it that term then. And to determine which races
were the most pure.
I'm just going to let everybody sit with that.
So what are some themes that jump out to us from the time machine?
What, what should we, what should we really be focused on? Don't be a
dick. Wait, no,
it's funny. My co author, it's brief side story. My co author and
I were like, hey, let's start a discord. You know, it'll be fun, blah, blah,
blah. It's like, well, we should, you know, set up some rules, make sure nobody's.
And I'm just like, okay, what rules should there be? He's like, really? It just
boils down to one like, don't be a dick.
So but the, the themes that, you know, it's
funny, it's not necessarily related to the, the excerpt that you just read, but when
I was thinking about this question, I was
reminded of how
the time traveler does the impossible
comes back and nobody will believe him.
And at. After he does that, he's like, I know you guys aren't gonna believe
me. I don't care. I'm gonna tell you the story. Don't ask any questions.
And I feel like sometimes leaders, as
much as I, as, as listening
and, and discourse are both
necessary values of good leadership.
Sometimes you have,
you just have to be like, okay, sit up, shut down. I need to say
this, this is what happened. And I
know you guys aren't gonna believe me. I think there's a time
and a place so that, that, that kind of Jumped out at me.
I think of. I think of Roy. I think of Roy Batty's speech at the
end of Blade Runner. I love the line. I love the line that he gives
right. To start his Tears in the Rain speech. I've seen things you people
wouldn't believe. Yeah. And then he goes on
and. And. And there's no way to prove it. And there's no way to prove
it. And. And so. And Harrison. And Harrison Ford's look, by the way,
after he gives a speech is classic. It's the classic look of the follower
who has no idea what he just heard and just goes. Or she just heard
and just goes. You know, I think
of. Think of the Fugitive, right? Where Tommy Lee
Jones traps Harrison Ford in the tunnel, right?
And Harrison Ford is the doctor says, I didn't kill my wife.
And Harris. And Tommy Lee Jones goes, I don't
care. And that's. That's it.
That's the response. And that's the response I kind of got from some of the
folks who are listening to. Or that's the oppression you get from
folks, you know, but yeah, okay, so doing the impossible in the service
of the ungrateful. Kind of.
Yeah. Or just. And sometimes
there's gonna be the criticism. Like you're gonna. You're gonna decide on
a course of action. My mentor recently said
a bad decision is better than no decision. Because a bad decision
can be improved upon. Like you can. You can
keep making that better. But if you never decide and you never do
anything, then there's. You
can't fix. It's not that you can't fix that, but you know what I mean?
Like, you gotta. You gotta decide. And so I think even.
And then you gotta follow through. Even if people are looking at your decision
and you've got all this either in your head because
of The Self Talk 100 is there? And then other people are
going to validate that negative self that you don't know what you're doing. And
this is a terrible decision and all of these risks
and sometimes you as the leader. And again, there's a
time and a place for listening, Right? But I think there's a gut check too.
So as humans, we have this. This marvelous
kind of duology. Whatever. You know,
we've got the brain, got the big brain, and then we've got the gut,
right? And so I think usually if you're not
sure, is this a time to listen? Is this a time to just
plow forward, like, check in with your gut? Usually you'll
know but anyway, so there's a time and a
place to listen, but then there's a time and a place to just be. Like,
I gotta. I gotta try this. Because if I don't,
I'll never know. If I keep listening to the naysayers that say, this is impossible,
this is a terrible idea, then we'll never.
We'll never progress. We'll never move forward because they're just looking
at. What was it? Oh, I love this quote, but I'm going to butcher
it, and I can't remember even who said it. But there's something to the effect
of if you continue. Continue to act based on
what has already been empirically proven,
we'll never learn anything new or get any
anywhere past what we've already done. Right?
Right. Right. We'll never defy those odds. We'll never. Yeah,
we'll never produce anything new. Well, nothing.
You got to have risks. Right? And at a certain point, you got
to take risks. Right. Nothing is without a downside. Nothing is
consequence free. Right? Right. No decision is
consequence free. You just have to figure out. No, not even figure
out. You have to be okay as a leader, just like
the. The time traveler was, who, by the way, is unnamed.
He's only called the time traveler. Right.
You have to be okay. And by okay, I mean
okay at every single level. Right. Which kind of ties into the conversation
we had in the previous section. But, like, you have to be okay at every
single level, biologically, psychologically,
spiritually, emotionally, whatever Lee, you want to put on there ecumenically,
however, whatever,
with the consequences of. Okay. I think about this practically
in terms of. In terms of family.
So if I'm in a family and there's a decision to
be made about, let's make it something small about where to
go for dinner. Right. And I know that
my kids really like pizza, and you say the word pizza and they're
going to lose their mind and they're going to be happy. And my wife doesn't
care about pizza. Matter of fact, my wife will probably
throat punch me if we go back to Chuck E. Cheese again.
And I decide out of the goodness of my heart that we're all going to
Chuck E. Cheese tonight because the three
people will be happy, the three
humans will be happy. And I will disappoint one human. Sure.
I've made a utilitarian decision
because the good of the many to go back to Star Trek for just a
minute. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. And that
one human that's a full size grown up human. She can go
get her needs met in a whole bunch of different ways. And she doesn't have
to go to Chuck E. Cheese if she doesn't want to. And so we're going
to Chuck E. Cheese.
The only way that decision works is if I am comfortable
with whatever the outcomes are going to be from deciding that the three
humans that I'm in, we're both in charge of, are going
to Chuck E. Cheese. And if I
don't want those consequences, if I am
uncomfortable with wherever that may go all the way from,
yeah, you're going to sleep in the bed, but you're going to be all the
way on the far side and it's going to be chilly all the way
to. You might be sleeping on the couch, you know,
for a couple of nights. Because depending upon, you know, how this is all going
to go. As long as I'm comfortable with that decision as the leader
of the family. And by the way, we could flip the genders. It doesn't matter
right then. Okay.
Like I'm, I'm, I'm behaving in a leadership capacity.
Too many people, I think, particularly in our current era,
believe that collaboration hedges all of those
consequences. And it doesn't. And it, and it doesn't. That's not what
collaboration's for. Collaboration is great for brainstorming or determining
where you're going to go to like eat with the three humans and your wife
or your husband in whatever situation. Like, that works fine. Okay.
Collaboration works there. It's a small decision. But when we start scaling up
decisions, collaboration can sometimes fall apart.
Yes. Sin is nodding her head. That's so funny that you,
you know, I feel like censored.
Censure. Censure. My mentor has been telling me that exact thing
because I, you know, I jumped into my business and I really
wanted partners, really wanted
partners because I am a collaborative artist. I love collaborating.
It's my favorite. But
yes, even, even with business partners, somebody has
to step forward, make the decision
and see what happens. See what happens. Somebody has to be the
person upon whom the weight of the failure
falls. And
someone has to be the person. And this is the critical thing. I wrote about
this in my book 12 Rules for Leaders. You should pick it up. Somebody
has to be the person who also
is happy enough with how the process went
and the outcome that was achieved to give away credit.
And everybody focuses on the failure falling on me part because we only ever see
the downsides, right? But to go back to the Chuck E.
Cheese example, if it works
out. And my wife's like, okay, yeah, let's go to Chuck E. Cheese. Even though
I'll throat punch you, I'll throw punch you in the way. In the car. In
the car. And so I get throat punched all the way to the car. But
we go to Chuck E. Cheese and my kids are running around and
my wife's sitting there. And let's say this is a. This is
not Chuck E. Cheese. This is Dave and Buster's. She could have a margarita. And
now it's all, like, worked out in the end. Right. And by the way, I
don't take any credit for that. I'm like, well, the kids, the kids decided on
this. It's all them.
They had nothing to do with me. Now if it fails,
I'm the one that gets to sleep on the couch because the kids aren't going
to sleep on the couch. Right, right. That's what we're looking for in
leadership. Yeah. So collaboration works up to a point,
but we also have to, I think, understand that
a bad decision. I love your thinking there, or the way
you frame that a bad decision is better than no decision. The Marines actually
believe that a Marine will be court martialed. This is one of the most fascinating
things I've ever heard. A Marine officer will be court martialed for making no
decision. But. Whoa, right.
But in the army, you're court martialed more
likely than not for making a bad decision.
Because I once heard a Marine frame this for me. Marine officer framed this for
me. Marines die whether you make a good decision or a
bad decision. Marines die. That's what we do. So just make
a decision. In the army, it's a different
thing. It's not army guys
die if we make a good decision or a bad decision. It's
what's the best possible decision you could have made under these circumstances and then make
that one right. And this is something
fundamental that's different between the branches. I find that to
be incredibly fascinating because most of real life is
downsides. Most of the time you're making, you
are. You're making a decision out of a. Out of a series of terrible options
that you didn't choose. You're like, oh, we faced all these options
and I didn't choose any of them. And in a perfect world, I would have
none of these. And I don't live in that world. I don't live in the
Darwinian utopia with the Eloi.
Which is not perfect, by the way. No, it's not. So, you know, more
Themes for leaders. It's just kind of one of, one of my
coaches always talked about how life is 50, 50, no matter where you are, no
matter how successful, how poor, how rich, how
many kids, how few kids, whatever, whatever it is,
life is 50, 50 good, bad.
And there are utopian aspects when, when he jumps
into the future and, you know, we've achieved.
Humanity has achieved everything that they have been gunning for.
But there are, there's, there's some creepy darkness there.
Like their food now, like the
halves are now, like, you know, Hasan was
reading it earlier, I don't know if you caught it, but they're basically just
fattened cattle just waiting to be eaten. And they have
some awareness of this, which is why they fear the dark and why they fear
the Morlocks. But that's it.
You know, they're frolicking around, eating, making
love, eating fruit, bathing in the river,
having the perfect life, terrified that they're going to be eaten
next. So that's
like. So I. Light and dark, light and dark. It's.
There's good and bad. So when I was reading this,
when I was reading this, I was thinking of our current cultural moment and what
flashed in my brain because I have all these illusions in my brain, like a
steel trap. So I was thinking of
the, the U.S. congresswoman from
New York City, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez.
She was at some event a few years ago now,
and she wore a dress that said Eat the Rich on it or had Eat
the Rich written on it, all white dress with, with a red writing. You could
see it online. And it was like some Met Gala, some thing where
they, like show off, you know, billion dollar dresses or whatever.
And she had it specially designed for her. It was during the Biden administration. It
was like a big deal, whatever. And, and I think about the
sentiment behind that and
I think in relation particularly to the Eloi and the warlocks. And I'm
not the first person to make this illusion, but when we're
talking about. And
by the way, just, just so you know how exactly dark my brain is,
I, I am, I've never admitted this on the show. This is a new one.
So one more layer gets peeled away. I am fascinated
by what makes a person eat another person. Like, the psychology behind
that. Like, how do you get to that point? Like, I understand if you're,
if you're in a plane crash in the Andes
mountains, desperation. I absolutely understand that.
I understand, you know, there are people who,
they will die before they will eat another, you know, they'll die before they go
there. Right now we, we have to counterpose that
with, in recent world history,
Native American tribes, North American, South America,
tribes that cannibalized each other. There are cannibal
tribes running around the world today. There are people
in the western world who have this recently happened in Germany,
probably about 10 years ago, someone advertised online
to eat somebody and somebody showed up and ate that person. And I believe
they were prosecuted in Germany. And the guy went to jail.
Krista is now shocked again. This is, this is my, this
is my, my steel trap brain. I think of all this. So
all this merges together. Right, right.
And, and so I'm talking about the Morlock of the
Eloy. And I wasn't really going to focus on the cannibalism, but you brought it
up, so you opened the door for me. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna
walk through. If we're eating the leisure
class metaphorically, which is, I'm sure what AOC would say her dress
meant. It's metaphorical eating. Yeah, okay,
but it's, it's, it's a real easy leap to go from metaphor,
particularly in the, in the times in which we are in now, go from metaphor
to actuality without much,
without people being pushed much to go in that direction.
What does it say? And Wells even says that, like, oh, well, this
is just a natural thing. Like, it's fine. Judge it. We shouldn't judge
it. We shouldn't judge it. Like, what do we do? We can.
How do we. How do we not?
I guess it's a morality question, really.
Well, and if you're. Well, I don't know enough about, like the,
about Marx, like the, the, the nitty gritty. But, like, do they even believe in
more like morality? Do they? Yeah, I didn't think so. So then, then of course
he's going to be like, well, I shouldn't judge it. No. They're historical determinists. Like,
you could see that even in Wells writing, they believe that history determines what people
do. And the battle between capital and labor
is the driving force. That's
not in the Communist Manifesto. That's in Das Kapital.
The battle between capital and labor is the driving force of
all human history. There's nothing else outside of
that. Religion is the opiate of the masses. It's just bs. It's designed.
Morality is just bs. It's designed to cover up our brute,
savage nature, which again, Wells was a,
again, as a Fabian socialist would have been, Would have been right
Alongside of that. Right. You would have thought that
was absolutely a correct way of
analyzing epistemicologically
reality. And I
think he's utterly and completely and totally incorrect. And that's bananas in
pajamas if I'm to be friendly.
So.
Where. Well, okay. Themes for leaders.
Hey guys. So for leaders, 50 50, you're gonna, you're gonna push,
you're gonna achieve some really great things. Most likely eventually if you keep
going. Right, right. You're gonna fail to fail, Fail, fail, fail, succeed.
Yeah. Even when you succeed,
you reach that new level in your business, you reach that new revenue goal, that
new, you know, whatever you're scaling,
you're starting out, you find you're like you're in
a startup and you obtain re regular revenue.
Yeah, there's going to be good and bad. My
coach like to say, you know, there is not better than here.
Like you, you can easily conceive of the things that will be
better there. Like my
business is currently in startup mode so that, you know, in five, ten years when
we're not in startup mode anymore, there are definitely things that there are going to
be better, but we will have scaled and there will be more
problems that I'm not dealing with now
because our business is smaller. Right. So the 5050 will be there. And
so I think leaders really just need to remember
that. And it doesn't mean you failed. It doesn't mean anything is wrong.
And your job is to
not necessarily keep your eye on the prize. I don't know why that just popped
into my head. But also keep morale
up around you because everybody else,
leadership is not necessarily their job. And a lot of them might
be unless you're, you're very attentive to your own
company's culture or whatever leadership position you're in to the
culture that you're leading. You, you, you got to pay
attention especially to the naysayers because that can get,
you can get a mutinous set
of, of folks real quick
if you're not, you know, managing,
managing that, leading in that way as well. It's not just about
if, especially if you're a leader in business. It's not just about the
revenue and, and all of that. The revenue, the
product, blah, blah, blah. It's. You manage your people too. Take care of your people.
I think I say that probably every time I'm on your. You probably do, but
it's true. I mean like, you wouldn't be the only one. Like everybody says that
because, because at the end of the day, these books that we've covered from
Moby Dick to, to Jane Austen to the
Time machine to. We'll be talking about. We're going to
be. One of the books that we're going to be covering in, in November is
A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway. And it doesn't
matter what the genre of the book is. It doesn't matter even who the
author is. Fundamentally, the leadership themes
that are embedded in all these books focus around
themes that are universal and that have not
changed through time. Or as my grandma would say, would have said
climb C L I M E time or climb.
Right. And the idea that
somehow we need to go to a leadership book written by some pointy headed
intellectual to get these ideas is one of the
reasons why I'm doing this show. Because we're fighting up
against, uphill against that. Right. Or downhill, depending upon your perspective.
So, so, so yeah, taking care
of your people, bringing them up,
understanding consequences. One, one last thing
I'd like to like to talk about a little bit before we switch modes and
sort of try to wrap up here this idea of
doing the impossible in the service of the ungrateful. Right. Okay.
So again,
at a very practical level, right. Going back to the Chuck
E. Cheese analogy one more time. If I take my kids to Chuck E.
Cheese because they've decided they get to want to go to Chuck E. Cheese
and it's all great. My wife's having the margarita,
she registered her objections in the car. But now everything's getting better. And
then we do the Chuck E. Cheese experience. Everybody has the cardboard pizza, it's
terrible. And the rat comes over and I want to throw,
punch the rat because I'm not in, I'm in a mood and I'm having water
because I got to drive. And then we all leave, we all
get in the car and my kid in the back seat says, wow,
that sucked. Now I've had that experience with
my children, right? And
the level of, I'll be honest, as a parent leader,
the level of frustration, dare I say rage,
rises up inside of me. Oh. Is.
Yeah. My son is three months old. I'm, I'm
becoming acquainted with. And my, my daughter's a toddler. So it just like
rage is the word and it's, it's not something I think parents talk
about. Sorry to interrupt, but. No, no, it's okay. It's not a word I think
parents like to admit to themselves or
anybody out loud. It is rage. It is what? Go ahead.
No, and then you, and then you. My solution, just. You have a Solution. Right.
Because my kids are significantly older. You're at the beginning. I'm almost at the end
of. At least with three of the four of them, I'm at the end of
the thing. And with the other one, he's eight. So like, we're getting into a
different thing there. Here's what you do. You, you take your hand.
This is the only technique I've known, I've learned. If you're driving the vehicle or
even if you're not, you take either your right hand or your left hand, depending
on which side of the front seat you're sitting in, and you slowly roll down
the window, just hit the button
and let the night air wash over your face. Let it
wash away the rage. So to wash away the rage as you go
down, you know, the 405 or whatever, wherever you happen to be living
at from that Chuck E. Cheese experience, that you just spent
all that time and emotional effort, which seemed impossible,
and now this person is ungrateful. And then you roll up the window
slowly and you say, you know, I really would like for you to just say
thank you. Just to show a little gratitude. Just say thank you
now with your children. If you're in a parenting
situation, that becomes now a matter of verbal discipline and verbal
correction. Right. With people that are adults, though,
who struggle with gratitude, I guess the question becomes, oh, my gosh,
how do you get them right? How do you, how do you deal
with people that are ungrateful if you're a leader.
Honestly, I think the first thing that comes to mind is just part
of the job. So, but, so, so just how.
Make sure that your mental well being, you have
support, let's put it, so you don't fly off the handle
and, you know, accidentally put a
proverbial gun to your company's head
and implode. Right. So that, that, I think that would be
my biggest recommendation. Yeah. Make sure that your mental health,
mental and emotional health, you're, that you're maintaining that, that you've got your
support set up, that you've got your habits. Those, those are just
as important as
the regular processes that,
you know, will grow or maintain or whatever it is you're trying to do in
your leadership position. Your, your mental
well being is, like, is paramount
because you're going to make decisions. People are going to come for you. People are
going to be ungrateful. And I'm talking to my. Because I, I actually have.
There's this, A very specific example in my business right now
that I just, in case I'M not gonna say any
specifics, but, man, I'm gonna be hitting that
in December and I hopefully will remind myself of my own.
My own. I'll send you recommendations.
Make sure you're doing your journaling and you talk to your coach and go to
the beach and make sure you just, you just take care of. You Go get
a massage. It'll be okay.
The world will not end. It feels like it. It feels like it. And then
people will come for you, though, and. Yeah,
and ultimately, I think for me, I'm in the middle of it. My
mentor is kind of on the other side of it, and he just. I love
his. I can't remember if we're allowed to curse or
like, to the extent of what we're allowed to curse, but dgaf, right. He just
doesn't give right. Doesn't give any right. And I'm like,
man, I wish I was there, because I don't. I take everything personally.
I was like, what else? I don't. Whatever, I don't care. I'm retired. And you
guys, you guys can't, like, what are you gonna do?
You're gonna be, you're gonna yap and then you're either gonna stay and continue to
give us business or you're gonna leave. And I have enough confidence in my business
model that I really don't care if you leave. In fact, please do. You know,
if you don't find enough value here, take off.
That's okay. That's what business is about, right?
Anything. That's right. You said the key word right. Value.
No. Confidence. Confidence. He has confidence. So
the whole thing with like a syndrome that goes around
online, it hasn't going around online for last 15 years. I see it all over
LinkedIn, you know, the whole boss, babe, we're talking about women
or we're talking about men. I got up and did 8,000
lifts and ran 450 miles and journaled and got my personal
affirmations da da da da da. So I could feel confident about making these decisions,
and I'm crushing it. That whole entire nonsense that you see in
entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial culture online is
driven by people that have a deep lack of confidence in their own decisions, because
they are. And I loved how you mentioned that he's older and retired
because they are young and
we've done a terrible job in our culture in the last two or three generations
of convincing, not convincing, of demonstrating to people that
life is long and you have to sort of
earn your keep to your benchmarks and I can say
this as someone who's in my mid-40s wandering towards a half century
of living in this world. There are things that
I just would never have known at 20. 20. I just would
never have known at 20. I wanted to know them at 20. Right. I could
intellectualize them at 20. But to actually
know them. Right. I know. I don't. I mean, I didn't.
I didn't know them until I was 40. And then also that's okay,
because I feel like maybe. Maybe this is a. This is just a millennial
thing. Like my generation, something my generation struggles with. It's like. It's
almost like. Because the knowledge is out there, then we sure should
be that much more advanced. And then we
freak out when we're not, because we're just not. We're
just not there yet. So knowledge is not wisdom. This
is what I would tell every millennial. Any millennial listening to this. Anybody who's between
the ages of. What's a millennial now? 30 and 45. 30 or 44. I'm
35, so. Yeah, so, right. Okay. Yeah, you're right. Take 10 years. Yeah, yeah, you're
right in there. So it's okay
to not have the wisdom now. You're gonna get
the wisdom, and Google ain't gonna deliver it to you. No
doordash ain't gonna deliver it to you. You can't get it on demand. You can't
swipe left or swipe right to get it. It just, It's. Sorry, it's not on
demand. Ken can give it to you. Like, I think, like you said, intellectually, like,
if you're well read, you read these, right? You're listening to Haison. Like, that
will help the wisdom come maybe a little faster. It'll. If
you steep yourself, right, and really contemplate. But I think,
you know, the crux of it all is just like, not. Giving an F.
Well, and the shortcut is always the long way around. So if you're looking, and
I've never really talked about shortcuts on this. On this show, but one of the
reasons why the time traveler goes and gets in his time machine is
because he's looking for a shortcut to Utopia. And he went too far.
He went too far. And so there
are no shortcuts to utopian outcomes, because there
aren't utopian outcomes. Aren't dystopian outcomes either, by the way. It's
neither one. They're just outcomes. But the shortcut that
you're looking for is always the long way. Around and people forget this,
right? The point was made, interestingly enough, the Billy Bob
Thornton character in the show Landman from Taylor Sheridan. Um,
he's talking to the young. The young city lawyer that they send out, the young
female city lawyer that they sent out to like, deal with him on his
oil stuff. And the thing that I,
that, that I. And by the way, I. I'm still looking
for shortcuts, right? It's a. It's a temptation to find the shortcut. It's
always a temptation to find the hack, find the shortcut, find the thing. And the
thing is, if you do that, you actually do far more
damage. Even looking for the shortcut does far more damage
than just going the long way around.
I think the other danger with looking for shortcuts is that
I mentioned this earlier. It's. It's predicated on this belief that
there is better than here. And something that I am working
on. I think not. I think right now is
not being in such a rush to get to the revenue goal. Just
enjoy the journey. But also because I'm a mom, right? There's a
lot more going on in my life. Like, I'm be.
I'm. I have other leadership positions other than my business. So
the balance of all of that, just, just, just don't. Don't be
in such a rush. Enjoy the journey. Learn, like,
you'll get there. And a lot of times, a lot of times
we hate this. We hate this. I hate this. A lot of times
there's that, there's. There is this idea. I remember hearing this, you know, years ago
when I was just starting as like an online entrepreneur was, you have to slow
down to go faster. And we're all like, yeah, cool, I'll
do that. And I'm telling you right now that I always thought I would
do that. And the way that that is
manifesting in my life right now, I'm like, no, I don't want to do that.
I don't want it. I don't. I don't. No, wait, are you sure that's what
that means? Are you just. That can't be right.
I don't wanna. I'm just fighting it. I'm fighting it tooth and nail. And it's
like what you said, like, just stop. Stop looking for the shortcuts. Do things slow.
Enjoy the ride. You get one life.
Like, stop being so this. We're all stress balls. Like, well,
you're not. What are you missing? What are you. Well, what are you missing?
So there's this whole idea that came after I was out of my 30s. I
didn't hear about it until I was in my 40s. But this whole idea of
the fear of missing out. Right? Yeah, but missing what?
What am I missing? Right, Right. Like I'm, and I see
this. If you're so busy and being a rush, you're missing your life now. Right.
You're so worried about missing out there that you're missing here.
Here. Right. Like, like I've got a 20 year old that lives in my house.
And one of the things that we work with her through when
she was in, in the late era of high school, a little bit
towards the beginning of college, but she was finally through. That was this idea
that. And we also don't give cell phones to our kids early
and we have a whole bunch of other rules set up to kind of mitigate
a lot of this nonsense. Right. But I have a
15 year old girl that lives in my house
and she, she has no cell phone and she's happy.
Ooh, it can be done. I want to, I want to tell
all the millennial parents out there, it can be done. It can be done so
much. Yes. All you have to do is be willing to live with the consequences
of what that means. And by the way, there are very
easy consequences. And the thing I point out is
our baby boomer and Gen X parents,
they did it and they didn't apologize.
That's the part that drives all of us crazy, is that they didn't apologize. But
why would they? They didn't need to. They just picked a route and
they just went for it. So anyway, this idea of fear, of missing out. So
one of the things that, that I work through or that my wife and I
worked through with our daughter is you're,
you're not missing anything. You're making choices. You cannot
do all of the things. So you have to curate
and make decisions. It's a great word. And if you don't curate
and make decisions, then you will be stuck in analysis
paralysis and you will do nothing and you will go nowhere.
Now, we can say this from the outside as wisdom, but it didn't become
real until she went off with her first real sort of big girl
job, for lack of a better term. And she saw other people
in her generation, in her time, paralyzed by analysis of
things that she'd already made decisions on. And she went, oh,
oh, click. Oh, that's so all I got to just do is just keep doing
that. And now she's, now she's, you know, now she's moving forward.
This is something where I think,
well, I'll frame it this way. And this is, again, every episode I bring
up movies, and every episode I bring up Jiu Jitsu. And so here's the moment.
Get ready for it. In Jiu Jitsu, it takes you
10 to 12 years to get a black belt. Most
people don't want to do the same
moves in a similar formation for 10 to
12 years while risking injury and pain
and not being able to bend over in the morning to get out of bed
for 12 years to get a strip of cloth that's black.
And that's okay. I'm not recommending you to do Jiu Jitsu. Everybody listening out here.
Jiu Jitsu is not for everyone. My. It's not
for everyone, but if it is for you, it is for you. Just remember.
And my, my instructor always says this, and it's absolutely the truth. He
rest. And he's. He's 34, so he's right in the. He's right in the mix.
Right. Enjoy the process. It's going to
take you 10 to 12 years. It's fine. Just come in and
enjoy the process. Now, what I see for folks, particularly folks who are
a generation down from me, is they'll come in four days a week, right off
the bat, and they'll just start because they're like, oh, no, I can
shortcut this. And they find
out that the shortcut is the long way around and they're injured and they're out.
Or they don't advance, or they don't go as fast as they wanted to, or
the instructor looks at them and goes, oh, well, that's all cool and everything, but
you're not ready. And then they get frustrated and fly off the handle.
And it's this. It's patience. Patience
takes time. Yeah. And to your point, I
loved how you framed that. Kristen, you only have one life. Well, not only, but
you have one life to live. It's this one. It's cool.
We can just chill out. And so the joke on me in the Jiu Jitsu
school is, oh, he's on the 15 year plan. I'm like, yeah, I tell everybody
I'm on the 15 year plan. What else am I going to be doing for
15 years? Right? Yeah, it's so.
Yep. There's a couple of analogies that, you know, I'm a, I'm a voice teacher
and, yeah, all that. I tell this to all of my
beginners. I. My passion right now is working with people who tell Themselves, they can't
sing. And I,
my students, I teach them classical technique, but I
pursued an opera career for 10, 12 years. And
I tell them, you know, ballet, ballet ballerinas, you know,
prima ballerinas are still practicing their. Their tendu,
which is the most basic ballet move ever.
Same thing with martial artists. They're always practicing that basic
punch, the basic block, the basic stance, horse dance,
whatever, whichever martial art you're doing,
and it's not sexy.
And that's the same thing with mindset work. That's the same thing with business.
Any mastery, any
mastery involves doing little
daily things that are not exciting, they're
not sexy, they're mundane. This is the same for raising children.
They are mundane. This was the word that popped up in my coaching actually last
week. Mundane. Fall in love with the mundane.
Whatever you're doing, like,
find a way to relish it, because this is your journey.
This is what you're meant to be doing. Presumably, if you've done all of that,
you know, this is what you've curated, this is what you're deciding.
Believe in your decisions enough to be like,
yeah, let's do this. Let's enjoy every. Every little bit.
The ins and outs. One last
question from your perspective and then we'll go back
to the book.
Do you think we struggle? No. So the devices
are blamed for a lot. Are we
struggling in the backwash to deal with, to address,
to manage too much
dopamine? Oh, yes.
At a biological level? Yes. Okay.
Yes. These devices, the. Oh, I. You know, I keep talking
about my coaches, guys, I. I need a lot of help. My. Like,
I have so much drama. Maybe this is just my personality type, I don't know.
But I have so much head drama that I'm like, I just constantly need other
people's input that. For. What is it? The. The
five strengths. Whatever. Input is one of my. One of. I can't remember.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Input is one of my top five. So I, I always need
a coach in my ear because otherwise I just spiral and I
turn into a puddle on the ground. Um, but input is number
two for me, if I remember correctly. Yeah, yeah, I'm. Yeah, that you like to
read. So I do. Look at that. But my coach was talking about.
She. She was leading a. A challenge, like screen
less challenge. And she just talks about you. The. I don't think we realize
this. Everything, the scrolling on Facebook,
Instagram, TikTok, even down to the
notifications, the color. The colors of the notifications on your phone,
everything is decide signed to Keep you on that
platform and keep you scrolling and it's. And
they're not stupid. Like they hired the experts
and they were like, what does this to the human brain? I, Well, I don't
know if that's actually what they did, but all I know is that these are
designed, yes. To trigger dopamine. So 100 hazeln. I think, I think
that's true. We're dealing with, we have to figure out how to
enjoy life without all of that dopamine. Because actually
a turning point, it's funny, you have to be careful when you say turning point
right now, but a turning point in my life was actually back in
the. When the lockdowns all happened during COVID 19. And I
actually during that most people were on social media more. And that
was when I had decided I'm not going to do it anymore. I just, I
completely, I didn't delete everything because I, because of my line of work,
you kind of have to maintain a social media presence. So I didn't delete anything,
but I took it off my phone and I was like, oh
my gosh, this is so much better. And that's when I started writing my book.
So if you have any sort of creative or if you're, you're leading, you
have this idea, this vision, something, get off your phone.
Yeah. Get off social media, stop doom
scrolling and go do something.
And that's hard. And I guess, you know, to, to Hasan's point,
recognize that when you move in that direction
that you are fighting an addiction because
of how social media and the phones and the
devices are designed to keep you on them. And
again, you don't have to take my word for granted. You can go look this
up. This is, it's science. This is
just this how they're designed because they want you to stay on them. Because the
more you use their product, the more you'll buy another one when it
breaks or when the latest model comes out, or whatever, you know. So
just, just, just be aware. And even if you don't change
anything, just be aware they are hacking your brain.
So whenever you decide that you want to go do something and
create instead of consume, you're going to have to
fight that addiction. That sucks. And it's hard, but you can do it
well. And I would say,
I would say that in addition to that, I would say or I would add
on that sort of the layer, the, the frosting on
that cake that Kristen has baked for us is this
if indeed the technologists that created
the phones were on the same mindset as the technologists who
are creating the robots. If indeed we do have 100,000
humanoid robots as we talked about and referenced way back in the
Philip K. Dick episode. If indeed those do get
shipped in the next five to 10 years and then we go to scale
on humanoid robots. The
dopamine inducing
behaviors that the technologists have tracked
and cataloged about us very carefully will be
imbued in those robots. And that
should be fun times for everyone. For everyone.
Yay. Back to the. Yeah,
back to the book. Back to
learning from our mistakes. Wait, learning from. Yes,
exactly. I'm
pretty sure this is a bad idea. Let's do it anyway. Let's do it anyway.
Yeah, it's fine. It'll make us
funny. We're gonna. We're gonna pick up a chapter six, the
Sunset of Mankind. Speaking of which.
So this is right where. The beginning of the book.
And. And he's looking around at where he has landed. And
this is where, by the way, we get his. We get his date. So we're
going to pick this up here. The call of the evening was upon the world.
As I emerged from the great hall. The scene was lit by the warm glow
of the setting sun. At first things were very confusing.
Everything was so entirely different from the world I had known, even the flowers.
The big building I had left was situated on the slope of a broad river
valley, but the Thames had shifted perhaps a mile from its present position.
I resolved to mount the summit of a crest perhaps a mile and a half
away, from which I could get a wider view of this, our planet, in the
year 82701 A.D.
for that, I should explain was the date the little dials of my machine
recorded as I walked. I was watching
for every impression that could possibly help to explain the condition of ruinous splendor in
which I found the world. For ruinous it was. A little way up the hill,
for instance, was a great heap of granite bound together by masses of aluminum. A
vast labyrinth of precipitous walls and crumpled heaps, amidst which
were thick heaps of very beautiful pagoda like plants. Nettles possibly,
but wonderfully tinted with brown about the leaves, incapable of
stinging. It was evidently the derelict remains of some vast structure.
To what end built I could not determine. It was here that I was destined
at a later date to have a very strange experience, the first intimation of
a still stranger discovery. But of that I will speak in its
proper place. Looking round was a sudden thought. From a
terrace on which I rested For a while I realized that there were no small
houses to be seen. Apparently the single house, and possibly even the household,
had vanished. Here and there among the greenery were
palace like buildings. But the house and the cottage, which form such characteristic
features of our own English landscape, had disappeared.
Communism, I said to myself.
And on the heels of that came another thought. I looked at the half dozen
little figures that were following me. Then, in a flash I perceived that all had
the same form of costume, the same soft, hairless visage and the same
girlish rotundity of limb. It may seem strange, perhaps, that
I had not noticed this before, but everything was so strange now. I saw the
fact plainly enough, in costume and in all the
differences of texture and bearing that now mark off
the sexes from each other. These people of the future were alike, and the
children seemed to my eyes to be but miniatures of their parents.
I judged then that the children of that time were extremely precocious, physically at least,
and I found afterwards abundant verification of my opinion.
Pause for just a moment. This is where I get the sense that Aldous
Huxley run a lot of H.G. wells work.
Because you see a lot of. You see this idea brought to his logical
conclusion in A Brave New World, which we
read. I did read during this period of time, but I did not include on
the podcast for various reasons.
Back to the book. Seeing this ease and security in which these people were listing
were living, I felt that this close resemblance of the sexes was after all what
one would expect for the strength of a man and the softness of a woman.
The institution of the family and the differentiation of occupations
are mere militant necessities of an age of physical
force, where population is balanced and abundant. Much
childbearing becomes an evil rather than a blessing to the state. Where
violence comes but rarely and offspring are secure, there is less necessity.
Indeed, there is no necessity for an efficient family,
and the specialization of the sexist with reference to their children's needs disappears.
We see some beginnings of this even in our own time and in this future
age it was complete. This, I must remind you, was my
speculation at the time. Later I was to appreciate how far it fell
short of the reality. While I
was musing upon these things, my attention was attracted by pretty little structure like a
well under a cupola. I thought in a transitory way of the oddness
of wells still existing, and then resumed the threat of my speculations. There were no
large buildings towards the top of the hill, and as my walking powers were evidently
miraculous, I was presently left alone for the first time with a
strange sense of freedom and adventure, I pushed on up to the crest.
There I found a seat of some yellow metal that I did not recognize, corroded
into places with a kind of pinkish rust and half smothered in soft moss. The
armrest casts filed into the resemblance of griffin's heads. I sat
down on it and I surveyed the broad view of our old world under the
sunset of that long day. It was as sweet and
fair as I have ever seen. The sun had already gone
below the horizon and the west was flaming gold, touched with some
horizontal bars of purple and crimson. Below was the valley of the Thames
in which the river lay like a band of burnished steel. I've already spoken of
the great palaces dotted out, dotted about
among the variegated greenery, some in ruins and some still occupy. Here
and there rose a white or silvery figure in the waste garden of the earth.
Here and there came the sharp vertical line of some cupola or obelisk.
There were no hedges, no signs of proprietary rights,
no evidences of agriculture. The whole earth
had become a garden.
H.G. wells betrays himself in
this. It is often said that man has a
God sized hole in his heart.
Christians will say this quite a bit and they will
assert from C.S. lewis on down, the apologetics, the
apologetics will, that God,
in particular Jesus, is the only thing that could fill that God sized
heart. And Wells betrays the size of his
God sized heart with this writing in the time machine. Because really what
the time traveler is looking down upon from his seat
high above the view,
he's looking down at the Garden of Eden,
at least right at the beginning. By the way,
there's always snakes in the garden, which is one thing Wells couldn't
really get his arms around. And by the way, he's got good company. Most
secular atheists, even in our own time, can't get their arms around the
concept of evil. Why is there evil? Why is there injustice? This
is the thing they think trips up believers
who have filled that hole in their heart. Oh, they, they
believe this. They believe. That's the key question that's going to
somehow have us all who do believe,
you know, hit ourselves in the head with our, you know,
palm of our hand and say, well, I could have had a V8. I never
knew I could have abandoned this God thing. Wow, I didn't
know that until you came along and exposed the idea of evil to me. Well,
the reality is that,
um, the time machine
is Wells's attempt to.
How to. Is his attempt to Try to navigate and understand the
human condition. And, you know, to do that in
a way that is explicitly anti
religion and focused on technology would have been really hard for him
in the culture that he came out of. And so he's going to put this
illusion in there and he's going to work forward from it because he knows that
it's the one that most people
are going to be familiar with. Right. It
was going to be the one that he could sell the most. It's also part
of his cultural. His cultural milieu. Right. His cultural tie.
He could no more avoid talking about or intimidate, intimating the
Garden of Eden than Ray Bradbury
could avoid intimating and talking about the Cold War and the Martian
Chronicle. Right. Or Philip K. Dick about nuclear
thermonuclear destruction in New Android Stream of Electric Sheep.
We have talked a lot about a lot of things. We haven't really talked about
time travel here, the actual mechanics of it. Now,
I understand, according to Stephen Hawking and Neil Degrassi Tyson and all the
big brains in the world, that we may potentially
maybe be able to travel to the
future like the time traveler did. But what
they propose is that according to the current laws of physics, the way we
currently understand quantum mechanics and everything else and theories
of relativity, there is no way to
go backwards. There's no way to return. There's no, as Nietzsche would
say, idea of return.
So once you go, you're basically gone.
Now they also propose that you need a machine big
enough, something with like ion engines that can really like warp a black
hole or turn something or create a wormhole of some kind,
because we actually don't have the power.
Well, as Michio Kaku would say, we're not a fourth level. We're not
a fourth level civilization yet. We haven't yet figured out how to
take the energy from our nearest star and warp it or
change it, or utilize it for our own means in a
way that could power the whole planet and all of our energy needs and still
have stuff left over, which is what he proposes fourth level civilizations do.
He says we are merely, if I remember correctly, we are merely a second level
civilization. We're still rudely pulling our modes
of energy out of the ground. Oh, you
terrible people. All right, I know. Okay,
thanks, Michio Kaku.
So I guess my, my question here is twofold.
Number one,
will we have Gardens of Edens in the future?
Like, can we get there from here? But then
number two,
can our technology get us
in time to a Garden of Eden?
No, no, I don't think so. But this will. This, this answer
really can only be. I can only answer.
It will be informed by my dearly held
religious beliefs. They're very close and it's. What,
it's so, no, I don't think so. I think, you know,
man. I think the nature
of man's fall precludes us from being
able to get back to the Garden of Eden. Right. The only thing,
you know, for, from Catholic theology
that will get us to paradise is, you know, the second coming from
Christ, blah, blah, blah. And that's all very theological, mystical. So no, I
don't think there's any. The Book of Revelations is a wild book.
Everybody should read it. So
yeah, yeah, but don't go read those. What is it? That was the 90s.
There's just a set fire. Oh, yeah, don't bother, don't bother with any of
that. Don't read the dispensationalism stuff. Don't do that. Don't do
that. You're gonna read that? No, no. So, no, I, I
don't think, I don't think there's anything humans could do. I think we're gonna keep
trying to. Especially as we become more
and more humanist. Humanistic, I don't know if that's quite the right
word, but human centered, where we just keep focusing on ourselves
and we're like, well, of course, like we could do anything. We're just going to
keep trying. So we're going to keep trying to get there and we'll do some
amazing things and we'll do some not so amazing things, I'm sure.
Because that's what's happened in the past, right? We've done some amazing things trying to
get there and we've done some not so amazing things trying to
get there until, you know, the second
Coming. Well, and so, so this makes me wonder,
right? So we talked a lot during this series of books
over the last probably month and a half. We've talked a lot about.
We talked a lot about aliens, we talked about space travel,
talked about. Now we're talking about time. Well, talk about time travel, kind of.
We've talked about, you know, the theory
put forth by Ray Bradbury in the Martian Chronicles that we
won't change Mars, Mars will instead change us.
Robert Heinlein in Stranger in a Strange Land, you know,
brings the man from Mars down to Earth. And of course, because he wrote
this book in the 1940s, the man from Mars starts a church,
which. I'm sorry, he starts a Discipline, which eventually becomes a church.
We postulated on this podcast with John Hill that he would start a political
party rather than a church if he came down these days, you know, that would
be the thing. Yeah. Because we've sublimated. Be an
influencer. Yeah. We've sublimated all of our religious impulses to politics
in. In America, which is always a good idea. Oh,
yeah, it's totally fine. Yeah. There'll be no. There'll be no negative. There'll be
no downside or suboptimal outcomes from that at all. I'm sure it'll all work out
well. Mm. Anyhow.
Anyhow. So we. And
now with. With. With the time machine.
Time travel is the ultimate manipulation that human beings are
looking for. It's the ultimate.
Other than maybe immortality, it's the ultimate thing that rich
people talk about in real terms, but they
only. I only ever hear wealthy people. And I don't mean, like a
little bit wealthy. I don't mean like the guy down the street who, like, owns
wealthy. Yeah, I'm not talking about the guy down the street who owns, like, four
Toyota dealerships and you can, like, go to your local country club and see him,
like, golfing on Thursday. I'm talking about that guy. I'm talking about, like, the
obscenely super wealthy Jeff Bezos yacht people. Okay.
They're the only ones I ever hear talking about time travel or immortality
or, you know, genetic manipulation of people in the future, you know, in the future
or now who are trying to biohack to the point about shortcuts. Biohack their
own biology. They're only people who are doing this kind of nonsense,
and it's because they don't want to outlive their money. That's really
fundamentally. They're greedy and vain. Now,
along the way to being greedy and vain, will they find some things that are
good for humanity for sure and that are marketable for
humanity for sure and that are useful
for humanity. Getting to where they need to go for sure. They're going to find
it on the way to the. There's a lot of different ways to get to
the opera, but they're going one way or the other. And time travel is one
of those things that. There's less
conversation about this in my time and in my era over the last 20 years,
when I was coming up, there was a lot of discussion about it, and then
we all sort of stopped talking about it right around September 11, and there's been
almost no talk about it ever since. And I wonder if it's
because if you go
to the future and you see that it's the same nonsense of
today. To go back to my point about Star Trek, just take it to its
logical conclusion tomorrow, and you can't get back
to warn anybody. You're stuck.
You're stuck. So the greatest time
travel show on television ever made
is Quantum Leap.
Greatest one, and I've talked about this on
the last episode and talk about it now. Quantum Leap is the greatest time
travel show on television ever made because it comes from
a simple conceit.
Dr. Scott Beckett stepped into the, you know,
the Quantum Leap accelerator and vanished.
And he had one theory. Dr. Samuel
Beckett had the theory that one could time travel, but only
within one's lifetime.
That's brilliant. And it makes perfect
sense because think about it.
You said you're in your 30s. If you were born
20 years before your birthday,
you'd be a totally different person, 100%.
And if you were 10 now, or
11, number one, you wouldn't be having this conversation. But number two, you'd be a
totally different person. Right? You can
only time travel between the year you were born
and your death year. Interesting. That's it. That's the only
time you've got. You can't go beyond those things. That's
genius. Because that speaks directly to the human condition,
Right? Because if you go past it, like if I got into a time
travel vehicle, a Quantum Leap accelerator,
which sounds like an awesome idea and went like way
past my own, my own death date, whatever that is,
and for a male of my time who was born in the year
that I was born in, I only get 72 years, according to the actuarial tape.
So. So it's currently 2025.
I am in my mid-40s. 72 is
31. 32.
31. 31 to 32 years from
now. Let's just say 30. Let's round the 75. Give me a couple extra years.
30 years from now. Okay, 30 years from now. 2025.
2050. 2055. Right. If I go past
2055, I have no anchor.
I don't know what's happening. There could be
thermonuclear war. There could be a planetary meltdown. The
entire United States could have slid off the map and no longer resist as a
geopolitical entity. Or everything could be great.
People could be like the Eloy walking around eating
whatever. Strawberries falling in their mouths. More likely than
not, of course, people will still be
manually pulling the dishes out of the dishwasher and being
frustrated that the AIs aren't doing and the robots aren't doing the things for them
that they really want to do. And people will have married robots or something. That's
more likely than not what will happen past 2055.
But you'll still have to like. You'll still have to like, write
poetry by hand because, like, the pencil is still the greatest
instrument even in 2065 that's ever been created. Okay, so I
can only travel between what year was I born? Yo. Yeah. 1979 and
2055. That's it. That's all I get. I don't get any more than
that.
That's why I think time travel doesn't work, because we actually can't
conceive because of the human condition. We can
predict that, yes, there'll be greed, vanity, deceit, hypocrisy.
There'll be all the bad stuff. There'll also be love and compassion, understanding
and empathy. But where that whack, a mole pops up.
This is why there was no black people on the Jetsons, because the people who
came up with the Jetsons couldn't conceive of that.
If they'd been born 20 years later, there would have been black people on the
Jetsons. If they born 20 years before, not
only the Jetsons would not exist. Like, the whole concept of the
Jetsons would have been like, ridiculously outrageous. And it would have had
the English people in it, probably not Americans. There you go.
Anyway, it's a theory I've got. Yeah, that's interesting.
The, the, the other, I guess con.
Concept of time travel that comes to my mind is, you
know, been since, since becoming Catholic, the
Christian theology has clarified magnificently for me. So it's, it's
really, really interesting when, you know, when Christians say, oh, God is
eternal, exists out of time. God exists out of time. Out of time. And so
that's, that's where my brain goes for time travel. Now it's like, no, we just
have to figure out how to get out of the timeline
and then be like, boop, we're going to reenter it over here. And then
we have to get back out. And then we can reenter it over here. But.
But then when you think about it that way, every, like,
I. Probably not. We probably won't be able to figure that out. God might just
be like, no, no, that would be a bad
idea. I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna quash that right
now. Gonna ixnay that right now. Right now
there are upper limits to reality. There is a ceiling to this game.
We saw this at the Tower of Babel. There's a ceiling to this game, and
it's the tower. When you touch God, right? And. And God doesn't really want
anybody to paraphrase from the old song, knocking on
heaven's door before he decides you're going to come knocking on heaven's door. Right?
And the other thing that really should break your brain,
Catholicism, Christianity, whatever you want to call it, is, is,
is, is, yes, Jesus, out of time for sure, that breaks your brain. But here's
the other thing that really breaks your noodle. Jesus or not Jesus, but God goes,
okay, I'm going to insert myself into the time stream here
in the form of a man, which is just the beginning of the outrageous
things that Christians believe. It's just the beginning. That's just.
That's the tip of the iceberg. That's. That's mildly,
moderately. That's whatever. We can deal with that. Let me really break
your brain. That then, then the son of God goes, oh, you know what? I'm
gonna die. And then in three days, I'm gonna be. I'm gonna be resurrected.
You have a good day. And by the way, all you have to do is
believe in that. And guess what? You
will. Will be saved.
And all. And all of humanity goes, excuse me, what?
And this is why I have said for a long time in my own
life, on my own journey, interestingly enough, I was raised
Catholic and then walked out of that and walked into Protestant
Christianity for a whole variety of reasons which are way beyond the pale of this
show, but walked into that. And I'm now walking through
that entire process of belief.
And, you know, I've said since the beginning,
Christianity makes the most outrageous claims of any religion on the planet. If you actually
look at its claims. And that's why it has to be true.
Has to be. Because the claims are outrageous and they require outrageous evidence, and we
have outrageous evidence, and it's just. You don't want to believe it. Well, that's okay.
It's true. True doesn't require you to believe. I think gravity. Gravity doesn't require you
to believe in it. It's just true. It just works, you know?
So go around, don't believe in gravity. Jump out the window. See how it works.
I don't know. Go ahead. Fine.
Gotta build a really expensive rocket to defeat gravity. There you go. Yep.
There's a guy around the corner from where I live. Yeah. Named
Elon. He can tell you all about that. There you go. Yeah.
Okay. You sort of wandered around the block on all this.
Yeah.
So you have young kids. I have an 8 year old.
The folks that are in that 10 and under group, Right. I think
about this book, the Time Machine, when I think about how we talk about time
travel, how we talk about memory and consciousness, how we
talk about how we anchor those ideas,
right? Utopia, Dystopia, and
the generation that is 10 and under that's being born right now and coming into
the world. Those people have zero
psychic or psychological connection to the 20th century in the way that
we do beyond
sort of the way we look at like sepia
toned pictures of our great grandparents from the old west, if we happen to have
any, right? Or like if your parents or great grand,
your great grandparents or great great grandparents came over on an immigrant boat, you know,
during the first immigrant waves in the early parts of the 21st or the 20th
century. You know those pictures of all those stiff people
standing at Ellis island, right. We have no connection to those people. And the people
who are 10 and under, they will have zero connection
to Vietnam or to Ronald
Reagan. I have little
enough connection to Vietnam. Well, well, okay,
let me, let me. Alarmingly, right. Alarmingly right. Like,
here's another one. They'll have little or no connection to September 11th or
Covid. It won't, it won't mean anything,
right? And so I
worry about this book,
right, The Time Machine. Not because I think it will fall out of favor,
but because I think that just like Martian Chronicles, it's one of those
books that's so embedded that we don't think about it. And so eventually,
at a certain point, no one will read it anymore. Like
1895 is a long way away if you were born in,
I mean, if you were born in 20, 20, 20. It's a
long way away. That's a lot of water to like step back over to
grab this book. A long way away when you were born in 1990. It is
a long way when you're born in 1990. This is the type of book that
they make you read in high school and you're like, why do I have to
read this? Why do I have to read this? It goes, right? It goes on
the pile with Jane Austen and Shakespeare. And you're like, there's got to be a
better solution. Why do I need to know about Macbeth? And so
we, we. We don't live currently as Eloys
and we don't live currently as Morlocks. That didn't play out. Maybe
metaphorically it has, but Material.
We don't live like that.
And I was promised vacations to the moon and rockets to the Mars
and I was even promised time travel by all these books. And instead I built
over 240 characters on Twitter of ransom and TikTok.
Nonsense. That's what I've been delivered. And by the way, Peter Thiel has brought this
up too. He's also frustrated about it's. At least one of the rich
guys is on my side. Like, he's frustrated by this too.
So normally when we cover science fiction, normally when we talk about these things, you
know, it goes into the speculative and it goes into the, it
goes into the sort of. I don't know where things are going to go, but
we've had some real insights in this series of podcasts that we've done this
year. So I
guess maybe my last question is for you is what are you going to tell
your kids about these books? And how
are you going to introduce. Because your, your kids are young, right? They're, they're in
that, they're in that mil you. My kid is a little bit older, but still
in that milieu. I'm currently reading Lord of the Rings to him and
he loves the hobbits. He's. Yeah, they're his, they're his spirit people.
You know, he likes the idea, but he also likes the idea of like eating
like eight times a day and stopping for, stopping
for a meal and like sitting by the side of like a ruined tower
at Orthank and having a cigar. Like, he loves all of that, you know.
So how do we give these books, how do we give this
book to our kids? How do we, how do we make it not be
Jane Austen or William Shakespeare? So this reminds me of
what was it? It was like a, a study. They were like kids
that grow up in households with books. Read
more. And I was like, yeah, because the parents are
reading. And so it's
so interesting since my housemate has moved out, we don't really have
the TV on. We don't turn the TV on.
We have like, we have two toy boxes for my.
And that even, that I'm thinking is too much for my 18 month old.
And, but, but one of them is full of books.
And when we're just hanging out in the living room, mom sits there and
reads something that's not too immersive because I have to
make sure the 18 month old doesn't care herself. But you
know, mom's sitting there with a book and
so how, how, how do I, how do I intend to,
you know, make sure my kids are reading this stuff and, and learning and
immersing themselves. I, I'm going to read it myself.
You lead by example. You lead by example.
Keep, keep yourself, keep yourself well, read. Keep yourself reading.
You know, one of my best friends who also has young kids, he's, he's thinking
the same thing. He's just made it his. And we, but like my, and
my best friends, like we grew up playing video games and I fully intend to
have my kids playing video games within reason because I think that
there's so much research on how much, how many good things video games
can teach you again in moderation. And I'm not talking about
the dumb mobile games that are just trying to get your money.
There's value even in something like Minecraft.
But that's again, beyond the pale of this, this, this show.
But you know, my kids will grow up watching me read
and already my daughter, my, she's 18 months old, but she'll go
over to pick up a book and she'll start reading it. She'll just flip the,
flip the pages if
you want readers, be a reader.
And then also. But don't flip your lid if you're
child for whatever reason because my, my, my brother
doesn't like reading and he's never been diagnosed with like
dyslexia or anything. But you know, there are kids, they're dyslexic. Like
audiobooks count. Audiobooks count.
Was that to the literature? Yeah, yeah. Exposure to literature. There you
go. I couldn't have, I couldn't have said it better myself.
So with that, like to thank Kristen Horn
coming on the show today. Thank you
for having me as always. As always. And, and with
that, well, we're.