Okay, so we started at
3556.
Okay, cool. All right.
Leadership Lessons from the Great Books podcast, episode
number 163, Martian Chronicles
with Ryan J. Stout
in three, two, one.
Hello, my name is Jesan Sorrells and this
is the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books podcast,
episode number 163.
So I was sitting at my local Walgreens
drugstore recently, waiting for my prescription to be
filled. And as I sat there watching
people frantically moving back and forth behind
the counter, no longer four feet above everybody else, they seem
to have jettisoned that now with, with modern pharmacies,
as I was watching them, you know, go back and forth, I also was
completing the last pages of the book that we
are covering today. Upon completion
of this book, I, I put it down, or I closed the cover
and sort of in a grumble, sort of with
maybe with a sigh, I just, I, I kind of thought, or I, or I
said, well, that was very Cold War ish.
And then I got up, I approached the counter, I let a
22 year old with a nose ring hand me a bag with my prescription
in it, and I went on my merry way.
Now, I'm not objecting to nose rings, nor am I objecting to Walgreens. And why
am I telling you this story? Well, I'm telling you the story because
today's book, I couldn't find a way to talk about it, a
way to get into it without consulting a friend of mine
who's been on the show before. And
that person sort of gave me some ideas, gave
me some thoughts that I'm going to be bringing here to my analysis or
to, to analysis of this book today. Part
of what defeated my attempts at analysis of this book's themes for leaders was the
fact that this book, as do all of the books on our show, this
book comes from a very specific moment in history. It
is a moment that has passed, but the
moment's ripples, or the ripple of the moment continue to
echo down through the pond of history to us,
even now, today.
Yet despite mixing metaphors, which I just did there, I am not
convinced that this book, this quote unquote fix up novel,
won't be viewed one day, maybe 25 years
from now, maybe 30 years from now. But I'm not convinced that it won't be
viewed one day as merely part of
the mass of flotsam and jetsam pushed out by the tide
coming in on the back half of the end of the last
long 20th century.
Today, on this episode of the podcast, we will rescue from the
flotsam and jetsam of the late 20th century.
Themes for leaders from a book that is quite
frankly, I think, already fading away in our
collective wisdom in America
and our collective cultural memory in the West. A book that was once
highly influential but gets mentioned less and
less more often as time goes on.
We're going to be covering the Martian Chronicles
by Ray Bradbury. Leaders.
It is good to renew one's wonder, said the philosopher.
Space travel has again made children
of us all. And of
course, as usual today, we will be joined on our show by
our co hosts, rejoining us from episode number 143 where
we tried to make sense of the poetry of the great
American free verse genius Ogden Nash, back
from his root in service of the people as a
carrier for the United States Postal Service,
back from that that duty, such as it were.
Ryan J. Stout Good afternoon, Ryan. How are
you doing today? I could not be better, thank you kindly. Been looking forward to
this and
yeah, yeah, surprised
to fall pretty deeply into to
the book pretty readily. So
let's start off with that. Normally we would start off with, you know, maybe
some reading some pieces from the book or some clips from the book. This book
is of course, as are most of the books on our show, under
copyright. So we will be reading sparingly from it. But there are a few
stories that we do want to talk about and we do want to discuss. We
will summarize certain sections of the book. There's a couple of stories that
Ryan wants to really reference and wants to really get dig into and we'll do
that. There's a couple that I really want to dig into and we'll, we'll do
that. But to open up our show or to open up sort of where
we're going to go today or set the tone maybe for where we're going to
go today. I'd like to hear from Ryan. What do you, what do you
think about the Martian Chronicles? You said that this was, this
was a really fast read for you. You kind of moved through it very quickly.
But I'm assuming you read it at one point in time in your life and
now you're reading it at another. So talk to us a little bit about the
Martian Chronicles, about your experiences with, with Ray Bradbury
because you weren't, you were not our co host when we did Fahrenheit 451.
That was John Hill. But a man is as well
versed as you in, in reading it in literature. You had to have run
across Bradbury. Before the thing that.
So it's.
He's a truth seeker. And
a lot of times artists, authors.
I believe Stephen King
references his muse as an, an angry,
short, angry Irishman
or something wearing a derby, having a cigar in his mouth,
constantly yelling at him that his. He, he's owed
pages. Yeah, he's a. And so that.
But also a truth seeker. And so
when you're able to combine so many
themes of the human condition and
spread it literally across almost a galaxy
anyway, because they reference. It's not just, it's not just Mars,
there's. It encapsulates
Jupiter and Saturn and exploration
and like I didn't know that much
about this book. I love how it's laid out in essays. I love that
form of storytelling where you're getting the insight into.
You could go long form and you
get insight into say the macro and
then you have short snippets of these,
a paragraph or two which kind of dive into
the, the micro of
philosophy and behavior and how it fits into the
larger picture and how all those things are essentially connected.
You can't, can't really remove an
entire section of history from life and say, well,
we didn't need that. Let's just connect, you know, the
1900s to, to. To the 19, you know,
75 or something like that or 1900 to 1975. So.
And interestingly enough,
thematically we're, we're seeing a lot of things that have been
repeating I think in, in, in more recent times,
very recent times. And,
and I think
it's impossible to not
see the see self reflection in
this work. I like the simple language. I
like that it's direct, it seems the first thing.
So the cold world, the Cold war.
I think I got through the first couple of paragraphs and I was like, this
is clearly a book that was written in the 50s, right? 40s or 50s
by the language. It seemed
behaviorally that it was
just, you know, very specific to that period of time.
And you know, Bradbury excelled
at expressing that and
exemplifying that period of time as well thematically throughout the book.
Well, and so one of the things we explored on our introductory
episode, which I'd recommend you go and listen to episode 162
that's out there right now. One of the things that
Bradbury was looking for in this novel. Well,
no, so he was challenged, right, by his editor to write a novel
that would be what was called or was termed
a fix up novel. Right. And so a fix up novel is
a book that is what we would call now on the
other side of the Joan Didions and the Hunter Thompsons and the Gay Talises
and the Truman Capotes of the world, what we would call
a nonfiction novel, right, which is a collection of essays that
focuses around a particular theme or a particular set of themes
back in the 40s and 50s that sort of didn't
exist other than in fiction. And Bradbury, I believe
in the Wikipedia article about this, Bradbury was quoted as saying
that immediately the book that came back to him was
Winesburg, Ohio, by Sherwood Anderson, Right.
And he really liked that book. And so he wanted to do. He was like,
he thought in his mind, I don't know, that I could ever do something that
was. That was that good, right? And so Martian Chronicles was his attempt to do
something that was that good. The other thing that we see in Martian
Chronicles is that these stories which were published in the 40s, before
they were all collected together in the 50s, were later on
utilized in different mediums in the 50s and 60s.
So a couple of these stories showed up
on the great old time radio show called
X Minus One was one of those. One of those science fiction stories.
Dimension X was another one. And so these were radio shows,
radio operas, and Ray Bradbury would write for those or he would
adapt stories, right, that he had already published in other books
or in other forms for these radio shows.
And later on when radio shows transferred to television for some of
these television shows, and then later on he would even mine his own work
in other areas for the show that was on in the.
Oh, gosh, it was in the 80s, I believe, the Ray Bradbury Theater,
which, by the way, you can check out on Amazon prime for free.
Well, not free. I mean, if you have a Prime account, you're already paying Jeff
Bezos his money, so you might as well be getting something out of it.
But my point is, Bradbury was this. Ray Bradbury
as a writer was this font of
knowledge and information because he didn't go to college, right? He, you know, he got
his college at a local library and that's where he figured out how to write.
And so you look at Martian Chronicles and you're right, it's
written in a very simple and a very
easy manner, but it's also got some
deceptively deep themes in it. So
what would you say are some of the themes, maybe some of the major
themes in the Martian Chronicles?
You know, I probably would have said something differently
than I'm going to say right now if
I just. The human, the arrogance of
this arrogance is baked
into human nature. And
I got a lot of, it's okay for me,
but it's not okay for you.
And
there's one particular part, and I. I
mentioned it earlier in
the. The off season.
Well, Sam Park. And also one of the things I really
loved was the use
of double meanings, or double
entendre, if you will, of names. And
it's not on the nose. He could have at any point,
everyone could have been referenced as,
for instance, Father Peregrine. Yeah,
Peregrine means the tendency to wander.
And then you have the peregrine falcon and also
Spender. And so
carefully selecting who
he used as. As a character to
create more depth.
And I think that helped. It helped me
relate to the characters
or at least see them as like a
complete person. And
yeah, that chapter was really upsetting.
Well, let's pull that out. So in my edition, because there's
multiple editions of the Martian Chronicles, and so the edition that I have was published,
I believe, was put together in the late 90s.
And one of the interesting things about this novel is
while the stories are, they do read as
being in a particular time frame. Right.
They are also or can be read as being timeless. And
so one of the things that was interesting when it was first published was the
dates were all projected forward to the late 1990s and
the early 2000s. And then when it was republished
or re. Released in the late 1990s, the dates were pushed
forward into. Pushed forward 25 years to where we
are today. And so I anticipate that when Martian Chronicles is
reissued probably next year, because next year is
2026, the dates will be pushed forward
yet another 25 years.
And so that's an interesting sort of
twist, right, on this novel, which
on the one hand, does allow it to be timeless, but then on the other
hand allows you to sort of see the. Allows you to
sort of see the. The threads on the baseball. Right. Allows you to see the
thread, see the movement. The story that Ryan is
referencing, the. The short story in the Martian Chronicles is from November,
or in my version, it's from November 20, New November 2005. Twenty years
ago, the off season. And a man named Sam
Parkhill, who landed earlier
on Mars with a group of folks who.
Who came to. Who came to Mars as part of the
second exploration of Mars.
Sam is a proprietor now. He's no longer an astronaut. He's a
proprietor of a. Of a hot dog
stand on the edge of the desert where he believes the
tourists will be coming. When human beings do finally arrive again
to continue to tame Mars. And that's another theme that's
in this book. And it's one that Bradbury plays with
quite a bit. One of the ones that I find to be more disturbing, actually.
And it's this idea that we believe
arrogantly, to your point, about human arrogance being baked in. We
believe arrogantly as humans that we will just go out and shape and
mold any place into our image and it will just fall to our feet.
And Bradbury starts from the premise, and you see this in all of the
stories in Martian Chronicles, particularly the early ones where the Martians are
both there and not there at the same time.
Bradbury starts from the premise that Mars
will change us more than we will change it
and that Mars will shape us and that there are things on
Mars that will impact us rather than
us impacting them. That our arrogance is
as nothing to Mars as
an ant's arrogance is nothing to us on our planet.
So Bradbury starts from this theme. He starts from this premise and by
off season, as a story plays around
with this arrogance. And so it opens with Sam, you know, sweeping out
his. His location and ranting about
Captain Wilder, who stopped him from killing Spender all those years ago.
And, and his wife is of course
nagging at him because that's the kind of wife that Sam
would marry. And then, and then
there's then. And then the Martians try to do something that's totally and
completely illogical and out of, out of step,
right? They, they. They present themselves
to. To Mr. Parkill, to Sam, and they
try to send him, or they try to make him an emissary
from, from. From them, right, to
the other. To the other humans. And the,
the apotheosis of the story really, really
comes when. Well, when they attempt to
communicate with Sam. And so I'll read this just very small
piece right here. He says,
I'm outnumbered, Elma. He cried. They'll kill me. He threw out
the anchor. He was trying to escape from the Martians that were trying to visit
him on a ship, right? It was no use. The sail flittered down,
folding unto itself, sighing. The ship stopped. The wind
stopped. Travel stopped. Mars stood still as the majestic
vessels of the Martians drew around and hesitated over him.
Earth man. A voice called from the high seat. Somewhere a
silvering mask moved. Ruby rimmed lips glittered with the words
I didn't do anything. Sam looked at all the faces. 100 and
all that surrounded him. There weren't that many Martians Left on Mars.
100150 all told. And most of them were here now,
on the dead seas in their resurrected ships by their dead chest cities, one
of which had just fallen like some fragile vass hit by a pebble. The
silverine masks glinted. It was all a mistake, he pleaded,
standing out of his ship. His wife slumped behind him in the
deeps of the hold like a dead woman. I came to Mars like any honest,
enterprising businessman. I took some surplus material from a rocket that crashed and I
built me the finest little stand that you ever saw. Right there on that land
by the crossroads. You know where it is. You've got to admit, it's a good
job of building. Sam laughed, staring around. And that Martian I know he
was a friend of yours came. His death was an accident, I assure you. All
I wanted to do was have a hot dog stand, the only one on Mars,
the first and most important one, you understand how it is. I was going
to serve the best darn hot dogs there with chili and onions and
orange juice. And he's
from New York. He's from New York City.
And I cannot think of a more American
thing, a more New York City,
Bronx thing to do is
to go to another planet and be like, this is
mine. And how American are hot
dogs? And
his wife, Elena. Who? Elma. No,
Alma. Alma, yeah. Who?
To your point, yes, that is it.
It makes, it looks perfect sense. It makes perfect sense.
And Elma is almost. She's the voice
of reason trying to. Trying to like,
hey, dude, hey, hey, you know Sam, you know,
this is. And
the jumping to conclusions, his complete
denial
of the effect that not
only he is having on the planet and the Martians,
but the human race, you know, this land is your land. This land is
my land. And
you think when he's surrounded by the 100 Martians, you
think they're gonna behave instead they, they
hand over the deed to the land, essentially. Right,
Exactly. They, they. They do the thing that.
And the analogy or the parallel. Not the analogy, the
parallel that I draw is this, to your point about him being from the
Bronx, what if the Native American tribes in Manhattan
had understood the concept of ownership enough to have a deed
when the Europeans showed up from
England or from Denmark or from
France or wherever the heck they were coming from transatlantically
and had handed the deed for Manhattan
over to the English and then
just left? And this is the thing Bradbury's playing
with. This is, this is the. This is. And by the way, Bradbury's
writing in the mid 20th century for an incredibly well, incredibly
sorry. A culture that actually knew its
history. And don't get me wrong, there's always been dumb people in our culture who
don't know history whatever. Please. There was ever a halcyon era of this,
but the, the. Well, I won't say there was never. Yes, there was ever a
halcyon era. And it was a matter of degree. The number of
people who would have caught the allusion in that story to the
Native American tribes at Manhattan would have been huge.
Among his reading public, particularly among the reading
public that really valued science fiction.
Bradbury was the first author, along with Isaac Asimov, Arthur
C. Clarke, and of course the great dean of science fiction,
Robert Heinlein, who really
took science fiction and moved it from being a genre of mere
kids stuff like Edgar rice Burroughs or H.G. wells
to being something that was more serious and more literary without
Heinlein and Bradbury and Asimov. And
you don't have Philip K. Dick, you don't have Charles Gibson,
you don't have any of those guys. Right. Even
down to today. You don't have Neal Stephenson, who's, Who's writing
science fiction novels that are like Bibles, just
squirting them out like Chiclets. Right. You don't have that.
Right. And so these ideas that,
that Bradbury's playing with were ideas designed
to bring along. To sneak along science fiction
and move it from the bottom pulp shelf into the top, the
top shelf of, of of literature in, in the mid 20th century.
By the way, the story ends, just so you know, and this is no spoiler
alert. Book's been out for 80 years. You can go find this. But
the story ends with the first, the first major
apocalypse that occurs in the book. That's what I.
Yeah, yeah, but the apocalypse observed
not from on Earth, but the apocalypse observed for
Mars. And of course, Elma, in all her
helpfulness, picks up a toothpick, starts
picking her teeth and says, well, you know, this will be a really bustling,
A really bustling location, a really bustling place
in about a million years.
And before that, Sam is going on. He's like, I
think directly he says, think of it. A hundred thousand
Mexicans just kind of out of
nowhere and then inciting. That's the particular race.
And the only time that
it is, at least this is how I read it. Like
the godlessness of the Earth people.
Yes. And the spiritual connectivity to. To the land
and each other on Mars is.
Is why I would think people would want to go there
because they're escaping Earth because Of X, Y and Z. Right.
Capitalism or social unrest or,
you know, whatever people want their. I think there's freedom. They
talk about freedom early in the book. And,
and to leave a dying
planet to
kill another planet in
what, a. In a fraction of the time? Well,
it opens up the question for me on this book.
And, and, and, you know, the question is, and I think this is the
core question, forget, are we alone in the
universe? Forget the whole Carl Sagan, big brain, Neil
DeGrasse Tyson, are we alone in the universe? Question.
That's boring. The core question for me is, are we
alone in the neighborhood? Like, the
neighborhood has nine planets. It's a small
neighborhood. I'm not really worried about what's happening
on Alpha Centauri, just like I don't think anybody on Office Centauri is
worried about what's happening here. If there is anybody there to worry,
even if they have a conception of worry in the same human way that I
worry, why would they? Right. Okay. I'm
more concerned or interested, depending upon your perspective
on
Jupiter's not. Or. I'm more interested in the idea, and
I think Bradbury was as well. I'm more interested in the idea of,
of is Jupiter empty
or is there something there? Because the neighbor
who's the, the neighbor who's in the projects next door to
me worries me more than the neighbor that lives in Kansas that
I've never met. And this is also part of the
conceit that, that Bradbury, that Bradbury
plays with one of the other things that jumps out to me about the book.
And I don't know if you'll. I don't know if you'll agree about this, but
I'm a. I'm a science. I'm a space travel guy. I'm
fascinated by it. Star Trek, Star Wars, I love all that crap. Right?
I've talked about some of that on this podcast before.
I. I
think that the linking, the
inextricable linking of exploratory space travel to
the whims of public policy and the vagaries of geopolitics
500 years from now or 200 years from now will be viewed. Will be
viewed by people who. We will be long dead. You and I will be long
dead. And this podcast will be dust on the Internet. It
will have been taken down by Google. It will no longer be up. No one
will care. People will have moved on. Right?
But that act will be
viewed as probably one of the most fundamentally
illogical acts of the late 20th century.
The. The attaching of something so.
A vision so big to something so small. And to your point,
it dovetails with that idea of human arrogance.
It dovetails right in there. Because our geopolitics should of course run our space
travel. Of course we should be like competing with the Russians
or whatever.
There is.
So we talked about. And this is. So the first
Captain and Spender
are the redeemable characters. Yes, yes, they are.
And I mentioned
spirituality in those two characters. You see
that there is. They're not godless. No.
Whereas rest of the characters, I mean when they're yee. Hauling and whooping
and talking about drinking wine by the canal
and I'm gonna go party. I've earned it. I came here from
Texas, blah, blah, blah. And you earned. What did
you earn? It's a kind of. And
it's this like self importance
and,
and the prancing through the towns,
breaking glass breaking, all this beautiful artwork
and, and, and Spender especially seeing
the connectivity between the, the spirit connection between
the, the Martians, the planet, the Earth, how they've
integrated art into nature, into. They've combined
science, art and nature and into
a harmonious sort of collection of
really a lot of the things that. That matter
and.
Well, okay, so that, that opens up the door to this question then.
Is it, will it ever be worth it for
people from Earth to go to Mars? Like I think about, I think, I think
about, I think about people like, like my wife, My wife does not care
about Mars. Like she would be in the
Ray Bradbury story. She'd be one of those people that. He doesn't write about the
die of the nuclear war. Right. Or that
didn't get into the rockets. Like the, the most heartbreaking
story is the one.
Well, no, there's two stories. So the most fascinating story for me we could
talk about this one is, is the one where
all the black people get, get this, get their.
They get all their stuff together and, and they get the heck out of town
and, and way in the middle of the air. June
2003. That's interesting. We're going to talk about that one
because for me, as a person who has a high melanin content
and lives in the United States of America, I found that one to be quite
interesting. But the most heartbreaking story
was the one that closes out the volume
in August of 2026. The million year Picnic
with the kid who doesn't understand. No. Who
understands only that he has to hold together
his dad. Right? He feels like he has to hold together his dad.
But then there's a turn where the power shifts,
right? And now his dad is holding him together, right?
Because he. The full. The full weight of the
realization that we can't go home again. You actually
can't go home again. There's no home to go back to
because a second apocalypse has occurred, right? A second atomic war has occurred.
And now Mars is the only place you got.
There's nothing else left, Right. There's nowhere to go back to.
There are people like my wife and many others
who do not give a tinker's damn about Mars
and won't leave the Earth even if you paid them. And I think there'll always
be those people, right? But then there are the people
who do want to go and who do want to go
there. And they will come in a wide variety of
personalities and positions. They will come like Sam
Parkhill and Spender and the
Captain, but they'll also come like the senator and his
wife and his sons. They'll come like
the guy retire to retire, right? The retirees who
came there and saw their dead child. Right? Because the Martians are going to screw
with you, right? Or they're going
to come like, case in point, they're going to come like the black people
just escaping oppression. Which, by the way, one of the questions I
had, sub question underneath. We should answer this first one. Is
it going to ever be worth it to go to Mars? Sub question, did the
black people. When the first nuclear war happened and the Earth sent out
the signal for all the people to come back, why did all the black people
go back? Bradbury never answers that question. Or did they? He
never answers that. He just sort of leaves it open for you to, like, speculate
on. Because I wouldn't have gone back. I'd have been like, no, we got the
rocket, we tore that sucker down. We set up a hot dog stand. Actually, we
didn't set up a hot dog stand. We set up a soul food stand over
there. Ribs? Yeah, Martian ribs
right from the canal over there. Sounds awesome. We
barbecued and slathered those little babies. Greatest thing ever. Come
on, brother, let's have some ribs. Why would I go back home
to what? So first
question. Is it ever going to be worth it for us to go to
Mars? That's a lot of trips to Home Depot.
It is, yeah. Or Lowe's or whatever. Whatever.
I mean.
Because this is the. I mean, this is. This is the problem that everybody has
with Elon Musk talking about SpaceX. Everybody who's opposed to
him won't say this. They Won't say it out loud.
They don't have the guts to say it. But what they want to say is
we don't think that what you're privately spending your money on, along with
technology, taxpayer dollars for sure, but what you're spending your money on is worth
it. We do not think that there will be a benefit for this. You should
stop. They won't say that out loud. They coach it in other terms like,
oh, he should spend his money on feeding poor kids in India
or fixing the environment or I don't know,
making a longer lasting light bulb. Anything but this thing
that we don't think is worth anything. I was so was
watching Roman. I can't think of his name. He's a PhD. He is
an AI. You may know who I'm talking about. He's an AI.
Safety. Oh yeah, okay. And so
he was saying, you know,
so the interview I was watching, the host was holding up signs with
just little, little, little signs with dates on them, like 2035,
2045, 2070, something like that. And
the host said, what do you think it's going to be like in, you know,
20, 2027? And then
he projected a little bit, he's like, you know, of course this is just my
opinion. I can't see that. And then when
he got into like 2050, he said, I, I,
I, he said it is so far out of
the scope of what I
can even relate to because everything
might be different, Everything, people might be hat machine.
People may not be around. So to project on
how society is going to function in something like 40 years from now, 30
years from now, 25 years from now, is so far
out of the purview of what we have experience as
human beings live in an analog life primarily.
And technology is evolving. I
mean. But we have tech, but we
have technological sophistication. And yet this is where I would push back on
him. I would say we have technological sophistication, sir, you're
absolutely correct. But we have massive levels in the west of
cultural barbarity.
I think that will last with us. I think the cultural barbarity will last with
us. And so that when
I think of Elon Musk in that, I think, let's just
face it, he might be a little more intelligent than most people. Sure,
yeah. I'll grant you. And so if, if he
runs the algorithm all the way out, or he runs it all the way out,
and this is kind of the conclusion he came to.
I'm not gonna, like, I kind of have no
opinion on it as far as, like,
the success of what that mission would look like, terraforming and
colonizing another planet. But
I also don't know. And he probably
has a. Maybe has a better idea.
And one of the things I wanted to. Okay. Is it worth it? So
I think that we would have to, as a species,
almost
eliminate violence as a gratuitous
response to
any malady when confronted with something we
don't understand or. Or can't
relate to. Okay. And that would be
Martians living on Mars, living in crystal
castles and having you.
Do you know what I'm saying? It's. Yeah, I think we would
need to be more spiritually evolved or.
And because. So I have a question. So if we
were more spiritually evolved in this book and these. And they
encountered, would the Martians be playing jokes on them if they
were. If, you know, if, If a thousand
Buddhist monks would. Would
Martians be like, completely.
So. So here's an idea that we explored in our Stranger in the Strange Land
episode with John Hill. You should go back and listen to that episode. If you
haven't. I'm sorry, I sent a. I sent a link to. Sent a link to
Ryan. I don't know if you've taken a listen to that yet. But one of
the ideas that we explored because Heinlein. So I look at the book Stranger
in a Strange Land as the logical sort of.
And this is why we're doing them together, the logical
follow up to the Martian Chronicles.
So the Million Year Picnic happens.
The kids grow up and Earth
gets put back together somehow because there's always gaps
and they bring the kid back and the kid is the man from
Mars and he could do all these things and he could be all these
things. And he sets up in part
three of Stranger
in a Strange Land, he sets up a discipline which
is eventually is referred to as. Or becomes a
church in the book. Now, in that
episode, we. I, I made the point with John Mountain, with John
Hill, that, that
the. If that book were updated to today, the man from
Mars would start a political party because we've replaced religion
with politics. I know from some professional
therapists that I, that I talked to who are part of my, my inner
circle, that a child's
first political identity is forming right around ninth grade. Now, which
is absolutely insane to me. That's absolutely nuts.
But that's because we have a meaning problem in our
society and culture, which of course ties into the competency crisis which you and I
were talking about. A different kind of context, right Both those things link together. They're
not independent. Right. And so to your point about
spirituality, one of
the interesting things, if you research conspiracy theories
as I want to do, is that
there are aliens that have visited our planet, but that they are not
physical beings, they are spiritual beings,
and that they are trying to communicate with us or raise us to
a higher spiritual plane. Because the fact of the matter
is that in the material universe that we see as planets,
most of what exists on those planets are spiritual entities, not
physical ones. This is a deep
conspiracy theory. This goes beyond David Icke and the reptilian
lizard people and into a whole bunch of different things like the Grays
and then the Illuminati and the Anukai and
Egyptians and a whole bunch of like Fox Mulder X file stuff that I
can't even get into. So there's always been this tension
between the material manifestation of a planet that appears to
be dead and this idea.
You, you came to it through violence. But this idea that there is something
spiritually wrong in the human psyche,
that's beyond just arrogance that needs to be corrected
before in essence, the training wheels can be taken off
and we can join everybody else, right?
And I always say to that, and this is why I brought in
Heinlein and conspiracy theories and all this, this is, I always say
to this, I always say this.
I don't know where we're at on cultural evolution, but
I do know this on spiritual. We ain't there yet.
I mean, our pineal gland has been shrinking for the last thousand years.
I mean, there's there and, and
I mean that's, that's. I mean, were we at once, point, one point,
telepathic? I mean, I don't think it's beyond the
reason. I mean, they're starting to see in certain children
with autism that there's, there's
a, there's a telepathic quality that they exhibit
that, you know, if you see that's all. That's, that's some sci fi stuff.
But that's also same thing. It's like, is it sci fi stuff
or is it so far away from what
we think is even physically or mentally
possible that you immediately brush it out of the
well? So there's a, there's an idea and, and this goes to the second
piece of it. Prepping for a future you don't understand, right? So
you talk about predictive on AI and everybody's going crazy about AI right now,
right? And the singularity is near and da da da
da. Okay, well, the reality
of artificial intelligence is this. It's artificial and it
ain't intelligent. I use a lot of it in my day to day. I do.
I use a lot of it with clients. It's artificial, it ain't intelligent. It's only
as good as the prompts that I put in into it. And I'm not scared
of it. As a matter of fact, I'm one of those crazy people who says,
let it all out. Don't hide anything. Let everything out. And by the
way, don't just let it out to like us first, first world Americans
who have the technology and the technological infrastructure to handle it. No,
no, no, no. Let it out to everybody from like the lowest
homeless person on the street to the Pope in Rome. Let
everybody have a shot at it. Because here's the thing. I'm going to bet we're
going to break that thing in about 10 minutes
and it's going to be some kid in Mumbai. Yeah. Yes. That's gonna break that
thing in about 10 minutes. Yeah, you've seen that. You've seen the kid in
Africa who's building transistors that are old hubcaps and
wire that he found on the ground. Like it's. There you go.
Yeah. To think that we can
even really even know almost. I don't want to say
anything, but that's something that's so far out of what is
what is currently. Well, we don't. Right.
Well, we. Well, we don't. Right. Like, like one of the greatest shows. I mentioned
this in our, in our conversation. Right. One of the greatest shows that's on, that
was ever on television was Quantum Leap. And
the premise of that show is very simple. You get
into the Quantum Leap chamber and you vanish. Right?
Except here's the thing. You could travel through time, but
you can only travel through time in your own lifetime.
And there's a certain conceit in that. That's brilliant
because Scott Bakula. Great, great. By the way,
the NBC tried to relaunch Quantum Leap and it didn't work.
I watched like two, four episodes of the new season, like from like two years
ago, and I was like, yeah, forget this. And then I left.
But the, the conceit of that is genius because here's the reality.
And it goes a little bit to what the AI Ethicist was saying about predictions.
If you were born, think about your own life, right? If you were born
20 years before you were actually born, so think about your birth date and
then they could go back 20 years. If you've been born 20 years before then
you'd be a totally different person. Even with all of the things that
have happened to you in your life, everything but
you, you wind that clock back 20 years. Now you're a
totally different person because you're coming up under totally different circumstances.
Now think about the year you were born in and wind that clock
forward 20 years. You're also a
totally, completely different person. For one, you're 20 years
younger, but
you also came up in a totally different kind of social
culture, spiritual culture, psychological culture. 20 years,
we don't think as humans at 20 years makes that much of a difference.
But Bradbury understood that it did. Right? And it does make
a bit of a difference, actually makes a lot of a difference. So
I say that to say this, we've lived
through four major technological revolutions since the 1990s,
four big ones, and I can name them off. We lived through the Internet.
The Internet was going to change all of our lives. And to a certain degree
it has. I would put the Internet up there with the printing press is
probably the most revolutionary thing that we've ever done as human beings. So we've got
the Internet. Then social media was going
to change my entire life. Except the reality is it hasn't really changed my entire
life. It's really just made the parts of my life that were
interior, now exterior. And that hasn't really changed anything
for me. There's still knuckleheads on Facebook, Marketplace, the way they were on
Craigslist were creeping around on chat boards back in the day.
Yahoo. Chatbots. So like that really. But okay, Internet, social media, that
was, that was the second revolution. Third major revolution was
cryptocurrency, Bitcoin. Okay, Remember when all that started, right?
Blockchain, bitcoin, crypto. And this is gradually
starting to move its way through the system. I do think in 20 years
Bitcoin will be in crypto. Cryptocurrencies, not necessarily bitcoin, but
cryptocurrencies of some form or another will be commonplace. But it's,
it was a slow moving revolution and now we're into the fourth one.
And this is the AI thing, right, that's being plugged to
us, right? So Internet, social media, crypto and AI.
And
if I had woke up, if I had, if, if you had woken me up
and told me in 1989 when I was like 10 years old
that those are going to be the four major revolutions of my time,
I, number one, I wouldn't know what the hell you were talking about. And number
two, I Wouldn't have believed you. And number three, I would have
gone back to, I don't know, playing Legos or trying to watch GI Joe or
something. Right. So
I guess maybe the question is,
do science fiction writers have a better handle on predicting the future than the
rest of us because they're just creative? Or.
Or is it more that because they're open and free thinking,
they place less boundaries on the spirituality of the human
condition. I think that
writing and reading so much because, I mean, most.
Most writers are, you know, voracious readers
or. And are just taking notes all the time. And
I think when someone is
plugged in to history,
because so I would. 80% of
writing is research.
And through the research
is where I kind of come up with ideas and you make
connections. And so
example, when I was in college, I
figured out at some point that because of
time and the classes I was taking, this
is why I only had to study one subject.
I figured out how to combine
the crossover in subjects with whether it be
English, psychology, public relations.
There's a thread that goes through all those. And what I was thinking Spanish
in college. I mean, you could. Even if you got the right
book
to help link those things together, you can kind of study.
All can study multiple ideas at
the same time because there's so much crossover. So it's not necessarily the
details of the information. It's.
It's seeing it. It's. It's like pattern detection
and understanding how. And. And seeing how it
applies to almost each generation or
each, Each period of time that it's coming from and how it's
relevant in.
And I think that's. I mean, that's what this book does. That's what it's. There's
a timelessness to this because you see the human
arrogance. You see, you know, the displacement. You see the
disregard for nature. You see the,
the, the. The disregard for
caring, just caring almost because
it's, you know, Park Hill yells, this is all mine.
This is, you know, like, I did this and whatever. It's like, did
you. You know, and that's. Someone told me years
ago there was. And this. There's some truth. But like in
aa, you know, and I know publicly,
but it. AA is. Someone told me years ago, it's like
it works so well to help people stop drinking
that the people, like, people started to think
they did it. All right. Okay. Yeah. And so
it's like, wait a minute. You're kind of disconnected from reality, because
I need to be the center of the universe, and so I am
the master of my domain and X, Y and Z. However, the
freedom, as you know, the freedom comes in
surrendering. Right? Yeah. And so
if that's what the Martians do,
they give them the deeds. They don't surrender in
the sense of militarily. They surrender
I think because they have enough foresight
to understand that it's not going to be worth their time.
And you're talking to interplanetary. So this is. I haven't shared
this with anyone but years
ago I had a. As. As
maybe when. So I, I started doing a. I did a
paper at Rutgers on. On.
It was something within environmentalism
and global warming. Sumatra and Borneo
and that entire area of the world.
And so I started doing a lot of research
like doomsday environmentalists. There's been people since the
60s saying there's only 10 years left, there's only 10 years left.
And they're almost pissed off when they're wrong
because they're completely null and void. Their entire identity and
their worldview investing so much in something
that is impossible to predict.
And, and it gives people an identity. And once.
You'Re. Yeah, yeah, you remove an identity from someone
then it's. I mean they're grasping at straws. You see people in
this book as they're this.
There's a few characters who. They start to lose it.
They're talking to themselves, they're talking to. And it's because
the reality is not necessarily
linked to any. Any foundational. And this is where the
spirituality comes. And this is where. That's why I brought up
the Buddhists and going to. Because if Buddhists met that first group
of Martians and it was because
they seem for all intents and purposes like almost like a wealthy. And the great
ones, the spear orbs and that it seems
like they were way more willing to kind of accept people
in. And the reason that they were shape shifting and.
And doing that stuff was to help bring
light and to the dysfunction of
the society they were leaving and recreating on another planet. Although
the Martians.
Well, it's interesting that you. It's interesting that you bring up the Buddhist because you
just clicked over something in my head. So Bradbury
is writing these stories and projecting forward into the future in the 40s and the
50s. Right. And even into the 60s. And that is during a
time of particular. Particularly Post World War II
is a time of particular cultural and social
conformity that occurred at a
level that both the naive of our time who would like to
return to that era misunderstand as
well, as the rebellious of our time, who are consistently
fighting against that error in their heads, also misunderstand.
Right. So they both miss both the rebellious and the naive miss this.
And Bradbury, along with many other writers, was. Was writing in
opposition to this conformity which this
cultural suffocation came from, in
their opinion. And by the way, this is not just Bradbury. Heinlein was writing in
this MO Too, came from the
presence of American evangelical Christianity,
the consistent boogeyman underneath everybody's bed.
And the assumption, of course, that Bradbury is
writing with is that American astronauts
or settlers going to Mars will have a default of
evangelical Christianity inside of them.
And, and I want to laugh because
as I said on the Stranger in a Strange Land episode,
the American evangelicals have lost the argument.
They're not a cultural power in America. It only took 80 years.
It took 80 years of revolution and rebellion and banging on them, calling
out hypocrisy. And sure, you could talk about regions in the country
maybe, and sure, you can make whatever allusions you want to make to
political parties and whoever's in the White House, but the
fact of the matter is that with the death of the Moral Majority at the
end of the 90s, we have now been 25 years away
from Christianity having any cultural weight in the
United States. So we are far more likely to
send to Mars a
person who has the. The. The
positioning of a secular
atheist Darwinist as their default
setting without even thinking about it. Then we do a
person who has a default setting of American fundamentalist
evangelical Christianity. That's number one. Number two in
Stranger in a Strange Land, by the way, Heinlein took on this directly.
He goes, of course, directly after all this with the foster rights and all that.
But it's interesting. He picked the Muslim,
curiously enough, and we talked a lot about this on that episode, so I don't
want to revisit that. But he picked the Muslim as a person who was willing
to renounce Islam and go join the man from Mars in
his discipline. Right? Except the reality
is, again, 80 years down the road.
That ain't anyone.
That's not what's going on. And that's not. I mean, look,
hey, look, you know what? Maybe I missed it, but the
last imam I heard from in, in
the Netherlands and in London was cocking and crowing
about how they're going to be having the call to
prayer all over Europe in the next 10 years.
And, like, everybody's just going to bend the knee from
England all the way. All the way, you know, east to Germany.
So. You bring up
Buddhism. That's interesting. I don't think the Germans
are gonna. Well, they're. There's
a lot of. There's a lot of cultural. There's a. So. So what. What you
are seeing what is happening at a. At a larger geopolitical level.
And I don't want to go too deep into this because there's a part of
the book I really want to get to before we close our. Our conversation today.
At a larger geopolitical level. What you see happening with.
Particularly with migration and things like that that are happening around the world in
opposition to migration is you are seeing an equal and
opposite reaction to the position of political
elites who believe that one human being is just as good as
another human being in one place or another. It doesn't matter.
And the people are pushing back on this, saying, no, no, no, no, no, no,
no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I come from a particular
place. To your point about human arrogance, I come from a particular place that has
particular identity with particular traditions, particular duh, duh, duh. And if you try to
erode that from me, I'm going to say no.
Whether that's good or bad, we can argue that we could. That's probably a discussion
worth having. But that's the grounding force. That's the foundation,
right? That's the grounding force. Correct? Right. The grounding force for a
Martian, to your point, and Bradbury got this, the grounding force
for the Martian is something totally different, just like the grounding force for a
Venusian or the grounding force for a Jupiterian or the grounding
force for a Saturnian. Right. I'm more curious
about who's in my neighborhood than I am
about who's on, like, dark matter star number 99
somewhere. Because those people in my neighborhood, I don't
know their grounding. I don't know what the grounding is of people on Mars. I
don't know what the grounding is of people on Saturn or on Jupiter. I don't
know what the grounding is of whatever spiritual entities may be
floating around Neptune. Right. Like,
I don't know what their spiritual grounding is. I don't know what their physical grounding.
I don't know if they have any. I don't even know if I can communicate
with them in a meaningful way. And
so all of this comes in, and I agree that
if we'd sent Buddhists, if
Bradbury had sent Buddhists to Mars, maybe the outcome would
have been different. Or maybe the human grounding
that appears different to us and all these identities isn't really that
different at all. And maybe that's part of what Bradbury is getting to. I don't
know. Okay. Yeah. No, I mean that. It's. I was
watching an interview the other day and, and you know, it's, it's,
you know the argument of, like, it's, it's the, it's all the same
God. Right? Yeah. Okay. It's just, you know, it's not, it's. It
ain't me. Right? You ain't God. I'm not God. Like
there's something. And, and that's it. And, and,
and grocking that point
to not to Highland is.
That's a wonderful place to meet is like, I, I believe in a
spiritual entity. I believe in a higher power that is not me.
And instead of saying, well,
you don't work on Sunday,
I don't work on. Or I don't work on Saturday, you don't work on Sunday,
like that doesn't become a point of
contention. It's just a, A little matter
of shift in perspective or the details a little bit different.
And if it was sort of opened up a little more and that
was the start of the conversation, I don't think the differences would be so
harmful. Right, right. Or so, or perhaps even maybe so
stark. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.
So there is a piece in here that I want to, I want to get
your, your thoughts on. So. Way in the middle of the air.
So in my edition, it's June 2003.
And this is the, this is the, this is the story
of. Well, it's a story of an exodus such as it were
speaking about. Leaving.
Yeah, go ahead. So the thing that I, I,
I didn't share. So
a few years ago, the, you know, the, the global warming, blah, blah.
I started to think, wait a minute.
Humans. Or I'm gonna say because humans. Because we could be, we could be
relatives of. Who knows? Okay.
Yeah. So whatever that was,
let's just say here. So humans did to Venus
what we're doing to the Earth now.
And maybe before the Earth
was terraformed and water and had an atmosphere, the
Venusians went to Mars.
Oh, yes, I've heard this before. Yes. And so. And then you
burn Mars out and then Earth is ready and we're.
Well, and in that case, I mean, I've, I have heard that before. You're not
the first person I've heard that from. And in that case, I always say, well,
we better get to Step it on Jupiter, then,
like, we better get. We forget Mars. Like that. That's. Please, like.
And that's where. Like, what is it? It's not 2001. 2000. Is
it 2010? It's 2010 where he winds up on
Jupiter, right? I think it's 2010.
It's one of those 2001 Space Odyssey sequel
books that Arthur C. Clarke wrote. It's either 2010 or
2040 where he winds up on Jupiter or they go
to the outer planets or something. Because the
original Dave with the monolith somehow
goes inside the monolith. I might be confusing the Kubrick movie with the book. I
might be. I might be merging those two things in my head. But I know
at some point Arthur C. Clarke had that
had humans voyaging to Jupiter
and either planning to put a probe on
Jupiter to terraform the planet or
trying to terraform one of the moons. Can't remember.
But it'll come back to me. We'll be on Europa in no time. Yeah, yeah,
yeah. It'll all work out. Or IO maybe. I hear that's a volcanic
planet. It might be warm enough for life. Might actually be water underneath
there. So, yeah. So I want to pick this up
again as we round the corner towards the end of our conversation today. This is
from way in the middle of the air, a story that is. That, for me,
is quite unique in science fiction. I've
read a fair bit of science fiction. I've watched a fair bit of science
fiction. And science fiction always struggles, with the exception of Star Trek, that's the
outlier, tends to struggle with, well,
race. Also class.
But primarily in an American context. Most American
science fiction tends to struggle with race. What are all
these racial groups going to do? How are they going to engage in the technology?
And Bradbury came up with a clever conclusion. And this was part of it.
So let me read. Let me just read a few pieces of this.
Far up the street, the levee seemed to have broken. The black warm waters
descended and engulfed the town. Between the blazing white banks of the town
stores, among the tree silences, a black tide flowed like
a kind of summer molasses. It poured turgidly forth upon the cinnamon dusty
road. It surged slow, slow. And it was men and women and horses
and barking dogs and it was little boys and girls. And from the
mouths of the people partaking of this tide came the sound of a river, a
summer day river going somewhere, murmuring and irrevocable. And in
that slow, steady channel of darkness that cut across the white glare of day were
touches of alert white, the eyes, the ivory eyes staring
ahead, glancing aside as the river, the long and endless river, took itself
from old channels into a new one for
various and uncountable tributaries and creeks and brooks of color and motion. The parts of
this river had joined, becoming one mother current and flowed on and
brimming the swell where things carried by the river, grandfather
clocks chiming, kitchen clocks ticking, caged heads screaming, babies
wailing and swimming among the thickened eddies where mules and cats
and sudden excursions of burst mattress springs floating by,
insane hair stuffing sticking out and boxes and crates and pictures of dark
grandfathers in oak frames, the river flowing on,
flowing it on, while the men sat like nervous hounds on the hardware porch,
too late to mend the levee, their hands empty.
Samuel T.S. wouldn't believe it. Why the hell where'd they get the transportation?
How they going to get to Mars? Rockets, said
Grandpa Quartermain. All the damn fool things.
Where'd they get rockets? Saved their money and built them.
I never heard about it. Seems these kept it a secret.
Worked on the rockets all themselves. I don't know where. In Africa, maybe?
Could they do that? Demanded Samuel T. Pacing about the porch.
Ain't there a law? It ain't as if they're declaring war,
grandpa declared quietly.
This is one of the more stunning stories in the history of science fiction.
It's. It's subtle. It's very
subtle. Yeah, even though it's, it's, it's, it seems kind of like,
like really obvious. But there's so many subtleties
within that little bit that you read.
It is. And then, you know, you go into the the one of the
men having an objection, you know, the objection of the overseer over the
slave realizing that the slaves could just leave, but not just leave and go to
the well, as Chris Rock might joke. But leave the and not
just leave the plantation and go someplace else on the same continent. No, no, no,
no no. Not just that. No, no no no. The the
slave is leaving the planet. The the
imagery that came into my head because I'm currently
in my Bible in a year reading. I'm currently, for better or
worse, trapped in the book of Ezekiel
in the Old Testament. This will be my third or fourth time
through the Bible in a year. I recommend everybody do it. Even if
you don't believe, just get the book under your belt. It's good to get the
book under your belt. But. But I'm reminded of
the Exodus, how the Exodus is described in the Old Testament,
right, where there's a great line in the
Exodus where basically the Egyptians
throw gold and jewels and baubles
and stuff at the, at the, at the Jewish, the Israelite slaves
as they literally walk out of town. And of course,
you know, just as in previous
tales referencing other things.
The. Allusions in this story are to the
exodus of the Jewish people from, from
Egypt. And Bradbury would have known that his audience would have recognized those
illusions or would have, or would have at least caught on to them because we
had a more bibly literate country at that time. Whether they, whether people
believed in it or not is a whole different thing altogether. But they, they were
biblically literate. They knew the stories. Right. As an
underpinning to make references to other things. Okay, well,
it's interesting to note that he combines this
together with his thoughts on
segregation, on oppression, on
slavery, on black and white relations.
And of course the story ends with
the rocket closing up and everybody, all the black people
just taking off and leaving.
And of course for me, the
irony in this story is Bradbury doesn't write a follow up to it. As a
matter of fact, in most of the other stories that follow on in the novel,
he doesn't even make a reference to it. Yeah, yeah, it's gone.
It's gone. It's completely gone. Well,
I mean, is that, I mean, is there, I mean the,
the like Moses was, it was a call in. Oh,
he was. And
so when you said, you know, you, you know, you personally would have stayed if
you were. Oh yeah, there. So you're right, he doesn't
write another thing. So you don't know. There could, there could have been a calling
to go back to, to go back to Earth for some,
you know, particular. Right,
but like why would you. Well, why. And I give it.
Even if. Let's, let's, let's be. Remember I said the whole thing about Quantum leap,
right? 20 years one way, 20 years the other. Okay, so I
was born
15 years. Year. No, 10 years.
10 years. I was born 10 years after the height of the civil rights movement.
10 years after
that is enough time with enough things having changed to
where now that was when I was born. To where, When I came of
age. Right. Or came into my manhood 10 years after.
20 years after that I was there. Right,
exactly. The, the, the,
the results of the civil rights movement
had, had flowed down to me.
Right. But the, and we explore this
sometimes when we, when we read books during Black History Month.
The, the, the, the I can appreciate the
energy of the folks who came before. But I got bigger
problems right now, right? I got to deal with. I don't have Eldridge Cleaver
problems, let's put it that way. Right. I got different kinds of problems, right?
And if I'm on Mars and my, my mother or my
father left Earth 20 years ago.
What are the. What's. Yeah, what's. What's that going to look like? What's that going
to look like? And of course, Bradbury is. Bradbury is mute on this and again,
curiously mute because, like, he references. So remember
the story of the man who, after the first exodus away from Earth,
he finds the one telephone that works on Mars
and he answers it. And then he goes and meets the woman.
Genevieve. Genevieve, right. It turns out Genevieve is a mess.
He gets in his car and drives. As fast
as he can. He drives 10,000 miles away.
And then later on, later on he is referenced in a
story where
like a third expedition comes to Mars and
they, they find him and he's. He's on a rocking chair in the middle of
a long abandoned superhighway. And they ask him, do you want to be picked up
and taken to the other side of the planet? And he goes, nope, I'm
fine.
Oh, by the way, I cracked up. I did. I cracked up. I.
And, and again, Bradbury is visiting something. He's visiting a
theme about male and female relationships, right? Even on
a dead planet that is absolutely, positively
abandoned. Even
if you're the last woman on Earth. I wouldn't. Or
a Mars. The last one on Mars. I would not entertain saying the idea
of. Yeah, that's. That's pretty powerful, man.
That's. That's pretty powerful. I gotta admit, I did. I cracked up
laughing. I did. I cracked him laughing.
Because it's so. It'S so raw to the truth
of interpersonal, you know, relations
between men and women. And then he
goes raw to the truth on the exodus part, right.
Of interpersonal relationships between the races, particularly
in a, in a, in a, in a historical time. That's
a historical snapshot. But then he
has no follow up to that. And I don't know why. I would love to
ask him. I would have loved to have asked him this, you know, or
maybe he did try to revisit it, but he couldn't find another way in. I
did read that when he wrote that short story, he had seen an
article about something that had happened in the segregated south that, like,
drove him crazy. And he sort of wrote it in, like,
one fell swoop and got it out and then it appeared in this
collection or he included it in this collection as part of this
fix up novel. And maybe he never really, to
your point about Stephen King earlier, maybe he was never able to really revisit that
emotional, that emotional push again. Maybe it was just a
one shot deal, I don't know. And, and you
have no idea how it could have like you were talking about, affect him emotionally,
right? It could, I mean it could have been so
devastating on some level that you know what? I don't want to, I don't want
to, I don't want to go into that place again because of how it
affected other areas of my life. Because it's, it's such, it can be such a
mirror. Right. And I mean writers generally speaking are
kind of, you know, sensitive people and
I don't know, there's, there's a lot of variables that could have been in play.
Yep. Yep. All right, well, we gotta, we've talked for
a little while. We gotta, we gotta wrap up here. I've got other things I've
got to do. You've got other things you've got to do? I gotta go, I
gotta go coach some people and teach them how to do
stuff. So
I think that. Well, no, I'm gonna let, gonna let you,
let you sort of round this out a little bit. So what, what should we
take from the Marsha. What should leaders take from the Marshall Chronicles? So I, I,
what's the point of this book? I, I look at the themes of
like I said, a lot of sub sub, but
guilt, shame, justification.
And also there's an element of when the hits the
fan, people expect, expected to be saved
and not taking into consideration that maybe they shouldn't be
saved. Maybe they've acted
so deplorably that they've kind
of like spent their, you know, pay it forward or
they spent their, you know, them being saved
and to the just like was it the
grip, the, the who's sitting in a rocking chair smoking
cigar. Oh yeah. You know what man? This is, this is maybe this is
it. And, and it's, it's wonderful that
although he broke from reality is able to kind of
like have some self reflection and say,
you know what, I can accept this. Yeah.
Yeah. I think for leaders as we round the corner
today. First off, I want to thank Brian
for coming on the show. Always a great time, always good seeing you, always good
hearing from you. I think for leaders,
a couple of different things. One, leaders have to have a robust
cultural or social vision for whatever they want their
organizations to be. I think one of the reasons why we haven't gone to Mars
the other way, we need someone as crazy or as
a person who runs the algorithm, to Ryan's point, all the way to the end,
as Elon, is because we do lack, socially and
culturally a robust vision for what space travel would look like.
We don't lack a robust imagination of what it could be,
but we do lack a vision of what we are capable of.
And this lack of vision exists because while the technological problems could be
solved, the application of scientific principles that science has
absolutely nothing to say about, the spiritual
problems and about how to solve those,
sure, science can put the Buddhists on the rocket and
science can bring them back, maybe. But science
can't tell the Buddhists what to do when they get there.
And all the training in the world won't help them. They need a vision.
They need an idea. They also need something that I think
we are finally wrapping our arms around culturally in America,
that we're missing. We. We need cultural confidence.
And that confidence and that meaning, for better or worse, emanates
from our leaders. I think accountability. And
accountability. Yes, that also emanates from our leaders. Yeah.
And. And if we don't believe that we're capable or accountable as
humans of executing exploration with wisdom, then we've
only digested negative lessons from our history of exploration,
and we have cavalierly dismissed and discarded all the positive ones.
Look, say what you want about how the Europeans treated
the native tribes in Manhattan. Without
that happening the way that it happened, I wouldn't be sitting here having this
conversation with you today. I just wouldn't. Maybe
it might have shown up in a different kind of way, but more likely than
not, probably wouldn't have shown up at all.
Leaders provide cultural and social vision for the future, both at
a family level, at a neighborhood level, but also at an organizational level. But
they can only provide such vision if they cut away the anchor of ironic
distance and carefully cultivated cynicism wrapped around
their actions and given permission to
them to have by recent history.
We got to cut away those things. We got to start caring. And I think
that that's at the core of the Martian Chronicles
by Ray Bradbury. I want to thank Ryan
Stout once again for coming on our show today. Thank you, Jason
Sorrells. Thank you, Ray Bradbury. Thank you,
Martians. And with that, well, we're out.
Have a beautiful evening. Right.