The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury - w/ Jesan Sorrells and Ryan J. Stout

0:02 Okay, so we started at 3556.

0:13 Okay, cool. All right. Leadership Lessons from the Great Books podcast, episode number 163, Martian Chronicles with Ryan J. Stout in three, two, one.

0:34 Hello, my name is Jesan Sorrells and this is the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books podcast, episode number 163.

0:48 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.

1:38 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.

2:20 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.

2:47 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.

3:38 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.

4:34 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

4:45 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.

5:22 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.

5:49 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,

6:33 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

6:54 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

7:17 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,

7:43 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,

8:23 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,

8:34 and I think it's impossible to not

8:43 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.

9:30 Well, and so one of the things we explored on our introductory episode, which I'd recommend you go and listen to episode 162

9:39 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.

10:23 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.

11:02 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.

11:40 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.

11:57 But my point is, Bradbury was this. Ray Bradbury as a writer was this font of

12:07 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?

12:40 You know, I probably would have said something differently than I'm going to say right now if

12:49 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.

13:11 And

13:15 there's one particular part, and I. I mentioned it earlier in

13:25 the. The off season.

13:29 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,

13:52 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

14:14 he used as. As a character to create more depth.

14:22 And I think that helped. It helped me relate to the characters or at least see them as like a complete person. And

14:42 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.

15:21 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.

16:01 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.

16:33 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.

17:16 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.

17:58 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.

18:35 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?

19:16 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.

19:55 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.

20:21 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,

20:49 Bronx thing to do is to go to another planet and be like, this is mine. And how American are hot dogs? And

21:08 his wife, Elena. Who? Elma. No, Alma. Alma, yeah. Who?

21:16 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

21:46 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?

22:56 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.

23:32 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.

24:12 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.

24:48 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.

25:26 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

25:46 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.

26:04 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?

26:52 Forget the whole Carl Sagan, big brain, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, are we alone in the universe? Question.

27:01 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

27:38 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.

28:13 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.

28:27 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.

29:10 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.

29:35 There is.

29:42 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,

30:35 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

31:08 really a lot of the things that. That matter and.

31:18 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.

31:55 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

32:13 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

32:39 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.

33:18 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.

34:02 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?

34:39 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.

35:08 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.

35:27 I mean.

35:31 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.

35:57 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,

36:31 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.

37:17 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.

37:58 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.

38:37 But I also don't know. And he probably has a. Maybe has a better idea.

38:46 And one of the things I wanted to. Okay. Is it worth it? So I think that we would have to, as a species,

38:56 almost

38:59 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.

39:50 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.

40:26 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.

41:11 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.

41:45 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.

42:29 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?

43:17 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.

43:31 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.

43:46 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

44:11 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.

44:46 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.

45:18 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.

45:47 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.

46:22 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.

46:47 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.

47:17 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?

47:51 And it does make a bit of a difference, actually makes a lot of a difference. So

47:57 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.

48:27 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.

48:54 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

49:23 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,

49:36 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.

50:04 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

50:18 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.

50:47 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.

51:13 I figured out how to combine

51:17 the crossover in subjects with whether it be English, psychology, public relations.

51:29 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

51:43 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.

52:19 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

52:38 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.

53:17 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.

53:58 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

54:34 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.

55:04 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

55:29 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.

56:10 Although the Martians.

56:15 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.

56:56 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.

57:43 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.

58:26 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.

59:12 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.

59:28 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.

1:00:10 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.

1:00:47 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.

1:01:12 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.

1:01:44 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.

1:02:19 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.

1:02:51 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.

1:03:40 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.

1:04:17 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.

1:04:33 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.

1:05:19 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.

1:05:58 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.

1:06:34 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.

1:07:10 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.

1:07:38 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.

1:08:10 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.

1:08:46 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.

1:09:22 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.

1:09:55 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.

1:10:29 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.

1:11:04 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.

1:11:32 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.

1:12:01 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

1:12:32 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

1:13:07 15 years. Year. No, 10 years. 10 years. I was born 10 years after the height of the civil rights movement. 10 years after

1:13:20 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?

1:14:03 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.

1:14:19 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

1:14:39 and he answers it. And then he goes and meets the woman. Genevieve. Genevieve, right. It turns out Genevieve is a mess.

1:14:52 He gets in his car and drives. As fast as he can. He drives 10,000 miles away.

1:15:00 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.

1:15:42 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.

1:16:25 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.

1:16:59 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.

1:17:29 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

1:17:39 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

1:18:01 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

1:18:53 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.

1:19:32 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.

1:20:10 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.

1:20:50 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.

1:21:25 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.

1:22:04 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.