The Time Machine by H.G. Wells – w/ Christen Blair Horne and Jesan Sorrells

1 Hello,

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my name is Jesan Sorrells and this is the

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Leadership Lessons from from the Great Books podcast,

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episode number 165.

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So we are wrapping up our time with

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science fiction books. We started off our

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journey and it’s been a long summer journey. We’re now into the

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late summer of 2025. But we began with

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Philip K. Dick’s book Do Androids Dream of Electric

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Sheep. We wandered all the way through Stranger in a Strange Land and

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the Martian Chronicles. And now we have arrived at the

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grandfather of them all. The book that we

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are going to cover today is one

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of those books that is so much a part of the general

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fabric of our lives when we think of,

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well, when we think of temporality, when we think of space, when we think of

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science fiction, that we tend to not remember

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that this book actually came from somewhere.

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It didn’t just sort of show up as the background

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fabric sui generis.

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The book we’re covering today is one of those rare science fiction novels that has

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influenced actual science itself

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and how we tend to think about various

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physics based problems in a deeply physical world.

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Now, I’m about to say something here and I want you to follow the bouncing

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ball, Dr. Emmett Brown’s assertions to the contrary.

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According to physicists, a person cannot travel

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backwards in time to quote, unquote, correct past mistakes,

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past injustices, or even past traumas. You also

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can’t at least at this point in human history, just head

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on down to the local corporate owned drugstore and buy

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some plutonium. You

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still even now have to rip it off.

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The idea of returning to a time in the past that was better than today

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via technology and science, rather than be a faulty memory or

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a pastiche of overwrought nostalgia and vague happy

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feelings, is a quirk unique to human beings.

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Part of that quirk has to do with conscious understanding of time, temporality, and

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of course, birth and death.

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

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past and from when the deep magic of science fiction

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itself was originally laid. Themes or leaders

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from a book that is buried deeply,

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whose themes are buried deeply, even whose, even whose

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dramatic arc is buried deeply in our collective Western,

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scientific, materialistic, cultural memory. Today

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we will be discussing the

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Time Machine. There we go. Got it on camera

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by H.G. wells

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leaders after the show today. I do have a few other things

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going on, but I am headed out of town to appropriate some

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plutonium from some Ukrainian nationalists as payment in

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exchange for giving them a shoddy bomb casing

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full of used pinball machine parts. So I think that

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should work out really well. I don’t think I’ll have any problem putting that in

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my flux capacitor in my DeLorean, brought to you by

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Tesla that’s parked out back.

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And today, the person who’s going to join me on my journey

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before I go on my other journey

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is a person who has been on our show

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before, our co host rejoining us from episode number

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143, Kristen B. Mort.

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How are you doing, Kristin? How’s it going today? Doing well.

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Glad to be here. I’m very excited. Are you? I’m always

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excited to be here. I love this podcast so much. Yeah,

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so, so, yeah, I’m, I am. I do need to.

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You need to make some preparations because time travel is a,

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it’s a testy thing. You know, you really. And you want to time travel in

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style. You don’t want to go back in like

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an ugly machine or a box car or a rail car

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or police box. I don’t know. That’s pretty stylish.

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I don’t know. That is pretty stylish. You do want to travel with some style.

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As Dr. Emmett Brown said, as he told Marty McFly once

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at the Pinewoods Mall at 3 o’ clock in the morning

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on October 12th, maybe it was October 15th, 1985.

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So we’re going to open with just a couple of

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pages from the Time Machine just to sort of set where we’re

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going. And then we’re going to ask Kristen her thoughts on this

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book on some of the themes for leaders and sort of lay the

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foundation for where we’re going to be going today in our show. So,

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oh, by the way, we will be reading directly from the Time Machine. One of

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the great things about this book is that it was published in, originally published, I

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believe it was 1895. And

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it is open source, which means it is in the public domain because we

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can read freely from it. Breathe

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free the air. All right,

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so I’m going to pick up with the time traveler telling his story,

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his incredulous story to, to some folks in,

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in 1890s London. And, and

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this is picking up from chapter 10, When Night Came. And

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I quote, looking at these stars suddenly dwarfed my own

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troubles and all the gravities of terrestrial life. I thought

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of their unfathomable distance and the slow, inevitable drift of their

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movements out of the unknown. Past into the unknown future.

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I thought of the great precessional cycle that the pole of the earth

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describes. Only 40 times had that silent

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revolution occurred during all the years that I had traversed. And during these few

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revolutions all the activity, all the traditions, the complex organizations,

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the nations, languages, literatures, aspirations, even the mere memory

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of man as I knew him had been swept out of existence.

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Instead were these frail creatures who had forgotten their high

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ancestry and and the white things of which I went in

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terror. Then I thought of the great fear that was

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between the two species. And for the first time with a sudden shiver came

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a clear knowledge of what the meat I had seen might

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be. Yet it was too horrible. I

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looked at little Weena sleeping beside me, her face white and star like under the

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stars, and forthwith dismissed the thought.

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Through that long night I held my mind off the Morlocks as well as I

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could and whiled away the time by trying to fancy I could find signs

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of old constellations in the new confusion. The sky kept very

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clear except for hazy cloud or so. No doubt I dozed at times.

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Then as my vigil wore on, came

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a faintness in the eastward sky like the reflection of some colorless fire.

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And the old moon rose thin and peaked and white.

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And close behind it, overtaking it and overflowing at the dawn, came pale at first

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and then growing pink and warm. No Morlocks had approached us. Indeed I had seen

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none upon the hill that night. And in the confidence of renewed day it

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almost seemed to me that my fear had been unreasonable. I stood up and found

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my foot with the loose heel swollen at the ankle and painful under the heel.

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So I sat down again, took off my shoes and flung them away.

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I awakened Weena and we went down to the wood, now green and pleasant

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instead of black and forbidding. We found some fruit wherewith to break our fast.

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We soon met others of the dainty ones, laughing and

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dancing in the sunlight as though there was no such thing in nature as

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the night. And then I thought once more of the meat I had

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seen. I felt assured now of what it was. And from the bottom of my

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heart I pitied this last feeble rill, the great flood of humanity.

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Clearly, at some time in the long ago of human decay the Morlocks food had

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run short. Possibly they had lived on rats and such like

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vermin. Even now man is far less discriminating

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and exclusive in his food than he was. Far less than any monkey.

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His prejudice against human flesh is no deep seated instinct. And so these

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inhuman sons of Men. I tried to look at the thing in a

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scientific spirit. After all, they were less human and more remote

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than our cannibal ancestors of 3 or 4,000 years ago. And the

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intelligence that would have made this state of things a torment had gone. Why should

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I trouble myself? These Eloi were mere

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fatted cattle which the Antlight warlocks preserved

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and preyed upon, probably saw to the breeding of.

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And there was Lena dancing

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at my side.

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I shouldn’t laugh, but I’m. I chuckle because where

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we’re going to go today with this, but, Kristen, let’s start off with

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Mr. Wells and the Time Machine. What do you know about this book and

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what, what encouraged you to read it? Upon my sending

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you the list of books, why did you pick this one as one that you

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wanted to talk about on our show today? Honestly,

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because I wanted the. The a reason to read

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it. It’s one of those, like, kind of like what you were saying. It’s the.

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One of the foundational science, science, sci fi

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books. And I knew very, very little

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about it. About it. And I actually told my husband, I was like, hey, I’m

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reading the Time Machine to discuss with Hayon on his,

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on his podcast. He was like, oh yeah, HD Wells. And I was like, okay.

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So you know, about

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exactly as much as I read sci fi, you know, this one just had completely

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escaped my, my notice in my readership. So I saw it not on the

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list, and I was like, well, obviously, obviously to

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read that. And what I didn’t know is, you know, I played Dungeons and

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Dragons and there’s a species in that game called the

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Morlocks. And so I saw the Morlocks pop and was

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like, no way. That is like. So that’s one of those things

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that you, as I aspire to as a writer, is to

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write something that becomes so pervasive in the

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vernacular that it just becomes, this

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is just a thing now. So it just. Yeah,

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it’s really cool. Well, and as a writer, when you’re looking at H.G. wells

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writing. So let’s talk about the writing a little bit of, of the, of the

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time machine. So H.G. wells was a

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utopian socialist cultural writer and critic.

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He was an accomplished novelist. He wrote many novels,

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many stories that would still reference today, the Invisible man

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among them, of course, the Time Machine and a few others.

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He is credited with giving an intellectual

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pastiche to the, to the, to

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the genre of science fiction, which at the time

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in the 1890s and in the early 20th century

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was either considered to be kid stuff we talked a little bit about this on

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the Martian Chronicles episode that we did when we took a look at Ray Bradbury’s

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work. And when we talk about Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert

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Heinlein, right, Where Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke

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and Isaac Asimov are considered to be the deans of science fiction, you know, the

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ones who raised it from being low stuff to being high stuff. But H.G.

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wells was the grandfather of them all. Without Wells, they wouldn’t have

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had, I think, a hope in,

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well, a hope in hell and Wells who believe in hell, so that’s fine,

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but a hope in that place of raising,

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of raising the writing in, in such a genre

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to a particular level. So as a writer, what do you think of the

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writing of this in this novel?

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I think, I think it’s interesting.

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I think it’s fun. I think. And I’m sure he did

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not approach it that way. It’s like, this is very serious,

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but. And I can also definitely see how,

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you know, from it sprang the rest of

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our, especially our time travel thought experiments

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that we like to consider and tell stories of.

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But. Well, one of the first things I notice is I, you know, I’m writing

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in third person and this

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switches, like it goes from. I think, no, it’s just

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in first person the entire time. And it’s like, okay, I’m writing

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this down and then this is verbatim what he said. And

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so that was really interesting because there’s not a lot of first

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person published today, but

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I still found it very effective, not very jarring.

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And it was, yeah, it was a fun read. Why do you

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think that is? Is that because we’re all doing the first person narrative thing on

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social media with the cameras in our faces now, the tiktoks and the

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twee or. And then like, well, is it, is it because,

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you know, our first person narratives have switched to mediums and so books are no

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longer the place for that, or is it because we’ve just run out

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of like, maybe those MFA programs and those writer

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retreats aren’t actually training people to write? I don’t know. No,

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it’s. I mean, it probably is. I feel like a lot of people, the teacher

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that I was listening to when I started my book, he,

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he was fairly, he was fairly even handed

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with the different perspectives and said, choose whichever one works best

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for your story. And I felt that first person was extremely

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effective for this particular story. But at the same time,

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he doesn’t teach at university and

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he tends to teach in a Very unorthodox way. So I

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wouldn’t be surprised at all if universities are like third person.

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This is the one that sells. Write in third person. You can only write in

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third person past, actually. And the reason I say

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mostly objective is because this, this particular teacher really

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hated on third person present, which is what I’m writing in, so.

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Third person present. Yeah, it’s every. It only works in ya. And I’m

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like, okay, dude, well, and that’s later.

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Well, and that’s. And that’s, I think, because I, you know, I don’t know why

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you said this is what sells. And I think at a literary

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level, you’re. You’re correct. Like, that’s what the

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agents can push, and that’s what the publishers can sort of

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package and market and scale and

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guarantee, or at least make the assumption of a guarantee

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that you’re going to sell 10,000 copies to Barnes and Noble somewhere,

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which is all you need, by the way, kids, to be on the New York

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times bestseller list. 10,000 copies, that’s

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it. And that sounds like a huge number when you sold zero.

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But you realize after you’ve written and published a few books, that actually is not

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that big a number. And, and so it’s kind of interesting to see who

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winds up on the, on the, on the New York Times bestseller list.

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Anyway, as you already mentioned, as Kristen already

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mentioned, the work is generally credited. The Time machine is generally credited

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with the popularization of the concept of time travel. And

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Wells did coin that term time machine, which is

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almost crazy to me, universally. I know. Yeah. That’s. Which

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again, it doesn’t surprise me. So. So

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in thinking about the literary life of H.G. wells. Right. The time which he wrote.

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So he was writing during the second generation after

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Darwin. So. So Darwin’s, you know, theory

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of evolution came. Was published. Gosh. I believe it was in the

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1840s or 1850s.

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Origin of the Species. You can, we can check on that on the, on the

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interwebs. Kristin’s going to go ahead and look that up. But I believe that

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Origin of the species was the 13. It was the 30s or the 40s.

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And so 1859. There we go. Okay, so 1860s.

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Okay, so Wells is coming along and

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is writing during a time when the

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meteor came out of the sky, such as it were, of Darwin.

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And people were trying to figure out in that second

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generation after his writing sort of hit what

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the new world quote, unquote, was going to look like.

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Welles was also writing as an Englishman

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in London. He was writing underneath the shadow of Karl

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Marx. So Marxist communism was

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also thought of as a. As a new way of creating a new

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man. And so Wells was the guy who sort of merged these two

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ideas together and not only leveraged his, not what

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we would call these days, nonfiction works, his nonfiction writing, his nonfiction

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novels to push ideas. He was a socialist,

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utopian, he believed in eugenics. People don’t know a whole lot about that, about. He

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was part of the Fabian Society, which at the root of the Fabian Society

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was we will, we will. We will take Darwin’s

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ideas around survival of the fittest

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and we will apply it to, well, specifically to racial

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groups and peoples. And he was an old colonialist

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because at the time in the 1890s, London

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was seated at the height of the English colonial

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Victorian world. The sun never set on the English

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empire. So Wells was raised in a culture where right

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to rule was thought of as merely fait

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accompli. And you comply, you combine that

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with ideas around

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the imperfection of species and the ideas of evolution taken

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to their logical end. And then of course, we’re going to talk a little bit

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about this later on because this also does pop up in the time machine, this

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idea of utopian schemes where men all

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share everything and everything is beautiful and we’re all, you know,

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eating fruit off of trees, lazily falling into our mouths, and only

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have to be worried about the propagation of the species, which he’s going to talk

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about here in a little bit. He was writing in that, in

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that time. Now, with that being said, Dostoyevsky was

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also writing in that time and Dostoevsky took a much more cynical view.

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What human being I know. Well, you know,

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so it’s interesting.

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And the time machine strikes you, or at least it did it strike me or

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struck me as the beginning of this idea of what’s called a fix

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up novel. So when we talk about Martian Chronicles, Ray

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Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles is a fix up novel. So it’s a collection of essays

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or a collection of short stories together that run on a particular theme but

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aren’t linked through transitions from one story to the next. Time

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Machine was originally published. I found this out through my Wikipedia research,

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was published in response to a request by W.E. henley, the editor

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of the national observer. And

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Wells had written something called the. A short story called the Chronic

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Argonauts. And so Henley challenged him

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to develop that story or rewrite that series of

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stories into a series of loosely connected and fictionalized

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essays. And they were anonymously published in the National observer

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from March 17 to June

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23, 1894. Now, with all that being

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said, the Time Machine has been adapted into two feature films of the

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same name, as well as two television shows. And many, many,

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many, many, many comic book adaptations of the Time

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Machine do exist. It has also indirectly inspired many

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more works of fiction and many, many, many, many, many,

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many media productions. Matter of fact, the whole

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conceit underneath, Back to the Future, which is my. The best

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time travel movie ever created by human beings,

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full of paradoxes and all, was inspired by

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the time machine, of course. Just. I mean, if

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he coined the. This is. This is what’s kind of insane to kind of think

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about. If he coined the term time machine,

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then kind of anything that has

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time travel in it with a machine

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wouldn’t exist without this book. It’s kind of like trying to think of our

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fantasy that the fantasy scene without Tolkien you can’t,

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right? You can’t. Like fantasy doesn’t exist. Well,

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00:21:17,810 –> 00:21:21,370
and think about. So in its current form, we did a

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mashup episode recently where we talked about the links between

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Tolkien, Pink Floyd and

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one other area, I can’t remember the other one that we linked together with Neil

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Kalachovsky, who’s a huge fan of Tolkien.

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Huge fan. And I asked him a question that I’m going to ask you, which

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is not in our questions for today, but I’m going to ask you. So this

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is something that occurred to me when you talk about Time Machine. So

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I asked him, could a book like Lord of the Rings, because series like Lord

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of the Rings be written in the

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next 50 years? Could we write something that

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was that out of the west, out of the Western culture, that was

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that powerful and that impactful? Because they’ll still be

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reading. We’ll still be reading Tolkien at the end of this century, which is only

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75 years away, by the way, but we’ll still be reading Tolkien.

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Could something like that be written

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without AI help by a human being

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in the next 75 years that will have impact for another hundred years hence

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on the other side of the 22nd century? And

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Neil said, I’ll give you his answer before you answer this question about time

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machine. Neil said, no, I don’t think we can do it. He

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said, I think that Tolkien was the concentration of

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all of the last 2000 years of Western culture and

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2000 years of British culture into one like human being.

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And I wonder. Depth of knowledge is insane, right? So

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could. Could we do something in the face of science fiction? So that’s

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fantasy, right? So in the space of Science fiction if we’re bifurcating these two because

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most people slap them together in their heads and move along. But in the space

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of science fiction, could we get

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an H.G. wells in the next 75 years?

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I, I, I think so, yes. Because I feel like my brain is full

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of references. Like it’s not a book, but even like Star

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Trek. You go back and you watch the old Star Trek shows and they’re using

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touch pads and they’re using things and you look at, you look at our technology

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today, you’ll be like, oh, that’s, we had that,

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we, somebody, somebody thought about that. And then some

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engineer went, oh, I bet we could make that now, right?

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So I, I think people will just keep imagining technology and that’s why

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it’s so funny. I was talk, talking to one of my best friends about this,

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about, you know, how as, as we conceive of it

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now, teleportation is impossible. And, and then the way we think

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about breaking it’s because we have to break down the person and break down the

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soul and you can’t break down the blah, blah, blah, blah.

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00:24:00,640 –> 00:24:04,440
Um, and I think I, my reference point is

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always like, Ford, who was telling his very,

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very intelligent engineers to do the

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impossible and create this like single

382
00:24:15,360 –> 00:24:19,160
block engine or whatever, it technically was, right? He’s like,

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I don’t care that you’re telling me it’s impossible, do it anyway. And they

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00:24:23,040 –> 00:24:26,690
would go try and they’d be like, no, but seriously dude, it’s impossible.

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You’d be like, I don’t care, do it anyway. We’re just going to keep

386
00:24:30,410 –> 00:24:33,850
doing that. So, and then I think what,

387
00:24:34,090 –> 00:24:37,130
what inspires that is

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creatives imagining the impossible first

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and being like, wouldn’t it be cool if this was a thing? And

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then eventually the engineers are like, oh, you know what? I think

391
00:24:49,690 –> 00:24:53,530
science has caught up to their imagination and we can make it.

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00:24:53,690 –> 00:24:57,450
And so that’s not quite the answer to your question, but in that

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00:24:57,450 –> 00:25:00,690
regard, I think humans are just going to keep doing, we’re just going to keep

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00:25:00,690 –> 00:25:04,170
imagining more and more and more wild things. So

395
00:25:04,410 –> 00:25:08,250
I think so I think it’s. Interesting you bring up Star Trek

396
00:25:08,730 –> 00:25:12,410
because the reason why, and we’ve had conversations

397
00:25:12,410 –> 00:25:16,010
on this show before about sort of the challenges and the

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00:25:16,010 –> 00:25:19,770
problems in current popular culture, entertainment, you know,

399
00:25:19,770 –> 00:25:23,330
around town of Monte Cristo and other things that we talked about.

400
00:25:23,890 –> 00:25:27,410
And I think the big challenge, and I see this with Star Trek,

401
00:25:27,730 –> 00:25:30,450
this is why I just want to scream at Paramount, just end it, put it

402
00:25:30,450 –> 00:25:34,250
in mothballs for 75 years. Just end it. Just kill

403
00:25:34,250 –> 00:25:37,810
it. It’s done. Same thing with. I’m looking at you. Disney, too. Star wars put

404
00:25:37,810 –> 00:25:41,490
it in mothballs for 75 years. Just mothball it. Like, we’re done, right?

405
00:25:43,010 –> 00:25:46,540
Yeah, yeah. Put it in a vault. Be done. It’s okay.

406
00:25:46,780 –> 00:25:50,580
It’s fine. I think. I don’t know. Supposedly,

407
00:25:50,580 –> 00:25:54,220
Marvel is making a comeback. So if Marvel can make a comeback, maybe Star wars,

408
00:25:54,220 –> 00:25:57,940
maybe. Okay, so Marvel is in a different spot

409
00:25:57,940 –> 00:26:01,500
because I think. Because Marvel.

410
00:26:01,740 –> 00:26:04,780
Stan Lee created something to his credit,

411
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and Jack Kirby and John Buscema

412
00:26:09,420 –> 00:26:13,270
and all of those guys. They created

413
00:26:13,270 –> 00:26:15,830
Steve Ditko, who always gets left out of the conversation

414
00:26:16,870 –> 00:26:20,590
because he was a weirdo libertarian and did, like, three things and then left. He

415
00:26:20,590 –> 00:26:24,310
couldn’t. He couldn’t play nice with everybody else. And that’s okay. He.

416
00:26:24,310 –> 00:26:27,830
He wasn’t. He wasn’t supposed to. And Joe. Well,

417
00:26:28,390 –> 00:26:31,030
they were creating something that.

418
00:26:32,070 –> 00:26:34,950
In a medium that is so malleable

419
00:26:35,830 –> 00:26:39,550
that it just shifts and changes over time. Like, we’ll always have comics with us

420
00:26:39,550 –> 00:26:43,290
as a medium, which means we’ll always have Marvel with us. You

421
00:26:43,290 –> 00:26:46,570
might have called Marvel, but we’ll always have Marvel with us as a medium over

422
00:26:46,570 –> 00:26:50,290
there somewhere. And it will always be a vein that can be tapped into. No

423
00:26:50,290 –> 00:26:53,490
matter how many times you decide you’re going to reboot Avengers with Robert Downey Jr.

424
00:26:53,490 –> 00:26:57,330
Before he croaks off. Okay, fine.

425
00:26:57,570 –> 00:27:01,170
Like, whatever. Yes, I. I’m a Gen Xer. I said what I said.

426
00:27:01,650 –> 00:27:02,850
Y’ all come for me later.

427
00:27:05,170 –> 00:27:08,740
Now, with that being said, I

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00:27:08,740 –> 00:27:12,580
think Star Trek and Star wars

429
00:27:12,580 –> 00:27:16,340
also suffers from this, but Star Trek specifically. This is my bugaboo with

430
00:27:16,340 –> 00:27:20,140
Star Trek. Star Trek only operates. And by the way, this goes back to the

431
00:27:20,140 –> 00:27:23,740
time machine. So H.G. wells had a

432
00:27:23,740 –> 00:27:27,580
conception of the future based on Marxism, communism,

433
00:27:27,980 –> 00:27:31,740
Darwinian utopianism and Darwinian evolution, social

434
00:27:31,820 –> 00:27:35,540
norming. Right. He actually believed he was part of the generation where all

435
00:27:35,540 –> 00:27:39,220
those ideas were new and he didn’t see any of the downsides. The

436
00:27:39,220 –> 00:27:42,860
man went to Stalinist Russia and met with Stalin and thought Stalin was

437
00:27:42,860 –> 00:27:46,620
fine. He’s like, I just needs to be tweaked a little bit

438
00:27:46,620 –> 00:27:50,460
here and there. He’s fine. He didn’t know all the things

439
00:27:50,460 –> 00:27:54,260
we know post World War II. He doesn’t have all

440
00:27:54,260 –> 00:27:58,100
that history. So I said this on an episode where we’re talking about World

441
00:27:58,100 –> 00:28:01,880
War I with Libby Unger. Right. Talk about Parade’s End.

442
00:28:01,880 –> 00:28:05,480
Right. Great book. Right. But

443
00:28:05,720 –> 00:28:09,320
I have empathy for any writer who was writing before 1940,

444
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because they didn’t know they were writing in the cultural context

445
00:28:13,640 –> 00:28:16,640
of the time they were in. And they didn’t know any of the horrors that

446
00:28:16,640 –> 00:28:19,800
were about to unfold on the back end of the century. They had no clue.

447
00:28:20,040 –> 00:28:23,840
Right. Or maybe they had some clue that they misread the tea leaves because they

448
00:28:23,840 –> 00:28:27,080
just thought, ah, Stalin, you could tweak him. Ah, Hitler. You could do a deal

449
00:28:27,080 –> 00:28:30,200
with that guy. Okay, okay, thanks, Joe Kennedy. Whatever,

450
00:28:32,120 –> 00:28:35,960
whatever. It’s fine. I made this point on. I

451
00:28:35,960 –> 00:28:39,080
made this point on the podcast Before 1933, Hitler,

452
00:28:39,400 –> 00:28:42,920
yes, we know now in 2025, he was a monster.

453
00:28:43,320 –> 00:28:46,520
In 1933, they did not know he was a monster. Right,

454
00:28:46,600 –> 00:28:49,720
okay, so, like, we got to give those people back there a break.

455
00:28:50,280 –> 00:28:54,090
Well, I transpose that to Wells, right? Wells imagined a

456
00:28:54,090 –> 00:28:57,810
future that was better with all these ideologies.

457
00:28:57,810 –> 00:29:00,330
And we’re about to read this little section here on the Time Machine that proves

458
00:29:00,330 –> 00:29:03,010
my point. And he projected that future forward.

459
00:29:04,370 –> 00:29:07,890
Star Trek now. Now, here’s my beef with Star Trek. Star

460
00:29:07,890 –> 00:29:11,650
Trek now proposes a future

461
00:29:11,650 –> 00:29:14,890
based on existential dread and nihilistic

462
00:29:14,890 –> 00:29:18,370
cynicism and a perception of sincerity as

463
00:29:18,370 –> 00:29:21,580
naivete. Because in our current era,

464
00:29:22,540 –> 00:29:25,660
the people who are writing Star Trek don’t believe in the future.

465
00:29:26,700 –> 00:29:30,140
They believe in Google Translate. They believe

466
00:29:30,220 –> 00:29:33,900
in AI. They believe in all but the cultural things

467
00:29:33,900 –> 00:29:37,620
underneath that. Wells. Every science fiction writer struggles with the

468
00:29:37,620 –> 00:29:41,380
cultural stuff, except Wells started with the cultural stuff and then

469
00:29:41,380 –> 00:29:45,220
went to the technology. Post World War II, we see this

470
00:29:45,220 –> 00:29:49,070
with Heinlein, Philip K. Dick, Charles Gibson, all those guys,

471
00:29:49,070 –> 00:29:52,510
right? Even Ray Bradbury kind of fell into this a little bit. So did Isaac

472
00:29:52,510 –> 00:29:56,070
Asimov. But they start with the tech and they leave the

473
00:29:56,070 –> 00:29:59,710
culture over here. And modern Star Trek

474
00:30:01,630 –> 00:30:05,390
starts with the tech and then just projects Twitter

475
00:30:05,550 –> 00:30:08,670
and the nonsense on TikTok forward 800 years.

476
00:30:09,150 –> 00:30:12,670
So you don’t have anybody in the writer’s room. You’ll appreciate this as a writer,

477
00:30:12,670 –> 00:30:16,090
you know, maybe in the writer’s room who’s like, what would happen if, like,

478
00:30:17,530 –> 00:30:20,970
all of the. Because it’s all political now, but

479
00:30:21,050 –> 00:30:24,890
let’s just pretend that all the right wingers actually, like one, the fascists

480
00:30:24,970 –> 00:30:28,250
actually won. Let’s project that for 800 years.

481
00:30:28,730 –> 00:30:32,090
What happens then? They don’t have the imagination for that. They have the imagination for

482
00:30:32,090 –> 00:30:35,810
Google Translate, but they don’t have the imagination for projecting a better world. And

483
00:30:35,810 –> 00:30:38,730
that’s my frustration with Star Trek. This is why I want to mothball it. I

484
00:30:38,730 –> 00:30:42,540
want to mothball it. So we get another generation of people who actually

485
00:30:42,540 –> 00:30:46,380
have Hope in the future because we don’t right now. And by the way, we

486
00:30:46,380 –> 00:30:49,860
don’t right now for very legitimate reasons. We’ve had 25 years of nonsense

487
00:30:50,420 –> 00:30:54,020
from, you know, from you know, the, the,

488
00:30:54,260 –> 00:30:57,860
the, the knocking down of the World Trade center, the terrorist attacks, World Trade center

489
00:30:58,019 –> 00:31:01,540
all the way to. I’m recording this In September of 2025,

490
00:31:01,780 –> 00:31:05,500
the assassination of Charlie Kirk. It’s been one friggin disaster after

491
00:31:05,500 –> 00:31:09,100
another. And the body politicians, because we’re in the fourth

492
00:31:09,100 –> 00:31:12,900
turning the body politic is in a time of chaos. And you can’t

493
00:31:12,900 –> 00:31:16,660
write hope in a time of chaos unless you

494
00:31:16,660 –> 00:31:20,420
have religious belief. So you actually believe in something, a transcendent thing for the

495
00:31:20,420 –> 00:31:24,180
future or you’re just like a person

496
00:31:24,260 –> 00:31:28,060
who, I believe fundamentally you’re a person who’s just like a Pollyanna

497
00:31:28,060 –> 00:31:31,060
and you’re just going to totally ignore the nonsense. And I don’t see very many

498
00:31:31,060 –> 00:31:34,890
Pollyannas who are creatives right now. But maybe I’m wrong. So there’s my

499
00:31:34,890 –> 00:31:38,690
whole rant on Star Trek that sums up everything. And so I’m,

500
00:31:38,930 –> 00:31:41,930
I always admire when people bring up Star Trek but I’m like just mothball because

501
00:31:41,930 –> 00:31:45,610
we just get it like I’m 4, I’m 45 years. Old, like

502
00:31:45,610 –> 00:31:48,930
the only, I mean I’m gone in terms of the tech like for the, for

503
00:31:48,930 –> 00:31:51,850
the tech thing. But yeah, I totally see. And you know, it’s funny to your

504
00:31:51,850 –> 00:31:55,650
point because I go to conventions and yeah,

505
00:31:55,810 –> 00:31:59,450
one of the panels that I was at was talking

506
00:31:59,450 –> 00:32:03,140
about how, where to start with sci fi if

507
00:32:03,140 –> 00:32:05,580
you’re not a sciencey. Not like

508
00:32:07,100 –> 00:32:10,940
one of my favorite sci fi writers. His, I think his, his background

509
00:32:10,940 –> 00:32:14,740
education is in like science, engineering, stuff like

510
00:32:14,740 –> 00:32:18,580
that. And so the, the panel was kind of about like

511
00:32:18,580 –> 00:32:21,580
well if you don’t have that but you want to write sci fi, how do

512
00:32:21,580 –> 00:32:25,380
you write sci fi? And they were like, I mean just start with kind of

513
00:32:25,380 –> 00:32:29,060
what you were saying, like start the culture, like start like start with

514
00:32:29,060 –> 00:32:31,880
an idea. And, and, and then they gave a really

515
00:32:32,840 –> 00:32:36,360
helpful definition of sci fi that now I can’t remember

516
00:32:36,520 –> 00:32:39,880
but basically gave me hope that one day I could write sci fi.

517
00:32:41,960 –> 00:32:45,720
So it’s like oh that would be fun. And basically.

518
00:32:45,720 –> 00:32:49,080
Well I think don’t, don’t, don’t worry so much about the technology.

519
00:32:49,400 –> 00:32:53,160
It’s more about telling human stories. So that

520
00:32:53,160 –> 00:32:56,970
hope is, is it wants, if it’s not there,

521
00:32:56,970 –> 00:33:00,730
it wants to be there. It’s like it’s a seed right now that

522
00:33:00,730 –> 00:33:04,450
has not sprouted and it really needs some water, but there’s no water

523
00:33:04,450 –> 00:33:08,210
coming right now. Well, well, if you look at.

524
00:33:08,210 –> 00:33:11,330
If you look at Duandro’s Dream of Electric Sheep, right? So you look at Philip

525
00:33:11,330 –> 00:33:15,090
K. Dick’s work, right? He

526
00:33:15,090 –> 00:33:18,770
had no hope for the future, and that’s why Blade Runner works. That’s

527
00:33:18,770 –> 00:33:22,480
why, like, do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep works?

528
00:33:22,640 –> 00:33:26,000
Right? Because the perspective he’s writing from,

529
00:33:26,480 –> 00:33:30,200
the sociopolitical. Geopolitical culture is all warped because of two.

530
00:33:30,200 –> 00:33:33,920
Because of nuclear wars, right? Which he’s writing in the 60s

531
00:33:34,480 –> 00:33:38,000
under. In. In a. In a historical time of the

532
00:33:38,000 –> 00:33:41,480
Cold War. And, you know, mutually assured. Well, mutually assured

533
00:33:41,480 –> 00:33:45,320
discretion wasn’t really an idea that came around till the 80s, but the. The template

534
00:33:45,320 –> 00:33:49,130
for that idea was there. Right, right. And so

535
00:33:49,130 –> 00:33:52,850
he was projecting forward that template, which is, by the way, science fiction does

536
00:33:52,850 –> 00:33:56,450
this. It projects forward the template. This is why dystopian science fiction

537
00:33:56,450 –> 00:34:00,050
doesn’t work, but neither does utopian science fiction, because you’re just projecting

538
00:34:00,050 –> 00:34:03,210
the dystopia or the utopia of your time

539
00:34:03,770 –> 00:34:07,570
forward however many years. Plant a flag here. Now

540
00:34:07,570 –> 00:34:11,010
we can all critique everybody and say, how cool, right?

541
00:34:11,010 –> 00:34:14,499
Okay, So I think you could

542
00:34:14,499 –> 00:34:18,299
probably do Star Trek. Well, if you didn’t focus on the

543
00:34:18,299 –> 00:34:22,059
tech and you did focus on the culture. But my pushback to that

544
00:34:22,059 –> 00:34:25,219
person would be. The writer on the panel on the dais would be,

545
00:34:26,979 –> 00:34:30,179
how can you write about culture when you’re not culturally confident

546
00:34:33,219 –> 00:34:37,059
if you don’t actually have pride in your culture? And I don’t

547
00:34:37,059 –> 00:34:40,900
mean sinful pride. I mean, you actually have looked at your

548
00:34:40,900 –> 00:34:44,580
culture, right? Wrong and indifferent, and said, in comparison to all

549
00:34:44,580 –> 00:34:48,060
other cultures, you’re not rel. You’re not a relativist in comparison to all of the

550
00:34:48,060 –> 00:34:50,380
cultures on the planet. This is the best one. So I’m just going to project

551
00:34:50,380 –> 00:34:54,220
that forward because that’s what Roddenberry did. Roddenberry. And this

552
00:34:54,220 –> 00:34:57,660
is what irritates, you know, Gen Zers and millennials about boomers.

553
00:34:57,660 –> 00:35:00,700
Boomers have cultural confidence. They just do.

554
00:35:01,500 –> 00:35:05,340
Like it drives them. They have no cultural guilt. Zero cultural

555
00:35:05,340 –> 00:35:09,010
guilt. Now, should they? Maybe, maybe not. I don’t

556
00:35:09,010 –> 00:35:10,490
know. But they don’t have any.

557
00:35:12,650 –> 00:35:16,370
And you’ve got millennials running around with cultural guilt and anxiety. You got

558
00:35:16,370 –> 00:35:19,850
Gen Zers running around with cultural guilt and anxiety. And Gen

559
00:35:19,850 –> 00:35:23,370
Xers are like, I have no cultural guilt. I’m cynical. Go away. Leave me alone.

560
00:35:23,850 –> 00:35:27,690
Just leave me alone. Just go away. Don’t bother me.

561
00:35:27,690 –> 00:35:30,730
Don’t bother me with your guilt, and don’t bother Me with your cultural confidence. You

562
00:35:30,730 –> 00:35:34,500
know, I once heard Gen X described as a, as a veil,

563
00:35:34,660 –> 00:35:38,420
a valley of humility stuck between two mountains of ego.

564
00:35:42,740 –> 00:35:46,500
So, so, like, how do you write in that space

565
00:35:46,580 –> 00:35:50,220
like that? And that’s fascinating to me as a person who creates things. How do

566
00:35:50,220 –> 00:35:53,940
you write in that, in that sort of cultural environment if you don’t have

567
00:35:53,940 –> 00:35:56,740
cultural confidence? I mean,

568
00:35:58,020 –> 00:36:01,460
I am a religious person, so I have a confidence in a different culture.

569
00:36:02,300 –> 00:36:05,340
Right, yeah, there you go. Yeah, So I do have cultural confidence. It’s just not

570
00:36:05,580 –> 00:36:09,420
necessarily in my country. Right, right. So

571
00:36:09,420 –> 00:36:13,260
thankfully, I follow one of my. Actually, the Godfather of my children

572
00:36:14,940 –> 00:36:18,500
helps me a lot with the, with the cultural guilt. He’s like,

573
00:36:18,500 –> 00:36:22,300
hey, when you, when you put this into perspective with the whole

574
00:36:22,860 –> 00:36:26,340
American experiment. And then actually, you help me with it a lot too. Just like,

575
00:36:26,340 –> 00:36:29,850
hey, because you’re right. Listening to people in my generation, it’s just like, it’s just

576
00:36:29,850 –> 00:36:33,610
all bad. The world’s going to shit. Right. But it’s like, hey,

577
00:36:33,610 –> 00:36:36,930
get some perspective, like about this experiment. We’re doing something

578
00:36:37,170 –> 00:36:40,930
nobody’s ever tried before. And it’s still pretty young. So

579
00:36:41,650 –> 00:36:45,090
all that to say that’s. I guess that’s where I write is

580
00:36:46,450 –> 00:36:50,290
I just have confidence in a different culture. Culture. Well, and I think. And I

581
00:36:50,290 –> 00:36:53,970
think you can write from that space, and that is refreshing because I do

582
00:36:53,970 –> 00:36:57,770
think that people need leaders in

583
00:36:57,770 –> 00:37:01,530
particular need to have cultural confidence, whether

584
00:37:01,530 –> 00:37:05,330
it’s in the culture of their organizations or their institutions or just

585
00:37:05,330 –> 00:37:09,170
the Overall, you know, 50,000 foot culture. I do think you have

586
00:37:09,170 –> 00:37:12,970
to. As Bona Serra says at the beginning of the Godfather, I love that

587
00:37:12,970 –> 00:37:16,490
opening for Francis Ford Coppola, you know, the immigrant

588
00:37:16,490 –> 00:37:20,330
Bonasera, the Italian immigrant, when he’s going to the Godfather to ask him for a

589
00:37:20,330 –> 00:37:24,020
favor, starts off with that iconic line. I love it when it opens from

590
00:37:24,020 –> 00:37:27,740
the. Opens from the black. And a couple of fades in on him

591
00:37:28,140 –> 00:37:31,820
and he brings him in, he says, and Bonicero says in that Italian immigrant accent,

592
00:37:32,140 –> 00:37:35,740
I believe in America. I

593
00:37:35,740 –> 00:37:39,180
raise my children in an American fashion,

594
00:37:39,580 –> 00:37:43,420
but never to dishonor themselves. This

595
00:37:43,420 –> 00:37:45,820
is how I raise my children. And this is how I was raising my children.

596
00:37:45,820 –> 00:37:49,140
I believe in America. I absolutely do.

597
00:37:49,780 –> 00:37:53,460
Because this is it. This is the. Yeah. And

598
00:37:53,460 –> 00:37:56,860
yes, I believe in Jesus too. I’ve been louder now out loud about all that

599
00:37:56,860 –> 00:38:00,540
too. Jesus in America. Absolutely, yes. Because guess

600
00:38:00,540 –> 00:38:03,620
what? If I didn’t, I couldn’t do this show.

601
00:38:05,940 –> 00:38:06,980
It wouldn’t work.

602
00:38:10,340 –> 00:38:13,300
None of this works without. Without. You’ve got to believe in it, you got to

603
00:38:13,300 –> 00:38:16,500
believe there’s something here on this third of a continent that’s worth saving.

604
00:38:17,290 –> 00:38:20,930
Right, right. And worth writing about. Yeah,

605
00:38:20,930 –> 00:38:23,690
yeah. We’re fighting for. Yeah. That reminds me of

606
00:38:25,290 –> 00:38:27,050
west side Story. It’s one of my favorite

607
00:38:28,730 –> 00:38:32,330
musicals, kind of ever. And thinking about that in the

608
00:38:32,330 –> 00:38:35,530
context of Bernstein as a person,

609
00:38:36,330 –> 00:38:39,930
things that he was struggling with personally. And

610
00:38:39,930 –> 00:38:43,690
then. But then there’s that, the

611
00:38:43,690 –> 00:38:47,330
America. Wait, what is it? Is it just called America?

612
00:38:47,330 –> 00:38:50,370
Can’t remember exactly the name of the number, but, you know, it’s the. The

613
00:38:51,090 –> 00:38:54,890
Puerto Ricans going back and forth. The women and the. And the

614
00:38:54,890 –> 00:38:58,689
men. Women are like, hey, it sucks here, but it’s. And, but it’s

615
00:38:58,689 –> 00:39:02,410
worth it. And it’s better than Puerto Rico. And then the men are like, no,

616
00:39:02,410 –> 00:39:05,970
it sucks here. We should go back. And they’re like, okay, bye.

617
00:39:07,170 –> 00:39:08,450
We’ll have kids here then.

618
00:39:11,240 –> 00:39:14,760
And. Yeah, and then. And both. And both sides

619
00:39:14,760 –> 00:39:18,560
have valid points. Right. I’m not

620
00:39:18,560 –> 00:39:20,920
saying there aren’t downsides, but you know what? Like,

621
00:39:22,280 –> 00:39:26,080
I don’t know. I. If there’s one thing I could

622
00:39:26,080 –> 00:39:29,720
do with this show, it would be to use these books

623
00:39:29,720 –> 00:39:33,280
that have come out of a very specific Western culture. Like Wells comes out of

624
00:39:33,280 –> 00:39:37,110
a very specific Western. Yes, he’s English, but it’s still the

625
00:39:37,110 –> 00:39:40,790
West. A very specific Western way of looking at

626
00:39:40,790 –> 00:39:44,510
the world that’s based on things that

627
00:39:44,510 –> 00:39:47,710
matter. And the

628
00:39:47,710 –> 00:39:51,350
apotheosis, the pinnacle, the

629
00:39:51,350 –> 00:39:55,190
sharp end of the spear of those things comes

630
00:39:55,190 –> 00:39:58,790
together. And it always has. It comes

631
00:39:58,790 –> 00:40:02,270
together here. It comes together here on this continent, among us people.

632
00:40:02,590 –> 00:40:06,270
If we don’t get it right here. And again, I am saying this

633
00:40:06,590 –> 00:40:10,150
in. In the backwash of the assassination of Charlie Kirk. If we

634
00:40:10,150 –> 00:40:12,910
don’t get this right here,

635
00:40:13,950 –> 00:40:16,670
I don’t know where else it’s going to get

636
00:40:17,390 –> 00:40:19,950
correct. I think somebody will try it again.

637
00:40:21,070 –> 00:40:24,270
Somebody will try. I don’t know that it’ll work because it comes out of a

638
00:40:24,270 –> 00:40:28,070
very specific. I mean, the, the next people that try aren’t going to have David

639
00:40:28,070 –> 00:40:31,650
Hume and Natural Law like the founding fathers did. Like, they’re not going to have

640
00:40:31,650 –> 00:40:35,330
that. You know, they’re going to have, oh, all those guys

641
00:40:35,330 –> 00:40:39,050
screwed up. We don’t have to go back to the original thing

642
00:40:39,050 –> 00:40:42,290
that they did that they screwed up. Instead, we’ll move forward from the screw up.

643
00:40:43,010 –> 00:40:46,010
And I don’t. Yeah, you know, and I don’t know. That that’s going to be

644
00:40:46,010 –> 00:40:49,690
necessarily bringing forward the good right parts of

645
00:40:49,690 –> 00:40:53,210
the foundation, just trying to learn from the mistakes. But really, you need

646
00:40:53,210 –> 00:40:56,930
both. You need both. You need the good stuff from the foundation and learning

647
00:40:56,930 –> 00:41:00,780
from the mistakes, which actually is relevant to one of your questions. That’s down.

648
00:41:00,780 –> 00:41:02,940
It is relevant to one of the questions. Swinging it back.

649
00:41:05,340 –> 00:41:08,740
We always do this. We always do this when we talk because we were wondering.

650
00:41:08,740 –> 00:41:12,020
Okay, so back to the book, Back to the Time

651
00:41:12,020 –> 00:41:15,860
Machine. Some of the themes. We’re going to talk

652
00:41:15,860 –> 00:41:19,420
about themes in a minute, but I want to talk about this piece right here

653
00:41:19,420 –> 00:41:22,860
in chapter eight, explanation. Right.

654
00:41:23,020 –> 00:41:26,650
Talking about. Talking about worldviews

655
00:41:26,650 –> 00:41:26,970
and

656
00:41:31,130 –> 00:41:33,850
talking about. I want to talk also about a little bit about the Arrow of

657
00:41:33,850 –> 00:41:37,690
Time, but this is the model of the Eloy.

658
00:41:37,850 –> 00:41:41,570
So I want to pick this up from. Again, from H.G. wells

659
00:41:41,570 –> 00:41:44,330
from Time Machine. I’m reading the open source, an open source edition,

660
00:41:45,850 –> 00:41:49,570
the original. The original 1895

661
00:41:49,570 –> 00:41:53,370
classic. You can get it on Project Gutenberg or on Kindle

662
00:41:53,370 –> 00:41:57,210
or anywhere where you download books. Okay, so

663
00:41:57,210 –> 00:42:00,690
picking up from here, the time traveler again, talking in first person,

664
00:42:01,010 –> 00:42:04,730
relating what he. What he has seen beneath my feet. Then the earth

665
00:42:04,730 –> 00:42:08,210
must be tunneled enormously. And these tunnelings were the habitats of the new race

666
00:42:08,610 –> 00:42:12,170
capital in capital R, by the way. I love that the presence of ventilating

667
00:42:12,170 –> 00:42:15,810
shafts and wells along the hill slopes, everywhere in fact, except along the river valley,

668
00:42:17,080 –> 00:42:20,800
showed how universal were its ramifications. What so natural then, as

669
00:42:20,800 –> 00:42:24,600
to assume that it was in this artificial underworld that such work was necessary

670
00:42:25,000 –> 00:42:28,640
to the comfort of the daylight race was done. The notion was so

671
00:42:28,640 –> 00:42:32,320
plausible that I at once accepted it and went on to assume the how of

672
00:42:32,320 –> 00:42:36,000
the splitting of the human species. I dare say you will

673
00:42:36,000 –> 00:42:39,680
anticipate the shape of my theory, though for myself I very soon felt that it

674
00:42:39,680 –> 00:42:43,490
fell far short of the truth. At first, proceeding

675
00:42:43,490 –> 00:42:46,930
from the problems of our own age, it seemed clear as daylight to me that

676
00:42:46,930 –> 00:42:50,690
the gradual widening of the present merely temporary and social

677
00:42:50,690 –> 00:42:54,410
difference between the capitalist and the laborer was the key to

678
00:42:54,410 –> 00:42:58,090
the whole position. No doubt it will seem grotesque enough to

679
00:42:58,090 –> 00:43:01,850
you and wildly incredible, and yet even now there are existing circumstances to

680
00:43:01,850 –> 00:43:05,450
point that way. There is a tendency to utilize underground

681
00:43:05,450 –> 00:43:09,170
space for the less ornamental purposes of civilization. There is the Metropolitan

682
00:43:09,170 –> 00:43:12,770
Railway in London, for instance. There are new electric railways. There are subways. There are

683
00:43:12,770 –> 00:43:16,570
underground workrooms and restaurants in there, and they increase in multiply.

684
00:43:16,970 –> 00:43:20,810
Evidently, I thought this tendency had increased till industry had gradually

685
00:43:20,810 –> 00:43:24,530
lost its birthright in the sky. I mean that it had gone

686
00:43:24,530 –> 00:43:27,770
deeper and deeper into larger and ever larger underground factories, spending

687
00:43:28,250 –> 00:43:31,210
still increasing amount of its time there, until in the End

688
00:43:32,010 –> 00:43:35,710
even now, does not an East End worker live in such an artificial land,

689
00:43:35,780 –> 00:43:39,260
Live in such artificial conditions as practically to be cut off from the natural surface

690
00:43:39,260 –> 00:43:42,980
of the earth? Again, the exclusive tendency of

691
00:43:42,980 –> 00:43:46,460
richer people, due no doubt to the increasing refinement of their education. And the

692
00:43:46,460 –> 00:43:50,300
widening gulf between them and the rude violence of the poor. Is already

693
00:43:50,300 –> 00:43:53,740
leading to the closing in their interests of considerable portions of the service of the

694
00:43:53,740 –> 00:43:57,460
land. About London, for instance, perhaps half the prettier country

695
00:43:57,460 –> 00:44:01,260
is shut in against intrusion. And this is the same widening gulf which is due

696
00:44:01,260 –> 00:44:04,800
to the length and expense of the higher educational process. And the

697
00:44:04,800 –> 00:44:08,480
increased faculties facilities for. And the temptations

698
00:44:08,480 –> 00:44:12,280
towards refined habits on the part of the rich. That will make

699
00:44:12,440 –> 00:44:16,200
that exchange between class and class. That promotion by intermarriage.

700
00:44:16,200 –> 00:44:20,000
Which at present retards the splitting of our species along lines of

701
00:44:20,000 –> 00:44:23,840
social stratification less and less frequent. So in the end,

702
00:44:23,840 –> 00:44:27,440
above ground you must have the haves pursuing pleasure and comfort and

703
00:44:27,440 –> 00:44:31,200
beauty. And below ground, the have nots. The workers getting continually

704
00:44:31,200 –> 00:44:34,960
adapted to the conditions of their labor. Once they were there,

705
00:44:34,960 –> 00:44:37,960
they would no doubt have to pay rent, and not little of it for the

706
00:44:37,960 –> 00:44:41,680
ventilation of their caverns. And if they refused, they would starve or be suffocated for

707
00:44:41,680 –> 00:44:44,880
arrears, such of them as were so

708
00:44:44,880 –> 00:44:48,480
constituted as to be miserable and rebellious would die. And in the end, the balance

709
00:44:48,480 –> 00:44:52,160
being permanent, the survivors would become as well adapted to the

710
00:44:52,160 –> 00:44:55,760
conditions of underground life. And as happy on their way as the overworld people were

711
00:44:56,160 –> 00:44:59,760
to theirs. And it seemed to me the refined beauty

712
00:44:59,840 –> 00:45:03,680
and the exfoliated pallor followed naturally enough.

713
00:45:04,160 –> 00:45:07,840
By the way, I love atoliated. It just means dark love

714
00:45:07,840 –> 00:45:11,440
that I’m not dark, but white. Sorry. The white pallor. The great

715
00:45:11,440 –> 00:45:15,120
triumph of humanity I had dreamed of took a different shape in my mind.

716
00:45:15,520 –> 00:45:19,320
It had been no such triumph of moral education and general cooperation as I

717
00:45:19,320 –> 00:45:23,100
had imagined. Instead, I saw real aristocracy armed with

718
00:45:23,100 –> 00:45:26,780
perfected science and working to a logical conclusion. The industrial system

719
00:45:26,780 –> 00:45:29,980
of today. Its triumph had not

720
00:45:30,460 –> 00:45:34,180
been simply a triumph over nature, but a triumph over nature and the fellow

721
00:45:34,180 –> 00:45:37,900
man. This, I must warn you, was my theory at the time. I had

722
00:45:37,900 –> 00:45:41,500
no convenient cicerone to the pattern of the

723
00:45:41,500 –> 00:45:45,180
utopian books. My explanation may be absolutely wrong.

724
00:45:45,420 –> 00:45:49,180
I still think it is the most plausible one. But even on this supposition,

725
00:45:49,180 –> 00:45:53,020
the balanced civilization that was at last attained. Must have long since passed its zenith.

726
00:45:53,020 –> 00:45:56,530
And was now far fallen into decay. By the way, Pause.

727
00:45:56,850 –> 00:46:00,610
He travels forward into the future. 802,000 years into

728
00:46:00,610 –> 00:46:04,450
the future. By the way, Back to the book. The two

729
00:46:04,450 –> 00:46:07,810
perfect security of the Overworlders had led them to a slow

730
00:46:07,810 –> 00:46:11,530
moment movement of degeneration to a general dwindling in size, strength

731
00:46:11,530 –> 00:46:15,370
and intelligence. This I could see clearly enough. What had already

732
00:46:15,370 –> 00:46:19,180
happened, what had happened to the undergrounders, I did not yet suspect. But from what

733
00:46:19,180 –> 00:46:22,900
I had seen of the Morlocks, that by the by was the

734
00:46:22,900 –> 00:46:26,580
name by which these creatures were called. I could imagine that the modification

735
00:46:26,580 –> 00:46:30,260
of the human type was even far more profound than among

736
00:46:30,260 –> 00:46:33,500
the quote unquote Eloi, the beautiful race

737
00:46:34,300 –> 00:46:36,620
that I already knew.

738
00:46:43,340 –> 00:46:45,900
That’s the logical conclusion of Darwinian eugenics.

739
00:46:48,640 –> 00:46:51,680
That’s the logical conclusion, that the races will split.

740
00:46:53,120 –> 00:46:56,760
Each race will become more and more like itself. By the

741
00:46:56,760 –> 00:46:59,280
way, just side note in history,

742
00:47:00,560 –> 00:47:04,080
many years after Welles passed away, it was

743
00:47:04,080 –> 00:47:07,760
found out that the, the National Socialists

744
00:47:08,720 –> 00:47:12,320
in Germany during World War II had been running around in India

745
00:47:12,480 –> 00:47:15,890
and in Africa measuring people’s heads

746
00:47:16,290 –> 00:47:19,890
to determine what their genetic phenotypes were.

747
00:47:19,890 –> 00:47:23,570
They didn’t call it that term then. And to determine which races

748
00:47:23,570 –> 00:47:24,690
were the most pure.

749
00:47:29,890 –> 00:47:31,490
I’m just going to let everybody sit with that.

750
00:47:35,890 –> 00:47:39,650
So what are some themes that jump out to us from the time machine?

751
00:47:39,880 –> 00:47:43,640
What, what should we, what should we really be focused on? Don’t be a

752
00:47:43,640 –> 00:47:44,680
dick. Wait, no,

753
00:47:51,160 –> 00:47:54,840
it’s funny. My co author, it’s brief side story. My co author and

754
00:47:54,840 –> 00:47:58,360
I were like, hey, let’s start a discord. You know, it’ll be fun, blah, blah,

755
00:47:58,360 –> 00:48:01,560
blah. It’s like, well, we should, you know, set up some rules, make sure nobody’s.

756
00:48:01,720 –> 00:48:04,720
And I’m just like, okay, what rules should there be? He’s like, really? It just

757
00:48:04,720 –> 00:48:07,900
boils down to one like, don’t be a dick.

758
00:48:09,980 –> 00:48:13,740
So but the, the themes that, you know, it’s

759
00:48:13,740 –> 00:48:17,460
funny, it’s not necessarily related to the, the excerpt that you just read, but when

760
00:48:17,460 –> 00:48:20,660
I was thinking about this question, I was

761
00:48:20,660 –> 00:48:24,380
reminded of how

762
00:48:24,380 –> 00:48:26,460
the time traveler does the impossible

763
00:48:29,020 –> 00:48:31,820
comes back and nobody will believe him.

764
00:48:34,290 –> 00:48:37,530
And at. After he does that, he’s like, I know you guys aren’t gonna believe

765
00:48:37,530 –> 00:48:41,370
me. I don’t care. I’m gonna tell you the story. Don’t ask any questions.

766
00:48:41,370 –> 00:48:45,010
And I feel like sometimes leaders, as

767
00:48:45,010 –> 00:48:48,290
much as I, as, as listening

768
00:48:49,730 –> 00:48:52,130
and, and discourse are both

769
00:48:56,130 –> 00:48:58,530
necessary values of good leadership.

770
00:49:01,080 –> 00:49:04,200
Sometimes you have,

771
00:49:04,760 –> 00:49:07,520
you just have to be like, okay, sit up, shut down. I need to say

772
00:49:07,520 –> 00:49:11,320
this, this is what happened. And I

773
00:49:11,320 –> 00:49:15,040
know you guys aren’t gonna believe me. I think there’s a time

774
00:49:15,040 –> 00:49:18,680
and a place so that, that, that kind of Jumped out at me.

775
00:49:19,160 –> 00:49:22,520
I think of. I think of Roy. I think of Roy Batty’s speech at the

776
00:49:22,520 –> 00:49:25,920
end of Blade Runner. I love the line. I love the line that he gives

777
00:49:25,920 –> 00:49:29,680
right. To start his Tears in the Rain speech. I’ve seen things you people

778
00:49:29,680 –> 00:49:33,400
wouldn’t believe. Yeah. And then he goes on

779
00:49:33,400 –> 00:49:35,600
and. And. And there’s no way to prove it. And there’s no way to prove

780
00:49:35,600 –> 00:49:39,440
it. And. And so. And Harrison. And Harrison Ford’s look, by the way,

781
00:49:39,440 –> 00:49:42,880
after he gives a speech is classic. It’s the classic look of the follower

782
00:49:43,040 –> 00:49:46,840
who has no idea what he just heard and just goes. Or she just heard

783
00:49:46,840 –> 00:49:50,520
and just goes. You know, I think

784
00:49:50,520 –> 00:49:54,040
of. Think of the Fugitive, right? Where Tommy Lee

785
00:49:54,040 –> 00:49:57,560
Jones traps Harrison Ford in the tunnel, right?

786
00:49:57,800 –> 00:50:01,560
And Harrison Ford is the doctor says, I didn’t kill my wife.

787
00:50:01,880 –> 00:50:05,160
And Harris. And Tommy Lee Jones goes, I don’t

788
00:50:05,480 –> 00:50:09,320
care. And that’s. That’s it.

789
00:50:09,320 –> 00:50:12,360
That’s the response. And that’s the response I kind of got from some of the

790
00:50:12,360 –> 00:50:15,880
folks who are listening to. Or that’s the oppression you get from

791
00:50:15,880 –> 00:50:19,640
folks, you know, but yeah, okay, so doing the impossible in the service

792
00:50:19,640 –> 00:50:23,440
of the ungrateful. Kind of.

793
00:50:23,440 –> 00:50:26,400
Yeah. Or just. And sometimes

794
00:50:26,960 –> 00:50:30,720
there’s gonna be the criticism. Like you’re gonna. You’re gonna decide on

795
00:50:30,720 –> 00:50:33,680
a course of action. My mentor recently said

796
00:50:35,680 –> 00:50:39,120
a bad decision is better than no decision. Because a bad decision

797
00:50:39,280 –> 00:50:42,720
can be improved upon. Like you can. You can

798
00:50:43,520 –> 00:50:47,160
keep making that better. But if you never decide and you never do

799
00:50:47,160 –> 00:50:50,930
anything, then there’s. You

800
00:50:50,930 –> 00:50:53,410
can’t fix. It’s not that you can’t fix that, but you know what I mean?

801
00:50:53,410 –> 00:50:57,210
Like, you gotta. You gotta decide. And so I think even.

802
00:50:58,170 –> 00:51:02,010
And then you gotta follow through. Even if people are looking at your decision

803
00:51:02,170 –> 00:51:05,970
and you’ve got all this either in your head because

804
00:51:05,970 –> 00:51:09,810
of The Self Talk 100 is there? And then other people are

805
00:51:09,810 –> 00:51:13,610
going to validate that negative self that you don’t know what you’re doing. And

806
00:51:13,610 –> 00:51:16,570
this is a terrible decision and all of these risks

807
00:51:17,760 –> 00:51:21,520
and sometimes you as the leader. And again, there’s a

808
00:51:21,520 –> 00:51:25,040
time and a place for listening, Right? But I think there’s a gut check too.

809
00:51:25,600 –> 00:51:29,040
So as humans, we have this. This marvelous

810
00:51:29,440 –> 00:51:33,240
kind of duology. Whatever. You know,

811
00:51:33,240 –> 00:51:36,480
we’ve got the brain, got the big brain, and then we’ve got the gut,

812
00:51:37,280 –> 00:51:40,920
right? And so I think usually if you’re not

813
00:51:40,920 –> 00:51:44,760
sure, is this a time to listen? Is this a time to just

814
00:51:46,840 –> 00:51:50,640
plow forward, like, check in with your gut? Usually you’ll

815
00:51:50,640 –> 00:51:54,480
know but anyway, so there’s a time and a

816
00:51:54,480 –> 00:51:56,560
place to listen, but then there’s a time and a place to just be. Like,

817
00:51:56,560 –> 00:51:59,479
I gotta. I gotta try this. Because if I don’t,

818
00:52:00,360 –> 00:52:03,840
I’ll never know. If I keep listening to the naysayers that say, this is impossible,

819
00:52:03,840 –> 00:52:07,480
this is a terrible idea, then we’ll never.

820
00:52:07,720 –> 00:52:11,330
We’ll never progress. We’ll never move forward because they’re just looking

821
00:52:11,330 –> 00:52:15,050
at. What was it? Oh, I love this quote, but I’m going to butcher

822
00:52:15,050 –> 00:52:18,130
it, and I can’t remember even who said it. But there’s something to the effect

823
00:52:18,130 –> 00:52:21,890
of if you continue. Continue to act based on

824
00:52:22,210 –> 00:52:25,090
what has already been empirically proven,

825
00:52:26,130 –> 00:52:29,570
we’ll never learn anything new or get any

826
00:52:29,730 –> 00:52:33,010
anywhere past what we’ve already done. Right?

827
00:52:33,330 –> 00:52:37,120
Right. Right. We’ll never defy those odds. We’ll never. Yeah,

828
00:52:37,120 –> 00:52:39,520
we’ll never produce anything new. Well, nothing.

829
00:52:43,840 –> 00:52:47,600
You got to have risks. Right? And at a certain point, you got

830
00:52:47,600 –> 00:52:51,200
to take risks. Right. Nothing is without a downside. Nothing is

831
00:52:51,200 –> 00:52:54,720
consequence free. Right? Right. No decision is

832
00:52:54,720 –> 00:52:58,440
consequence free. You just have to figure out. No, not even figure

833
00:52:58,440 –> 00:53:01,960
out. You have to be okay as a leader, just like

834
00:53:01,960 –> 00:53:05,720
the. The time traveler was, who, by the way, is unnamed.

835
00:53:05,720 –> 00:53:08,240
He’s only called the time traveler. Right.

836
00:53:10,160 –> 00:53:13,840
You have to be okay. And by okay, I mean

837
00:53:13,840 –> 00:53:17,600
okay at every single level. Right. Which kind of ties into the conversation

838
00:53:17,600 –> 00:53:21,360
we had in the previous section. But, like, you have to be okay at every

839
00:53:21,360 –> 00:53:25,200
single level, biologically, psychologically,

840
00:53:25,680 –> 00:53:29,520
spiritually, emotionally, whatever Lee, you want to put on there ecumenically,

841
00:53:29,600 –> 00:53:31,040
however, whatever,

842
00:53:44,280 –> 00:53:47,800
with the consequences of. Okay. I think about this practically

843
00:53:48,520 –> 00:53:50,680
in terms of. In terms of family.

844
00:53:52,840 –> 00:53:56,600
So if I’m in a family and there’s a decision to

845
00:53:56,600 –> 00:54:00,370
be made about, let’s make it something small about where to

846
00:54:00,370 –> 00:54:03,450
go for dinner. Right. And I know that

847
00:54:03,930 –> 00:54:07,770
my kids really like pizza, and you say the word pizza and they’re

848
00:54:07,770 –> 00:54:11,490
going to lose their mind and they’re going to be happy. And my wife doesn’t

849
00:54:11,490 –> 00:54:15,250
care about pizza. Matter of fact, my wife will probably

850
00:54:15,250 –> 00:54:17,930
throat punch me if we go back to Chuck E. Cheese again.

851
00:54:19,130 –> 00:54:22,850
And I decide out of the goodness of my heart that we’re all going to

852
00:54:22,850 –> 00:54:24,900
Chuck E. Cheese tonight because the three

853
00:54:26,420 –> 00:54:30,180
people will be happy, the three

854
00:54:30,180 –> 00:54:34,020
humans will be happy. And I will disappoint one human. Sure.

855
00:54:34,260 –> 00:54:36,580
I’ve made a utilitarian decision

856
00:54:38,020 –> 00:54:40,780
because the good of the many to go back to Star Trek for just a

857
00:54:40,780 –> 00:54:44,580
minute. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. And that

858
00:54:44,580 –> 00:54:48,300
one human that’s a full size grown up human. She can go

859
00:54:48,300 –> 00:54:51,470
get her needs met in a whole bunch of different ways. And she doesn’t have

860
00:54:51,470 –> 00:54:54,070
to go to Chuck E. Cheese if she doesn’t want to. And so we’re going

861
00:54:54,070 –> 00:54:54,990
to Chuck E. Cheese.

862
00:54:58,590 –> 00:55:02,350
The only way that decision works is if I am comfortable

863
00:55:02,350 –> 00:55:05,670
with whatever the outcomes are going to be from deciding that the three

864
00:55:05,670 –> 00:55:09,430
humans that I’m in, we’re both in charge of, are going

865
00:55:09,430 –> 00:55:13,110
to Chuck E. Cheese. And if I

866
00:55:13,110 –> 00:55:16,710
don’t want those consequences, if I am

867
00:55:16,710 –> 00:55:19,710
uncomfortable with wherever that may go all the way from,

868
00:55:20,430 –> 00:55:22,510
yeah, you’re going to sleep in the bed, but you’re going to be all the

869
00:55:22,510 –> 00:55:26,230
way on the far side and it’s going to be chilly all the way

870
00:55:26,230 –> 00:55:29,550
to. You might be sleeping on the couch, you know,

871
00:55:30,430 –> 00:55:34,070
for a couple of nights. Because depending upon, you know, how this is all going

872
00:55:34,070 –> 00:55:37,750
to go. As long as I’m comfortable with that decision as the leader

873
00:55:37,750 –> 00:55:41,150
of the family. And by the way, we could flip the genders. It doesn’t matter

874
00:55:41,230 –> 00:55:44,940
right then. Okay.

875
00:55:45,420 –> 00:55:48,860
Like I’m, I’m, I’m behaving in a leadership capacity.

876
00:55:50,060 –> 00:55:53,660
Too many people, I think, particularly in our current era,

877
00:55:54,540 –> 00:55:58,260
believe that collaboration hedges all of those

878
00:55:58,260 –> 00:56:01,860
consequences. And it doesn’t. And it, and it doesn’t. That’s not what

879
00:56:01,860 –> 00:56:05,700
collaboration’s for. Collaboration is great for brainstorming or determining

880
00:56:05,700 –> 00:56:08,620
where you’re going to go to like eat with the three humans and your wife

881
00:56:08,830 –> 00:56:12,550
or your husband in whatever situation. Like, that works fine. Okay.

882
00:56:12,550 –> 00:56:15,910
Collaboration works there. It’s a small decision. But when we start scaling up

883
00:56:15,910 –> 00:56:19,230
decisions, collaboration can sometimes fall apart.

884
00:56:24,749 –> 00:56:28,390
Yes. Sin is nodding her head. That’s so funny that you,

885
00:56:28,390 –> 00:56:30,030
you know, I feel like censored.

886
00:56:31,630 –> 00:56:35,390
Censure. Censure. My mentor has been telling me that exact thing

887
00:56:37,110 –> 00:56:40,590
because I, you know, I jumped into my business and I really

888
00:56:40,590 –> 00:56:44,110
wanted partners, really wanted

889
00:56:44,110 –> 00:56:47,870
partners because I am a collaborative artist. I love collaborating.

890
00:56:47,870 –> 00:56:50,150
It’s my favorite. But

891
00:56:52,070 –> 00:56:55,630
yes, even, even with business partners, somebody has

892
00:56:55,630 –> 00:56:59,110
to step forward, make the decision

893
00:57:00,310 –> 00:57:04,150
and see what happens. See what happens. Somebody has to be the

894
00:57:04,150 –> 00:57:07,780
person upon whom the weight of the failure

895
00:57:07,780 –> 00:57:11,420
falls. And

896
00:57:12,220 –> 00:57:15,460
someone has to be the person. And this is the critical thing. I wrote about

897
00:57:15,460 –> 00:57:19,100
this in my book 12 Rules for Leaders. You should pick it up. Somebody

898
00:57:19,100 –> 00:57:21,580
has to be the person who also

899
00:57:22,620 –> 00:57:25,660
is happy enough with how the process went

900
00:57:26,700 –> 00:57:30,060
and the outcome that was achieved to give away credit.

901
00:57:30,300 –> 00:57:34,100
And everybody focuses on the failure falling on me part because we only ever see

902
00:57:34,100 –> 00:57:37,950
the downsides, right? But to go back to the Chuck E.

903
00:57:37,950 –> 00:57:41,710
Cheese example, if it works

904
00:57:41,710 –> 00:57:44,950
out. And my wife’s like, okay, yeah, let’s go to Chuck E. Cheese. Even though

905
00:57:44,950 –> 00:57:46,990
I’ll throat punch you, I’ll throw punch you in the way. In the car. In

906
00:57:46,990 –> 00:57:50,270
the car. And so I get throat punched all the way to the car. But

907
00:57:50,270 –> 00:57:53,910
we go to Chuck E. Cheese and my kids are running around and

908
00:57:53,910 –> 00:57:57,630
my wife’s sitting there. And let’s say this is a. This is

909
00:57:57,630 –> 00:58:01,380
not Chuck E. Cheese. This is Dave and Buster’s. She could have a margarita. And

910
00:58:01,380 –> 00:58:04,860
now it’s all, like, worked out in the end. Right. And by the way, I

911
00:58:04,860 –> 00:58:07,620
don’t take any credit for that. I’m like, well, the kids, the kids decided on

912
00:58:07,620 –> 00:58:08,780
this. It’s all them.

913
00:58:11,660 –> 00:58:15,020
They had nothing to do with me. Now if it fails,

914
00:58:15,260 –> 00:58:17,340
I’m the one that gets to sleep on the couch because the kids aren’t going

915
00:58:17,340 –> 00:58:21,140
to sleep on the couch. Right, right. That’s what we’re looking for in

916
00:58:21,140 –> 00:58:24,860
leadership. Yeah. So collaboration works up to a point,

917
00:58:25,660 –> 00:58:29,290
but we also have to, I think, understand that

918
00:58:29,450 –> 00:58:33,210
a bad decision. I love your thinking there, or the way

919
00:58:33,210 –> 00:58:36,570
you frame that a bad decision is better than no decision. The Marines actually

920
00:58:36,810 –> 00:58:39,650
believe that a Marine will be court martialed. This is one of the most fascinating

921
00:58:39,650 –> 00:58:43,210
things I’ve ever heard. A Marine officer will be court martialed for making no

922
00:58:43,210 –> 00:58:47,050
decision. But. Whoa, right.

923
00:58:47,530 –> 00:58:51,130
But in the army, you’re court martialed more

924
00:58:51,130 –> 00:58:53,690
likely than not for making a bad decision.

925
00:58:56,640 –> 00:58:59,960
Because I once heard a Marine frame this for me. Marine officer framed this for

926
00:58:59,960 –> 00:59:03,720
me. Marines die whether you make a good decision or a

927
00:59:03,720 –> 00:59:07,560
bad decision. Marines die. That’s what we do. So just make

928
00:59:07,560 –> 00:59:11,120
a decision. In the army, it’s a different

929
00:59:11,280 –> 00:59:14,840
thing. It’s not army guys

930
00:59:14,840 –> 00:59:18,360
die if we make a good decision or a bad decision. It’s

931
00:59:18,360 –> 00:59:21,760
what’s the best possible decision you could have made under these circumstances and then make

932
00:59:21,760 –> 00:59:25,420
that one right. And this is something

933
00:59:25,420 –> 00:59:29,140
fundamental that’s different between the branches. I find that to

934
00:59:29,140 –> 00:59:32,860
be incredibly fascinating because most of real life is

935
00:59:32,860 –> 00:59:36,580
downsides. Most of the time you’re making, you

936
00:59:36,580 –> 00:59:39,660
are. You’re making a decision out of a. Out of a series of terrible options

937
00:59:39,660 –> 00:59:43,100
that you didn’t choose. You’re like, oh, we faced all these options

938
00:59:43,260 –> 00:59:45,740
and I didn’t choose any of them. And in a perfect world, I would have

939
00:59:45,740 –> 00:59:49,020
none of these. And I don’t live in that world. I don’t live in the

940
00:59:49,020 –> 00:59:51,100
Darwinian utopia with the Eloi.

941
00:59:53,280 –> 00:59:56,960
Which is not perfect, by the way. No, it’s not. So, you know, more

942
00:59:56,960 –> 01:00:00,720
Themes for leaders. It’s just kind of one of, one of my

943
01:00:00,720 –> 01:00:04,040
coaches always talked about how life is 50, 50, no matter where you are, no

944
01:00:04,040 –> 01:00:07,200
matter how successful, how poor, how rich, how

945
01:00:07,760 –> 01:00:10,480
many kids, how few kids, whatever, whatever it is,

946
01:00:11,440 –> 01:00:13,840
life is 50, 50 good, bad.

947
01:00:15,360 –> 01:00:19,070
And there are utopian aspects when, when he jumps

948
01:00:19,070 –> 01:00:21,750
into the future and, you know, we’ve achieved.

949
01:00:22,630 –> 01:00:26,230
Humanity has achieved everything that they have been gunning for.

950
01:00:27,830 –> 01:00:31,590
But there are, there’s, there’s some creepy darkness there.

951
01:00:31,670 –> 01:00:35,030
Like their food now, like the

952
01:00:35,030 –> 01:00:38,830
halves are now, like, you know, Hasan was

953
01:00:38,830 –> 01:00:42,350
reading it earlier, I don’t know if you caught it, but they’re basically just

954
01:00:42,350 –> 01:00:46,010
fattened cattle just waiting to be eaten. And they have

955
01:00:46,010 –> 01:00:49,210
some awareness of this, which is why they fear the dark and why they fear

956
01:00:49,210 –> 01:00:52,050
the Morlocks. But that’s it.

957
01:00:53,090 –> 01:00:56,730
You know, they’re frolicking around, eating, making

958
01:00:56,730 –> 01:00:59,170
love, eating fruit, bathing in the river,

959
01:01:00,610 –> 01:01:04,370
having the perfect life, terrified that they’re going to be eaten

960
01:01:04,370 –> 01:01:08,210
next. So that’s

961
01:01:08,210 –> 01:01:11,940
like. So I. Light and dark, light and dark. It’s.

962
01:01:11,940 –> 01:01:14,660
There’s good and bad. So when I was reading this,

963
01:01:15,780 –> 01:01:18,820
when I was reading this, I was thinking of our current cultural moment and what

964
01:01:18,820 –> 01:01:21,780
flashed in my brain because I have all these illusions in my brain, like a

965
01:01:21,780 –> 01:01:24,100
steel trap. So I was thinking of

966
01:01:25,460 –> 01:01:29,140
the, the U.S. congresswoman from

967
01:01:29,300 –> 01:01:32,420
New York City, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez.

968
01:01:32,900 –> 01:01:36,500
She was at some event a few years ago now,

969
01:01:36,990 –> 01:01:39,870
and she wore a dress that said Eat the Rich on it or had Eat

970
01:01:39,870 –> 01:01:42,790
the Rich written on it, all white dress with, with a red writing. You could

971
01:01:42,790 –> 01:01:46,550
see it online. And it was like some Met Gala, some thing where

972
01:01:46,550 –> 01:01:50,030
they, like show off, you know, billion dollar dresses or whatever.

973
01:01:50,270 –> 01:01:53,470
And she had it specially designed for her. It was during the Biden administration. It

974
01:01:53,470 –> 01:01:57,030
was like a big deal, whatever. And, and I think about the

975
01:01:57,030 –> 01:02:00,710
sentiment behind that and

976
01:02:00,710 –> 01:02:04,520
I think in relation particularly to the Eloi and the warlocks. And I’m

977
01:02:04,520 –> 01:02:07,960
not the first person to make this illusion, but when we’re

978
01:02:07,960 –> 01:02:11,720
talking about. And

979
01:02:11,880 –> 01:02:15,240
by the way, just, just so you know how exactly dark my brain is,

980
01:02:16,040 –> 01:02:19,400
I, I am, I’ve never admitted this on the show. This is a new one.

981
01:02:19,400 –> 01:02:23,080
So one more layer gets peeled away. I am fascinated

982
01:02:23,400 –> 01:02:27,200
by what makes a person eat another person. Like, the psychology behind

983
01:02:27,200 –> 01:02:31,000
that. Like, how do you get to that point? Like, I understand if you’re,

984
01:02:31,380 –> 01:02:34,980
if you’re in a plane crash in the Andes

985
01:02:35,780 –> 01:02:39,380
mountains, desperation. I absolutely understand that.

986
01:02:41,620 –> 01:02:45,220
I understand, you know, there are people who,

987
01:02:45,540 –> 01:02:49,340
they will die before they will eat another, you know, they’ll die before they go

988
01:02:49,340 –> 01:02:52,900
there. Right now we, we have to counterpose that

989
01:02:53,860 –> 01:02:57,600
with, in recent world history,

990
01:02:58,960 –> 01:03:02,520
Native American tribes, North American, South America,

991
01:03:02,520 –> 01:03:06,240
tribes that cannibalized each other. There are cannibal

992
01:03:06,240 –> 01:03:10,080
tribes running around the world today. There are people

993
01:03:10,080 –> 01:03:13,800
in the western world who have this recently happened in Germany,

994
01:03:13,800 –> 01:03:16,960
probably about 10 years ago, someone advertised online

995
01:03:19,200 –> 01:03:22,880
to eat somebody and somebody showed up and ate that person. And I believe

996
01:03:22,880 –> 01:03:25,040
they were prosecuted in Germany. And the guy went to jail.

997
01:03:27,610 –> 01:03:31,370
Krista is now shocked again. This is, this is my, this

998
01:03:31,370 –> 01:03:35,050
is my, my steel trap brain. I think of all this. So

999
01:03:35,050 –> 01:03:37,690
all this merges together. Right, right.

1000
01:03:39,050 –> 01:03:42,650
And, and so I’m talking about the Morlock of the

1001
01:03:42,650 –> 01:03:44,810
Eloy. And I wasn’t really going to focus on the cannibalism, but you brought it

1002
01:03:44,810 –> 01:03:47,450
up, so you opened the door for me. So I’m gonna, I’m gonna, I’m gonna

1003
01:03:47,450 –> 01:03:51,170
walk through. If we’re eating the leisure

1004
01:03:51,170 –> 01:03:54,930
class metaphorically, which is, I’m sure what AOC would say her dress

1005
01:03:54,930 –> 01:03:57,970
meant. It’s metaphorical eating. Yeah, okay,

1006
01:03:58,530 –> 01:04:01,970
but it’s, it’s, it’s a real easy leap to go from metaphor,

1007
01:04:02,050 –> 01:04:05,290
particularly in the, in the times in which we are in now, go from metaphor

1008
01:04:05,290 –> 01:04:08,930
to actuality without much,

1009
01:04:08,930 –> 01:04:11,970
without people being pushed much to go in that direction.

1010
01:04:12,770 –> 01:04:16,530
What does it say? And Wells even says that, like, oh, well, this

1011
01:04:16,530 –> 01:04:20,340
is just a natural thing. Like, it’s fine. Judge it. We shouldn’t judge

1012
01:04:20,340 –> 01:04:23,260
it. We shouldn’t judge it. Like, what do we do? We can.

1013
01:04:24,140 –> 01:04:26,380
How do we. How do we not?

1014
01:04:28,540 –> 01:04:30,620
I guess it’s a morality question, really.

1015
01:04:32,220 –> 01:04:36,060
Well, and if you’re. Well, I don’t know enough about, like the,

1016
01:04:36,300 –> 01:04:40,100
about Marx, like the, the, the nitty gritty. But, like, do they even believe in

1017
01:04:40,100 –> 01:04:43,900
more like morality? Do they? Yeah, I didn’t think so. So then, then of course

1018
01:04:43,900 –> 01:04:47,430
he’s going to be like, well, I shouldn’t judge it. No. They’re historical determinists. Like,

1019
01:04:47,430 –> 01:04:50,870
you could see that even in Wells writing, they believe that history determines what people

1020
01:04:50,870 –> 01:04:54,430
do. And the battle between capital and labor

1021
01:04:54,670 –> 01:04:57,790
is the driving force. That’s

1022
01:04:58,430 –> 01:05:00,510
not in the Communist Manifesto. That’s in Das Kapital.

1023
01:05:03,550 –> 01:05:07,270
The battle between capital and labor is the driving force of

1024
01:05:07,270 –> 01:05:10,910
all human history. There’s nothing else outside of

1025
01:05:10,910 –> 01:05:14,750
that. Religion is the opiate of the masses. It’s just bs. It’s designed.

1026
01:05:15,150 –> 01:05:18,990
Morality is just bs. It’s designed to cover up our brute,

1027
01:05:19,070 –> 01:05:22,790
savage nature, which again, Wells was a,

1028
01:05:22,790 –> 01:05:26,270
again, as a Fabian socialist would have been, Would have been right

1029
01:05:26,270 –> 01:05:28,910
Alongside of that. Right. You would have thought that

1030
01:05:29,870 –> 01:05:32,590
was absolutely a correct way of

1031
01:05:34,270 –> 01:05:37,150
analyzing epistemicologically

1032
01:05:38,420 –> 01:05:42,180
reality. And I

1033
01:05:42,260 –> 01:05:45,660
think he’s utterly and completely and totally incorrect. And that’s bananas in

1034
01:05:45,660 –> 01:05:49,060
pajamas if I’m to be friendly.

1035
01:05:55,700 –> 01:05:56,100
So.

1036
01:06:01,300 –> 01:06:04,340
Where. Well, okay. Themes for leaders.

1037
01:06:08,160 –> 01:06:12,000
Hey guys. So for leaders, 50 50, you’re gonna, you’re gonna push,

1038
01:06:12,000 –> 01:06:15,640
you’re gonna achieve some really great things. Most likely eventually if you keep

1039
01:06:15,640 –> 01:06:19,120
going. Right, right. You’re gonna fail to fail, Fail, fail, fail, succeed.

1040
01:06:19,680 –> 01:06:23,520
Yeah. Even when you succeed,

1041
01:06:23,520 –> 01:06:27,320
you reach that new level in your business, you reach that new revenue goal, that

1042
01:06:27,320 –> 01:06:29,920
new, you know, whatever you’re scaling,

1043
01:06:30,800 –> 01:06:34,520
you’re starting out, you find you’re like you’re in

1044
01:06:34,520 –> 01:06:37,770
a startup and you obtain re regular revenue.

1045
01:06:38,010 –> 01:06:41,730
Yeah, there’s going to be good and bad. My

1046
01:06:41,730 –> 01:06:45,530
coach like to say, you know, there is not better than here.

1047
01:06:45,610 –> 01:06:49,210
Like you, you can easily conceive of the things that will be

1048
01:06:49,210 –> 01:06:52,849
better there. Like my

1049
01:06:52,849 –> 01:06:56,610
business is currently in startup mode so that, you know, in five, ten years when

1050
01:06:56,610 –> 01:06:59,730
we’re not in startup mode anymore, there are definitely things that there are going to

1051
01:06:59,730 –> 01:07:03,150
be better, but we will have scaled and there will be more

1052
01:07:03,150 –> 01:07:06,430
problems that I’m not dealing with now

1053
01:07:06,670 –> 01:07:10,230
because our business is smaller. Right. So the 5050 will be there. And

1054
01:07:10,230 –> 01:07:13,790
so I think leaders really just need to remember

1055
01:07:14,990 –> 01:07:18,190
that. And it doesn’t mean you failed. It doesn’t mean anything is wrong.

1056
01:07:19,710 –> 01:07:22,190
And your job is to

1057
01:07:23,390 –> 01:07:26,430
not necessarily keep your eye on the prize. I don’t know why that just popped

1058
01:07:26,430 –> 01:07:30,250
into my head. But also keep morale

1059
01:07:30,250 –> 01:07:33,850
up around you because everybody else,

1060
01:07:35,930 –> 01:07:39,450
leadership is not necessarily their job. And a lot of them might

1061
01:07:39,450 –> 01:07:42,970
be unless you’re, you’re very attentive to your own

1062
01:07:42,970 –> 01:07:46,690
company’s culture or whatever leadership position you’re in to the

1063
01:07:46,690 –> 01:07:50,130
culture that you’re leading. You, you, you got to pay

1064
01:07:50,130 –> 01:07:53,050
attention especially to the naysayers because that can get,

1065
01:07:54,010 –> 01:07:57,030
you can get a mutinous set

1066
01:07:57,510 –> 01:08:01,030
of, of folks real quick

1067
01:08:01,030 –> 01:08:04,550
if you’re not, you know, managing,

1068
01:08:04,870 –> 01:08:08,230
managing that, leading in that way as well. It’s not just about

1069
01:08:08,870 –> 01:08:12,270
if, especially if you’re a leader in business. It’s not just about the

1070
01:08:12,270 –> 01:08:15,870
revenue and, and all of that. The revenue, the

1071
01:08:15,870 –> 01:08:19,670
product, blah, blah, blah. It’s. You manage your people too. Take care of your people.

1072
01:08:20,070 –> 01:08:23,589
I think I say that probably every time I’m on your. You probably do, but

1073
01:08:23,589 –> 01:08:26,429
it’s true. I mean like, you wouldn’t be the only one. Like everybody says that

1074
01:08:26,429 –> 01:08:30,269
because, because at the end of the day, these books that we’ve covered from

1075
01:08:30,269 –> 01:08:33,909
Moby Dick to, to Jane Austen to the

1076
01:08:33,909 –> 01:08:37,749
Time machine to. We’ll be talking about. We’re going to

1077
01:08:37,749 –> 01:08:41,189
be. One of the books that we’re going to be covering in, in November is

1078
01:08:41,189 –> 01:08:44,909
A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway. And it doesn’t

1079
01:08:44,909 –> 01:08:48,469
matter what the genre of the book is. It doesn’t matter even who the

1080
01:08:48,469 –> 01:08:52,310
author is. Fundamentally, the leadership themes

1081
01:08:52,310 –> 01:08:55,150
that are embedded in all these books focus around

1082
01:08:55,710 –> 01:08:59,350
themes that are universal and that have not

1083
01:08:59,350 –> 01:09:02,590
changed through time. Or as my grandma would say, would have said

1084
01:09:02,750 –> 01:09:06,310
climb C L I M E time or climb.

1085
01:09:06,310 –> 01:09:09,990
Right. And the idea that

1086
01:09:09,990 –> 01:09:13,750
somehow we need to go to a leadership book written by some pointy headed

1087
01:09:13,750 –> 01:09:17,389
intellectual to get these ideas is one of the

1088
01:09:17,389 –> 01:09:21,189
reasons why I’m doing this show. Because we’re fighting up

1089
01:09:21,189 –> 01:09:24,389
against, uphill against that. Right. Or downhill, depending upon your perspective.

1090
01:09:24,789 –> 01:09:28,589
So, so, so yeah, taking care

1091
01:09:28,589 –> 01:09:31,749
of your people, bringing them up,

1092
01:09:31,749 –> 01:09:35,549
understanding consequences. One, one last thing

1093
01:09:35,549 –> 01:09:38,669
I’d like to like to talk about a little bit before we switch modes and

1094
01:09:38,669 –> 01:09:42,320
sort of try to wrap up here this idea of

1095
01:09:42,560 –> 01:09:46,000
doing the impossible in the service of the ungrateful. Right. Okay.

1096
01:09:46,400 –> 01:09:50,120
So again,

1097
01:09:50,120 –> 01:09:53,880
at a very practical level, right. Going back to the Chuck

1098
01:09:53,880 –> 01:09:57,440
E. Cheese analogy one more time. If I take my kids to Chuck E.

1099
01:09:57,440 –> 01:10:00,320
Cheese because they’ve decided they get to want to go to Chuck E. Cheese

1100
01:10:01,200 –> 01:10:04,000
and it’s all great. My wife’s having the margarita,

1101
01:10:04,720 –> 01:10:08,490
she registered her objections in the car. But now everything’s getting better. And

1102
01:10:08,490 –> 01:10:12,210
then we do the Chuck E. Cheese experience. Everybody has the cardboard pizza, it’s

1103
01:10:12,210 –> 01:10:15,890
terrible. And the rat comes over and I want to throw,

1104
01:10:15,890 –> 01:10:18,850
punch the rat because I’m not in, I’m in a mood and I’m having water

1105
01:10:18,850 –> 01:10:22,650
because I got to drive. And then we all leave, we all

1106
01:10:22,650 –> 01:10:26,370
get in the car and my kid in the back seat says, wow,

1107
01:10:27,010 –> 01:10:30,730
that sucked. Now I’ve had that experience with

1108
01:10:30,730 –> 01:10:33,010
my children, right? And

1109
01:10:35,100 –> 01:10:38,540
the level of, I’ll be honest, as a parent leader,

1110
01:10:39,260 –> 01:10:42,940
the level of frustration, dare I say rage,

1111
01:10:43,500 –> 01:10:46,620
rises up inside of me. Oh. Is.

1112
01:10:47,500 –> 01:10:50,780
Yeah. My son is three months old. I’m, I’m

1113
01:10:51,420 –> 01:10:55,180
becoming acquainted with. And my, my daughter’s a toddler. So it just like

1114
01:10:55,500 –> 01:10:59,300
rage is the word and it’s, it’s not something I think parents talk

1115
01:10:59,300 –> 01:11:02,380
about. Sorry to interrupt, but. No, no, it’s okay. It’s not a word I think

1116
01:11:02,380 –> 01:11:05,770
parents like to admit to themselves or

1117
01:11:05,770 –> 01:11:09,210
anybody out loud. It is rage. It is what? Go ahead.

1118
01:11:09,530 –> 01:11:12,690
No, and then you, and then you. My solution, just. You have a Solution. Right.

1119
01:11:12,690 –> 01:11:16,130
Because my kids are significantly older. You’re at the beginning. I’m almost at the end

1120
01:11:16,130 –> 01:11:18,810
of. At least with three of the four of them, I’m at the end of

1121
01:11:18,810 –> 01:11:21,370
the thing. And with the other one, he’s eight. So like, we’re getting into a

1122
01:11:21,370 –> 01:11:25,210
different thing there. Here’s what you do. You, you take your hand.

1123
01:11:25,210 –> 01:11:28,770
This is the only technique I’ve known, I’ve learned. If you’re driving the vehicle or

1124
01:11:28,770 –> 01:11:31,410
even if you’re not, you take either your right hand or your left hand, depending

1125
01:11:31,410 –> 01:11:34,730
on which side of the front seat you’re sitting in, and you slowly roll down

1126
01:11:34,730 –> 01:11:36,050
the window, just hit the button

1127
01:11:39,010 –> 01:11:42,810
and let the night air wash over your face. Let it

1128
01:11:42,810 –> 01:11:46,410
wash away the rage. So to wash away the rage as you go

1129
01:11:46,410 –> 01:11:50,010
down, you know, the 405 or whatever, wherever you happen to be living

1130
01:11:50,010 –> 01:11:53,770
at from that Chuck E. Cheese experience, that you just spent

1131
01:11:53,770 –> 01:11:57,610
all that time and emotional effort, which seemed impossible,

1132
01:11:58,090 –> 01:12:01,770
and now this person is ungrateful. And then you roll up the window

1133
01:12:01,770 –> 01:12:05,570
slowly and you say, you know, I really would like for you to just say

1134
01:12:05,570 –> 01:12:09,050
thank you. Just to show a little gratitude. Just say thank you

1135
01:12:09,210 –> 01:12:12,930
now with your children. If you’re in a parenting

1136
01:12:12,930 –> 01:12:16,730
situation, that becomes now a matter of verbal discipline and verbal

1137
01:12:16,730 –> 01:12:20,570
correction. Right. With people that are adults, though,

1138
01:12:21,480 –> 01:12:25,200
who struggle with gratitude, I guess the question becomes, oh, my gosh,

1139
01:12:25,200 –> 01:12:29,000
how do you get them right? How do you, how do you deal

1140
01:12:29,000 –> 01:12:31,560
with people that are ungrateful if you’re a leader.

1141
01:12:36,600 –> 01:12:40,400
Honestly, I think the first thing that comes to mind is just part

1142
01:12:40,400 –> 01:12:43,400
of the job. So, but, so, so just how.

1143
01:12:45,560 –> 01:12:49,140
Make sure that your mental well being, you have

1144
01:12:49,140 –> 01:12:52,260
support, let’s put it, so you don’t fly off the handle

1145
01:12:53,860 –> 01:12:57,420
and, you know, accidentally put a

1146
01:12:57,420 –> 01:12:59,380
proverbial gun to your company’s head

1147
01:13:01,060 –> 01:13:04,740
and implode. Right. So that, that, I think that would be

1148
01:13:04,980 –> 01:13:08,580
my biggest recommendation. Yeah. Make sure that your mental health,

1149
01:13:09,620 –> 01:13:13,420
mental and emotional health, you’re, that you’re maintaining that, that you’ve got your

1150
01:13:13,420 –> 01:13:17,210
support set up, that you’ve got your habits. Those, those are just

1151
01:13:17,210 –> 01:13:18,810
as important as

1152
01:13:20,970 –> 01:13:23,050
the regular processes that,

1153
01:13:24,890 –> 01:13:28,090
you know, will grow or maintain or whatever it is you’re trying to do in

1154
01:13:28,090 –> 01:13:31,730
your leadership position. Your, your mental

1155
01:13:31,730 –> 01:13:34,810
well being is, like, is paramount

1156
01:13:35,370 –> 01:13:39,090
because you’re going to make decisions. People are going to come for you. People are

1157
01:13:39,090 –> 01:13:42,930
going to be ungrateful. And I’m talking to my. Because I, I actually have.

1158
01:13:42,930 –> 01:13:46,680
There’s this, A very specific example in my business right now

1159
01:13:46,680 –> 01:13:50,480
that I just, in case I’M not gonna say any

1160
01:13:50,480 –> 01:13:54,280
specifics, but, man, I’m gonna be hitting that

1161
01:13:54,280 –> 01:13:57,800
in December and I hopefully will remind myself of my own.

1162
01:13:59,320 –> 01:14:01,480
My own. I’ll send you recommendations.

1163
01:14:04,440 –> 01:14:08,200
Make sure you’re doing your journaling and you talk to your coach and go to

1164
01:14:08,200 –> 01:14:11,290
the beach and make sure you just, you just take care of. You Go get

1165
01:14:11,290 –> 01:14:13,130
a massage. It’ll be okay.

1166
01:14:14,890 –> 01:14:18,610
The world will not end. It feels like it. It feels like it. And then

1167
01:14:18,610 –> 01:14:22,250
people will come for you, though, and. Yeah,

1168
01:14:22,650 –> 01:14:26,210
and ultimately, I think for me, I’m in the middle of it. My

1169
01:14:26,210 –> 01:14:29,530
mentor is kind of on the other side of it, and he just. I love

1170
01:14:29,610 –> 01:14:33,330
his. I can’t remember if we’re allowed to curse or

1171
01:14:33,330 –> 01:14:36,770
like, to the extent of what we’re allowed to curse, but dgaf, right. He just

1172
01:14:36,770 –> 01:14:40,350
doesn’t give right. Doesn’t give any right. And I’m like,

1173
01:14:40,430 –> 01:14:43,870
man, I wish I was there, because I don’t. I take everything personally.

1174
01:14:45,230 –> 01:14:48,750
I was like, what else? I don’t. Whatever, I don’t care. I’m retired. And you

1175
01:14:48,750 –> 01:14:52,550
guys, you guys can’t, like, what are you gonna do?

1176
01:14:52,550 –> 01:14:55,790
You’re gonna be, you’re gonna yap and then you’re either gonna stay and continue to

1177
01:14:55,790 –> 01:14:59,150
give us business or you’re gonna leave. And I have enough confidence in my business

1178
01:14:59,150 –> 01:15:02,750
model that I really don’t care if you leave. In fact, please do. You know,

1179
01:15:02,750 –> 01:15:06,140
if you don’t find enough value here, take off.

1180
01:15:06,460 –> 01:15:09,820
That’s okay. That’s what business is about, right?

1181
01:15:11,980 –> 01:15:15,500
Anything. That’s right. You said the key word right. Value.

1182
01:15:16,220 –> 01:15:19,420
No. Confidence. Confidence. He has confidence. So

1183
01:15:20,299 –> 01:15:23,980
the whole thing with like a syndrome that goes around

1184
01:15:23,980 –> 01:15:27,820
online, it hasn’t going around online for last 15 years. I see it all over

1185
01:15:27,820 –> 01:15:31,660
LinkedIn, you know, the whole boss, babe, we’re talking about women

1186
01:15:32,230 –> 01:15:35,590
or we’re talking about men. I got up and did 8,000

1187
01:15:35,670 –> 01:15:38,990
lifts and ran 450 miles and journaled and got my personal

1188
01:15:38,990 –> 01:15:42,270
affirmations da da da da da. So I could feel confident about making these decisions,

1189
01:15:42,270 –> 01:15:45,790
and I’m crushing it. That whole entire nonsense that you see in

1190
01:15:45,790 –> 01:15:49,470
entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial culture online is

1191
01:15:49,470 –> 01:15:53,030
driven by people that have a deep lack of confidence in their own decisions, because

1192
01:15:53,030 –> 01:15:56,790
they are. And I loved how you mentioned that he’s older and retired

1193
01:15:57,190 –> 01:16:00,580
because they are young and

1194
01:16:02,660 –> 01:16:06,220
we’ve done a terrible job in our culture in the last two or three generations

1195
01:16:06,220 –> 01:16:09,940
of convincing, not convincing, of demonstrating to people that

1196
01:16:09,940 –> 01:16:13,420
life is long and you have to sort of

1197
01:16:13,420 –> 01:16:17,260
earn your keep to your benchmarks and I can say

1198
01:16:17,260 –> 01:16:20,980
this as someone who’s in my mid-40s wandering towards a half century

1199
01:16:21,140 –> 01:16:24,860
of living in this world. There are things that

1200
01:16:24,860 –> 01:16:28,650
I just would never have known at 20. 20. I just would

1201
01:16:28,650 –> 01:16:32,250
never have known at 20. I wanted to know them at 20. Right. I could

1202
01:16:32,250 –> 01:16:35,370
intellectualize them at 20. But to actually

1203
01:16:35,770 –> 01:16:39,530
know them. Right. I know. I don’t. I mean, I didn’t.

1204
01:16:39,530 –> 01:16:42,810
I didn’t know them until I was 40. And then also that’s okay,

1205
01:16:43,210 –> 01:16:46,890
because I feel like maybe. Maybe this is a. This is just a millennial

1206
01:16:46,890 –> 01:16:50,650
thing. Like my generation, something my generation struggles with. It’s like. It’s

1207
01:16:50,650 –> 01:16:53,940
almost like. Because the knowledge is out there, then we sure should

1208
01:16:54,660 –> 01:16:58,420
be that much more advanced. And then we

1209
01:16:58,420 –> 01:17:02,260
freak out when we’re not, because we’re just not. We’re

1210
01:17:02,260 –> 01:17:06,020
just not there yet. So knowledge is not wisdom. This

1211
01:17:06,020 –> 01:17:09,659
is what I would tell every millennial. Any millennial listening to this. Anybody who’s between

1212
01:17:09,659 –> 01:17:13,460
the ages of. What’s a millennial now? 30 and 45. 30 or 44. I’m

1213
01:17:13,460 –> 01:17:17,060
35, so. Yeah, so, right. Okay. Yeah, you’re right. Take 10 years. Yeah, yeah, you’re

1214
01:17:17,060 –> 01:17:20,030
right in there. So it’s okay

1215
01:17:21,390 –> 01:17:25,150
to not have the wisdom now. You’re gonna get

1216
01:17:25,150 –> 01:17:28,590
the wisdom, and Google ain’t gonna deliver it to you. No

1217
01:17:28,750 –> 01:17:32,390
doordash ain’t gonna deliver it to you. You can’t get it on demand. You can’t

1218
01:17:32,390 –> 01:17:36,150
swipe left or swipe right to get it. It just, It’s. Sorry, it’s not on

1219
01:17:36,150 –> 01:17:39,870
demand. Ken can give it to you. Like, I think, like you said, intellectually, like,

1220
01:17:40,030 –> 01:17:43,790
if you’re well read, you read these, right? You’re listening to Haison. Like, that

1221
01:17:43,790 –> 01:17:47,540
will help the wisdom come maybe a little faster. It’ll. If

1222
01:17:47,540 –> 01:17:51,100
you steep yourself, right, and really contemplate. But I think,

1223
01:17:51,580 –> 01:17:55,420
you know, the crux of it all is just like, not. Giving an F.

1224
01:17:56,380 –> 01:17:59,580
Well, and the shortcut is always the long way around. So if you’re looking, and

1225
01:17:59,580 –> 01:18:03,140
I’ve never really talked about shortcuts on this. On this show, but one of the

1226
01:18:03,140 –> 01:18:06,980
reasons why the time traveler goes and gets in his time machine is

1227
01:18:06,980 –> 01:18:10,780
because he’s looking for a shortcut to Utopia. And he went too far.

1228
01:18:11,270 –> 01:18:15,030
He went too far. And so there

1229
01:18:15,030 –> 01:18:18,590
are no shortcuts to utopian outcomes, because there

1230
01:18:18,590 –> 01:18:22,190
aren’t utopian outcomes. Aren’t dystopian outcomes either, by the way. It’s

1231
01:18:22,190 –> 01:18:25,870
neither one. They’re just outcomes. But the shortcut that

1232
01:18:25,870 –> 01:18:29,270
you’re looking for is always the long way. Around and people forget this,

1233
01:18:29,430 –> 01:18:33,190
right? The point was made, interestingly enough, the Billy Bob

1234
01:18:33,190 –> 01:18:37,040
Thornton character in the show Landman from Taylor Sheridan. Um,

1235
01:18:37,680 –> 01:18:41,000
he’s talking to the young. The young city lawyer that they send out, the young

1236
01:18:41,000 –> 01:18:44,080
female city lawyer that they sent out to like, deal with him on his

1237
01:18:44,720 –> 01:18:48,480
oil stuff. And the thing that I,

1238
01:18:48,560 –> 01:18:52,360
that, that I. And by the way, I. I’m still looking

1239
01:18:52,360 –> 01:18:56,120
for shortcuts, right? It’s a. It’s a temptation to find the shortcut. It’s

1240
01:18:56,120 –> 01:18:59,400
always a temptation to find the hack, find the shortcut, find the thing. And the

1241
01:18:59,400 –> 01:19:03,080
thing is, if you do that, you actually do far more

1242
01:19:03,080 –> 01:19:06,690
damage. Even looking for the shortcut does far more damage

1243
01:19:06,930 –> 01:19:08,610
than just going the long way around.

1244
01:19:12,050 –> 01:19:15,650
I think the other danger with looking for shortcuts is that

1245
01:19:16,290 –> 01:19:20,009
I mentioned this earlier. It’s. It’s predicated on this belief that

1246
01:19:20,009 –> 01:19:23,690
there is better than here. And something that I am working

1247
01:19:23,690 –> 01:19:27,530
on. I think not. I think right now is

1248
01:19:27,530 –> 01:19:31,310
not being in such a rush to get to the revenue goal. Just

1249
01:19:31,310 –> 01:19:35,070
enjoy the journey. But also because I’m a mom, right? There’s a

1250
01:19:35,070 –> 01:19:38,710
lot more going on in my life. Like, I’m be.

1251
01:19:38,710 –> 01:19:42,430
I’m. I have other leadership positions other than my business. So

1252
01:19:42,430 –> 01:19:46,190
the balance of all of that, just, just, just don’t. Don’t be

1253
01:19:46,190 –> 01:19:49,710
in such a rush. Enjoy the journey. Learn, like,

1254
01:19:50,270 –> 01:19:54,070
you’ll get there. And a lot of times, a lot of times

1255
01:19:54,070 –> 01:19:57,780
we hate this. We hate this. I hate this. A lot of times

1256
01:19:58,340 –> 01:20:01,860
there’s that, there’s. There is this idea. I remember hearing this, you know, years ago

1257
01:20:01,860 –> 01:20:05,700
when I was just starting as like an online entrepreneur was, you have to slow

1258
01:20:05,700 –> 01:20:09,500
down to go faster. And we’re all like, yeah, cool, I’ll

1259
01:20:09,500 –> 01:20:13,260
do that. And I’m telling you right now that I always thought I would

1260
01:20:13,260 –> 01:20:16,660
do that. And the way that that is

1261
01:20:16,660 –> 01:20:20,420
manifesting in my life right now, I’m like, no, I don’t want to do that.

1262
01:20:20,500 –> 01:20:24,340
I don’t want it. I don’t. I don’t. No, wait, are you sure that’s what

1263
01:20:24,340 –> 01:20:27,420
that means? Are you just. That can’t be right.

1264
01:20:28,460 –> 01:20:31,740
I don’t wanna. I’m just fighting it. I’m fighting it tooth and nail. And it’s

1265
01:20:31,740 –> 01:20:35,500
like what you said, like, just stop. Stop looking for the shortcuts. Do things slow.

1266
01:20:36,860 –> 01:20:40,380
Enjoy the ride. You get one life.

1267
01:20:41,660 –> 01:20:45,340
Like, stop being so this. We’re all stress balls. Like, well,

1268
01:20:45,340 –> 01:20:49,110
you’re not. What are you missing? What are you. Well, what are you missing?

1269
01:20:49,270 –> 01:20:52,710
So there’s this whole idea that came after I was out of my 30s. I

1270
01:20:52,710 –> 01:20:55,430
didn’t hear about it until I was in my 40s. But this whole idea of

1271
01:20:55,430 –> 01:20:58,950
the fear of missing out. Right? Yeah, but missing what?

1272
01:20:59,270 –> 01:21:03,070
What am I missing? Right, Right. Like I’m, and I see

1273
01:21:03,070 –> 01:21:06,590
this. If you’re so busy and being a rush, you’re missing your life now. Right.

1274
01:21:06,590 –> 01:21:10,310
You’re so worried about missing out there that you’re missing here.

1275
01:21:10,470 –> 01:21:13,670
Here. Right. Like, like I’ve got a 20 year old that lives in my house.

1276
01:21:14,340 –> 01:21:18,020
And one of the things that we work with her through when

1277
01:21:18,020 –> 01:21:21,820
she was in, in the late era of high school, a little bit

1278
01:21:21,820 –> 01:21:25,660
towards the beginning of college, but she was finally through. That was this idea

1279
01:21:25,660 –> 01:21:29,380
that. And we also don’t give cell phones to our kids early

1280
01:21:29,460 –> 01:21:32,380
and we have a whole bunch of other rules set up to kind of mitigate

1281
01:21:32,380 –> 01:21:36,180
a lot of this nonsense. Right. But I have a

1282
01:21:36,180 –> 01:21:37,700
15 year old girl that lives in my house

1283
01:21:40,370 –> 01:21:43,810
and she, she has no cell phone and she’s happy.

1284
01:21:44,050 –> 01:21:47,890
Ooh, it can be done. I want to, I want to tell

1285
01:21:47,890 –> 01:21:51,330
all the millennial parents out there, it can be done. It can be done so

1286
01:21:51,330 –> 01:21:54,050
much. Yes. All you have to do is be willing to live with the consequences

1287
01:21:54,050 –> 01:21:57,090
of what that means. And by the way, there are very

1288
01:21:57,730 –> 01:22:00,770
easy consequences. And the thing I point out is

1289
01:22:01,490 –> 01:22:04,290
our baby boomer and Gen X parents,

1290
01:22:05,420 –> 01:22:08,700
they did it and they didn’t apologize.

1291
01:22:08,940 –> 01:22:12,020
That’s the part that drives all of us crazy, is that they didn’t apologize. But

1292
01:22:12,020 –> 01:22:15,780
why would they? They didn’t need to. They just picked a route and

1293
01:22:15,780 –> 01:22:19,100
they just went for it. So anyway, this idea of fear, of missing out. So

1294
01:22:19,820 –> 01:22:22,500
one of the things that, that I work through or that my wife and I

1295
01:22:22,500 –> 01:22:25,420
worked through with our daughter is you’re,

1296
01:22:26,220 –> 01:22:29,980
you’re not missing anything. You’re making choices. You cannot

1297
01:22:29,980 –> 01:22:33,300
do all of the things. So you have to curate

1298
01:22:33,940 –> 01:22:37,700
and make decisions. It’s a great word. And if you don’t curate

1299
01:22:37,700 –> 01:22:41,100
and make decisions, then you will be stuck in analysis

1300
01:22:41,100 –> 01:22:44,820
paralysis and you will do nothing and you will go nowhere.

1301
01:22:45,300 –> 01:22:48,860
Now, we can say this from the outside as wisdom, but it didn’t become

1302
01:22:48,860 –> 01:22:52,700
real until she went off with her first real sort of big girl

1303
01:22:52,700 –> 01:22:56,260
job, for lack of a better term. And she saw other people

1304
01:22:56,830 –> 01:23:00,590
in her generation, in her time, paralyzed by analysis of

1305
01:23:00,590 –> 01:23:03,710
things that she’d already made decisions on. And she went, oh,

1306
01:23:04,910 –> 01:23:08,750
oh, click. Oh, that’s so all I got to just do is just keep doing

1307
01:23:08,750 –> 01:23:11,550
that. And now she’s, now she’s, you know, now she’s moving forward.

1308
01:23:13,630 –> 01:23:16,350
This is something where I think,

1309
01:23:18,990 –> 01:23:22,790
well, I’ll frame it this way. And this is, again, every episode I bring

1310
01:23:22,790 –> 01:23:25,950
up movies, and every episode I bring up Jiu Jitsu. And so here’s the moment.

1311
01:23:26,620 –> 01:23:30,460
Get ready for it. In Jiu Jitsu, it takes you

1312
01:23:30,460 –> 01:23:33,740
10 to 12 years to get a black belt. Most

1313
01:23:33,980 –> 01:23:37,500
people don’t want to do the same

1314
01:23:37,580 –> 01:23:41,300
moves in a similar formation for 10 to

1315
01:23:41,300 –> 01:23:45,020
12 years while risking injury and pain

1316
01:23:45,420 –> 01:23:49,260
and not being able to bend over in the morning to get out of bed

1317
01:23:50,300 –> 01:23:53,510
for 12 years to get a strip of cloth that’s black.

1318
01:23:55,670 –> 01:23:59,230
And that’s okay. I’m not recommending you to do Jiu Jitsu. Everybody listening out here.

1319
01:23:59,230 –> 01:24:03,070
Jiu Jitsu is not for everyone. My. It’s not

1320
01:24:03,070 –> 01:24:06,710
for everyone, but if it is for you, it is for you. Just remember.

1321
01:24:07,110 –> 01:24:10,710
And my, my instructor always says this, and it’s absolutely the truth. He

1322
01:24:10,710 –> 01:24:14,510
rest. And he’s. He’s 34, so he’s right in the. He’s right in the mix.

1323
01:24:14,510 –> 01:24:18,320
Right. Enjoy the process. It’s going to

1324
01:24:18,320 –> 01:24:22,040
take you 10 to 12 years. It’s fine. Just come in and

1325
01:24:22,040 –> 01:24:25,280
enjoy the process. Now, what I see for folks, particularly folks who are

1326
01:24:25,680 –> 01:24:28,680
a generation down from me, is they’ll come in four days a week, right off

1327
01:24:28,680 –> 01:24:32,240
the bat, and they’ll just start because they’re like, oh, no, I can

1328
01:24:32,240 –> 01:24:35,960
shortcut this. And they find

1329
01:24:35,960 –> 01:24:39,200
out that the shortcut is the long way around and they’re injured and they’re out.

1330
01:24:39,200 –> 01:24:42,560
Or they don’t advance, or they don’t go as fast as they wanted to, or

1331
01:24:42,560 –> 01:24:45,440
the instructor looks at them and goes, oh, well, that’s all cool and everything, but

1332
01:24:45,440 –> 01:24:49,160
you’re not ready. And then they get frustrated and fly off the handle.

1333
01:24:49,160 –> 01:24:52,760
And it’s this. It’s patience. Patience

1334
01:24:52,760 –> 01:24:56,440
takes time. Yeah. And to your point, I

1335
01:24:56,440 –> 01:24:59,280
loved how you framed that. Kristen, you only have one life. Well, not only, but

1336
01:24:59,280 –> 01:25:02,600
you have one life to live. It’s this one. It’s cool.

1337
01:25:03,560 –> 01:25:06,640
We can just chill out. And so the joke on me in the Jiu Jitsu

1338
01:25:06,640 –> 01:25:09,600
school is, oh, he’s on the 15 year plan. I’m like, yeah, I tell everybody

1339
01:25:09,600 –> 01:25:11,970
I’m on the 15 year plan. What else am I going to be doing for

1340
01:25:11,970 –> 01:25:15,410
15 years? Right? Yeah, it’s so.

1341
01:25:15,410 –> 01:25:19,210
Yep. There’s a couple of analogies that, you know, I’m a, I’m a voice teacher

1342
01:25:19,370 –> 01:25:22,930
and, yeah, all that. I tell this to all of my

1343
01:25:22,930 –> 01:25:26,649
beginners. I. My passion right now is working with people who tell Themselves, they can’t

1344
01:25:26,649 –> 01:25:30,250
sing. And I,

1345
01:25:30,250 –> 01:25:33,370
my students, I teach them classical technique, but I

1346
01:25:33,850 –> 01:25:37,560
pursued an opera career for 10, 12 years. And

1347
01:25:37,800 –> 01:25:41,480
I tell them, you know, ballet, ballet ballerinas, you know,

1348
01:25:41,720 –> 01:25:45,000
prima ballerinas are still practicing their. Their tendu,

1349
01:25:45,320 –> 01:25:48,680
which is the most basic ballet move ever.

1350
01:25:48,920 –> 01:25:52,640
Same thing with martial artists. They’re always practicing that basic

1351
01:25:52,640 –> 01:25:56,400
punch, the basic block, the basic stance, horse dance,

1352
01:25:56,400 –> 01:25:58,280
whatever, whichever martial art you’re doing,

1353
01:26:00,600 –> 01:26:03,110
and it’s not sexy.

1354
01:26:04,550 –> 01:26:08,070
And that’s the same thing with mindset work. That’s the same thing with business.

1355
01:26:08,790 –> 01:26:12,390
Any mastery, any

1356
01:26:12,390 –> 01:26:15,910
mastery involves doing little

1357
01:26:16,470 –> 01:26:20,310
daily things that are not exciting, they’re

1358
01:26:20,310 –> 01:26:23,750
not sexy, they’re mundane. This is the same for raising children.

1359
01:26:24,630 –> 01:26:28,070
They are mundane. This was the word that popped up in my coaching actually last

1360
01:26:28,070 –> 01:26:30,790
week. Mundane. Fall in love with the mundane.

1361
01:26:31,910 –> 01:26:34,310
Whatever you’re doing, like,

1362
01:26:36,470 –> 01:26:40,310
find a way to relish it, because this is your journey.

1363
01:26:40,310 –> 01:26:43,830
This is what you’re meant to be doing. Presumably, if you’ve done all of that,

1364
01:26:43,990 –> 01:26:47,510
you know, this is what you’ve curated, this is what you’re deciding.

1365
01:26:47,990 –> 01:26:50,790
Believe in your decisions enough to be like,

1366
01:26:51,670 –> 01:26:55,470
yeah, let’s do this. Let’s enjoy every. Every little bit.

1367
01:26:55,470 –> 01:26:59,100
The ins and outs. One last

1368
01:26:59,100 –> 01:27:02,940
question from your perspective and then we’ll go back

1369
01:27:02,940 –> 01:27:03,420
to the book.

1370
01:27:06,700 –> 01:27:10,460
Do you think we struggle? No. So the devices

1371
01:27:10,460 –> 01:27:13,980
are blamed for a lot. Are we

1372
01:27:13,980 –> 01:27:17,580
struggling in the backwash to deal with, to address,

1373
01:27:17,980 –> 01:27:21,820
to manage too much

1374
01:27:21,820 –> 01:27:25,010
dopamine? Oh, yes.

1375
01:27:25,410 –> 01:27:29,170
At a biological level? Yes. Okay.

1376
01:27:29,170 –> 01:27:32,890
Yes. These devices, the. Oh, I. You know, I keep talking

1377
01:27:32,890 –> 01:27:36,690
about my coaches, guys, I. I need a lot of help. My. Like,

1378
01:27:36,690 –> 01:27:39,570
I have so much drama. Maybe this is just my personality type, I don’t know.

1379
01:27:39,570 –> 01:27:42,490
But I have so much head drama that I’m like, I just constantly need other

1380
01:27:42,490 –> 01:27:45,970
people’s input that. For. What is it? The. The

1381
01:27:46,130 –> 01:27:49,420
five strengths. Whatever. Input is one of my. One of. I can’t remember.

1382
01:27:50,220 –> 01:27:53,060
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Input is one of my top five. So I, I always need

1383
01:27:53,060 –> 01:27:56,780
a coach in my ear because otherwise I just spiral and I

1384
01:27:56,940 –> 01:28:00,620
turn into a puddle on the ground. Um, but input is number

1385
01:28:00,620 –> 01:28:03,980
two for me, if I remember correctly. Yeah, yeah, I’m. Yeah, that you like to

1386
01:28:03,980 –> 01:28:07,820
read. So I do. Look at that. But my coach was talking about.

1387
01:28:07,980 –> 01:28:11,660
She. She was leading a. A challenge, like screen

1388
01:28:11,660 –> 01:28:15,300
less challenge. And she just talks about you. The. I don’t think we realize

1389
01:28:15,300 –> 01:28:18,860
this. Everything, the scrolling on Facebook,

1390
01:28:18,940 –> 01:28:22,540
Instagram, TikTok, even down to the

1391
01:28:22,540 –> 01:28:26,180
notifications, the color. The colors of the notifications on your phone,

1392
01:28:26,180 –> 01:28:29,700
everything is decide signed to Keep you on that

1393
01:28:29,700 –> 01:28:33,260
platform and keep you scrolling and it’s. And

1394
01:28:33,260 –> 01:28:37,060
they’re not stupid. Like they hired the experts

1395
01:28:37,060 –> 01:28:40,670
and they were like, what does this to the human brain? I, Well, I don’t

1396
01:28:40,670 –> 01:28:43,630
know if that’s actually what they did, but all I know is that these are

1397
01:28:43,630 –> 01:28:47,470
designed, yes. To trigger dopamine. So 100 hazeln. I think, I think

1398
01:28:47,470 –> 01:28:51,310
that’s true. We’re dealing with, we have to figure out how to

1399
01:28:51,470 –> 01:28:54,590
enjoy life without all of that dopamine. Because actually

1400
01:28:55,870 –> 01:28:59,270
a turning point, it’s funny, you have to be careful when you say turning point

1401
01:28:59,270 –> 01:29:02,670
right now, but a turning point in my life was actually back in

1402
01:29:02,990 –> 01:29:06,710
the. When the lockdowns all happened during COVID 19. And I

1403
01:29:06,710 –> 01:29:10,510
actually during that most people were on social media more. And that

1404
01:29:10,510 –> 01:29:13,670
was when I had decided I’m not going to do it anymore. I just, I

1405
01:29:13,670 –> 01:29:17,510
completely, I didn’t delete everything because I, because of my line of work,

1406
01:29:17,510 –> 01:29:21,270
you kind of have to maintain a social media presence. So I didn’t delete anything,

1407
01:29:21,430 –> 01:29:25,270
but I took it off my phone and I was like, oh

1408
01:29:25,270 –> 01:29:27,750
my gosh, this is so much better. And that’s when I started writing my book.

1409
01:29:28,390 –> 01:29:32,190
So if you have any sort of creative or if you’re, you’re leading, you

1410
01:29:32,190 –> 01:29:35,990
have this idea, this vision, something, get off your phone.

1411
01:29:36,390 –> 01:29:40,110
Yeah. Get off social media, stop doom

1412
01:29:40,110 –> 01:29:43,910
scrolling and go do something.

1413
01:29:45,670 –> 01:29:49,030
And that’s hard. And I guess, you know, to, to Hasan’s point,

1414
01:29:49,990 –> 01:29:53,190
recognize that when you move in that direction

1415
01:29:53,910 –> 01:29:57,590
that you are fighting an addiction because

1416
01:29:57,750 –> 01:30:01,360
of how social media and the phones and the

1417
01:30:01,360 –> 01:30:05,080
devices are designed to keep you on them. And

1418
01:30:05,080 –> 01:30:07,960
again, you don’t have to take my word for granted. You can go look this

1419
01:30:07,960 –> 01:30:11,720
up. This is, it’s science. This is

1420
01:30:11,720 –> 01:30:15,039
just this how they’re designed because they want you to stay on them. Because the

1421
01:30:15,039 –> 01:30:18,720
more you use their product, the more you’ll buy another one when it

1422
01:30:18,720 –> 01:30:22,280
breaks or when the latest model comes out, or whatever, you know. So

1423
01:30:22,280 –> 01:30:25,820
just, just, just be aware. And even if you don’t change

1424
01:30:25,820 –> 01:30:28,980
anything, just be aware they are hacking your brain.

1425
01:30:29,620 –> 01:30:33,220
So whenever you decide that you want to go do something and

1426
01:30:33,300 –> 01:30:37,060
create instead of consume, you’re going to have to

1427
01:30:37,060 –> 01:30:40,340
fight that addiction. That sucks. And it’s hard, but you can do it

1428
01:30:41,460 –> 01:30:42,900
well. And I would say,

1429
01:30:45,460 –> 01:30:48,140
I would say that in addition to that, I would say or I would add

1430
01:30:48,140 –> 01:30:51,800
on that sort of the layer, the, the frosting on

1431
01:30:51,800 –> 01:30:54,640
that cake that Kristen has baked for us is this

1432
01:30:55,840 –> 01:30:59,640
if indeed the technologists that created

1433
01:30:59,640 –> 01:31:03,480
the phones were on the same mindset as the technologists who

1434
01:31:03,480 –> 01:31:07,040
are creating the robots. If indeed we do have 100,000

1435
01:31:07,040 –> 01:31:10,640
humanoid robots as we talked about and referenced way back in the

1436
01:31:10,640 –> 01:31:14,280
Philip K. Dick episode. If indeed those do get

1437
01:31:14,280 –> 01:31:18,010
shipped in the next five to 10 years and then we go to scale

1438
01:31:18,010 –> 01:31:20,890
on humanoid robots. The

1439
01:31:21,130 –> 01:31:24,010
dopamine inducing

1440
01:31:24,090 –> 01:31:27,890
behaviors that the technologists have tracked

1441
01:31:27,890 –> 01:31:31,650
and cataloged about us very carefully will be

1442
01:31:31,650 –> 01:31:35,410
imbued in those robots. And that

1443
01:31:35,410 –> 01:31:38,250
should be fun times for everyone. For everyone.

1444
01:31:40,810 –> 01:31:44,390
Yay. Back to the. Yeah,

1445
01:31:45,990 –> 01:31:49,270
back to the book. Back to

1446
01:31:49,750 –> 01:31:53,390
learning from our mistakes. Wait, learning from. Yes,

1447
01:31:53,390 –> 01:31:57,150
exactly. I’m

1448
01:31:57,150 –> 01:32:00,310
pretty sure this is a bad idea. Let’s do it anyway. Let’s do it anyway.

1449
01:32:00,310 –> 01:32:03,990
Yeah, it’s fine. It’ll make us

1450
01:32:03,990 –> 01:32:07,430
funny. We’re gonna. We’re gonna pick up a chapter six, the

1451
01:32:07,430 –> 01:32:09,930
Sunset of Mankind. Speaking of which.

1452
01:32:14,490 –> 01:32:17,530
So this is right where. The beginning of the book.

1453
01:32:18,730 –> 01:32:22,490
And. And he’s looking around at where he has landed. And

1454
01:32:22,490 –> 01:32:25,850
this is where, by the way, we get his. We get his date. So we’re

1455
01:32:25,850 –> 01:32:28,490
going to pick this up here. The call of the evening was upon the world.

1456
01:32:28,490 –> 01:32:31,730
As I emerged from the great hall. The scene was lit by the warm glow

1457
01:32:31,730 –> 01:32:35,210
of the setting sun. At first things were very confusing.

1458
01:32:35,770 –> 01:32:39,050
Everything was so entirely different from the world I had known, even the flowers.

1459
01:32:39,450 –> 01:32:42,290
The big building I had left was situated on the slope of a broad river

1460
01:32:42,290 –> 01:32:45,930
valley, but the Thames had shifted perhaps a mile from its present position.

1461
01:32:46,410 –> 01:32:49,810
I resolved to mount the summit of a crest perhaps a mile and a half

1462
01:32:49,810 –> 01:32:53,490
away, from which I could get a wider view of this, our planet, in the

1463
01:32:53,490 –> 01:32:56,650
year 82701 A.D.

1464
01:32:57,610 –> 01:33:00,970
for that, I should explain was the date the little dials of my machine

1465
01:33:01,050 –> 01:33:04,800
recorded as I walked. I was watching

1466
01:33:04,800 –> 01:33:08,400
for every impression that could possibly help to explain the condition of ruinous splendor in

1467
01:33:08,400 –> 01:33:12,160
which I found the world. For ruinous it was. A little way up the hill,

1468
01:33:12,160 –> 01:33:15,920
for instance, was a great heap of granite bound together by masses of aluminum. A

1469
01:33:15,920 –> 01:33:19,640
vast labyrinth of precipitous walls and crumpled heaps, amidst which

1470
01:33:19,640 –> 01:33:23,200
were thick heaps of very beautiful pagoda like plants. Nettles possibly,

1471
01:33:23,360 –> 01:33:26,960
but wonderfully tinted with brown about the leaves, incapable of

1472
01:33:26,960 –> 01:33:30,800
stinging. It was evidently the derelict remains of some vast structure.

1473
01:33:30,800 –> 01:33:34,120
To what end built I could not determine. It was here that I was destined

1474
01:33:34,120 –> 01:33:37,880
at a later date to have a very strange experience, the first intimation of

1475
01:33:37,880 –> 01:33:41,360
a still stranger discovery. But of that I will speak in its

1476
01:33:41,360 –> 01:33:45,120
proper place. Looking round was a sudden thought. From a

1477
01:33:45,120 –> 01:33:47,760
terrace on which I rested For a while I realized that there were no small

1478
01:33:47,760 –> 01:33:51,520
houses to be seen. Apparently the single house, and possibly even the household,

1479
01:33:51,840 –> 01:33:55,490
had vanished. Here and there among the greenery were

1480
01:33:55,490 –> 01:33:59,130
palace like buildings. But the house and the cottage, which form such characteristic

1481
01:33:59,130 –> 01:34:01,850
features of our own English landscape, had disappeared.

1482
01:34:02,650 –> 01:34:04,890
Communism, I said to myself.

1483
01:34:06,410 –> 01:34:09,610
And on the heels of that came another thought. I looked at the half dozen

1484
01:34:09,610 –> 01:34:13,010
little figures that were following me. Then, in a flash I perceived that all had

1485
01:34:13,010 –> 01:34:16,810
the same form of costume, the same soft, hairless visage and the same

1486
01:34:17,130 –> 01:34:20,920
girlish rotundity of limb. It may seem strange, perhaps, that

1487
01:34:20,920 –> 01:34:24,280
I had not noticed this before, but everything was so strange now. I saw the

1488
01:34:24,280 –> 01:34:27,760
fact plainly enough, in costume and in all the

1489
01:34:27,760 –> 01:34:31,440
differences of texture and bearing that now mark off

1490
01:34:31,440 –> 01:34:35,280
the sexes from each other. These people of the future were alike, and the

1491
01:34:35,280 –> 01:34:39,120
children seemed to my eyes to be but miniatures of their parents.

1492
01:34:39,200 –> 01:34:42,960
I judged then that the children of that time were extremely precocious, physically at least,

1493
01:34:42,960 –> 01:34:45,920
and I found afterwards abundant verification of my opinion.

1494
01:34:47,530 –> 01:34:51,330
Pause for just a moment. This is where I get the sense that Aldous

1495
01:34:51,330 –> 01:34:54,650
Huxley run a lot of H.G. wells work.

1496
01:34:54,890 –> 01:34:58,650
Because you see a lot of. You see this idea brought to his logical

1497
01:34:58,650 –> 01:35:02,490
conclusion in A Brave New World, which we

1498
01:35:02,490 –> 01:35:05,930
read. I did read during this period of time, but I did not include on

1499
01:35:05,930 –> 01:35:07,690
the podcast for various reasons.

1500
01:35:09,930 –> 01:35:13,530
Back to the book. Seeing this ease and security in which these people were listing

1501
01:35:13,910 –> 01:35:17,230
were living, I felt that this close resemblance of the sexes was after all what

1502
01:35:17,230 –> 01:35:20,310
one would expect for the strength of a man and the softness of a woman.

1503
01:35:20,630 –> 01:35:24,150
The institution of the family and the differentiation of occupations

1504
01:35:24,150 –> 01:35:27,750
are mere militant necessities of an age of physical

1505
01:35:27,750 –> 01:35:31,470
force, where population is balanced and abundant. Much

1506
01:35:31,470 –> 01:35:34,990
childbearing becomes an evil rather than a blessing to the state. Where

1507
01:35:34,990 –> 01:35:38,790
violence comes but rarely and offspring are secure, there is less necessity.

1508
01:35:38,950 –> 01:35:41,670
Indeed, there is no necessity for an efficient family,

1509
01:35:42,630 –> 01:35:46,470
and the specialization of the sexist with reference to their children’s needs disappears.

1510
01:35:46,870 –> 01:35:49,590
We see some beginnings of this even in our own time and in this future

1511
01:35:49,590 –> 01:35:52,990
age it was complete. This, I must remind you, was my

1512
01:35:52,990 –> 01:35:56,830
speculation at the time. Later I was to appreciate how far it fell

1513
01:35:56,830 –> 01:36:00,630
short of the reality. While I

1514
01:36:00,630 –> 01:36:04,430
was musing upon these things, my attention was attracted by pretty little structure like a

1515
01:36:04,430 –> 01:36:08,200
well under a cupola. I thought in a transitory way of the oddness

1516
01:36:08,200 –> 01:36:11,800
of wells still existing, and then resumed the threat of my speculations. There were no

1517
01:36:11,800 –> 01:36:15,520
large buildings towards the top of the hill, and as my walking powers were evidently

1518
01:36:15,520 –> 01:36:19,200
miraculous, I was presently left alone for the first time with a

1519
01:36:19,200 –> 01:36:22,239
strange sense of freedom and adventure, I pushed on up to the crest.

1520
01:36:23,840 –> 01:36:27,040
There I found a seat of some yellow metal that I did not recognize, corroded

1521
01:36:27,040 –> 01:36:30,760
into places with a kind of pinkish rust and half smothered in soft moss. The

1522
01:36:30,760 –> 01:36:34,420
armrest casts filed into the resemblance of griffin’s heads. I sat

1523
01:36:34,420 –> 01:36:38,100
down on it and I surveyed the broad view of our old world under the

1524
01:36:38,100 –> 01:36:41,900
sunset of that long day. It was as sweet and

1525
01:36:41,900 –> 01:36:45,580
fair as I have ever seen. The sun had already gone

1526
01:36:45,580 –> 01:36:49,100
below the horizon and the west was flaming gold, touched with some

1527
01:36:49,100 –> 01:36:52,900
horizontal bars of purple and crimson. Below was the valley of the Thames

1528
01:36:52,900 –> 01:36:56,700
in which the river lay like a band of burnished steel. I’ve already spoken of

1529
01:36:56,700 –> 01:37:00,060
the great palaces dotted out, dotted about

1530
01:37:00,730 –> 01:37:04,570
among the variegated greenery, some in ruins and some still occupy. Here

1531
01:37:04,570 –> 01:37:08,010
and there rose a white or silvery figure in the waste garden of the earth.

1532
01:37:08,170 –> 01:37:11,850
Here and there came the sharp vertical line of some cupola or obelisk.

1533
01:37:12,410 –> 01:37:16,010
There were no hedges, no signs of proprietary rights,

1534
01:37:16,490 –> 01:37:20,330
no evidences of agriculture. The whole earth

1535
01:37:20,810 –> 01:37:23,850
had become a garden.

1536
01:37:32,260 –> 01:37:35,820
H.G. wells betrays himself in

1537
01:37:35,820 –> 01:37:39,620
this. It is often said that man has a

1538
01:37:39,620 –> 01:37:41,780
God sized hole in his heart.

1539
01:37:43,300 –> 01:37:47,100
Christians will say this quite a bit and they will

1540
01:37:47,100 –> 01:37:50,580
assert from C.S. lewis on down, the apologetics, the

1541
01:37:50,580 –> 01:37:53,720
apologetics will, that God,

1542
01:37:54,280 –> 01:37:58,120
in particular Jesus, is the only thing that could fill that God sized

1543
01:37:58,200 –> 01:38:01,920
heart. And Wells betrays the size of his

1544
01:38:01,920 –> 01:38:05,520
God sized heart with this writing in the time machine. Because really what

1545
01:38:05,520 –> 01:38:08,760
the time traveler is looking down upon from his seat

1546
01:38:09,720 –> 01:38:11,240
high above the view,

1547
01:38:13,240 –> 01:38:15,080
he’s looking down at the Garden of Eden,

1548
01:38:17,330 –> 01:38:20,970
at least right at the beginning. By the way,

1549
01:38:20,970 –> 01:38:24,810
there’s always snakes in the garden, which is one thing Wells couldn’t

1550
01:38:24,810 –> 01:38:28,490
really get his arms around. And by the way, he’s got good company. Most

1551
01:38:28,490 –> 01:38:32,010
secular atheists, even in our own time, can’t get their arms around the

1552
01:38:32,010 –> 01:38:35,850
concept of evil. Why is there evil? Why is there injustice? This

1553
01:38:35,850 –> 01:38:37,970
is the thing they think trips up believers

1554
01:38:39,890 –> 01:38:43,690
who have filled that hole in their heart. Oh, they, they

1555
01:38:43,690 –> 01:38:47,010
believe this. They believe. That’s the key question that’s going to

1556
01:38:47,330 –> 01:38:50,050
somehow have us all who do believe,

1557
01:38:50,930 –> 01:38:54,370
you know, hit ourselves in the head with our, you know,

1558
01:38:54,450 –> 01:38:57,570
palm of our hand and say, well, I could have had a V8. I never

1559
01:38:57,570 –> 01:39:01,370
knew I could have abandoned this God thing. Wow, I didn’t

1560
01:39:01,370 –> 01:39:05,170
know that until you came along and exposed the idea of evil to me. Well,

1561
01:39:05,650 –> 01:39:07,410
the reality is that,

1562
01:39:09,180 –> 01:39:12,860
um, the time machine

1563
01:39:13,420 –> 01:39:15,660
is Wells’s attempt to.

1564
01:39:17,020 –> 01:39:20,820
How to. Is his attempt to Try to navigate and understand the

1565
01:39:20,820 –> 01:39:24,660
human condition. And, you know, to do that in

1566
01:39:24,660 –> 01:39:28,460
a way that is explicitly anti

1567
01:39:28,460 –> 01:39:32,300
religion and focused on technology would have been really hard for him

1568
01:39:32,300 –> 01:39:35,300
in the culture that he came out of. And so he’s going to put this

1569
01:39:35,300 –> 01:39:38,340
illusion in there and he’s going to work forward from it because he knows that

1570
01:39:38,340 –> 01:39:40,680
it’s the one that most people

1571
01:39:42,600 –> 01:39:46,360
are going to be familiar with. Right. It

1572
01:39:46,360 –> 01:39:48,920
was going to be the one that he could sell the most. It’s also part

1573
01:39:48,920 –> 01:39:52,440
of his cultural. His cultural milieu. Right. His cultural tie.

1574
01:39:53,000 –> 01:39:56,760
He could no more avoid talking about or intimidate, intimating the

1575
01:39:56,760 –> 01:40:00,120
Garden of Eden than Ray Bradbury

1576
01:40:01,320 –> 01:40:04,800
could avoid intimating and talking about the Cold War and the Martian

1577
01:40:04,800 –> 01:40:08,030
Chronicle. Right. Or Philip K. Dick about nuclear

1578
01:40:08,030 –> 01:40:11,270
thermonuclear destruction in New Android Stream of Electric Sheep.

1579
01:40:14,790 –> 01:40:17,990
We have talked a lot about a lot of things. We haven’t really talked about

1580
01:40:17,990 –> 01:40:21,270
time travel here, the actual mechanics of it. Now,

1581
01:40:21,910 –> 01:40:25,750
I understand, according to Stephen Hawking and Neil Degrassi Tyson and all the

1582
01:40:25,750 –> 01:40:29,110
big brains in the world, that we may potentially

1583
01:40:29,110 –> 01:40:32,880
maybe be able to travel to the

1584
01:40:32,880 –> 01:40:36,440
future like the time traveler did. But what

1585
01:40:36,440 –> 01:40:40,080
they propose is that according to the current laws of physics, the way we

1586
01:40:40,080 –> 01:40:43,880
currently understand quantum mechanics and everything else and theories

1587
01:40:43,880 –> 01:40:47,720
of relativity, there is no way to

1588
01:40:47,720 –> 01:40:51,280
go backwards. There’s no way to return. There’s no, as Nietzsche would

1589
01:40:51,280 –> 01:40:53,840
say, idea of return.

1590
01:40:54,880 –> 01:40:58,200
So once you go, you’re basically gone.

1591
01:41:01,160 –> 01:41:04,960
Now they also propose that you need a machine big

1592
01:41:04,960 –> 01:41:08,680
enough, something with like ion engines that can really like warp a black

1593
01:41:08,680 –> 01:41:12,359
hole or turn something or create a wormhole of some kind,

1594
01:41:12,359 –> 01:41:15,400
because we actually don’t have the power.

1595
01:41:16,120 –> 01:41:19,960
Well, as Michio Kaku would say, we’re not a fourth level. We’re not

1596
01:41:19,960 –> 01:41:23,160
a fourth level civilization yet. We haven’t yet figured out how to

1597
01:41:25,350 –> 01:41:28,950
take the energy from our nearest star and warp it or

1598
01:41:28,950 –> 01:41:32,710
change it, or utilize it for our own means in a

1599
01:41:32,710 –> 01:41:35,750
way that could power the whole planet and all of our energy needs and still

1600
01:41:35,750 –> 01:41:39,430
have stuff left over, which is what he proposes fourth level civilizations do.

1601
01:41:39,590 –> 01:41:43,270
He says we are merely, if I remember correctly, we are merely a second level

1602
01:41:43,270 –> 01:41:46,990
civilization. We’re still rudely pulling our modes

1603
01:41:46,990 –> 01:41:50,240
of energy out of the ground. Oh, you

1604
01:41:50,320 –> 01:41:53,840
terrible people. All right, I know. Okay,

1605
01:41:54,160 –> 01:41:55,680
thanks, Michio Kaku.

1606
01:41:58,000 –> 01:42:01,600
So I guess my, my question here is twofold.

1607
01:42:02,080 –> 01:42:02,800
Number one,

1608
01:42:06,880 –> 01:42:10,400
will we have Gardens of Edens in the future?

1609
01:42:11,520 –> 01:42:15,090
Like, can we get there from here? But then

1610
01:42:15,090 –> 01:42:15,850
number two,

1611
01:42:18,810 –> 01:42:20,970
can our technology get us

1612
01:42:22,570 –> 01:42:25,850
in time to a Garden of Eden?

1613
01:42:29,850 –> 01:42:33,610
No, no, I don’t think so. But this will. This, this answer

1614
01:42:33,610 –> 01:42:36,890
really can only be. I can only answer.

1615
01:42:38,090 –> 01:42:41,490
It will be informed by my dearly held

1616
01:42:41,490 –> 01:42:44,720
religious beliefs. They’re very close and it’s. What,

1617
01:42:44,800 –> 01:42:48,160
it’s so, no, I don’t think so. I think, you know,

1618
01:42:48,320 –> 01:42:51,920
man. I think the nature

1619
01:42:52,080 –> 01:42:55,800
of man’s fall precludes us from being

1620
01:42:55,800 –> 01:42:59,440
able to get back to the Garden of Eden. Right. The only thing,

1621
01:42:59,600 –> 01:43:02,960
you know, for, from Catholic theology

1622
01:43:03,520 –> 01:43:07,320
that will get us to paradise is, you know, the second coming from

1623
01:43:07,320 –> 01:43:11,110
Christ, blah, blah, blah. And that’s all very theological, mystical. So no, I

1624
01:43:11,110 –> 01:43:14,390
don’t think there’s any. The Book of Revelations is a wild book.

1625
01:43:15,110 –> 01:43:18,310
Everybody should read it. So

1626
01:43:19,510 –> 01:43:23,070
yeah, yeah, but don’t go read those. What is it? That was the 90s.

1627
01:43:23,070 –> 01:43:26,790
There’s just a set fire. Oh, yeah, don’t bother, don’t bother with any of

1628
01:43:26,790 –> 01:43:30,630
that. Don’t read the dispensationalism stuff. Don’t do that. Don’t do

1629
01:43:30,630 –> 01:43:34,430
that. You’re gonna read that? No, no. So, no, I, I

1630
01:43:34,430 –> 01:43:36,950
don’t think, I don’t think there’s anything humans could do. I think we’re gonna keep

1631
01:43:36,950 –> 01:43:40,340
trying to. Especially as we become more

1632
01:43:41,060 –> 01:43:44,780
and more humanist. Humanistic, I don’t know if that’s quite the right

1633
01:43:44,780 –> 01:43:48,260
word, but human centered, where we just keep focusing on ourselves

1634
01:43:49,860 –> 01:43:52,900
and we’re like, well, of course, like we could do anything. We’re just going to

1635
01:43:52,900 –> 01:43:56,140
keep trying. So we’re going to keep trying to get there and we’ll do some

1636
01:43:56,140 –> 01:43:59,300
amazing things and we’ll do some not so amazing things, I’m sure.

1637
01:44:00,020 –> 01:44:03,300
Because that’s what’s happened in the past, right? We’ve done some amazing things trying to

1638
01:44:03,300 –> 01:44:07,050
get there and we’ve done some not so amazing things trying to

1639
01:44:07,050 –> 01:44:10,810
get there until, you know, the second

1640
01:44:10,810 –> 01:44:14,570
Coming. Well, and so, so this makes me wonder,

1641
01:44:14,570 –> 01:44:18,210
right? So we talked a lot during this series of books

1642
01:44:18,210 –> 01:44:21,170
over the last probably month and a half. We’ve talked a lot about.

1643
01:44:22,610 –> 01:44:25,490
We talked a lot about aliens, we talked about space travel,

1644
01:44:26,290 –> 01:44:29,490
talked about. Now we’re talking about time. Well, talk about time travel, kind of.

1645
01:44:30,510 –> 01:44:34,110
We’ve talked about, you know, the theory

1646
01:44:34,110 –> 01:44:37,830
put forth by Ray Bradbury in the Martian Chronicles that we

1647
01:44:37,830 –> 01:44:40,430
won’t change Mars, Mars will instead change us.

1648
01:44:41,710 –> 01:44:45,390
Robert Heinlein in Stranger in a Strange Land, you know,

1649
01:44:45,469 –> 01:44:49,230
brings the man from Mars down to Earth. And of course, because he wrote

1650
01:44:49,230 –> 01:44:52,990
this book in the 1940s, the man from Mars starts a church,

1651
01:44:53,150 –> 01:44:56,990
which. I’m sorry, he starts a Discipline, which eventually becomes a church.

1652
01:44:57,570 –> 01:45:01,410
We postulated on this podcast with John Hill that he would start a political

1653
01:45:01,410 –> 01:45:04,730
party rather than a church if he came down these days, you know, that would

1654
01:45:04,730 –> 01:45:08,250
be the thing. Yeah. Because we’ve sublimated. Be an

1655
01:45:08,250 –> 01:45:11,890
influencer. Yeah. We’ve sublimated all of our religious impulses to politics

1656
01:45:11,890 –> 01:45:15,570
in. In America, which is always a good idea. Oh,

1657
01:45:15,570 –> 01:45:19,410
yeah, it’s totally fine. Yeah. There’ll be no. There’ll be no negative. There’ll be

1658
01:45:19,410 –> 01:45:22,250
no downside or suboptimal outcomes from that at all. I’m sure it’ll all work out

1659
01:45:22,250 –> 01:45:23,900
well. Mm. Anyhow.

1660
01:45:26,460 –> 01:45:30,260
Anyhow. So we. And

1661
01:45:30,260 –> 01:45:32,380
now with. With. With the time machine.

1662
01:45:33,980 –> 01:45:37,620
Time travel is the ultimate manipulation that human beings are

1663
01:45:37,620 –> 01:45:41,180
looking for. It’s the ultimate.

1664
01:45:41,580 –> 01:45:45,340
Other than maybe immortality, it’s the ultimate thing that rich

1665
01:45:45,340 –> 01:45:49,110
people talk about in real terms, but they

1666
01:45:49,110 –> 01:45:52,870
only. I only ever hear wealthy people. And I don’t mean, like a

1667
01:45:52,870 –> 01:45:56,070
little bit wealthy. I don’t mean like the guy down the street who, like, owns

1668
01:45:56,230 –> 01:45:58,670
wealthy. Yeah, I’m not talking about the guy down the street who owns, like, four

1669
01:45:58,670 –> 01:46:01,550
Toyota dealerships and you can, like, go to your local country club and see him,

1670
01:46:01,550 –> 01:46:04,790
like, golfing on Thursday. I’m talking about that guy. I’m talking about, like, the

1671
01:46:04,790 –> 01:46:08,630
obscenely super wealthy Jeff Bezos yacht people. Okay.

1672
01:46:08,790 –> 01:46:12,470
They’re the only ones I ever hear talking about time travel or immortality

1673
01:46:12,870 –> 01:46:16,620
or, you know, genetic manipulation of people in the future, you know, in the future

1674
01:46:16,620 –> 01:46:20,340
or now who are trying to biohack to the point about shortcuts. Biohack their

1675
01:46:20,340 –> 01:46:23,580
own biology. They’re only people who are doing this kind of nonsense,

1676
01:46:24,060 –> 01:46:27,540
and it’s because they don’t want to outlive their money. That’s really

1677
01:46:27,540 –> 01:46:31,380
fundamentally. They’re greedy and vain. Now,

1678
01:46:31,380 –> 01:46:34,100
along the way to being greedy and vain, will they find some things that are

1679
01:46:34,100 –> 01:46:37,940
good for humanity for sure and that are marketable for

1680
01:46:37,940 –> 01:46:41,660
humanity for sure and that are useful

1681
01:46:41,660 –> 01:46:44,100
for humanity. Getting to where they need to go for sure. They’re going to find

1682
01:46:44,100 –> 01:46:47,430
it on the way to the. There’s a lot of different ways to get to

1683
01:46:47,430 –> 01:46:51,270
the opera, but they’re going one way or the other. And time travel is one

1684
01:46:51,270 –> 01:46:54,390
of those things that. There’s less

1685
01:46:54,710 –> 01:46:58,390
conversation about this in my time and in my era over the last 20 years,

1686
01:46:59,110 –> 01:47:01,710
when I was coming up, there was a lot of discussion about it, and then

1687
01:47:01,710 –> 01:47:05,550
we all sort of stopped talking about it right around September 11, and there’s been

1688
01:47:05,550 –> 01:47:09,390
almost no talk about it ever since. And I wonder if it’s

1689
01:47:09,390 –> 01:47:13,200
because if you go

1690
01:47:13,200 –> 01:47:17,000
to the future and you see that it’s the same nonsense of

1691
01:47:17,000 –> 01:47:20,600
today. To go back to my point about Star Trek, just take it to its

1692
01:47:20,600 –> 01:47:24,320
logical conclusion tomorrow, and you can’t get back

1693
01:47:24,880 –> 01:47:27,680
to warn anybody. You’re stuck.

1694
01:47:29,120 –> 01:47:32,800
You’re stuck. So the greatest time

1695
01:47:32,880 –> 01:47:36,080
travel show on television ever made

1696
01:47:36,670 –> 01:47:37,630
is Quantum Leap.

1697
01:47:40,190 –> 01:47:44,030
Greatest one, and I’ve talked about this on

1698
01:47:44,030 –> 01:47:47,750
the last episode and talk about it now. Quantum Leap is the greatest time

1699
01:47:47,750 –> 01:47:51,430
travel show on television ever made because it comes from

1700
01:47:51,430 –> 01:47:52,750
a simple conceit.

1701
01:47:56,030 –> 01:47:59,710
Dr. Scott Beckett stepped into the, you know,

1702
01:47:59,870 –> 01:48:03,310
the Quantum Leap accelerator and vanished.

1703
01:48:05,700 –> 01:48:09,500
And he had one theory. Dr. Samuel

1704
01:48:09,500 –> 01:48:13,300
Beckett had the theory that one could time travel, but only

1705
01:48:13,300 –> 01:48:14,740
within one’s lifetime.

1706
01:48:17,540 –> 01:48:20,180
That’s brilliant. And it makes perfect

1707
01:48:21,380 –> 01:48:23,940
sense because think about it.

1708
01:48:25,700 –> 01:48:29,300
You said you’re in your 30s. If you were born

1709
01:48:29,300 –> 01:48:32,720
20 years before your birthday,

1710
01:48:32,880 –> 01:48:35,680
you’d be a totally different person, 100%.

1711
01:48:36,480 –> 01:48:40,160
And if you were 10 now, or

1712
01:48:40,160 –> 01:48:43,680
11, number one, you wouldn’t be having this conversation. But number two, you’d be a

1713
01:48:43,680 –> 01:48:47,480
totally different person. Right? You can

1714
01:48:47,480 –> 01:48:51,160
only time travel between the year you were born

1715
01:48:51,160 –> 01:48:54,880
and your death year. Interesting. That’s it. That’s the only

1716
01:48:54,880 –> 01:48:58,100
time you’ve got. You can’t go beyond those things. That’s

1717
01:48:58,180 –> 01:49:01,700
genius. Because that speaks directly to the human condition,

1718
01:49:01,940 –> 01:49:05,460
Right? Because if you go past it, like if I got into a time

1719
01:49:05,460 –> 01:49:08,740
travel vehicle, a Quantum Leap accelerator,

1720
01:49:09,940 –> 01:49:13,700
which sounds like an awesome idea and went like way

1721
01:49:13,700 –> 01:49:17,380
past my own, my own death date, whatever that is,

1722
01:49:18,340 –> 01:49:22,140
and for a male of my time who was born in the year

1723
01:49:22,140 –> 01:49:25,380
that I was born in, I only get 72 years, according to the actuarial tape.

1724
01:49:25,380 –> 01:49:28,510
So. So it’s currently 2025.

1725
01:49:29,630 –> 01:49:33,150
I am in my mid-40s. 72 is

1726
01:49:33,550 –> 01:49:36,419
31. 32.

1727
01:49:36,721 –> 01:49:40,390
31. 31 to 32 years from

1728
01:49:40,390 –> 01:49:43,310
now. Let’s just say 30. Let’s round the 75. Give me a couple extra years.

1729
01:49:43,310 –> 01:49:46,418
30 years from now. Okay, 30 years from now. 2025.

1730
01:49:46,575 –> 01:49:49,590
2050. 2055. Right. If I go past

1731
01:49:49,590 –> 01:49:52,190
2055, I have no anchor.

1732
01:49:53,380 –> 01:49:57,100
I don’t know what’s happening. There could be

1733
01:49:57,100 –> 01:50:00,940
thermonuclear war. There could be a planetary meltdown. The

1734
01:50:00,940 –> 01:50:03,860
entire United States could have slid off the map and no longer resist as a

1735
01:50:03,860 –> 01:50:07,460
geopolitical entity. Or everything could be great.

1736
01:50:07,940 –> 01:50:11,220
People could be like the Eloy walking around eating

1737
01:50:11,540 –> 01:50:15,260
whatever. Strawberries falling in their mouths. More likely than

1738
01:50:15,260 –> 01:50:18,940
not, of course, people will still be

1739
01:50:18,940 –> 01:50:22,350
manually pulling the dishes out of the dishwasher and being

1740
01:50:22,350 –> 01:50:25,590
frustrated that the AIs aren’t doing and the robots aren’t doing the things for them

1741
01:50:25,590 –> 01:50:28,510
that they really want to do. And people will have married robots or something. That’s

1742
01:50:28,510 –> 01:50:30,990
more likely than not what will happen past 2055.

1743
01:50:33,230 –> 01:50:37,030
But you’ll still have to like. You’ll still have to like, write

1744
01:50:37,030 –> 01:50:40,710
poetry by hand because, like, the pencil is still the greatest

1745
01:50:40,710 –> 01:50:44,550
instrument even in 2065 that’s ever been created. Okay, so I

1746
01:50:44,550 –> 01:50:47,910
can only travel between what year was I born? Yo. Yeah. 1979 and

1747
01:50:47,910 –> 01:50:51,670
2055. That’s it. That’s all I get. I don’t get any more than

1748
01:50:51,670 –> 01:50:51,950
that.

1749
01:50:55,870 –> 01:50:59,390
That’s why I think time travel doesn’t work, because we actually can’t

1750
01:51:00,030 –> 01:51:03,710
conceive because of the human condition. We can

1751
01:51:03,710 –> 01:51:07,390
predict that, yes, there’ll be greed, vanity, deceit, hypocrisy.

1752
01:51:07,630 –> 01:51:11,350
There’ll be all the bad stuff. There’ll also be love and compassion, understanding

1753
01:51:11,350 –> 01:51:14,750
and empathy. But where that whack, a mole pops up.

1754
01:51:20,010 –> 01:51:22,810
This is why there was no black people on the Jetsons, because the people who

1755
01:51:22,810 –> 01:51:24,810
came up with the Jetsons couldn’t conceive of that.

1756
01:51:27,050 –> 01:51:29,410
If they’d been born 20 years later, there would have been black people on the

1757
01:51:29,410 –> 01:51:33,170
Jetsons. If they born 20 years before, not

1758
01:51:33,170 –> 01:51:36,610
only the Jetsons would not exist. Like, the whole concept of the

1759
01:51:36,610 –> 01:51:40,410
Jetsons would have been like, ridiculously outrageous. And it would have had

1760
01:51:40,410 –> 01:51:43,510
the English people in it, probably not Americans. There you go.

1761
01:51:46,710 –> 01:51:49,990
Anyway, it’s a theory I’ve got. Yeah, that’s interesting.

1762
01:51:50,390 –> 01:51:53,670
The, the, the other, I guess con.

1763
01:51:53,830 –> 01:51:57,629
Concept of time travel that comes to my mind is, you

1764
01:51:57,629 –> 01:52:01,430
know, been since, since becoming Catholic, the

1765
01:52:01,430 –> 01:52:05,150
Christian theology has clarified magnificently for me. So it’s, it’s

1766
01:52:05,150 –> 01:52:08,730
really, really interesting when, you know, when Christians say, oh, God is

1767
01:52:08,730 –> 01:52:12,250
eternal, exists out of time. God exists out of time. Out of time. And so

1768
01:52:12,250 –> 01:52:15,890
that’s, that’s where my brain goes for time travel. Now it’s like, no, we just

1769
01:52:15,890 –> 01:52:18,610
have to figure out how to get out of the timeline

1770
01:52:19,650 –> 01:52:23,410
and then be like, boop, we’re going to reenter it over here. And then

1771
01:52:23,410 –> 01:52:26,690
we have to get back out. And then we can reenter it over here. But.

1772
01:52:26,930 –> 01:52:29,250
But then when you think about it that way, every, like,

1773
01:52:31,410 –> 01:52:34,980
I. Probably not. We probably won’t be able to figure that out. God might just

1774
01:52:34,980 –> 01:52:38,460
be like, no, no, that would be a bad

1775
01:52:38,460 –> 01:52:42,180
idea. I’m just gonna, I’m just gonna quash that right

1776
01:52:42,180 –> 01:52:45,900
now. Gonna ixnay that right now. Right now

1777
01:52:46,220 –> 01:52:49,740
there are upper limits to reality. There is a ceiling to this game.

1778
01:52:50,700 –> 01:52:53,620
We saw this at the Tower of Babel. There’s a ceiling to this game, and

1779
01:52:53,620 –> 01:52:57,420
it’s the tower. When you touch God, right? And. And God doesn’t really want

1780
01:52:57,420 –> 01:53:00,700
anybody to paraphrase from the old song, knocking on

1781
01:53:00,980 –> 01:53:04,340
heaven’s door before he decides you’re going to come knocking on heaven’s door. Right?

1782
01:53:04,900 –> 01:53:07,060
And the other thing that really should break your brain,

1783
01:53:08,020 –> 01:53:11,860
Catholicism, Christianity, whatever you want to call it, is, is,

1784
01:53:11,860 –> 01:53:15,540
is, is, yes, Jesus, out of time for sure, that breaks your brain. But here’s

1785
01:53:15,540 –> 01:53:19,140
the other thing that really breaks your noodle. Jesus or not Jesus, but God goes,

1786
01:53:19,140 –> 01:53:22,020
okay, I’m going to insert myself into the time stream here

1787
01:53:24,260 –> 01:53:27,980
in the form of a man, which is just the beginning of the outrageous

1788
01:53:27,980 –> 01:53:31,610
things that Christians believe. It’s just the beginning. That’s just.

1789
01:53:31,610 –> 01:53:35,130
That’s the tip of the iceberg. That’s. That’s mildly,

1790
01:53:35,130 –> 01:53:38,970
moderately. That’s whatever. We can deal with that. Let me really break

1791
01:53:38,970 –> 01:53:42,210
your brain. That then, then the son of God goes, oh, you know what? I’m

1792
01:53:42,210 –> 01:53:45,570
gonna die. And then in three days, I’m gonna be. I’m gonna be resurrected.

1793
01:53:47,090 –> 01:53:49,610
You have a good day. And by the way, all you have to do is

1794
01:53:49,610 –> 01:53:53,330
believe in that. And guess what? You

1795
01:53:53,330 –> 01:53:54,770
will. Will be saved.

1796
01:53:58,500 –> 01:54:01,540
And all. And all of humanity goes, excuse me, what?

1797
01:54:04,100 –> 01:54:07,780
And this is why I have said for a long time in my own

1798
01:54:07,780 –> 01:54:11,620
life, on my own journey, interestingly enough, I was raised

1799
01:54:11,620 –> 01:54:15,380
Catholic and then walked out of that and walked into Protestant

1800
01:54:15,380 –> 01:54:18,700
Christianity for a whole variety of reasons which are way beyond the pale of this

1801
01:54:18,700 –> 01:54:22,280
show, but walked into that. And I’m now walking through

1802
01:54:22,280 –> 01:54:25,520
that entire process of belief.

1803
01:54:27,680 –> 01:54:30,960
And, you know, I’ve said since the beginning,

1804
01:54:31,440 –> 01:54:35,200
Christianity makes the most outrageous claims of any religion on the planet. If you actually

1805
01:54:35,200 –> 01:54:38,400
look at its claims. And that’s why it has to be true.

1806
01:54:40,160 –> 01:54:43,800
Has to be. Because the claims are outrageous and they require outrageous evidence, and we

1807
01:54:43,800 –> 01:54:47,320
have outrageous evidence, and it’s just. You don’t want to believe it. Well, that’s okay.

1808
01:54:47,320 –> 01:54:51,080
It’s true. True doesn’t require you to believe. I think gravity. Gravity doesn’t require you

1809
01:54:51,080 –> 01:54:54,720
to believe in it. It’s just true. It just works, you know?

1810
01:54:54,720 –> 01:54:57,680
So go around, don’t believe in gravity. Jump out the window. See how it works.

1811
01:54:58,560 –> 01:55:00,400
I don’t know. Go ahead. Fine.

1812
01:55:02,240 –> 01:55:05,840
Gotta build a really expensive rocket to defeat gravity. There you go. Yep.

1813
01:55:05,920 –> 01:55:09,400
There’s a guy around the corner from where I live. Yeah. Named

1814
01:55:09,400 –> 01:55:12,640
Elon. He can tell you all about that. There you go. Yeah.

1815
01:55:13,650 –> 01:55:17,090
Okay. You sort of wandered around the block on all this.

1816
01:55:17,330 –> 01:55:17,810
Yeah.

1817
01:55:25,410 –> 01:55:27,970
So you have young kids. I have an 8 year old.

1818
01:55:29,970 –> 01:55:33,770
The folks that are in that 10 and under group, Right. I think

1819
01:55:33,770 –> 01:55:37,170
about this book, the Time Machine, when I think about how we talk about time

1820
01:55:37,170 –> 01:55:40,900
travel, how we talk about memory and consciousness, how we

1821
01:55:40,900 –> 01:55:44,460
talk about how we anchor those ideas,

1822
01:55:44,540 –> 01:55:48,140
right? Utopia, Dystopia, and

1823
01:55:48,380 –> 01:55:52,020
the generation that is 10 and under that’s being born right now and coming into

1824
01:55:52,020 –> 01:55:54,700
the world. Those people have zero

1825
01:55:55,980 –> 01:55:59,780
psychic or psychological connection to the 20th century in the way that

1826
01:55:59,780 –> 01:56:02,380
we do beyond

1827
01:56:04,140 –> 01:56:07,620
sort of the way we look at like sepia

1828
01:56:07,620 –> 01:56:11,420
toned pictures of our great grandparents from the old west, if we happen to have

1829
01:56:11,420 –> 01:56:15,220
any, right? Or like if your parents or great grand,

1830
01:56:15,220 –> 01:56:18,460
your great grandparents or great great grandparents came over on an immigrant boat, you know,

1831
01:56:18,460 –> 01:56:21,580
during the first immigrant waves in the early parts of the 21st or the 20th

1832
01:56:21,580 –> 01:56:24,420
century. You know those pictures of all those stiff people

1833
01:56:25,220 –> 01:56:29,020
standing at Ellis island, right. We have no connection to those people. And the people

1834
01:56:29,020 –> 01:56:32,260
who are 10 and under, they will have zero connection

1835
01:56:33,780 –> 01:56:37,100
to Vietnam or to Ronald

1836
01:56:37,100 –> 01:56:40,740
Reagan. I have little

1837
01:56:40,740 –> 01:56:44,540
enough connection to Vietnam. Well, well, okay,

1838
01:56:44,540 –> 01:56:48,020
let me, let me. Alarmingly, right. Alarmingly right. Like,

1839
01:56:48,580 –> 01:56:52,420
here’s another one. They’ll have little or no connection to September 11th or

1840
01:56:52,420 –> 01:56:55,460
Covid. It won’t, it won’t mean anything,

1841
01:56:55,940 –> 01:56:59,380
right? And so I

1842
01:56:59,380 –> 01:57:02,780
worry about this book,

1843
01:57:03,180 –> 01:57:06,980
right, The Time Machine. Not because I think it will fall out of favor,

1844
01:57:06,980 –> 01:57:10,820
but because I think that just like Martian Chronicles, it’s one of those

1845
01:57:10,820 –> 01:57:14,660
books that’s so embedded that we don’t think about it. And so eventually,

1846
01:57:14,660 –> 01:57:18,140
at a certain point, no one will read it anymore. Like

1847
01:57:18,140 –> 01:57:21,500
1895 is a long way away if you were born in,

1848
01:57:22,140 –> 01:57:25,830
I mean, if you were born in 20, 20, 20. It’s a

1849
01:57:25,830 –> 01:57:29,670
long way away. That’s a lot of water to like step back over to

1850
01:57:29,670 –> 01:57:33,510
grab this book. A long way away when you were born in 1990. It is

1851
01:57:33,510 –> 01:57:35,990
a long way when you’re born in 1990. This is the type of book that

1852
01:57:35,990 –> 01:57:38,190
they make you read in high school and you’re like, why do I have to

1853
01:57:38,190 –> 01:57:40,389
read this? Why do I have to read this? It goes, right? It goes on

1854
01:57:40,389 –> 01:57:44,190
the pile with Jane Austen and Shakespeare. And you’re like, there’s got to be a

1855
01:57:44,190 –> 01:57:47,390
better solution. Why do I need to know about Macbeth? And so

1856
01:57:52,040 –> 01:57:55,800
we, we. We don’t live currently as Eloys

1857
01:57:55,800 –> 01:57:59,280
and we don’t live currently as Morlocks. That didn’t play out. Maybe

1858
01:57:59,280 –> 01:58:02,280
metaphorically it has, but Material.

1859
01:58:03,000 –> 01:58:04,280
We don’t live like that.

1860
01:58:07,160 –> 01:58:10,920
And I was promised vacations to the moon and rockets to the Mars

1861
01:58:10,920 –> 01:58:14,720
and I was even promised time travel by all these books. And instead I built

1862
01:58:14,720 –> 01:58:18,520
over 240 characters on Twitter of ransom and TikTok.

1863
01:58:18,520 –> 01:58:22,160
Nonsense. That’s what I’ve been delivered. And by the way, Peter Thiel has brought this

1864
01:58:22,160 –> 01:58:25,280
up too. He’s also frustrated about it’s. At least one of the rich

1865
01:58:26,560 –> 01:58:29,840
guys is on my side. Like, he’s frustrated by this too.

1866
01:58:32,640 –> 01:58:36,120
So normally when we cover science fiction, normally when we talk about these things, you

1867
01:58:36,120 –> 01:58:39,800
know, it goes into the speculative and it goes into the, it

1868
01:58:39,800 –> 01:58:42,860
goes into the sort of. I don’t know where things are going to go, but

1869
01:58:42,860 –> 01:58:46,420
we’ve had some real insights in this series of podcasts that we’ve done this

1870
01:58:46,420 –> 01:58:50,220
year. So I

1871
01:58:50,220 –> 01:58:53,820
guess maybe my last question is for you is what are you going to tell

1872
01:58:53,820 –> 01:58:57,580
your kids about these books? And how

1873
01:58:57,580 –> 01:59:00,780
are you going to introduce. Because your, your kids are young, right? They’re, they’re in

1874
01:59:00,780 –> 01:59:03,420
that, they’re in that mil you. My kid is a little bit older, but still

1875
01:59:03,420 –> 01:59:07,260
in that milieu. I’m currently reading Lord of the Rings to him and

1876
01:59:07,260 –> 01:59:10,850
he loves the hobbits. He’s. Yeah, they’re his, they’re his spirit people.

1877
01:59:12,130 –> 01:59:15,170
You know, he likes the idea, but he also likes the idea of like eating

1878
01:59:15,170 –> 01:59:18,890
like eight times a day and stopping for, stopping

1879
01:59:18,890 –> 01:59:22,690
for a meal and like sitting by the side of like a ruined tower

1880
01:59:22,690 –> 01:59:26,530
at Orthank and having a cigar. Like, he loves all of that, you know.

1881
01:59:28,130 –> 01:59:31,930
So how do we give these books, how do we give this

1882
01:59:31,930 –> 01:59:35,010
book to our kids? How do we, how do we make it not be

1883
01:59:35,700 –> 01:59:39,140
Jane Austen or William Shakespeare? So this reminds me of

1884
01:59:42,100 –> 01:59:45,780
what was it? It was like a, a study. They were like kids

1885
01:59:47,220 –> 01:59:50,940
that grow up in households with books. Read

1886
01:59:50,940 –> 01:59:54,340
more. And I was like, yeah, because the parents are

1887
01:59:54,340 –> 01:59:58,060
reading. And so it’s

1888
01:59:58,060 –> 02:00:01,830
so interesting since my housemate has moved out, we don’t really have

1889
02:00:01,830 –> 02:00:04,990
the TV on. We don’t turn the TV on.

1890
02:00:05,630 –> 02:00:08,670
We have like, we have two toy boxes for my.

1891
02:00:10,190 –> 02:00:14,030
And that even, that I’m thinking is too much for my 18 month old.

1892
02:00:14,350 –> 02:00:17,710
And, but, but one of them is full of books.

1893
02:00:19,470 –> 02:00:22,990
And when we’re just hanging out in the living room, mom sits there and

1894
02:00:22,990 –> 02:00:26,790
reads something that’s not too immersive because I have to

1895
02:00:26,790 –> 02:00:30,540
make sure the 18 month old doesn’t care herself. But you

1896
02:00:30,540 –> 02:00:33,620
know, mom’s sitting there with a book and

1897
02:00:34,180 –> 02:00:38,020
so how, how, how do I, how do I intend to,

1898
02:00:38,020 –> 02:00:41,380
you know, make sure my kids are reading this stuff and, and learning and

1899
02:00:41,780 –> 02:00:44,980
immersing themselves. I, I’m going to read it myself.

1900
02:00:46,020 –> 02:00:49,700
You lead by example. You lead by example.

1901
02:00:49,700 –> 02:00:52,980
Keep, keep yourself, keep yourself well, read. Keep yourself reading.

1902
02:00:54,670 –> 02:00:57,830
You know, one of my best friends who also has young kids, he’s, he’s thinking

1903
02:00:57,830 –> 02:01:01,230
the same thing. He’s just made it his. And we, but like my, and

1904
02:01:01,470 –> 02:01:04,230
my best friends, like we grew up playing video games and I fully intend to

1905
02:01:04,230 –> 02:01:07,470
have my kids playing video games within reason because I think that

1906
02:01:07,710 –> 02:01:11,390
there’s so much research on how much, how many good things video games

1907
02:01:11,390 –> 02:01:15,150
can teach you again in moderation. And I’m not talking about

1908
02:01:15,150 –> 02:01:18,190
the dumb mobile games that are just trying to get your money.

1909
02:01:20,260 –> 02:01:22,420
There’s value even in something like Minecraft.

1910
02:01:24,100 –> 02:01:27,860
But that’s again, beyond the pale of this, this, this show.

1911
02:01:28,580 –> 02:01:31,940
But you know, my kids will grow up watching me read

1912
02:01:32,660 –> 02:01:36,300
and already my daughter, my, she’s 18 months old, but she’ll go

1913
02:01:36,300 –> 02:01:39,060
over to pick up a book and she’ll start reading it. She’ll just flip the,

1914
02:01:39,060 –> 02:01:42,900
flip the pages if

1915
02:01:42,900 –> 02:01:45,460
you want readers, be a reader.

1916
02:01:46,660 –> 02:01:50,180
And then also. But don’t flip your lid if you’re

1917
02:01:50,980 –> 02:01:53,380
child for whatever reason because my, my, my brother

1918
02:01:54,980 –> 02:01:58,620
doesn’t like reading and he’s never been diagnosed with like

1919
02:01:58,620 –> 02:02:02,060
dyslexia or anything. But you know, there are kids, they’re dyslexic. Like

1920
02:02:02,060 –> 02:02:05,620
audiobooks count. Audiobooks count.

1921
02:02:10,420 –> 02:02:14,220
Was that to the literature? Yeah, yeah. Exposure to literature. There you

1922
02:02:14,220 –> 02:02:16,980
go. I couldn’t have, I couldn’t have said it better myself.

1923
02:02:18,730 –> 02:02:22,090
So with that, like to thank Kristen Horn

1924
02:02:22,330 –> 02:02:26,050
coming on the show today. Thank you

1925
02:02:26,050 –> 02:02:29,770
for having me as always. As always. And, and with

1926
02:02:29,770 –> 02:02:32,650
that, well, we’re.