Welcome to our world listeners. I'm Captain Jake Maraldi. Today on the podcast we'll be talking to Max Brooks, the author of World War Z and Harlem Health Fighters, about creativity and more importantly standing up for those creative ideas that come across your desk. As always, the opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the respective participants and do not constitute the position of the United States government.

Well, Max Brooks, welcome back to the podcast.

I appreciate you taking the time to come back and talk to us again.

Today, you talked about championing creativity. And I kind of wanted to lead off

with just the concept of creativity. It's what we talked about in our last podcast. But refresh

our listeners again as to what's so important about the concept of creativity.

Well, creativity is going to be critical in the wars of today because everything changes so quickly.

I mean, it used to be that wars, you knew who the enemy was, you knew the weapon systems,

their doctrine. You could train for it and prepare for it. Now it's improv theater.

Literally, the technology, the players, the rules, everything is going to change day to day. And so you need to be flexible.

You need to take whatever doctrine you were under and throw that book away.

What interests me about the creativity concept is it's something that, like I said a second ago,

that we talked about in this podcast and you see it everywhere across all spheres, all domains of life, absolutely everything talks about how the world

is changing quickly and we have to be innovative.

And it's to the point that it's almost a cliche that we have to be innovative and creative.

What you talked about today, though, and I think is is extremely interesting is that that type of

thinking in and of itself maybe is rewarded but that it's not necessarily the championing it being

the second right to to come is not necessarily rewarded why why is that's exactly right well i mean

i think it's it's hardwired into human DNA to be a follower.

I think it goes back to our earliest beginnings, that our little tribes of weak, you know, hairy homo sapiens,

cowering on the plains of Africa. All we had to survive was the group.

And if you bucked the group, you could all get killed. And so I think

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