Hello.
My name is Jesan Sorrells and this is the Leadership
Lessons from the Great Books Podcast Bonus.
There is no book reading on these bonus
episodes. Instead these are interviews,
rants, raves, or general audio
musings, and even conversations with interesting people
that don't necessarily focus on a specific book or even
a specific theme, but are still about leadership.
Because listening to me muse or rant or
speechify or talk to an interesting person about leadership
is still better than reading and trying to understand
yet another business book.
So at the beginning of the summer, we switched around the format of this
show partially to perform deeper dives into literature in order
to extract greater leadership insights and in order to have
more engaging conversations with our guests. However,
at the beginning of this year, before we switched up the format,
we came up with a scheme, sort of an idea, right,
to create a series of mashup episodes. I'm using air quotes
there that would feature a guest that we had never yet talked to on the
show. And we will be discussing themes and topics from
books that we had previously covered on previous episodes
of this show. Mix it with a healthy dollop of insights from other mediums
such as film and music. And if you've been listening to the show regularly, you
know that my regular guest co host, Tom Libby, and I
tend to somehow, every single episode wind up talking
about a film that somehow relates to a theme that's in,
that's in the book that we are covering on that particular
day. So this is just going to be an extended version of,
of that now mashup, for those of you who don't know
what that term means according to the Internet's Urban
Dictionary, which by the way, you can find out all kinds of fun stuff
about current slang by going into the Urban
Dictionary. But the, the, the idea of a mashup or the
concept or the term mashup according to Urban Dictionary is
quote, to take elements of two or more pre existing pieces of music and
combine them to make a new song. And that's
sort of, kind of what we're going to be doing here today.
This episode is the first of four of these episodes. And,
and we're going to begin, as I said, with a doozy.
So the line, the lyric, right, that jumps out to me when
we start thinking about these things that we're going to be putting together today
is this one. Forward he cried from the rear
and the front rank died and
the general sat in the lines on the map
moved from side to side
Whenever I hear these words, whenever I repeat these words, whenever I
sing these words badly when I'm out on my homestead, you know,
moving around hay or predator proofing a
turkey enclosure or just sweating in the 100
degree heat in the undisclosed location where I
live. I am
repeating this line from us and them from
Pink Floyd's iconic album the Dark side of the Moon from
1973. And when I do repeat this line, I always think
about warfare, particularly World War I. There's something about that line that
conjures up images of French generals
and British generals with big old handlebar mustaches hanging out in trenches
way in the back while folks bayonets
go charging into the breach of barbed wire. And
they just keep charging into the breach of barbed wire getting cut down
repeatedly. Now the song is
about war, but it is really about war against the
government. And Roger Waters lyrics can be
applicable to any war where bureaucratic generals waste the
flower of youth to achieve pointless strategic aims.
And I think the war that proves the rule is probably
World War I. Now, the intersection with a couple of
books that we've covered on this podcast here is clear. We covered All Quiet on
the Western Front in episode number 127. And in that episode we
discussed the nature of warfare, loyalty, patriotism and
meaning in the trenches of the Western Front as brought to us by
Eric Marie Remarque.
And it's been a minute here, but we've also covered the Lord of the
Rings trilogy. We did that in episodes number 76,
77 and 78 by J.R.R. tolkien, a book series
written by a man who, like many of his generation in England,
including a gentleman named C.S. lewis, experienced World War I
directly at the Battle of the Somme and contracted
trench fever for all of his efforts.
Matter of fact, he learned all the same lessons that C.S. lewis learned. He just
came to different conclusions. And so I'm
mashing all of that together because this is a mash up episode.
And we're going to talk about the intersections between Pink Floyd
and Lord of the Rings and World War I. And all quiet on the
Western Front today with our guest. So
today we are joined by Neil Kalachovsky. I was supposed to say
it like that, throw my fingers up. You'll be able to see that on the
video. Neil is the co founder of award.
I have to say it that way because there's a strong capital letter at
the end Award. Its goal is to maximize their clients
chance of a successful Sbir stt
our award. He is also a Tolkien enthusiast. That's
why he's on the show, not because of Sbir or sttr.
And he also has an interest in the
vagaries and the intricacies of World War I. He also
has a background as a, if I'm not mistaken, Neil,
a rock musician, right? This is true,
yes. And so he will know quite a bit about Pink Floyd and he
might have something to say about my favorite
concept album probably of all
time. Probably the best concept album of all time. Other people will say the wall
or whatever, it's Dark side of the moon, please. I mean, the T
shirt is iconic just from the album cover alone, you know. Right.
Can't beat that with a stick. And I think they'll still be
selling those T shirts to disaffected 15 year olds 80 years
from now. And of course they won't know that there is no dark side of
the moon. It's actually all dark. It's all dark. It's all dark.
Really? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yep. So welcome to the show, Neil. How are
you doing today? You. Jesan. Good to see you. Yeah, I'm doing great. Yeah.
I'm in New York today, by the way. It's 95 degrees. 95 degrees
in New York City. Actually, the person I was just talking to on the phone
before we hit record on this was also in New York City and he
was complaining while he was in traffic about how angry
everybody gets when it's 95 degrees in New York City. Yeah,
I'm in an air conditioned room, so. So
there. It's like 62 in
here.
So. So we'll just, we'll just start off with our
very first question here in the heat of the day.
You're a huge Lord of the Rings Tolkien guy. Talk with us about the impact
of Lord of the Rings on you. So there's a tendency for
me to make some sarcastic remark like, well, I don't know, I just read them.
But that's not true. I've been reading them all my life. I
don't think I can recall when I first
read them, but it was definitely pre fifth grade because I have a very strong
memory of reading them. My,
I was up in Alberta, Canada. My father was a professor and we
had, he took a sabbatical in Edmonton, Alberta, and this
would have been 1973. And
I would curl up, they would let you go home for lunch
and I would curl up at lunch and read the Lord of the Rings in
like a patch of sunlight in the house. And I remember this quite
clearly. I, I think much of
my moral philosophy, a lot of my
politics, a lot of my General
view of history is just very colored by the Lord
of the Rings and CS Lewis and, you know,
all of that genre. I was a big Dungeons and
Dragons guy. Yeah, I'm officially a nerd. Yeah.
Back in, when I went to college and
when you play Dungeons and Dragons, I discovered Dungeons and Dragons when I went
to college. I actually didn't know it existed in high school. I would thought you
would have thought that would have called out to me naturally, but somehow I missed
it. But
you were basically playing in Tolkien's. World.
Even if it wasn't Tolkien's world. Elves were elves, hobbits were
hobbits, dwarves were dwarves. And there was a shared understanding that, you know, dwarves
were surly and carried an axe and elves were handsome and tall and
they carried a bow. And you just
knew in advance, you know, so orcs were bad.
You were pretty sure the orcs were bad and that carried
on, you know, and that. And then of course, the original Dungeons and Dragons
eventually became what were known as MUDs, multi user dungeons where we were playing by
text and that eventually turned into World of Warcraft. And you know, the,
the incredibly addictive games that we have did way of saying
the influence on me is profound. Just absolutely profound.
So that challenge or that
influence right now, that challenge. And you mentioned on the show,
you said moral philosophy, politics
and history. Right. Were the three areas that Tolkien most
influenced you, influenced you in. And you said 1973,
which is the same year the Dark side of the Moon came out. Yes, it
is. I do know that in
the 70s, when people were reading Lord of the Rings,
they would write in the subway Frodo lives.
Right? Oh, yeah. That was like one of the things that people would, that people
would do. Tolkien fans would do.
And I do know that there had been intimations of intersections between
Tolkien and Pink Floyd and even
Tolkien and, and even, well, Pink. Not Tolkien, but Pink
Floyd. You're thinking of Zeppelin. Zeppelin, that's it.
Zeppelin, yes, Zeppelin. Although interesting enough, I associate. Why
do I associate Zeppelin with the wizard of Oz? Why do I do that?
I don't know. But isn't there something where you can play Dark side of the
Moon to Wizard of Oz and attracts. Yeah, yeah,
right, yeah. Yes. Okay, so why somebody
very high came up with that one? Very. You know,
that's the interesting thing about cannabis. It always makes you better
at engineering. Not much anything else, just. Just engineering.
What are the intersections between, in your brain, right,
Between Tolkien and music and these
different genres of, of art. And by the way, you know, we're talking
obviously in 20, 25 here, you know,
you know, 20 years after, you know, the Lord of the Rings films
came out, which I thought that property was unfilmable.
I just, I thought they couldn't do it. And somehow or another Peter
Jackson did it and it was kind of insane. I was, I was
working as a, as a part time film projectionist
back in the day when they still had physical film. And
I got a chance to put together the Lord of the Rings films, which was
great. Oh, cool. Yeah. And so I sort of got to see them before
other people did, all three of them, actually, before other people did.
And it was just kind of astonishing what he was able to, what he was
able to pull off. But, but yeah, let's go back, let's
go back to the 1970s. Let's go back to where you were starting. How does,
how do those things intersect in your mind? What's that, what's that
like rock music. And the Lord of the Rings. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So I think on several of us, first of all,
the early 70s, late 60s was explosion in
musical creativity. And the Lord of the Rings is an
intensely creative work. And
what's funny is that that often got associated say with
a little bit with the drug culture, with LSD
and so forth, which would have horrified Tolkien, by the way. Absolutely.
By the way, 73 is also the year Tolkien died. Right.
So the, So I, I don't think
he would have had much time for the actual rock bands.
It's hard to see Tolkien hanging out with Led Zeppelin
or Pink Floyd. Or Pink Floyd, yeah. But
there was definitely, you know, sort of a, it
was a whole counterculture kind of thing. And
Middle Earth was this just, you know, if you wanted to get away,
Middle Earth was a wonderful place to get away too. You know, by
the way, you mentioned Frodo lives in the subways. I can remember hiking the Appalachian
Trail in the seventies with my brother. And in the huts you would see Frodo
lives carved. Yeah.
In the, you know, in the wood of the hut that you were staying in.
So I, I think first of all, just for sheer
creativity and, you know, the late 60s, early 70s was
such an experimental time for music. I mean, people
were trying all sorts of crazy things. Of course the Beatles were like, you know,
cutting tapes and playing them backwards, which is, you know,
just, you know, whoever thought of doing that? Jimi Hendrix, you know,
basically invents feedback. I know the purists on here are going
to say the Beatles did it first. I'm not my
friend Who's a Beatles fan is going to kill me. But I can't remember the
song. But they actually have a moment of feedback first. But
let's. It was hendrix.
I'm sorry, 13 seconds of feedback at the
beginning of a song does not. You know. But, you know, Hendrix basically invents the
lead guitarist. Oh, yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah.
And then Paige, you know, from Led Zeppelin, picks that up. But,
you know, you can see Tolkien lyrics in some of the
Led Zeppelin. Sorry? Well, you can see Tolkien lyrics in some of the Led
Zeppelin lyrics or Tolkien illusions in some of the Led Zeppelin
lyrics. And with Floyd, I
think it was more, you know, they were sort of the
leading edge of acid rock
definitely during the Syd Barrett years, and
even, you know, even Dark side of the Moon. So
I. I don't think you're gonna. I think you'd have to search pretty hard to
find something in Florby. Go, oh, that's Tolkien right there.
The. You know, I think certainly
Tolkien and Lewis, and one thing they would have had in common for
politics is a distaste for useless war, for pointless
war. Yep. I don't. I don't think Tolkien would have felt that way
necessarily, against the struggle against evil, which he saw as
my view, anyway, necessary in part. Yeah. Basically human existence.
But, you know, that there. That there were. You know, that there were
dumb wars and. And. And
that those are just sort of useless wastes of human life.
I think they would have. Would have agreed on that. So I. I think
that's kind of it. I mean, you can see,
you know, you could. But. So I think it's just a general. In. In
the spirit of this episode, it's a general mashup of
creativity as opposed to, you know, Roger Waters
saying, I wrote this because I read the Hobbit and. Right.
Yeah, well, Roger Waters. I mean, I looked. I looked because I had
forgotten a whole ton of stuff, you know, about him. So I. I looked up
his. His Wikipedia page, which
is always a fun and exciting adventure, as research
for this show. And one of the things that you do
note about Waters,
and it's easy to note it, you know, it's easy to see it in his
sort of. His posture. But I
think more so when he was a younger man than he is now,
but when he was a young man, you definitely got the impression that
he wanted to use Pink Floyd
as a vehicle for his creative vision. And
everybody else was just sort of along for the ride. Everybody else is in the
back of the bus. Right. We're recording this episode,
about two weeks after the death of Brian Wilson of the
Beach Boys. Right? A man who, I was telling my wife, I
remember watching an American Masterworks episode on PBS
about the Beach Boys back in maybe like the 90s, the late
90s, early 2000s, one of those random Saturday afternoons I
was at home probably hungover,
watching pbs, trying to stop the pounding in my brain. And,
and one of the things that jumped out to me about the interview with Brian
Wilson was just how
angry he still was about the Beatles being more popular.
He never lost that bitterness. He never. And he, and he didn't really care if
you liked it or didn't like it. He was just sort of like, no, you
know, love, love me do, Come on, let me do a composition for you. And
then he like, would sit down and do like a whole composition, right? Yeah, yeah.
Like, this is, this is an 18 bar composition. It's so much better. And I'm
just like, it doesn't matter, you lost. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. You lost,
buddy. It, it is funny though. These insanely successful
people, and yet they're still, you know, driven by the fact that, you know,
40 years before there was one, you know, one girl who
didn't like them or something. Well, have you ever, have you ever heard the
story about Michael Jordan? Because I was a basketball
guy for years, but have you ever heard the story of Michael Jordan at the,
at his, his induction ceremony in, in high school or
something? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he invited the coach who benched him to the
NBA induction ceremony. Yeah, like you're,
you're Michael Jordan. You're, to paraphrase Allen Iverson,
you're black. Jesus. Yeah, like, like you just, that's what. Makes you
Jordan or Brady, maybe. Brian Wilson
is still, you know, you know, you're still driven
by that anger, you know. Right. So
I hadn't heard that about Brian Wilson, but that's funny, especially because the Beach
Boys, you know, when you think of nice rock and roll, you know, as opposed
to. Yeah, you go, oh, they were, they were nice guys. Even if they kind
of sort of hung out with Charlie Manson maybe a little too much.
Just a little bit of, a little bit of a tweak. Just a little bit
too much. A little too, a little too close to the Manson. But,
but, you know, you look back on their songs and, I mean, I don't think
there's an angry song in the, in the repertoire anywhere. Oh, no, I,
I, I think probably their best song, and they did a lot of different, obviously,
a lot of different songs, but the song that probably sticks with me the most,
I think I have it on my favorites list on Spotify is God Only Knows.
Yeah. Like, it's a beautiful song. Beautiful composition.
Now, full disclosure, I am not a fan of the
Beatles. I. I think that they were. I gotta go. Right,
right. Well, I guess we're done for the day. Short interview
and we're done. I think they were a Right Place,
Right Time band. Yes. I think they could play. Yes. I think they could put
together compositions. Right Place, Right Time. If they showed up 10 years earlier,
they'd have been nobody. And if they showed up 10 years later, they'd have been
nobody. They hit the right place at the right time. You know, Ed Sullivan, the
whole nine yards. They rode the wave. And I can't. I can't
take away the wave from them. I can never do that.
Okay. But I can judge the talent that's riding the wave.
And I think there was a lot of sharp talent during that time
that sort of got overshadowed. Go right
on ahead. I, I actually.
So, so, you know, when I was thinking about this episode, I was thinking, well,
what are the. What are the common themes between Pink Floyd or Dark side of
the Moon? Yeah. Lord of the Rings and All Quiet on the Western Front?
The one thing I came up with is that in some ways, they really set
the tone for their genre, essentially, almost for
the next, you know, 50 years going forward. You know, when I read.
So, you know, I was saying when you. And this is going to loop back
to the Beatles in a second. Sure. But.
So Lord of the Rings, I've been reading all my life, but All Quiet on
the Western Front, I think I read when I was maybe in high school, and
then when you asked me to do this episode, I said, well, I better, you
know, brush up. So I reread it, and
one of the things that struck me was if you look at almost
any war movie from, like, 1930 on,
it has all those, you know, the burnout,
the guy who goes back to the home front, and they can't understand him. You
know, the craziness of the front, you know,
the Brief Flower of Love, which is immediately destroyed
by the craziness of war. You know, and it's like, oh, my gosh, you can
just. Like, that's Platoon or that's Full Metal Jacket, or that's every
single war movie ever. Right. In a way, you could almost
trace it back to All Quiet on the Western Front front. And I would say
almost every piece of Fantasy literature. And again,
depending upon who your audience is, you might have some people, angry people calling in
about this. But almost every piece of fantasy literature,
certainly for the rest of the 20th century and
probably into the 21st century as well, heavily. Heavily
influenced by the Lord of the Rings. You can see. Oh, yeah,
you can. You can see it.
And I could. I could give you examples of this, but
I would say it to. As far as
acid rock goes, or, you know, that
sort of dark. Dark rock,
if you want to call it that, Dark side of the Moon
was. Was the Granddaddy. I mean, it was, you know, it
is. It has some, you know, very depressing lyrics.
It's interesting. So I. I did not have a
good understanding of who Pink Floyd was. Right.
But I. I sort of. So the way I was raised.
And I'll get back to this, is going to tie into my critique of the
Beatles as well. The way I was raised. I was raised in a Motown household.
I was not raised in a Beatles household. Right, right. Okay. So
people don't understand this now because everybody listens to everything everywhere and no one
cares. Right. Back then, it mattered kids. Back then, it mattered kids.
That's right. And so if you were in a
Jewish house or a WASP house, you
were probably listening to the Beatles. Maybe you were
listening to the Doors. If you were really rebellious and a hippie. If you were
super cool. If you were super cool. Right. But if you were
African American, yeah, you weren't listening to
any of that. You were listening to the Jackson 5.
You were listening to Dionne Warwick. You were listening
to what's her Name?
Oh, well, yeah, you were listening to Aretha Franklin. You were
listening to Marvin Gaye. Kids. Yeah. You were
listening to that. And. And those two things. And again, I
have to. Because everybody's Spotify list crosses over. Now, those
two things didn't cross over.
Except for the Beatles themselves. They were listening to those
folks. Right. The Beatles. Absolutely. For sure. They were absolutely
listening to those. As Elvis had listened to the gospel music
of his time, as Johnny Cash had listened to the gospel music
of his time, you know, the artists, for
sure. You know, Dave Brubeck, Right. I'm a huge jazz guy. Right. So Dave
Brubeck, you know, would hang out with
Coltrane and Miles Davis and. All right, so you're
right. Absolutely. The musicians all fed each other and
understood that racial differences didn't matter
when it came to actual musical talent. If you could swing, you could swing. And
that's just it. Right, right. Musicians have always understood this
Comedians have always understood this. This is why Chris Rock hangs out with Jerry Seinfeld.
And they're really good friends. Yeah. And they just will continue to be forever. Right.
This is why Dave Chappelle and Bill Burr, you can put
them in a room together, don't put them on stage together, because they're going to
try to outdo each other. It's going to be really mess, but. I like to
be in that room. Oh, my God.
And they're going to say the most outrageous cutting things to each other,
and there is going to be nothing that is going to be off the table.
Yeah. But there's a second piece of this, and that's the
viewer, the audience, and the audience makes all these separations.
And so with the household that I was raised in, my father was not a
Beatles fan. He was like, no, that's. That's white music for white people. Right. We
listen to Marvin Gaye in this house. Right, Right. You know,
so that was my influence. Right. But it's interesting to talk about genre breaking,
because when you think about books. Right.
In my house, I was right. I was a bibliophile. I'm raising my kids files.
I mean, I host this podcast, Read. We read books from everywhere. Like,
my mother was always the kind of person who was like. Who always said. I
was like, who always said, you can learn anything from any book
anywhere. Just go read it. Right. So totally agree.
We're going to have the Bible, but we're also going to have the Bhagavad Gita,
and we're going to have the Book of Mormon. Just go read it and then
we can have a discussion about this. Right? Yeah. Very free thinking when it came
to. When it came to books. That's a free thinking when it came to music.
And so when I finally
ran across Pink Floyd, I was in college
in, like, the early 2000s when I finally ran across them.
And obviously they were already, you know, sort of. I don't want to say past
their prime, but they were, you know, recycling.
Recycling the wall for the 350th time. Yeah.
That was. The Wall was the Pink Floyd
purists might kill me, but I. The. The Wall was their high
watermark. I mean, by the way, I think the Wall is brilliant. I think it's
an absolutely brilliant album,
but it's. It's very difficult to sustain that kind of,
you know, like, you know, that kind of brilliance. They
had some good songs, and then Roger Waters on his solo, on
his own had some good songs, but it
never Quite equaled that in my view. So. Yeah, well. And as
I said before, I think he needed Pink Floyd as a container for all of
his creative. Yeah. Energies.
Right. And once he got rid of Sid Barrett, whose
brain fell apart, you know, once. You know, once that. I mean, if Sid Barrett's
brain hadn't fallen apart, there was probably going to be a real battle in that.
In that band between him and Roger Waters. Yeah, I think so.
You know, and it would have been. Like Brian Jones and Mick
Jagger in the Stone. Eventually they would. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And somebody's going to
lose. Somebody's going to lose that, that, that. That game. And I. I wouldn't.
I don't quite know who would have lost or won on that. And it's one
of those. Those things in rock culture that you're never going to know the answer
to that. It's like. It's like in comic books, Superman, Batman, you know, you're never
going to know. Yeah. But I say all that to say
this. My critique of the Beatles is not, again, it does not
come from a perspective of a lack of
musical ability. I think they have musical ability. I just think they got caught up
in right place at right time, and
that sort of overlapped a lot of. Or allowed them to lap over a lot
of things and gloss over a lot of things that would have killed other
bands. So
I kind of agree with you on that. I mean, and it's almost hard to
see through the.
Through the Beatlemania in a way. Right. Because it was so
such a phenomenon. In fact, you'll get a kick out of this, by the way,
for. I'm actually doing kind of a. For
Halloween, I'm doing kind of a Beetle Mania thing in my hometown to
try to transmit maybe to the next generation. Well, it's. It
was in some ways kind of a cultural phenomenon. It was. Yeah. You know, like,
what was this all about? I. I can tell you about that another time
if you want. But. But we were talking about,
say, in. In the spirit of the episode first. Yeah, right.
Getting there first. I think the Beatles got to a lot
of places first. They were really early on
the psychedelic thing. I mean, you can always say, did
some. I mean, let's, let's. Sergeant Peppers was kind of
the breakthrough album for the Summer of Love. It was the breakthrough
album for the psychedelic influence
in. In rock and roll. And it was in kind of really
kind of one of the first themed albums. Right. You can see
Dark side of the Moon, you can see the Wall. You know, I Mean, not
directly, but the, the idea of an entire album or.
Tommy. Right, yeah, the idea of an entire album based around, you
know, a single recurring theme. They were kind of
the first. Here's, here's a great. I heard, I heard a
podcast once. This was really interesting. Interesting. They were debating
which beetle had the most cultural influence and you know what
answer they came up with? George Harrison.
Why? So one of the things the guys pointed out, and this is
really true, he said in 1967, if you went
through an American city, you didn't see Indian restaurants, you
didn't see yoga studios. Right? There was no, there was
none of that. Where did that come from?
It came from the Beatles going to India. And they
went there because of George Harrison. You know, I know some
Indians, A good friend of mine, he's Indian, he
emigrated to the dispute. He immigrated to the United States in 1988.
So he was a little bit before that, a little bit after that.
But his father, new people who immigrated to, in.
Immigrated from India to the United States back in the 60s. I'm gonna have to,
I'm gonna have to check that out and see if he buys that theory. Yeah,
yeah, see if he buys the, the George Harrison theory. I'll give you one
more. By the way, George Harrison is
somewhat credited with taking the first selfie. He was at
the Taj Mahal. He took a Polaroid camera, you can look this up,
turned it around, took a picture of himself at the 1965 at
the Taj Mahal. So I will say, I will say this. And this is going
to be. People who are going to listen to this, were maybe a little bit
younger, are going to be like, this is very boomer focused. I don't know any,
about any of this. This is ridiculous. And I get it. Sorry, kids. Well,
you know, I get it. You don't. But they wear the cool bands, kids. Well,
you know, I got, you know, Taylor Swift is better, Kanye
is. Whatever, I get it again. And every, every generation has their own
thing, right? Has to have their own thing. And the Beatles did
benefit, just like the Beach Boys did. All the people
that we've mentioned so far, even Zeppelin in the 70s benefited, but
the Beach Boys, Marvin Gaye, anything coming,
anything coming out of Motown, my God, the
Doors, you know, even,
even the Rolling Stones,
everybody benefited from the mid 20th century
Peace dividend that America got for fighting
a brutal war in Europe and in Asia,
from defeating two world devouring powers
and a war that, you know, if we really want to be honest,
traced its roots to World War I.
Absolutely. And so World War II is World War. Yeah,
yeah. It's just. It's the bookend 22 years later. Exactly. Yeah. Well,
you know, I mean, Hitler with different technology. Hitler had a chip on his shoulder,
to say the least. And, you
know, that may be the understatement of the. It may be. And.
And he, you know,
he. He wanted. Well, he wanted vengeance. He
wanted retribution against reality itself because
of what he experienced in the trenches and what he saw in the trenches.
Those, again, the same trenches, interestingly enough, that
Tolkien was in. Yeah. And again,
I. I think about World War I as this incubator for all of the
20th century. Right. So, you know, you've got
Tolkien in there. You've got CS Lewis experiment experiencing things. You got Ernest
Hemingway driving, you know, an ambulance.
You've got F. Scott Fitzgerald who would have
gone to Europe, but he couldn't get past his commanding officer, who I
believe was a gentleman named Dwight Eisenhower. Oh, is it
true? Harry Truman served in World
War I as a very. As a young man.
Winston Churchill, obviously. I mean,
the only reason Stalin didn't go to the front was
because Lenin got shipped in a train through Finland by
the Germans back to the Russians to kick them out of the war. But
Stalin should have been at the front. If Stalin had been at the front, you
probably wouldn't have had the purges in the 30s, or you might have had them,
but they might have been more. They might have been worse. And of course,
my personal favorite character, not even character
personality of World War I was T.E.
lawrence. Lawrence of Arabia. My God.
A man who sets the. To talk about genre,
set the arch type of the adventurer, soldier,
writer, the intellect and the fighter. The person who
could shoot you on a Wednesday and then that same afternoon have
tea with you and talk about how terrible, you
know, the English are and how we should cut up Arabia and plan a
revolution. Like all this got set with World War I,
and I have a quote here, actually, from the First World
War by John Keegan, a book I recommend everybody read.
Yeah, absolutely. Because it is a great book that talks about how
World War I actually started based on, interestingly enough, train
timetables. Yep. And I
quote, John Keegan called
the First World War a tragic and unnecessary conflict.
Unnecessary because the train of events that led to its outbreak might have been broken
at any point during the five weeks of crisis and that preceded the first
clash of arms had prudence or common goodwill found a voice.
Tragic because the consequences of the first clash ended the lives of 10
million human beings tortured the emotional lives of millions more
destroyed the benevolent and optimistic culture of the European continent and
left. When the guns at last fell silent four years later,
a legacy of political rancor and racial hatred so
intense that no explanation of the causes of the Second
World War can stand without reference to those
roots. Close quote.
We'll never have. We'll never have a war like that again.
I hope not. It
was really one of the most
disastrous events in humanistry. I think it was
also part. Part of the disaster was that,
I mean, this is. This is kind of well established military
doctrine had not caught up to military technology. And so
you had, you know, the phenomenon of people charging machine guns and just getting
moaned down in the thousands. I read a book recently by Andrew
Roberts, who's a brilliant. He wrote.
He wrote the. The biography of Napoleon and
Churchill and he. He did an
analysis of the first. Just the first day of the sum. Just the first day,
you know, what led up to it, what was the strategic thinking?
And I'm going to.
I assume this podcast is PG rated, so I won't cuss. It was
a screw up and basically came down to
a massive misunderstanding of,
you know, of tactics in the age of
artillery and the machine gun. They had no idea
that, you know, they thought they were, you know, completely decimating the German
defenses. The Germans had just gone underground. The
artillery bombardment would pass overhead and they would, you know,
wait for it to go by and then they would come up and get in
their positions and they could just watch the British coming over and they would get
tangled in the barbed wire. They had no real. There was. There was
some kind of terrible screw up that the snips that
they put on the front of the bayonets to cut through the barbed wire were
insufficient. So they were sitting there snipping away at the barbed wires.
You know, the machine guns were just raking them and it
was horrific. It was absolutely horrific. It was the biggest single
loss of life in the history of the British Army.
Thus the line, you know, forward. They cried from the rear and the front rank
died. And the general sat and the lines on the map move from
side to side. Like, that's. That's World War
I. That's the whole thing. You had generals
who, like Patton, Right.
Who had. Who were working out
because of French problems with the Germans, because
of the unresolved war of the summer of 1870.
Yep. They were working out personal beefs they had with the
Germans. Yeah. And then the
Germans are working through at the time
their idea of the right to rule Europe. Thank
you, Von Bismarck. And the ability,
or the, not the ability, the, the
desire by the Kaiser to. And a
lot of countries have this. I'm looking at you, China right now.
But the desire to be worshipped
or, or, or have other folks bend the knee
to you as the center of a particular continent.
And then you had the British, who. And honestly, if the
British had stayed out of World War I, it probably could have been just a
continent, a bunch of continental nonsense, and no one would know anything about it.
But the British felt they had to jump in because they protected the shipping lanes.
I'm looking at you, United States of America, right? And
so you have all these
dynamics at play and to your point, your new military technology.
So submarine warfare started in World War
I. The use of, to your point, machine guns and barbed
wire trenches. I mean, you see all this aerial,
Aerial warfare, Right. Whoever thought about using planes to do
anything? Right. Brand new technology. I mean, Kitty Hawk happened when. I mean,
your technology, you know, 1905.
Oh five. Right. And so, you know, 10 years, not even 10 years,
eight years later, they're taking that tech and they're flying over the
battlefields and they're, they're having air, air raids. And then of
course, the technology that would be utilized
to horrific means in the Second World War. Gas.
Yeah. No one ever talks about the gas attacks in World
War I. The gas attacks screwed up more people on
both sides of, of the, of the,
the dividing line there.
Including, including Hitler, right?
Oh, yeah. I mean, look, I'm not talking
about World War II Hitler. I'm not talking about the Hitler like in his 40s
and 50s. I'm not talking about that guy Hitler in his 20s.
I want to be very clear on this. I'm talking about Hitler in his 20s
before being rejected from art school, before wandering around
homeless in Vienna screaming about the Jews, before looking for a
communist under every bushel basket that you could find before
all that idealistic Hitler.
So would say fun at a party Hitler, he was 20. 20
party when he was 20. That Hitler
served in a role as a runner
of messages between lines.
If you look it up, I think on Google, if I remember correct, I looked
it up years ago and some people can, can check me on this.
Runners had something like a 95% death rate.
Oh, it's a very dangerous job. Yeah. And the question, of
course, that, that almost never gets asked here because everybody always asks the
time travel question. If you can go back and kill Hitler in the cradle, would
you do it? Okay, yeah, whatever. Here's the question that nobody ever asks, why
is it that Hitler was in that 5% that didn't catch a bullet?
That is an interesting question. Why do you think?
I think because
I'm gonna push back on Albert Einstein a little bit. I think God does play
dice with the universe. I'm gonna leave it at that.
Because Churchill. Churchill was there too. Yeah.
Churchill also had close brushes with death. Right. Earlier in his.
Earlier in his life, he was. In fact, I think Churchill had a famous
line he said. Did he say something like, there's nothing so exhilarating as get.
As someone shooting at you and missing. That's.
That was one of his lines. So. So he was great with
it. He was great with a quote. He was. He was definitely. He could. He
could rail. He could rattle them off. So I want to be very clear. I'm
not admiring Hitler. I'm not admiring any of these people. Very clear.
I know you're not, but I want to be very clear for folks listening, if
you're coming into this raw. Okay. I'm merely saying that World War
I set the table for a whole lot of different. Whole lot of different
dynamics that then played out further and into the 20th, and I would
even argue deep into the 21st century, so. Oh,
absolutely. The current challenges that we are having with the remnants of the
Ottoman Empire
go all the way back to the death of the Ottoman Empire in World War
I. I mean, we would have not probably had the Iraq War
without. Without the Ottoman Empire. How about this? Churchill
develops the Iranian oil fields to power the British
Navy in World War I. There you go. That's. That's why
he. He was. He was the guy, as the first Sea Lord
who said, forget coal burning. We got a better. We
got a. We got to pull that oil up out of the ground. Right? Yeah,
yeah. And. And oil dominates, of course, a lot of the
strategy of. Of World War II in the
sense that, you know, one of the things that Hitler is trying to do when
he drives into Russia is get to the, you know, the oil fields in the
South. Correct. Of the. Of the Union. I mean, he ends up screwing
it up in. And in fact, how about this? I'm going to pull
it to the Lord of the Rings, much like Sauron. Okay. Because
he's so blinded by, you know, in some ways, his.
His. His manias that, you know,
so. So the whole, you know, the whole t. If you will, the tactic of
Gandalf in. In. In the Lord of the Rings is to draw
Soran away from Mordor because he knows that Frodo
and. And Sam are bringing the ring, you know,
to Aradruin, and so he wants to empty the land. And that's.
That's the whole tactic is. Is to pull him out, pull him out too soon.
And that's kind of what happens at the Battle of the Pelenor Fields. He almost
takes Minas Tirith, but he doesn't quite. Because he struck too soon.
Right. And the.
Now, Tolkien would be the very first person
in line to say that the Lord of the Rings was not an allegory for
the Second World War. He hated allegory. He hated the. A lot of it was
written before the Lord of the Rings. All of that. All of that is true.
But there was sort of a similar sort of thing that, you
know, Hitler could not decide in some ways whether he wanted the oil
or whether he, you know. And of course, when the 6th army got to Stalingrad,
there was that. It happened to be called Stalingrad.
Of all names. It had that name. Right. And
it was tactically, probably not. It was not the
smartest move to tie the. Well, of course, in retrospect, turned out to be a
very bad move, but they couldn't know that at the
time to bog the 6th army down
in Stalingrad. And, you know, and
by the way, it's not the topic of our podcast, but I am fascinated
by Stalin. I'm probably the one person you'll ever meet who would love to go
to Volgorad, which is what it's called today. It is. And it is.
So the battle of. Have you ever seen the movie about the
enemy at the gates? Yeah. Okay. You knew. Yeah. You know, you read the book.
Okay, okay. So one of the things that.
And, you know, look, when you talk about World War I and World
War II, particularly in the West,
Russia's contributions to world peace
in the terms of blood and guts, to
paraphrase from General Patton, my favorite World War II
general,
the unreconstructed General Patton. And he fought in
World War I. And he fought in World War I. Yes, he did. Yes, he
did. He was another one. I'm going to keep pulling. He was another one. That's
right. He was another one. He did.
The Russians are never given credit. You know, they're never.
They're sort of an afterthought. And that's really too bad,
A, because it shows a fundamental disrespect for their sacrifice.
B, we have this weird thing in our heads in America
that we can't compliment our enemy because that
might mean that we Approve of what the enemy has done. But you can
look at what the enemy has done and go, okay. I mean that's,
that was actually like, from their perspective, that was actually wisdom. No, that was, that
was smart. That's what they should done. And Stalingrad,
if you look at that battle,
they did exactly the right thing. I mean that's classic city
siege tactics. I mean you would see that later on in Vietnam.
You would see that later on in Baghdad
the second time when the Americans went in and then Al Qaeda decided that they
were gonna, they're basically gonna try to own that city. And then the
Marines. The marines and the seals had to go back in
and, and sort of, sort of take that sucker back.
But you, you, this is, I mean Stalingrad sets the tone
for city based door to door siege
tactics. If you want to defend your house.
Yeah, it's still the most destructive battle I think in, in history.
And you know, the Germans called it rotten Krieg, right? Rat war.
Because the tactic of the Russian, the, the, the
commander on the Russian side was a guy named Chukov. Most
people think of Zhukov, who was the supreme commander, but Chukov was the guy on
the ground like literally in charged with holding on to Stalingrad
at all costs. And one of the things his tactic
was you need to be right up with your enemy,
like right there because, because the German artillery was superior. But
if you're 10ft away, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter.
They can't hit you with artillery because they'll be hitting their own guys, right? So
they would very often have situations where what they call, they had, they had a
term, they called it a Stalingrad wedding cake. Do you know what that is? No,
I don't know that. Russians, Germans, Russians
in, in the same building all shooting at each other. So
yeah, it was, I mean for, you know, I think there's something like a million
casualties at Stalingrad. The, The
Russians shoot 15, 000 of their own. Oh yeah, they do.
Oh yeah. For quote unquote, cowardice. Again, if this
is audio, I'm making inter quotes cowardice.
Right. And yeah, it was, it was
just. But if you'll forgive me, just a quick
aside because my daughter may listen to this. My daughter Alexa may listen to this
episode. She asked me a while ago to. So I,
I did all this traveling in, in the 80s and one of the places I
went to, Hasan, was the Soviet Union in
1989. And I was
at that time just starting my career as a physicist and they were
opening up through glassnost. They wanted Western physicists
to come and visit. And I was like, this much a physicist,
but my brother was studying physics and he got invited, and he got me invited,
and that's how I ended up there. And anyway, I'm actually
writing her a bit of a memoir and I'm doing it as a. As a
movie script for fun, because a. I couldn't remember everything that actually happened.
So I'm filling in the blanks, you know, sort of. Yeah, fictional,
fictional moments. But there was. They did take us
to see some of the World war. World War II was still close enough in
1989. And so, you know, when you
say it's not remembered, it's not remembered in the west, right.
But Russia, it is the defining,
you know, war of, of their, of their culture.
And, you know, one of the
things that they will point out, they'll say, out of
every five Germans killed in World War II, four of them were
killed on the Eastern front. Hey, look, you know,
Vladimir Putin has been quoted, and I say this repeatedly
about the man. It tells you sort of what his brain is like.
He is consistently quoted, or not consistently, but he
was quoted back in the 90s
during the time of Yeltsin and others.
And by the way, he's a former KGB guy. So let's just be real about
here, about what we're talking about here. You know,
he was quoted as saying the collapse of the Soviet Union was
the greatest geopolitical disaster of the 20th century.
Right. Now, just sort of let that stand because there were so many
geopolitical disasters. That was the greatest one.
But if you're Russian, if you're Russian,
that is the greatest geopolitical disaster of the
20th century. Well, I will say this. I certainly understand
the Russian concern about invasion from
their West. Oh, yeah, because it's happened every century for
like the last four centuries. I mean, you can go back to Sweden
invading, invading Russia, you know, during the
time of Peter the Great, of course, the Napoleon,
I was about to say, burns Moscow, but he didn't burn Moscow, they burned
Moscow to deny it to him. But, you know,
so. And, and in World War I, they also get invaded
and lose. And that in some ways is
what sort of, in some ways led to the tactics of World War II.
Because in the German mind, oh, we're going to win, right.
Because look how easily we beat them. You know, 20 years ago, it's just going
to be that. And now we have tanks and now we have better technology, and
now we're definitely going to Win. Right. Well, I think they also fundamentally
underestimated the. And I
think this is another. And we'll move on after this
piece, but I think, I think fundamentally the
Germans underestimated
the inter. Into war. German thinking
underestimated the consolidation. No, not
consolidation. They underestimated the
intelligence and venalness
of, of Vladimir Ilyich Ulanov
Lenin. And
we've, we've covered some of Lenin's writings on this podcast.
I'm fascinated by Lenin. A man
who had zero military experience whatsoever
and a man who if he was in a food fight, wouldn't bust a
grape, but
he would sign an order to kill 20,000 people
and then go have lunch. Oh, sure.
And a man who. And we covered on this podcast, in
a recent episode, we covered Animal Farm. Right. A
great. George Orwell's great allegorical. We did like
allegory, his great allegorical novel or fantasy
novel about Lenin and Stalin and Trotsky.
And I think the Germans
underestimated just how brutal Lenin was and just what kind of system he'd
set up. I think they also underestimated the psychology
of Stalin. They didn't,
they didn't understand that. That
in order to survive in a communist system that's built
off of gulags and Siberia and just general
Russian dowerness, just in general
dourness, you've got to
be. Well, like Stalin's
nickname, you got to be a man of iron. And they just, they really
underestimated that. Like they just thought, they just thought they were
peasants or, or even worse, subhumans. Are you talking about
world war. During World War II. But, but that was, but that
was, that was reflected in their attitudes. That was reflected in Bismarck and, and the
Kaiser's attitudes towards them. In World War I, though, this is a long standing
thing with, with, with the Germans.
Yeah, there was always. And of course World two War War ii, this
just became, you know, just, just got raised to the
heights of absolute insanity. But there was always a sense of
German racial. In their minds. German racial superiority over,
over the Russians. Right. And that they were simply peasants and they
could just roll over them and that there
was almost a natural by. By world by the time of Hitler that had
transformed into. We have a natural right essentially
to the lands to the east and you know, and lean. Strong.
Yeah. Leaving. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Right. So,
you know, the,
so that was, that was certainly part of their thinking.
They also felt that, you know, communism was
an inherently decadent system. I think it was
Goebbels who said, you know, all we have to do is kick the door in,
and the whole structure will fall down. And
they really. But the one thing I will also say is that there
is a deep Russian patriotism which might not attach to a
government per se, but attaches to the land of Russia. Right. And
that they will kill and die in defense of Russia in
a way that I sometimes say that they're.
They're. They're very bad at invading other countries. They're not. They're pretty good at defending
their own. The. The.
You know. Well, and, you know, that's. That's just me. That's my quote.
No, no, no, I believe. I believe you're. I believe you're fundamentally onto something there.
I mean, every time Russia goes adventuring. So there was a great book I had
back in the day, and I can't find it for the life of me. It
might be in a box somewhere in storage. I would love to cover it on
the podcast, but it was a collection. Of.
KGB files that were declassified in the late 90s.
And it's just. It just shows the level of Soviet
adventurism that was going on in the world. From
Angola to Cuba to Vietnam to China
to places in South Africa. South
Africa. The KGB literally had
its fingers in every
pie you could possibly imagine in the world
up to and including the American university system, by the way, folks.
So just let's be clear on that. And.
And the CIA was
consistently playing catch up with these people.
Consistently playing catch up. The KGB was running rings
around the CIA everywhere in the world
and was doing so because the
KGB understood something that even the CIA of now has forgotten.
Because the current generation of CIA agents, from what I understand,
doesn't want to go talk to people. They just want to search around on the
Internet all the time, which makes sense, I guess.
But the KGB did a really, really good job of
developing what is known in. In the spy world as human
human intelligence. They did a really awesome human human.
They do a really good job of just showing up
and just talking to you, giving you a cigarette. I'm gonna light it for
you. Maybe we'll have some vodka. We'll just have a chat. Like 10 minutes. Yeah.
And then all of a sudden, they're in your life. They're hooked in. And this
is the thing that we miss about intelligence work. And so the
KGB put on a road show for damn near 40
years across the globe on how to do this.
And it worries me. I got to admit, it worries
me as an American. An American, First American, by the
way. It worries Me that we don't seem to be as
interested in investing that because you could take a
25 year. Old.
Gen Z and just be like, yeah, you're not going to have a computer today.
We're going to drop you in the middle of like, I don't know, we're going
to drop you in the middle of the Horn of Africa and you're going to
have to hike your way out. You have a good luck, you have a good
time. Well, what happens if I win? If you win, you live. If you
fail? Well, I mean there's, there's, there's much more at
Harvard that we can go get but we don't, we don't frame it that
way. Instead what we do, from what I understand is we recruit those folks now
into the whole digital thing because we think we can get more information off the
phones than we can from human intelligence. And there's a major
gap there I think that we're missing in the case. So, so hey showed how
to close that gap. You know, it's kind of a cool thought. So you
know the number one company, right that's sort of
championing the use of AI in say, you know,
intelligence work. Palantir. Oh yeah, I know.
And the other big, I find that in the other, one of the other big
defense companies right now that's going to play a major role in Golden Dome and
both named for Lord of. The Rings, you know, Paladin. Yeah,
yeah, yeah, the seeing stones. The
far seeing. So I, so you talk about the influence of the
Lord of the Rings. It's clearly influencing the tech
entrepreneurs of today. And I'm sure we could come up with three or four more
examples if we poked around. But I'll just
add one thing to you said to what you were saying about the KGB
outclassing the CIA, at least for a long time.
I read a book, I have it somewhere like, I don't know, I'd
have to dig deep. But anyway, it was written by a
guy who is in charge of counter espionage under
Stalin on the Eastern front and then
was principally in charge of
after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
principally in charge of trying to steal atomic
secrets from the West. And one of the,
the, he had an interview at the back and the interview at the back
was basically, you know, did the Soviet Union.
So the, the, the idea was for a long time, oh, they didn't, you know,
they didn't get nuclear secrets from, you know,
spy work or craft work or anything like that. They developed it on their
own and you know, basically this was a triumph of Soviet
science. Blah blah, blah, blah, blah. He says in the book, oh no, we stole
it all. We stole everything. And they
had, and they had extremely high level contacts,
including with some very famous physicists. And
it was who may or may not have known who they were giving
information to. But some of the things that this, this guy
talked about during the Second World War, they wouldn't. They invented. It's
a fascinating story. They invented an entire. I
may get a few of the details wrong, so forgive me, but there was a
battalion of German troops that got caught behind the line and they wiped them
out. And they kept them alive as a ghost battalion
with radio traffic and communications and they
would say, drop U.S. supplies. Oh,
we could pull off this major thing here. And they were
doing this up to 1945. The Germans never figured out they would send in
like paratroopers. Paratroopers would get killed. You know, they'd send in
supplies, the Soviets would turn it around. It was fascinating
how, you know, they had the Germans completely cabalixed. But he
basically said after the war we had the Americans cabalix as well. They did
not. Yeah, we were playing chess, they were playing checkers basically. Well, in American
idealism, I mean, this is what MI6, this is where the MI6
and Mossad Lapis all the time. I
even think even now that strain of American
idealism that's built into us culturally and just comes
as part of our DNA. And part of it is, part of it is because
look for just by dint
of geography, it is
really hard. China's gonna find this out if they
decide they're going to launch an amphibious attack across the Taiwan Strait. We
found this out with Normandy. It's really hard to launch a
successful amphibious landing across.
Almost never been done. Almost right. Almost never been done. It's even
harder to launch a successful
continental landing across an ocean.
It's hard. Yeah, because I see you coming. It's hard. It's hard,
it's hard. So you've got to be sneaky. You've got
to build tunnels, you've got to, you've got to invest in human intelligence.
You have to have a year, a multi year long process and even then it
might not work because your spies and your
human intelligence, which are embedded in the local population
that lives across the ocean of the place you would like to invade,
can easily become seduced by the local population.
This is the challenge of human intelligence and American
optimism because of the nature of us having
two oceans that basically allow everybody to leave us alone, for want
of a better term. And North America basically being
our backyard. South America, less said about that. Central America, less said about
that. But I'm talking about Canada and Mexico. We're the big dog. And that's just
it. There's
very little. Been very little development. Right.
Of the dirtier parts of. And that's not to say the
CIA doesn't do dirty things or they haven't gotten some training and they haven't gotten
better the last 20 years, but there's very
little of that sort of venal cynicism that
comes along and that's embedded in
MI6 and M. Assad and what is now the FSB.
I mean, for God's sakes, during the time of Communism,
the East German Stasi claimed that one
out of every three East German citizens was a spy.
That's nuts. That means, that means. That means if you're in a
room with five people, three of them are reporting on you
to someone. Yeah, that's
ridiculous. Yeah. That's a level of
cynicism and ideological commitment that most Americans can't
get to. And I think this is why we struggle in the spy. In the
spy realm. I think it also has to do with how existential it is for
you. I mean, if one of the things, and this might be
to our detriment, as you point out, we are so
isolated in terms of having oceans on either side
that you get this false sense of security that you don't
need to develop that kind of level of, you know, of,
of constantly
monitoring your enemy. And
that can be very dangerous because you get lulled into a false
sense of security. And,
you know, the, the nations that are cheek
and jowl with each other, they don't, they don't see it that way. They don't
see it that way. They don't see it that way. So Israel, I can tell
you, you know, Israel, you know, you know, at one point was nine
miles wide up until the Six Day War. I mean. Right. You know,
at its narrowest point. I mean, you know. Oh, I've said they had to have
exquisite spycraft. They had to know it was happening all the time because it could
happen so fast. I've said repeatedly if, if
the population of California, no, if
the United States was crammed into the popular, into this, into an area the size
of California and everything west of California, or, sorry,
east of California, was basically bent
on killing everybody in California, you damn straight
we would have all kinds of different. We'd be really good
at it. And so I'm not naive. I
know that because of the Patriot act, because of what happened with 9 11, how
that freaked everybody out. Donald Rumsfeld's floating of
memos everywhere. The Iran Iraq war or not Iran
Iraq war, sorry, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. I understand that we have
gotten better air quotes at the
intelligence game of. And of course
my conspiracy theory buddies will all say, well, we're all. The CIA is doing color
revolutions and is at the bottom of the Epstein thing and all this.
Sure, maybe, maybe we are that sophisticated. But we're not
as good as the Europeans and the Russians and the
British and the. And the
Israelis yet we're getting better. Of course
though, even these. I mean look at 10-7-the. Right. You know. Yeah, I've
heard the conspiracies theory too. I think that's nonsense. There is
no way. If they had, if they had known that was coming that they wouldn't
have prepared for it. Oh yeah, no, try to try. Disrupted
and, and repel it. But you know, I mean Hamas was doing
things like using old fashioned landlines to communicate and
to really try. So you know there's spycraft and, and there's counter
spycraft but on the
whole it's. I mean, you know, you probably heard as I did recently that
Mossad had apparently had a. This blows my mind. Had a
base in Iran. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. I'm not surprised
because. So here's. Okay. And then we'll move on from this because this is not
a spycraft. This is not a spycraft podcast. I'm wondering if there's
spycraft in Lord of the Rings. Is it this spy? Is
there. I mean maybe Gollum is kind of a spy. A little bit. Yeah, I
would say so. I would say Gollum is probably your. Oh,
not Boromir.
Is he a spy?
I got to admit he's not. He's not who he pretends to be, I guess.
Yeah. And I got to admit like.
Ah. When you read it, number one, I don't trust anybody in
Gondor. I just don't like. Faramir was the most honorable person in
Gondor. His father was a waste of time
for a whole variety of reasons. Well, it's. It's
okay. So to your point about being cheek to jowl with the enemy, right?
Yes. Yeah. If you stare to. I'm gonna quote,
quote that great gamma philosopher Nietzsche. If you
stare too long into the abyss. Okay.
Yeah, it stares back. Exactly. Yeah. And there's something like that. Something like that.
Some random thing and the Steward of Gondor stared too long into the
abyss. He did. He did. And he
despairs. And he despairs. Right. And that's what, that's where he. And that's what
Tolkien wanted to. Wanted to make that point. It was like, you can't look at
evil too long, otherwise you will have no hope. You'll be
robbed of hope. And then all kinds of other dirty
deeds open up for you. Because the right. I
love using this, this, this paraphrase, the door and the floor of your head
opens up and then just. The thing just goes all the way down. It just
goes all the way down at that point. And then you get into seeing stones.
His, his arguments with Gandalf. You know, the whole deal
with. Was it Pippin? Like it's, It's a whole thing. It's a whole
thing. Yeah. You know, and, and Faramir. Faramir had hope,
but he didn't have the strength of being the first son. Yeah.
Yeah. How about this? I think I just figured out who the spy is. Oh,
who's the spy? Who's the spy In Lord of the Rings? I think it's Wormtongue
in the. In the halls of King Theoden. Right? Yes.
He's deliberately sent there to corrupt King Theoden.
He is a man of Gondor, Rohan.
Yep. He's actually a double agent of
Saruman. I think He's. He's the spy. Yeah. And
he, you know, he gets, you know, he gets the spy's end, I guess.
I did not come through fire and shadow to bandy witless words with a
witless worm or whatever. Yeah. Until the lightning falls.
Yeah, that's right. Yeah, that's right.
That's a great line. I. The mentality
that allows the Mossad to think they can set
up a listening site in Tehran instead of
a base in Tehran is the same kind of mentality
that allows, to your point,
Grimmel Wormtongue to show up and just set up.
Right. And I think that the, the
British, Tolkien from. Who has
a thousand, more than a thousand, fifteen hundred years of
European clamoring
behind him, who is seeking
to figure out how Christianity
and goodness and evil all intersect.
I think this is the reason why Tolkien has been captured by people on the
political right in this country when it started out with people who are on the
political left. I think that's true, actually. He has shifted
from the left to the right. Right.
Even in the way that he looks at the environment. So you look at. And
it's interesting because I'm reading. I'M reading Fellowship of the ring with my 8 year
old now. I'm. I'm giving this, giving the gift to him. Right. And so I'm
having a chance to go through it one more time. And you look
at a character like Tom Bombadil and you look at the,
the descriptions of the, the Old Forest and the way
Tom Bombadil inherits the, or interacts with the force. That's a very,
at least in America, politically rightist way
of looking at nature. Oh, oh, yeah. He's almost a
survivalist. Right. He's like, he's. Yeah. And you could argue
he's, he's detached himself from the concerns of Middle Earth. Right. Because
Gandalf, when they're debating what to do with the Ring, right, at one point they
say, well, let's send it back to Bombadil because it seems to have no effect
on him. And Gandalf says, you can't do that. He does. He
won't understand such. I think the line is, such things have no hold on his
mind. Something like that. Yes. Where, yeah,
Bombadil is not interested, you know, in
the, the wars of the World. Neither
is Fangor. No. Well, and Bombadil is an interesting character.
I've seen Christian apologists over the last 20 years. There's one
I'm thinking of in particular who wrote a book called in the House of Tom
Bobil, a guy named C.R. wiley. Yeah.
Christian apologists, I think, have, have, have caught on to
some of the more apologetic ideas in Lord of the
Rings. And, you know, Christian apologetics exists
to justify Christianity to the world. And
you see this, you know, in, in Lewis, obviously, in that hideous strength or the
Abolition of Man or obviously the Screwtape Letters. But then you
also see it in, you know, an eminently Catholic writer
who also is very familiar with Lewis's work, G.K. chesterton.
Right. And so, you know, you've got.
And Christianity has had apologetics going all the way back to Augustine. That's nothing new.
But what is new, I would dare say, is,
is Christians taking a look at Tolkien and
instead of rejecting, quote, unquote, Tolkien for
the magical elements, they begin to now, or there
has begun more to be a sense that.
No, wait a minute. What Tolkien is describing is
the, the
unredeemed world that can be redeemed through,
through the positive and dare I even say, spiritual
actions of genuinely believing people.
And we're Americans, we would love those people to be Christian.
You know, Jewish folks can come along too. That's fine. We'll
argue with the Muslims
because we don't want the violence. But Tom Bomb.
And Tom Bombadil represents that sense
of, particularly over the last 20 years, of being
exhausted with having to come up with or being tagged with from the
left, a. A blame for
continuous wars when it would just be easier
to just Tom Bombadil the heck out of the thing and just escape. To
escape to the. Because. Escape back to the land. And
this is something that's very layered, that's happening in Christian apologetics. Tolkien would reject that.
I'm talking. I think he would. Yeah. Yeah. I think he would say
you do not escape evil by
hiding from it, essentially, and
that you have to. You know, there's a wonderful line
that Gandalf has at one point, and my Tolkien
fanatic friends are going to savage me for not getting this quite right. But it's
essentially along the lines of, you know, we.
It's after the battle of the Pelidor Fields. And he essentially says, look, we're here
to. So I'm not going to get it right at all. So I'm not even
going to try. We're here to solve the problem in front of us. And what
I think he says something like, we till the. We
till the fields, you know, of today. What.
Whether they, you know, it's not under our control.
And again, I apologize, I did not get that quite right. But
it. But you have to. In some ways you have a responsibility for
standing for evil to evil, standing up to evil.
And I think the other marvelous thing about the. The Lord of the
Rings, and I've talked about this, I belong to a C.S. lewis
book group here in Massachusetts. And
the. The idea that there is. There's this
intersection between human action and grace, you know, or the.
Or the. The idea that
maybe humanity on its own cannot fully overcome evil, that it does
need some intercession to do so. In fact, I.
I think, if I understand correctly, like the final scene where
Frodo is fighting Gollum on the edge of the. Of
the crack of doom was
the idea that Gollum was going to be there at that final scene. Tolkien
baked that in from the beginning. Like it wasn't just a
fortuitous series of events that Gollum happens to end up there at the end. And
it was because he wanted very much to transmit this idea
that. That Frodo on his own. I
remember when I was a kid sort of going, you couldn't do it,
Frodo. You couldn't. You know, and I would come up with all
these alternate endings. I saw like, damn, push his Gollum into the
bed. You know, these sorts of things.
Because I, I wanted Frodo to ultimately go,
no, and toss it in. But I,
I, I think Tolkien from the beginning knew that, that he was
not going to be able to on his own. Ultimately, you know, you could, you
could argue that the triumph of Frodo is to get the Ring to the crack
of doom, just to get it there. Right? Yeah. Right.
Yes. So the, the line that Gandalf has
when he's talking to Frodo in the Shire before they set out to,
on that log walk to Rivendell,
he says to Frodo, because Frodo says, why didn't
Bilbo, I love that scene, kill Gandalf or not get all. But when he
killed Gollum, right. Why didn't he kill him? Why didn't he ask? Gandalf says
when he had the chance. Exactly. And
what does Gandalf tell him? He says it was grace that said that
stayed Bilbo's hand. Right. Many who live
deserve death and many who die deserve
life. Are you going to give it to them? You know, do not be
too quick to deal out death and judgment. He said, I love it.
Fearing for your own safety. That's right.
Not see all ends. That's correct.
I want you to see. I could.
And so what you see there is that Christian conception
which, and I will be very blunt on this, my wife and I were
actually talking about something that was parallel to this but a different kind of context
which actually relates this. But I'm not going to bring it. We were talking about
it on Sunday and because American
Christianity is kind of going through some convulsions right now,
massive convulsions that you don't notice if you're in the secular atheist world.
You don't notice it if you're in a different religious tradition because you're, I presume,
going through similar convulsions in your own religious tradition because there
is no new thing, as it says, Ecclesiastes, under the sun.
Everything that has been done now has been done before.
But, but there's massive convulsions going on in American Christianity
where we are trying, where American Christians, and not just
evangelicals either, are trying to put together
what all of the things mean,
everything from grace to faith to
resilience, and trying to put it together into a box
for people who are, for the millennial generation. A lot of this is happening the
millennial generation right now because out of all of
the four major generations that are Currently, on this
continent, they are the first generation where the vast
majority of them either were unchurched or were
churched and left for the church because the church was a show for
them rather than. It was an entertainment complex rather
than a complex of grace. And what Lord of the Rings does,
interestingly enough, is it sets the table
for even secular people who will
not accept a triune, whatever conception
to begin to be infected with that idea that.
Oh, to your point, there's something else that's
running stuff here that I don't understand and it ain't totally agree. And
it does it in such a gentle way. It's so right.
I mean, it's just. Yes. You know, it's just the, the,
the. It's just a great adventure story.
It's exciting. There's even a love story in there if you want to go to
Faramir and Alen. The, you know,
and I think. And, and in some ways, in this way, it's like Narnia,
you know, I mean, who wouldn't want, you know, a world of talking animals? My
kids loved that when they were young. Yeah. Oh, yeah. And,
you know, the fact that Aslan was really a Christ figure, they didn't,
they didn't internalize any of that.
So I think that might also be some of the power of the
Lord of the Rings that takes these incredible, incredibly important and
deep concepts and it just, you know,
just gives them to you in such a gentle and
really pleasing fashion that you can't resist. You can't
resist. So let me ask you a question here. And we're going
to turn the corner and get to some conclusions and some ideas for leaders coming
up here in a minute. So you've already mentioned, you mentioned
previously when we were talking about different genres
that were influenced or not different genres, the ways in which Lord of the
Rings all quiet on the western front and even Pink Floyd's work
in that dark rock spot really sort of
set. They were tone setting. I love that term that you used, tone setting
for specific genres. And, you know, some of the books that have
followed on Lord of the Rings, where folks have been explicit either about
modeling them on Lord of the Rings or modeling them against Lord of the Rings
2 series, two fantasy series that sort of jump out in my head
immediately that I wrote down when you were talking about this was, of course,
George R.R. martin's game of Thrones, which he will not finish.
I'm going to go on record. It will never be finished. He will die and
then someone else will pick it up and finish it. Maybe, if we're lucky.
And by the way, he was explicit about being anti Lord of the Rings.
Interestingly enough, he doesn't like the hobbits. He thinks it's stupid.
And then on the other end, you have a person who
explicitly admitted that Lord of the Rings was a huge
part of the way in which he laid out his seven book
adventure series, of which I read all seven books. Stephen
King's the Dark Tower. So, so
I haven't read that. I'm sorry. So it's okay. It's all right.
George Martin. By the way, I, I, I
sometimes describe Game of Thrones. It's the Lord of the
Rings, except it has sex and death is real.
You know, because when people die in the Lord, you know, the elves don't even
really die. They just, you know, go to Palanor. You just sort of wander away
the western sea and go that way. Although
to this day the death scene of, of Aragorn,
which is in the appendix, will literally bring terrors to my eyes. And
that's not an exaggeration. I was reading it for the, for the
book group and I was like, I'm sorry, I can't get through this without
tears coming to my eyes. I mean, such a gorgeous scene.
But I'll, I'll throw another fantasy
series on the table which is Lord of the Rings influenced, but
interestingly I think tries to incorporate Eastern philosophy, which
is the Earthsea trilogy by Ursula again.
So, okay, yeah, it was originally three. And this is
again sort of an unfortunate byproduct of
our, of our capitalist system. Hasan once it made money, she
said, oh, maybe I'll write a fourth. Oh, maybe I'll write a fifth. You know
what, maybe there's eight more. Never do that, you know, and then eventually it kind
of peters out. But the first three are brilliant. And it's really,
that is, if you will, where the goal is not so much
good fighting evil as balance. The idea, the goal of the, the
goal of the wizards is to maintain balance in the work, in the world.
And it's all about understanding things like the, the nature of
magic is to find something's true name. Like the, like, you know,
your real name, you know, not the name you walk around with, but your
real name. And, but you know, there
are wizards and there are dragons and there are, you know, guys with swords. And
it's very Lord of the Rings in that sense. But it's a,
it's got this very sort of Eastern Buddhist,
Eastern philosophy tinge to it. And I Always
think that's, that's another one to throw in
the. Throw in the hopper somewhere. Yeah, throw in the pile
somewhere. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, throw the pile. Okay, so the question.
So then the, just. So then this, this is the question then.
We now live in a bifurcated, fractured,
fragmented, attention span theater world.
We have fewer people reading. No.
Yes. Well, we have fewer people reading
and the people that we do have read than ever before in, in the history
of the, of America anyway. And, and
we also have. Of the few people who are reading,
they are reading less complicated material
than ever before. Matter of fact, page counts in novels are down.
A novel used to be 225 to 250. 250,
sometimes 300 pages. Now it's down to 175. And the
type's getting bigger. And the type's getting bigger.
And the, and the plot, right. And the plot lines are all from Tick Tock.
Are we ever going to see, in your opinion, are we
ever going to see a trilogy
that will match the power of Lord of the Rings
ever again in the West? In
my opinion, I think. And that makes me sad,
but I. Or if it is, it's going to require a work of genius
beyond my understanding. The, the.
Just. Just like I don't think we'll see a rock group like the Beatles again,
again because of time and place. I do think also it,
it has to come from someone like
Tolkien. First of all, this was Tolkien's, you know, if you think about it. What
else? Yeah, he wrote a few other things, but let's face it, that's what he
wrote, right? I mean, I know there's a few. Oh, yeah,
yeah. The Silmarillion is just nonsense. Yeah, there's a few other. I think he, he
did something on Beowulf and I'm sure I read those when I was a kid,
but that, that's his masterwork. This was
his life. It came out of his,
you know, his, his career as a linguist
and the love of languages is, you know, beyond all
the great philosophy and, and everything else, there's just a sheer
love of languages, a love of, of
myth that is, you know, so embedded in the Lord of the
Rings.
To produce a Tolkien, I think took like all of
British culture. It took, it took like 1500
years of British culture to produce one Tolkien. I
don't think we're going to see something like that again in
our lifetimes. And that, frankly, makes me very sad. But
I will say this is a podcast and if anyone out there thinks there's something
that is like that from. Send it to Hasan and he'll send it to
me, because I would read that in a heartbeat. I absolutely
will. So. But and
also the other thing about these great works of literature,
and it's of course, in our. In our other careers,
Hasan, you and I talk about, you know, intellectual property and patents quite a bit.
And the thing about a patent, as you know, is once it's done, that's it.
You can't reinvent that, you know, and everything else has to
root around it in a way, because it exists now. And you can't. You can't
pull that back. You can't.
I'm trying to think, you know, was there. You know,
Dune was. It was a good work of science fiction.
I don't think it was a great work. I also think it was one of
those where Frank Herbert just kind of realized he had a
good thing going and kept writing books. And
in some ways, Tolkien was never. First of all, Tolkien was
not really that interested in the monetary success
of the Lord of the Rings. So he wasn't. He. He wasn't sort of
seduced into. Okay, now let's write the sequel. What happens
after Sauron Falls? You know, you know, Sauron
2, the sequel,
he was never really particularly interested in that. And
that tends to dilute the great works. Even if, like I said, like I
was saying earlier, the Earthsea trilogy, I'm not comparing it to the Lord of the
Rings. I'm not saying it's on that level, but it was a very
solid work of fantasy, and it sort of got diluted down a little bit.
Are we gonna see.
I'm just gonna go back to my original. No, I don't think so.
I think you've hit on something. 1500 years of English culture
all reached its pinnacle out of Tolkien's pen,
which. Which I mean, indicates to me that maybe 1500 years from
now, maybe something will come
out of an American pen.
Maybe. But even that person
will still be. I hate to say it,
but that person will still be influenced by
Lord of the Rings. They'll still be reading it. Even if it's. Even if. Even
if it's. Even if it's. Even if it's generated by
some weird techno. Not weird. Some. Some cutting edge technology
that I cannot even conceptualize right now.
And maybe it will be a writer that will be
on some planet that is not even inhabited yet by human beings.
Let me ask you the same question. Or related.
Do you see Chat, GPT or any
large language model that Is, you know, son or daughter of Chat
GPT that comes along. Do you ever see it creating a work of
art that can stir you in the same way
that the Lord. I mean, are you going to be rereading that work of that
book. Book. To your. I'm sorry, eight year old. Your daughter Is she
ate. Yeah. To your eight year. My son. Excuse me, My
son. My son. Years years later.
I'm gonna seriously answer. I'm gonna take that question seriously. I'm gonna seriously answer
about it. Sarcastic, you know, sponsor.
Right. My sincere
answer. And I'm saying this in
2025 with the current
thing that is chat GPT. And I mess around with all the four large language,
the four major ones, perplexity, chat GPT, Claude and.
And Grok. I played around with them. You know,
I, I'm listening to and watching the arguments and the vicissitudes going back
and forth. That's the context by which I say this.
Yeah, I don't think so either. I was going to say, I don't see me
reading to. So we have. Our. Our first granddaughter was born five
months ago, and I don't see me reading something from Chat
GPT to her at eight years.
No, I do see me reading the rings. But, but here's my. But.
Yeah, yeah. Yes, yes, absolutely.
And I think that we represent.
Because I'm in my. I'm in my mid-40s. We represent
the tail end. Or, or maybe I
should even. I won't frame it as a tail end. We represent the oldest
end. I'm gonna say something that's very terrible here. The
oldest end of a dying tradition, or, or at least the very
minimum, the oldest end of a tradition that the
technologists who name their companies after Lord,
after aspects of the Lord of the Rings, would seek to use their technology
to kill. They want to kill the
tradition because the tradition involves. And
this goes back to what I was talking with my wife about this weekend around
Christianity. The tradition
requires us to deal with messy,
unpredictable, buggy human
beings. And the technologists hate human
beings. From Marc Andreessen all the way
to Sam Altman all the way to Elon Musk, who.
I personally think he's crazy and I admire what he's doing.
All the way to Peter Thiel. I think every single one of those folks
all the way up and down the structure, they dislike human
beings because the, the, the messiness
of humanity for them is a
bug, not a. That's a really. That's an interesting insight.
And that fundamental,
fundamental insight. Yeah. He was Also entranced by technology.
They have a mind of metal, you know. Right,
exactly. And it led to. And, and then, and then, you know, he
winds up, you know, going back to the Shire and
getting run out of town. Because look, the
tension between the city and the country will never be
resolved. It just won't be. And that's okay, by the
way. Fortunately, we live on a third of a continent that's big enough
to where freedom of movement is still unrestricted. So if you don't want to live
in the city, you may move someplace else. You have freedom of association and
freedom of movement. If you don't like the city you're living in and the people
that you do not have a connection with, move, Move
somewhere else. Oh well, I'd have to get a new job.
Yeah, and we have the blood of pioneers in our
genetics. And these days, often you don't have. To get a new job. Your job
just moves with you. Yeah, right. Often you don't. It just moves
with you. Like. I'm reading a book, I'm reading a book right now which we're
going to cover on the podcast called. It was a
Pulitzer Prize finalist a few years ago, Empire of the Summer Moon,
about how the, about how the US army basically destroyed the
Comanches and in, in west. In
West Texas and opened up the frontier. Good, bad, ugly and
indifferent in a post civil war United States.
The blood of those people still runs through our veins.
Move, go somewhere else, leave the cities. And by the
way, a lot of people have decided to do this with, with COVID and decided
to do that in 2020 and 2021 and 2022, great American move around
did occur. So people do understand this.
The, the thing that I think the technologists
don't get is because they have that mind of metal,
they don't understand all of the things that are outside the metal.
And, and I would, the comparison I would
make is the Eye of Sauron. They search everywhere
for anything because they are totalizing in their belief
that they must get rid of all the bugs and that is their
downfall. The hobbit that they don't see
is the thing that is their downfall. And to your point earlier,
you're right. Frodo just had to get the
ring to the crack right of Mount
Doom. And then anything else that happened after that
was, you know, what less religious people would just call
kismet or luck. I don't believe in luck. I would instead
call it grace. That's right. So.
So no, I don't. I don't believe that we will be. We're not the generation
that will be reading chat GPT generated texts to our children. Now I
look at my 8 year old and I told him the other day,
part of the reason I'm reading you Lord of the Rings is because I want
to fill you with the old things. Because I have a feeling a lot of
people in your generation who were born to be, who have been born
eight years before you and are being born now will be seduced
to believing that the new thing is the best
thing. And I am fighting. I
am fighting a rear guard action. And so you may call me a reactionary if
you like fighting a rear guard action, fine.
I'm retreating and defilating all over the place. No, I'm
retreating and defilating all over the place.
Exactly. I'm looking good while I'm doing it.
All right, so we're going to wrap up our conversation. This has been great,
wide ranging conversation, Fantastic. Talked about a lot of things.
This is fantastic. And this is what, this is what our bonus episodes are really
about. Right? We're not focusing necessarily on a specific book or a specific idea or
specific things. We're just having interesting conversations with, with interesting
folks on the long form again, my long
form podcast is part of that defilating and
retreating action. I'm using the 10. I'm right there with you, my friend.
I'm backing up with you. Talk about the firing as
I go. Talk about the old things. No
chat GPT used here. I write all my own scripts and this is the real
live me that you're hearing. Okay,
what do we take from all of this melange, this
massage mashup, this, this mix that we've thrown in the
pot from Pink Floyd to Lord of the Rings to the battle of
Stalingrad TO World War I-20 year old
Hitler to, you know, Winston Churchill again having a bullet go
past his head to, you know, MI6
and the KGB and Vladimir Putin.
American intransigence, or maybe just naivete.
What do we take from all of this? This, this
goulash that we have? What do we, what do we, what
do we, what do we want leaders to know? As a, as a wrap up
from this episode today, what is the big idea for leaders here?
Or what are some big ideas for leaders here today? Two words, never
despair.
Denethor despairs in the Lord of the Rings and it's his downfall.
He actually can't see that there is a possible
victory because all he sees is the
triumph. You know, he has that Great line. You may triumph on
the pelenor fields for a day, but against the power that has now arisen, there
is no final victory. But he's wrong. There is a final victory.
So I think that that would be
the. The. The takeaway, ultimately,
is that don't despair.
Good can triumph over evil, and
there's. There's precedent for it in everything that you just
mentioned, as, you know, the.
Even in. Even in Pink Floyd, ultimately. And Pink Floyd could be
pretty dark. You know, they didn't. There's a lot of despair
in Pink Floyd ultimately, you know, throughout
their career, but there are sort of moments of,
you know, of triumph. And
I think that that's important to focus on because
it's very easy to just.
You can. Not only is it easy to despair, you can
fall in love with it, you know, in a very dark and weird way,
and it can become sort of your. All that
you. All that you can see. So that. That. That,
to me, is certainly the takeaway of the Lord of the Rings that, you know,
even when things look darkest, don't despair.
You know, I think that's a good takeaway for leaders, no matter whether
they're reading Lord of the Rings, listening to. Listening to
classic music of whatever genre, or
reading histories of events that have
occurred long before them when people
did not despair and did behave what we would call now
heroically. And I think this is a direct shot to the
nothing ever happens. Nothing ever changes crowd. No, things happen.
Things change. Never
despair. I like that.
Okay, that's gonna be our close. It feels like a mic drop.
Thank. I like to thank Neil. It does
seem like a mic drop moment. I would like to thank Neil for covering all
the podcast today that. Well,
okay, we're out.