Leadership Lessons From The Great Books

Why Don't We Learn From History by B.H. Liddell Hart w/Tom Libby & Jesan Sorrells
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00:00 Welcome and Introduction - Why Don't We Learn From History by B.H. Liddell Hart
01:00 "Cracks in the Human Condition"
09:17 Informal Committees Shape Decisions
11:07 "Psychology, Memory, and Bias"
18:29 "Majority Shapes Right and Wrong"
25:14 "Negotiating Reality in America"
30:30 "Systems, Democracy, and Global Chaos"
35:17 Historical Bias and Emotional Impact
39:29 AI Adoption: Reality vs Expectations
44:20 "AI Essential for Business Success"
48:27 "Pre-WWII Polish Guarantee Debate"
56:42 Post-COVID Education System Concerns
59:43 "Making Poetry and History Alive"
01:06:26 Teaching Complexity in History
01:11:23 "Drunk on Ideas, Not Rote"
01:16:12 "Perspective and Counterfactual Insights"
01:23:39 "The Perils of Intellectual Neglect"
01:24:54 "Emotion, Truth, and Progress"
01:31:28 "Misguided Solidarity and History"
01:39:23 Passion for History and Context
01:41:20 "Cycle of Pride and Conflict"
01:46:57 "Wealth Fails to Ensure Legacy"
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Opening and closing themes composed by Brian Sanyshyn of Brian Sanyshyn Music.
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Creators and Guests

Host
Jesan Sorrells
CEO of HSCT Publishing, home of Leadership ToolBox and LeadingKeys
Host
Thomas Libby
Producer
Leadership Toolbox
The home of Leadership ToolBox, LeaderBuzz, and LeadingKeys. Leadership Lessons From The Great Books podcast link here: https://t.co/3VmtjgqTUz

What is Leadership Lessons From The Great Books?

Understanding great literature is better than trying to read and understand (yet) another business book, Leadership Lessons From The Great Books leverages insights from the GREAT BOOKS of the Western canon to explain, dissect, and analyze leadership best practices for the post-modern leader.

Hello, my name is Jesan Sorrells, and

this is the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books podcast,

episode number 167,

which puts us at about. Let's see, how

many episodes is that? Eight.

Yeah. Eight episodes from our 175th

episode. So we should get there by the end of this year. And thank you

all for joining us on this journey. All right,

so on this show, my co host

who's joining me today, Tom and I have

circled around and around and around, coming back

similar to the Nietzschean Myth of Return, to

a core idea that is reflected in all of the books

that we talk about on this show. And it is

the idea that, and Tom is probably going to say it again today, the more

things change, the more they stay the same.

And this is true. It's. It's what people in Washington,

D.C. pre Covid used to call a true fact.

I don't know what they call it now, but it is definitely true,

which is why we keep returning to this idea repeatedly, no matter the

book, no matter the genre, and no matter the author.

In one way, if you're listening to this, you could conclude that

this fact of return reflects something inherent in the human condition

itself. I think Richard Messing, who

came on and talked with us about man's search for meaning, and Viktor Frankl

might say that. Right. In another

way, you could say that this fact of noticing and

recognizing such a conclusion reflects the idea that we are

aware, deeply so, of the broken parts and

cracks in the facade of how we address the clearly

broken parts of the human condition.

And it may indicate that noticing the how opens up an

opportunity for all of us as leaders to seek and to

explore and to maybe try to get a glimpse of the

light that lies behind the cracks in the human

condition. So today on the show we are

covering, we're going to talk about topics from a book

that does its best and the best that it can

to engage in noticing the cracks in the human face of

the problems and challenges of the human condition. And

a book that tries to examine and really talk about what lies behind those cracks

in a coherent fashion. So let's start on

our journey repeating probably same things

we've repeated before on this show, although there's always new people joining us,

so it's always new to you. Today we will

be covering the book and the question

posed by it. Oh, I love that. Why don't we Learn

From History by B.H. liddell

Hart? By the way, my book has a yellow cover.

Your mileage will vary. I do like the yellow cover.

Leaders. The penultimate question of all time, which

is the question of why don't we learn from history, has nothing

but hard answers to it.

And of course, on my journey through this book,

we will be joined today by our regular co host, Tom Libby.

How you doing today, Tom? Doing well, Jesan. And you know, I gotta be

honest, I'm not surprised in the least that you selected me to help you with

this book because to your point, I think I've said

at least two dozen times on this podcast

that phrase that the more things change, the more things stay the same. So I

appreciate, I appreciate you tapping me in on this one because I think we're

gonna have a lot of fun with the, with this particular subject matter.

So, so appreciate it. Yeah, absolutely. Well, I would encourage everybody to go and

listen to the intro episode where we talk a little bit about

BH Lidell Hart as a writer.

He was, he was an interesting guy just

in general. He was part of the generation of

folks that was born in the,

in the late 19th century, came of age

in the early 20th century,

fought in World War I. And just like C.S. lewis and

J.R.R. tolkien and Eric Remarque

and other notable names like T.E. lawrence, Lawrence of

Arabia, Winston Churchill,

and of course, your friend and mine, Adolf Hitler,

he learned all kinds of interesting lessons

about history, BH Lidelhart did, and about human

nature in the trenches of the Somme

and of Verdun and at Verdun. And we

explore a lot of that history on that intro episode. So I would

encourage you to, to go and take a listen to it. Now. We're not going

to dive so much into, into Liddell Hart's as a person today

on the show. Instead, we're going to really focus on, we're really going to focus

on the ideas in the book. And, and when you open up, why don't we

learn from history what you see. And I mentioned this in the intro

episode as well. What you see is that the

preface was written by his son, which is great. The version that I have,

Adrian J. Liddell Hart, who actually made a name for himself in

World War II and in the military as well.

And when you open up the table of contents, you see that the book is

divided into three parts, right? There's

History and Truth, which is a great way to start a book

entitled why Don't We Learn from History, Government and Freedom and then

War and Peace. And so as a military historian, you would think that he would

start with War and Peace first, but no, no, he saves that for the end.

And each One of the

sections features a short essay, usually no more than four

pages, where he lays out his ideas very succinctly.

And this book really, Tom, really

sort of puts me in mind of the essay

by George Orwell that we covered where he talked about English literature.

Right. It's, it's sort of the clearest example of clear writing that I've

seen in a while. And, and partially that's because they're both, you

know, they're both English. They both came out of the English, you know, writing,

thinking, literature structure that was built in Europe.

Right. So they're products of that. They're products of that European and

English tradition that goes back, you know, well over

1500 years of just getting clarity in writing.

And as a military historian, Liddell Hart really pursued

clarity in thinking and clarity in writing. And so when you read

these essays, he doesn't mince words. There's no

fat in anything in here.

So I'm going to open up with

the section Restraints of Democracy and Power

Politics in a Democracy. And this essay is in Government

and Freedom, which is in the, the second

section of his essays. And each one of the

essays does build on the other one. So we're going to pull them out separately,

we're going to talk about them in relation to why don't we learn from history?

But there's lessons for leaders in all of this, you know, whether you're a

civic leader, leader of a nonprofit, leader of a for profit, or

even just a leader of your family or community.

So let's go to the book Restraints

of Democracy, and I quote, we

learn from history that democracy has commonly put a premium on

conventionality. By its nature, it prefers those who keep

in step with the slowest march of thought and frowns on

those who may disturb, quote, unquote, the conspiracy for mutual

inefficiency. Thereby, this system

of government tends to result in the triumph of mediocrity and

entails the exclusion of first rate ability. If this is combined

with honesty. But the alternative to it,

despotism, almost inevitably means the triumph of

stupidity. And of the two evils, the former

is less. Hence it is better that ability should

consent to its own sacrifice and subordination to the regime of

mediocrity. Rather than assist in establishing a regime where,

in the light of past experience, brute stupidity will be enthroned

and ability may only preserve its footing at the price of

dishonesty. What is the value

in England and America and what is of value

in England and America and worth defending its tradition of freedom, the

guarantee of its vitality. Our civilization, like the Greek, has,

for all its blundering way, taught the value of freedom, of criticism, of authority,

and of harmonizing this with order. Anyone who urges a different

system for efficiency's sake is betraying the vital

tradition. Then he switches to power

politics in a democracy. And I want to point this out.

He says this talking about how decisions get

made in a democratic government. He says this while committee meetings are

not so frequently held in the late afternoon as in the morning, dinner

itself provides both an opportunity and an atmosphere suited to the informal kind of committee

that tends to be more influential than those which are formally constituted.

The informal type is usually small, and the smaller it is, the more

influential it may be. The two or three gathered

together may outweigh a formal committee of 20 or 30 members, to which

it may often be related under the blanket, where it is assembled by

someone who has a leading voice in a larger official committee. For it

will represent his personal selection in the way of consultants. And

its members being chosen for their congeniality as well as for their advisory

value is likely to reach clear cut conclusions, which in turn may be

translated into the decisions of a formal committee. For at any

gathering of 20 or 30 men there is likely to be so much diversity

and nebulosity of views that the consent of the majority can

generally be gained for any conclusion that is sufficiently definite and

impressively backed by well considered arguments and sponsored by a heavyweight

member, especially if the presentation is

carefully stage managed.

I love that

we don't have to talk about power politics because we, we don't like to talk

about that. But this still, especially in the

current political landscape. What you just

read could probably blow up half the people's brains in country right

now. Well, so let's open

up with that. The very first question that I have from here,

Tom, why don't we learn from history?

Get right into it. Good lord. So I,

I think there's so many factors here and I, I. One thing that I will

say, and I know we're not going to get into Liddell's life per

se, but I wonder how

much more, how much more impact his

book would have had if he had today's access to

psychology and like the psychological research, like some of the

psychological research behind some of the stuff that he talks about is like,

it's actually because, because of his book, I've, I've seen several

research, research

papers been done basically because of this. Right. So in,

so to go back to your, to your point and, and I don't know what

the technical terms for them are, but like there is something to be said about,

like, about

memory bias, right? So like, so we sometimes don't

learn from history because quite honestly we're only, we're

very biased to the history that we read, right? So take, I mean

US History is a very good example of this when you go and you start

reading, if you were to read.

And the other part of it too, and I think he talks about it a

little bit in the book where the, because the victor

usually writes the majority of, of passages when it comes

to enter your subject matter here, whether it's

War one, World War two, it could be the cola wars for all I care.

It doesn't matter. Like whatever, whatever conflict

or situation that you're talking about, it's usually the, to

the victor goes the spoils, right? So somebody who wins that fight or

wins that race or wins that whatever is going to write.

You're going to pay more attention to their writings. Therefore, you're going

to see the results of the victory and you're not going to, you have a

very, you have a very, very conscious bias of what

history looks like. So you tend to, to not worry about.

Good example. Again, you are talking about the current political landscape that

we're talking about. Everybody. You can go back in history

and pinpoint times in history where you can say

Hitler gained control of

the political catastrophe that

happened in Germany. We view it now as

a political catastrophe. Well, guess what? Because all the Allies wrote all the,

wrote all the, all the history, right? So but

at the moment and in the time frame of the, in Germany

when all that was happening, the, the people in the moment did not view this

as a, as a, necessarily a bad thing. Were there people that were

like, hey, wait a second, should this really be happening? Maybe,

but they, their voice was never heard because a vast

majority of people, he was a charismatic speaker, people he followed,

people followed him, et cetera, et cetera. And nobody ever saw it coming, so to

speak. Yeah, everybody thought they could do

a deal with that guy. I mean even, even

not Joseph Kennedy. Charles Lindbergh who ran for President. Charles Lindbergh

who ran for President. Henry Ford, right. Who wanted

to. Not wanted to, but helped. I

believe it was either Mercedes or it

might have been IG Farben. I can't remember who he helped out, but he went

over to, he did, he went over to Germany and he helped him set up

factories to like for the purposes of re. Industrialization after

the, to your point, the disaster of the Weimar Republic and inflation.

Right. But Henry Ford was another guy who thought,

yeah, okay, you know, we can, we can deal with this guy. Even Joe

Kennedy, John Kennedy's and Ted Kennedy's dad,

Joe Kennedy got in trouble. I believe he was the ambassador

to England from America during

the Roosevelt administration. He got in trouble

just before the war kicked off by basically saying, hey, you know what?

This Hitler guy, he's not terrible. Like, we

could probably do a deal with him. It's fine. Hell, Stalin did a deal with

Hitler. So, so what is the rest of the world looking at our

current administration as? And there's. There are people in our

country that thinks that that's, that, that we're watching history repeat itself as

we speak now. There are. And I want to, I want

to talk a little about that today, because reading this book in the context of

the current political climate that we are in was extremely

interesting. Yeah. There's something that I, I think

there's stark differences that. Oh, yeah, what was in place? Like, we have

some checks and balances and we have things that like that are, that our government.

I, I don't see, I don't see our current

administration turning into Hitler, but there are people in our country that think that

there are. There are. Correct. Right. Because. Because some of the signs and stuff are

there. But, but again, where Germany didn't have checks and

balances, we do. The science can be there all they want as long

as our government operates as the way that they're supposed to

operate. We don't, we, we're not going to have that. It's, it's,

it's also, whether you like. Him or not is not my point. I could care

less whether you like him or not. That's not, that's not what I'm getting at

here. Yeah, that's not what we're getting at here. What we're talking about also. And

this gets to, to what I just read there. So the

ways in which most European

governments were set up even after World War I,

everything cracked apart after World War I, but

certain ways still struggled on. Even 80 years

later in our time, there's still evidence of this.

So Europe and England and specifically

European countries like France,

Russia, not so

much Spain, although you could throw a spade in there. Italy for sure.

And of course, Germany come out of a

concept or have a, have an inbuilt concept of

aristocratic rule that we don't have.

We explicitly rejected that. And so

in the United States, our founding explicitly rejects aristocratic rule.

This is where the, and these

people, maybe they had a point, maybe they didn't, but that the protesters this summer

were talking about no kings or whatever. Like. Well,

I mean, if you look at the Constitution and if you look at the three,

the three branches of government, like they're

functioning exactly constitutionally as they should be. You just don't like

the decisions that they're making. Which is, which is, which is why you

get to vote. That's why you, that's why, that's

why, like we were talking about with, with Charlie Kirk's assassination

and around that this is why freedom of speech matters. Because which,

which by the way, we also don't have a tradition of in a European context.

And so how decisions get made in an

aristocratic, with an aristocratic mindset, in an aristocratic

manner is fundamentally different than how decisions get made in a more. And this is

point that Liddell Hart's making in a more democratic mindset. So when he

talks about a small cadre of people making decisions and then basically stage

managing them for 20 or 30 other people, that comes. And

Liddell Hart was English. Comes out of a specific aristocratic

mindset. Yeah, yeah. That we don't have.

So, so as I started this conversation where I said

I wish Lidell had access to some of the research that, that

has, that psych psychology has come leaps and bounds over the last, you know,

80 years since, since World War II. So, so there's, there's that,

there's that, that, you know, that hindsight bias that we have

because, because history is written by the victors most times.

And again, we're getting better at that, but not. Still not great. But then

there you have the other. I, I was once told that the difference

between right and wrong is the majority. And that

really, that really hit me hard too because now you're saying to me

that I could know that one plus one, we go back to Orwell, right?

I could know that one plus one or two plus two equals four. But you're

going to say that the majority of people say it's five. So now it's just

right. Five is right from now on. But that in.

When it comes to something so linear as

math, maybe you can make arguments against it. But when it comes

to something that's either opinion or, or

consensus based or like, there's a lot, there are a

lot of situations where the right thing to do and this

is where we get the whole Democratic vote, right? So you're going to vote 100

people vote or you know, 200 people vote and, or

100 people vote and 51 of them say this. So we're just going to do

that. And 49 of them can know damn well that it's the wrong thing to

do. But the right. The difference between right and wrong is the

majority right. Like, so there's also some of that that happens throughout the

course of history. And then there's the final one that

I think of, quite honestly is

there's a disassociation of time that happens. Right. The further

away from something we get, we become more arrogant that

we can see it, we know it's happening. We're not going to make the same

mistakes because we know they're there, but yet we do because we have a bias

of disassociation of time. And I'll give you an example of this one.

Now, for those of you who can't see me on the video here, I'm

not a woman, so I'm not speaking as a woman. But childbirth, to me is

a very good example of this on an individual basis. You're a parent,

I'm a parent. I don't know if you spent time in the delivery room with

your wife, but I did. Yeah. I watched what she went through

and I went. Why would anybody do this more than once? Like,

why? Like, honestly, like, the amount of the, the. The. The mental

anguish, the physical anguish, the, the pain they go through. Like,

it, it. Childbirth, to me, is one of the most fascinating things

on the. In the entire natural world. Because

women decide to do this again. Like, Right. I know, I know.

Let me just say this for, for the record. I know,

guys, if we went through that once, we'd be like, hell, no, we're

done. Nope, because we wouldn't do that

again. Like, it's like we don't have the same mindset. But. But to get back

to Liddell and this. The reason I say it this way is because there's a

disassociation with time. So when women have. If you ever notice, like,

two years later, they didn't remember the pain the same

way that you, observer, do. Right?

Right. So, like. Right. By the way, guys, I'm totally kidding. Because we do

stupid. We still do stupid stuff all the time. And we continue. You

fall off a ladder, you still climb the ladder. I mean, you know, I'm just

saying, like, as an observer, as an observer watching

childbirth, and you think to yourself, why would anybody ever do this again? But

as a woman watches her child grow up and she gets

disassociated from the time of it, she decides to

have another child. And I think that is Another symptom of

what we're talking about here. The longer we go from this, from the.

Again, take this, our current political landscape, to

Hitler. You can make all the associations you want. We feel

like it's not going to happen again because of the checks and balances that we

have in place. But, but if you're just a simple observer looking

in and you're looking at this going, holy crap, it's happening again

because these people have had so much time in between that they didn't realize

it. And by the way, go backwards in time. And you can say the same

thing about people like Napoleon, about Hannibal, about, like, just

keep going. Like you. There's. There's plenty of instances where that

singular person is. Is that dynamic shift in the

power of. And the balance of power. So it's

happened several times. I, Again, I don't think. I think

we have. I think we figured out some checks and balances. But I could see

this happening again. Look at the current situation in Russia.

Putin. Oh, yeah, right. Like, he, he's proving that this could

potentially happen again in Russia for sure. Like that. Like, I don't know if the

Russian government has checks and balances to, to make sure that he doesn't do that,

but I don't think they do. They don't. He's been. He's been running things

pretty well. Well, well, you know, pretty consistently, I would say. Well, pretty

consistently. So I'm not claiming to know their political. But I'm just saying, like,

he's working. I think it's fairly consistently for the last 30 years there. As an

observer of history, I see this happening again.

That's, that's, that's the point. But it's the observer. Yeah, but I think. I think.

So between those three things, I think if Liddell had access

to really deep research in those psychological profiles,

I think his book would have been even more impactful. I, I'm not

suggesting it's not impactful. I. And I, I think it's really.

I think it's a really good book. But. And of course, it answers a

question. I think it answers the question pretty well for its time. Yeah.

But think about a guy like Liddell having access to the current psychology

research that we have and how much more impactful he could have been with that

book. So a couple things there.

So we use

history to. And Lidell Hart talks about

this in his book, too. A variation of this. And again, to your point, pre.

Not pre. But the depth of psychological research. When he wrote this, and he wrote

it in, I believe it was the. Yeah. Published in

1944. Ye. Yeah, exactly. So, you

know, the, the degree to which, to your point, the degree to which psychological research

has come along since 1944 is. Is leaps and

bounds ahead of what he. He had in his time.

But even then he understood something about human nature, which gets

to a couple of different things that we've talked about on this show. So we

talked about it in our extra episode where we. Where we discussed the

movie Oppenheimer, which interestingly enough, I watched again last night,

kind of just weirdly lined up with this. And then.

And then we also talked about this in the Orwell episode, not only

on his. In his essay on literature in the English language,

but also in his books, you know, animal farm in 1984.

Right. There's a through line here. Right.

And even books that we've covered, a couple books we cover

from Theodore Roosevelt. We covered the

book that he wrote way back when he was a

representative, I think, or a senator in New York State.

He wrote a book about power politics. We talked about that with Libby Younger.

And the through line that Tom is getting to, and I do agree with it,

is this. We have to figure out, and

this is part of the radical experiment of America, but we have to

figure out how to negotiate

reality with each other. So to get back to two plus two equals five

and this, this, by the way, can start happening in the last 10 years here,

because I'm going to go ahead and step on this third rail, because why not?

If you want to say that two plus two equals five in a dynamic

environment where you're not abrogating my speech, you're just providing me

consequences for that speech, which is a whole other kind of discussion.

If you want to go ahead and say two plus two equals five, knock yourself

right the hell out. Sure, go ahead.

But I'm going to. I'm going to channel Ben Shapiro here

and I'm going to say facts don't care about your feelings.

So, like, you could say two plus two equals five all day, but

I have two things. Then I put together two more

things and invariably I'm going to have four things.

Sorry. Like, this is just. This is just reality. This is the

ceiling of, like, your logic. Right. You could feel any way you

want about it. You could feel that it's. And here we go. I'm going to

step on the. Step on the rail. You could feel that it's white supremacist.

You could feel that it's a sign of the patriarchy. You can feel

that it's oppressive. You can feel that it's a sign of

systemic oppression. You could feel that it's a sign of

white fragility. You could feel all of these things.

And I hold up two fingers, and then I

hold up two more fingers and I still only have four

fingers. That's

it. That's. That's it. That's it. That's the whole thing. There's no, there's no more

argument that I need to. Right. And so this, this has started happening, this

renegotiation of reality that you're talking about, which is

fine with history. I don't have a problem with renegotiating

reality with history. And, and Liddell Hart talks a little bit about this in his

book. You know, when myths become stronger than the history, the myth becomes

the history. He, he mentions this, right. And it's fine. I

have no problem taking a scientific approach. He does. He has a

problem with taking a scientific approach to history. He talks about it in the first

part of his book because he thinks that it drains and denud

of all of its emotive value. And he doesn't think that you should be able

to do that. He thinks you should balance the emotive value with the scientific

pursuit of the truth. I. Okay, I can see his

argument, But I also think that human beings are going

to look for that emotive value and they're going to look forward in myths. You

can't take that out of the human because again, that's one of those, like two

plus two equals four things. It's one of the things that's built into human understanding

of reality. But if we want to renegotiate history, sure,

let's renegotiate history. Let's go ahead and dig into the

Tuskegee Project. Let's go ahead and dig into

Black Wall street in Oklahoma. Let's go ahead and dig

into the decimation of the Native American

tribes in, in, in North America

and in Mexico and in South America. Let's go ahead and dig into that

and understand that when you do that,

and this is something that we also forget with history, I think, and

it's notorious in warfare. Understand that when you do

that, the enemy you are fighting or you are opposing

also gets a vote in a free speech society.

So when you start pulling apart people's myths, they're going

to have a reaction to that and a response to

that. Now, we would like to keep that response and reaction in the space of

speech. So there's going to be an argument, there's going to be a

verbal conflict, there's going to be a fight.

And I think in the structure that we have in America, that's fine. We should

be doing that. Now you have to talk about the observer from the outside. If

I'm an observer from the outside looking at this, all this looks like is just

massive chaos, just endless, never ending massive chaos

about things that should just be decided by an aristocratic

cadre of individuals. Everybody gets told what the thing is

and then you just move on. By the way, this is what they do in

communist China. They have myths based on

Confucianism and the Chinese communist government just says, we've decided

this, you're welcome.

Everybody sort of goes, yeah, that's fine. By the way, in those kinds of systems,

to Orwell's point, if you're in a to totalizing

system like that, where, where dissension from something is

not allowed, this is the point from 1984. Yeah, the two

plus two does equal five, sure, in

that system. But guess what? That

system has to negotiate with the reality of other systems in a global environment.

Which is part of the reason why the Internet's like wrecking havoc

everywhere right now and has for the last 30, almost 40 years

and actually more than 40 years now and will continue to wreak havoc, by the

way, for the next hundred years because we're not going to be able to get

over this. And then the other thing that you're talking about in there, so there's

negotiating reality, then there's the other thing you're talking about. There is democracy.

And fundamentally, as an aristocrat,

B. H Liddell Hart was opposed to democracy and he's joined

in good as a fellow traveler, or he walks as a fellow

traveler alongside Thomas Jefferson, who was opposed to democracy,

and George Washington, who was opposed to democracy, and Ben Franklin who was

opposed to democracy, and John Adams who was opposed to democracy.

These guys wanted a. And they built a republic

because democracies are two wolves and a

sheep voting on who gets to be dinner.

That's a democracy. Congratulations. 66% of the people,

66% of the entities in that group just voted on dinner

and your vote didn't count. That's democracy. Democracy is

inevitably, inevitably degrades to mob rule. We saw this, we see this

throughout history, literally. So you build a republic,

and in a republic, the two wolves,

the two wolves have to send one wolf as a representative and the sheep

gets to send two sheeps as a representative. And now we're going to have a

Fight. And that's how we keep balance in the system.

And so we've got all these dynamics which impact how we view

history in America. But to your point, the through line is

about negotiating reality and who gets to negotiate that and who gets to

say what the other thing too. And through your little

Spiel. Spiel there. I wanted to, I just wanted to jump in and say one

thing before, but I obviously wanted to let you finish. But, but when

you, when you're referencing the two plus two, and I still have four

and you know, fact. Listen, facts are facts. Right? Like, to your point,

the problem with history is

it's almost never. Yes, the facts, ma'. Am. Right.

Like, there has to. There's always human emotion in it. There's always

like these degrees of champions and like,

like there's always these. There's heroism and like we're

elevating things to, to make it feel more real or to more. Have

more impact. And it's never like, if you were to ever

read a history book that was literally just factual information, nobody would read the

whole. Nobody would read it. No, like, no, it's like, wait,

okay, so World War II started in this date, ended in this date. The

battle of this date was this date, this day, the battle. Like, like. But

because we tie everything into some sort of

emotion, we have to feel an emotion for anything that we're

involved in, whether it's reading history, creating history,

looking at the future, etc. Etc. So to your point about the 2

+2 is always going to equal 4. Yes, because there's no

emotion in that that you cannot, you can't invoke emotion into

math. Right.

Like, I remember, I read recently, I read

recently, somebody, somebody was arguing some political.

Blah, blah, blah, whatever. And the person, literally, the, the argument, what

they were talking about was like, listen, you cannot

distort math. And they literally said

exactly what you said. 2/2 is always going to equal 4. So if you're looking

at statistical data that is verified

statistical data, I'm not talking about stuff that we just make up.

First time I ever heard this line, it made me laugh so hard. It's like,

hey, Tom, did you know that 86 of all statistics are made up? And I

went, there you go, what? Like, I had to stop. And I was like,

that's made up. Exactly. Right. So, like,

so but if you. But if it's verified statistical data and

you can say that X number of people voted this way,

X number of people voted that way. So 28 of people

voted this Way based on the information they were given that is statistical.

You cannot change that. That. It just is what it is,

right? They were trying to make that argument and the guy was still fighting, like,

pushing back, going, no, you can, you can, you can manipulate statistics.

Well, yes, but then they've not. Then they're not validated. They're not

verifiable statistics at that point. They're 86% of

statistics are made up. Like, you have to be able to validate it. If you

can't validate it, then it's not, it's not reasonable to see. So, so

my, my point to all that is that,

yes, mathematical information, things that you can

literally see, two plus two equals four. I, if anybody

tries to argue that, I just think they're being silly, and all of us are

going to think they're being silly. But when they start debating on the

merits of historical information that is written by people, that are

written by the winners, so to speak, that are written by the

majority, all of that stuff when

you read that, you feel something when you read that. That's

another bias that we probably don't talk about is the emotional

bias that you get when you read some of those things. So therefore,

if you see that the United States and its allies are going to

win World War II based on what you're reading, and you say, okay, so

why, why do we have the. Why are we trying to prevent World War

iii? We know the new the. The allies are going to win. That's what happens,

right? So we look throughout history, but, like, can we stop for a second? And

let's, like, not lose the millions of lives that we're going to lose because of

it. Like, is there a way to circumvent? Right. Just go from point A to

point C instead of, like, can we skip point B,

skip point D. Yeah, don't learn. That's what we don't learn. Right. Well,

and this is, this is. I mean, again, I watched Oppenheimer last night, right?

And you know, it's interesting. Like, there's a movie coming out, and we always

end up talking about movies. This is the moment to do this. Right? Now there's

a movie coming out from Catherine Bigelow, who directed A Hurt Locker

and a couple other movies on Netflix

about, like, Five Minutes to Nuclear Impact or

something like that. Anyway, it reminds. It's on. It's going on Netflix. It's coming out

in December. I think it's going to be in the theaters for, like, a brief

minute, and then it's going to. It's called House of Fire, I think, or House

of Dynamite or I can't remember. Anyway, it doesn't matter what the name

of the movie is. It's the latest entry into a

genre of films that started, gosh,

back in the 1950s with the movie directed by Stanley Kubrick,

Dr. Strangelove, or how I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb,

where artists who are

attempting to, to your point about emotion, who are attempting to

emote into history, because that's what artists do do

and are attempting to get the viewer or the observer to engage

emotionally with something, an idea that they have.

There's a long genre of films that began there and

continues on through the Katherine Bigalow film, of which Oppenheimer is one of these films

where to your point about World War 3,

it's that constant drum beat of warning that nuclear

thermonuclear destruction is the worst thing that can possibly ever happen.

It will destroy all of humanity, all civilization, everywhere,

period, full stop. And it is, it is a

drumbeat that runs through history.

And to your point about forgetting, and this is sort of the last thing I

want to say, and then we can go back to the book. But your point

about forgetting, we've forgotten how bad World War

II really was because we are distanced from it.

And my concern also is that we have forgotten how

bad a nuclear bomb can be.

Thus you get crazy talk like in the last

administration from certain people about

arming, arming

bases in Europe with nuclear tipped

whatever, and if Russia does this thing

or that thing in the Ukraine, we're going to use those

nukes. People in the last administration running around saying, saying

nonsense like this. And of course the Russians are responding with,

listen, we lost 60 some odd million people in

what we call the Great Patriotic War and we didn't miss

a beat. You really want to go ahead, you really want to go ahead and

pull that smoke wagon, you go right on ahead. We got nukes

too. Yeah, exactly. And this is, this is the hubris to your point. This

is reflect, even, just even allowing that to be said, number one,

moves the Overton window on talking about nuclear war. But it also,

it also reflects a level of hubris and arrogance

that can only come from being disassociated in time and

forgetting the lessons of history. Right. Yeah. And by the

way, but just to circle this back into the whole purpose of this

podcast in general, this

nothing that we're talking about excludes businesses, by the way. No,

we, we've seen the same. Think again,

current Environment not excluded. If you think

about, like, I was actually, I literally just read something

earlier, earlier today about this, which I found fascinating because

those of us in the sales and marketing world have been talking recently about

AI kind of plateauing a little bit. Like there's, there's been, like

there was this major rush and there was all this talk about

AI replacing people and taking jobs and all this other stuff,

and yet I just saw a statistic, statistic. I just saw

a statistic this morning that said of the

Fortune 500 companies, the average company is only

deploying AI at about a 2% efficiency rate.

How many people you think they're replacing at IBM because of this?

How many people do you think at Amazon do you think they're replacing because of

it? It's just not happening the way we expected it. Now here's. Let me back

up to my point a second ago. We saw this once before,

folks, the dot com in the late 90s where

investors were just throwing money upon money upon money at

anything that had dot com at the end of it. And some of them lost

their shirts. Some of them did okay. Some of them did all right. Yeah. The

dot com boom didn't. It didn't. Just

because there were a few winners did not mean that a,

an intense amount of businesses failed. Yeah. Oh,

yeah. So. So what did that teach us? Apparently

nothing. Nothing. Because, because, because investors are

starting to throw so much money at AI right now, I guarantee you

a majority of them are going to lose their shirts and there are going to

be a few, a select few that come out on top. And for some reason,

we're going to remember history as the dot com boom and the AI boom as

being successful. How that happens to me is

beyond. Like, again, business does the same stuff.

Like, I feel, I, I've been telling people lately, I feel like

I'm a veteran who's been through like the fourth World War. Like, I feel like

I've been, you know, I feel like I've been through four. I was going through

the search revolution. Well, no, the first one was the Internet revolution to your point,

with the dot com bubble. Oh, go back, go back one step further. The email.

When email. Oh, God. Oh, yeah, email. Oh my God.

Email's gonna change the world. And we're never gonna, we're not gonna need a postal

service anymore, right, Exactly. We have Amazon that delivers packages literally

daily, like a day to people's. Anyway, go ahead. Sorry. Yeah,

yeah, sure. Amazon knows exactly where I live

anyway. They can find me. They'll have no Problem

finding me, by the way. So does ups. Amazon knows where I live,

UPS knows where I live, the postal service, everybody knows where I live now. Like,

I can't even get away from it at this point anyway. Good. But yeah, you

got email. Take all that away. Email, Internet.

Oh, God. Social media was going to revolutionize how we were going. Remember

that. Like, we were all just going to live in these, like, these like Facebook

pods and the Instagram Pod and the LinkedIn Pod, and we were never going to.

And then, and then VR ar, which was a brief.

Before that, it was, it was a 3D printing. Oh, yeah. Oh, I haven't even

gotten to that one yet. 3D printing. Crypto. Oh, my God.

Yeah, crypto. And, and now, now here

we are with AI. And I got to admit

to your point, Tom, I get a little

grizzled and gray when I, when I hear

about it because I'm like. On the one hand, it's very exciting

because it's a, it's, it is a gold rush, exciting kind of, kind of thing.

You can, you could fall into the emotion of it. Right. Because it gets to

be emotive. It's the bright shiny object thing. It's the bright shiny object thing.

Exactly. You just talked about. That's exactly what they were. Now

are some of them. Yeah, I'm not suggesting that they quote, unquote, failed.

We won't know that for 15 years, though. We won't know for 15 years. Business

lessons. And then, and then being more calculated about how we project, how

we go forward, business. We learned nothing from all of those things you just said.

The email, the, the dot com boom, the search engine, the,

the, the, the 3D printing, the crypto, the

social media. At all of those. There were

thousands of companies involved in those things, most of which failed.

Right. Like, but there will.

And there will be an AI apocalypse. There will. Yeah, there will be an LLM

apocalypse everywhere. Like, I was reading something of the other day in one of the

startup. One of the startup newsletters that I read for the other project that you

and I are on. And,

and something like all of

the. Oh yeah, I know what it was. All of the investor money, or the

vast majority of investor money in Silicon Valley. If you don't have something

AI, you can't get, you can't even get into the door now.

And I think about the event that we ran this week

with the folks that we ran that with on that other

project. And, and I mean,

there's way more things happening in the world. I Think we only had like what,

two, maybe three out of the, out of the companies, out of the ones that

we looked at that were. And I'm being on purposely oblique

about this folks, but like three companies that we looked at

that even had an AI play. The vast majority of everybody else

is still trying to do a business the way you do a

business. Now is there going to be an AI play built into that?

Yeah, maybe. Probably because you got to get investors attention. But

that's insane to me because there's just so many other businesses that are, that could

operate in the world without, without an LLM. Yeah. And there's so many other

problems that we solve that LLMs can't solve. So anyway, yeah, no,

we haven't learned. And there'll be another bubble in 10 years. There'll be another

bubble, I guarantee. And it might be, honestly, it might be the humanoid robot bubble

that I think might be the hardware bubble, that might be the hardware version, that

might be the 3D printing version. The next bubble you.

And so Elon, you know why, Jason? Because the more things change, the more.

Things and the more they stick. There we go. There it

is. There it is. Back to the book. Back

to why don't we learn from History by B.H. liddell Hart.

This is an open source book, by the way. You can get it online for

free. So. But the version that I'm reading has a

yellow cover and it was edited and with an introduction by Gills

Lauren. But you can grab this book anywhere

online. This is, this is definitely an open source book and I would encourage you

if you are in business or you're in leadership

or you are in tech,

especially if you're part of one of those LLM

driven AI startups. I strongly recommend

reading this book. All right, back to the book. So

let's look at the importance of keeping promises and the importance of care about making

promises. And, and I want to talk about, with Tom, about something that he

mentioned that ties into how we teach history.

Back to the book on the importance of keeping promises.

Civilization is built on the practice of keeping promises.

It may not sound a high attainment, but if trust in its observance

should be shaken, the whole structure cracks and sinks.

Any constructive effort in all human relations, personal,

political and commercial depend on being able

to depend on promises. By the way,

pause for just a minute. That's genius. I've never heard

that. I've never heard an argument for high trust, a high trust

society laid out as succinctly as is laid out in those

three Sentences. That's brilliant. That's brilliant writing.

Back to the book. This truth has a reflection on the question of

collective security among nations and on the lessons of history in regards to that

subject. In the years before the war, the charge was constantly brought. And

by the way, the war he's talking about, just pause again, is World War II.

But sometimes he's also talking about World War I. So just you have to think

about those both in concert with each other. All right. In the years before the

war, the charge was constantly brought that its supporters were courting the risk of war

by their exaggerated respect for covenants. Although

they may have been fools in disregarding the conditions necessary for the

effective fulfillment of pledges, they at least show themselves men

of honor. I have that double underlined, by the way, and in the long

view of more fundamental common sense than those who

argued that we should give aggressors a free hand so long as they left us

alone. History has shown repeatedly

that the hope of buying safety in this way is the greatest of

delusions. The importance of care about

making promises. It is immoral to make promises

that one cannot in practice fulfill in the sense that the

recipient expects on the ground in

1939. This is ahead of World War II. I question the

underlying morality of the Polish guarantee as well as its practicality. If

the Poles had realized the military inability of Britain and France to save them from

defeat and of what such a defeat would mean to them individually and

collectively, it is unlikely that they would have shown such a stubborn opposition to

Germany's originally modest demands for Danzig and a

passage through the Corridor, since it was obvious to me that they were bound to

lose those points and even much more in the event of a conflict.

It seemed to me wrong on our part to make promises that we

that were bound to encourage false hopes. It

also seemed to me that any such promises were the most certain way to produce

war. Because the inevitable provocativeness of guaranteeing at such

a moment of tension an area which we had hitherto treated as outside our

sphere of interest, because of the manifest temptation which the

guarantee offered to a military minded people like the Germans, to show how

fatuously impractical our guarantee was, and because of its

natural effect on stiffening the attitude of a people, the

Poles who had always shown themselves exceptionally intractable in

negotiating a reasonable settlement of any issue

and historian could not help seeing certain parallels between the long standing aspect of

the Polish German situation and that between Britain and the Boer Republics 40

years earlier, and remembering the effects on us of the attempts of the other European

powers to induce or coerce us into negotiating a settlement with the Boers.

If our own reaction then had been so violent, it could hardly be expected that

the reaction of a nation filled with an even more bellicose spirit would be less

violent, especially as the attempt to compel negotiation was backed by

an actual promise of making war if Poland felt moved to

resist the German conditions.

That is a brilliant piece of analysis. That's why I'm reading this. That is a

brilliant piece of analysis of the psychology

of nation states, which we don't often talk about. Like, we try

to pretend that nations are these, and

maybe we do it less so now than we have in the past in history.

We try to pretend that nation states are somehow this amorphous collection of

ideas. But nation states actually do have their own psychology and

their own character. And history reveals that. And

Liddell Hart there is brilliant

in basically saying, if you're going to make a promise,

keep it, but understand the character as a nation

state of the nation state

that you are making the promise to understand their

character, study them, examine them,

don't just. And then this gets to our current geopolitical

climate. Don't just, like in the case of NATO, sign a piece

of paper 80 years ago and then just sort of pretend like everything's

the same as it was 80 years ago. And nation

states, characters change just like people.

France now is

significantly different than they were at

the back end of World War II after being

humiliated by the Germans. They're significantly different.

They can pay for the protection of their own

continent, by the way, this is all that Trump is saying, by the way. He's

been saying this since his first administration. Maybe, maybe you

could pay for the protection of your own continent,

because maybe the character of France as a nation state

has changed. Maybe the character of Germany as a nation state has changed. Maybe the

character of Sweden and Finland and at all has

changed since World War II.

Maybe we don't just have to keep honoring these guarantees

in perpetuity. Now, the other

idea in there, which I find to be interesting, is this idea of being a

person of honor. And this gets to diplomacy, right? And

so if civilization is built on promises, and

one of the big lessons that Liddell Hart learned from World War I

was how,

how fatuous, to a certain degree, diplomacy

really was in the run up to that war. And so

that mistake where, interestingly enough, has been corrected, we now have more

diplomatic venues to get more people to talk as leaders of

nation states to talk than ever before in the History of the world. It's kind

of insane that we have a un. That's actually kind of nuts in the history

of the world, and we don't appreciate how. Bananas in pajamas, that is.

We just don't. We just don't. And the first place that we don't appreciate

that, I think, is in how we teach history to

the next generation. So Tom hit on this,

and this is an interesting point. The biggest challenge in teaching

history is getting people to care

about it who were born after all of that was done.

And so that's the question to Tom. How do we get people to care?

How do we teach history to people who were born after

all of that was over? Well, and before

you. Before you get to that challenge, I think what happens even

before that is even if you. Let's say. Let's say you don't get

them excited about it, but you at least get them to read it, there's another

bias that happens that psychology proves that there's a. An

in. What's it. What the hell would they. I forget how they worded it. I

don't remember the title they gave it, but it's like a. It's like an obvious.

An obvious ton ability factor. My point is,

so when you. When you read. When you read the history of World War II

and you see, oh, like, oh, you watched this guy come into power and

nobody really wanted. And then it's almost like you see the inevitability

without somebody actually teaching it to you. Well, we're not speaking

German right now, so obviously we won, right? Like, so then, like, there's like an

obvious factor that happens in reading history that. That

gives you a bias that you already know the outcome. So

another reason why today that. That whole history repeats itself kind of

thing is because we. We have this expectation of

inevitability, right? That because history showed us this

inevitability, now we're going to expect this inevitability. And whether it happens or

not, which, by the way, it usually does.

That's why we keep saying the more things stay the same,

but. But we keep making the same mistakes over and over again

because we take the inevitability factor into it

subconsciously. So to your point about getting the next

generation to learn to care

about it, that's another reason why you and I get

involved so heavily in conversations about film. It's a

media in which we can get the next generation to understand and learn from some

of those historical events. You produce Band

of Brothers or Saving Private Ryan or.

And you Get a the next generation to watch that movie. And they go, oh

my God. And they think it's just cinematography. And then they realize it's a real

thing, it actually happened. They're like, oh my God, I should go

learn about World War. Like we have mechanisms that we can use

and pull the lever on to get the next generation to care.

Well, we did. I'm not sure they care anymore. They don't watch it. They don't

watch all that many more. Maybe we should put them in TikTok videos. Maybe that's

what it is. Just short 30 second clips of what happened with

World War II. And maybe then we'll get some the next generation to care about

history the. Way that we do. But

kidding aside though, but that, that's. We, we've got to

stop. We've got to get it out of the. We, we have to. We. If

we can change the way the mechanisms in which we teach,

we will be able to touch the hearts of the next generation. Because

when you and I were growing up, it was books, it was

our imagination that reading these books and, and how

they impacted us. This generation doesn't really care

so much about books, but they care about media. And so like some of these,

like video media and all that. So if we can use that,

all we need to do is get their attention. Once we get their attention and

they care about it, then they'll go back and, and figure out the rest. Right.

So there's a lot of talk about teachers in this country, particularly the five years

after Covid. Right. Because you know, we all went on lockdown and then,

you know, everybody who's a parent who had their kid in the public school system

kind of looked over the shoulder. This is kind of what happened. Actually, not kind

of. This is what happened. Everybody who had a kid in public school

all of a sudden had their kids at home learning off of a laptop

and looking over the shoulder and actually for the

first time in

a long time in America, actually seeing for

four, six, eight hours a day what a teacher is actually teaching

their kids. This is why things have started to crack apart with the K through

12 system, which by the way, the unions were

the ones that insisted on lockdowns and worked

in concert with the government and insisted on and still insist on lock

on, on. What are you teaching students

from, from home in many areas, particularly urban areas of

our country. Even though we know three point about statistical

data, we have good research now that

kids lose a step when they are taught virtually

particularly if they are being switched from being taught in person to

being taught virtually, we know this. This is a fact. Okay?

It's like that two plus two thing. It just is. This is

the thing. Okay? We could argue about why. We could argue

about what the inputs are. All that, that's fine. But you can't argue with the

fact, okay? We talk a lot about

teachers in this country and how much teachers get paid and we lament and we

wring our hands and all of that. I don't want to get into any of

that. Instead, I want to talk about something that's a little bit more

egregious, I think, which is the

fact that. And this goes to your point about students and TikTok,

I would agree. However, I

think students. I agree. And I think that students

care about ideas the same way students always

have. And what we lack are

teachers willing to engage

passionately with ideas

about the subject matter they are hired to teach. And

this is hugely important with history, right? So, for instance,

if I am going to teach. No. If

I'm going to going to attend a class on an area that

you know a lot about in history, Native American history, it

doesn't matter whether I agree with your conclusions or not about that history.

None of that matters. None of that matters. I'm

going there to tie into your passion about

that because your passion is going to

either make me care more or it's going to make

me disagree. But either way, I will give you attention

because of the passion that I see coming from you. This is the whole plot

of the movie Dead Poets Society. How do you make poetry and Shakespeare

interesting? Right? Well, you make poetry and Shakespeare interesting by having a

dynamic person teaching poetry and Shakespeare. That's how you make it interesting.

Same thing with history. And yet

when you hear teachers talk about teaching history, it's

either one of two poles. You either have a person who's got a personal,

as a teacher, got a personal bugaboo of a thing that they're drilling in on

that's interesting to them, but it's not interesting maybe to 99 of the people that

they're teaching. You see this in colleges a lot. Or you get

a person who is in a K through 12 space where

they would love to be passionate about history, but they're fighting uphill

against a lack of comprehension, a lack of preparation, kids

falling behind the policies of the system of the blah, blah, blah, blah,

blah. And they would love to be passionate, but they're not going to try to

break the system because they're getting paid $30,000 a year. They just want their pension

at the end of it. They're just not going to try to break the system.

And by the way, they know that the teacher. Because I know teachers in K

through 12 system over the course of my life. They know that the teacher down

the hall who's supposed to be teaching English comprehension or

spelling or whatever, is it doing their job. They know

this. They know, they know. And so by the time that

kid shows up in sixth period for history,

they're fighting uphill against the previous, you know, the other previous five

periods of nonsense. And so they're just trying to get through the period and get

the kid out. And those are the two poles

the teachers are fighting a pill against.

And history is so critical for our time. Now, I would argue that it's

probably as critical or more critical even than English than

English, right? Even being able to speak and write well.

Because history is the place where, for

it's the platform where our political battles are being fought.

It's the place where ideologies are being

made and are being rendered. It's even a place where, oddly enough,

identities are being formed of all kinds.

And teachers have a huge, huge responsibility, particularly

in the K12 system. Have a huge responsibility. And I don't know how you fix

the two poles problem.

Well, and to your point, I think,

I think history is too big of a subject for

that to be the, the thing that they use to try to break the polls.

Right? So. Because yeah, like

if you just think about. So I remember, I remember going through The K through

12 system, whatever in public schools. And I remember,

I remember like in. So we had to take four years when I got to

high school. There were four years of high school, right? 9, 10, 11, 12 Y.

And the, and they, they. This is not a, a

college environment where you get to select your, you know, your

course, your courses, right? So they. You dictated

year one. Year one was world history, year two was US

history, year three was.

US. History post World War I, I think it was. So it was

US history one which was like from the beginning of the country,

you know, 1500s, uh, up until, you know,

1918, World War I. And then it was

history from World War u. S history. Two

was World War I to present day. And then the, the

four. The fourth year was, was some sort of like there

was some nonsense. I say nonsense, but it was because it was like, it was

like theoretical history. Like it was like a future thing. Like we were, we were

trying to predict like his history predictions or something. Some craziness like that.

Which by the way, not a single one of us will write about anything. But

whatever. But because we're not driving

flying cars right now. Yeah. We literally just talked

about this before we hit the record button. We're not flying cars. We're not teleporting

anywhere. We don't have the Galactic Empire, the Galactic Federation

of Planets. We don't have any of that yet. And of my graduating class in,

in whatever night, early night, whatever, the 19, whatever,

whatever. We all thought that was happening because we watched

the Jetsons growing up. Right. Whatever. Anyway, but, but

anyway, to your, to your point, the. When they, when they

said to us, like, you know, freshman year is

going to be world history. And we were like, okay, cool. Whose world?

What world? Like, because. And they, they went through these,

they went through these timelines so fast. Yeah. You

couldn't get passionate about any of them even if you wanted to. Right. Like

I. Most of what I learned about in world history my freshman year, I had

to go reback and I had to go back and revisit things that I thought

were even a little bit interesting to see if I was curious about him. The

main dynasty in China, the Samurai. All the like,

we, and we talked about some of these things on your podcast, but I had

to go backwards and after the fact to see, like, was that

worth my time and effort to dig a little deeper because they had.

It's so surface level and to your point, if I'm a history

teacher, for example. To your point. Exactly.

And I would make the argument that being a teacher in this country

is the easiest job on the planet. It is the easiest job on the planet

because number one, you're not doing it at all unless you

absolutely love it and you really want to be there

because as you know and me being on this. But I love history and there's

certain parts of history that I love way more than others. I could never

be a history teacher because I would want to teach just that. And they won't

let me. Right. Right. Because I have to follow some syllabus and.

Etc. So I have to love teaching more than

anything else in my being in order to be a history teacher.

Yep. Which I don't. Which is why I'm not a history teacher. So

if I, if I were, that's why I say, and by the way, any teacher

out there, you don't have to come find me to kill me. I'm not suggesting

you have an easy job. That is not what I said. I didn't say you're

the function of your job is easy. I'm just saying it's the easiest job in

the planet because you're not doing it unless you love it. And they always

say if you love what you do, you never work a day in your life.

So there you go, Ex. So you have the easiest job

if you, you're doing it because you love it. And if you love it, then

it's not really work. And if you, if it's not really work, then stop complaining

about it anyway. But no, I'm kidding. I'm totally, totally

kidding. No, no, it's fine. I, I already nuked. I already nuked teachers already.

I nuked the unions. I'm in far more trouble than you are. Oh,

yeah, because you went after the union. I'm just going after the individual. Oh, yeah,

yeah, yeah, yeah, right. More than me. They're gonna. Yeah, Randy Baumgarten's gonna

find me in about 10 seconds. Anyway, sorry, go ahead, keep going. Yeah, no, but,

but anyway. But the point, like, to your point, it's, it's part of the problem

that we have with, with, especially with subject matter like this book,

is that the subject matter is so

intense, so wide, so varied, so

expansive, that there's no way that a single individual is

going to be able to teach all of it. And if we focus on one

thing or another, it's, it's not going to be. It's, it's so isolating

that there. You're not understanding all of the other factors involved. For

example, and to your, to your point about, like, if you really

go deep, if you could literally be a teacher about

the preamble to World War II, never mind the actual war, but

the, the events that led up to World War II, you could teach an entire

semester college syllabus on just that

if somebody was willing to take it. But they don't

find that valuable enough to take that course, like that one course about

the, you know, the, the. The era between World War I and World

War II that basically caused World War II to happen in the first place.

All the geopolitical landscaping that happened, all the political power shifting that

happened, all that stuff in one instance. And by the

way, not just the time frame, forget about just the time frame,

but what was happening in Germany was different than what was happening

in the rest of Europe that was different. That was happening in China. Did China

have anything to do with this? Did the United States being so,

so arrogant and egotistical, thinking that they were too strong to even

bother with it in the first place. What was that geopolitical landscape?

How was that economy working for you, by the way? Black. Black Friday was in

there. In. Involved in that as well. Like there. There. There's so many different

components to what just brought us to war. One that. Sorry.

To. To World War II, that you could not be an expert at all of

it. You just can't. So. Right. That's another reason why we don't learn from the

mistakes of history. It's too vast and we just don't

get deeply involved in enough to, like, actually pluck out

the real lessons. So this goes. But this goes

to. Okay, so this goes to a basic problem with. With the. With the structure

of the public school system, which we never actually talked about that on this podcast.

It's been a long time coming. The structure of K through 12

schooling is built, of course, on the

Henry Ford industrialization model,

which, by the way, takes its. Talk about history, takes

its cue, or took its cue from a Prussian model,

a German Prussian model of education, which was focused on

getting people just enough information to become

rote soldiers. Right. To be able

to. Because this is what. This is what not only Kaiser Wilhelm.

Well, every German leader from Kaiser Wilhelm all the way to Adolf

Hitler wanted. Right. Was

compliant troops that would do what they

were told. And Henry Ford and

John D. Rockefeller. And John. John Dewey. Rockefeller, sorry,

Dewey and Ford and all those other folks got together

and a bunch of other folks got together and they said, we will build an

American public education system to take these people from the farm

who were used to

walking behind a plow and doing whatever it is that they wanted. Right? And we

have to turn them into industrial cogs in a room

so that they don't get up and leave to turn a person into an

industrial cog, starting at the age of 4 or

5 or 6 until they are 17

or 18. You don't need to teach

that person history. So, of course history is taught. As to your

point, this dizzying array of names

and dates and nonsense that you just blast through

because you're not actually teaching people ideas or how to think, because

God forbid you do that. You don't want them to think. You want them to

shut up and go to the factory. And this is my

opposition, by the way, one of my core oppositions to the entire public

school system in America. We need to reform the

whole thing. I don't know if that's possible.

My wife is way more radical on this than I am, which is why we

homeschool our kids. Yes, I did just say. But we homeschool our kids. My wife

is way more radical on this than I am. I think the

system probably has to be, not probably has to be reformed

because we no longer live in a world where

rote factory work,

even if we bring all the factories back to America, it still won't be rope

factory work. It will not be the rope factory work of

what Henry Ford was wanting his workers to be between

1910 and 1930.

It's not going to be that. That worked really well in the 20th century.

Mass industrialization worked really well. I'm not knocking it.

And we don't live in that world anymore. We don't live in a world of

mass industrialization. We need people to think in terms of ideas,

not in terms of rote responses to the test.

And so history, which, to your point about

being an expert in what happened in the world between,

let's say, let's conserve, let's take, let's pick a 25 year period between like, you

know, 1915 and, and you know, our 15 year period,

1950. Oh, no, no, let's put 25, 1915 to

1939. Being an expert just on that

requires you to be as, as someone once said,

Richard Dawkins, I think when he was talking to Jordan Peterson, used this phrase, which

I really like, be drunk on ideas. You have to be drunk on the

ideas of that period. Because to your point,

there's a lot of ideas of that period, economic, social, cultural, and on

and on and on. I don't know that you have anybody in

K through 12 who

approaches because they're still doing the rope thing.

Right, the rope preparation thing. And are there some systems that are changed, some

parts of the school system, some parts of the country that are changing? Yes. I'm

sure that if you're in the sound of my voice, you're going to think of

Your K through 12 public education building or your

student and you're going to say, well, not my kid. That's not what's happening. Blah,

blah, blah, blah, blah. It's great. Okay, sure. No one raindrop blames itself for the

flood. Okay, cool. Yeah, you're special. Got it. All right.

But you see the outcomes, by the way, when those

kids who have gone through the K through 12 system and some of them have

matriculated to college now come out and

not only do they not know history, but they know tick tock really well.

They don't know how to write a sentence. And now I, as an employer,

as a leader, have to lead these people around who, who have

never been given the who's. Who's whose thirst has

never been activated for even the history

of the business that they are in because their thirst was never

activated properly for the history of the world and

country that they live in. That's a

tragedy. I said all of that. To say that that is an

absolute tragedy on how we teach history.

And as an amateur historian and a person who gets interested

in all of this stuff, it's an absolute bugaboo for me. Like,

we do. We homeschool our kids and so, like, when my wife has a difficult

question in history that she does not know how to answer or how to propose

or difficult idea that pops up in history, go ask.

She told me to go ask. Go ask your father. Go ask him. He'll tell

you. And I'll talk to you for four hours about it. Because I just, I

just know. I just know the stuff. Like, sure, ask me about the collapse of

the rise and fall the Ottoman Empire. Like, why do I know about that?

Why do I need to know about that? Like the sultan here,

like, why do I need to know about that? Or why do I need to

know about the monetary system of, you know, the Greek

islands as described by Heraclitus?

Why do I need. Why, why do I know this? Because I'm passionate about the

ideas behind those kinds of things. And there's always a core idea.

And of course the idea is of humanity advancing and building civilization

built on to Lidell Hart's idea, built on promises.

But at the end of the day, I'm drunk on ideas. And you need a

history teacher to be drunk on ideas, particularly at the K12 level, because

my, the kids will pick up on that passion and then they'll lock it.

And by the way, you never want to ask a kid to predict the future.

Like, that's ridiculous. That's. That's some nonsense. Did you,

when you were in high school, did you go to, like, not go to. But

were you like, in that? Did you. You don't have to say the year you

graduated, but like, in the four years of high school, looking back,

was that part of like the years in this country where we were doing experimental

learning? Oh, God, yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. All right, so you, you.

I'm sorry, I'm sorry.

Yeah, it was just. And again, it was like. But

there was. They were trying to teach us like,

predictive analytics. I. They shouldn't have called it a history class, put it that

way. But, but it fell under, under the history department

because it was supposed to be historical data that was supposed to be predictive analytics.

I always thought that that class should have been under the math department, but that's

whatever. So, but anyway, either way, nothing,

nothing that we had. Not a single one of us got a damn thing right.

But, but okay, so. Well, one last question.

So you, you brought up something that's very interesting. So

I'll ask, I'll frame my observation the four of a question without any

run up. How's your factual history? Why

is that so popular?

Well, I, I, I think,

I, I think it gives you retrospect and, and I think that

the, we talked a lot about history invoking emotions here.

I think sometimes I, I think sometimes

that counterfactual information you get a different sense,

you get a different emotion coming from it and then it's up to you to

kind of balance that that, that too. Again,

this is, this is a very, this to me is a very clear

example of. There's always three sides to every story.

His, hers and the truth. That's why to me,

counterfactual information that can be very, very important when you

start seeing. Again, I, I'm not talking about

statistical, verifiable statistical data. I'm talking about

like, I'll just take our, an example

from, from my, my own, my own

repertoire. Here, right here in Massachusetts, out in western part of

Massachusetts, there's a small town that originally was a native community.

And the, the,

the facts of the case, the statistical data behind it

was a hundred armed men walked

into that village and killed 400 unarmed people.

Period. Okay. Okay. The factual versus

counterfactual details to it were

that the armed men were colonialists. The

native community was comprised at the time of the

massacre or at the time of the, the incursion. The, the time of the

event was mostly women and children.

So you had a hundred armed men going in and killing 400

unarmed women and children. Okay, the

counter. So that's, that's all factual information that's supposed to invoke

a certain kind of feeling to you. And I'm, as I'm even saying it, I

get riled up a little bit inside. But so then the alternate, the

counterfactual information of that was the armed men had

intel that told them that warriors were going to be there and

that they should shoot on site. And it didn't matter whether they were

just shoot the people and we'll, it's like basically drop the bodies and we'll figure

it out later. Most of those armed men,

years later had tremendous

mental breakdowns. Over it. These guys did not live

normal, healthy lives after the fact. So they did. They were

basically just taking. Let me, Let me ask you if you heard this story before.

We killed innocent people, but we were just taking orders. We're a military

faction that we're just, we're just doing our job. We're just taking orders. So you

shouldn't vilify us over this. Right.

So again, when you talk about counterfactual information or,

or. And again, it's not because the.

Again, facts are facts, you can't really change them, but sometimes when

you hear only one side of the facts and you don't hear both

sides of, again, factual information, albeit. And again,

the point is now you have his, hers in the truth. Right? So now you

have the, the. The. We also don't

know, the warriors that were expected to be there, were they

deemed, you know, criminals

or some sort of. What is the

word that I'm thinking of here? Somebody that you're

targeting very specifically in warfare. I can't remember there's a particular name for it.

Oh, insurgents. Yeah. Yeah. So. So though. And

they were known. They. We don't know. There were certain facts that we don't know.

Now after the fact, after the deed was done, after, you know, and this came

out probably 100 years later,

that those particular warriors were in fact involved

in raids on, you know, on the colonial. And this, this was

pre. Before the time of the state of Massachusetts even existed.

So this is like in the 1600s. And. But so that

you find out after the fact that those warriors were indeed, in fact part

of. Of raids that were on, you know, colonial

towns and they, they did do some stuff. They. That could have warranted them

being singled out and, and going after. So

does that justify the hundred armed men going in there and killing 400

unarmed and innocent women and children? Probably not that, but

let me say. Let me rephrase that. No.

Does that negate them from. From responsibility of quote,

unquote, just taking orders? No. But if you

were in that moment and you were one of those soldiers, would you have done

something different? My guess is no.

Oh, does something different. No. Everybody's a hero after the fact

or. Or a villain after the fact. Everybody's a hero or a villain. Right. But

in that moment, can you truly crucify that per those. Those

hundred guys? Some could say yes to a

degree. Because again, again, walking into a village of

400 innocent women and children, by the way, I keep saying the word innocent because

that's the way it's Depicted, you can simply say 400 women

and children. Right. Yeah. You don't. Yeah, you don't need another adjective on there.

But. But again, but the word innocent is. Is purposeful.

It's intended to invoke emotion to you. Right, Right.

So that. That's. Again, that's kind of what I'm. What I'm getting at here. And

when you're describing the 100 men, it's 100 armed

military men. Like, again, you're supposed to get a feeling

of what you're. What you're seeing here. And you're supposed to develop this

vision in your brain as to what was happening at the moment. Now, there are

people that will argue that at some point One of those

100 should have realized that they weren't armed insurgents, that they were actually

women and children. Stopped the massacre. Maybe you killed

100 of them, but you're not going to kill all 400.

Right. But that's. That's the argument that's made in most of these cases

where you're no longer just following orders. You are now just a

murderer because you've. You've walked into this village, you started shooting.

Nobody stopped to actually think or do or whatever. But again,

that's the whole. Like, to your point about. Or the question about car. Counterfactual

information is. To me, it's always that.

That version of his, hers and the truth. Always. There's always some semblance

of. You're gonna get a story from the victor, a story from the loser.

And the. The actual story is probably somewhere in the middle. Somewhere in the

middle. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well. And

Liddell Hart has an answer for this. Back to the book. There's a thought about

this. Back to the book. Back to. Why don't we learn from history?

So this is in the War and Peace section. The

dilemma of the Intellectual.

We did not plan this, folks, so this is good.

Neither intellectuals nor their critics appear to recognize the

inherent dilemma of the thinking man and its inevitability.

The dilemma should be faced, for it is a natural part of the growth of

any human mind. An intellectual ought to realize the extent to

which the world is shaped by human emotions, emotions uncontrolled

by reason. His thinking must have been shallow and his

observations narrow. If he fails to realize that having once

learned to think and to use reason as a guide, however, he cannot possibly

float with the current of popular emotion and fluctuate with its violent

changes unless he himself ceases to think or is deliberately false in

his own thought. And in the Latter case, it

is likely that he will commit intellectual suicide gradually, quote,

unquote, by the death of a thousand cuts. A deeper

diagnosis of the malady from which left wing intellectuals have suffered in the

past might suggest that their troubles have come not from following reason too far,

but from not following it far enough to realize the general power of

unreason. That's an interesting point. Many

of them also seem to have suffered from failing to apply reason internally as

well as externally, through not using it with the control of their own

emotions. In that way, they unwittingly helped to get this country into the mess

of the last war and then found themselves in an intellectual mess as a

result. In one of the more penetrating criticisms

written on this subject, George Orwell

exposed a profound truth in saying that, quote, the energy that

actually shapes the world springs from emotions. He referred to the deep

seated and dynamic power of racial pride, leader worship, religious belief, love

of war. There are powerful emotions beyond these, however,

the energy of the intellectual himself springs from emotion, the love of

truth, the desire for wider knowledge and understanding. That emotion

has done quite a lot to shape the world, as a study of world history

amply shows. In the thinking man, that

source of energy dries up only when he ceases to believe

in the guiding power of thought and allows himself to become merely a

vehicle for the prevailing popular emotions of

the moment. I'm going to skip

down because he's going to talk about Bertrand Russell, he says, and I'm going to

read this paragraph. History bears witness to the vital part that

prophets, quote, unquote, have played in human progress, which is evidence of

the ultimate practical value of expressing unreservedly the truth as

one sees it. Yet it also becomes clear that the acceptance and spreading

of their vision has always depended on another class of men, leaders

who had to be philosophical strategists striking a

compromise between truth. I think you've said this actually,

Tom, striking a compromise between truth and

men's receptivity to it. Their effect

is often depended as much on their own limitations in perceiving the

truth as on their practical wisdom in proclaiming it.

The prophet must be stoned. That is their lot and the test of their self

fulfillment. A leader who is stoned, however, may merely prove that he has failed in

his function through a deficiency of wisdom or through confusion, confusing his

function with that of a prophet. Time alone can tell whether the effect of

such a sacrifice redeems the apparent failure as a leader that does honor to

him as a man. And then, finally, I'm going to Skip

a couple paragraphs to go down. Opposition to the truth is inevitable,

especially if it takes the form of a new idea. But the degree of resistance

can be diminished by giving thought not only to the aim but to the method

of approach. This is an important tactic.

Avoid a frontal attack on a long established position.

Instead, seek to turn it by a flank movement so that a more

penetrable side is exposed to the thrust of truth.

But any such indirect approach. But in any such indirect

approach, take care not to diverge from the truth. For nothing is

more fatal to its real advancement than to lapse

into untruth.

I wish this guy was still alive. I'd love to have him on the show.

The dilemma of the intellectual. Or,

you know, I mean, I. There's a clip floating around from one of our episodes

of our show. We were talking about Sam Altman. If we're so smart,

why aren't we rich? Tom, you know. Yeah, I watch that a lot,

that clip.

I mean, the big

separation in life is between the thinker and the doer, right? And,

and the intellect is hobbled by his mind and the working of his faculties.

He's hobbled into not doing or not acting.

However, the theory of how people operate can only take you so far.

You actually have to go into practice. You actually have to. You actually

have to actually interact with people, right? And the dilemma of the intellectual,

the, the practical dilemma that Liddell Hart is talking about

here relates exactly to what we've been talking about here on,

on the show. When we over

intellectualize history and we lack

the emotive where we. Or we deny the emotive power of it, or even worse.

And I see a lot of this happening particularly in the last, I would say

10 to 15 years in our country when we are. When we allow

history to fall into political or ideological

capture. Now we're tying emotions

to ideology to wind people up because we don't know

another way to get them to act like.

One of the knocks in our time is how few people, particularly

young people, protest

injustices like previous generations

did in the 60s and 70s. And there's a lot of

different factors that go into why young people don't protest injustices at

as high a rate as was

done by previous generations. There's a lot of different factors that go into this.

But the biggest thing that I see is the protests from young people

that are about injustices that may or may not be

happening are probably some of the most ill

informed protests

in recent history because

they have not been given the intellectual foundation

They've just the intellectual foundation to think through their positions.

So I'll give you a case in point. I can pro, this is a big

example and I can point to this when I see a protest on

an Ivy League college campus. Columbia is

too easy to pick on, so I'll pick on Stanford.

And, and, and just for the record. Stanford is not an Ivy League school,

but go ahead. Well, they, they think they are, but anyway, it's fine. I

know, I know they're not, but they think they are anyway, so. Yeah,

and, and, and students unroll a banner in

protest and the banner on

says Gays for G.

There's a fundamental, there's several fundamental. And I'm

not the only person to point this out. This is why it's so easy. There's

several fundamental steps in

the ladder to that thought that you just

haven't been educated on gay people

in Gaza? Well, there are none

because in that part of the world, Islam has a

tradition as a religion

that is not as, shall we say, tolerant as

Western Christianity has been. And Western

secularism has been around

the public open practice out of the closet of

homosexuality. And so if you

are unrolling a banner that proclaims that you are

gay and you, you are protesting against a

perceived injustice happening during a war in Gaza,

so thus you are pro the people in Gaza, you have to understand

that the history of the people that you claim to be in, in solidarity

with, those people don't want to be in solidarity

with you. And by the way, this is not something that they've recently like come

to a conclusion about. They don't want to be in

solidarity with you going back to like 600,

the 6th century. And by the way, they've been very clear about

this. They're not hiding it.

So that reveals an intellectual poverty

that is incredibly troubling. That could be an intellectual poverty that

again could be solved through an actual understanding

understanding of the facts of history. So would you, would you

been, would you have been more understanding of the

rolling out of the banner if it said gays for Gaza and then in

parentheses it said we understand the irony?

Yes, I would have been. Yes, that, that would actually, that would actually have worked

for me. Yes, actually, that, that would, that would have worked for me. Absolutely. And

I picked that one because it's, it's a hot bit one, but you can see

it everywhere on social media. I picked that. So I picked that one. One. It's

also very blatant. Like, I knew exactly where you were going with

this as soon as you said, the. What the banner said. Yeah, it's very blatant.

I do, I do agree with you in, in a sense, like, so

there's. Just a lack of, a lack of historical understanding behind that. Right, right.

And, and to my point, it's not whether you are gay or

not. Shouldn't have, like, who cares? I, I don't. It's not

if they're gay or not. But if you're going to write something like that,

to your point, or to my point a second ago, be clever

about it and make sure you let the world know you understand the irony

behind it. Like, we, we know that the people in Gaza don't give a

crap about us, but we, we care about them. We care about the

right, we care about the X, Y, whatever, whatever. If you feel

it's an atrocity or if you feel like it's a humanitarian thing,

whatever, whatever you're. But, but to your point, and I, I don't disagree

with you, by the way, that there is a fundamental disconnect

with some of the, the ways in which people are

project that they think versus what they actually think or what

or, or why they think that way. There's, there's disconnect there. And I, I think,

yeah, when I saw, I, I saw something similar

several times. And it's not just Stanford that has done it. There's been. The

LGBTQ community has done several things like that.

And, and Right. I just go, but do you,

like, do you understand who you're supporting? And by the way,

I'm not suggesting that we shouldn't stop the, the,

this craziness that's happening in the Middle East. I. No, no, no. I am for

stopping killing people. Believe me. I don't care what country you're in.

I had. Stop killing people. Like, why are we doing this? This doesn't make any

sense. You, you referenced a few minutes ago or earlier in this

podcast, this, this podcast episode that we today have more

avenues for diplomacy than we ever have yet. Ever.

Yet we still have. These things happen. Like,

absolutely. Because. Because human nature will. Human nature will. Will out.

Even Ladell Hart would say this human nature will out. Like, it just, it just

will. People will go to war. I'm reading John Keegan's, which we're

going to cover that on the podcast too. Coming up here in an episode, John

Keegan's History of the First World War War. And it is

the thing, the reasons he talks about for going to war are

the same reasons that people go to war now. It has not changed.

National pride. A leader's personal hurt feelings

and arrogance and ego. Right. They think they can get away with it or

they have hurt pride as a nation or as a leader. Arrogance,

ego, pride, power. Right, exactly.

And, and so they're just going to. There's going to do it. So I, I

would. And yes, if there were a, there were a banner that were rolled out

underneath there, absolutely. I would, I would be

like, oh, okay, so you, you know what the game is. Okay, cool. I can

leave that. But, but because there's not a banner there

now, I have to treat you or I have to treat that message. I have

to deal with that message. I have to examine that message critically

in the realm of ideas and in the realm of ideas,

that message.

It may take a brain surgeon. Normally you say it doesn't take a brain surgeon.

No, no. It may take a brain surgeon to, to

parse critically what's happening inside of that

message and to realize, again, the poverty of idea that's at the

bottom of it. And by the way, there's a lot of these messages that are

floating around now, like, okay, you want to be in solidarity with the Palestinians for

whatever identity group you come from in America. Cool beings, that's fine. You have the

freedom to do that. You live in America. You should be thanking whatever deity

you pray to that you live in America. Cool. Fine. Understand,

though, that your particular affinity group,

the history of your particular affinity group in this country

is a history that is, that is uniquely situated

in this historical context of this, this country.

So now I'm going to pick on the Columbia students. Now I'm going to go

for them. So when you're talking about

bringing the Intifada to Columbia University,

you don't know what you're talking about. You

just don't know what you're talking about. You have no idea. You, you, you've now,

you've now taken a historical event that you may feel emotion

about or a series of historical events that you may feel emotion about

because of the way they were taught to you by a person who's an expert

on those historical events. You've taken that emotion, you've

channeled it into political ideology, and you've come up with a

sloganeering idea that sounds good on paper.

Right. We're going to internationalize or globalize the Intifada. Right.

And you don't understand what

you're asking for because someone like me

looks at that message and goes, okay.

And by the way, there's no irony underneath that you're deadly Sincere.

Okay, that's cool. I'm deadly sincere about not having the

Intifada here because I know exactly what that word means. And the

history that that word represents inside of that historical

context over there. That has, by the way,

some of it does have something to do with us as America, but it has

a vast majority, vast majority of that has more

to do with how the European colonial powers dealt with the

breakup of the Ottoman Empire and dealt with Turkey

going all the way back to the rise of the Ottoman empire in like

1086 or something.

That's history. That's what I'm talking about. That poverty of

understanding, that inability to link ideas together and have second thoughts.

That's the part that's most troubling to me around why we don't learn

from history. That's the most troubling thing to me. And of course I'm going to

have people who are going to email me and say, well, hey, son, yes, we

absolutely do understand that. It goes to 1086. And you have to understand that colonialism,

daba dabba, dabba, systemic oppression. And I'm going to say, well, that's one

interpretation. That's just like your interpretation,

man. I have a different interpretation.

I want to see that you have an actual depth to your

interpretation. And I don't think you do, because I don't think you studied

history.

Yeah. Oh, I'm going all in on this one. I'm going

all in on this episode. I got nothing on this one. I'm going all in

on this one. I am, because I'm passionate about history and I'm

passionate about people actually learning these things and actually caring

in sincere ways about what the words are that they say

and understanding the historical context that, that they exist and that they exist

in. And also understanding that

the history of this country is not the history of everywhere else. And so

the kinds of quirks and things that you get to get away with here, if

I put you anywhere else, I mean, we're talking about the Middle east right now,

but let's talk about any, any country on the African continent.

If I put you there, you're going to have, you're going to have, you're going

to have a problem because it's a different thing there. And

so outsourcing that or

insourcing those ideas to here doesn't. Doesn't work. And

then the other, the other way doesn't work either. Outsourcing those ideas to other

places. Like the conversations that we have in America about social justice

based on our particular historical understanding of what that means don't work

in France and they don't work in England because they come

from a different lineage and a different heritage and a different way of thinking about

both society and justice which gets

back to historical consciousness anyway.

And, and you know, so, so listen, this is, this is summed up very

easily, right? This is subbed up very easily. Yeah, go ahead. We just did two

hours. We did. And, and the idea, the concept

here is very simply we're never going to learn

from history. It's never going to happen because

of the, the, the emotions behind pride, power,

ego. That, that's part of, it's,

it's human nature. It's who we are as a people, as, as a, as a,

as an entity, as a being. We, we, we get our, we get

our pride hurt, we want to fight, we get, we, we, we,

we see something that we don't have that somebody else has, we want it, we're

gonna. Fight. Like it, it,

we're never. Now that being said,

if we ever get to the point where, you know, there's

been lots of talks about how, you know, over

evolution where like you know, we're losing our pinky, we lost our

appendix because certain things happen and there's some sci fi

theory out there that, that says that as we, as our

brains get bigger and we are urged to actually that that

fight or flight mechanism will go away and

the urge to fight for power will go away because we'll have the intellect

to not have to do that anymore. Until that happens,

we're never going to learn from history because we are going to fight over things

that are prideful for us. We're going to fight over things that we want power

over. We're going to fight over things that you know, our leadership

has a ego, ego trip over

because of their own, their own self interest or wor. Like

that's going to continue to happen. So and, and

I don't think any, there, there was a reference to,

there was a reference to the, the, the, the, the, the

military strategy room that goes a little beyond

the Joint Chiefs of Staffs in, in World War II in thinking about

Japan would never in a million years bomb Pearl harbor because they just know how

big and strong the United States is. And there was like a,

a believability bias that happened in there where even if one person said

but wait, the data shows this and they

go yeah, I don't care what the data says, Japan will never do it. Right?

Japan's never going to do that. We're too big, we're too big, we're too big,

etc. Etc. We're too strong, we're too powerful, etc. Whatever. And

there's a, there's a report even of saying that when Japan's,

when Japan's planes were in, in route,

a radar radar technician went

to his superior officer and said hey, there's a blip on this map. It looks

a little funny. And the radar got the, the, the superior officer said,

oh well, we're, I, I think we're expecting our

B17s coming back. Don't worry about it.

An hour later, Pearl harbor doesn't exist or you know, the rest is history.

So yeah, so there there. So even when there is a

singular voice of reason

because of like that consensus bias that happened

in that we still don't listen to it. So even if there is an

intellect that comes above and beyond or goes beyond or our thinking and

again all the things we talked about today, whether it's military,

geopolitical, whether it's business related because you don't think that the,

that somebody out there is going to an like the, the

VC world going hey can we put a little bit of a break on this,

on spending on these AI companies? Because there's going to be a bubble somewhere. And

then the, the consensus bias still happens and goes

nah, you don't know. What you're talking about. Nah, you don't know what you're talking

about. You don't know what you're talking about.

So foreign. We're

not solving this problem today, Hasan. No, we're not solving this problem today.

But maybe, maybe, maybe that we can. Identify it

is probably tells me that there is much smarter people than us that

have already identified it and they couldn't do anything about it.

Well so at least, at least what we can say is this. I think we

can say this. I think we could sum up the our two hour long conversation

in this, this, this two hour long episode around why We Don't Learn

from History by BH Lart with this

I am a proponent and I think probably you are Tom, as

you Tom, are as well. I am a proponent of a. More,

some would say tragic but maybe that's not it. A more

small C. Small C conservative view of history

rather than a large capital P progressive view of history

which is the kind of view of history that quite frankly

folks in the west have had since the Enlightenment going back

to the 17th century. This idea that everything will

just somehow consistently get better and that

history is merely the Tale of

endless improvement going forward. I mean, you see this with the techno future optimistic

right now, like Mark Andreessen and others that are. To your point, they're sitting around

in all those rooms dumping all this money into AI because like, the future

will just be better. Maybe it will, maybe it won't.

The tragic view of human nature. They also serve another

very vital problem with the. The whole theory of history teaching us

is because they feel if they throw enough money at it, it will eventually get

better regardless. Right? You're right. Exactly. No matter how tragic human nature is,

is right. Right. And. And the thing is you can't.

In taking a small c. Conservative view of. Of. Of human nature.

Not of human nature, sorry, of history, which I, I believe

I'm a proponent of. You.

You understand that no matter how many trillions of dollars you throw at human

nature. And yes, I did use trillions.

It doesn't matter. Human nature is impervious to your

trillions. And human nature is a whack a

mole. It pops up in all kinds of odd

places and it. It pushes

and expands boundaries, usually against your

will and the will of your dollars. And by the way, the will of your

power. You know, you could say that

the trillions of dollars will do it, or rules and regulations will

do it, or laws will do it, or punishments and

consequences will do it. And the fact of the matter is,

a small c conservative reading of history

says that you're actually incorrect.

You're wrong. And you're wrong with

a. You're wrong. And you're. And you're one more.

You're one more wealthy person or wealthy system

or wealthy set of institutions

that will wind up on the ash sheep of history

being read about by a bunch of people

four or five hundred years from now going, why those people didn't get it.

Yeah.

And so with that, there's no upper.

Upper on this episode of the podcast. There's a way to end with this. I

think we're done. I think we're just. We're just done. Wait, hold on. I think

we're done here

with that. We're. We're out.