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.