The following is a conversation with Dan Carlin, host of Hardcore History and Common Sense
podcasts. To me, Hardcore History is one of, if not the greatest podcast ever made. Dan and Joe
Rogan are probably the two main people who got me to fall in love with the medium of podcasting
as a fan and eventually as a podcaster myself. Meeting Dan was surreal. To me, he was not just
the mere human like the rest of us, since his voice has been a guide through some of the darkest
moments of human history for me. Meeting him was like meeting Jenkins Kahn, Stalin, Hitler,
Alexander the Great, and all of the most powerful leaders in history all at once in a crappy hotel
room in the middle of Oregon. It turns out that he is in fact just the human and truly one of the
good ones. This was a pleasure and an honor for me. Quick mention of his sponsor, followed by
some thoughts related to the episode. First is Athletic Greens, the all-in-one drink that I
start every day with to cover all my nutritional bases. Second is Simply Safe, a home security
company I use to monitor and protect my apartment. Third is Magic Spoon, low carb, keto friendly
cereal that I think is delicious. And finally, Cash App, the app I use to send money to friends
for food and drinks. Please check out these sponsors in the description to get a discount
and to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that I think we're living through one of
the most challenging moments in American history. To me, the way out is the reason and love.
Both require a deep understanding of human nature and of human history. This conversation is about
both. I am, perhaps hopelessly, optimistic about our future. But if indeed we stand at the precipice
of the great filter, watching our world consumed by fire, think of this little podcast conversation
as the appetizer to the final meal before the apocalypse. If you enjoy this thing,
subscribe on YouTube, review it with 5 stars an apple podcast, follow on Spotify,
support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Freedman. And now, finally,
here's my conversation with the great Dan Carlin. Let's start with the highest
philosophical question. Do you think human beings are fundamentally good? Or are all of us capable
of both good and evil? And it's the environment that molds how we, the trajectory that we take
through life. How do we define evil? Evil seems to be a situational eye of the beholder kind of
question. So if we define evil, maybe I can get a better idea of, and that could be a whole show,
couldn't be defining evil. But when we say evil, what do we mean? That's a slippery one. But I think
there's some way in which your existence, your presence in the world leads to pain and suffering
and destruction for many others in the rest of the world. So you, you steal the resources and you
use them to create more suffering than there was before in the world. So I suppose it's somehow
deeply connected to this other slippery word, which is suffering. As you create suffering in the
world, you bring suffering to the world. But here's the problem, I think with it, because I fully
see where you're going with that. And I understand it. The problem is, is the question of the reason
for inflicting suffering. So sometimes one might inflict suffering upon one group of individuals
in order to maximize a lack of suffering with another group of individuals, or one who might not
be considered evil at all, might make the rational, seemingly rational choice of inflicting pain and
suffering on a smaller group of people in order to maximize the opposite of that for a larger group
of people. Yeah, that's one of the dark things about, I've spoken and read the work of Stephen
Codkin, I'm not sure if you're familiar with the historian, and he's basically a Stalin,
Joseph Stalin scholar. And one of the things I realized, I'm not sure where to put Hitler,
but with Stalin, it really seems that he was sane and he thought he was doing good for the world.
I really believe from everything I've read about Stalin, that he believed that communism
is good for the world. And if you have to kill a few people along the way, it's like you said,
the small groups, if you have to sort of remove the people that stand in the way of this utopian
system of communism, then that's actually good for the world. And it didn't seem to me that he
could even consider the possibility that he was evil. He really thought he was doing good for
the world. And that's stuck with me because he's one of the most, it's to our definition of evil.
He seems to have brought more evil onto this world than almost any human in history.
And I don't know what to do with that. Well, I'm fascinated with the concept,
so fascinated by it that the very first hardcore history show we ever did,
which was a full 15 or 16 minutes, was called Alexander versus Hitler. And the entire question
about it was the motivations. So if you go to a court of law because you killed somebody,
one of the things they're going to consider is why did you kill them? And if you killed somebody,
for example, in self-defense, you're going to be treated differently than if you maliciously
killed somebody maliciously to take their wallet. And in the show, we wondered, because I don't
really make pronouncements, but we wondered about if you believe Hitler's writings, for example,
Mein Kampf, which is written by a guy who's a political figure who wants to get on. So I mean,
it's about as believable as any other political tract would be. But in his mind, the things that
he said that he had to do were designed for the betterment of the German people. Whereas Alexander
the Great, once again, this is somebody from more than 2000 years ago, so with lots of propaganda
in the intervening years. But one of the views of Alexander the Great is that the reason he did
what he did was, for lack of a better word, write his name in a more permanent graffiti on the pages
of history, in other words, to glorify himself. And if that's the case, does that make Alexander
a worse person than Hitler? Because Hitler thought he was doing good, whereas Alexander, if you
believe the interpretation, was simply trying to exalt Alexander. So the motivations of the people
doing these things, it seems to me, matter. I don't think you can just sit there and go,
the only thing that matters is the end result, because that might have been an unintentional
byproduct, in which case that person, had you been able to show them the future,
might have changed what they were doing. So were they evil, or misguided, or wrong, or made the
right... And I hate to do that, because there's certain people like Hitler that I don't feel
deserve the benefit of the doubt. At the same time, if you're fascinated by the concept of evil,
and you delve into it deeply enough, you're going to want to understand why these evil people did
what they did. And sometimes it can confuse the hell out of you, who wants to sit there and try
to see things from Hitler's point of view, to get a better understanding and sort of commiserate with...
So obviously, first history show, I'm fascinated with the concept.
So do you think it's possible, if we put ourselves in the mindset of some of the people that have
created so much suffering in the world, that all of them had their motivations were...
had good intentions underlying them? No. I don't... It's simply because there's so many. I mean,
the law of averages would suggest that that's not true. I guess it's pure evil
possible, meaning you... Again, it's slippery, but you... The suffering is the goal.
The suffering... Intentional suffering. Yes. I think that... And I think that there's
historical figures that one could point... But that gets to the deeper question of,
are these people sane? Do they have something wrong with them? Are they twisted from something in
their youth? These are the kinds of things where you start to delve into the psychological
makeup of these people. In other words, is anybody born evil? And I actually believe
that some people are. I think the DNA can get scrambled up in ways. I think the question of
evil is important too, because I think it's an eye of the beholder thing. I mean, if Hitler,
for example, had been successful. And we were today on the sixth or seventh leader of the
Third Reich since I think his entire history would be viewed through a different lens,
because that's the way we do things, right? Genghis Khan looks different to the Mongolians
than he does to the residents of Baghdad, right? And I think... So an eye of the beholder question,
I think, comes into all these sorts of things. As you said, it's a very slippery question.
As somebody who's fascinated by military history, where do you put violence in terms of
the human condition? Is it core to being human, or is it just a little tool that we use every
once in a while? So I'm going to respond to your question with a question. What do you see the
difference being between violence and force? Let me go farther. I'm not sure that violence is
something that we have to put up with as human beings forever, that we must resign ourselves to
violence forever. But I have a much harder time seeing us able to abolish force. And there's going
to be some ground where if those two things are not the same, and I don't know that maybe they are,
where there's certainly some crossover. And I think force... You're an engineer,
you'll understand this better than I do, but think about it as a physical law. If you can't
stop something from moving in a certain direction without pushing back in that same direction,
I'm not sure that you can have a society or a civilization without the ability to
use a counterforce when things are going wrong, whether it's on an individual level,
right? A person attacks another person, so you step in to save that person. Or even at the highest
levels of politics or anything else, a counterforce to stop the inertia or the impetus of another
movement. So I think that force is a simple, almost law of physics in human interaction,
especially at the civilizational level. I think civilization requires a certain amount of,
if not violence, then force. And again, they've talked... I mean, it goes back into
St. Augustine, all kinds of Christian beliefs about the proper use of force. And people have
philosophically tried to decide between, can you have sort of an Ahinza,
a Buddhist sort of, you know, we will be nonviolent toward everything and exert no force,
or there's a reason to have force in order to create the space for good. I think force
is inevitable. Now, we can talk, and I've not come up to the conclusion myself,
if there is a distinction to be made between force and violence. I mean, is a nonviolent force
enough or is violence when done for the cause of good, a different thing than violence done either
for the cause of evil, as you would say, or simply for random reasons? I mean, we humans lack control
sometimes. We can be violent for no apparent reason or goal. And that's... I mean, listen,
you look at the criminal justice system alone and the way we interact with people who are
acting out in ways that we as a society have decided is intolerable. Can you deal with that
without force and at some level violence? I don't know. Can you maintain peacefulness
without force? I don't know. Just to be a little bit more specific about the idea of force, do you
put force as general enough to include force in the space of ideas? So you mentioned Buddhism,
or religion, or just Twitter. I can think of no things farther apart than that.
Okay. Is the battles we do in the space of ideas of the great debates throughout history,
do you put force into that? Or do you, in this conversation, are we trying to right now keep
it to just physical force in saying that you have an intuition that force might be with us
much longer than violence? I think the two bleed together. Because it's always my go-to example.
I'm afraid and I'm sure that the listeners all hate it. But take Germany during the 1920s,
early 1930s, before the Nazis came to power. And they were always involved in some level of force,
beating up in the streets or whatever it might be. But think about it more like an
intellectual discussion until a certain point. It would be difficult, I imagine,
to keep the intellectual counter-force of ideas from at some point degenerating into something
that's more coercion, counter-force, if we want to use the phrases we were just talking about.
So I think the two are intimately connected. I mean, actions follow thought, right? And at a
certain point, I think especially when one is not achieving the goals that they want to achieve
through peaceful discussion or argumentation or trying to convince the other side that sometimes
the next level of operations is something a little bit more physically imposing, if that makes
sense. We go from the intellectual to the physical. Yeah, so it too easily spills over into violence.
Yes, and one leads to the other often. So you kind of implied perhaps a hopeful message,
but let me ask you in the form of a question, do you think we'll always have war?
I think it goes to the forced question too. So for example, what do you do? I mean,
let's play with nation states now, although I don't know that nation states are something we
should think of as a permanent construct forever. But how is one nation state supposed to prevent
another nation state from acting in ways that it would see as either detrimental to the global
community or detrimental to the interest of their own nation state? And I think we've had this
question of going back to ancient times, but certainly in the 20th century, this has come up
quite a bit. I mean, the whole Second World War argument sometimes revolves around the idea of
what the proper counter force should be. Can you create an entity, a League of Nations,
a United Nations, a one world entity maybe even that that alleviates the need for counter force
involving mass violence and armies and navies and those things. I think that's an open discussion
we're still having. It's good to think through that. Because having us like a United Nations,
there's usually a centralized control. So there's humans at the top. There's committees and usually
like leaders emerge as singular figures that then can become corrupted by power. And it's just a
really important, it feels like a really important thought experiment and something to really rigorously
think through how can you construct systems of government that are stable enough to push us
towards less and less war and less and less unstable and another tough word, which is unfair
of application of force. That's really at the core of the question that we're trying to figure
out as humans. As our weapons get better and better and better at destroying ourselves,
it feels like it's important to think about how we minimize the over application or unfair
application of force. There's other elements that come into play too. You and I are discussing
this at the very high intellectual level of things, but there's also a tail wagging the dog
element to this. So think of a society of warriors, a tribal society from a long time ago.
How much do the fact that you have warriors in your society and that their reason for existing,
what they take pride in, what they train for, their status in their own civilization,
how much does that itself drive the responses of that society? How much do you need war to
legitimize warriors? That's the old argument that you get to, and we've had this in the 20th
century too, that the creation of arms and armies creates an incentive to use them and that they
themselves can drive that incentive as a justification for their reasons for existence.
That's where we start to talk about the interactivity of all these different elements of society
upon one another. So when we talk about governments and war, well, you need to take into account
the various things those governments have put into place in terms of systems and armies and
things like that to protect themselves. For reasons we can all understand, but they exert
a force on your range of choices, don't they? It's true. You're making me realize that in my
upbringing, and I think I'm bringing of many, warriors are heroes. To me, I don't know where
that feeling comes from, but to die fighting is an honorable way to die. It feels like that.
I've always had a problem with this because as a person interested in military history,
the distinction is important. And I try to make it at different levels. So at base level, the
people who are out there on the front lines doing the fighting, to me, those people can be compared
with police officers and firemen and people that fire persons. But I mean, people that are involved
in an ethical attempt to perform a task, which ultimately one can see in many situations as
being a saving sort of task, right? Or if nothing else, a self-sacrifice for what they see as the
greater good. Now, I draw a distinction between the individuals and the entity that they're a part
of, a military. And I certainly draw a distinction between the military and then the entire, for
lack of a better word, military industrial complex that that service is a part of. I feel a lot less
moral attachment to those upper echelons than I do the people on the ground. The people on the
ground can be any of us and have been in a lot of... We have a very professional sort of military
now where it's a subset of the population. But in other periods of time, we've had conscription
and drafts and it hasn't been a subset of the population. It's been the population, right?
And so it is the society oftentimes going to war. And I make a distinction between those warriors
and the entities either in the system that they're part of the military or the people that control
the military at the highest political levels. I feel a lot less moral attachment to them. And
I have a much harsher about how I feel about them. I do not consider the military itself to be heroic.
And I do not consider the military industrial complex to be heroic. I do think that is a tail
wagging the dog situation. I do think that draws us into looking at military endeavors as a solution
to the problem much more quickly than we otherwise might. And to be honest, to tie it all together,
I actually look at the victims of this as the soldiers we were talking about. If you set a fire
to send firemen into to fight, then I feel bad for the firemen. I feel like you've abused the
trust that you give those people, right? So when people talk about war, I always think that the
people that we have to make sure that a war is really necessary in order to protect are the
people that you're going to send over there to fight that. The greatest victims in our society
of war are often the warriors. So in my mind, when we see these people coming home from places
like Iraq, a place where I would have made the argument and did at the time that we didn't belong,
to me, those people are victims. And I know they don't like to think about themselves that way,
because it runs totally counter to the ethos. But if you're sending people to protect this
country shores, those are heroes. If you're sending people to go do something that they
otherwise probably don't need to do, but they're there for political reasons or anything else you
want to put in that's not defense related, well, then you've made victims of our heroes. And so I
feel like we do a lot of talk about our troops and our soldiers and stuff, but we don't treat them
as valuable as we as the rhetoric makes them sound. Otherwise, we would be more,
we would be much more careful about where we put them. If you're going to send my son, and I don't
have a son, I have daughters, but if you're going to send my son into harm's way, I'm going to
demand that you really need to be sending him into harm's way. And I'm going to be angry at you
if you put him into harm's way, if he doesn't warrant it. And so I have much more suspicion
about the system that sends these people into these situations where they're required to be
heroic. Then I do the people on the ground that I look at as either the people that are defending
us in situations like the second world war, for example, or the people that turn out to be
the individual victims of a system where they're just a cog and a machine, and the machine doesn't
really care as much about them as the rhetoric and the propaganda would insinuate.
Yeah. And as my own family history, it would be nice if we could talk about,
there's a gray area in the places that you're talking about.
There's a gray area in everything. In everything. But when that gray area is part of your own blood,
as it is for me, it's worth shining a light on somehow.
Sure. Give me an example of what you mean.
So you did a program of four episodes of Ghosts of the Ostfront.
So I was born in the Soviet Union. I was raised in Moscow. My dad was born and raised in Kiev.
My grandmother, who just recently passed away, was raised in Ukraine.
It's a small city on the border between Russia and Ukraine.
I have a grandfather born in Kiev.
In Kiev? The interesting thing about the timing of everything,
as you might be able to connect, is she survived. She's the most badass woman
I've ever encountered in my life. And most of the warrior spirit I carry is probably from her.
She survived Polymorph, the Ukrainian starvation of the 30s.
She was a beautiful teenage girl during the Nazi occupation.
So she survived all of that. And of course, family that everybody,
and so many people died through that whole process.
So one of the things you talk about in your program is that
the gray area, even with the warriors, it happened to them.
Just because you're saying now, they didn't have a choice.
So my grandfather on the other side, he was a machine gunner
that was in Ukraine. In the Red Army?
In the Red Army, yeah. And they threw, the statement was that there's,
I don't know if it's obvious or not, but the rule was there's no surrender.
So you better die. So basically, the goal was when he was fighting,
and he was lucky enough, one of the only to survive by being wounded early on,
is there was a march of Nazis towards, I guess, Moscow.
And the whole goal in Ukraine was to slow them into the winter.
I mean, I view him as such a hero.
And he believed that he's indestructible, which is survivor bias,
and that bullets can't hurt him. And that's what everybody believed.
And of course, basically everyone that, he quickly rose to the ranks,
let's just put it this way, because everybody died.
It was just bodies dragging these heavy machine guns,
like always slowly retreating, shooting and retreating, shooting and retreating.
And I don't know, he was a hero to me.
Like, I always, I grew up thinking that he was the one that sort of defeated the Nazis, right?
But the reality, there could be another perspective, which is all of this happened to him
by the incompetence of Stalin, the incompetence, and men of the Soviet Union being used like pawns
in a, in a shittily played game of chess, right?
So, like, the one narrative is, of him as a victim, as you're kind of describing.
And it then, somehow that's more paralyzing, and that's more, I don't know,
it feels better to think of him as a hero and as Russia, Soviet Union saving the world.
I mean, that narrative also is in the United States, that the United States was key in saving
the world from the Nazis.
It feels like that narrative is powerful for people.
I'm not sure, and I carry it still with me, but when I think about the right way to think
about that war, I'm not sure if that's the correct narrative.
Let me suggest something.
There's a line that a, that a Marine named Eugene Sledge had said once,
and I keep it on my phone because it's, it's, it makes a real distinction.
And he said, the front line is really where the war is.
And anybody, even a hundred yards behind the front line, doesn't know what it's really like.
Now, the difference is, is there are lots of people miles behind the front line that are in danger,
right?
You can be in a medical unit in the rear, and artillery could strike you, planes could strike you.
I mean, you, you could be in danger, but at the front line, there are two different things.
One is that, that, and at least, and I'm doing a lot of reading on this right now,
and reading a lot of veteran's accounts, James Jones, who wrote books like From Here to Eternity,
Fictional Accounts of the Second World War, but he based them on his own service.
He was at Guadalcanal, for example, in 1942.
And Jones had said that the evolution of a soldier in front line action requires an almost
surrendering to the idea that you're going to live, that you become accustomed to the idea
that you're going to die.
And he said, you're a different person simply for considering that thought seriously,
because most of us don't.
But what that allows you to do is to do that job at the front line, right?
If you're too concerned about your own life, you become less of a good guy at your job, right?
The other thing that the people in the 100 yards at the front line do that the people
in the rear medical unit really don't, is you kill, and you kill a lot, right?
You don't just, oh, there's a sniper back here, so I shot him.
It's we go from one position to another, and we kill lots of people.
Those things will change you.
And what that tends to do, not universally, because I've read accounts from Red Army soldiers,
and they're very patriotic, right?
But a lot of that patriotism comes through years later as part of the nostalgia and the remembering.
When you're down at that front 100 yards, it is often boiled down to a very small world.
So your grandfather, was it your grandfather?
Grandfather.
At the machine gun, he's concerned about his position and his comrades and the people
who he owes a responsibility to.
And it's a very small world at that point.
And to me, that's where the heroism is, right?
He's not fighting for some giant world civilizational thing.
He's fighting to save the people next to him and his own life at the same time,
because they're saving him too.
And that there is a huge amount of heroism to that.
And that gets to our question about force earlier.
Why would you use force?
Well, how about to protect these people on either side of me, right?
Their lives.
Now, is there hatred?
Yeah, I hated the Germans for what they were doing.
As a matter of fact, I got a note from a poll not that long ago.
And I have this tendency to refer to the Nazis, right?
The regime that was...
And he said, why do you keep calling them Nazis?
He says, say what they were.
They were Germans.
And this guy wanted me to not absolve Germany by saying, oh, it was this awful group of people
that took over your country.
He said the Germans did this.
And there's that bitterness where he says, let's not forget what they did to us.
And what we had to do back, right?
So for me, when we talk about these combat situations, the reason I call these people
heroic is because of their fighting to defend things we could all understand.
I mean, if you come after my brother and I take a machine gun and shoot you,
and you're going to overrun me, I mean, you're going to...
That becomes a situation when we talked about counter force earlier.
Much easier to call yourself a hero when you're saving people.
Or you're saving this town right behind you.
And you know, if they get through your machine gun, they're going to burn these villages.
They're going to throw these people out in the middle of winter, these families.
That to me is a very different sort of heroism than this amorphous idea of patriotism.
Patriotism is a thing that we often get used with, right?
People manipulate us through love of country and all this because they understand that this
is something we feel very strongly, but they use it against us sometimes in order to whip up a war
fever or to get people. I mean, there's a great line, and I wish I could remember it in its entirety,
that Herman Göring had said about how easy it was to get the people into a war.
He says, you know, you just appeal to their patriotism.
I mean, there's buttons that you can push and they take advantage of things like love of country
and the way we have a loyalty and admiration to the warriors who put their lives on the line.
These are manipulatable things in the human species that reliably can be counted on
to move us in directions that in a more sober, reflective state of mind,
we would consider differently. I mean, you get this war fever up and people wave flags and
they start denouncing the enemy and they start saying, you know, we've seen it over and over
and over again in ancient times this happened. But the love of country is also beautiful.
So I haven't seen it in America as much. So people in America love their country.
Like this patriotism is strong in America, but it's not as strong as I remember,
even with my sort of being younger, the love of the Soviet Union.
Now, was it the Soviet Union, this requires a distinction, or was it Mother Russia?
What it really was was the Communist Party.
Okay. So it was this, it was the system in place.
So the system in place, like loving, I haven't quite deeply synchronized exactly what you love.
I think you love the, that like populist message of the worker, of the common man,
the common. So let me draw the comparison then. And I often say this, that the United States,
like the Soviet Union, is an ideological based society, right? So you take a country like France.
It doesn't matter which French government you're in now, the French have been the French for a
long time, right? It's not based on an ideology, right? Whereas what unites the United States is
an ideology, freedom, liberty, the Constitution, this is what draws, you know, the E pluribus unum,
kind of the idea, right? This that out of many one, well, what, what binds all these unique
different people, the shared beliefs, this ideology, the Soviet Union was the same way.
Because as you know, the Soviet Union, Russia was merely one part of this Soviet Union.
And if you believe the rhetoric until Stalin's time, everybody was going to be
united under this ideological banner someday, right? It was a global revolution.
So ideological societies are different. And to be a fan of the ideological framework and goal,
I mean, I'm a liberty person, right? I would like to see everybody in the world have my system of
government, which is part of a, of a bias, right? Because they might not want that. But I think it's
better for everyone because I think it's better for me. At the same time, when the ideology,
if you consider, and you know, this stems from ideas of the enlightenment, and there's a bias
there. So my bias are toward the, but you feel, and this is why you say we're going to bring
freedom to Iraq, we're going to bring freedom to here, we're going to bring freedom because we
think we're spreading to you something that is just undeniably positive. We're going to free you
and give you this. It's hard for me to, to wipe my own bias away from there, right? Because if I
were in Iraq, for example, I would want freedom, right? But if you then leave and let the Iraqis
vote for whomever they want, are they going to vote for somebody that will, I mean, you know,
you look at Russia now, and I hear from Russians quite a bit because so much of my,
my views on Russia and the Soviet Union were formed in my formative years. And, and, you know,
we were not hearing from many people in the Soviet Union back then, but now you do. You hear from
Russians today who will say your views on Stalin are archaic and cold. You know, so, so you try to
reorient your beliefs a little bit, but it goes to this idea of if you gave the people in Russia a
free and fair vote, will they vote for somebody who promises them a free and open society based
on enlightenment, democratic principles, or will they vote for somebody we in the US would go,
what are they doing? They're voting for some strong man who's just good. You know, so,
I think it's very hard to throw away our own biases and preconceptions and, and, you know,
it's an all eye of the beholder kind of thing. But when you're talking about ideological societies,
it is very difficult to throw off all the years of indoctrination into the superiority of your
system. I mean, listen, in the Soviet Union, Marxism one way or another was part of every
classrooms. You know, you could be studying geometry and they'll throw Marxism in there somehow,
because that's what united the society. And that's what gave it a higher purpose. And that's what
made it in the minds of the people who were its defenders, a superior, morally superior system.
And we do the same thing here. In fact, most people do. But see, you're still French, no matter
what, what, what the ideology or the government might be. So, so in that sense, it's funny that
there would be a Cold War with these two systems, because they're both ideologically based systems
involving peoples of many different backgrounds who are united under the umbrella of the ideology.
First of all, that's brilliantly put. I'm in a funny position that in my formative year,
so I came here when I was 13, is when I, you know, teenage is your first love or whatever,
is I fall in love, I fell in love with the American set of ideas of freedom and individuals.
They're telling, aren't they? They're telling, yes.
But I also remember, it's like you remember like maybe an ex-girlfriend or something like that.
I also remember loving as a very different human, the, the Soviet idea, like we had the
national anthem, which is still the, I think the most badass national anthem, which is the
Soviet Union, like saying, we're the indestructible nation. I mean, just the words are so like
American words are like, oh, we're nice, like we're freedom. But like a Russian Soviet Union
national anthem was like, we're bad motherfuckers, nobody will destroy us. I just remember
feeling pride in a nation as a kid, like dumb, not knowing anything, because we all had to
recite the stuff. It was, there's a uniformity to everything. There's pride underlying everything.
I didn't think about all the destructive nature of the bureaucracy, the incompetence of, you know,
all the things that come with the implementation of communism, especially around the 80s and 90s.
But I remember what it's like to love that set of ideas. So in a funny place of like, remember,
like switching the love, because I'm, you know, I kind of joke around about being Russian, but,
you know, my long-term monogamous relationship is now with the idea, the American ideal,
like I'm stuck with it in my mind. But I remember what it was like to love it. And I think about
that too, when people criticize China or they criticize the current state of affairs with
how Stalin is remembered and how Putin is, to know that the, you can't always wear the American
ideal of individualism, radical individualism and freedom in analyzing the ways of the world
elsewhere, like in China, in Russia, that it does, if you don't take yourself too seriously,
as Americans all do, as I do, it's kind of a beautiful love to have for your government,
to believe in the nation, to let go of yourself and your rights and your freedoms,
to believe in something bigger than yourself. That's actually, that's a kind of freedom.
That's, you're actually liberating yourself, if you think like life is suffering, you're giving
into the flow of the water, the flow, the way of the world by giving away more power from
yourself and giving it to what you would conceive as, as the power of the people together. Together
we'll do great things and really believing in the ideals of what, in this case, I don't even
know what you would call Russia, but whatever the heck that is, authoritarian, powerful state,
powerful leader, believing that can be as beautiful as believing the American ideal.
Not just that. Let me add to what you're saying. I spend a lot of time trying to get out of my
own biases. It is a fruitless endeavor long term, but you try to be better than you normally are.
One of the critiques that China, and I always, as an American, I tend to think about this as
their government, right? This is a rationale that their government puts forward, but what you just
said is actually, if you can make that viewpoint beautiful is kind of a beautiful way of approaching
it. The Chinese would say that what we call human rights in the United States and what we
considered to be everybody's birthright around the world is instead Western rights. That's the
words they use, Western rights. It's a fundamentally Western-oriented, and I'll go back to the
Enlightenment-based ideas on what constitutes the rights of man. They would suggest that that's not
internationally and always applicable, right? That you can make a case, and again, I don't
believe this. This runs against my own personal views, but that you could make a case that the
collective well-being of a very large group of people outweighs the individual needs of any
single person, especially if those things are in conflict with each other, right? If you cannot
provide for the greater good because everyone's so individualistic, well, then really, what is the
better thing to do, right? To suppress individualism so everybody's better off? I think trying to
recognize how someone else might see that is important if we want to, you know, you had talked
about eliminating war. We talked about eliminating conflict. The first need to do that is to try to
understand how someone else might view something differently than yourself. I'm famously one of
those people who buys in to the ideas of traditional Americanism, right? A lot of people who live
today, I mean, they would seem to think that things like patriotism requires a belief in the
strong military and all these things we have today, but that is a corruption of traditional
Americanism, which viewed all those things with suspicion in the first 100 years of the Republic
because they saw it as an enemy to the very things that Americans celebrated, right? How could you
have freedom and liberty and individualistic expression if you had an overriding military that
was always fighting wars and the founders of this country looked to other examples, like Europe,
for example, and saw that standing militaries, for example, standing armies, were the enemy of
liberty. Well, we have a standing army now and one that is totally interwoven in our entire society.
If you could go back in time and talk to John Quincy Adams, right, early president of the
United States and show him what we have now, he would think it was awful and horrible and that
somewhere along the line, the Americans had lost their way and forgotten what they were all about.
But we have so successfully interwoven this modern military industrial complex with the
traditional benefits of the American system and ideology so that they've become intertwined in
our thinking, whereas 150 years ago, they were actually considered to be at opposite polarities
and a threat to one another. So when you talk about the love of the nation, I tend to be
suspicious of those things. I tend to be suspicious of government. I tend to try very hard to not
be manipulated and I feel like a large part of what they do is manipulation and propaganda.
And so I think a healthy skepticism of the nation state is actually 100% Americanism in the
traditional sense of the word. But I also have to recognize, as you so eloquently stated,
Americanism is not necessarily universal at all. And so I think we have to try to be more
understanding. The traditional American viewpoint is that if a place like China does not allow their
people individual human rights, then they're being denied something. They're being denied and 100
years ago, they would have said they're God-given rights. Man is born free and if he's not free,
it's because of something done to him, right? The government has taken away his God-given rights.
I'm getting excited just listening to that.
Well, but I mean, I think the idea that this is universal is in and of itself a bias. Now,
do I want freedom for everybody else? I sure do. But the people in the Soviet Union who really
bought into that wanted the workers of the world to unite and not be exploited by the greedy,
blood-sucking people who worked them to death and pocketed all of the fruits of their labor.
If you frame it that way, that sounds like justice as well. So it is an eye of the beholder sort
of thing. I'd love to talk to you about Vladimir Putin while we're in this feeling and wave of
empathy and trying to understand others that are not like us. One of the reasons I started
this podcast is because I believe that there's a few people I could talk to. Some of it is ego.
Some of it is stupidity. Is there some people I could talk to that not many others can talk to?
The one person I was always thinking about was Vladimir Putin.
You still speak the language?
I speak the language very well.
That makes it even easier. I mean, you might be appointed for that job.
That's the context in which I'm asking you this question. What are your
thoughts about Vladimir Putin from historical context? Have you studied him? Have you thought
about him?
Yes. Studied is a loaded word. I find it hard sometimes to not filter things through an American
lens. As an American, I would say that the Russians should be allowed to have any leader
that they want to have. But what an American would say is, but there should be elections.
If the Russians choose Vladimir Putin and they keep choosing him, that's their business.
Whereas an American, I would have a problem is when that leader stops letting the Russians
make that decision. And we would say, well, now you're no longer ruling by the consent of the
governed. You've become the equivalent of a person who may be oppressing your people. You might as
well be a dictator. Now, there's a difference between a freely elected and reelected and reelected
and reelected dictator if that's what they want. And look, it would be silly to broad brush the
Russians like it would be silly to broad brush anyone, millions and millions of people with
different opinions amongst them all. But they seem to like a strong person at the helm. And
listen, there's a giant chunk of Americans who do too in their own country. But an American would
say, as long as the freedom of choice is given to the Russians to decide this and not taken away
from them, right? It's one thing to say he was freely elected, but a long time ago, and we've
done away with elections since then, is a different story too. So my attitude on Vladimir Putin is,
if that's who the Russian people want, and you give them the choice, right? If he's only there
because they keep electing him, that's a very different story. When he stops offering them
the option of choosing him or not choosing him, that's when it begins to look nefarious to someone
born and raised with the mindset and the ideology that is an integral part of yours truly and that
you can see gray areas and nuance all you like, but it's hard to escape. And you alluded to this
too. It's hard to escape what was indoctrinated into your bones in your formative years. It's
like exit, you know, your bones are growing, right? And you can't go back. So to me, this is so much
a part of who I am that I have a hard time jettisoning that and saying, oh, no, Vladimir Putin
not being elected anymore is just fine. I'm too much of a product of my upbringing to go there.
Does that make sense? Yeah, absolutely. But of course, there's, like we were saying,
this gray areas, which is, I believe I have to think through this, but I think there is a point
of which Adolf Hitler became the popular choice in Nazi Germany in the 30s. There's a, in the same
way, from an American perspective, you can start to criticize some in a shallow way, some in a
deep way. The way that Putin has maintained power is by controlling the press, so limiting
one other freedom that we Americans value, which is the freedom of the press or freedom of speech,
that he, it is very possible. Now things are changing now, but for most of his presidency,
he was the popular choice and sometimes by far. And, you know, I have, I actually don't have
real family in Russia who don't love Putin. I, the only people who write to me about Putin
and not liking him are like sort of activists who are young, right? But like, to me, they're
strangers. I don't know anything about them. The people I do know have a big family in Russia.
They love Putin. Do they miss elections?
Would they want the choice to prove it at the ballot box and, and, or, or are they so in love
with him that they're, they wouldn't want to take a chance that someone might vote him out?
No, they don't think of it this way. And they are aware of the incredible bureaucracy and
corruption that is lurking in the shadows, which is true in Russia.
Right. Everywhere. Everywhere. But like, there's something about the Russian, it's the remnants,
it's corruption is so deeply part of the Russian, so the Soviet system that even the overthrow of
the Soviet, the, the, the breaking apart of the Soviet Union and Putin coming and reforming a
lot of the system, it's still deeply in there. And, and they're aware of that. That's part of the,
like the love for Putin is partially grounded in the fear of what happens when the corrupt take
over, the greedy take over. And they, they see Putin as the stabilizer, as like a hard
like force that says. A counter force. A counter force that gets your shit together.
Like basically from the Western perspective, Putin is, is terrible. But from, from the Russian
perspective, Putin is the only thing holding this thing together before it goes, if it collapses.
Now the, from the, like Gary Kasparov has been loud on this, you know, a lot of people from the
Western perspective say, well, if it has to collapse, let it collapse, you know, that's easier
said than done when you don't have to live through that. Exactly. And so anyone worrying about their
family about, and they also remember the, the inflation and the economic instability and the
suffering and the starvation that happened in the nineties with the collapse of the Soviet Union.
And they saw the kind of reform and the economic vibrancy that happened when Putin took power,
that they think like this guy's holding it together. And they see elections as potentially
being mechanisms by which the corrupt people can manipulate the system unfairly as opposed to
letting the people speak with their voice. They somehow figure out a way to manipulate the elections
to elect somebody like one of them Western revolutionaries. And so I think one of the
beliefs that's important to the American system is the belief in the electoral system that the
voice of the people can be heard in the various systems of government, whether it's judicial,
whether it's, I mean, basically the assumption is that the system works well enough for you to be
able to elect the popular choice. Okay. So there's a couple of things that come to mind on that.
The first one has to do with the idea of oligarchs. There's a belief in political science,
you know, it's not the overall belief, but that every society is sort of an oligarchy really
if you break it down, right? So what you're talking about are some of the people who would form
an oligarchic class in Russia and that Putin is the guy who can harness the power of the state
to keep those people in check. The problem, of course, in a system like that, a strongman system,
right, where you have somebody who can hold the reins and steer the ship when the ship is violently
in a storm is the succession. So if you're not creating a system that can operate without you,
then that terrible instability and that terrible future that you justify the strongman for
is just awaiting your future, right? I mean, unless he's actively building the system that
will outlive him and allow successors to do what he's doing, then what you've done here is create
a temporary, I would think, a temporary stability here because it's the same problem you have in
a monarchy, right? Where you have this one king and he's particularly good or you think he's
particularly good, but he's going to turn that job over to somebody else down the road and the
system doesn't guarantee because no one's really worked on it. And again, you would tell me if
Putin is putting into place, I know he's talked about it over the years, putting into place a
system that can outlive him and that will create the stability that the people in Russia like him
for when he's gone. Because if the oligarchs just take over afterwards, then one might argue,
well, we had 20 good years of stability. But I mean, I would say that if we're talking about a
ship of state here, the guy steering the ship maybe, if you want to look at it from the Russian
point of view, has done a great job maybe, just saying. But the rocks are still out there and
he's not going to be at the helm forever. So one would think that his job is to make sure that
there's going to be someone who can continue to steer the ship for the people of Russia after
he's gone. Now, let me ask, because I'm curious, and ignorant. So is he doing that, do you think?
Is he setting it up so that when there is no Putin, the state is safe?
From the beginning, that was the idea, whether one of the fascinating things, now I read every
biography, English written biography on Putin, so I need to think more deeply. But one of the
fascinating things is how did power change Vladimir Putin? He was a different man when he
took power than he is today. I actually, in many ways, admire the man that took power.
I think he's very different than Stalin and then Hitler at the moment they took power.
I think Hitler and Stalin were both, in our previous discussion, already on the trajectory of
evil. I think Putin was a humble, loyal, honest man when he took power. The man he is today
is worth thinking about and studying. I'm not sure. That's an old line though about absolute
power corrupting absolutely. But it's kind of a line. It's a beautiful quote,
but you have to really think about it. What does that actually mean? One of the things I still
have to do, I've been focusing on securing the conversation. I haven't gone through a dark
place yet because I feel like I can't do the dark thing for too long. So I really have to put myself
in the mind of Putin leading up to the conversation. But for now, my sense is he took power when Yeltsin
gave him one of the big acts of the new Russia was, for the first time in his history,
a leader could have continued being in power and chose to give away power. That was the George
Washington. We in the United States would look at that as absolute positive. It was a sign of
good things. Yes. And so that was a huge act. And Putin said that that was the defining thing that
will define Russia for the 21st century, that act, and he will carry that flag forward. That's why
in rhetoric, after two terms, he gave away power. To Medvedev. But it was a puppet, right?
Yeah. Yes. But still, the story was being told. I think he believed it early on.
I believe he still believes it, but I think he's deeply suspicious of the corruption that lurks
in the shadows. And I do believe that as somebody who thinks clickbait journalism is broken,
journalists annoy the hell out of me. Clickbait journalism is working perfectly.
Journalism is broken. Clickbait things working great.
So I understand from Putin's perspective that journalists can be seen as the enemy of the
state because people think journalists write these deep, beautiful philosophical pieces about
criticizing the structure of government and the proper policy, the steps that we need to take
to make a greater nation. No, they're unfairly take stuff out of context. They're critical in
ways that's shallow and not interesting. They call you a racist or sexist or they make up
stuff all the time. So I can put myself in the mindset of a person that thinks that it is okay
to remove that kind of shallow fake news voice from the system. The problem is, of course,
that is a slippery slope to then you remove all the annoying people from the system,
and then you change what annoying means, which annoying starts becoming a thing that like anyone
who opposes the system. I mean, it's obvious that it becomes a slippery slope, but I can also put
myself in the mindset of the people that see it's okay to remove the liars from the system
as long as it's good for Russia. Okay. So herein lies, and this again, the traditional American
perspective because we've had yellow so-called yellow journalism since the founding of the
Republic. That's nothing new. But the problem then comes into play. When you remove journalists,
even it's a broad brush thing because you remove both the crappy ones who are lying and the ones
who are telling the truth too, you're left with simply the approved government journalists,
right? The ones who are towing the government's line, in which case the truth as you see it
is a different kind of fake news, right? It's the fake news from the government instead of
the clickbait news and, oh yeah, maybe truth mixed into all that too in some of the outlets.
The problem I always have with our system here in the United States right now is
trying to tease the truth out from all the falsehoods. And look, I've got 30 years in journalism.
My job used to be to go through before the internet all the newspapers and find that I
used to know all the journalists by name and I could pick out who they were and I have a hard
time picking out the truth from the falsehood. So I think constantly, how are people who don't have
all this background, who have lives or who are trained in other specialties, how do they do it?
But if the government is the only approved outlet for truth, a traditional American and a lot of
other traditional societies based on these ideas of the Enlightenment that I talked about earlier
would see that as a disaster waiting to happen or a tyranny in progress. Does that make sense?
Oh, it totally makes sense. And I would agree with you. I still agree with you. But it is clear
that something about the freedom of the press and freedom of speech in today, like literally the last
few years with the internet is changing. And the argument, you know, you could say that the American
system of freedom of speech is broken. Because here's the belief I grew up on and I still hold,
but I'm starting to be sort of trying to see multiple views on it. My belief was that freedom
of speech results in a stable trajectory towards truth always. So like truth will emerge. I was
my sort of faith and belief that that yeah, there's going to be lies all over the place,
but there'll be like a stable thing that is true that's carried forward to the public.
Now it feels like it's possible to go towards a world where nothing is true or truth is something
that groups of people convince themselves of and there's multiple groups of people. And the idea
of some universal truth as opposed to the butter thing is something that we can no longer exist
under. Like some people believe that the Green Bay Packers is the best football team and some people
can think of the Patriots and they deeply believe it to where they call the other groups liars.
Now that's fun for sports. That's fun for favorite flavors of ice cream. But they might believe that
about science, about the various aspects of politics, various aspects of sort of different
policies within the function of our government. And like that's not just like some weird thing
we complain about, but that'll be the nature of things like truth is something we can no longer
have. Well, and let me de-romanticize the American history of this too, because the American press
was often just as biased. I always looked to the 1970s as the high watermark of the American
journalistic post-Watergate era where it was actively going after the abuses of the government
and all these things. But there was a famous speech, very quiet though, very quiet, given by
Catherine Graham, who was a Washington Post editor, I believe. And I actually, somebody sent it to me,
we had to get it off of a journalism, like a J store kind of thing. And she at a luncheon
assured that the government people at the luncheon, don't worry, this is not going to be
something that we make a trend. Because the position of the government is still something
that was carried, the newspapers were the water, and the newspapers were the big thing up until
certainly the late 60s, early 70s. The newspapers were still the water carrier of the government,
right? And they were the water carriers of the owners of the newspaper. So let's not pretend
there was some angelic, wonderful time. And I'm saying to me, because I was the one who brought
it up, let's not pretend there was any super age of truthful journalism and all that. And I mean,
you go to the revolutionary period in American history, and it looks every bit as bad as today,
right? That's a hopeful message, actually. So things may not be as bad as they look.
Well, let's look at it more like a stock market, and that you have fluctuations
in the truthfulness or believability of the press. And there are periods where it was higher than
other periods. The funny thing about the so-called clickbait era, and I do think it's terrible,
but I mean, it resembles earlier eras to me. So I always compare it to when I was a kid growing
up, when I thought journalism was as good as it's ever gotten. It was never perfect.
But it's also something that you see very rarely in other governments around the world. And there's
a reason that journalists are often killed regularly in a lot of countries. And it's because
they report on things that the authorities do not want reported on. And I've always thought
that that was what journalism should do. But it's got to be truthful. Otherwise,
it's just a different kind of propaganda, right? Can we talk about Genghis Khan? Genghis Khan?
Sure. By the way, is it Genghis Khan or Genghis Khan? It's not Genghis Khan. It's either Genghis Khan
or Chinggis Khan. So let's go with Genghis Khan. The only thing I'll be able to say with any certain
last certain thing I'll say about it. It's like, I don't know, GIF versus GIF.
I don't know how it ever got started the wrong way.
So first of all, your episodes on Genghis Khan, for many people, are the favorite. It's fascinating
to think about events that had so much, like inner ripples, had so much impact on
so much of human civilization. In your view, was he an evil man? Let's go start a discussion of evil
people. Another way to put it is I've read, he's much loved in many parts of the world,
like Mongolia. And I've also read arguments that say that he was quite a progressive for the time.
So where do you put him? Is he a progressive or is he an evil destroyer of humans?
As I often say, I'm not a historian, which is why what I try to bring to the Hardcore History
Podcasts are these sub themes. So each show has a, and they're not, I try to kind of soft peddle
them. So they're not always like really right in front of your face. In that episode, the soft
peddling sub theme had to do with what we refer to as a historical arsonist. And it's because some
historians have taken the position that sometimes, and most of this is earlier stuff, historians
don't do this very much anymore. But these were the wonderful questions I grew up with
that blend, it's almost the intersection between history and philosophy. And the idea was that
sometimes the world has become so overwhelmed with bureaucracy or corruption or just stagnation
that somebody has to come in or some group of people or some force has to come in and do the
equivalent of a forest fire to clear out all the dead wood so that the forest itself can be rejuvenated
and society can then move forward. And there's a lot of these periods where the historians
of the past will portray these figures who come in and do horrific things as creating an almost
service for mankind, right? Creating the foundations for a new world that will be better than the old
one. And it's a recurring theme. And so this was the sub theme of the Kahn's podcast, because
otherwise you don't need me to tell you the story of the Mongols, but I'm going to bring up the
historical arsonist element. But this gets to how the Kahn has been portrayed, right? If you want
to say, oh, yes, he cleared out the dead wood and made for a fruit, well, then it's a positive thing.
If you say, my family was in the forest fire that he set, you're not going to see it that way.
Much of what Genghis Khan is credited with on the upside, right? So things like religious
toleration. And you'll say, well, he was religiously, the Mongols were religiously tolerant. And so
this makes them almost like a liberal reformer kind of thing. But this needs to be seen within
the context of their empire, which was very much like the Roman viewpoint, which is the Romans
didn't care at a lot of times what your local people worshiped. They wanted stability. And if
that kept stability and kept you paying taxes and didn't require the legionaries to come in and
then they didn't care, right? And the Khans were the same way. Like, they don't care what you're
practicing as long as it doesn't disrupt their empire and cause them trouble. But what I always
like to point out is, yes, but the Khan could still come in with his representatives to your town,
decide your daughter was a beautiful woman that they wanted in the Khan's concubine and they
would take them. So how liberal an empire is this, right? So many of the things that they get credit
for as though there's some kind of nice guys may in another way of looking at it just be a simple
mechanism of control, right? A way to keep the empire stable. They're not doing it out of the
goodness of their heart. They have decided that this is the best. And I love because the Mongols were
what we would call a pagan people. Now, I love the fact that they, I think we call it,
I forgot the term we used, had to do with like, like they were hedging their bets religiously,
right? They didn't know which God was the right one. So as long as you're all praying for the
health of the Khan, we're maximizing the chances that whoever the gods are, they get the message,
right? So I think it's been portrayed as something like a liberal empire. And the idea of Mongol
universality is more about conquering the world. And it's like saying, you know, we're going to
bring stability to the world by conquering it. Well, what if that's Hitler, right? He could
make the same case, or Hitler wasn't really the world conqueror like that, because he wouldn't
have been, he wouldn't have been trying to make it equal for all peoples. But my point being that
it kind of takes the positive moral slant out of it. If their motivation wasn't a positive moral
slant to the motivate, and the Mongols didn't see it that way. And I think the way that it's
portrayed is like, and I always like to use this, this, this analogy, but it's like shooting an arrow
and painting a bullseye around it afterwards, right? How do we, how do we justify and make
them look good in a way that they themselves probably, unless we don't have the Mongol
point of view per se? I mean, there's something called the secret history of the Mongols. And
there's things written down by Mongolian overlords through people like Persian and Chinese scribes
later, we don't have their point of view. But it sure doesn't look like this was an attempt to create
some wonderful place where everybody was living a better life than they were before. I think
that's, that's later people putting a nice rosy spin on it. So, but there's an aspect to it.
Maybe you can correct me, because I'm projecting sort of my idea of what it would take to,
to, to conquer so much land is the ideology is emergent. So if I were to guess,
the Mongols started out as exceptionally as warriors who valued excellence in skill of killing,
not even killing, but like the actual practice of war. And you can start out small and you can grow
and grow and grow. And then in order to maintain the stability of the things over which of the
conquered lands, you developed a set of ideas with which you can, like you said, establish control,
but it was emergent. And it seems like the core first principle idea of the Mongols is just to
be excellent warriors. That felt, that felt to me like the starting point. It wasn't some ideology.
Like with Hitler and Stalin, with Hitler, the, there was an ideology that didn't have anything
to do with, with war underneath it. It was more about conquering. It feels like the Mongols started
out more organically, I would say, it's like this phenomenon started emergently. And they were just
like similar to the Native Americans with the Comanches, like the different warrior tribes
that Joe Rogan's currently obsessed with, that led, led me to look into it more. They seem to
just start out just valuing the skill of fighting, whatever the tools of war they had,
which were pretty primitive, but just to be the best warriors that could possibly be,
make a science out of it. Is that, is that crazy to think that there was no ideology behind it in
the beginning? I'm going to back up a second. I'm reminded of the line said about the Romans,
that they create a wasteland and call it peace. That is, but there's a lot of conquerors like
that, right? Where you will sit there. And listen, historians forever have, it's the
famous trade-offs of empire. And they'll say, well, look at the trade that they facilitated.
And look at the religion, all those kinds of things, but they come at the cost of all those
peoples that they conquered forcibly and by force integrated into their empire. The one thing we
need to remember about the Mongols that makes them different than, say, the Romans. And this is
complex stuff and way above my pay grade, but I'm fascinated with it. And it's more like the
Comanches that you just brought up, is that the Mongols are not a settled society. They come from
a nomadic tradition. Now, several generations later, when you have Kublai Khan as the emperor of
China, it's beginning to be a different thing, right? And the Mongols, when their empire broke
up, the ones that were in the so-called settled societies, right? Iran, places like that,
they will become more like, over time, the rulers of those places were traditionally.
And the Mongols in, say, like the Cognate of the Golden Horde, which is still in their traditional
nomadic territories, will remain traditionally more Mongol. But when you start talking about who
the Mongols were, I try to make a distinction. They're not some really super special people.
They're just the latest confederacy in an area that saw nomadic confederacies going back to the
beginning of recorded history, the Skithians, the Sarmatians, the Avars, the Huns, the Magyars.
I mean, these are all the nomadic, the nomads of the Eurasian steppe were huge, huge players in
the history of the world until gunpowder nullified their traditional weapons system,
which I've been fascinated with because their traditional weapons system is not one you could
copy. Because you were talking about being the greatest warriors, you could be every warrior
society I've ever seen values that. What the nomads had of the Eurasian steppe was this relationship
between human beings and animals that changed the equation. It was how they rode horses.
And societies like the Byzantines, which would form one flank of the steppe, and then all the
way on the other side, you had China and below that you had Persia, these societies would all
attempt to create mounted horsemen who used archery. And they did a good job, but they were
never the equals of the nomads because those people were literally raised in the saddle.
They compared them to centaurs. The Comanches, great example, considered to be the best horse
riding warriors in North America. The Comanches, I always loved watching, there's paintings,
George Catlin, the famous painter who painted the Comanches, illustrated it. But the Mongols
and the Scythians and Scythians and the Avars and all these people did it too,
where they would shoot from underneath the horse's neck, hiding behind the horse the whole way.
You look at a picture of somebody doing that and it's insane. This is what the Byzantines
couldn't do and the Chinese couldn't do. It was a different level of harnessing a human-animal
relationship that gave them a military advantage that could not be copied. It could be emulated,
but they were never as good. That's why they always hired these people. They hired mercenaries
from these areas because they were incomparable. It's the combination of people who were shooting
bows and arrows from the time they were toddlers, who were riding from the time they were trying, who
rode all the time. The Huns were bow-legged, the Romans said, because they ate, slept everything
in the saddle. That creates something that is difficult to copy and it gave them a military
advantage. I enjoy reading actually about when that military advantage ended, so 17th and 18th
century, when the Chinese on one flank and the Russians on the other are beginning to use firearms
and stuff to break this military power of these various cons. The Mongols were simply the most
dominating and most successful of the Confederacies, but if you break it down, they really formed
the nucleus at the top of the pyramid, of the apex of the food chain. A lot of the people that
were known as Mongols were really lots of other tribes, non-Mongolian tribes, that when the Mongols
conquer you, after they killed a lot of you, they incorporated you into their Confederacy
and often made you go first. You're going to fight somebody. We're going to make these people go out
in front and suck up all the arrows before we go in and finish the job. I guess a fan of the
Mongols would say that the difference and what made the Mongols different wasn't the weapon system
or the fighting or the warriors or the armor or anything, it was Genghis Khan. If you go look at
the other really dangerous, from the outside world's perspective, dangerous step, nomadic
Confederacies from past history was always when some great leader emerged that could unite the
tribes. You see the same thing in Native American history to a degree too. You had people like Attila
or there was one called Tumen. You go back in history and these people make the history books
because they caused an enormous amount of trouble for their settled neighbors that normally,
I mean Chinese Byzantine and Persian approaches to the steppe people were always the same.
They would pick out tribes to be friendly with. They would give them money, gifts, hire them,
and they would use them against the other tribes. Generally, Byzantine, especially in Chinese
diplomatic history, was all about keeping these tribes separated. Don't let them form Confederations
of large numbers of them because then they're unstoppable. Attila was a perfect example.
The Huns were another large, the Turks, another large Confederacy of these people and they were
devastating when they could unite so the diplomatic policy was don't let them. That's
what made the Mongols different is Genghis Khan united them and then unlike most of the tribal
Confederacies, they were able to hold it together for a few generations.
To linger on the little thread that you started pulling on this man, Genghis Khan,
that was a leader. Temujin, yeah.
What do you think makes a great leader? Maybe if you have other examples throughout history
and great, again, let's use that term loosely. Now I was going to ask for a definition.
Great uniter of whether it's evil or good, it doesn't matter. Is there somebody who stands
out to you, Alexander the Great, so we're talking about military or ideologies. Some people bring
up FDR or, I mean, it could be the founding fathers of this country, or we can go to,
was he a man of the century, up there, Hitler of the 20th century, then Stalin and these people
had really amassed the amount of power that probably has never been seen in the history
of the world. Is there somebody who stands out to you by way of trying to define what makes a
great uniter, great leader in one man or a woman maybe in the future?
Sure. It's an interesting question and I want to have thought a lot about because, well,
let's take Alexander the Great as an example, because Alexander fascinated the world of his
time, fascinated ever since, people have been fascinated with the guy. But Alexander was a
hereditary monarch, right? He was handed the kingdom. He was fascinated.
Right, but he did not need to rise from nothing to get that job. In fact, he reminds me of a lot
of other leaders of Frederick the Great, for example, in Prussia. These are people who inherited
the greatest army of their day. Alexander, unless he was an imbecile, was going to be
great no matter what because, I mean, if you inherit the Wehrmacht, you're going to be able
to do something with it, right? Alexander's father may have been greater, Philip. Philip II
was the guy who literally did create a strong kingdom from a disjointed group of people that
were continually beset by their neighbors. He's the one that reformed that army, took things that
he had learned from other Greek leaders like the Theban leader of Pamanundas, and then laboriously
over his lifetime stabilized the frontiers, built this system. He lost an eye doing it.
His leg was made lame. This was a man who looked like he built the empire and led from the front
ranks. Then who may have been killed by his son, we don't know who assassinated Philip,
but then handed the greatest army the world had ever seen to his son, who then did great
things with it. You see this pattern many times. In my mind, I'm not sure Alexander really can be
that great when you compare him to people who arose from nothing. The difference between what we
would call in the United States the self-made man or the one who inherits a fortune. There's
an old line that it's a slur, but it's about rich people. He was born on third base and
thought he hit a triple, right? Philip was born at home plate and Alexander started on third base.
I try to draw a distinction between them. Genghis Khan is tough because there's two traditions.
The tradition that we grew up with here in the United States and that I grew up learning was
that he was a self-made man. There is a tradition and it may be one of those things that's put
after the fact because a long time ago, whether or not you had blue blood in your veins was an
important distinction. The distinction that you'll often hear from Mongolian history is that this
was a nobleman who had been deprived of his inheritance, so he was a blue blood anyway.
I don't know which is true. There's certainly, I mean, when you look at a Genghis Khan, though,
you have to go, that is a wicked amount of things to have achieved. He's very impressive as a figure.
Attila is very impressive as a figure. Hitler's an interesting figure. He's one of those people
because the more you study about Hitler, the more you wonder where the defining moment was. Because
if you look at his life, I mean, Hitler was a relatively
common soldier in the First World War. I mean, he was brave. He got some decorations. In fact,
the highest decoration he got in the First World War was given to him by a Jewish officer.
He often didn't talk about that decoration even though it was the more prestigious one because
it would open up a whole can of worms you didn't want to get into. I mean, if you said who was
Hitler today, one of the top things you're going to say is he was an antisemite. Well,
then you have to draw a distinction between general, regular antisemitism that was pretty
common in the era and something that was a rabid level of antisemitism. But Hitler didn't seem to
show a rabid level of antisemitism until after or at the very end of the First World War.
So, if this is a defining part of this person's character and much of what we consider to be his
evil stems from that, what happened to this guy when he's an adult, right? He's already fought in
the war to change him so. I mean, it's almost like the old, there was always a movie theme.
Somebody gets hit by something on the head and their whole personality changes, right? I mean,
it almost seems something like that. So, I don't think I call that necessarily a great leader.
To me, the interesting thing about Hitler is what the hell happened to a non-descript person who
didn't really impress anybody with his skills. And then in the 1920s, it's all of a sudden,
as you said, sort of the man of the hour, right? So, that to me is kind of fast. I have this feeling
that Genghis Khan, and we don't really know, was an impressive human being from the get-go. And then
he was raised in this environment with pressure on all sides. You start with this diamond and then
you polish it and you harden it his whole life. Hitler seems to be a very unimpressive gemstone
most of his life, but then all of a sudden. So, I mean, I don't think I can label great leaders.
And I'm always fascinated by that idea that, and I'm trying to remember who the quote was by that,
that great men, oh, Lord Acton. So, great men are often not good men. And that in order to be great,
you would have to jettison many of the moral qualities that we normally would consider
a Jesus or a Gandhi or, you know, these qualities that one looks at as the good,
upstanding moral qualities that we should all aspire to as examples, right? The Buddha,
whatever it might be. Those people wouldn't make good leaders because what you need to be a good
leader often requires the kind of choices that a true philosophical, diogenes moral man wouldn't
make. So, I don't have an answer to your question. How about that? That's a very long way of saying,
I don't know. Just linger a little bit. It does feel like from my study of Hitler,
that the time molded the man versus Genghis Khan, where it feels like he, the man molded his time.
Yes. And I feel that way about a lot of those nomadic Confederacy builders, that they really
seem to be these figures that stand out as extraordinary in one way or another. Remembering,
by the way, that almost all the history of them were written by the enemies that they so mistreated
that they were probably never going to get any good press. They didn't write themselves.
That's a caveat we should always have to basically.
Yes. Nomadic or Native American peoples or tribal peoples anywhere generally do not get the advantage
of being able to write the history of their heroes. Okay. I've recently almost done with
the rise in the fall of the Third Reich. It's one of the historical descriptions of Hitler's rise
to power, Nazi's rise to power. There's a few philosophical things I'd like to
ask you to see if you can help. Like one of the things I think about is,
how does one be a hero in 1930s Nazi Germany? What does it mean to be a hero? What do heroic
actions look like? I think about that because I think about how I move about in this world today.
You know, that we live in really chaotic and tense times where I don't think you want to
draw any parallels between Nazi Germany and modern day in any of the nations we can think about,
but it's not out of the realm of possibility that authoritarian governments take hold,
authoritarian companies take hold. And I'd like to think that I could be in my little small way
and inspire others to take the heroic action before things get bad. And I kind of try to place myself
in what would 1930s Germany look like? Is it possible to stop a Hitler? Is it even the right
way to think about it? And how does one be a hero in it? I mean, you often talk about that living
through a moment in history is very different than looking at that history, looking, you know,
when you look back. I also think about it. Would it be possible to understand what's happening
that the bells of war are ringing? It seems that most people didn't seem to understand late into
the 30s that war is coming. That's fascinating. On the United States side, inside Germany,
like the opposing figures, the German military didn't seem to understand this. Maybe the other
countries, certainly France and England didn't seem to understand this. I kind of tried to put
myself into the 90s, 30s Germany as I'm Jewish, which is another little twist on the whole.
Like what would I do? What should one do? Do you have interesting answers?
So earlier we had talked about Putin and we had talked about patriotism and love of
country and those sorts of things. In order to be a hero in Nazi Germany by our views here,
you would have had to have been anti-patriotic to the average German's viewpoint in the 1930s.
You would have to have opposed your own government and your own country. And that's a very,
it would be a very weird thing to go to people in Germany and say, listen, the only way you're
going to be seen as a good German and a hero to the country that will be your enemies is,
we think you should oppose your own government. It's a strange position to put the people in
a government and saying, you need to be against your leader. You need to oppose your government's
policies. You need to oppose your government. You need to hope and work for its downfall.
That doesn't sound patriotic. It wouldn't sound patriotic here in this country if you made a
similar argument. I will go away from the 1930s and go to the 1940s to answer your questions.
There is movements like the White Rose Movement in Germany, which involved young people really and
from various backgrounds, religious backgrounds often who worked openly against the Nazi government
at a time when power was already consolidated. The Gestapo was in full force and they execute
people who are against the government. These young people would go out and distribute pamphlets.
Many of them got their heads cut off with guillotines for their trouble,
and they knew that that was going to be the penalty. That is a remarkable amount of bravery,
and sacrifice, and willingness to die, and almost not even willingness because they were
so open about it. It's almost a certainty. That's incredibly moving to me. When we talk,
and we had talked earlier about the human spirit and all that kind of thing, there are people in
the German military who opposed and worked against Hitler, for example. To me, that's almost cowardly
compared to what these young people did in the White Rose Movement because those people in the
Wehrmacht, for example, who were secretly trying to undermine Hitler, they're not really putting
their lives on the line to the same degree. I remember once saying there were no conscientious
objectors in Germany as a way to point out to people that you didn't have a choice and you
were going to serve in it. I got letters from Jehovah's Witnesses who said, yes, there were,
and we got sent to the concentration camps. Those are remarkably brave things. It's one thing to have
your own set of standards and values. It's another thing to say, oh, no, I'm going to display them
in a way that with this regime, that's a death sentence. Not just for me, for my family. In
these regimes, there was not a lot of distinction made between father and son and wives. That's a
remarkable sacrifice to make and far beyond what I think I would even be capable of. The admiration
comes from seeing people who appear to be more morally profound than you are yourself.
When I look at this, I look at that kind of thing and I just say, wow, and the funny thing is if you
had gone to most average Germans on the street in 1942 and said, what do you think of these people?
They're going to think of them as traitors who probably got what they deserved. That's the eye
of the beholder thing. It's the power of the state to so propagandize values and morality in a way
that favors the state that you can turn people who today we look at as unbelievably brave and moral
and crusading for righteousness and turn them into enemies of the people. In my mind, it would be
people like that. See, I think, so hero is a funny word and we romanticize the notion,
but if I could drag you back to 1930s Germany from 1940s, I feel like the heroic actions that
doesn't accomplish much is not what I'm referring to. So there's many heroes I look up to that
that like David Goggins, for example, the guy who runs crazy distances. He runs for no purpose
except for the suffering in itself. And I think his willingness to challenge the limits of his mind
is heroic. I guess I'm looking for a different term, which is how could Hitler have been stopped?
My sense is that he could have been stopped in the battle of ideas, where people, millions of
people were suffering economically, were suffering because of the betrayal of World War I in terms
of the love of country and how they felt they were being treated. And a charismatic leader
that inspired love and unity that's not destructive could have emerged. And that's where the battle
should have been fought. I would suggest that we need to take into account the context of the
times that led to Hitler's rise of power and created the conditions where his message resonated.
That is not a message that resonates at all times, right? It is impossible to understand the rise of
Hitler without dealing with the First World War and the aftermath of the First World War and the
inflationary, terrible depression in Germany and all these things. And the dissatisfaction with the
Weimar Republic's government, which was often seen as something put into place by the victorious
powers. Hitler referred to the people that signed those agreements, that signed the armistice as
the November criminals. And he used that as a phrase which resonated with the population. This
was a population that was embittered. And even if they weren't embittered, the times were so
terrible. And the options for operating within the system in a non-radical way seemed totally
discredited, right? You could work through the Weimar Republic, but they tried and it wasn't
working anyway. And then the alternative to the Nazis, who were bully boys in the street,
were communist agitators that to the average conservative Germans seemed no better. So you
have three options if you're an average German person. You can go with the discredited government,
put in power by your enemies that wasn't working anyway. You could go with the Nazis,
who seemed like a bunch of super patriots calling for the restoration of German authority. Or you
could go with the communists. The entire thing seemed like a litany of poor options, right? And
in this realm, Hitler was able to triangulate, if you will. He came off as a person who was going
to restore German greatness at a time when this was a powerful message. But if you don't need
German greatness restored, it doesn't resonate, right? So the reason that your love idea and all
this stuff I don't think would have worked in the time period is because that was not a commodity
that the average German was in search of then. Well, it's interesting to think about whether
greatness can be restored through mechanisms, through ideas that are not so, from our perspective
today, so evil. I don't know what the right term is. But the war continued in a way. So remember
that when Germany, when Hitler is rising to power, the French are in control of parts of Germany,
right? The ruler, one of the main industrial heartlands of Germany, was occupied by the French.
So there's never this point where you're allowed to let the hate dissipate, right? Every time maybe
things were calming down, something else would happen to stick the knife in and twisted a little
bit more from the average German's perspective, right? The reparations, right? So if you say,
okay, well, we're going to get back on our feet. The reparations were crushing. These things prevented
the idea of love or brotherhood and all these things from taking hold. And even if there were
Germans who felt that way, and there most certainly were, it is hard to overcome the power of everyone
else. What I always say when people talk to me about humanity is I believe on individual levels
were capable of everything and anything, good, bad, or indifferent. But collectively, it's different,
right? And in the time period that we're talking about here, messages of peace on earth and love
your enemies and all these sorts of things were absolutely deluged and overwhelmed and drowned
out by the bitterness, the hatred, and let's be honest, the sense that you were continually being
abused by your former enemies. There were a lot of people in the Allied side that realized this
and said, we're setting up the next war. They understood that you can only do certain things
to collective human populations for a certain period of time before it is natural for them to
want to. And you can see German posters from the region, Nazi propaganda posters that show
them breaking off the chains of their enemies. And I mean, Germany awake, right? That was the
great slogan. So I think love is always a difficult option. And in the context of those times,
it was even more disempowered than normal. Well, this goes to the just a linger in it for a little
longer. The question of the inevitability of history. Do you think Hitler could have been
stopped? Do you think this kind of force that you're saying that there was a pain and it was
building, there was a hatred that was building? Do you think there was a way to avert?
I mean, there's two questions could have been a lot worse and could have been better in the
trajectory of history in the 30s and 40s. The most logical, see, we had started this conversation,
it brings a wonderful bow tie into the discussion and buttons it up nicely. We had talked about
force and counter force earlier. The most obvious and much discussed way that Hitler could have
been stopped has nothing to do with Germans. When he remilitarized the Rhineland, everyone talks
about what a couple of French divisions would have done had they simply gone in and contested.
And this was something Hitler was extremely, I mean, it might have been the most nervous time
in his entire career because he was afraid that they would have responded with force
and he was in no position to do anything about it if they did. So this is where you get the people
who say, and Churchill is one of these people too, where they talk about that he should have been
stopped militarily right at the very beginning when he was weak. I don't think, listen, there were
candidates in the Catholic center party and others in the Weimar Republic that maybe could have done
things and it's beyond my understanding of specific German history to talk about it intelligently.
But I do think that had the French responded militarily to Hitler's initial moves into that
area, that he would have been thwarted. And I think he himself believed, if I'm remembering my
reading, that this would have led to his downfall. So the potential, see, what I don't like about
this is that it almost legitimizes military intervention at a very early stage to prevent
worse things from happening. But it might be a pretty clear cut case. But it shows we pointed
out that there was a lot of sympathy on the part of the Allies for the fact that the Germans
probably should have Germany back and this is traditional German land. I mean, they were trying,
in a funny way, it's almost like the love and the sense of justice on the Allies part may have
actually stayed their hand in a way that would have prevented much, much, much worse things later.
But if the times were such that the message of a Hitler resonated, then simply removing Hitler
from the equation would not have removed the context of the times. And that means one of two
things, either you could have had another one, or you could have ended up in a situation equally
bad in a different direction. I don't know what that means because it's hard to imagine anything
could be worse than what actually occurred. But history is funny that way. And that Hitler's
always everyone's favorite example of the difference between the great man theory of history
and the trends and forces theories of history. The times made a Hitler possible and maybe even
desirable to some. If you took him out of the equation, those trends and forces are still in
place. So what does that mean? If you take him out and the door is still open, does somebody else
walk through it? Yeah, it's mathematically speaking, the probability of charismatic leaders
emerge. I'm so torn on that at this point. Here's another way to look at it. The institutional
stability of Germany in that time period was not enough to push back. And there are other periods
in German history. I mean, that Hitler arose in arisen in 1913. He doesn't get anywhere because
Germany's institutional power is enough to simply quash that. It's the fact that Germany was unstable
anyway that prevented a united front that would have kept radicalism from getting out of hand.
Does that make sense? Yes, absolutely. A tricky question on this, just to
stay in this a little longer because I'm not sure how to think about it, is the World War II
versus the Holocaust. We were talking just now about the way that history unrolls itself and
Hitler have been stopped. And I don't quite know what to think about Hitler without the Holocaust.
And perhaps in his thinking how essential the anti-Semitism and the hatred of Jews was,
it feels to me that, I mean, we were just talking about where did he pick up his hatred
of the Jewish people. There's stories in Vienna and so on that it almost is picking up
the idea of anti-Semitism as a really useful tool as opposed to actually believing it in his core.
Do you think World War II as it turned out and Hitler as he turned out would be possible without
anti-Semitism? Could we have avoided the Holocaust or was it an integral part of
the ideology of fascism and the Nazis? Not an integral part of fascism because Mussolini really,
I mean, Mussolini did it to please Hitler, but it wasn't an integral part. What's interesting to me
is that that's the big anomaly in the whole question because anti-Semitism didn't need to be
a part of this at all. Hitler had a conspiratorial view of the world. He was a believer that the
Jews controlled things. The Jews were responsible for both Bolshevism on one side and capitalism
on the other. They ruled the banks. I mean, the United States was a Jew-ified country.
Bolshevism was a Jew-ified sort of a political. In other words, he saw Jews everywhere and he
had that line about if the Jews of Europe force another war to Germany, they'll pay the price
or whatever, but then you have to believe that they're capable of that. The Holocaust is a weird,
weird sidebar to the whole thing. Here's what I've always found interesting. It's a sidebar that
weakened Germany because look at the First World War. Jews fought for Germany. Who was the most
important? This is a very arguable point, but it's just the first one that pops into my head.
Who was the most important Jewish figure that would have maybe been on the German side had the
Germans had a non-antisemitic? Well, listen, that whole part.
I'm starting to know.
Yes, it's not Einstein, but the whole, I should point out that to say Germany or Europe or Russia
or any of those things were not antisemitic is to do injustice to history, right?
Pogroms everywhere. I mean, that is the standard operating procedure. What you see in the
Hitlerian era is an absolute huge spike, right? Because the government has a conspiracy theory
that the Jews have. It's funny because Hitler both thought of them as weak and super powerful
at the same time, right? And as an outsider, people that weakened Germany, the whole idea of
the blood and how that connects to Darwinism and all that sort of stuff is just weird, right?
A real outlier. But Einstein, let's just play with Einstein. If there's no antisemitism in Germany
or none above the normal level, the baseline level, does Einstein leave along with all the other
Jewish scientists? And what does Germany have as increased technological and intellectual
capacity if they stay, right? It's something that actually weakened that state. It's a tragic flaw
in the Hitlerian worldview. Let me, you had mentioned earlier, maybe it was not
integral to his character. Maybe it was a wonderful tool for power. I don't think so.
Somewhere along the line, and really not at the beginning, this guy became absolutely obsessed
with this. With the conspiracy theory. And Jews. And he surrounded himself with people
and theorists. I'm going to use that word really, really sort of loosely. Who believed this too.
And so you have a cabal of people who are reinforcing this idea that the Jews control
the world. He called it international Jewry was a huge part of the problem. And because of that,
they deserve to be punished. They were an enemy within all these kinds of things.
It's a nutty conspiracy theory that the government of one of the most,
I mean, the big thing with Germany was culture, right? They were, they were, they were a leading
figure in, in culture and philosophy and all these kinds of things. And that they could be
overtaken with this wildly, wickedly weird conspiracy theory. And that it would actually
determine things. I mean, Hitler was taking vast amounts of German resources and using it to wipe
out this race when he needed them for all kinds of other things to fight a war of annihilation. So
that is the weirdest part of the whole Nazi phenomenon.
It's the darkest possible silver lining to think about is that the Holocaust may have been in the
hatred of the Jewish people, may have been the thing that avoided Germany getting the nuclear
weapons first. And isn't that a wonderful historical ironic twist that if it weren't so
overlaid with tragedy, a thousand years from now, we'll be seeing something really kind of funny.
Well, that's, that's true. It's fascinating to think as you've talked.
So the seeds of his own destruction, right? The tragic flaw.
And my hope is, this is a discussion I have with my dad as a physicist,
is that evil inherently contains with it that kind of incompetence. So
my dad's discussion sees a physicist and engineer, his belief is that at this time in our history,
the reason we haven't had nuclear like terrorists blow up a nuclear weapon somewhere in the world is
that the kind of people that would be terrorists are simply not competent enough at their job
of being destructive. So like there's a kind of, if you plot it, the more evil you are,
the less able you are. And by evil, I mean purely just like we said, if we were to consider the
hatred of Jewish people as evil, because it's sort of detached from reality, it's like,
like just this pure hatred of something that's grounded on things, you know, conspiracy theories.
If that's evil, then the more you sell yourself, the more you give into these conspiracy theories,
the less capable you are at actually engineering, which is very difficult engineering your
clear weapons and effectively deploying them. So that's the, that's a hopeful message that the
destructive people in this world are by their worldview incompetent in creating the ultimate
destruction. I don't agree with that. Oh boy. I straight up don't agree with that. So why are
we still here? Why haven't we destroyed ourselves? Why haven't the terrorists blow? It's been many
decades. Why haven't we destroyed ourselves to this point? Well, when you say it's been many
decades, many decades, it's like saying in the life of 150 year old person, we've been doing well
for a year. The problem with all these kinds of equations, and it was Bertrand Russell,
right? The philosopher who said so. He said it's unreasonable to expect a man to walk on a tight
rope for 50 years. I mean, the problem is that this is a long game. And let's remember that up
until relatively recently, what would you say, 30 years ago, the nuclear weapons in the world were
really tightly controlled. That was one of the real dangers in the fall of the Soviet Union.
Remember the worry that all of a sudden you were going to have bankrupt former Soviet
republic selling nuclear weapons to terrorists and whatnot. I would suggest, and here's another
problem, is that when we call these terrorists evil, it's easy for an American, for example,
to say that Osama bin Laden is evil. Easy for me to say that. But one man's terrorist is another
man's freedom fighter, as the saying goes. And to other people, he's not. What Osama bin Laden did,
and the people that worked with him, we would call evil genius. The idea of hijacking planes
and flying them into the buildings like that, and that he could pull that off.
That still boggles my mind. It's funny. I'm still stunned by that. And yet,
the idea, here's the funny part, and I hesitate to talk about this because I don't want to give
anyone ideas. But you don't need nuclear weapons to do incredibly grave amounts of danger.
Really, I mean, what one can of gasoline and a big lighter can do in the right place and the right
time and over and over and over again can bring down societies. This is the argument behind
the importance of the stability that a nation-state provides. So when we went in and took out Saddam
Hussein, one of the great counterarguments from some of the people who said, this is a really
stupid thing to do, is that Saddam Hussein was the greatest anti-terror weapon in that region
that you could have because they were a threat to him. And he did it in a way that was much more
repressive than we would ever be. And this is the old line about why we supported right-wing
death squad countries because they were taking out people that would inevitably be a problem for
us if they didn't. And they were able to do it in a way we would never be able to do, supposedly.
We're pretty good at that stuff. Just like the Soviet Union was behind the scenes and
underneath the radar. But the idea that the stability created by powerful and strong,
centralized leadership allowed them, it's almost like outsourcing anti-terror activities, allowed
them to, for their own reasons. I mean, you see the same thing in the Syria situation with the
Assad's. I mean, you can't have an ISIS in that area because that's a threat to the Assad government
who will take care of that for you. And then that helps us by not having an ISIS. So I would suggest
one, that the game is still on on whether or not these people get nuclear weapons in their hands.
I would suggest they don't need them to achieve their goals, really. The crazy thing is if you
start thinking like the Joker in Batman, the terrorist ideas, it's funny, I guess I would be
a great terrorist because I'm just full of those ideas. Oh, you could do this. It's scary to think
of how vulnerable we are. But the whole point is that you as the Joker wouldn't do the terrorist
actions. That's the theory that's so hopeful to me with my dad is that all the ideas, your ability
to generate good ideas, forget nuclear weapons, how you can disrupt the power grid, how you can
disrupt the attack our psychology, attack like with a can of gasoline, like you said, somehow
disrupt the American system of ideas, like that coming up with good ideas there. Are we saying
evil people can't come up with evil genius ideas? That's what I'm saying. We have this Hollywood
story. I don't think history backs that up. I mean, I think you can say with the nuclear weapons it
does, but only because they're so recent. Yes. But I mean, evil genius. I mean, that's almost
proverbial. Okay, so to push back for the fun of it. I don't mean to. I don't want you to leave
this in a terrible mood because I pushed back on every hopeful idea you had. But I tend to be a
little cynical about that stuff. But that goes to the definition of evil, I think, because I'm not
so sure human history has a lot of evil people being competent. I do believe that they mostly,
like in order to be good at doing what may be perceived as evil, you have to be able to construct
an ideology around which you truly believe when you look in the mirror by yourself that you're
doing good for the world. And it's difficult to construct an ideology where destroying the
lives of millions or disrupting the American system, I'm already contradicting myself as I'm
saying. I was just going to say, people have done this already. Yes. But then it's the question
of like about aliens with the idea that if the aliens are all out there, why haven't they visited
us? The same question, if it's so easy to be evil, not easy, if it's possible to be evil,
why haven't we destroyed ourselves? And your statement is from the context of history,
the game is still on. And it's just been a few years since we've found the tools to destroy
ourselves. And one of the challenges of our modern time that we don't often think about this pandemic
kind of revealed is how soft we've gotten in terms of our deep dependence on the system.
So somebody mentioned to me, what happens if power goes out for a day? What happens if power
goes out for a month? Oh, for example, the person that mentioned this was a Berkeley faculty that
I was talking with. He's an astronomer who's observing solar flares. And it's very possible
that a solar flare, they happen all the time to different degrees to knock out the power grid
for months. So just as a thought experiment, what happens if just power goes out for a week
in this country? Like the electromagnetic pulses in the nuclear weapons and all those kinds of
things. But maybe that's an act of nature. And even just the act of nature will reveal
like a little fragility, the fragility of it all. And then the evil can emerge. I mean,
the kind of things that might happen when power goes out, especially during a divisive time.
Well, you won't have food. At baseline level, that would mean that the entire supply chain
begins to break down. And then you have desperation and desperation opens the door to everything.
Can I ask a dark question? As opposed to the other things we've been talking about?
There's always a thread, a hopeful message. I think there'll be a hopeful message on this one
too. You may have the wrong guess. I'm just saying. If you were to bet money on the way that
human civilization destroys itself, or it collapses in some way that is where the result
would be unrecognizable to us as anything akin to progress, what would you say? Is it
nuclear weapons? Is it some societal breakdown through just more traditional kinds of war?
Is it engineered pandemics, nanotechnology? Is it artificial intelligence? Is it something we
can't even expect yet? Do you have a sense of how we humans will destroy ourselves? Or might we live
forever? I think what governs my view of this thing is the ability for us to focus ourselves
collectively. And that gives me the choice of looking at this and saying, what are the odds
we will do X versus Y? Go look at the 62 Cuban Missile Crisis where we looked at the potential
of nuclear war and we stared right in the face of that. To me, I consider that to be,
you want to talk about a hopeful moment. That's one of the rare times in our history where I think
the odds were overwhelmingly that there would be a nuclear war. And I'm not the super Kennedy
worshiper that I grew up in an era where he was, especially amongst people in the Democratic Party,
he was almost worshipped. And I was never that guy, but I will say something.
John F. Kennedy by himself probably made decisions that saved 100 million or more lives
because everyone around him thought he should be taking the road that would have led to those deaths.
And to push back against that is when you look at it now, I mean, again, if you were a betting
person, you would have bet against that. And that's rare, right? So when we talk about how the world
will end, the fact that one person actually had that in their hands meant that it wasn't a collective
decision. Remember, I said I trust people on an individual level, but when we get together,
we're more like a herd and we devolve down to the lowest common denominator. That was something
where the higher ethical ideas of a single human being could come into play and make the decisions
that influence the events. But when we have to act collectively, I get a lot more pessimistic.
So take what we're doing to the planet. And we talk about it always now in terms of climate
change, which I think is far too narrow. And I always get very frustrated when we talk about
these arguments about, is it happening? Is it human? Just look at the trash. Forget climate for a
second. We're destroying the planet because we're not taking care of it. And because what it would
do to take care of it would require collective sacrifices that would require enough of us to
say okay. And we can't get enough of us to say okay, because too many people have to be on board.
It's not John F. Kennedy making one decision from one man. We have to have 85% of us or something
around the world. Not just, you can't say we're going to stop doing damage to the world here
in the United States. If China does it, right? So the amount of people that have to get on board
that train is hard. You get pessimistic hoping for those kinds of shifts unless
it's, you know, Krypton's about to explode. And so I think if you're talking about a gambling
man's view of this, that that's got to be the odds on favorite because it requires such a UNM.
I mean, and the systems maybe aren't even in place, right? The fact that we would need
intergovernmental bodies that are completely discredited now on board and you would have to
subvert the national interests of nation states. I mean, the amount of things that have to go right
in a short period of time where we don't have 600 years to figure this out, right?
So to me, that looks like the most likely just because the things we would have to do
to avoid it seem the most unlikely. Does that make sense?
Yes, absolutely. I believe, call me naive. And just like you said with the individual,
I believe that charismatic leaders, individual leaders will save us.
Like this. What if you don't get them all at the same time? What if you get a charismatic leader
in one country but under or what if you get a charismatic leader in a country that doesn't
really matter that much? Well, it's a ripple effect. So it starts with one leader and their
charisma inspires other leaders. So it's like one aunt queen steps up and then the rest of
the aunt starts behaving. And then there's like little other spikes of leaders that emerge.
And then that's where collaboration emerges. I tend to believe that when you heat up the system and
shit starts getting really chaotic, then the leader, whatever this collective intelligence
that we've developed, the leader will emerge. Do you think there's just as much of a chance though
that the leader would emerge and say the Jews are the people who did all this? That's right.
You know what I'm saying is that the idea that they would come up, you have a charismatic leader
and he's going to come up with the right or she is going to come up with the right solution as
opposed to totally coming up with the wrong solution. I mean, I guess what I'm saying is
you could be right, but a lot of things have to go the right way. But my intuition about the
evolutionary process that led to the creation of human intelligence and consciousness on earth
results in the power of like, if we think of it just the love in the system versus the hate in
the system, that the love is greater. The human kindness potential in the system is greater than
the human hatred potential. And so the leader that is in the time when it's needed, the leader that
inspires love and kindness is more likely to emerge and will have more power. So you have the
hitlers of the world that emerge, but they're actually in a grand scheme of history are not
that impactful. So it's weird to say, but not that many people died in World War II. If you look at
the full range of human history, you know, it's up to 100 million, whatever that is,
with natural pandemics too, you can have those kinds of numbers, but it's still a percentage.
I forget what the percentage is, maybe three, five percent of the human population on earth,
maybe it's a little bit focused on a different region, but it's not destructive to the entirety
of human civilization. So the, I believe that the charismatic leaders, when time is needed,
that do good for the world in the broader sense of good are more likely to emerge than the ones
that say kill all the Jews. It's possible though, and this is just, you know, I've thought about
this all of 30 seconds, but I mean, we're betting money here on the 21st century. Who's going to
win? I think maybe you've divided this into too much of a black and white dichotomy, this love
and good on one side and this evil on another. Let me throw something that might be more in the
center of that linear balancing act, self-interest, which may or may not be good, you know, good,
the good version of it we call enlightened self-interest, right? The bad version of it we
call selfishness, but self-interest to me seems like something more likely to impact the outcome
than either love on one side or evil on the other. Simply a question of what's good for me,
or what's good for my country, or what's good for my point of view, or what's good for my business.
I mean, if you tell me, and maybe I'm a coal miner, or maybe I own a coal mine, if you say to me,
we have to stop using coal because it's hurting the earth, I have a hard time
disentangling that greater good question from my right now good feeding my family question, right?
So I think maybe it's going to be a much more banal thing than good and evil, much more a question
of we're not all going to decide at the same time that the interests that we have are aligned.
Does that make sense? Yeah, totally. But I mean, I've looked at Ayn Rand and Objectivism and kind
of really thought like, how bad or good can things go when everybody's acting selfishly?
But I think we're just talking to ants here with microphones, talking about
ants here with microphones. But the question is, when this spreads, so what do I mean by
love and kindness? I think it's human flourishing on earth and throughout the cosmos.
It feels like whatever the engine that drives human beings is more likely to result in human
flourishing. And people like Hitler are not good for human flourishing. So that's what I mean by
good. Maybe it's an intuition that kindness is an evolutionary advantage. I hate those terms,
I hate to reduce stuff to evolutionary biology always, but it just seems like for us to multiply
throughout the universe, it's good to be kind to each other. And those leaders will always emerge
to save us from the hitlers of the world that want to kind of burn the thing down with a
flame thrower. That's the intuition. But let's talk about, you brought up evolution
several times. Let me play with that for a minute. I think going back to animal times,
we are conditioned to deal with overwhelming threats right in front of us. So I have quite
a bit of faith in humanity when it comes to impending doom right outside our door.
If Krypton's about to explode, I think humanity can rouse themselves to great and would give power
to the people who needed it and be willing to make the sacrifices. But that's what makes,
I think, the pollution slash climate change slash screwing up your environment threat so
particularly insidious is it happens slowly. It defies fight and flight mechanisms. It defies
the natural ability we have to deal with the threat that's right on top of us. And it requires an
amount of foresight that while some people would be fine with that, most people are too worried
and understandably, I think, too worried about today's threat rather than next generation's
threat or whatever it might be. So I mean, when we talk about, when you said, what do you think
the greatest threat is? I think with nuclear weapons, I think, could we have a nuclear war
we darn right could. But I think that there's enough of a inertia against that because people
understand instinctively, if I decide to launch this attack against China and I'm India, we're
going to have 50 million dead people tomorrow. Whereas if you say, we're going to have a whole
planet of dead people in three generations, if we don't start now, I think the evolutionary
way that we have evolved mitigates maybe against that. In other words, I think I would be pleasantly
surprised if we could pull that off. Does that make sense?
Totally. I don't mean to be like the I'm the site predicting doom.
No, it's great. Well, it's fun that way. I think we're both, maybe I'm over the top on the love
thing. Maybe I'm over the top on the doom. So it makes for a fun chat, I think. So one guy that
I've talked to several times is solely becoming a friend is a guy named Elon Musk. He's a big fan
of hardcore history, especially Genghis Khan, a series of episodes, but really all of it,
him and his girlfriend Grimes listen to it. I know Elon.
Yeah, you know Elon? Okay, awesome. So that's like relationship goals, like listen to hardcore
history on the weekend with your loved one. Okay. So let me, if I were to look at the guy
from a perspective of human history, it feels like he will be a little spec that's remembered.
Oh, absolutely.
You think about like the people, what will we remember from our time? Who are the people
we'll remember, whether it's the Hitler's or the Einstein's? Who's going to be? It's hard to
predict when you're in it, but it seems like Elon would be one of those people remembered.
And if I were to guess what he's remembered for, it's the work he's doing with SpaceX and potentially
being the person that we don't know, but the being the person who launched a new era of space
exploration. If we look, you know, centuries from now, if we are successful as human beings,
surviving long enough to venture out into the, you know, toward the stars, it's weird to ask
you this. I don't know what your opinions are, but do you think humans will be a multiplanetary
species in the arc, long arc of history? Do you think Elon will be successful in his dream?
And he doesn't, he doesn't shy away from saying it this way, right? He really wants us to colonize
Mars first, and then colonize other Earth-like planets in other solar systems throughout the
galaxy. Do you have a hope that we humans will venture out towards the stars?
So here's the thing. And this actually, again, dovetails do what we were talking about earlier.
I actually, first of all, I toured SpaceX. And it's hard to get your mind around,
because he's doing what it took governments to do before. Okay. So it's incredible that
we're watching individual companies and stuff doing this.
Doing it faster and cheaper.
Yeah. Well, and pushing the envelope, right? Faster than the governments at the time we're
moving. It really is. I mean, there's a lot of people who I think, who think Elon is overrated,
and you have no idea, right? When you go see it, you have no idea. But that's actually not
what I'm most impressed with. It's Tesla, I'm most impressed with. And the reason why is because
in my mind, we just talked about what I think is the greatest threat, the environmental stuff.
And I talked about our inability, maybe, all at the same time to be willing to sacrifice our
self-interests in order for the goal. And I don't want to put words in Elon's mouth,
so you can talk to him if you want to. But in my mind, what he's done is recognize that problem.
And instead of building a car that's a piece of crap, but it's good for the environment,
so you should drive it, he's trying to create a car that if you're only motivated by your
self-interest, you'll buy it anyway. And it will help the environment and help us transition away
from one of the main causes of damage. I mean, one of the things this pandemic
and the shutdown around the world has done is show us how amazingly quickly the Earth can
actually rejuvenate. We're seeing clear skies in places, species come, and you would have thought
it would have taken decades for some of this stuff. So what if to name just one major pollution
source, we didn't have the pollution caused by automobiles, right? And if you had said to me,
Dan, what do you think the odds of us transitioning away from that were 10 years ago,
I would have said, well, people aren't going to do it because it's inefficient, it's this, it's
that, nobody wants to, but what if you created the vehicle that was superior in every way,
so that if you were just a self-oriented consumer, you'd buy it because you wanted that car.
That's the best way to get around that problem of people not wanting to, I think he's identified
that. And as he's told me before, you know, when the last time a car company was created that
actually, you know, blah, blah, blah, he's right. And so I happen to feel that even though he's
pushing the envelope on the space thing, I think somebody else would have done that someday.
I'm not sure because of the various things he's mentioned, how difficult it is to start there.
I'm not sure that the industries that create vehicles for us would have gone where he's
going to lead them if he didn't force them there through consumer demand by making a better car
that people want it anyway. They'll follow, they'll copy, they'll do all those things.
And yet, who was going to do that? So I hope he doesn't hate me for saying this,
but I happen to think the Tesla idea may alleviate some of the need to get off this
planet because the planet's being destroyed, right? And we're going to colonize Mars probably
anyway if we live long enough. And I think the Tesla idea, not just Elon's version,
but ones that follow from other people, is the best chance of making sure we're around long
enough to see Mars colonize. Does that make sense?
Yeah, totally. And one other thing from my perspective, because I'm now starting a company,
I think the interesting thing about Elon is he serves as a beacon of hope,
like, pragmatically speaking, for people that sort of to push back on our doom conversation from
earlier, that a single individual could build something that allows us as self-interested
individuals to gather together in a collective way to actually alleviate some of the dangers
that face our world. So it gives me hope as an individual that I could build something
that can actually have impact, that counteracts the Stalin's and the Hitler's and all the threats
that face, that human civilization faces, that an individual has that power. I didn't believe
that the individual has that power in the halls of government. I don't feel like any one presidential
candidate can rise up and help the world, unite the world. It feels like from everything I've seen
and you're right with Tesla, it can bring the world together to do good. That's a really powerful
mechanism of whatever you say about capitalism, that you can build companies that start with a
single individual. Of course, there's a collective that grows around that, but the leadership of
a single individual, their ideas, their dreams, their vision can catalyze something that takes
over the world and does good for the entire world. But again, I think the genius of the idea
is that it doesn't require us to go head-to-head with human nature. He's actually built human
nature into the idea by basically saying, I'm not asking you to be an environmental activist.
I'm not asking you to sacrifice to make it. I'm going to sell you a car. You're going to like
better and by buying it, you'll help the environment. That takes into account our foibles as a species
and actually leverages that to work for the greater good. That's the sort of thing that does
turn off my little doom caster cynicism thing a little bit because you're actually hitting us
where we live. You can take somebody who doesn't even believe the environment's a problem,
but they want a Tesla. They're inadvertently helping anyway. I think that's the genius of the idea.
Yeah. I'm telling you, that's one way to make love a much more efficient mechanism of change
than hate. Making it in your self-interest to love somebody.
Making it in your self-interest, creating a product that leads to more love than hate.
You're going to want to love your neighbor because you're going to make a fortune.
There you go. I'm on board.
That's why Elon said love is the answer. I think exactly what he meant.
Okay. Let's try something difficult. You've recorded an episode
steering into the iceberg on your common sense program that has started a lot of conversations.
It's quite moving. It was quite haunting.
It got me a lot of angry emails.
Really?
Of course. I did something I haven't done in 30 years. I endorsed a political candidate
from one of the two main parties, and there were a lot of disillusioned people because of that.
I guess I didn't hear it as an endorsement. I just heard it as a,
the similar flavor of conversation as you have in hardcore history. It's almost a
speaking about modern times in the same voice as you speak about when you talk about history.
It was just a little bit of a haunting view of the world today. I know we were just wearing
our doom caster.
You're going to have me put that right back on, are you?
No. I like the term doom caster. How do we get love to win?
What's the way out of this? Is there some hopeful line that we can walk to
avoid something, and I hate to use the terminology, but something that looks like a civil war,
not necessarily a war of force, but a division to a level where it doesn't any longer feel
like a united States of America with an emphasis on united? Is there a way out?
I read a book a while back. I want to say George Friedman, the strat for a guy,
wrote it. It was something called the next 100 years, I think it was called.
And I remember thinking, I didn't agree with any of it. And one of the things I think he said in
the book was that the United States was going to break up. I'm going from memory here. He might not
have said that at all, but something was stuck in my memory about that. And I remember thinking,
but I think some of the arguments were connected to the differences that we had and the fact that
those differences are being exploited. So we talked about media earlier and the lack of truth and
everything. We have a media climate that is incentivized to take the wedges in our society
and make them wider. And there's no countervailing force to do the opposite or to help.
So there was a famous memo from a group called Project for a New American Century,
and they took it down, but the Wayback Machine online still has it. And it happened before 9-11,
spawned all kinds of conspiracy theories because it was saying something to the effect of,
and I'm really paraphrasing here, but that the United States needs another Pearl Harbor type
event because those galvanize a country that without those kinds of events periodically is
naturally geared towards pulling itself apart. And it's those periodic events that act as the
countervailing force that otherwise is not there. If that's true, then we are naturally inclined
towards pulling ourselves apart. So to have a media environment that makes money off
widening those divisions, which we do. I mean, I was in talk radio and it has those people,
the people that used to scream at me because I wouldn't do it, but I mean, we would have these
terrible conversations after every broadcast where I'd be in there with the program director and
they're yelling at me about heat. Heat was the word. They create more heat. Well, what is heat,
right? Heat is division, right? And they want the heat not because they're political,
they're not Republicans or Democrats either. We want listeners and we want engagement and
involvement. And because of the constructs of the format, you don't have a lot of time to get it.
So you can't have me giving you like on a podcast an hour and a half or two hours where we build a
logical argument and you're with me the whole way, your audience is changing every 15 minutes.
So whatever points you make to create interest and intrigue and engagement have to be
knee jerk right now. They told me once that the audience has to know where you stand on every
single issue within five minutes of turning on your show. In other words, you have to be part
of a linear set of political beliefs so that if you feel A about subject A, then you must feel D
about subject D. And I don't even need to hear your opinion on it because if you feel that way
about A, you're going to feel that way about D. This is a system that is designed to pull us
apart for profit, but not because they want to pull us apart, right? It's a byproduct of the profit.
That's one little example of 50 examples in our society that work in that same fashion.
So what that project for a new American Century document was saying is that we're naturally
inclined towards disunity and without things to occasionally ratchet the unity back up again
so that we can start from the baseline again and then pull ourselves apart till the next Pearl Harbor
that you'll pull yourself apart, which I think that's what the George Friedman book was saying
that I disagreed with so much at the time. So in answer to your question about civil wars,
we can't have the same kind of civil war because we don't have a geographical division that's as
clear-cut as the one we had before, right? You had a basically North-South line and some border
states. It was set up for that kind of a split. Now, we're divided within communities, within
families, within gerrymandered voting districts and precincts, right? So you can't disengage.
We're stuck with each other. So if there's a civil war now, for lack of a better word,
what it might seem like is the late 1960s, early 1970s, where you had the bombings and, you know,
let's call it domestic terrorism and things like that, because that would seem to be
something that once again, you don't even need a large chunk of the country pulling apart.
10% of people who think it's the end times can do the damage, just like we talked about terrorism
before and a can of gas and a big lighter. I've lived in a bunch of places and I won't give anybody
ideas where a can of gas and a big lighter would take a thousand houses down before you could
blink, right? That terrorist doesn't have to be from the Middle East, doesn't have to have some
sort of a fundamentalist religious agenda. It could just be somebody really pissed off about
the election results. So once again, if we're playing an odds game here, everybody has to behave
for this to work right. Only a few people have to misbehave for this thing to go sideways. And
remember, for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. So you don't even have to have
those people doing all these things. All they have to do is start a tit for tat retribution cycle.
And there's an escalation. Yes. And it creates a momentum of its own,
which leads fundamentally, if you follow the chain of events down there to some form of
dictatorial government as the only way to create stability, right? You want to destroy the Republic
and have a dictator? That's how you do. And there are parallels to Nazi Germany, the burning of the
Reichstag, blah, blah, blah. I'm the doomcaster again. And some of it could be manufactured
by those seeking authoritarian power. Absolutely. Like the Reichstag fire was. Or the Polish soldiers
that fired over the border before the invasion in 1939. To fight the devil's advocate with an
angel's advocate, I would say, just as our conversation about Elon, it feels like individuals
have power to unite us, to be that force of unity. So you mentioned the media. I think
you're one of the great podcasters in history. Joe Rogan is a long form, whatever. It's not
podcasting. It's actually whatever the- Very infrequent is what it is, no matter what it is.
But the basic process of it is you go deep and you stay deep and the listener stays with you
for a long time. So I'm just looking at the numbers. We're almost three hours in. And
from previous episodes, I can tell you that about 300,000 people are still listening to the sound of
our voice three hours in. So usually it's 300,000 to 500,000 people listen and they two- Congratulations,
by the way. That's wonderful. Joe Rogan is like 10 times that. And so he has power to unite.
You have power to unite. There's a few people with voices that it feels like they have power to
unite. Even if you quote unquote endorse a candidate and so on, there's still- It feels to me that
speaking of- I don't want to keep saying love, but it's love and maybe unity more
practically speaking that like sanity, that like respect for those you don't agree with or don't
understand. So empathy, just a few voices of those can help us avoid the really importantly,
not avoid the singular events, like you said, of somebody starting a fire and so on, but avoid
the escalation of it, the preparedness of the populace to escalate those events. To turn a
singular event in a single riot or a shooting or even something much more dramatic than that,
to turn that into something that creates ripples that grow as opposed to ripples that fade away.
So I would like to put responsibility on somebody like you and me in some small way. And Joe,
being cognizant of the fact that a lot of very destructive things might happen in November
and a few voices can save us is the feeling I have. Not by saying who you should vote for
or any of that kind of stuff, but really by being the voice of calm that calms the seas
from- or whatever the analogy is from boiling up. Because I truly am worried about-
this is the first time this year when I sometimes, I somehow have felt that the American project
will go on forever. When I came to this country, I just believed and I think I'm young, like,
you know, I have a dream of creating a company that will do a lot of good for the world.
And I thought that America is the beacon of hope for the world and the idea is a freedom,
but also the idea of empowering companies that can do some good for the world. And I'm just worried
about this America that filled me, a kid that came from- our family came from nothing and from,
you know, Russia as it was, Soviet Union as it was, to be able to do anything in this new country.
I'm just worried about it. And it feels like a few people can still keep this project going,
like people like Elon, people like Joe. Is there- do you have a bit of that hope?
I'm watching this experiment with social media right now. And I don't even mean social media,
really expand that out to- I mean, I feel like we're all guinea pigs right now watching-
you know, I have two kids and just watching- and there's a three-year space between the two of them.
One's 18, the other's 15. And just, you know, in- when I was a kid, a person who was 18 and 15
would not be that different. Just three years difference, more maturity, but their life experiences
you would easily classify those two people as being in the same generation. Now, because of the speed
of technological change, there is a vast difference between my 18-year-old and my 15-year-old and not
in the maturity question, just in what apps they use, how they relate to each other, how they deal
with their peers, their social skills, all those kinds of things where you turn around and go,
this is uncharted territory. We've never been here. So it's going to be interesting to see
what effect that has on society. Now, as that relates to your question, the most upsetting
part about all that is reading how people treat each other online. And, you know,
there's lots of theories about this. The fact that some of it is just for trolling laughs,
that some of it is just people are not interacting face to face, so they feel free to treat each
other that way. And I, of course, I'm trying to figure out how how if this is how we have always
been as people, right? We've always been this way, but we've never had the means to post our
feelings publicly about it. Or if the environment and the social media and everything else has
provided a change and changed us into something else. Either way, when one reads how we treat
one another, and the horrible things we say about one another online, which seems like it
shouldn't be that big of deal, they're just words, but they have a cumulative effect. I mean, when
you, I was reading Megan Markle, who I don't know a lot about because it's too much of the
pop side of culture for me to pale. But I read a story the other day where she was talking about
the abuse she took online and how incredibly overwhelming it was and how many people were
doing it. And you think to yourself, okay, this is something that people who were in positions
of what you were discussing earlier never had to deal with. Let me ask you something, and boy,
this is the ultimate doom caster thing of all time to say. When you think of historical figures
that push things like love and peace and creating bridges between enemies, when you think of what
happened to those people, first of all, they're very dangerous. Every society in the world has a
better time, easier time dealing with violence and things like that than they do nonviolence.
Nonviolence is really difficult for governments to deal with, for example. What happens to
Gandhi and Jesus and Martin Luther King? And you think about all those people, right?
When they're that day, it's ironic, isn't it, that these people who push for peaceful solutions
are so often killed? But it's because they're effective. And when they're killed, the effectiveness
is diminished. Why are they killed? Because they're effective. And the only way to stop them is to
eliminate them because they're charismatic leaders who don't come around every day. And if you
eliminate them from the scene, the odds are you're not going to get another one for a while.
I guess what I'm saying is the very things you're talking about, which would have the effect you
think it would, right? They would destabilize systems in a way that most of us would consider
positive. But those systems have a way of protecting themselves, right? And so I feel like
history shows, history is pretty pessimistic, I think, by and large, if only because we can find
so many examples that just sound pessimistic. But I feel like people who are dangerous to the
way things are tend to be removed. Yes. But there's two things to say. I feel like you're right,
that history, I feel like the ripples that love leaves in history are less obvious to detect,
but are actually more transformational. Well, one could make a case about, I mean,
if you want to talk about the long term value of a Jesus, a Gandhi, yes, those people's ripples
are still affecting people today. I agree. And that's, you feel those ripples through the general
improvement of the quality of life that we see throughout the generations. You feel the ripples
through the growth. I'll go along with you on that. Okay. But even if that's not true,
I tend to believe that, and by the way, the company that I'm working on is a competitor,
is exactly attacking this, which is a competitor to Twitter. I think I can build a better Twitter
as a first step. There's a long story in there. I think a three-year-old child could build a better
and that this is not to denigrate you. I'm sure yours would be better than a three-year-old,
but in Twitter is so. And listen, Facebook too, they're really awful platforms for
intellectual discussion and meaningful discussion. And I'm on it. So let me just say I'm part of
the problem. We're new to this. So it wasn't obvious at the time how to do it. I agree.
It's now a three-year-old can do it. I tend to believe that we live in a time where the tools
that people that are interested in providing love, the weapons of love are much more powerful.
So the one nice thing about technology is it allows anyone to build a company that's more
powerful than any government. So that could be very destructive, but it could be also very
positive. And I tend to believe that somebody like Elon that wants to do good for the world,
somebody like me and many like me, could have more power than any one government.
And by power, I mean the power to affect change, which is different from God.
What do you do with government? And I don't mean to interrupt you, but I'll forget my
friend. I'm getting old. But I mean, how do you deal with the fact that already governments who
are afraid of this are walling off their own internet systems as a way to create firewalls
simply to prevent you from doing what you're talking about? In other words,
if there's an old line that if voting really changed anything, they'd never allow it.
But if love through a modern day successor to Twitter would really do what you want it to do,
and this would destabilize governments, do you think that governments would take countermeasures
to squash that love before it got too dangerous?
There's several answers. One, first of all, I don't actually to push back on something you
said earlier, I don't think love is as much of an enemy of the state as one would think.
Different states have different views.
I think the states want power, and I don't always think that love is in tension with power.
I think it's not just about love, it's about rationality, it's reason,
it's empathy, all of those things. I don't necessarily think there always have to be
by definition in conflict with each other. That's one sense, I feel like, basically,
you can trojan horse love behind, but you have to be good at it. This is the thing,
is you have to be conscious of the way these states think. The fact that China bans certain
services and so on, that means the companies weren't eloquent, whoever the companies are,
weren't actually good at infiltrating. I think, isn't that a song? Love is a battlefield?
It's all a game, and you have to be good at the game. Just like Elon, we said with Tesla and
saving the environment, that's not just by getting on a stage and saying it's important
to save the environment. It's by building a product that people can't help but love,
and then convincing Hollywood stars to love it. There's a game to be played.
Okay, so let me build on that, because I think there's a way to see this. I think you're right.
So it has to do with the story about the 1960s. In the vast scheme of things, the 1960s looks
like a revival of neo-romantic ideas. I had a buddy of mine several years, well, two decades
older than I was, who was in the 60s, went to the protest, did all those kind of things.
We were talking about it, and I was romanticizing it. He said, don't romanticize it. He goes,
let me tell you, most of the people that went to those protests and did all those things,
all they were there was to meet girls and have a good time. It wasn't so, but
it became in vogue to have all. In other words, let's talk about your empathy and love.
You're never going to, in my opinion, grab that great mass of people that are only in it for
them, they're interested in whatever it were. But if meeting girls for a young teenage guy
requires you to feign empathy, requires you to read deeper subjects because that's what people
are into. You can almost, as a silly way to be trendy, you could make maybe empathy trendy,
love trendy, solutions that are the opposite of that, the kind of things that people inherently
will not put up with you. In other words, the possibility exists to change the zeitgeist
and reorient it in a way that even if most of the people aren't serious about it,
the results are the same. Does that make sense? Absolutely. Okay. So we've found a meeting of
them on this. Yeah, exactly. Creating incentives that encourage the best and the most beautiful
aspects of human nature. They can't start a will. It all boils down to meeting girls and boys.
Once again, you're getting to the bottom of the evolutionary motivations and you're always on
a safe ground when you do that. That's a little difficult for me. And I'm sure it's actually
difficult for you to listen to me say complimenting you, but it's difficult for both of us.
But you and I, as I mentioned to you, I think I've been friends for a long time, it's just been one
way. It's two-way now. It's two-way now. So that's the beauty of podcasting. I mean,
I've just been fortunate enough with this particular podcast that I see it in people's eyes when they
meet me, that they've been friends with me for a few years now. And we become fast friends
actually after we start talking. But it's one way in the vet in that first moment.
There's something about, especially hardcore history that I do some crazy challenges and
running and stuff. I remember in particular, probably don't have time, one of my favorite
episodes, the pain-fotainment one. Some people hate that episode. Because it's too real. Yeah,
they can't listen to it. It's by Darkest One. We wanted to set a baseline. That's the baseline.
But I remember listening to that when I ran 22 miles from me, that was a long distance.
Oh, wow. That's pain-fotainment right there. Yeah. And it just pulls you in and there's
something so powerful about this particular creation that's bigger than you actually,
that you've created. It's kind of interesting. I think anything that is successful like that,
like Elon stuff too, it becomes bigger than you. And that's what you're hoping for,
right? Yeah, absolutely. Didn't mean to interrupt you. I apologize.
I guess when a question I have, if you look in the mirror, but you also look at me,
what advice would you give to yourself and to me and to other podcasters, maybe to Joe Rogan,
about this journey that we're on? I feel like it's something special. I'm not sure exactly what's
happening, but it feels like podcasting is special. What advice, and I'm relatively new to it,
but what advice do you have for people that are carrying this flame and traveling this journey?
Well, I'm often asked for advice by new podcasters, people just starting out. And so,
I have sort of a tried and true list of do's and don'ts. But I don't have advice or suggestions
for you or for Joe. Joe doesn't need anything from me. Joe's figured it out, right? I mean,
he hasn't yet. He's still a confused kid curious about the world. But that's the genius of it.
That's what makes it work, right? That's what Joe's brand is, right? I guess what I'm saying is,
is by the time you reach the stage that you're at or Joe's at, they have figured this out.
The people that sometimes need help are brand new people trying to figure out what do I do
with my first show and how do I talk to them? And I have standard answers for that. But you found
your niche. I mean, you don't need me to tell you what to do. As a matter of fact, I might ask you
questions about how you do what you do, right? Well, there's, I guess there's specific things
that we were talking offline about monetization. That's a fascinating one. Very difficult as an
independent, yeah. And one of the things that Joe is facing with, I don't know if you're paying
attention, but he joined Spotify with a $100 million deal before going exclusive on their
platform. The idea of exclusivity, that one, I don't give a damn about money personally,
but I'm single. And I like living in a shitty place. So I enjoy, so I guess makes it easy.
You get the freedom, right? To not care, yeah.
The freedom. Materials is slate.
Not saving for anybody's college.
Exactly. Yeah. Okay. So on that point, but I also, okay, maybe it's romanticization,
but I feel like podcasting is pirate radio. And when I first heard about Spotify,
partnering up with Joe, I was like, you know, fuck the man. I said, I even, I drafted a few
tweets and so on, just like attacking Spotify, then I calmed myself down that you can't lock
up the special thing we have. But then I realized that maybe that these are vehicles for just reaching
more people and actually respecting podcasters more and so on. So that's what I mean by it's
unclear what the journey is, because you also serve as beacon for now there's like millions,
millions, one million plus podcasters. I wonder what the journey is. Do you have a sense?
Are you romantic in the same kind of way in feeling that because you have roots in radio too?
Do you feel that podcasting is pirate radio? Or is the Spotify thing one possible avenue?
Are you nervous about Joe as a fan, as a friend of Joe? Or is this a good thing for us?
So my history of how I got involved in podcasting is interesting. I was in radio,
and then I started a company back in the era where the dot-com boom was happening and everybody
was being bought up and it just seemed like a great idea, right? I did it with six other people,
and the whole goal of the company was we had to invent the term. I'm sure everybody,
there's other places that invented it at the same time, but what we were pitching
to investors was something called amateur content. So this is before YouTube, before podcasting,
before all this stuff. And my job was to be the evangelist, and I would go to these people
and talk and sing the praises of all the ways that amateur content was going to be great.
And I never got a bite. And they all told me the same thing. This isn't going to take off
because anybody who's good is already going to be making money at this. And I kept saying,
forget that. We're talking about scale here. If you have millions of pieces of content being made
every week, a small percentage is going to be good no matter what, right? 16-year-olds will
know what other 16-year-olds like. And I kept pushing this nobody bit. But the podcast grew
out of that because if you're talking about amateur content in 1999, well, then you're already,
you're ahead of the game in terms of not seeing where it's going to go financially,
but seeing where it's going to go technologically. And so when we started the podcast in 2005,
and it was the political one, not hardcore history, which was an outgrowth of the old radio show,
we didn't have any financial ideas. We were simply trying to get our handle on the technology and
how you distribute it to people and all that. And it was years later that we tried to figure
out, okay, how can we get enough money to just support us while we're doing this? And the cheap
and the easy way was just to ask listeners to donate like a PBS kind of model. And that was
the original model. So then once we started down that, we figured out other models and
the advertising thing and we sell the old shows. And so all these became ways for us to support
ourselves. But as podcasting matured and as more operating systems developed and phones were developed
and all these kinds of things, every one of those developments, which actually made it easier for
people to get the podcast actually made it more complex to make money off of them. So while our
audience was building, the amount of time and effort we had to put into the monetization side
began to skyrocket. So to get back to your Spotify question, to use just one example,
there's a lot of people who are doing similar things. In this day and age, we just sell MP3
files and all you had to have was an MP3 player, it's cheap and dirty. Now every time there's an
OS upgrade, something breaks for us. So we're having, I mean, my choices are at this point to
start hiring staff, more staff, people and then be a human resources manager. I mean, the pirate
radio side of this was the pirate radio side of this because you didn't need anybody, but
you or you and another, I mean, you could just do this lean and mean and it's becoming hard to
do it lean and mean now. So if somebody like a Spotify comes in and says, hey, we'll handle
that stuff for you. In the past, I would just say, f off, we don't need you. I don't mind. And I
definitely am not making what we could make on this. But what we would have to do to make that
is onerous to me. But it's becoming onerous to me day to day anyway. And so if somebody were to
come in and say, hey, we'll pick that up for you, we will not interfere with your content at all.
We won't. And in my case, you can't say we need to show a month because that ain't happening, right?
So I mean, everybody's, everybody's design is different, right? So it doesn't, you know,
there's not one size fits all. But I guess as a longtime pirate podcaster, there are, you know,
we've been looking to partner with people, but nobody's right for us to partner with me. So I'm
always looking for ways to take that side of it off my plate, because I'm not interested in that
side. All I want to do is the shows and the, you know, it's really at this point, you shouldn't
call yourself an artist because some, you know, that's something to be decided by. But I mean,
we're, we're trying to do art and there's something very satisfying in that. But the part that I
can't stand is the, the increasing amount of time, the monetization question takes on us.
And so there's a case to be made, I guess is what I'm saying, that if a partnership with some
outside firm enhances your ability to do the art without disenhancing your ability to do the art,
it's, the word I'm looking for here is it's, it's, it's enticing. I don't like big companies.
So I'm afraid of whatever strings might come with that. And if I'm Joe Rogan, and I'm talking
about subjects that can make company, public companies, you know, a little nervous, I would
certainly be careful. But at the same time, people who are not in this game don't understand
the problems that literally, I mean, just all the operating systems, all the pod catchers,
every time some new pod catcher comes out, makes it easier to get the podcast,
that's something we have to account for on the back end. And I'm not exactly the technological
wizard of all time. So I think it is maybe, maybe the short answer is, is that as the medium develops,
it's becoming something that you have to consider, not because you want to sell out,
but because you want to keep going. And it's becoming harder and harder to be pirate-like
in this environment. The thing that convinced me, especially inside Spotify, is that they
understand. So if you walk into this whole thing with some skepticism, as you're saying,
of big companies, then then it works because Spotify understands the magic that makes podcasting,
or they appear to, in part. At least they understand enough to respect Joe Rogan. And despite what,
I don't know if you, so there's the internet and there's people with opinions on the internet.
Really? Yes.
And they have opinions about Joe and Spotify. But the reality is, there's two things,
in private conversation with Joe, and in general, there's two important things. One,
Spotify literally doesn't tell Joe anything. All the people that think that Spotify is somehow
pushing Joe in this direction or that. It's a contractual. Didn't he insist upon that?
It's in the contract. But also, companies have a way of, even with the contract,
they sure do, to be marketing people. Hey, I know we're not forcing you.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I hate that.
Yeah. But Joe, what you and Joe are the same, and Spotify is smart enough not to send a single
email of that kind. That's really smart. And they leave them be. There is meetings inside
Spotify that people complain, but those meetings never reach Joe. That's company stuff. And the
idea that Spotify is different than Pirate Radio, the difficult thing about podcasting
is nobody gives a damn about your podcast. You're alone in this. I mean, there's fans and stuff,
but nobody's looking out for you. Yeah. And the nice thing about Spotify is they want Joe's
podcast to succeed even more. What Joe talked about is that's the difference between YouTube
and Spotify. Spotify wants to be the Netflix of podcasting. And what Netflix does is they
don't want to control you in any way, but they want to create a platform where you can flourish.
Your interests are aligned. Interests are aligned.
So let me bring up something that let's make a distinction, because not all
companies who do this are the same. And you brought up YouTube and Spotify. But to me,
YouTube is at least more like Spotify than some of these smaller... The term is walled garden,
right? You've heard the term walled garden. Okay. So I've been around podcasting so long now that
I've seen rounds of consolidation over the years. And they come in waves. And all of a sudden,
so you'll get... And I'm not going to mention any names. But up until recently, the consolidation
was happening with relatively small firms compared to people like Spotify. And the problem was,
is that by deciding to consolidate your materials in a walled garden, you are walling yourself off
from audience, right? So your choice is, I'm going to accept this amount of money from this company,
but the loss is going to be a large chunk of my audience. And that's a catch 22 because
you're negotiating power with that company is based on your audience size. So signing up with
them diminishes your audience size, you lose negotiating power. But when you get to the level
of the Spotify to just pick them out, there's other players, but you brought up Spotify specifically,
these are people who can potentially, potentially enhance your audience over time. And so the risk
to you is lower because if you decide in a year or two, whatever the licensing agreements term is,
that you're done with them and you want to leave, instead of how you would have been with some of
these smaller walled gardens where you're walking away with a fraction of the audience you walked
in with, you have the potential to walk out with whatever you got in the original deal, plus a
larger audience because their algorithms and everything are designed to push people to your
content if they think you'd like. So it takes away some of the downside risk, which, which
alleviates and if you can write an agreement like Joe Rogan, I mean, where you've protected your,
your freedom to put the content out the way you want. So and if some of the downside risk is
mitigated, and if you eliminate the problem of trying to monetize and stay up with the latest
tech, then it might be worth it. I, you know, I'm scared of things like that. But at the same time,
I'm trying to not be an idiot about it. And I can be an idiot about it. And when you've been doing
it as independently for as long as I have, the inertia of that has a force all its own.
But I'm, I'm, I'm inhibited enough in what I'm trying to do on this other end, that it's opened
me at least to listening to people. But listen, at the same time, I love my audience. And it sounds
like a cliche, but they're literally the reason I'm here. So I want to make sure that whatever I do,
if I can, is in keeping with a relationship that I've developed with these people over 15 years.
But like you said, no matter what you do, you are, because see, here's the thing, if you don't sign
up with one of those companies to make it easier for them to get your stuff on this hand, they
might yell at you for how difficult it is because the new, the new, the new operating system just
updated and you just, I can't get your stuff. So either way you're opening yourself up to
ridicule at this point, all of that makes it easier to go, well, if the right deal came along and
weren't screwing me and they weren't screwing my audience and blah, blah, blah. You know, I mean,
again, in this business, when you're talking about cutting edge technology that is ever changing,
and as you said, a million podcasts and growing, I think you have to try to maintain flexibility.
And especially if they can mitigate the downside risk, I think you have to, I think you'd be an
idiot to not at least try to stay up on the current trends. And look, I'm watching Joe,
I'm going, okay, let's see how it goes for Joe. I mean, if, if, if he's like, ah, this is terrible,
I'm getting out of this, you go, okay, those people are off. You know, so Joe's, Joe's put
himself out as a guinea pig and I, and the rest of us, guinea pigs appreciate it.
As a huge, as a fan of your show and as a fan of Netflix, the people there, I think I can speak
for like millions of people in hope that the hardcore history comes to Netflix or if Spotify
becomes the Netflix, the podcasting that just Spotify, there's something at its best that they
bring out the, you said artists. So I can say it is they bring out the best out of the artists.
They, they remove some of the headache and somehow like they put at their best, Netflix,
for example, is able to enforce and find the, the beauty and the power in the creations that you
make even better than you. Like they don't interfere with the creations, but they somehow,
it's a branding thing probably to- Yeah, the interfering would be, that would be a no go from
Netflix. That's right. Absolutely. That can't, that can't happen. But that's why Netflix is
masterful. They seem to not interfere with the talent as opposed to I could throw other people
under the bus. There's a lot of places under the bus that could be thrown. Absolutely. So I would
love, I know there's probably people screaming yes right now in terms of hardcore history on
Netflix would be awesome. And I don't love asking this question, but it's asked probably the most
popular question that's unanswerable. So let me try to ask it in a way that you would actually
answer it, which is, of course, you said you don't release shows very often. And the question is,
the requests and the questions is, well, can you tell Dan to do one on the Civil War? Can
you tell Dan to do one on the pulling bottom part? Can you, can you tell him to do one? You know,
every, every topic and you've spoken to this, actually your answer about the Civil War is
quite interesting. I didn't know you knew what my answer about the Civil War was. That, that you
don't, as a military historian, you enjoy in particular when there is differences in the
armies as opposed to contrasts as with the Civil War, which like blew my mind when I heard you say
is, you know, it's, there's not an interesting, a deep intricate contrast between the two opposing
sites like the Roman Civil Wars where it's legionary against legionary. Yeah. Is, and you've also
said that you kind of the shows you work on are ones where you have some roots of fundamental
understanding about that period. And, and so like when you work on a show, it's basically like pulling
at those strings further and like refreshing your mind and learning. Definitely done the research.
Wow. These are like words out of my mouth. Yeah. You're right. So, but is there something like,
like shower thoughts on Reddit? Is there some ideas that are like lingering in your head about
possible future episodes? Is there things that, whether you not committing to anything, but
whether you're going to do it or not, is there something that's like makes you think, hmm,
that would be interesting to, to pull at that thread a little bit? Oh yeah. We have things we
keep in our back pocket for later. So blueprint for Armageddon, the first World War series we did,
that was in my back pocket the whole time. And when the centennial of the war happened, it just
seemed to be the likely time to bring out what was. That was a hell of a series. That's probably
one of my favorite series. That's probably one of my favorite series. My rear end, man. I have to
tell you. Psychologically, you mean? Well, just, you know, when you get to these, I think,
I'm guessing here, I think it's 26 hours, all pieces together. Think about, and we don't do
scripts. It's improvised. Yeah. So think about what 2020, I had somebody write on Twitter just
yesterday saying, he said something like, I'm not seeing the dedication here. You're only getting
2.5 shows out a year. And I wanted to say, man, you have no idea what the only people who
understand, really, are other history podcasters. And even they don't generally do 26 hours.
You know, that was a two year endeavor. As I said, the first show we ever did was like 15 minutes.
I could crank out one of those a month. But when you're doing, I mean, the last show we did on
the fall of the Roman Republic was five and a half hours. That's a book, right? And it was part
six or something. So, I mean, you just do the math. And it felt like you were sorry to interrupt
on World War I. It felt like you were emotionally pulled in to it. Like, it felt taxing.
I was gonna say, if that's a good thing, though, because that, you know, and I think we said during
the show, that was the feeling that the people at the time have. And I think at one point,
we said, this is starting to seem gruesomely repetitive. Now you know how the people at the
time felt. So in other words, that had sort of inadvertently, because when you improvise a show,
some of these things are inadvertent, but it had inadvertently created the right climate for
having a sense of empathy with the storyline. And to me, that those are the serendipitous
moments that make this art and not some sort of paint by the numbers kind of endeavor, you know?
And that's to me, that wouldn't have happened had we scripted it out.
So it's mostly you just bring the tools of knowledge to the table and then in large part
improvise like the actual wording. I always say we make it like they made things like spinal tap
and some of those other things where the material, so I do have notes about things like on page 427
of this book, you have this quote, so that I know, aha, I'm at the point where I can drop that in.
And sometimes I'll write notes saying, here's where you left off yesterday. So I remember.
But in the improvisation, you end up throwing a lot out. And so like, but it allows us to go off
on tangents, like we'll try things like I'll sit there and go, I wonder what this would sound like
and I'll spend two days going down that road and then I'll listen to it and go, doesn't work. But
that's, you know, like writers do this all the time. It's called killing your babies, right?
You got can't, you know, but people go so this guy goes, I'm not seeing the dedication. He has no
idea how many things were thrown out. I did an hour and a half. I had an hour and a half into the
current show about two months ago. And I listened to it and I just went, you know what, it's not
right. Boom, out the window. There goes six weeks of work. Yeah. Right. But here's the problem.
You trust your science intro. Do you trust your judgment on that? No. No. But here's the thing.
Our show is a little different than other people's Joe Rogan called it evergreen content. In other
words, my political show is like a car you buy. And the minute you drive it off the lot,
it loses half its value, right? Because it's not current anymore. These shows are
are just as good or just as bad five years from now as they are when we do, although the standards
on the internet change. So when I listen to my old shows, I cringe sometimes because the standards
are so much higher now. But when you're creating evergreen content, you have two audiences to worry
about. You have the audience that's waiting for the next show and they've already heard the other
ones and they're impatient and they're telling you on Twitter, where is it? But you have show,
the show is also for people five years from now who haven't discovered it yet and who don't care
a wint for how long it took because they're going to be able to download the whole and all they care
about is quality. And so what I always tell new podcasters is they always say, I read all these
things. They say it's very important you have a schedule release schedule. Well, it's not more
important than putting out a good piece of work. And the audience will forgive me if it takes too
long, but it's really good when you get it. They will not forgive me if I rush it to get it out on
time and it's a piece of crap. So for us, and this is why when you brought up a Spotify dealer,
anything else, they can't interfere with this at all because my job here as far as I'm concerned
is quality and everything else goes by the wayside because the only thing people care about long
term, the only thing that gives you longevity is how good is it, right? How good is that book?
If you read J.R.R. Tolkien's work tomorrow, you don't care how long it took him to write it,
all you care is how good is it today. And that's what we try to think too. And I feel like if it's
good, if it's really good, everything else falls into place and takes care of itself.
Although sometimes to push back, sorry to interrupt. I've done it to you a thousand times,
so you can get me back, please. Sometimes the deadline, you know, some of the greatest like
movies and books have been, you think about like Dusty Yeske, I forget which one,
knows from Underground or something, he needed the money, so he had to write it real quick.
Like sometimes the deadline creates as powerful at taking a creative mind of an artist and just
like slapping it around to force some of the good stuff out. Now, the problem with history,
of course, is there's different definitions of good that like it's not just about what you
talk about, which is the storytelling, the richness of the storytelling. And I'm sure you're, you know,
you know, again, not to compliment you too much, but you're one of the great storytellers of our
time. That I'm sure if you put in a jail cell and forced at like somebody pointed a gun at you,
you could tell one hell of a good story. But you still need the facts of history,
or not necessarily the facts, but you know, like making sure you painting the right full picture,
not perfectly right. That's what I meant about the audience doesn't understand what a history
podcast is. You can't just riff and be wrong. So let me let me both both oppose what you just said
and back up what you just said. So I have a book that I wrote, right? And in a book, you have a
hard deadline, right? So Harper Collins had a hard deadline on that book. So when I released it, I
was mad, because I would have worked on it a lot longer, which is my style, right? Get it right.
But we had a chapter in that book entitled pandemic prologue question mark. And it was the
book about the part about the black death and the 1918 flu and all that kind of stuff. And I was
just doing an interview with a Spanish journalist this morning who said, did you ever think how
lucky you got on that on that, you know, and first of all, lucky on a pandemic, it strikes you.
But had I had my druthers, I would have kept that book working in my study for months more.
And the pandemic would have happened. And that episode that would have looked like a
chapter I wrote after the fact, I would have had to rewrite the whole thing, it would have been.
So that argues for what you said at the same time, I would have spent months more working on it,
because to me, it didn't look the way I wanted it to look yet, you know.
Can you drop a hint of the things that you're keeping on the shelves?
Oh, the Alexander the Great. I've talked around it. I talked to somebody the other day said,
do you know that the very first word in your very first podcast, in the title,
the very first thing that anybody ever saw with hardcore history is the term is the word Alexander.
And because the show is entitled Alexander versus Hitler, I have talked around the career,
I've done show after I talked about his mother in one episode, I talked about the funeral games
after his death, I've talked around this, I've specifically left this giant Alexandrian size
hole in the middle, because we're going to do that show one day. And I'm going to lovingly enjoy
talking about this crazily interesting figure of Alexander the Great. So that's one of the ones
that's on the back pocket list. And what we try to do is whenever we're doing a second world war
in Asia and the Pacific now, I'm on part five, whenever the heck we finish this, the tendency
is to then pick a very different period, because we've had it and the audience has had it.
So I will eventually get to the Alexander saga.
What about just one last kind of little part of this is what about the other half of that first
10 minute 15 minute episode, which is so you've done quite a bit about the world war, you've
done quite a bit about Germany. Will you ever think about doing Hitler and the man?
It's funny because I talked earlier about how I don't like to go back to the old shows because
our standards have changed so much. Well, a long time ago, one of my standards for not getting
five hour podcasts done or not getting too deeply into them was to flip around the interesting
points. We didn't realize we were going to get an audience that wanted the actual history. We
thought we could just go with, assume the audience knew the details and just talk about the weird
stuff that only makes up one part of the show now. So we did a show called Nazi tidbits,
and it was just little things about, it's totally out of date now. You can still buy them,
but they're out of date, where we dealt a little with it. It would be interesting,
but I'll give you another example. History is not stagnant, as you know. We had talked about Stalin
earlier, and Ghost of the Osfront was done years ago, and people will write me from Russia now and
say, well, your portrayal of Stalin is totally outdated because there's all this new stuff from
the former Soviet Union. And you do, you turn around and you go, okay, they're right. And so when
you talk about Hitler, it's very interesting to think about how I would do a Hitler show today
versus how I did one 10 years ago. And you would think, well, what's new? I mean, it happens
so long, but there's lots of new stuff, and there's lots of new scholarship. And so,
yeah, I would think that would be an interesting one to do someday. I haven't thought about that.
That's not in the back pocket. But yeah, that'd be interesting.
I have a disproportionate amount of power because I'd trap you somehow in the room.
And thereby- During a pandemic.
During a pandemic. So, like, my hope will be stuck in your head. But after Alexander the Great,
which would be an amazing podcast, I hope you do give a return to Hitler. The rise and fall of
the Third Reich, which to me- It's a contemporary book, basically.
Yeah. And I, exactly. It's by a person who was there.
Shire, yeah. I really loved that study of the man of Hitler. And I would love to hear your
study of certain aspects of it. And perhaps even an episode that's more focused on a very
particular period, I just feel like you can tell a story that- It's funny,
Hitler's one of the most studied people, and I still feel like all the stories,
or most of the stories, haven't been told.
Oh, and there's, listen, I've got three books at home. I'm on all the publishers' lists now.
And they just say, young Hitler, there's this Hitler, there's that. I mean, I've been reading
these books, and I've read about Hitler. I read the rise and fall of the Third Reich. My mother
thought I needed to go to a psychologist because I read it when I was six. And she said, there's
something wrong with the boy. But she was right. She was absolutely right. But you would think
that something like that is pretty established fact, and yet there's new stuff coming out all
the time. And needless to say, Germany's been investigating this guy forever. And sometimes
it takes years to get the translations. I took five years of German in school. I can't read
any of it. And he is, when you talk about fascinating figures, the whole thing is so
twistedly weird. It came out a couple years ago. Somebody found a tape of him talking to
General Manerheim. And he's just in a very normal conversation of the sort we're having
now. And the Hitler tapes, when you hear him normally, he's ranting and waving. But this
was a very sedate. And I wish I'd understood the German well enough to really get a feel because
I was reading what Germans said, and they said, wow, you can really hear the Southern accent.
Little things that only a native speaker would hear. And I remember thinking, this is such a
different side of this twisted character. And you would think that this was information that
was out in the rise and fall of the Third Reich, but it wasn't. And so this goes along with that
stuff about new stuff coming out all the time. Alexander, new stuff coming out all the time.
Really? Well, at least interpretations rather than factual data.
And those color, those give depth to your understanding.
Yes. And you want that because the historiography, people love that. And that was a byproduct of
my lack of credentials, where we thought we're going to bring in the historians and we call them
audio footnotes right away for me to say, listen, I'm not a historian, but I'll quote this guy who
is so you can trust him. But then we would quote other people who had different views. And people
didn't realize that if they're not history majors, that historians don't always agree on this stuff
and that they have disagreements. And they loved that. So I love the fact that there's more stuff
out there because it allows us to then bring in other points of view and sort of maybe
three dimensionalize or flesh out the story a little bit more.
Two last questions, one really simple, one absurdly ridiculous and perhaps also simple.
First, who has been in this he real? I don't even know what you're talking about.
Very well. How's that for an answer? It's like asking me, is Harvey the white rabbit real? I
don't know. There's carrots all around the production room, but I don't know what that means.
Well, a lot of people demanded that I somehow figure out a way to prove the existence.
If I said he was real, people would say, no, he's not. And if I said he was,
if he wasn't real, they would say, yes, he is. So it's a Santa Claus Easter Bunny kind of vibe
there. Yeah. I mean, what is real anyway? That's exactly what I told him exists.
Okay. The most absurd question. I'm very sorry. Very sorry, but then again, I'm not.
What's the meaning of it all? You study history of human history.
Have you been able to make sense of why the hell we're here on this spinning rock?
Does any of it even make sense? What's the meaning of life?
What I look at sometimes that I find interesting is certain consistencies that we have over time.
History doesn't repeat, but it has a constant, and the constant is us. Now, we change. I mentioned
earlier the wickedly weird time we live in with what social media is doing to us is guinea pigs,
and that's a new element. But we're still people who are motivated by love, hate, greed, envy, sex.
I mean, all these things that would have connected us with the ancients, right?
That's the part that always makes history sound like it rhymes. And when you put the constant,
the human element, and you mix it with systems that are similar. So one of the reasons that the
ancient Roman Republic is something that people point to all the time as something that seems
like we're repeating history is because you have humans, just like you had then, and you have a
system that resembles the one we have here. So you throw the constant in with a system that is
somewhat similar, and you begin to see things that look like they rhyme a little. So for me,
I'm always trying to figure out more about us. And when you show us in 500 years ago in Asia,
and 800 years ago in Africa, and you look at all these different places that you put the guinea
pig in, and you watch how the guinea pig responds to the different stimuli and challenges, I feel
like it helps me flesh out a little bit more who we are in the long timeline, not who we are today
specifically, but who we've always been. It's a personal quest. It's not meant to educate anybody
else. It's something that fascinates me. Do you think there's in that common humanity throughout
history of the guinea pig, is there a why underneath it all? Or is it somehow like it feels like it's
an experiment of some sort? Oh, now you're into Elon Musk and I talked about this, the simulation
thing, right? Nick Bostrom's the idea that there's some kid and we're the equivalent of an alien's
ant farm, and we hope he doesn't throw a tarantula in just to see what happens.
I think the wise elude us. And I think that what makes philosophy and religion and those
sorts of things so interesting is that they grapple with the wise. But I'm not wise enough
to propose a theory myself, but I'm interested enough to read all the other ones out there.
Let's put it this way. I don't think there's any definitive why that's been agreed upon,
but the various theories are fascinating. Yeah, whatever it is, whoever the kid is that created
this thing, the ant farm is kind of interesting. So far. He's a little bit twisted and perverted
and sadistic, maybe. That's what makes it fun, I think. But then again, that's the Russian
perspective. I was just going to say, it is the Russian perspective.
A little bit. That's what makes the Russian, so Russian history, one day I'll do some Russian
history. I took it college. Oh, that's the ant farm, baby. That's an ant farm with a very,
very frustrated young teenage alien kid. Dan, I can't say I've already complimented you with
way too much. I'm a huge fan. This has been an incredible conversation. It's a huge gift.
Your gift of humanity, I hope you- Oh, let me cut you off and just say,
you've done a wonderful job. This has been fun for me. The questions, and more importantly,
the questions can come from anybody. The counter statements, your responses have been wonderful.
You made this a very fun intellectual discussion for me. Thank you. Well, let me have the last
word and say, I agree with Elon, and despite the doom caster say that, I think we've concluded
definitively, and you don't get a chance to respond, that love is in fact the answer and the way
forward. So thanks so much, Dan. Thank you for having me. Thanks for listening to this conversation
with Dan Carlin, and thank you to our sponsors. Athletic Greens, the all-in-one drink that I
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And now, let me leave you with some words from Dan Carlin. Wisdom requires a flexible mind.
Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.