Dan Carlin: Hardcore History | Lex Fridman Podcast #136

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 a 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 genghis khan 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 each 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 simplisafe 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 through 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 5 stars nappa podcast follow on spotify support it on patreon or connect with me on twitter at lex friedman 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 uh 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 and that could be a whole show couldn't 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 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 a 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 he i 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 if 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 stuck with me because he's one of the most is 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 um was called alexander versus hitler and the entire question about it was the motivations right 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 right and if you killed somebody for example in self-defense you're going to be treated differently than if you malicious kill kill somebody maliciously to take their wallet right and in the show we we wondered because you know i don't really make uh pronouncements but we wondered about uh if you believe hitler's writings for example mein kampf uh which you know is written by a guy who's a political figure who wants to get so i mean it's about as 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 to for the betterment of the german people right whereas alexander the great once again this is somebody from more than 2000 years ago so with lots of propaganda in the intervening years right but one of the the views of alexander the great is that the reason he did what he did was to for lack of a better word write his name in a more permanent graffiti on the pages of history right 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 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 uh 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 wrong you know so and i hate to do that because there's certain people like hitler that i don't feel deserve the benefit of the doubt uh 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 you know 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 um but in fact 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 led created so much suffering in the world that all of them had their motivations were had good intentions underlying them no i don't i mean simply because there's so many i mean the law of averages would would suggest that that's not true i guess it is pure evil possible meaning you uh again it's slippery but you the suffering is the goal suffering intentional suffering yeah yes i think that and i think that there's historical figures that that that one could point and but that gets to the deeper question of are these people saying uh do they have something wrong with them are they twisted from something in their youth um you know i mean 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 um and i think so 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 where do you put as somebody who's fascinated by military history where do you put violence as uh as in terms of the human condition is it core to being human or is it just a little uh 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 i 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 the re i think force you know you're an engineer you'll understand this better than i 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 i'm not sure that you can have a society or a civilization without the ability to use a counter force 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 um or on uh you know even at the highest levels of politics or anything else a counter force to stop the uh inertia or the impetus of of of another movement so i think that force is 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 than force so um and again they've talked i mean it goes back into saint augustine all kinds of christian beliefs about the the proper use of force and people have have philosophically tried to decide between can you have a sort of an ahinsa uh buddhist sort of we you know we would be non-violent toward everything and exert no force or or there's a reason to have force in order to create the space for good uh i think force is inevitable now we can talk and and i've not come up to the conclusion myself uh if there is a distinction to be made between force and violence i mean is is um is a non-violent 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 um and that's i mean you look at the criminal justice system alone and the way we 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 uh 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 uh the battles we do in the space of ideas of um you know 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 you have an intuition that force might be with us much longer than violence i think the two bleed together so um take because it's it's always it's always my go-to example i'm afraid and i'm sure that the listeners all hate it but take take germany during uh the 1920s early 1930s before the nazis came to power and they were always involved in some level of force you know beating up in the streets or whatever it might be but think about it more like an intellectual discussion until a certain point um is that it would be difficult i imagine to keep the intellectual counterforce of ideas from at some point degenerating into something that's more um coercion um counterforce if we want to use the phrases we were just talking about so i think the two are are intimately connected i mean actions follow thought right and at a certain point i think especially when when one is not achieving the goals that they want to achieve through uh peaceful discussion or argumentation or um trying to convince the other side that sometimes the next level of operations is something a little bit more physically uh 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 uh perhaps a hopeful message but let me ask in the form of a question do you think we'll always have war i think it goes to the force question too so for example um what do you do i mean we're let's let's play with nation states now although i don't know that nation states uh are something we should think of as a permanent constitution forever um 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 um you know and i i think 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 counterforce should be uh can you create an entity a league of nations a united nations uh a one world entity maybe even that that alleviates the need for counterforce involving mass violence and armies and navies and those things uh i think that's an open discussion we're still having it's good to think through that because um having us like a united nations there's usually a centralized control so there's humans at the top there's committees and uh usually like leaders emerge a 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 war which is unfair of application of force you know it's 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 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 is 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 um what their status in their own civilization how much does that itself drive the responses of that society right um how much do you need war to legitimize warriors um you know that's the old argument that you get to and we've had this in the 20th century too that that the creation of arms and armies creates a an incentive to use them right and and that they themselves can drive that incentive as as a justification for their reasons for existence you know um 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 you know governments and war we 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 to protect themselves right for reasons we can all understand but they exert a force on your your range of choices don't they it's true you're making me realize that uh in my upbringing and i think i'm bringing of many warriors are heroes you know to me i don't know where that feeling comes from but to sort of uh die fighting is uh it's 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 um and i try to make it at different levels so at base level the the people who are out there on the front lines doing the fighting uh to me those people can be compared with police officers and firemen and people the fire persons um but but i mean people that are are um involved in an ethical uh attempt to perform a task which ultimately uh one can see in many situations as being a savings sort of task right or or if nothing else a self-sacrifice for what they see is 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 uh to those upper echelons than i do the people on the ground the people on the ground could be any of us and have been in a lot of you know we have a very professional uh sort of military now where it's a very uh a subset of the population but in other periods of time we've had conscription and drafts and 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 um a lot less moral attachment to them and i have i'm 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 um 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 i mean if you if you set a fire to send firemen into to fight um then i feel bad for the firemen i feel like you've abused the trust that you give those people right so when when people talk about war i always think that the people that we have to make sure that a war is really necessary uh 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 i in my mind um you know 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 to the ethos but if you're sending people to protect this country's 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 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 as the rhetoric makes them sound otherwise we would be more um 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 if it 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 than i do the people on the ground that i look at as um either uh the people that are defending us you know in situations like this you know the second world war for example or or the people that um 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 as the rhetoric and the propaganda would insinuate yeah and uh as my own family history it would be nice if we could talk about there's a gray area in in the places that you're talking about there's a gray area in everything and everything but when that gray area is part of your own blood as it is for me it's it's worth shining a light on somehow sure give me example what you mean so you did a program of four episodes of ghosts of the us front yeah 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 um uh raised in ukraine she 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 as she survived she's the most badass woman of uh i've ever encountered my life and most of the warrior spirit i carry is probably from her she survived polymor the ukrainian starvation of the 30s she was a beautiful teenage girl during the nazi occupation of so she survived all of that and of course family that that everybody you know and so many people died the whole process so and one of the things you talk about in your program is that the gray area is even with the warriors it happened to them just like as you're saying now it uh they didn't have a choice so my my grandfather on the on the other side he was uh a machine gunner uh that was in ukraine that that in the red army in the red army yeah and they through uh like the 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 you better die so you i mean you're 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 uh nazis towards i guess moscow and the whole goal in ukraine was to slow everyth to slow them into the 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 you know bullets can't hurt him and that's what everybody believed and of course basically everyone that uh he quickly rose to the ranks let's just put it this way because everybody died it's it's it's it was just bodies dragging these heavy machine guns like always you know i was 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 and but the reality that there could be another perspective which is all of this happened to him uh by the incompetence of stalin the incompetent incompetence and uh men of uh 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 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 that uh 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 uh that a marine named eugene sledge uh had said once and i 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 start i mean you could be in danger but at the front line there are two different things one is um that that and at least and i'm doing a lot of reading on this right now and reading a lot of veterans accounts james jones who wrote uh uh books like from here to eternity fictional accounts of the second world war but he based them on his own service he was at uh 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 you 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 um you become less of a good guy at your job right the other thing that the people in the one in the 100 yards of 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 uh 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 those 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 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 um now is there hatred yeah i hated the germans for what they were doing as a matter of fact i uh 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 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 you know what they did to us and why and what we had to do back right um so for me when we talk about these combat situations the reason i call these people heroic is because of they're 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 gonna though that becomes a situation where we talked about counter force earlier um 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 gonna 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 you know patriotism is a thing that we often get um used with right people 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 goering 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 um 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 um sober reflective state of mind we would consider differently it gets the i mean you get this war fever up and people people wave flags and they start denouncing the enemy and they start signing 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 okay the system in place like loving i haven't quite deeply psychologized exactly what you love i think you love the that like populist message of the worker of the common man that's common so let me let me draw the comparison then um and i often say this that 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 uh it's 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 it's the e pluribus unum kind of the idea right this that out of many one well what what binds all these unique different people these shared beliefs this ideology the soviet union was the same way because as you know the soviet union russia was merely one part of the 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 um 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 um 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 um 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 u.s would go what are they doing they're voting for some strong man who's just good you know so um i think it's very hard to throw away our own uh biases and 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 diff 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 classroom's 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 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 um in my formative years i came here when i was 13 is when i you know teenage is your first love or whatever as i fall in love i fell in love with the american set of ideas of freedom and individuals 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 americans 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 uh 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 um 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 the of you know all the things that come with the implementation of communism especially around the 80s and 90s but i i remember what it's like to love that set of ideas so i'm 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 my long-term monogamous relationship is not 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 and i 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 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 uh that's a kind of freedom that's you're actually liberating yourself if you think like life is suffering you're 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 um what in that 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 uh as beautiful as believing the american ideal not just that let me add to what you're saying i'm very i spend a lot of time trying to get out of my own biases uh it is 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 you know 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 you know 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 consider to be everybody's birthright around the world is instead western rights that's the words they use western rights it's a it's a fundamentally western oriented and i'll go back to the enlightenment enlightenment based ideas um on what constitutes the rights of man and 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 um 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 talk about eliminating conflict uh the first need to do that is to try to understand how someone else might view something differently than yourself um i'm famously one of those people who buys in to the ideas of of traditional americanism right and look what a lot of people who who live today i mean they would seem to think that things like um 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 hundred 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 um expression if you had an overriding military that was always fighting wars and 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 um and and one that is totally interwoven in our entire society if you could 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 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 uh military industrial complex with the the traditional uh 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 um 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 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 um 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 see our the 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 but i mean i think 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 you know the 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 you know so it is an eye of the beholder sort of thing i'd love to talk to you about vladimir putin sort of while we're on 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 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 do you still speak the language i speak the language very well that makes it even easier i mean you might be 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 uh studied as a is a loaded word um here's here's and again i i find it hard sometimes to not filter things through an american lens so 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 right so if the russians choose vladimir putin and they keep choosing him that's their business where where as 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 right now there's a difference between a freely elected and re-elected and re-elected and re-elected dictator right if that's what they want and and look i i it would be silly to broad brush the russians like it would be silly to broad-brush anyone right 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 um in their own country but an american would say as long as the freedom of choice is 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 is a different story too so my attitude on 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 of yours truly and that i can't you know you can see gray areas and nuance all you like but it's hard to escape as you wish and you you alluded to this too it's hard to escape what was indoctrinated into your bones in your formative years uh 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 it's 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 what we're saying there's gray areas which is i believe i have to think through this but i think there is a point at which adolf hitler became the popular choice in nazi germany in the 30s there's a in 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 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 they 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 a remnants it's corruption is so deeply part of the russians so the soviet system that even the overthrow of the soviet the the the breaking apart of the soviet union and uh 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 counterforce counterforce like get your shit together like basically from the western perspective putin is is terrible but from from the russian perspective putin is 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 90s 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 uh manipulate the elections to elect somebody uh 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 uh uh i mean basically the assumption is that the system works well enough for you to be able to uh 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 um there's a belief in political science uh you know it's not the overall belief but 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 in in russia and that putin is the guy who can harness uh the power of the state to keep those people in check the problem of course in a system like that a strong man system right where you have somebody who can 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 that you justified the strong man for is just awaiting your future right i mean unless unless he's actively building the system that will outlive him and allow successors to do what he's doing then 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 um where 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 and again you would tell me if 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 you know 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 and ignorant so uh 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 haven't 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 admired the man that took power i think is 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 that that's an old line though about absolute power corrupting absolutely but it's you know it's kind of a line uh you know it's it's a beautiful quote but you have to really think about it you know like what does that actually mean like one of the things i i still have to do you know i've been focusing on securing the conversation right so i i've been 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 senses his he took power when yeltsin gave him one of the big sort of acts of the new russia was for the first time in its history a leader could have continued being in power and chose to give away power that was the george washington right in the united states would look at that as absolute positive yeah a sign a sign of good things yes and so that was a huge act and uh putin said that 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 he after two terms he gave away power to medvedev yeah but it was a puppet right yeah yes but it was but like still the story was being told i think he believed it early on i think he i believe he still believes it but i think he's deeply suspicious of the corruption that looks in the shadows and i i do believe that like as somebody who thinks clickbait journalism is broken journalists annoy the hell out of me hey journalism's working perfectly journalism's broken journalists made things working great so i understand from putin's perspective that journalism 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 what you know the steps that we need to take to make a greater nation no they they're unfairly take stuff out of context they uh they're critical in ways that's like shallow and not interesting they 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 uh 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 the system i mean i get i get the um the slippery it's obvious 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 and okay so here in 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 um but but the problem then comes into play when you remove journalists even you know it's a broad brush thing because but you remove both the the crappy ones who are lying and the ones who are telling the truth too you're left with simply the the approved government journalists right the ones who are toeing 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 click bait 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 and find the i used to know all the journalists by name and i could pick out you know who they were and and 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 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 is broken because the here's 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 that was my sort of faith and belief that that yeah there's going to be lies all over the place but there will 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 is something that groups of people convince themselves of and there's multiple groups of people and the idea of some universal truth as i suppose is the better thing is uh is something that we can no longer exist under like some people believe that the green bay packers is the best uh football team and some people can think 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 uh various aspects of uh politics various aspects of sort of uh 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 could no longer have well let's and let me de-romanticize the american history of this too because the american press was often just as biased just as i mean i always looked to the 1970s as the high water mark of the american journalistic in the post-watergate era where it was actively going after um 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 uh i actually somebody sent it to me we had to get it off of a journalism like a jstor kind of thing and she at a at a luncheon um assured that the to the government people at the luncheon don't worry this is not going to be something that we make a trend we're not because the position of the government is still something that was carried you know the 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 um 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 or believability of the press and there are periods where it was higher than other periods the funny thing about the so-called click-bait 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 um but it's also something that you see very rarely in in other governments around the world and there's a reason that journalists are often killed uh 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 chingas khan so let's go with the genghis khan the only thing i'll be able to say with any certain last certain thing i'll say about it uh it's like i don't know gif versus jif i don't know how i don't know how it ever got started the wrong way yeah so first of all your episodes on uh genghis khan for many people are the favorite it's fascinating to think about events that had so much like in their ripples had so much impact on so much of human civilization in your view was he an evil man this goes to our discussion of evil another way to put it is i've read he's much loved in much part 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 and they're not i try to kind of soft pedal them so they're not always like really right in front of your face um in that episode the soft pedaling sub theme had to do with what we uh referred to as a historical arsonist and it's because some historians have taken the position that sometimes and and most of this is earlier so 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 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 for mankind right uh 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 of the cons 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 um and but this gets to how the khan has been portrayed right if you want to say oh yes he cleared out the dead wood and made for a for well then it's a positive thing if you say my family was in the forest fire that he set it you're not going to see it that way um much of what genghis khan is credited with on the upside right so things like religious toleration and you'll say well he was uh religiously the mongols were religious uh 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 of their empire which was uh very much like the roman viewpoint which is the romans didn't care a lot of time what your local people worshipped they wanted stability and if that kept stability and kept you paying taxes and didn't require the legionaries to come in and and then they didn't care right and and the cons 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 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 and i think we call it i forgot the term we used it had to do with 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 um so i think it's been portrayed as something like a liberal empire and it the idea of mongol universality universality is it's 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 motivation and and the mongols didn't see it that way and 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 um shooting an arrow and painting a bullseye around it afterwards right how how do we how do we justify and make them look good in a way that they themselves probably and 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 i think that's that's later people uh 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 uh to conquer so much land is uh 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 the actual practice of war and it can start out small 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 emerg 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 at the that what led me to look into it more they 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 they 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 gonna back up a second i'm reminded of the lines said about the romans that they create a wasteland and call it peace that is wow that but but but there's a lot of conquerors like that right um where where uh you you will sit there and listen historians forever have it's it's the trait it's the famous trade-offs of empire and they'll say well look at the trade that they facilitated and look at you know the religion all those kinds of things but they come at the cost of all those peoples that they conquered forcibly and and 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 okay they are they are they come from a nomadic tradition now several generations later when you have a kubila khan as as the as the emperor of china it's it's beginning to be a different thing right and the mongols when their empire broke up the ones that were uh in settle 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 and say like the the cognate of the golden horde which is still in in their traditional nomadic territories will remain traditionally more mongol but when you start talking about who the mongols were i try to 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 scythians the sarmatians the avars the huns the magyars i mean these are all the nomadic you know the nomads of the eurasian steppe were huge huge players in the history of the world until gunpowder nullified their their traditional weapon system which i've been fascinated with because their traditional weapon 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 this what the nomads had of the eurasian step 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 step 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 uh um uh painter who painted the comanches uh 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 of harnessing a human animal relationship that gave them a military advantage that could not be copied right it could be emulated but they were never as good right that's why they always hired these people they hired mercenaries from these areas because they were incomparable right so the combination of people who were shooting bows and arrows from the time they were toddlers who were riding from the time they were who rode all the time i mean they were the huns were bow-legged the romans said because they were never out they ate slapped everything in the saddle that creates something that is difficult to copy and it gave them a military advantage uh you know i enjoy reading actually about uh 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 of these various cons um 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 and 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 know 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 so to me and 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 and 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 and you see the same thing in native american history two degree two um you had people like attila right or uh there was one called twomin 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 and 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 he was able they were able to hold it together for a few generations to linger on the little thread they started pulling on this man genghis khan that was a leader yeah what do you think makes a great leader maybe if you have other examples throughout history and great again let's lose that use that term loosely now he's gonna 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 grace talking about military or ideologies you know some people bring up fdr or or i mean it could be the founding fathers of this country or we can go to uh was he mana uh man of the century up there hitler of uh the 20th century and stalin and these people had really uh 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 uh trying to define what makes a great uniter great leader in one man or a woman maybe in the future it's an interesting question and one i've thought a lot about because 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 yeah he he was handed the kingdom which is fascinating 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 in 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 uh he philip ii was the guy who who literally did create a a strong kingdom from a disjointed group of people that were continually beset by their neighbors he's the one that reformed that army uh took things that he had learned from other uh greek leaders like the theban leader at pemanandes um and and then laboriously over his lifetime stabilized the frontiers built this system he lost an eye doing it he he he his leg was made lame i mean he this was a man who looked like he built the empire and led from from the front ranks i mean um so and then and then who may have been killed by his son we don't know who assassinated philip um but then handed the greatest army the world had ever seen to his son who then did great things with it you see this this pattern many times so in my mind i'm not sure alexander really can be that great when you compare him to people who arose from nothing so 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 you know it's a slur but uh it's about rich people and it's like he was born on he was born on third base and thought he hit a triple right um philip was born at home plate and he had to hit alexander started on third base and so 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 but there is a tradition and it may be one of those things that's put after the fact because a lot a long time ago whether or not you had blue blood in your veins was an important distinction and so the distinction that you'll often hear from mongolian history uh is that this was a a nobleman who had been deprived of his inheritance so he was a blue blood anyway i don't know which is true uh 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 uh he's very impressive as a figure attila is very impressive as a figure um hitler's an interesting figure he's one of those people cuz you know the more you study about hitler the more you wonder where the defining moment was because um 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 uh he got some decorations in fact the highest decoration he got in the first world war was given to him by a jewish officer and it was uh 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 but hitler's i mean if you said who was hitler today one of the top things you're going to say is he was an anti-semite well then you have to draw a distinction between general regular anti-semi-semitism that was pretty common in the era and something that was a rabid level of anti-semitism but hitler didn't seem to show a rabid level of anti-semitism 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 and much of what we consider to be his 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 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 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 so 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 and 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 uh 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 these qualities that one looks at as as the good upstanding moral qualities that we should all aspire to as examples right the buddha whatever it might be um 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 yeah um 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 uh confederacy builders that they really seem to be these figures that that stand out as extraordinary for one 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 yeah basically 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 uh 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 nazis rise to power there's a few philosophical things i'd like to uh 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 intense 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 are are ringing uh it seems that most people didn't seem to understand on you know 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 off the other country certainly france and england didn't seem to understand this that kind of tried to put myself into 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 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 germans viewpoint in the 1930s right 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 as a good german and a hero to the country that will be your you know enemies is we think you should oppose your own government it's it's a strange position to put the people in a government in 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 if you made a similar argument i will go away from the 1930s and go to the 1940s to answer your questions there's 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 and these young people would go out and distribute pamphlets and 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 right um that's incredibly moving to me so when we talk and we had talked earlier about sort of the human spirit and all that kind of thing there are people in the german military who opposed and worked against hitler for example but to me that's almost cowardly compared to what these young people did in the white rose movement because those people in the in the vermont for example who were secretly trying to undermine hitler they're they're not really putting their lives on the line to the same degree um and so i i think when i look at heroes and listen i remember once saying there were no conscientious objectors in in germany as a way to point out to people that you didn't have a choice you know you were going to serve in there and 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 um set of 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 and not just for me for my family right 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 and far beyond what i think i would even be capable of and so the admiration comes from seeing people who appear to be more morally profound than you are yourself um so when i look at this i look at that that kind of thing and i just say wow and the funny thing is if you'd have 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 traders who probably got what they deserved so that's the eye of the beholder thing it's the power of the state to um to so propagandize values and morality in a way that favors the state uh 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 um so i mean in my mind it would be people like that see i 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 sure 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 uh like david goggins for example the 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 uh 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 or people millions of people were suffering economically or suffering because of the betrayal of world war one 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 and and created the conditions where his message resonated uh that is not a message that resonates at all times right um it is impossible to understand the 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 um dissatisfaction with the weimar republic's government which was often seen as uh as uh something put into which it was put into place by the the victorious powers uh hitler referred to the people that signed those agreements uh that 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 seem 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 uh the restoration of german authority or you could go with the communists and the entire thing seemed like a litany of poor options right and in this realm hitler was able to triangulate if you will um 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 um 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 that when germany when hitler is rising to power the french are in control of parts of germany right the ruhr uh 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 twist it a little bit more from the average german's perspective right um 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 you know what i always say when people talk to me about humanity is i believe on individual levels we're 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 and and 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 this is i mean 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 there are 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 the great um slogan so i think love is always a difficult option and in the context of those times it it was even more disempowered than normal well this goes to the just to linger in it for a little longer the question of the innova 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 was building there's 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 in the trajectory of history in the 30s and 40s the most logical see we had started this conversation brings a wonderful bow tie into the discussion and and and buttons it up nicely we had talked about force encounter force earlier uh the most uh obvious and much discussed way that hitler could have been stopped has nothing to do with germans um when he uh re-militarized 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 um you know i mean and churchill's one of these people too where they talk about uh that you know 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 in the in the catholic center party and others in 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 um that this would have led to his downfall so the potential see i i 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 but it should also be pointed out that there was a lot of sympathy on the part of the allies for the fact that you know 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's funny that way and that hitler is always everyone's favorite example of the difference between the great man theory of history and the trends and forces theories of history right 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 right 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 uh the probability of charismatic leaders emerge i i'm so torn on that i i'm uh uh at this point here's another way to look at it the institutional um 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 arizona in 1913 he doesn't get anywhere because germany's institutional uh 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 when we we were talking just now about the way that history unrolls itself and could hitler have been stopped and i 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 i don't know we were just talking about where did he pick up his hatred of the jewish people there's uh 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's 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 right hitler had a conspiratorial view of the world he was a believer that the jews controlled things right 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 jewifide country right uh bolshevism was was a a a jewifide sort of a 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 that the holocaust is a weird weird sidebar to the whole thing and 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 right who was the most important and 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-anti-semitic well listen that whole part of the style yes it was einstein but the whole i should point out to say germany or europe or russia or any of those things were not anti-semitic is to do injustice to history right pogroms everywhere i mean yes that is it's standard operating procedure what 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 and as an outsider people that we can join the whole idea of the blood and how that connects to darwinism and 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 anti-semitism in germany or or none above the normal level right um the baseline level um does einstein leave along with all the other uh jewish scientists and i mean and what does germany have as as increased technological and intellectual capacity if they stay right it's something that actually weakened that state it's it's a tragic flaw in in the hitlerian worldview but it was so and and i don't let me you had mentioned earlier like 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 a conspiracy theory and jews and and and he surrounded himself uh 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 that inter he called it international jewry was a huge part of the problem and that because of that they deserved to be punished they were an enemy within all these kinds of things it's a 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 of the whole nazi phenomenon it's the 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 is it isn't that a wonderful historical ironic twist that if it weren't so overlaid with tragedy a thousand years from now will be seen as 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 discussions he's a physicist and engineer his belief is that at this time in our history the reason we haven't had nuclear like uh terrorist uh 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 uh 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 in to these conspiracy theories the less capable you are at actually engineering which is very difficult engineering nuclear weapons and effectively deploying them so that's the that's a hopeful message that the destructive people in this world are by their world view 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 it's when you say it's been many decades many day that's like saying in the in the life of a 150 year old person uh we've been doing well for a year the problem the problem with all these kinds of equations and it was bertrand russell right the philosopher who said so uh he said it was it's unreasonable to expect a man to walk on a tightrope for 50 years i mean the the the problem is is that this is a long game and let's remember that up until relatively recently what would you say 30 years ago it 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 the um the worry that that all of a sudden you were going to have bankrupt former soviet republics selling nuclear weapons to terrorists and whatnot i would suggest and 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 and that still boggles my mind i'm still it's funny i'm still stunned by that and yet i you know the idea here's the funny part and i don't i i hesitate to talk about this because i don't want to give anyone ideas right but you don't need nuclear weapons to do incredibly grave amounts of danger yes really i mean what one can of gasoline and a bic 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 counter-arguments 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 so he took that and he did it in a way that was much more repressive than we would ever be right and this is the old line about why we supported um uh 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 they were able to do it in a way we would never be able to do supposedly we're pretty good at that stuff you know 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 assads 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 um i would suggest one that the game is still on on whether or not these people get nuclear weapons uh in their hands i would suggest they don't need them to achieve their goals really uh the the the crazy thing is if you start thinking like the joker in batman the 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 that's the theory that's so hopeful to me with my dad is that all the ideas your ability to generate good ideas what forget nuclear weapons how you can disrupt the power grid how you can disrupt the attack our psychology uh 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 yeah but i mean evil genius i mean that's almost proverbial but that's okay so to push back for the fun of it or i don't i don't mean to i don't want you to leave this with a t in a terrible mood because i push back on every hopeful idea but i tend to be a little cynical about that stuff but but that goes to the 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'm gonna say people have done this already yes so i but but then it's the the question of like about aliens with the the uh 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 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 you know 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 uh 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 i've got your cell phones yeah to knock out the power grid for months so like you know just as a thought experiment what happens if just power goes out for a week in this country this is like the e and the electromagnetic magnetic pulses and the nuclear weapons and all those kinds of things yeah but maybe that's an act of nature yes 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 the uh the entire supplies chain begins to break down and then you have desperation and desperation opens the door to everything can ask a dark question as opposed to the other things we've been talking about there's there's always a thread a hopeful message i think it'll be a hopeful message on this one too you may have the wrong guess um 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 what governs my view of this thing is is the ability for us to focus ourselves collectively right and that gives me the choice of looking at this and saying what are the odds we will do x versus y right um so go look at the 62 cuban missile crisis where uh 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 uh i'm not the super kennedy worshiper that you know i grew up in an era where he was especially amongst people in the democratic party he was almost worshiped and i was never that guy but i will say something john f kennedy by himself um probably made decisions that saved a hundred 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 um so so when we talk about how the world will end um the fact that one person actually had that in their hands meant that it wasn't a collective decision it gave 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 uh ethical ideas of a single human being could come into play and make the decisions that 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 uh look at you know and and i i always get very frustrated when we talk about these arguments about is it happening is it human just look at the trash forget forget climb it 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 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 percent of us or something around the world not just you can't say we're going to stop uh uh doing damage to the to the 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 right you know krypton's about to explode we have 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 unanim 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 uh the national interests of nation states i mean the the amount of things that have to go right in a short period of time we don't have 600 years to figure this out right so to me that 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 i believe call me naive in 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 like so it's uh it's like one ant queen steps up and then the rest of the ant 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 like 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 like 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 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 rights 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 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 the the the human kindness potential in the system is greater than the human uh hatred potential and so the leader that is in the time when it's needed the leader that inspires love and kindness will 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 the grand scheme of history are not that impactful so it's it's weird to say but not that many people died in world war ii if you look at the the the the full range of human history uh you know it's uh 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 the charismatic leaders when time is needed that do good for the world in uh the broader sense of good are more likely to emerge than the ones that say kill all the jews i it's it's possible though and this is just you know i've thought about this all of 30 seconds but i mean uh it it it's we're betting money here on the on the 21st century who's going to win i think maybe uh 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 uh a 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 from my point of view or what's good for my business i mean if you tell me um and maybe i 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 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 two ants here with microphones talking about two seconds but like the the question is when they when this spreads so what what is 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 is they is is there's a i mean maybe it's an intuition that kindness is an evolutionary advantage i hate those terms i hate to reduce stuff to the 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 flamethrower that's the intuition but let's talk about you you brought up evolution several times let me let me play with that for a minute um 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 uh if krypton's about to explode i think humanity can r 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 the pollution slash climate change slash you know screwing up your environment um uh threats so particularly insidious is it happens slowly right 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 would be fine with that most people are too worried and understandably i think too worried about today's threat rather than next generations threat or whatever it might be so i mean when we talk about when you had 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 i think that there's enough of of inertia we're 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 gonna have a whole planet of dead people in three generations if we don't start now i think the evolutionary uh way that we have 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 i'm the scripting doom it's fun that way i think we're both uh maybe i'm over the top on the left maybe i'm over the top on the doom so it makes it makes for a fun chat i think so one one guy that i've talked to several times who's slowly becoming a friend is a guy named elon musk he's a big fan of hardcore history uh especially genghis khan uh series of episodes but really all of it him and his uh his girlfriend grimes listen to it which is i know what you like yeah you know elon okay awesome so that's like relationship goals uh like listen to hardcore history on the weekend with your loved one okay uh 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 speck that's remembered oh absolutely you think about like the people what will we remember from our time who are the people will remember whether it's the the hitler's or the einsteins 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 october 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 multi-planetary 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 is when you you it's hard to get your mind around because he's doing what it took governments to do before yes okay so so it's incredible that we're watching individual companies and stuff doing this doing it faster and cheaper yeah well and and and and pushing the envelope right faster than the governments at the time we're moving it's it's it really is i mean there's a lot of people who i i think who think elon is 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 um 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 for the goal and i don't want to put words in elon's mouth so you can 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 you know 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 and if 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 people 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 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 colonized 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 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 like it gives me hope as an individual that i can build something that can actually have impact that counteracts the uh the stalins and the hitlers and all the threats that face that human civilization faces that an individual has that power i i didn't believe that the individual has that power in the in the halls of government like 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 in and you're right with tesla it can bring the world together to do good that's a really powerful mechanism of you know whatever you say about capitalism that you can build companies that start you know it starts with a single individual of course there's a collective that 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 if i think but again i i think the genius of the idea is that it doesn't require us to go head-to-head with human nature right he he's he's actually built human nature into the idea by basically saying i'm not asking you to be uh an environmental activist i'm not asking you to sacrifice to make i'm gonna 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 and 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 right you're you're you're not you can take somebody who doesn't even believe the environment's a problem but they want a tesla so they're inadvertently helping anyway i think that's the genius of the idea yeah and i'm telling you that's one way to make love much more efficient mechanism of change than uh hate making it in your self-interest just creating a product that uh least to more love than uh than hate you're gonna want to love your neighbor because you're gonna make a fortune okay there you go that's why he's right i'm on board that's why elon said love is the answer that's i think uh exactly what he meant okay let's try something difficult uh you've uh recorded an episode of steering into the iceberg on your common sense program yeah that has started a lot of conversations it's quite moving it was quite haunting 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 in hardcore history it's almost the speaking about modern times in the same voice as you speak about when you talk about history so it was just a a little bit of a haunting view of the world today i know we were just wearing our doom doom let me put that right back on are you no the the i like the term doom caster uh is is there is there um how do we get love to win what's the way out of this is there some hopeful line that we can walk to uh 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 a division to a level where it doesn't any longer feel like a united states of america with an emphasis on united is is there a way out i read a book a while back i want to say george friedman the stratfor guy wrote it was something called the next hundred years i think it was called and i remember thinking um i didn't agree with any of it and one of the things i think he said in the book was that you know 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 i remember thinking um but i 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 in 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 to you know so um there was a famous uh memo from a group called project for a new american century and they took it down but the way back machine online still has it and it happened before 9 11 spawned all kind of conspiracy theories because it was saying something to the effect of and i'm really paraphrasing here but you know 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 um 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 uh which we do i mean i was in talk radio and and it 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 worthy 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 or democrats either they're 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 things 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 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 prophet that's one little example of 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 was i think that's what the george friedman book was saying that i disagreed with so much at the time um 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 that would seem to be something that once again you don't even need a large chunk of the country pulling apart ten percent of people who think it's 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 in a bic lighter would take a thousand houses down before you could blink yeah right um 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 retribution cycle and there's an escalation yes and it go 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 that you know blah blah blah i'm the doom caster again all right well and some of it could be manufactured by the those seeking authoritarian power absolutely like the reichstag fire was or the polish soldiers that fired over the border before the invasion in 1939 uh to fight the uh the devil's advocate was an angel's advocate uh i would say just as our conversation about elon it feels like individuals have power to unite us to to be that force of unity so uh you mentioned the media i think you're one of the great podcasters in history joe rogan is a like 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 i'm just looking at the numbers like we're almost three hours in and i 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 300 to 500 000 people listen and they too congratulations by the way that's wonderful joe rogan is what like 10 times that and so he has power to unite uh you have power to unite there's a few people with voices that it feels like they have power to unite even if you 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 uh so empathy well 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 yeah to to turn a singular event in a single riot or a shooting or like even something much more dramatic than that to turn that into something that creates like ripples that grow as opposed to ripples that fade away and so like i would like to put responsibility on somebody like you and uh on 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 we should vote for or any of that kind of stuff but really by being the the voice of calm that like calms the the seas from or whatever the analogy is from boiling up because i i truly am worried about this is the first time this year when i i sometimes i somehow have felt that the american project will go on forever that when i came to this country i just believed and i think i'm young but 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 ideas of 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 uh 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 um i mean i feel like we're all guinea pigs right now watching you know i have two kids and and just watching and there's a three year space between the two of them one's 18 the other is 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 a maturity question just in what apps they use how they relate to each other how they deal with their peers uh 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 um 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 um 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 word but they have a cumulative effect i mean when you uh i was reading um meghan markle who i don't know a lot about because it's it's too much of the pop side of culture for me to pay 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 are 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 um and and creating bridges between enemies when you think of how 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 non-violence non-violence 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 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 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 and so i i feel like history shows see history is pretty pessimistic i think by and large um if only because we can find so many examples that just sound passive 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 like well one could make a case about i mean if you want to talk about the the long-term value of a jesus a gandhi yeah 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 in throughout the generations like you feel the ripples i'll go along with you on that okay but i would even if that's not true now i tend to believe that and by the way the 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 longer story in there i think a three-year-old child could build it better and that this is not to denigrate you i'm sure yours would be better than a three-year-old but twitter is so and listen facebook to their they're really awful platforms for intellectual discussion and meaningful discussion but and i'm on it so let me just say i'm part of the problem we're new to this so it's not it wasn't obvious at the time how to do it it's now you agree and now a three-year-old can i do i i tend to believe that we live in a time where the tools that people that are interested in providing love like the weapons of love are much more powerful so like 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 that's 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 to uh and by power i mean the power to affect change which is different from government government and i don't mean to interrupt you but i'll forget my train of thought 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 if if love through a modern day successor to twitter would really do what you wanted to do and this would destabilize governments do you think that governments would would take counter measures 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 as one would think different states have different views i i think the states want power and i don't always think that love is in tension with power like i think and and 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 so that's one sense is i feel like basically you can trojan horse love into behind behind uh but you have to be good at it this is the thing is you have to be conscious of the way these states think so the fact that china banned certain services and so on that means the the companies weren't eloquent whoever the companies are weren't actually good at infiltrating like i think isn't that a song like love is a battlefield i think it's all a cat editor yeah it's all a game and you have to be good at the game and just like elon we said you know with tesla and saving uh the environment i mean that's not just by getting on a stage and saying it's important to save the environment is by building a product that people can't help but love and then convincing hollywood stars to love it like there's there's a game to be played okay so let me let me build on that because i i think there's a way to see this i think you're right and so uh it has to do with a story about the 1960s in the vast scheme of things the 1960s looks like a revival of neo-romantic ideas right uh i had a buddy of mine several years well two decades older than i was who was uh in the 60s went to the protest did all those kind of things and we were talking about it and i was romanticizing it and he said don't romanticize 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 and you know it was 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 gonna in my opinion grab that great mass of people that are only in it for them they're interested in whatever 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 that are the opposite of that um the kind of things that people inherently will not put up with you in other words the possibility exists to change the zeitgeist yes 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 okay so we've found a meeting of the month yeah yeah exactly creating creating incentives that uh that encourage the best and the most beautiful aspects of feminism 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 safe ground when you do that yeah that's a little difficult for me of uh you know and i'm sure it's actually difficult for you to to listen to me say complimenting you but uh it's not good it's difficult for both of us okay so but uh you know you and i as i mentioned to you i think off mike been friends for a long time it's just been one way so like i've been away now it's two way is to right now so like that's the beauty of podcasting you know i mean now just been fortunate enough with this particular podcast that i see in people's eyes when they meet me that they've been friends with me for for for a few years now and and we become fast friends actually after we start talking yeah but it's one way in the vet in that first moment uh you know like there's something about your especially hardcore history that uh you know i do some crazy challenges and running and stuff i remember in particular probably don't have time one of my favorite episodes the painfultainment one some people hate that episode because it's too real it's my darkest one we wanted to set a baseline that's the baseline but i remember listening to that and when i ran uh 22 miles for me that was the long distance yeah and uh it just pulls you in and there 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 that's what you're hoping for right yeah absolutely didn't mean to interrupt you i apologize i guess one a question i have if you like 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 what advice do you have for 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 a tried and true list of uh do's and don'ts and and but i don't have um 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 that's but that's the genius of it that's what makes it work right that's what that's what joe's brand is right um i guess what i'm saying is by the time you reach the stage that you're at or joe's at or they don't need 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 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 uh i guess there's specific things like we were uh talking offline about monetization that's a fascinating one very difficult as an independent yeah and uh one of the things that joe is facing with um i don't know if you're paying attention but he joined spotify with a 100 million dollar 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 so and i i like living in a shitty place so i i enjoy it so i guess makes it easier you get the freedom right now you know yeah freedom materials is slate not saving for anybody's college exactly yeah okay so uh 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 i said i i even i drafted a few tweets and so on just like attacking spotify then i'd calm 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 uh you also serve as beacon for now there's like millions 1 million plus podcasters i i i wonder what the journey is do you have a sense um are you at romantic in the same kind of way in feeling that because you have a roots and 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 it's a good thing for us so my history of how i got involved in podcasting is interesting yes i i i was in radio uh 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 start um i did it with seven other six other people and the whole goal of the company was uh we had 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 i my job was to be the evangelist and i would go to these people and talk and 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 old is like and i kept pushing this nobody bit but the podcast grew out of that because in if you're talking about amateur content in 1999 well then you're already where you know 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 um which was an outgrowth of the old radio show um we didn't have any financial um 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 we and the cheap and the easy way was just to ask listeners to donate like a pbs kind of model and that was that was the original model um so then once we started down that we figured out other models and there's the advertising thing and we sell the old shows and so all these became ways for us to support ourselves um but as as podcasting matured and as more operating systems develop 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 yes 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 um in this day and age you know 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 you know 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 know 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 um we'll handle that stuff for you in the past i would just say f off we don't need you yeah i don't mind and i i definitely am not making what we could make on this but what we would have to do to make that is honoris to me but it's becoming onerous to me day to day anyway and so if somebody were to come in and say hey uh 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 a show a month because that ain't happening right so i mean everybody's everybody's uh design is different right so it doesn't you know there's not one size fits all but i guess as a long time pirate podcaster um there are you know we've been looking to partner with people but nobody's right for us to partner with i mean so 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 other but i mean 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 upon 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 um the word i'm looking for here is it's um it's it's enticing yes uh i don't like big companies um so i'm afraid of 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 um 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 podcatchers every time some new podcatcher 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 um 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 i don't know if you uh 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 like all the people that think they the spotify somehow pushing joe in this direction contractuals didn't insist upon that it's in the contract but also you know companies have a way of even with the contract i sure do to be you know marketing people hey i know we're not forcing you yeah yeah yeah yeah i hate that yeah but jump with you 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 they leave them be there is meetings inside spotify that like people have read about people complain but those meetings never reached joe that that never that's like company stuff and the idea that spotify is different than pirate radio the 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 nobody's looking out for you yeah yeah and the nice thing about spotify is they want joe to joe's podcast to succeed even more that's what joe talked about is that's the difference between youtube and spotify spotify wants to be the netflix of podcasting and they like what netflix does is they they they don't want to control you in any way but they want to create a a platform where you can flourish even when your interests are aligned interests are alone so let me bring up let me bring up something that uh let's make a distinction because not all companies who do this are the same and you brought up youtube and spotify but but to me youtube is at least more like spotify than some of these smaller uh the term is walled garden right you've heard the term walls garden okay so um 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 uh and i'm not going to mention any names but 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 to consolidate your materials in a walled garden you are walling yourself off from audience right um 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 um 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 agreement's 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 uh 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 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 yes 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 uh 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 yes um but um 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 um but like you said no matter what you do you are go 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 os the new the new operating system just updated and you just i can't get your 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 they weren't screwing me and they weren't screwing my audience and blah blah um 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 yeah i mean if if he's like ah this is terrible i'm getting out of this you go okay those people are right you know so 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 shows and as a fan of netflix the people there i think i can speak for like millions of people in hope that hardcore history comes to netflix or if spotify becomes the netflix of podcasting into 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 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 it's a branding thing probably too interfering would be that would be a no-go for me that's right absolutely that can't help but that's why netflix is masterful they they seem to not interfere with the talent as opposed to i could throw other people under the bus like 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 uh in terms of hardcore history on netflix would be awesome um and i 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 uh the question is the requests and the questions is what can you tell dan to do one on the civil wars can you tell dan to do one on the napoleon bonaparte can you tell them to do one you know ever 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 but the civil war was that that you don't you as a military historian you enjoy in particular when there is differences in the armies of contrast 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 opposings like the roman civil wars which 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 uh is there some ideas that are like lingering in your head about possible future episodes is there things that whether you uh not committing to anything but uh whether you're gonna do it or not is there something that's like makes you think hmm that would be interesting to uh to pull at that thread a little bit oh yeah i i we have things we keep in our back pocket for later so uh 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 favorites my rear end man i have to tell you psychologically you know 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 and we don't do scripts it's improvised yeah so think about what 20 20 i had somebody write on twitter just yesterday saying um 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 um 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 um and it was part six or something so i mean you just do the math um and it felt like you were excited to interrupt and on world war one 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 if this is starting to seem gruesomely repetitive now you know how the people at the time felt so in other words that had any sort of inadvertently because when you improvise the 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 uh some sort of paint by the numbers kind of endeavor you know and 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 um the material so 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 um and sometimes i'll write notes saying here's where you left off yesterday so i remember um but in the improvisation you end up throwing a lot out and so um like 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 him and go it 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 get not 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 you're sorry to interrupt do you trust your judgment on that no no uh but but here's here's the here's the thing um our show is a little different than other people's uh joe rogan called it evergreen content in other words uh 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 just as good or just as bad uh 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's also for people five years from now who haven't discovered it yet and who don't care a wit 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 it's very important you have a 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 deal or anything else they can't interfere with this at all because my 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 jrr tolkien's work tomorrow you don't care how long it took him to write it all he cares how good is this 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 um and 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 dostoyevsky i forget which one knows from underground or something he needed the money so he had to write it real quick sometimes the deadline creates is 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 there's different definitions of good um 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 again not to compliment you too much but you're one of the great storytellers of our time that that i'm sure if you put in a jail cell and force a like somebody point a gun at you you could tell one hell of a good story but you still need the facts of history uh 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 so let me let me both both oppose what you just said and back up what you just said excellent so i have a book that i wrote right and uh and in a book you have a hard deadline right so harpercollins 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 the part about the black death and the 1918 flu and all that kind of stuff and 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 yes and that epis that would have looked like a chapter i wrote after the fact i would have to rewrite the whole thing it would have been so that argues for for what you said at the same time i 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 podcast i've talked around the very i 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 that is the word alexander and because the show's 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 the the funeral games after his death i've talked around this i've specifically left this giant alexandrian-sized 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 is um whenever this we're doing um 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 um so it's time so um i will eventually get to the alexander saga what about just one last kind of little part of this is uh 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 the man it's funny because uh 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 or not getting too deeply into them was to flit 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 you know it's totally out of date now like you know you can still buy them but they're out of date um where we dealt a little with it uh you know it would be interesting but i'll give you another example i mean history is not stagnant as you know uh and we had talked about stalin earlier and uh ghost of the offspring was done years ago and people will write me from russia now and say well your portrayal of stalin is totally out of uh out of uh uh it's it's outdated because there's all this new stuff from the former soviet union and you do you turn around and you go okay um 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 um and you would think well what's new i mean it happened so long but there's lots of new stuff and there's lots of new scholarship and and so um yeah i would think that would be an interesting one to do someday uh i i haven't thought about that that's not in the back pocket but uh but yeah that'd be interesting i have a disproportionate amount of power because i trapped you somehow in the room and and thereby during a pandemic so like my hope will be stuck in your head but after alexander the great which would be an amazing uh podcast i i hope you do cons give a return to hitler the rise and fall of the third reich which to me uh i i have a contemporary book basically yeah yeah and i exactly it's by a person who was there shira yeah i i really loved that study of the man of hitler and i would love to hear your study of certain aspects of it perhaps even an episode that's like more focused on a very particular period i just feel like you can uh tell a story that it's funny hitler is one of the most studied people and i still feel like this 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 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 and but but um but she was right but she was absolutely right but uh but you would think that that something like that is pretty established fact and yet there's new stuff coming out all the time and needless to say uh 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 so um so i mean and and he is when you talk about fascinating figures he's so the whole thing is so twistedly weird um there was a it came out a couple years ago somebody found a tape of him talking to uh gender i want to say it was general um uh the finnish general manaheim right um and and he's just in a very normal conversation of the sort we're having now and you know the hitler tapes when you hear normally he's ranting and raving 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 uh what germans said they said wow you can really hear the southern accent you know little things that only a a native speaker would hear and i remember thinking this is such a different side of this twisted character and you would think you would always you would think that this was information that was out in in in in the rise and fall of the third ranking but it wasn't and so this this this is uh 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 your those give depth to your understanding yes you and you want that because the historiography people people love that and that was a byproduct of my lack of credentials where we thought we're going to bring in um the historians we call them audio footnotes right a way 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 that you know 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 so i i love the fact that there's more stuff out there because it allows us to then bring in um 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 is ben and is 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 reel 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 prove 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 if it exists okay the most absurd question i'm very sorry very excited but then again i'm not what what's the meaning of it all you 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 uh history doesn't repeat but it has a a constant and the constant is us now we change i mentioned earlier the the wickedly weird time we live in with what social media is doing to us as 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 you know 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 um as a as something that seems like we're repeating history is because you have the two con 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 um so for me i'm always trying to figure out more about us and when you show us in uh 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 um it's a personal quest it's not meant to educate anybody else it's it's something that fascinates me do you think there's uh in that common humanity throughout history the 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 sure yeah the idea that there's some some kid and we're the equivalent of an alien's ant farm you know and we hope he doesn't throw a tarantula in just to see what happens um i think the whys elude us and i think that what makes philosophy and religion and those sorts of things so interesting is that they grapple with the whys um but i'm not wise enough to to uh propose a theory myself but i'm interested enough to read all the other ones out there so um i i 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 the ant farm kind of interesting it's so far a little bit a little bit twisted and perverted and sadistic that's what makes it fun i think um but then again that's the russian perspective i was just gonna say it is the russian perspective a little bit of what makes the russians so russian history one day i'll do some russian history i took it to college that's the ant farm baby that's an ant farm with a very very frustrated young uh uh teenage alien kid dan i can't say i've already complimented you way too much i'm a huge fan this has been an incredible conversation it's a huge gift i your your gift of humanity i hope you 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 start every day with to cover all my nutritional bases simply safe a home security company i use to monitor and protect my apartment magic spoon low-carb keto friendly cereal that i think is delicious and finally cash app the app i used 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 if you enjoy this thing subscribe on youtube review it with five stars and upper podcast follow on spotify support on patreon or connect with me on twitter alex friedman 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 you