Mash Up Episode ft. Lord of the Rings, All Quiet on the Western Front and Pink Floyd w/Neal Kalechofsky & Jesan Sorrells

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Hello.

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My name is Jesan Sorrells and this is the Leadership

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Lessons from the Great Books Podcast Bonus.

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There is no book reading on these bonus

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episodes. Instead these are interviews,

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rants, raves, or general audio

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musings, and even conversations with interesting people

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that don’t necessarily focus on a specific book or even

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a specific theme, but are still about leadership.

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Because listening to me muse or rant or

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speechify or talk to an interesting person about leadership

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is still better than reading and trying to understand

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yet another business book.

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So at the beginning of the summer, we switched around the format of this

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show partially to perform deeper dives into literature in order

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to extract greater leadership insights and in order to have

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more engaging conversations with our guests. However,

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at the beginning of this year, before we switched up the format,

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we came up with a scheme, sort of an idea, right,

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to create a series of mashup episodes. I’m using air quotes

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there that would feature a guest that we had never yet talked to on the

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show. And we will be discussing themes and topics from

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books that we had previously covered on previous episodes

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of this show. Mix it with a healthy dollop of insights from other mediums

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such as film and music. And if you’ve been listening to the show regularly, you

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know that my regular guest co host, Tom Libby, and I

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tend to somehow, every single episode wind up talking

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about a film that somehow relates to a theme that’s in,

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that’s in the book that we are covering on that particular

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day. So this is just going to be an extended version of,

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of that now mashup, for those of you who don’t know

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what that term means according to the Internet’s Urban

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Dictionary, which by the way, you can find out all kinds of fun stuff

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about current slang by going into the Urban

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Dictionary. But the, the, the idea of a mashup or the

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concept or the term mashup according to Urban Dictionary is

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quote, to take elements of two or more pre existing pieces of music and

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combine them to make a new song. And that’s

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sort of, kind of what we’re going to be doing here today.

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This episode is the first of four of these episodes. And,

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and we’re going to begin, as I said, with a doozy.

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So the line, the lyric, right, that jumps out to me when

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we start thinking about these things that we’re going to be putting together today

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is this one. Forward he cried from the rear

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and the front rank died and

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the general sat in the lines on the map

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moved from side to side

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Whenever I hear these words, whenever I repeat these words, whenever I

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sing these words badly when I’m out on my homestead, you know,

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moving around hay or predator proofing a

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turkey enclosure or just sweating in the 100

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degree heat in the undisclosed location where I

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live. I am

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repeating this line from us and them from

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Pink Floyd’s iconic album the Dark side of the Moon from

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1973. And when I do repeat this line, I always think

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about warfare, particularly World War I. There’s something about that line that

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conjures up images of French generals

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and British generals with big old handlebar mustaches hanging out in trenches

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way in the back while folks bayonets

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go charging into the breach of barbed wire. And

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they just keep charging into the breach of barbed wire getting cut down

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repeatedly. Now the song is

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about war, but it is really about war against the

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government. And Roger Waters lyrics can be

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applicable to any war where bureaucratic generals waste the

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flower of youth to achieve pointless strategic aims.

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And I think the war that proves the rule is probably

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World War I. Now, the intersection with a couple of

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books that we’ve covered on this podcast here is clear. We covered All Quiet on

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the Western Front in episode number 127. And in that episode we

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discussed the nature of warfare, loyalty, patriotism and

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meaning in the trenches of the Western Front as brought to us by

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Eric Marie Remarque.

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And it’s been a minute here, but we’ve also covered the Lord of the

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Rings trilogy. We did that in episodes number 76,

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77 and 78 by J.R.R. tolkien, a book series

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written by a man who, like many of his generation in England,

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including a gentleman named C.S. lewis, experienced World War I

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directly at the Battle of the Somme and contracted

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trench fever for all of his efforts.

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Matter of fact, he learned all the same lessons that C.S. lewis learned. He just

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came to different conclusions. And so I’m

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mashing all of that together because this is a mash up episode.

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And we’re going to talk about the intersections between Pink Floyd

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and Lord of the Rings and World War I. And all quiet on the

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Western Front today with our guest. So

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today we are joined by Neil Kalachovsky. I was supposed to say

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it like that, throw my fingers up. You’ll be able to see that on the

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video. Neil is the co founder of award.

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I have to say it that way because there’s a strong capital letter at

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the end Award. Its goal is to maximize their clients

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chance of a successful Sbir stt

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our award. He is also a Tolkien enthusiast. That’s

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why he’s on the show, not because of Sbir or sttr.

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And he also has an interest in the

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vagaries and the intricacies of World War I. He also

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has a background as a, if I’m not mistaken, Neil,

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a rock musician, right? This is true,

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yes. And so he will know quite a bit about Pink Floyd and he

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might have something to say about my favorite

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concept album probably of all

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time. Probably the best concept album of all time. Other people will say the wall

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or whatever, it’s Dark side of the moon, please. I mean, the T

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shirt is iconic just from the album cover alone, you know. Right.

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Can’t beat that with a stick. And I think they’ll still be

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selling those T shirts to disaffected 15 year olds 80 years

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from now. And of course they won’t know that there is no dark side of

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the moon. It’s actually all dark. It’s all dark. It’s all dark.

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Really? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

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Yep. So welcome to the show, Neil. How are

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you doing today? You. Jesan. Good to see you. Yeah, I’m doing great. Yeah.

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I’m in New York today, by the way. It’s 95 degrees. 95 degrees

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in New York City. Actually, the person I was just talking to on the phone

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before we hit record on this was also in New York City and he

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was complaining while he was in traffic about how angry

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everybody gets when it’s 95 degrees in New York City. Yeah,

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I’m in an air conditioned room, so. So

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there. It’s like 62 in

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here.

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So. So we’ll just, we’ll just start off with our

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very first question here in the heat of the day.

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You’re a huge Lord of the Rings Tolkien guy. Talk with us about the impact

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of Lord of the Rings on you. So there’s a tendency for

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me to make some sarcastic remark like, well, I don’t know, I just read them.

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But that’s not true. I’ve been reading them all my life. I

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don’t think I can recall when I first

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read them, but it was definitely pre fifth grade because I have a very strong

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memory of reading them. My,

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I was up in Alberta, Canada. My father was a professor and we

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had, he took a sabbatical in Edmonton, Alberta, and this

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would have been 1973. And

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I would curl up, they would let you go home for lunch

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and I would curl up at lunch and read the Lord of the Rings in

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like a patch of sunlight in the house. And I remember this quite

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clearly. I, I think much of

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my moral philosophy, a lot of my

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politics, a lot of my General

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view of history is just very colored by the Lord

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of the Rings and CS Lewis and, you know,

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all of that genre. I was a big Dungeons and

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Dragons guy. Yeah, I’m officially a nerd. Yeah.

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Back in, when I went to college and

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when you play Dungeons and Dragons, I discovered Dungeons and Dragons when I went

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to college. I actually didn’t know it existed in high school. I would thought you

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would have thought that would have called out to me naturally, but somehow I missed

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it. But

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you were basically playing in Tolkien’s. World.

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Even if it wasn’t Tolkien’s world. Elves were elves, hobbits were

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hobbits, dwarves were dwarves. And there was a shared understanding that, you know, dwarves

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were surly and carried an axe and elves were handsome and tall and

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they carried a bow. And you just

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knew in advance, you know, so orcs were bad.

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You were pretty sure the orcs were bad and that carried

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on, you know, and that. And then of course, the original Dungeons and Dragons

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eventually became what were known as MUDs, multi user dungeons where we were playing by

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text and that eventually turned into World of Warcraft. And you know, the,

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the incredibly addictive games that we have did way of saying

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the influence on me is profound. Just absolutely profound.

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So that challenge or that

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influence right now, that challenge. And you mentioned on the show,

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you said moral philosophy, politics

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and history. Right. Were the three areas that Tolkien most

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influenced you, influenced you in. And you said 1973,

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which is the same year the Dark side of the Moon came out. Yes, it

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is. I do know that in

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the 70s, when people were reading Lord of the Rings,

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they would write in the subway Frodo lives.

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Right? Oh, yeah. That was like one of the things that people would, that people

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would do. Tolkien fans would do.

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And I do know that there had been intimations of intersections between

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Tolkien and Pink Floyd and even

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Tolkien and, and even, well, Pink. Not Tolkien, but Pink

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Floyd. You’re thinking of Zeppelin. Zeppelin, that’s it.

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Zeppelin, yes, Zeppelin. Although interesting enough, I associate. Why

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do I associate Zeppelin with the wizard of Oz? Why do I do that?

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I don’t know. But isn’t there something where you can play Dark side of the

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Moon to Wizard of Oz and attracts. Yeah, yeah,

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right, yeah. Yes. Okay, so why somebody

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very high came up with that one? Very. You know,

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that’s the interesting thing about cannabis. It always makes you better

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at engineering. Not much anything else, just. Just engineering.

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What are the intersections between, in your brain, right,

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Between Tolkien and music and these

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different genres of, of art. And by the way, you know, we’re talking

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obviously in 20, 25 here, you know,

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you know, 20 years after, you know, the Lord of the Rings films

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came out, which I thought that property was unfilmable.

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I just, I thought they couldn’t do it. And somehow or another Peter

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Jackson did it and it was kind of insane. I was, I was

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working as a, as a part time film projectionist

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back in the day when they still had physical film. And

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I got a chance to put together the Lord of the Rings films, which was

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great. Oh, cool. Yeah. And so I sort of got to see them before

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other people did, all three of them, actually, before other people did.

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And it was just kind of astonishing what he was able to, what he was

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able to pull off. But, but yeah, let’s go back, let’s

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go back to the 1970s. Let’s go back to where you were starting. How does,

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how do those things intersect in your mind? What’s that, what’s that

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like rock music. And the Lord of the Rings. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

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So I think on several of us, first of all,

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the early 70s, late 60s was explosion in

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musical creativity. And the Lord of the Rings is an

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intensely creative work. And

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what’s funny is that that often got associated say with

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a little bit with the drug culture, with LSD

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and so forth, which would have horrified Tolkien, by the way. Absolutely.

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By the way, 73 is also the year Tolkien died. Right.

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So the, So I, I don’t think

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he would have had much time for the actual rock bands.

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It’s hard to see Tolkien hanging out with Led Zeppelin

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or Pink Floyd. Or Pink Floyd, yeah. But

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there was definitely, you know, sort of a, it

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was a whole counterculture kind of thing. And

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Middle Earth was this just, you know, if you wanted to get away,

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Middle Earth was a wonderful place to get away too. You know, by

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the way, you mentioned Frodo lives in the subways. I can remember hiking the Appalachian

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Trail in the seventies with my brother. And in the huts you would see Frodo

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lives carved. Yeah.

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In the, you know, in the wood of the hut that you were staying in.

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So I, I think first of all, just for sheer

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creativity and, you know, the late 60s, early 70s was

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such an experimental time for music. I mean, people

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were trying all sorts of crazy things. Of course the Beatles were like, you know,

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cutting tapes and playing them backwards, which is, you know,

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just, you know, whoever thought of doing that? Jimi Hendrix, you know,

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basically invents feedback. I know the purists on here are going

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to say the Beatles did it first. I’m not my

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friend Who’s a Beatles fan is going to kill me. But I can’t remember the

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song. But they actually have a moment of feedback first. But

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let’s. It was hendrix.

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I’m sorry, 13 seconds of feedback at the

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beginning of a song does not. You know. But, you know, Hendrix basically invents the

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lead guitarist. Oh, yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah.

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And then Paige, you know, from Led Zeppelin, picks that up. But,

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you know, you can see Tolkien lyrics in some of the

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Led Zeppelin. Sorry? Well, you can see Tolkien lyrics in some of the Led

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Zeppelin lyrics or Tolkien illusions in some of the Led Zeppelin

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lyrics. And with Floyd, I

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think it was more, you know, they were sort of the

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leading edge of acid rock

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definitely during the Syd Barrett years, and

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even, you know, even Dark side of the Moon. So

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I. I don’t think you’re gonna. I think you’d have to search pretty hard to

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find something in Florby. Go, oh, that’s Tolkien right there.

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The. You know, I think certainly

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Tolkien and Lewis, and one thing they would have had in common for

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politics is a distaste for useless war, for pointless

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war. Yep. I don’t. I don’t think Tolkien would have felt that way

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necessarily, against the struggle against evil, which he saw as

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my view, anyway, necessary in part. Yeah. Basically human existence.

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But, you know, that there. That there were. You know, that there were

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dumb wars and. And. And

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that those are just sort of useless wastes of human life.

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I think they would have. Would have agreed on that. So I. I think

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that’s kind of it. I mean, you can see,

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you know, you could. But. So I think it’s just a general. In. In

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the spirit of this episode, it’s a general mashup of

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creativity as opposed to, you know, Roger Waters

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saying, I wrote this because I read the Hobbit and. Right.

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Yeah, well, Roger Waters. I mean, I looked. I looked because I had

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forgotten a whole ton of stuff, you know, about him. So I. I looked up

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his. His Wikipedia page, which

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is always a fun and exciting adventure, as research

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for this show. And one of the things that you do

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note about Waters,

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and it’s easy to note it, you know, it’s easy to see it in his

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sort of. His posture. But I

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think more so when he was a younger man than he is now,

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but when he was a young man, you definitely got the impression that

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he wanted to use Pink Floyd

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as a vehicle for his creative vision. And

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everybody else was just sort of along for the ride. Everybody else is in the

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back of the bus. Right. We’re recording this episode,

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about two weeks after the death of Brian Wilson of the

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Beach Boys. Right? A man who, I was telling my wife, I

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remember watching an American Masterworks episode on PBS

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about the Beach Boys back in maybe like the 90s, the late

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90s, early 2000s, one of those random Saturday afternoons I

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was at home probably hungover,

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watching pbs, trying to stop the pounding in my brain. And,

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and one of the things that jumped out to me about the interview with Brian

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Wilson was just how

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angry he still was about the Beatles being more popular.

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He never lost that bitterness. He never. And he, and he didn’t really care if

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you liked it or didn’t like it. He was just sort of like, no, you

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00:18:10,140 –> 00:18:13,820
know, love, love me do, Come on, let me do a composition for you. And

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then he like, would sit down and do like a whole composition, right? Yeah, yeah.

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Like, this is, this is an 18 bar composition. It’s so much better. And I’m

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just like, it doesn’t matter, you lost. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. You lost,

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buddy. It, it is funny though. These insanely successful

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people, and yet they’re still, you know, driven by the fact that, you know,

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40 years before there was one, you know, one girl who

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didn’t like them or something. Well, have you ever, have you ever heard the

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00:18:38,810 –> 00:18:42,490
story about Michael Jordan? Because I was a basketball

296
00:18:42,490 –> 00:18:45,810
guy for years, but have you ever heard the story of Michael Jordan at the,

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00:18:46,290 –> 00:18:49,970
at his, his induction ceremony in, in high school or

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00:18:49,970 –> 00:18:53,490
something? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he invited the coach who benched him to the

299
00:18:53,490 –> 00:18:57,010
NBA induction ceremony. Yeah, like you’re,

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you’re Michael Jordan. You’re, to paraphrase Allen Iverson,

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you’re black. Jesus. Yeah, like, like you just, that’s what. Makes you

302
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Jordan or Brady, maybe. Brian Wilson

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is still, you know, you know, you’re still driven

304
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by that anger, you know. Right. So

305
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I hadn’t heard that about Brian Wilson, but that’s funny, especially because the Beach

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Boys, you know, when you think of nice rock and roll, you know, as opposed

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00:19:23,380 –> 00:19:26,780
to. Yeah, you go, oh, they were, they were nice guys. Even if they kind

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of sort of hung out with Charlie Manson maybe a little too much.

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Just a little bit of, a little bit of a tweak. Just a little bit

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too much. A little too, a little too close to the Manson. But,

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but, you know, you look back on their songs and, I mean, I don’t think

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there’s an angry song in the, in the repertoire anywhere. Oh, no, I,

313
00:19:44,560 –> 00:19:48,160
I, I think probably their best song, and they did a lot of different, obviously,

314
00:19:48,160 –> 00:19:50,840
a lot of different songs, but the song that probably sticks with me the most,

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I think I have it on my favorites list on Spotify is God Only Knows.

316
00:19:54,400 –> 00:19:57,680
Yeah. Like, it’s a beautiful song. Beautiful composition.

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00:19:58,560 –> 00:20:02,040
Now, full disclosure, I am not a fan of the

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00:20:02,040 –> 00:20:05,380
Beatles. I. I think that they were. I gotta go. Right,

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00:20:05,940 –> 00:20:09,140
right. Well, I guess we’re done for the day. Short interview

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and we’re done. I think they were a Right Place,

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Right Time band. Yes. I think they could play. Yes. I think they could put

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together compositions. Right Place, Right Time. If they showed up 10 years earlier,

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they’d have been nobody. And if they showed up 10 years later, they’d have been

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nobody. They hit the right place at the right time. You know, Ed Sullivan, the

325
00:20:27,220 –> 00:20:30,900
whole nine yards. They rode the wave. And I can’t. I can’t

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00:20:30,900 –> 00:20:34,220
take away the wave from them. I can never do that.

327
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Okay. But I can judge the talent that’s riding the wave.

328
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And I think there was a lot of sharp talent during that time

329
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that sort of got overshadowed. Go right

330
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on ahead. I, I actually.

331
00:20:54,060 –> 00:20:57,290
So, so, you know, when I was thinking about this episode, I was thinking, well,

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what are the. What are the common themes between Pink Floyd or Dark side of

333
00:21:00,250 –> 00:21:03,850
the Moon? Yeah. Lord of the Rings and All Quiet on the Western Front?

334
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The one thing I came up with is that in some ways, they really set

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the tone for their genre, essentially, almost for

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the next, you know, 50 years going forward. You know, when I read.

337
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So, you know, I was saying when you. And this is going to loop back

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00:21:19,130 –> 00:21:21,380
to the Beatles in a second. Sure. But.

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So Lord of the Rings, I’ve been reading all my life, but All Quiet on

340
00:21:26,180 –> 00:21:28,660
the Western Front, I think I read when I was maybe in high school, and

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then when you asked me to do this episode, I said, well, I better, you

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00:21:31,220 –> 00:21:34,180
know, brush up. So I reread it, and

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one of the things that struck me was if you look at almost

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any war movie from, like, 1930 on,

345
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it has all those, you know, the burnout,

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the guy who goes back to the home front, and they can’t understand him. You

347
00:21:50,370 –> 00:21:53,890
know, the craziness of the front, you know,

348
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the Brief Flower of Love, which is immediately destroyed

349
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by the craziness of war. You know, and it’s like, oh, my gosh, you can

350
00:22:02,329 –> 00:22:06,010
just. Like, that’s Platoon or that’s Full Metal Jacket, or that’s every

351
00:22:06,010 –> 00:22:09,770
single war movie ever. Right. In a way, you could almost

352
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trace it back to All Quiet on the Western Front front. And I would say

353
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almost every piece of Fantasy literature. And again,

354
00:22:17,600 –> 00:22:21,400
depending upon who your audience is, you might have some people, angry people calling in

355
00:22:21,400 –> 00:22:24,880
about this. But almost every piece of fantasy literature,

356
00:22:24,880 –> 00:22:28,319
certainly for the rest of the 20th century and

357
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probably into the 21st century as well, heavily. Heavily

358
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influenced by the Lord of the Rings. You can see. Oh, yeah,

359
00:22:36,880 –> 00:22:38,720
you can. You can see it.

360
00:22:40,590 –> 00:22:44,270
And I could. I could give you examples of this, but

361
00:22:44,510 –> 00:22:48,350
I would say it to. As far as

362
00:22:48,350 –> 00:22:52,070
acid rock goes, or, you know, that

363
00:22:52,070 –> 00:22:55,790
sort of dark. Dark rock,

364
00:22:55,790 –> 00:22:59,390
if you want to call it that, Dark side of the Moon

365
00:22:59,390 –> 00:23:03,190
was. Was the Granddaddy. I mean, it was, you know, it

366
00:23:03,190 –> 00:23:06,920
is. It has some, you know, very depressing lyrics.

367
00:23:09,320 –> 00:23:13,160
It’s interesting. So I. I did not have a

368
00:23:13,160 –> 00:23:16,920
good understanding of who Pink Floyd was. Right.

369
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But I. I sort of. So the way I was raised.

370
00:23:20,960 –> 00:23:23,800
And I’ll get back to this, is going to tie into my critique of the

371
00:23:23,800 –> 00:23:27,320
Beatles as well. The way I was raised. I was raised in a Motown household.

372
00:23:27,480 –> 00:23:31,130
I was not raised in a Beatles household. Right, right. Okay. So

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people don’t understand this now because everybody listens to everything everywhere and no one

374
00:23:34,850 –> 00:23:38,570
cares. Right. Back then, it mattered kids. Back then, it mattered kids.

375
00:23:38,570 –> 00:23:41,850
That’s right. And so if you were in a

376
00:23:42,650 –> 00:23:46,329
Jewish house or a WASP house, you

377
00:23:46,329 –> 00:23:50,050
were probably listening to the Beatles. Maybe you were

378
00:23:50,050 –> 00:23:53,290
listening to the Doors. If you were really rebellious and a hippie. If you were

379
00:23:53,690 –> 00:23:57,210
super cool. If you were super cool. Right. But if you were

380
00:23:57,210 –> 00:24:01,020
African American, yeah, you weren’t listening to

381
00:24:01,020 –> 00:24:04,300
any of that. You were listening to the Jackson 5.

382
00:24:04,700 –> 00:24:08,500
You were listening to Dionne Warwick. You were listening

383
00:24:08,500 –> 00:24:11,980
to what’s her Name?

384
00:24:13,260 –> 00:24:17,060
Oh, well, yeah, you were listening to Aretha Franklin. You were

385
00:24:17,060 –> 00:24:20,580
listening to Marvin Gaye. Kids. Yeah. You were

386
00:24:20,580 –> 00:24:24,260
listening to that. And. And those two things. And again, I

387
00:24:24,260 –> 00:24:28,070
have to. Because everybody’s Spotify list crosses over. Now, those

388
00:24:28,070 –> 00:24:29,350
two things didn’t cross over.

389
00:24:31,750 –> 00:24:35,510
Except for the Beatles themselves. They were listening to those

390
00:24:35,510 –> 00:24:39,350
folks. Right. The Beatles. Absolutely. For sure. They were absolutely

391
00:24:39,350 –> 00:24:42,990
listening to those. As Elvis had listened to the gospel music

392
00:24:42,990 –> 00:24:46,670
of his time, as Johnny Cash had listened to the gospel music

393
00:24:46,670 –> 00:24:50,390
of his time, you know, the artists, for

394
00:24:50,390 –> 00:24:54,150
sure. You know, Dave Brubeck, Right. I’m a huge jazz guy. Right. So Dave

395
00:24:54,150 –> 00:24:57,100
Brubeck, you know, would hang out with

396
00:24:57,580 –> 00:25:01,420
Coltrane and Miles Davis and. All right, so you’re

397
00:25:01,420 –> 00:25:04,660
right. Absolutely. The musicians all fed each other and

398
00:25:04,660 –> 00:25:08,460
understood that racial differences didn’t matter

399
00:25:08,460 –> 00:25:11,900
when it came to actual musical talent. If you could swing, you could swing. And

400
00:25:11,900 –> 00:25:15,380
that’s just it. Right, right. Musicians have always understood this

401
00:25:15,380 –> 00:25:19,180
Comedians have always understood this. This is why Chris Rock hangs out with Jerry Seinfeld.

402
00:25:19,180 –> 00:25:22,620
And they’re really good friends. Yeah. And they just will continue to be forever. Right.

403
00:25:22,620 –> 00:25:26,470
This is why Dave Chappelle and Bill Burr, you can put

404
00:25:26,470 –> 00:25:29,030
them in a room together, don’t put them on stage together, because they’re going to

405
00:25:29,030 –> 00:25:31,830
try to outdo each other. It’s going to be really mess, but. I like to

406
00:25:31,830 –> 00:25:33,030
be in that room. Oh, my God.

407
00:25:35,910 –> 00:25:39,510
And they’re going to say the most outrageous cutting things to each other,

408
00:25:39,750 –> 00:25:42,310
and there is going to be nothing that is going to be off the table.

409
00:25:42,550 –> 00:25:46,350
Yeah. But there’s a second piece of this, and that’s the

410
00:25:46,350 –> 00:25:49,430
viewer, the audience, and the audience makes all these separations.

411
00:25:50,210 –> 00:25:53,010
And so with the household that I was raised in, my father was not a

412
00:25:53,010 –> 00:25:56,570
Beatles fan. He was like, no, that’s. That’s white music for white people. Right. We

413
00:25:56,570 –> 00:25:59,490
listen to Marvin Gaye in this house. Right, Right. You know,

414
00:26:00,530 –> 00:26:04,130
so that was my influence. Right. But it’s interesting to talk about genre breaking,

415
00:26:04,130 –> 00:26:07,730
because when you think about books. Right.

416
00:26:08,770 –> 00:26:12,210
In my house, I was right. I was a bibliophile. I’m raising my kids files.

417
00:26:12,210 –> 00:26:16,060
I mean, I host this podcast, Read. We read books from everywhere. Like,

418
00:26:16,060 –> 00:26:19,260
my mother was always the kind of person who was like. Who always said. I

419
00:26:19,260 –> 00:26:22,540
was like, who always said, you can learn anything from any book

420
00:26:22,620 –> 00:26:26,300
anywhere. Just go read it. Right. So totally agree.

421
00:26:26,300 –> 00:26:29,260
We’re going to have the Bible, but we’re also going to have the Bhagavad Gita,

422
00:26:29,260 –> 00:26:32,099
and we’re going to have the Book of Mormon. Just go read it and then

423
00:26:32,099 –> 00:26:35,580
we can have a discussion about this. Right? Yeah. Very free thinking when it came

424
00:26:35,580 –> 00:26:38,380
to. When it came to books. That’s a free thinking when it came to music.

425
00:26:39,420 –> 00:26:43,150
And so when I finally

426
00:26:43,150 –> 00:26:46,150
ran across Pink Floyd, I was in college

427
00:26:47,030 –> 00:26:50,310
in, like, the early 2000s when I finally ran across them.

428
00:26:51,190 –> 00:26:54,990
And obviously they were already, you know, sort of. I don’t want to say past

429
00:26:54,990 –> 00:26:58,150
their prime, but they were, you know, recycling.

430
00:26:58,550 –> 00:27:01,430
Recycling the wall for the 350th time. Yeah.

431
00:27:02,710 –> 00:27:06,550
That was. The Wall was the Pink Floyd

432
00:27:06,550 –> 00:27:10,350
purists might kill me, but I. The. The Wall was their high

433
00:27:10,350 –> 00:27:14,150
watermark. I mean, by the way, I think the Wall is brilliant. I think it’s

434
00:27:14,150 –> 00:27:17,390
an absolutely brilliant album,

435
00:27:17,790 –> 00:27:21,630
but it’s. It’s very difficult to sustain that kind of,

436
00:27:21,630 –> 00:27:25,470
you know, like, you know, that kind of brilliance. They

437
00:27:25,470 –> 00:27:29,190
had some good songs, and then Roger Waters on his solo, on

438
00:27:29,190 –> 00:27:32,990
his own had some good songs, but it

439
00:27:32,990 –> 00:27:36,780
never Quite equaled that in my view. So. Yeah, well. And as

440
00:27:36,780 –> 00:27:40,460
I said before, I think he needed Pink Floyd as a container for all of

441
00:27:40,460 –> 00:27:43,700
his creative. Yeah. Energies.

442
00:27:43,940 –> 00:27:47,580
Right. And once he got rid of Sid Barrett, whose

443
00:27:47,580 –> 00:27:51,140
brain fell apart, you know, once. You know, once that. I mean, if Sid Barrett’s

444
00:27:51,140 –> 00:27:53,940
brain hadn’t fallen apart, there was probably going to be a real battle in that.

445
00:27:53,940 –> 00:27:57,700
In that band between him and Roger Waters. Yeah, I think so.

446
00:27:57,780 –> 00:28:01,420
You know, and it would have been. Like Brian Jones and Mick

447
00:28:01,420 –> 00:28:05,060
Jagger in the Stone. Eventually they would. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And somebody’s going to

448
00:28:05,060 –> 00:28:08,500
lose. Somebody’s going to lose that, that, that. That game. And I. I wouldn’t.

449
00:28:08,820 –> 00:28:11,700
I don’t quite know who would have lost or won on that. And it’s one

450
00:28:11,700 –> 00:28:14,740
of those. Those things in rock culture that you’re never going to know the answer

451
00:28:14,740 –> 00:28:18,540
to that. It’s like. It’s like in comic books, Superman, Batman, you know, you’re never

452
00:28:18,540 –> 00:28:22,220
going to know. Yeah. But I say all that to say

453
00:28:22,220 –> 00:28:26,020
this. My critique of the Beatles is not, again, it does not

454
00:28:26,020 –> 00:28:29,580
come from a perspective of a lack of

455
00:28:29,580 –> 00:28:32,880
musical ability. I think they have musical ability. I just think they got caught up

456
00:28:32,880 –> 00:28:35,680
in right place at right time, and

457
00:28:36,480 –> 00:28:40,240
that sort of overlapped a lot of. Or allowed them to lap over a lot

458
00:28:40,240 –> 00:28:43,840
of things and gloss over a lot of things that would have killed other

459
00:28:43,840 –> 00:28:46,160
bands. So

460
00:28:47,759 –> 00:28:51,400
I kind of agree with you on that. I mean, and it’s almost hard to

461
00:28:51,400 –> 00:28:53,280
see through the.

462
00:28:55,920 –> 00:28:59,480
Through the Beatlemania in a way. Right. Because it was so

463
00:28:59,630 –> 00:29:03,190
such a phenomenon. In fact, you’ll get a kick out of this, by the way,

464
00:29:03,190 –> 00:29:07,030
for. I’m actually doing kind of a. For

465
00:29:07,030 –> 00:29:10,870
Halloween, I’m doing kind of a Beetle Mania thing in my hometown to

466
00:29:10,870 –> 00:29:14,630
try to transmit maybe to the next generation. Well, it’s. It

467
00:29:14,630 –> 00:29:17,870
was in some ways kind of a cultural phenomenon. It was. Yeah. You know, like,

468
00:29:17,950 –> 00:29:21,750
what was this all about? I. I can tell you about that another time

469
00:29:21,750 –> 00:29:25,470
if you want. But. But we were talking about,

470
00:29:26,010 –> 00:29:29,370
say, in. In the spirit of the episode first. Yeah, right.

471
00:29:29,610 –> 00:29:33,330
Getting there first. I think the Beatles got to a lot

472
00:29:33,330 –> 00:29:37,130
of places first. They were really early on

473
00:29:37,210 –> 00:29:40,890
the psychedelic thing. I mean, you can always say, did

474
00:29:40,890 –> 00:29:44,610
some. I mean, let’s, let’s. Sergeant Peppers was kind of

475
00:29:44,610 –> 00:29:48,450
the breakthrough album for the Summer of Love. It was the breakthrough

476
00:29:48,450 –> 00:29:50,970
album for the psychedelic influence

477
00:29:52,340 –> 00:29:55,940
in. In rock and roll. And it was in kind of really

478
00:29:55,940 –> 00:29:59,220
kind of one of the first themed albums. Right. You can see

479
00:30:00,100 –> 00:30:03,940
Dark side of the Moon, you can see the Wall. You know, I Mean, not

480
00:30:03,940 –> 00:30:07,700
directly, but the, the idea of an entire album or.

481
00:30:07,700 –> 00:30:11,340
Tommy. Right, yeah, the idea of an entire album based around, you

482
00:30:11,340 –> 00:30:15,060
know, a single recurring theme. They were kind of

483
00:30:15,060 –> 00:30:18,580
the first. Here’s, here’s a great. I heard, I heard a

484
00:30:18,580 –> 00:30:22,170
podcast once. This was really interesting. Interesting. They were debating

485
00:30:22,250 –> 00:30:25,970
which beetle had the most cultural influence and you know what

486
00:30:25,970 –> 00:30:29,370
answer they came up with? George Harrison.

487
00:30:30,250 –> 00:30:34,050
Why? So one of the things the guys pointed out, and this is

488
00:30:34,050 –> 00:30:37,810
really true, he said in 1967, if you went

489
00:30:37,810 –> 00:30:41,490
through an American city, you didn’t see Indian restaurants, you

490
00:30:41,490 –> 00:30:45,170
didn’t see yoga studios. Right? There was no, there was

491
00:30:45,170 –> 00:30:48,950
none of that. Where did that come from?

492
00:30:49,910 –> 00:30:53,710
It came from the Beatles going to India. And they

493
00:30:53,710 –> 00:30:57,510
went there because of George Harrison. You know, I know some

494
00:30:57,510 –> 00:31:00,390
Indians, A good friend of mine, he’s Indian, he

495
00:31:00,870 –> 00:31:04,390
emigrated to the dispute. He immigrated to the United States in 1988.

496
00:31:04,710 –> 00:31:08,150
So he was a little bit before that, a little bit after that.

497
00:31:09,110 –> 00:31:12,880
But his father, new people who immigrated to, in.

498
00:31:12,960 –> 00:31:16,680
Immigrated from India to the United States back in the 60s. I’m gonna have to,

499
00:31:16,680 –> 00:31:20,160
I’m gonna have to check that out and see if he buys that theory. Yeah,

500
00:31:20,160 –> 00:31:24,000
yeah, see if he buys the, the George Harrison theory. I’ll give you one

501
00:31:24,000 –> 00:31:26,720
more. By the way, George Harrison is

502
00:31:28,480 –> 00:31:32,240
somewhat credited with taking the first selfie. He was at

503
00:31:32,240 –> 00:31:35,840
the Taj Mahal. He took a Polaroid camera, you can look this up,

504
00:31:35,920 –> 00:31:39,670
turned it around, took a picture of himself at the 1965 at

505
00:31:39,670 –> 00:31:42,990
the Taj Mahal. So I will say, I will say this. And this is going

506
00:31:42,990 –> 00:31:45,590
to be. People who are going to listen to this, were maybe a little bit

507
00:31:45,670 –> 00:31:49,430
younger, are going to be like, this is very boomer focused. I don’t know any,

508
00:31:49,430 –> 00:31:53,270
about any of this. This is ridiculous. And I get it. Sorry, kids. Well,

509
00:31:53,270 –> 00:31:56,270
you know, I get it. You don’t. But they wear the cool bands, kids. Well,

510
00:31:56,270 –> 00:31:59,990
you know, I got, you know, Taylor Swift is better, Kanye

511
00:31:59,990 –> 00:32:03,550
is. Whatever, I get it again. And every, every generation has their own

512
00:32:03,550 –> 00:32:07,090
thing, right? Has to have their own thing. And the Beatles did

513
00:32:07,090 –> 00:32:10,850
benefit, just like the Beach Boys did. All the people

514
00:32:10,850 –> 00:32:14,650
that we’ve mentioned so far, even Zeppelin in the 70s benefited, but

515
00:32:14,890 –> 00:32:18,570
the Beach Boys, Marvin Gaye, anything coming,

516
00:32:18,570 –> 00:32:22,330
anything coming out of Motown, my God, the

517
00:32:22,330 –> 00:32:25,210
Doors, you know, even,

518
00:32:26,170 –> 00:32:27,850
even the Rolling Stones,

519
00:32:29,940 –> 00:32:33,460
everybody benefited from the mid 20th century

520
00:32:33,460 –> 00:32:37,060
Peace dividend that America got for fighting

521
00:32:37,620 –> 00:32:40,820
a brutal war in Europe and in Asia,

522
00:32:42,100 –> 00:32:45,460
from defeating two world devouring powers

523
00:32:45,940 –> 00:32:48,980
and a war that, you know, if we really want to be honest,

524
00:32:49,540 –> 00:32:52,580
traced its roots to World War I.

525
00:32:53,460 –> 00:32:57,300
Absolutely. And so World War II is World War. Yeah,

526
00:32:57,300 –> 00:33:00,880
yeah. It’s just. It’s the bookend 22 years later. Exactly. Yeah. Well,

527
00:33:01,280 –> 00:33:04,640
you know, I mean, Hitler with different technology. Hitler had a chip on his shoulder,

528
00:33:04,960 –> 00:33:08,800
to say the least. And, you

529
00:33:08,800 –> 00:33:12,080
know, that may be the understatement of the. It may be. And.

530
00:33:12,480 –> 00:33:16,200
And he, you know,

531
00:33:16,200 –> 00:33:19,960
he. He wanted. Well, he wanted vengeance. He

532
00:33:19,960 –> 00:33:23,760
wanted retribution against reality itself because

533
00:33:23,760 –> 00:33:27,520
of what he experienced in the trenches and what he saw in the trenches.

534
00:33:28,070 –> 00:33:31,470
Those, again, the same trenches, interestingly enough, that

535
00:33:31,470 –> 00:33:35,190
Tolkien was in. Yeah. And again,

536
00:33:35,910 –> 00:33:39,470
I. I think about World War I as this incubator for all of the

537
00:33:39,470 –> 00:33:43,030
20th century. Right. So, you know, you’ve got

538
00:33:43,030 –> 00:33:46,670
Tolkien in there. You’ve got CS Lewis experiment experiencing things. You got Ernest

539
00:33:46,670 –> 00:33:49,830
Hemingway driving, you know, an ambulance.

540
00:33:51,670 –> 00:33:55,480
You’ve got F. Scott Fitzgerald who would have

541
00:33:55,480 –> 00:33:59,160
gone to Europe, but he couldn’t get past his commanding officer, who I

542
00:33:59,160 –> 00:34:03,000
believe was a gentleman named Dwight Eisenhower. Oh, is it

543
00:34:03,000 –> 00:34:06,800
true? Harry Truman served in World

544
00:34:06,800 –> 00:34:09,680
War I as a very. As a young man.

545
00:34:11,120 –> 00:34:14,720
Winston Churchill, obviously. I mean,

546
00:34:16,320 –> 00:34:19,880
the only reason Stalin didn’t go to the front was

547
00:34:19,880 –> 00:34:23,660
because Lenin got shipped in a train through Finland by

548
00:34:23,660 –> 00:34:27,140
the Germans back to the Russians to kick them out of the war. But

549
00:34:27,140 –> 00:34:30,260
Stalin should have been at the front. If Stalin had been at the front, you

550
00:34:30,260 –> 00:34:33,660
probably wouldn’t have had the purges in the 30s, or you might have had them,

551
00:34:33,660 –> 00:34:37,100
but they might have been more. They might have been worse. And of course,

552
00:34:37,420 –> 00:34:40,700
my personal favorite character, not even character

553
00:34:40,700 –> 00:34:44,140
personality of World War I was T.E.

554
00:34:44,220 –> 00:34:47,660
lawrence. Lawrence of Arabia. My God.

555
00:34:47,900 –> 00:34:51,570
A man who sets the. To talk about genre,

556
00:34:51,730 –> 00:34:55,330
set the arch type of the adventurer, soldier,

557
00:34:55,410 –> 00:34:59,170
writer, the intellect and the fighter. The person who

558
00:34:59,170 –> 00:35:02,850
could shoot you on a Wednesday and then that same afternoon have

559
00:35:02,850 –> 00:35:06,569
tea with you and talk about how terrible, you

560
00:35:06,569 –> 00:35:10,090
know, the English are and how we should cut up Arabia and plan a

561
00:35:10,090 –> 00:35:13,490
revolution. Like all this got set with World War I,

562
00:35:14,610 –> 00:35:18,310
and I have a quote here, actually, from the First World

563
00:35:18,310 –> 00:35:21,070
War by John Keegan, a book I recommend everybody read.

564
00:35:22,270 –> 00:35:25,870
Yeah, absolutely. Because it is a great book that talks about how

565
00:35:26,350 –> 00:35:30,110
World War I actually started based on, interestingly enough, train

566
00:35:30,190 –> 00:35:33,550
timetables. Yep. And I

567
00:35:33,550 –> 00:35:37,310
quote, John Keegan called

568
00:35:37,310 –> 00:35:40,990
the First World War a tragic and unnecessary conflict.

569
00:35:41,310 –> 00:35:45,150
Unnecessary because the train of events that led to its outbreak might have been broken

570
00:35:45,150 –> 00:35:48,960
at any point during the five weeks of crisis and that preceded the first

571
00:35:48,960 –> 00:35:52,720
clash of arms had prudence or common goodwill found a voice.

572
00:35:53,360 –> 00:35:57,040
Tragic because the consequences of the first clash ended the lives of 10

573
00:35:57,040 –> 00:36:00,800
million human beings tortured the emotional lives of millions more

574
00:36:01,120 –> 00:36:04,760
destroyed the benevolent and optimistic culture of the European continent and

575
00:36:04,760 –> 00:36:07,840
left. When the guns at last fell silent four years later,

576
00:36:08,640 –> 00:36:12,400
a legacy of political rancor and racial hatred so

577
00:36:12,400 –> 00:36:16,090
intense that no explanation of the causes of the Second

578
00:36:16,090 –> 00:36:19,850
World War can stand without reference to those

579
00:36:19,850 –> 00:36:22,330
roots. Close quote.

580
00:36:26,010 –> 00:36:28,490
We’ll never have. We’ll never have a war like that again.

581
00:36:31,130 –> 00:36:34,730
I hope not. It

582
00:36:34,730 –> 00:36:37,810
was really one of the most

583
00:36:37,810 –> 00:36:41,390
disastrous events in humanistry. I think it was

584
00:36:41,390 –> 00:36:44,510
also part. Part of the disaster was that,

585
00:36:45,790 –> 00:36:48,590
I mean, this is. This is kind of well established military

586
00:36:49,310 –> 00:36:52,950
doctrine had not caught up to military technology. And so

587
00:36:52,950 –> 00:36:56,710
you had, you know, the phenomenon of people charging machine guns and just getting

588
00:36:56,710 –> 00:37:00,550
moaned down in the thousands. I read a book recently by Andrew

589
00:37:00,550 –> 00:37:02,750
Roberts, who’s a brilliant. He wrote.

590
00:37:04,270 –> 00:37:07,640
He wrote the. The biography of Napoleon and

591
00:37:08,520 –> 00:37:11,920
Churchill and he. He did an

592
00:37:11,920 –> 00:37:15,320
analysis of the first. Just the first day of the sum. Just the first day,

593
00:37:15,320 –> 00:37:18,360
you know, what led up to it, what was the strategic thinking?

594
00:37:18,920 –> 00:37:22,120
And I’m going to.

595
00:37:22,680 –> 00:37:26,480
I assume this podcast is PG rated, so I won’t cuss. It was

596
00:37:26,480 –> 00:37:30,120
a screw up and basically came down to

597
00:37:30,120 –> 00:37:33,490
a massive misunderstanding of,

598
00:37:33,890 –> 00:37:37,570
you know, of tactics in the age of

599
00:37:38,370 –> 00:37:42,050
artillery and the machine gun. They had no idea

600
00:37:42,130 –> 00:37:45,570
that, you know, they thought they were, you know, completely decimating the German

601
00:37:46,050 –> 00:37:49,730
defenses. The Germans had just gone underground. The

602
00:37:49,730 –> 00:37:53,370
artillery bombardment would pass overhead and they would, you know,

603
00:37:53,370 –> 00:37:55,970
wait for it to go by and then they would come up and get in

604
00:37:55,970 –> 00:37:59,290
their positions and they could just watch the British coming over and they would get

605
00:37:59,290 –> 00:38:03,140
tangled in the barbed wire. They had no real. There was. There was

606
00:38:03,140 –> 00:38:06,980
some kind of terrible screw up that the snips that

607
00:38:06,980 –> 00:38:09,900
they put on the front of the bayonets to cut through the barbed wire were

608
00:38:09,900 –> 00:38:13,140
insufficient. So they were sitting there snipping away at the barbed wires.

609
00:38:13,620 –> 00:38:17,380
You know, the machine guns were just raking them and it

610
00:38:17,380 –> 00:38:20,900
was horrific. It was absolutely horrific. It was the biggest single

611
00:38:21,540 –> 00:38:25,060
loss of life in the history of the British Army.

612
00:38:26,580 –> 00:38:30,420
Thus the line, you know, forward. They cried from the rear and the front rank

613
00:38:30,420 –> 00:38:34,130
died. And the general sat and the lines on the map move from

614
00:38:34,130 –> 00:38:37,770
side to side. Like, that’s. That’s World War

615
00:38:37,770 –> 00:38:40,850
I. That’s the whole thing. You had generals

616
00:38:41,250 –> 00:38:45,090
who, like Patton, Right.

617
00:38:45,490 –> 00:38:48,210
Who had. Who were working out

618
00:38:49,330 –> 00:38:53,130
because of French problems with the Germans, because

619
00:38:53,130 –> 00:38:56,050
of the unresolved war of the summer of 1870.

620
00:38:57,500 –> 00:39:00,820
Yep. They were working out personal beefs they had with the

621
00:39:00,820 –> 00:39:04,300
Germans. Yeah. And then the

622
00:39:04,300 –> 00:39:08,140
Germans are working through at the time

623
00:39:09,980 –> 00:39:13,700
their idea of the right to rule Europe. Thank

624
00:39:13,700 –> 00:39:16,940
you, Von Bismarck. And the ability,

625
00:39:17,340 –> 00:39:20,900
or the, not the ability, the, the

626
00:39:20,900 –> 00:39:24,710
desire by the Kaiser to. And a

627
00:39:24,710 –> 00:39:28,230
lot of countries have this. I’m looking at you, China right now.

628
00:39:28,470 –> 00:39:32,150
But the desire to be worshipped

629
00:39:32,390 –> 00:39:34,950
or, or, or have other folks bend the knee

630
00:39:35,910 –> 00:39:39,590
to you as the center of a particular continent.

631
00:39:40,230 –> 00:39:43,830
And then you had the British, who. And honestly, if the

632
00:39:43,830 –> 00:39:47,390
British had stayed out of World War I, it probably could have been just a

633
00:39:47,390 –> 00:39:50,710
continent, a bunch of continental nonsense, and no one would know anything about it.

634
00:39:51,180 –> 00:39:55,020
But the British felt they had to jump in because they protected the shipping lanes.

635
00:39:55,180 –> 00:39:58,940
I’m looking at you, United States of America, right? And

636
00:39:59,020 –> 00:40:02,140
so you have all these

637
00:40:02,140 –> 00:40:05,580
dynamics at play and to your point, your new military technology.

638
00:40:05,900 –> 00:40:09,500
So submarine warfare started in World War

639
00:40:09,500 –> 00:40:13,260
I. The use of, to your point, machine guns and barbed

640
00:40:13,260 –> 00:40:17,100
wire trenches. I mean, you see all this aerial,

641
00:40:17,180 –> 00:40:20,950
Aerial warfare, Right. Whoever thought about using planes to do

642
00:40:20,950 –> 00:40:24,670
anything? Right. Brand new technology. I mean, Kitty Hawk happened when. I mean,

643
00:40:24,670 –> 00:40:28,470
your technology, you know, 1905.

644
00:40:28,550 –> 00:40:32,230
Oh five. Right. And so, you know, 10 years, not even 10 years,

645
00:40:32,230 –> 00:40:35,750
eight years later, they’re taking that tech and they’re flying over the

646
00:40:35,750 –> 00:40:39,350
battlefields and they’re, they’re having air, air raids. And then of

647
00:40:39,350 –> 00:40:43,190
course, the technology that would be utilized

648
00:40:43,270 –> 00:40:46,880
to horrific means in the Second World War. Gas.

649
00:40:48,000 –> 00:40:51,720
Yeah. No one ever talks about the gas attacks in World

650
00:40:51,720 –> 00:40:55,360
War I. The gas attacks screwed up more people on

651
00:40:55,360 –> 00:40:59,200
both sides of, of the, of the,

652
00:40:59,200 –> 00:41:00,640
the dividing line there.

653
00:41:02,720 –> 00:41:04,720
Including, including Hitler, right?

654
00:41:06,560 –> 00:41:10,320
Oh, yeah. I mean, look, I’m not talking

655
00:41:10,320 –> 00:41:13,760
about World War II Hitler. I’m not talking about the Hitler like in his 40s

656
00:41:13,760 –> 00:41:17,550
and 50s. I’m not talking about that guy Hitler in his 20s.

657
00:41:19,310 –> 00:41:22,430
I want to be very clear on this. I’m talking about Hitler in his 20s

658
00:41:23,470 –> 00:41:27,190
before being rejected from art school, before wandering around

659
00:41:27,190 –> 00:41:30,630
homeless in Vienna screaming about the Jews, before looking for a

660
00:41:30,630 –> 00:41:34,190
communist under every bushel basket that you could find before

661
00:41:34,190 –> 00:41:36,910
all that idealistic Hitler.

662
00:41:38,830 –> 00:41:42,520
So would say fun at a party Hitler, he was 20. 20

663
00:41:42,520 –> 00:41:46,280
party when he was 20. That Hitler

664
00:41:48,600 –> 00:41:51,880
served in a role as a runner

665
00:41:52,360 –> 00:41:54,600
of messages between lines.

666
00:41:56,040 –> 00:41:58,760
If you look it up, I think on Google, if I remember correct, I looked

667
00:41:58,760 –> 00:42:01,720
it up years ago and some people can, can check me on this.

668
00:42:02,760 –> 00:42:06,440
Runners had something like a 95% death rate.

669
00:42:07,450 –> 00:42:11,130
Oh, it’s a very dangerous job. Yeah. And the question, of

670
00:42:11,130 –> 00:42:14,930
course, that, that almost never gets asked here because everybody always asks the

671
00:42:14,930 –> 00:42:17,250
time travel question. If you can go back and kill Hitler in the cradle, would

672
00:42:17,250 –> 00:42:21,050
you do it? Okay, yeah, whatever. Here’s the question that nobody ever asks, why

673
00:42:21,050 –> 00:42:23,610
is it that Hitler was in that 5% that didn’t catch a bullet?

674
00:42:25,530 –> 00:42:28,570
That is an interesting question. Why do you think?

675
00:42:29,290 –> 00:42:30,250
I think because

676
00:42:33,860 –> 00:42:36,380
I’m gonna push back on Albert Einstein a little bit. I think God does play

677
00:42:36,380 –> 00:42:39,700
dice with the universe. I’m gonna leave it at that.

678
00:42:43,540 –> 00:42:46,900
Because Churchill. Churchill was there too. Yeah.

679
00:42:47,380 –> 00:42:50,820
Churchill also had close brushes with death. Right. Earlier in his.

680
00:42:50,900 –> 00:42:54,580
Earlier in his life, he was. In fact, I think Churchill had a famous

681
00:42:54,580 –> 00:42:58,380
line he said. Did he say something like, there’s nothing so exhilarating as get.

682
00:42:58,380 –> 00:43:00,580
As someone shooting at you and missing. That’s.

683
00:43:02,540 –> 00:43:06,380
That was one of his lines. So. So he was great with

684
00:43:06,380 –> 00:43:09,300
it. He was great with a quote. He was. He was definitely. He could. He

685
00:43:09,300 –> 00:43:12,620
could rail. He could rattle them off. So I want to be very clear. I’m

686
00:43:12,620 –> 00:43:16,220
not admiring Hitler. I’m not admiring any of these people. Very clear.

687
00:43:16,380 –> 00:43:18,340
I know you’re not, but I want to be very clear for folks listening, if

688
00:43:18,340 –> 00:43:22,100
you’re coming into this raw. Okay. I’m merely saying that World War

689
00:43:22,100 –> 00:43:25,460
I set the table for a whole lot of different. Whole lot of different

690
00:43:25,460 –> 00:43:29,260
dynamics that then played out further and into the 20th, and I would

691
00:43:29,260 –> 00:43:33,060
even argue deep into the 21st century, so. Oh,

692
00:43:33,060 –> 00:43:36,780
absolutely. The current challenges that we are having with the remnants of the

693
00:43:36,780 –> 00:43:37,740
Ottoman Empire

694
00:43:41,260 –> 00:43:44,380
go all the way back to the death of the Ottoman Empire in World War

695
00:43:44,380 –> 00:43:47,180
I. I mean, we would have not probably had the Iraq War

696
00:43:49,340 –> 00:43:52,820
without. Without the Ottoman Empire. How about this? Churchill

697
00:43:52,820 –> 00:43:56,550
develops the Iranian oil fields to power the British

698
00:43:56,550 –> 00:44:00,230
Navy in World War I. There you go. That’s. That’s why

699
00:44:00,230 –> 00:44:03,830
he. He was. He was the guy, as the first Sea Lord

700
00:44:03,990 –> 00:44:07,710
who said, forget coal burning. We got a better. We

701
00:44:07,710 –> 00:44:11,069
got a. We got to pull that oil up out of the ground. Right? Yeah,

702
00:44:11,069 –> 00:44:14,710
yeah. And. And oil dominates, of course, a lot of the

703
00:44:14,950 –> 00:44:18,550
strategy of. Of World War II in the

704
00:44:18,550 –> 00:44:21,710
sense that, you know, one of the things that Hitler is trying to do when

705
00:44:21,710 –> 00:44:24,870
he drives into Russia is get to the, you know, the oil fields in the

706
00:44:24,870 –> 00:44:28,610
South. Correct. Of the. Of the Union. I mean, he ends up screwing

707
00:44:28,610 –> 00:44:32,450
it up in. And in fact, how about this? I’m going to pull

708
00:44:32,450 –> 00:44:36,050
it to the Lord of the Rings, much like Sauron. Okay. Because

709
00:44:36,050 –> 00:44:39,570
he’s so blinded by, you know, in some ways, his.

710
00:44:40,290 –> 00:44:44,130
His. His manias that, you know,

711
00:44:44,210 –> 00:44:47,450
so. So the whole, you know, the whole t. If you will, the tactic of

712
00:44:47,450 –> 00:44:50,970
Gandalf in. In. In the Lord of the Rings is to draw

713
00:44:50,970 –> 00:44:54,530
Soran away from Mordor because he knows that Frodo

714
00:44:54,530 –> 00:44:58,170
and. And Sam are bringing the ring, you know,

715
00:44:58,410 –> 00:45:01,850
to Aradruin, and so he wants to empty the land. And that’s.

716
00:45:02,010 –> 00:45:05,210
That’s the whole tactic is. Is to pull him out, pull him out too soon.

717
00:45:05,690 –> 00:45:09,370
And that’s kind of what happens at the Battle of the Pelenor Fields. He almost

718
00:45:09,370 –> 00:45:12,810
takes Minas Tirith, but he doesn’t quite. Because he struck too soon.

719
00:45:13,050 –> 00:45:16,090
Right. And the.

720
00:45:18,180 –> 00:45:21,820
Now, Tolkien would be the very first person

721
00:45:21,820 –> 00:45:25,020
in line to say that the Lord of the Rings was not an allegory for

722
00:45:25,020 –> 00:45:28,820
the Second World War. He hated allegory. He hated the. A lot of it was

723
00:45:28,820 –> 00:45:32,420
written before the Lord of the Rings. All of that. All of that is true.

724
00:45:32,740 –> 00:45:36,500
But there was sort of a similar sort of thing that, you

725
00:45:36,500 –> 00:45:40,260
know, Hitler could not decide in some ways whether he wanted the oil

726
00:45:40,260 –> 00:45:43,860
or whether he, you know. And of course, when the 6th army got to Stalingrad,

727
00:45:43,860 –> 00:45:47,640
there was that. It happened to be called Stalingrad.

728
00:45:49,080 –> 00:45:52,840
Of all names. It had that name. Right. And

729
00:45:54,120 –> 00:45:57,960
it was tactically, probably not. It was not the

730
00:45:57,960 –> 00:46:01,480
smartest move to tie the. Well, of course, in retrospect, turned out to be a

731
00:46:01,480 –> 00:46:05,200
very bad move, but they couldn’t know that at the

732
00:46:05,200 –> 00:46:07,880
time to bog the 6th army down

733
00:46:09,080 –> 00:46:12,010
in Stalingrad. And, you know, and

734
00:46:13,290 –> 00:46:17,050
by the way, it’s not the topic of our podcast, but I am fascinated

735
00:46:17,050 –> 00:46:20,290
by Stalin. I’m probably the one person you’ll ever meet who would love to go

736
00:46:20,290 –> 00:46:23,970
to Volgorad, which is what it’s called today. It is. And it is.

737
00:46:23,970 –> 00:46:27,610
So the battle of. Have you ever seen the movie about the

738
00:46:27,690 –> 00:46:31,450
enemy at the gates? Yeah. Okay. You knew. Yeah. You know, you read the book.

739
00:46:31,450 –> 00:46:34,570
Okay, okay. So one of the things that.

740
00:46:35,770 –> 00:46:39,480
And, you know, look, when you talk about World War I and World

741
00:46:39,480 –> 00:46:41,640
War II, particularly in the West,

742
00:46:44,600 –> 00:46:48,040
Russia’s contributions to world peace

743
00:46:48,520 –> 00:46:52,080
in the terms of blood and guts, to

744
00:46:52,080 –> 00:46:55,880
paraphrase from General Patton, my favorite World War II

745
00:46:55,880 –> 00:46:56,200
general,

746
00:46:59,480 –> 00:47:03,200
the unreconstructed General Patton. And he fought in

747
00:47:03,200 –> 00:47:05,600
World War I. And he fought in World War I. Yes, he did. Yes, he

748
00:47:05,600 –> 00:47:09,240
did. He was another one. I’m going to keep pulling. He was another one. That’s

749
00:47:09,240 –> 00:47:11,440
right. He was another one. He did.

750
00:47:14,640 –> 00:47:17,680
The Russians are never given credit. You know, they’re never.

751
00:47:18,560 –> 00:47:22,320
They’re sort of an afterthought. And that’s really too bad,

752
00:47:23,920 –> 00:47:27,440
A, because it shows a fundamental disrespect for their sacrifice.

753
00:47:28,320 –> 00:47:32,120
B, we have this weird thing in our heads in America

754
00:47:32,120 –> 00:47:35,880
that we can’t compliment our enemy because that

755
00:47:35,880 –> 00:47:39,720
might mean that we Approve of what the enemy has done. But you can

756
00:47:39,720 –> 00:47:43,280
look at what the enemy has done and go, okay. I mean that’s,

757
00:47:45,360 –> 00:47:49,080
that was actually like, from their perspective, that was actually wisdom. No, that was, that

758
00:47:49,080 –> 00:47:51,520
was smart. That’s what they should done. And Stalingrad,

759
00:47:52,960 –> 00:47:54,400
if you look at that battle,

760
00:47:56,880 –> 00:48:00,720
they did exactly the right thing. I mean that’s classic city

761
00:48:02,000 –> 00:48:05,520
siege tactics. I mean you would see that later on in Vietnam.

762
00:48:06,000 –> 00:48:09,120
You would see that later on in Baghdad

763
00:48:09,920 –> 00:48:13,560
the second time when the Americans went in and then Al Qaeda decided that they

764
00:48:13,560 –> 00:48:17,160
were gonna, they’re basically gonna try to own that city. And then the

765
00:48:17,160 –> 00:48:20,000
Marines. The marines and the seals had to go back in

766
00:48:21,520 –> 00:48:24,480
and, and sort of, sort of take that sucker back.

767
00:48:25,520 –> 00:48:29,280
But you, you, this is, I mean Stalingrad sets the tone

768
00:48:30,040 –> 00:48:33,760
for city based door to door siege

769
00:48:33,760 –> 00:48:36,280
tactics. If you want to defend your house.

770
00:48:37,400 –> 00:48:41,240
Yeah, it’s still the most destructive battle I think in, in history.

771
00:48:42,040 –> 00:48:45,640
And you know, the Germans called it rotten Krieg, right? Rat war.

772
00:48:46,120 –> 00:48:49,880
Because the tactic of the Russian, the, the, the

773
00:48:49,880 –> 00:48:53,520
commander on the Russian side was a guy named Chukov. Most

774
00:48:53,520 –> 00:48:56,720
people think of Zhukov, who was the supreme commander, but Chukov was the guy on

775
00:48:56,720 –> 00:49:00,480
the ground like literally in charged with holding on to Stalingrad

776
00:49:00,480 –> 00:49:04,040
at all costs. And one of the things his tactic

777
00:49:04,040 –> 00:49:07,640
was you need to be right up with your enemy,

778
00:49:07,720 –> 00:49:11,560
like right there because, because the German artillery was superior. But

779
00:49:11,560 –> 00:49:15,400
if you’re 10ft away, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter.

780
00:49:15,400 –> 00:49:18,560
They can’t hit you with artillery because they’ll be hitting their own guys, right? So

781
00:49:18,560 –> 00:49:22,080
they would very often have situations where what they call, they had, they had a

782
00:49:22,080 –> 00:49:25,440
term, they called it a Stalingrad wedding cake. Do you know what that is? No,

783
00:49:25,440 –> 00:49:27,560
I don’t know that. Russians, Germans, Russians

784
00:49:29,910 –> 00:49:32,790
in, in the same building all shooting at each other. So

785
00:49:33,670 –> 00:49:37,510
yeah, it was, I mean for, you know, I think there’s something like a million

786
00:49:37,510 –> 00:49:40,990
casualties at Stalingrad. The, The

787
00:49:40,990 –> 00:49:44,630
Russians shoot 15, 000 of their own. Oh yeah, they do.

788
00:49:44,630 –> 00:49:48,470
Oh yeah. For quote unquote, cowardice. Again, if this

789
00:49:48,470 –> 00:49:52,230
is audio, I’m making inter quotes cowardice.

790
00:49:52,230 –> 00:49:56,070
Right. And yeah, it was, it was

791
00:49:56,070 –> 00:49:59,900
just. But if you’ll forgive me, just a quick

792
00:49:59,900 –> 00:50:03,460
aside because my daughter may listen to this. My daughter Alexa may listen to this

793
00:50:03,460 –> 00:50:07,300
episode. She asked me a while ago to. So I,

794
00:50:07,300 –> 00:50:10,260
I did all this traveling in, in the 80s and one of the places I

795
00:50:10,260 –> 00:50:13,499
went to, Hasan, was the Soviet Union in

796
00:50:13,499 –> 00:50:17,220
1989. And I was

797
00:50:17,220 –> 00:50:20,820
at that time just starting my career as a physicist and they were

798
00:50:20,820 –> 00:50:24,140
opening up through glassnost. They wanted Western physicists

799
00:50:24,660 –> 00:50:28,020
to come and visit. And I was like, this much a physicist,

800
00:50:28,580 –> 00:50:31,700
but my brother was studying physics and he got invited, and he got me invited,

801
00:50:31,700 –> 00:50:35,220
and that’s how I ended up there. And anyway, I’m actually

802
00:50:35,300 –> 00:50:38,300
writing her a bit of a memoir and I’m doing it as a. As a

803
00:50:38,300 –> 00:50:42,100
movie script for fun, because a. I couldn’t remember everything that actually happened.

804
00:50:42,100 –> 00:50:45,460
So I’m filling in the blanks, you know, sort of. Yeah, fictional,

805
00:50:45,940 –> 00:50:49,380
fictional moments. But there was. They did take us

806
00:50:49,950 –> 00:50:53,590
to see some of the World war. World War II was still close enough in

807
00:50:53,590 –> 00:50:57,270
1989. And so, you know, when you

808
00:50:57,270 –> 00:51:00,750
say it’s not remembered, it’s not remembered in the west, right.

809
00:51:00,750 –> 00:51:03,950
But Russia, it is the defining,

810
00:51:06,270 –> 00:51:09,710
you know, war of, of their, of their culture.

811
00:51:10,350 –> 00:51:14,110
And, you know, one of the

812
00:51:14,110 –> 00:51:17,200
things that they will point out, they’ll say, out of

813
00:51:18,000 –> 00:51:21,720
every five Germans killed in World War II, four of them were

814
00:51:21,720 –> 00:51:24,080
killed on the Eastern front. Hey, look, you know,

815
00:51:25,920 –> 00:51:29,280
Vladimir Putin has been quoted, and I say this repeatedly

816
00:51:29,600 –> 00:51:33,120
about the man. It tells you sort of what his brain is like.

817
00:51:33,840 –> 00:51:37,680
He is consistently quoted, or not consistently, but he

818
00:51:37,760 –> 00:51:40,480
was quoted back in the 90s

819
00:51:41,930 –> 00:51:44,330
during the time of Yeltsin and others.

820
00:51:45,530 –> 00:51:48,730
And by the way, he’s a former KGB guy. So let’s just be real about

821
00:51:48,730 –> 00:51:52,570
here, about what we’re talking about here. You know,

822
00:51:52,650 –> 00:51:56,410
he was quoted as saying the collapse of the Soviet Union was

823
00:51:56,410 –> 00:51:59,450
the greatest geopolitical disaster of the 20th century.

824
00:52:00,890 –> 00:52:03,850
Right. Now, just sort of let that stand because there were so many

825
00:52:03,930 –> 00:52:07,050
geopolitical disasters. That was the greatest one.

826
00:52:07,670 –> 00:52:11,190
But if you’re Russian, if you’re Russian,

827
00:52:11,750 –> 00:52:15,470
that is the greatest geopolitical disaster of the

828
00:52:15,470 –> 00:52:19,270
20th century. Well, I will say this. I certainly understand

829
00:52:19,670 –> 00:52:22,790
the Russian concern about invasion from

830
00:52:23,349 –> 00:52:27,030
their West. Oh, yeah, because it’s happened every century for

831
00:52:27,030 –> 00:52:30,350
like the last four centuries. I mean, you can go back to Sweden

832
00:52:30,350 –> 00:52:34,110
invading, invading Russia, you know, during the

833
00:52:34,110 –> 00:52:36,660
time of Peter the Great, of course, the Napoleon,

834
00:52:38,020 –> 00:52:41,540
I was about to say, burns Moscow, but he didn’t burn Moscow, they burned

835
00:52:41,540 –> 00:52:45,220
Moscow to deny it to him. But, you know,

836
00:52:45,220 –> 00:52:48,980
so. And, and in World War I, they also get invaded

837
00:52:49,300 –> 00:52:53,100
and lose. And that in some ways is

838
00:52:53,100 –> 00:52:56,700
what sort of, in some ways led to the tactics of World War II.

839
00:52:56,700 –> 00:53:00,500
Because in the German mind, oh, we’re going to win, right.

840
00:53:00,660 –> 00:53:04,430
Because look how easily we beat them. You know, 20 years ago, it’s just going

841
00:53:04,430 –> 00:53:07,230
to be that. And now we have tanks and now we have better technology, and

842
00:53:07,310 –> 00:53:10,110
now we’re definitely going to Win. Right. Well, I think they also fundamentally

843
00:53:10,110 –> 00:53:13,870
underestimated the. And I

844
00:53:13,870 –> 00:53:16,830
think this is another. And we’ll move on after this

845
00:53:17,870 –> 00:53:21,630
piece, but I think, I think fundamentally the

846
00:53:21,630 –> 00:53:25,150
Germans underestimated

847
00:53:25,470 –> 00:53:27,950
the inter. Into war. German thinking

848
00:53:29,040 –> 00:53:32,680
underestimated the consolidation. No, not

849
00:53:32,680 –> 00:53:34,720
consolidation. They underestimated the

850
00:53:36,480 –> 00:53:40,080
intelligence and venalness

851
00:53:40,240 –> 00:53:43,840
of, of Vladimir Ilyich Ulanov

852
00:53:43,920 –> 00:53:46,560
Lenin. And

853
00:53:47,600 –> 00:53:51,280
we’ve, we’ve covered some of Lenin’s writings on this podcast.

854
00:53:51,280 –> 00:53:54,930
I’m fascinated by Lenin. A man

855
00:53:54,930 –> 00:53:58,010
who had zero military experience whatsoever

856
00:53:59,210 –> 00:54:02,770
and a man who if he was in a food fight, wouldn’t bust a

857
00:54:02,770 –> 00:54:05,690
grape, but

858
00:54:07,130 –> 00:54:10,570
he would sign an order to kill 20,000 people

859
00:54:10,970 –> 00:54:13,770
and then go have lunch. Oh, sure.

860
00:54:16,330 –> 00:54:20,130
And a man who. And we covered on this podcast, in

861
00:54:20,130 –> 00:54:23,780
a recent episode, we covered Animal Farm. Right. A

862
00:54:23,780 –> 00:54:27,140
great. George Orwell’s great allegorical. We did like

863
00:54:27,140 –> 00:54:30,860
allegory, his great allegorical novel or fantasy

864
00:54:30,860 –> 00:54:34,500
novel about Lenin and Stalin and Trotsky.

865
00:54:37,460 –> 00:54:40,660
And I think the Germans

866
00:54:40,660 –> 00:54:44,420
underestimated just how brutal Lenin was and just what kind of system he’d

867
00:54:44,420 –> 00:54:47,700
set up. I think they also underestimated the psychology

868
00:54:47,940 –> 00:54:51,380
of Stalin. They didn’t,

869
00:54:52,580 –> 00:54:56,380
they didn’t understand that. That

870
00:54:56,380 –> 00:55:00,180
in order to survive in a communist system that’s built

871
00:55:00,180 –> 00:55:03,700
off of gulags and Siberia and just general

872
00:55:03,780 –> 00:55:07,500
Russian dowerness, just in general

873
00:55:07,500 –> 00:55:11,220
dourness, you’ve got to

874
00:55:11,220 –> 00:55:14,900
be. Well, like Stalin’s

875
00:55:14,900 –> 00:55:18,280
nickname, you got to be a man of iron. And they just, they really

876
00:55:18,360 –> 00:55:21,760
underestimated that. Like they just thought, they just thought they were

877
00:55:21,760 –> 00:55:25,520
peasants or, or even worse, subhumans. Are you talking about

878
00:55:25,520 –> 00:55:29,160
world war. During World War II. But, but that was, but that

879
00:55:29,160 –> 00:55:32,880
was, that was reflected in their attitudes. That was reflected in Bismarck and, and the

880
00:55:32,880 –> 00:55:36,600
Kaiser’s attitudes towards them. In World War I, though, this is a long standing

881
00:55:36,600 –> 00:55:39,400
thing with, with, with the Germans.

882
00:55:39,960 –> 00:55:43,760
Yeah, there was always. And of course World two War War ii, this

883
00:55:43,760 –> 00:55:47,360
just became, you know, just, just got raised to the

884
00:55:47,360 –> 00:55:50,800
heights of absolute insanity. But there was always a sense of

885
00:55:51,040 –> 00:55:54,680
German racial. In their minds. German racial superiority over,

886
00:55:54,680 –> 00:55:58,480
over the Russians. Right. And that they were simply peasants and they

887
00:55:58,480 –> 00:56:02,200
could just roll over them and that there

888
00:56:02,200 –> 00:56:05,920
was almost a natural by. By world by the time of Hitler that had

889
00:56:05,920 –> 00:56:09,760
transformed into. We have a natural right essentially

890
00:56:09,760 –> 00:56:13,180
to the lands to the east and you know, and lean. Strong.

891
00:56:14,060 –> 00:56:17,420
Yeah. Leaving. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Right. So,

892
00:56:18,700 –> 00:56:21,260
you know, the,

893
00:56:22,460 –> 00:56:26,179
so that was, that was certainly part of their thinking.

894
00:56:26,179 –> 00:56:29,180
They also felt that, you know, communism was

895
00:56:29,820 –> 00:56:33,660
an inherently decadent system. I think it was

896
00:56:33,660 –> 00:56:36,220
Goebbels who said, you know, all we have to do is kick the door in,

897
00:56:36,540 –> 00:56:39,900
and the whole structure will fall down. And

898
00:56:40,300 –> 00:56:43,900
they really. But the one thing I will also say is that there

899
00:56:43,900 –> 00:56:47,740
is a deep Russian patriotism which might not attach to a

900
00:56:47,740 –> 00:56:51,580
government per se, but attaches to the land of Russia. Right. And

901
00:56:51,580 –> 00:56:55,300
that they will kill and die in defense of Russia in

902
00:56:55,300 –> 00:56:59,060
a way that I sometimes say that they’re.

903
00:56:59,060 –> 00:57:02,340
They’re. They’re very bad at invading other countries. They’re not. They’re pretty good at defending

904
00:57:02,340 –> 00:57:06,120
their own. The. The.

905
00:57:06,920 –> 00:57:10,720
You know. Well, and, you know, that’s. That’s just me. That’s my quote.

906
00:57:10,720 –> 00:57:14,360
No, no, no, I believe. I believe you’re. I believe you’re fundamentally onto something there.

907
00:57:14,360 –> 00:57:17,760
I mean, every time Russia goes adventuring. So there was a great book I had

908
00:57:17,760 –> 00:57:21,440
back in the day, and I can’t find it for the life of me. It

909
00:57:21,440 –> 00:57:24,520
might be in a box somewhere in storage. I would love to cover it on

910
00:57:24,520 –> 00:57:27,160
the podcast, but it was a collection. Of.

911
00:57:29,090 –> 00:57:31,810
KGB files that were declassified in the late 90s.

912
00:57:33,570 –> 00:57:36,970
And it’s just. It just shows the level of Soviet

913
00:57:36,970 –> 00:57:40,130
adventurism that was going on in the world. From

914
00:57:40,130 –> 00:57:43,730
Angola to Cuba to Vietnam to China

915
00:57:45,090 –> 00:57:48,650
to places in South Africa. South

916
00:57:48,650 –> 00:57:52,130
Africa. The KGB literally had

917
00:57:52,130 –> 00:57:55,260
its fingers in every

918
00:57:56,860 –> 00:58:00,460
pie you could possibly imagine in the world

919
00:58:00,940 –> 00:58:04,620
up to and including the American university system, by the way, folks.

920
00:58:05,580 –> 00:58:08,860
So just let’s be clear on that. And.

921
00:58:09,420 –> 00:58:11,900
And the CIA was

922
00:58:11,900 –> 00:58:15,660
consistently playing catch up with these people.

923
00:58:16,700 –> 00:58:20,380
Consistently playing catch up. The KGB was running rings

924
00:58:20,380 –> 00:58:22,630
around the CIA everywhere in the world

925
00:58:24,070 –> 00:58:27,870
and was doing so because the

926
00:58:27,870 –> 00:58:31,550
KGB understood something that even the CIA of now has forgotten.

927
00:58:31,550 –> 00:58:35,110
Because the current generation of CIA agents, from what I understand,

928
00:58:35,270 –> 00:58:37,670
doesn’t want to go talk to people. They just want to search around on the

929
00:58:37,670 –> 00:58:41,270
Internet all the time, which makes sense, I guess.

930
00:58:42,150 –> 00:58:45,870
But the KGB did a really, really good job of

931
00:58:45,870 –> 00:58:49,590
developing what is known in. In the spy world as human

932
00:58:49,740 –> 00:58:53,420
human intelligence. They did a really awesome human human.

933
00:58:53,660 –> 00:58:57,020
They do a really good job of just showing up

934
00:58:57,580 –> 00:59:01,300
and just talking to you, giving you a cigarette. I’m gonna light it for

935
00:59:01,300 –> 00:59:05,020
you. Maybe we’ll have some vodka. We’ll just have a chat. Like 10 minutes. Yeah.

936
00:59:05,020 –> 00:59:08,020
And then all of a sudden, they’re in your life. They’re hooked in. And this

937
00:59:08,020 –> 00:59:11,620
is the thing that we miss about intelligence work. And so the

938
00:59:11,620 –> 00:59:15,100
KGB put on a road show for damn near 40

939
00:59:15,100 –> 00:59:17,980
years across the globe on how to do this.

940
00:59:18,950 –> 00:59:22,670
And it worries me. I got to admit, it worries

941
00:59:22,670 –> 00:59:26,430
me as an American. An American, First American, by the

942
00:59:26,430 –> 00:59:30,190
way. It worries Me that we don’t seem to be as

943
00:59:30,190 –> 00:59:33,590
interested in investing that because you could take a

944
00:59:33,590 –> 00:59:35,030
25 year. Old.

945
00:59:37,350 –> 00:59:40,710
Gen Z and just be like, yeah, you’re not going to have a computer today.

946
00:59:40,950 –> 00:59:44,220
We’re going to drop you in the middle of like, I don’t know, we’re going

947
00:59:44,220 –> 00:59:46,380
to drop you in the middle of the Horn of Africa and you’re going to

948
00:59:46,380 –> 00:59:48,980
have to hike your way out. You have a good luck, you have a good

949
00:59:48,980 –> 00:59:52,780
time. Well, what happens if I win? If you win, you live. If you

950
00:59:52,780 –> 00:59:56,420
fail? Well, I mean there’s, there’s, there’s much more at

951
00:59:56,420 –> 01:00:00,260
Harvard that we can go get but we don’t, we don’t frame it that

952
01:00:00,260 –> 01:00:04,060
way. Instead what we do, from what I understand is we recruit those folks now

953
01:00:04,060 –> 01:00:07,620
into the whole digital thing because we think we can get more information off the

954
01:00:07,620 –> 01:00:11,260
phones than we can from human intelligence. And there’s a major

955
01:00:11,260 –> 01:00:14,640
gap there I think that we’re missing in the case. So, so hey showed how

956
01:00:14,640 –> 01:00:18,240
to close that gap. You know, it’s kind of a cool thought. So you

957
01:00:18,240 –> 01:00:21,480
know the number one company, right that’s sort of

958
01:00:21,480 –> 01:00:24,920
championing the use of AI in say, you know,

959
01:00:24,920 –> 01:00:28,160
intelligence work. Palantir. Oh yeah, I know.

960
01:00:29,280 –> 01:00:32,720
And the other big, I find that in the other, one of the other big

961
01:00:32,720 –> 01:00:36,480
defense companies right now that’s going to play a major role in Golden Dome and

962
01:00:37,120 –> 01:00:40,940
both named for Lord of. The Rings, you know, Paladin. Yeah,

963
01:00:40,940 –> 01:00:44,700
yeah, yeah, the seeing stones. The

964
01:00:44,700 –> 01:00:48,420
far seeing. So I, so you talk about the influence of the

965
01:00:48,420 –> 01:00:51,620
Lord of the Rings. It’s clearly influencing the tech

966
01:00:52,260 –> 01:00:55,300
entrepreneurs of today. And I’m sure we could come up with three or four more

967
01:00:55,300 –> 01:00:59,100
examples if we poked around. But I’ll just

968
01:00:59,100 –> 01:01:02,260
add one thing to you said to what you were saying about the KGB

969
01:01:02,580 –> 01:01:05,780
outclassing the CIA, at least for a long time.

970
01:01:07,060 –> 01:01:10,860
I read a book, I have it somewhere like, I don’t know, I’d

971
01:01:10,860 –> 01:01:14,620
have to dig deep. But anyway, it was written by a

972
01:01:14,620 –> 01:01:17,700
guy who is in charge of counter espionage under

973
01:01:17,780 –> 01:01:21,060
Stalin on the Eastern front and then

974
01:01:22,260 –> 01:01:24,980
was principally in charge of

975
01:01:25,860 –> 01:01:29,620
after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,

976
01:01:29,700 –> 01:01:33,260
principally in charge of trying to steal atomic

977
01:01:33,260 –> 01:01:36,860
secrets from the West. And one of the,

978
01:01:37,100 –> 01:01:40,940
the, he had an interview at the back and the interview at the back

979
01:01:40,940 –> 01:01:44,380
was basically, you know, did the Soviet Union.

980
01:01:44,700 –> 01:01:48,060
So the, the, the idea was for a long time, oh, they didn’t, you know,

981
01:01:48,060 –> 01:01:51,260
they didn’t get nuclear secrets from, you know,

982
01:01:51,660 –> 01:01:55,340
spy work or craft work or anything like that. They developed it on their

983
01:01:55,340 –> 01:01:58,980
own and you know, basically this was a triumph of Soviet

984
01:01:58,980 –> 01:02:02,110
science. Blah blah, blah, blah, blah. He says in the book, oh no, we stole

985
01:02:02,110 –> 01:02:05,670
it all. We stole everything. And they

986
01:02:05,670 –> 01:02:08,870
had, and they had extremely high level contacts,

987
01:02:10,390 –> 01:02:13,510
including with some very famous physicists. And

988
01:02:14,070 –> 01:02:17,270
it was who may or may not have known who they were giving

989
01:02:18,230 –> 01:02:21,910
information to. But some of the things that this, this guy

990
01:02:21,910 –> 01:02:25,750
talked about during the Second World War, they wouldn’t. They invented. It’s

991
01:02:25,750 –> 01:02:29,540
a fascinating story. They invented an entire. I

992
01:02:29,540 –> 01:02:32,820
may get a few of the details wrong, so forgive me, but there was a

993
01:02:32,820 –> 01:02:36,420
battalion of German troops that got caught behind the line and they wiped them

994
01:02:36,420 –> 01:02:40,060
out. And they kept them alive as a ghost battalion

995
01:02:40,060 –> 01:02:43,820
with radio traffic and communications and they

996
01:02:43,820 –> 01:02:45,500
would say, drop U.S. supplies. Oh,

997
01:02:47,580 –> 01:02:51,300
we could pull off this major thing here. And they were

998
01:02:51,300 –> 01:02:55,010
doing this up to 1945. The Germans never figured out they would send in

999
01:02:55,010 –> 01:02:58,370
like paratroopers. Paratroopers would get killed. You know, they’d send in

1000
01:02:58,370 –> 01:03:01,930
supplies, the Soviets would turn it around. It was fascinating

1001
01:03:02,170 –> 01:03:05,770
how, you know, they had the Germans completely cabalixed. But he

1002
01:03:05,770 –> 01:03:09,450
basically said after the war we had the Americans cabalix as well. They did

1003
01:03:09,450 –> 01:03:12,970
not. Yeah, we were playing chess, they were playing checkers basically. Well, in American

1004
01:03:13,050 –> 01:03:16,890
idealism, I mean, this is what MI6, this is where the MI6

1005
01:03:16,890 –> 01:03:20,650
and Mossad Lapis all the time. I

1006
01:03:20,650 –> 01:03:23,890
even think even now that strain of American

1007
01:03:24,050 –> 01:03:27,690
idealism that’s built into us culturally and just comes

1008
01:03:27,690 –> 01:03:31,410
as part of our DNA. And part of it is, part of it is because

1009
01:03:32,930 –> 01:03:36,650
look for just by dint

1010
01:03:36,650 –> 01:03:40,370
of geography, it is

1011
01:03:40,450 –> 01:03:44,170
really hard. China’s gonna find this out if they

1012
01:03:44,170 –> 01:03:48,020
decide they’re going to launch an amphibious attack across the Taiwan Strait. We

1013
01:03:48,020 –> 01:03:51,740
found this out with Normandy. It’s really hard to launch a

1014
01:03:51,740 –> 01:03:54,420
successful amphibious landing across.

1015
01:03:55,300 –> 01:03:58,980
Almost never been done. Almost right. Almost never been done. It’s even

1016
01:03:59,140 –> 01:04:02,180
harder to launch a successful

1017
01:04:03,220 –> 01:04:06,580
continental landing across an ocean.

1018
01:04:07,220 –> 01:04:10,820
It’s hard. Yeah, because I see you coming. It’s hard. It’s hard,

1019
01:04:11,860 –> 01:04:15,680
it’s hard. So you’ve got to be sneaky. You’ve got

1020
01:04:15,680 –> 01:04:19,520
to build tunnels, you’ve got to, you’ve got to invest in human intelligence.

1021
01:04:19,520 –> 01:04:23,360
You have to have a year, a multi year long process and even then it

1022
01:04:23,360 –> 01:04:26,960
might not work because your spies and your

1023
01:04:26,960 –> 01:04:30,240
human intelligence, which are embedded in the local population

1024
01:04:30,560 –> 01:04:33,840
that lives across the ocean of the place you would like to invade,

1025
01:04:34,480 –> 01:04:37,120
can easily become seduced by the local population.

1026
01:04:38,960 –> 01:04:42,070
This is the challenge of human intelligence and American

1027
01:04:42,150 –> 01:04:45,350
optimism because of the nature of us having

1028
01:04:45,990 –> 01:04:49,830
two oceans that basically allow everybody to leave us alone, for want

1029
01:04:49,830 –> 01:04:53,550
of a better term. And North America basically being

1030
01:04:53,550 –> 01:04:57,269
our backyard. South America, less said about that. Central America, less said about

1031
01:04:57,269 –> 01:05:00,750
that. But I’m talking about Canada and Mexico. We’re the big dog. And that’s just

1032
01:05:00,750 –> 01:05:04,390
it. There’s

1033
01:05:04,470 –> 01:05:08,270
very little. Been very little development. Right.

1034
01:05:08,270 –> 01:05:11,980
Of the dirtier parts of. And that’s not to say the

1035
01:05:11,980 –> 01:05:14,860
CIA doesn’t do dirty things or they haven’t gotten some training and they haven’t gotten

1036
01:05:14,860 –> 01:05:18,380
better the last 20 years, but there’s very

1037
01:05:18,460 –> 01:05:22,260
little of that sort of venal cynicism that

1038
01:05:22,260 –> 01:05:25,420
comes along and that’s embedded in

1039
01:05:25,660 –> 01:05:29,100
MI6 and M. Assad and what is now the FSB.

1040
01:05:29,820 –> 01:05:33,260
I mean, for God’s sakes, during the time of Communism,

1041
01:05:33,900 –> 01:05:37,640
the East German Stasi claimed that one

1042
01:05:37,640 –> 01:05:40,960
out of every three East German citizens was a spy.

1043
01:05:42,480 –> 01:05:46,320
That’s nuts. That means, that means. That means if you’re in a

1044
01:05:46,320 –> 01:05:50,000
room with five people, three of them are reporting on you

1045
01:05:50,000 –> 01:05:52,960
to someone. Yeah, that’s

1046
01:05:52,960 –> 01:05:56,480
ridiculous. Yeah. That’s a level of

1047
01:05:56,560 –> 01:06:00,400
cynicism and ideological commitment that most Americans can’t

1048
01:06:00,400 –> 01:06:02,800
get to. And I think this is why we struggle in the spy. In the

1049
01:06:02,800 –> 01:06:06,550
spy realm. I think it also has to do with how existential it is for

1050
01:06:06,550 –> 01:06:09,390
you. I mean, if one of the things, and this might be

1051
01:06:10,670 –> 01:06:13,990
to our detriment, as you point out, we are so

1052
01:06:13,990 –> 01:06:17,070
isolated in terms of having oceans on either side

1053
01:06:17,630 –> 01:06:21,350
that you get this false sense of security that you don’t

1054
01:06:21,350 –> 01:06:24,910
need to develop that kind of level of, you know, of,

1055
01:06:24,990 –> 01:06:27,230
of constantly

1056
01:06:28,430 –> 01:06:31,400
monitoring your enemy. And

1057
01:06:32,520 –> 01:06:36,360
that can be very dangerous because you get lulled into a false

1058
01:06:36,440 –> 01:06:38,440
sense of security. And,

1059
01:06:40,040 –> 01:06:43,800
you know, the, the nations that are cheek

1060
01:06:43,800 –> 01:06:46,760
and jowl with each other, they don’t, they don’t see it that way. They don’t

1061
01:06:46,760 –> 01:06:48,920
see it that way. They don’t see it that way. So Israel, I can tell

1062
01:06:48,920 –> 01:06:52,520
you, you know, Israel, you know, you know, at one point was nine

1063
01:06:52,520 –> 01:06:56,040
miles wide up until the Six Day War. I mean. Right. You know,

1064
01:06:56,520 –> 01:07:00,200
at its narrowest point. I mean, you know. Oh, I’ve said they had to have

1065
01:07:01,340 –> 01:07:04,260
exquisite spycraft. They had to know it was happening all the time because it could

1066
01:07:04,260 –> 01:07:07,900
happen so fast. I’ve said repeatedly if, if

1067
01:07:07,900 –> 01:07:11,700
the population of California, no, if

1068
01:07:11,700 –> 01:07:15,140
the United States was crammed into the popular, into this, into an area the size

1069
01:07:15,140 –> 01:07:18,900
of California and everything west of California, or, sorry,

1070
01:07:18,900 –> 01:07:22,660
east of California, was basically bent

1071
01:07:22,660 –> 01:07:26,060
on killing everybody in California, you damn straight

1072
01:07:26,390 –> 01:07:30,190
we would have all kinds of different. We’d be really good

1073
01:07:30,190 –> 01:07:33,950
at it. And so I’m not naive. I

1074
01:07:33,950 –> 01:07:37,790
know that because of the Patriot act, because of what happened with 9 11, how

1075
01:07:37,790 –> 01:07:41,630
that freaked everybody out. Donald Rumsfeld’s floating of

1076
01:07:41,630 –> 01:07:45,350
memos everywhere. The Iran Iraq war or not Iran

1077
01:07:45,350 –> 01:07:48,910
Iraq war, sorry, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. I understand that we have

1078
01:07:48,910 –> 01:07:52,390
gotten better air quotes at the

1079
01:07:52,390 –> 01:07:56,030
intelligence game of. And of course

1080
01:07:56,110 –> 01:07:59,550
my conspiracy theory buddies will all say, well, we’re all. The CIA is doing color

1081
01:07:59,550 –> 01:08:02,830
revolutions and is at the bottom of the Epstein thing and all this.

1082
01:08:03,150 –> 01:08:06,870
Sure, maybe, maybe we are that sophisticated. But we’re not

1083
01:08:06,870 –> 01:08:10,390
as good as the Europeans and the Russians and the

1084
01:08:10,390 –> 01:08:14,150
British and the. And the

1085
01:08:14,150 –> 01:08:17,810
Israelis yet we’re getting better. Of course

1086
01:08:17,810 –> 01:08:21,530
though, even these. I mean look at 10-7-the. Right. You know. Yeah, I’ve

1087
01:08:21,530 –> 01:08:25,370
heard the conspiracies theory too. I think that’s nonsense. There is

1088
01:08:25,370 –> 01:08:28,970
no way. If they had, if they had known that was coming that they wouldn’t

1089
01:08:28,970 –> 01:08:32,730
have prepared for it. Oh yeah, no, try to try. Disrupted

1090
01:08:32,730 –> 01:08:36,450
and, and repel it. But you know, I mean Hamas was doing

1091
01:08:36,450 –> 01:08:39,890
things like using old fashioned landlines to communicate and

1092
01:08:40,610 –> 01:08:43,930
to really try. So you know there’s spycraft and, and there’s counter

1093
01:08:43,930 –> 01:08:47,770
spycraft but on the

1094
01:08:47,770 –> 01:08:51,290
whole it’s. I mean, you know, you probably heard as I did recently that

1095
01:08:51,290 –> 01:08:54,890
Mossad had apparently had a. This blows my mind. Had a

1096
01:08:54,890 –> 01:08:58,210
base in Iran. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. I’m not surprised

1097
01:08:59,890 –> 01:09:03,570
because. So here’s. Okay. And then we’ll move on from this because this is not

1098
01:09:03,570 –> 01:09:07,010
a spycraft. This is not a spycraft podcast. I’m wondering if there’s

1099
01:09:07,010 –> 01:09:10,670
spycraft in Lord of the Rings. Is it this spy? Is

1100
01:09:10,670 –> 01:09:14,030
there. I mean maybe Gollum is kind of a spy. A little bit. Yeah, I

1101
01:09:14,030 –> 01:09:17,550
would say so. I would say Gollum is probably your. Oh,

1102
01:09:17,710 –> 01:09:21,070
not Boromir.

1103
01:09:22,590 –> 01:09:23,710
Is he a spy?

1104
01:09:26,270 –> 01:09:29,870
I got to admit he’s not. He’s not who he pretends to be, I guess.

1105
01:09:30,110 –> 01:09:32,110
Yeah. And I got to admit like.

1106
01:09:34,110 –> 01:09:37,550
Ah. When you read it, number one, I don’t trust anybody in

1107
01:09:37,550 –> 01:09:41,390
Gondor. I just don’t like. Faramir was the most honorable person in

1108
01:09:41,390 –> 01:09:44,070
Gondor. His father was a waste of time

1109
01:09:45,110 –> 01:09:48,910
for a whole variety of reasons. Well, it’s. It’s

1110
01:09:48,910 –> 01:09:52,630
okay. So to your point about being cheek to jowl with the enemy, right?

1111
01:09:53,190 –> 01:09:56,710
Yes. Yeah. If you stare to. I’m gonna quote,

1112
01:09:56,950 –> 01:10:00,590
quote that great gamma philosopher Nietzsche. If you

1113
01:10:00,590 –> 01:10:04,180
stare too long into the abyss. Okay.

1114
01:10:04,180 –> 01:10:07,780
Yeah, it stares back. Exactly. Yeah. And there’s something like that. Something like that.

1115
01:10:07,780 –> 01:10:11,460
Some random thing and the Steward of Gondor stared too long into the

1116
01:10:11,460 –> 01:10:15,100
abyss. He did. He did. And he

1117
01:10:15,100 –> 01:10:18,940
despairs. And he despairs. Right. And that’s what, that’s where he. And that’s what

1118
01:10:18,940 –> 01:10:22,220
Tolkien wanted to. Wanted to make that point. It was like, you can’t look at

1119
01:10:22,220 –> 01:10:26,060
evil too long, otherwise you will have no hope. You’ll be

1120
01:10:26,060 –> 01:10:29,730
robbed of hope. And then all kinds of other dirty

1121
01:10:29,730 –> 01:10:33,450
deeds open up for you. Because the right. I

1122
01:10:33,450 –> 01:10:36,930
love using this, this, this paraphrase, the door and the floor of your head

1123
01:10:36,930 –> 01:10:40,410
opens up and then just. The thing just goes all the way down. It just

1124
01:10:40,410 –> 01:10:43,730
goes all the way down at that point. And then you get into seeing stones.

1125
01:10:43,970 –> 01:10:47,810
His, his arguments with Gandalf. You know, the whole deal

1126
01:10:47,810 –> 01:10:51,530
with. Was it Pippin? Like it’s, It’s a whole thing. It’s a whole

1127
01:10:51,530 –> 01:10:54,930
thing. Yeah. You know, and, and Faramir. Faramir had hope,

1128
01:10:55,480 –> 01:10:59,320
but he didn’t have the strength of being the first son. Yeah.

1129
01:10:59,880 –> 01:11:03,400
Yeah. How about this? I think I just figured out who the spy is. Oh,

1130
01:11:03,400 –> 01:11:06,760
who’s the spy? Who’s the spy In Lord of the Rings? I think it’s Wormtongue

1131
01:11:07,320 –> 01:11:10,800
in the. In the halls of King Theoden. Right? Yes.

1132
01:11:10,800 –> 01:11:14,360
He’s deliberately sent there to corrupt King Theoden.

1133
01:11:14,520 –> 01:11:18,200
He is a man of Gondor, Rohan.

1134
01:11:18,200 –> 01:11:21,330
Yep. He’s actually a double agent of

1135
01:11:21,890 –> 01:11:25,330
Saruman. I think He’s. He’s the spy. Yeah. And

1136
01:11:25,970 –> 01:11:29,810
he, you know, he gets, you know, he gets the spy’s end, I guess.

1137
01:11:31,650 –> 01:11:35,250
I did not come through fire and shadow to bandy witless words with a

1138
01:11:35,250 –> 01:11:39,050
witless worm or whatever. Yeah. Until the lightning falls.

1139
01:11:39,050 –> 01:11:41,410
Yeah, that’s right. Yeah, that’s right.

1140
01:11:42,530 –> 01:11:46,170
That’s a great line. I. The mentality

1141
01:11:46,170 –> 01:11:49,970
that allows the Mossad to think they can set

1142
01:11:49,970 –> 01:11:53,810
up a listening site in Tehran instead of

1143
01:11:53,810 –> 01:11:57,450
a base in Tehran is the same kind of mentality

1144
01:11:58,730 –> 01:12:02,570
that allows, to your point,

1145
01:12:02,810 –> 01:12:06,490
Grimmel Wormtongue to show up and just set up.

1146
01:12:06,490 –> 01:12:09,770
Right. And I think that the, the

1147
01:12:09,770 –> 01:12:13,570
British, Tolkien from. Who has

1148
01:12:13,570 –> 01:12:17,190
a thousand, more than a thousand, fifteen hundred years of

1149
01:12:17,190 –> 01:12:20,790
European clamoring

1150
01:12:20,790 –> 01:12:24,430
behind him, who is seeking

1151
01:12:24,430 –> 01:12:27,350
to figure out how Christianity

1152
01:12:28,550 –> 01:12:32,070
and goodness and evil all intersect.

1153
01:12:33,990 –> 01:12:37,670
I think this is the reason why Tolkien has been captured by people on the

1154
01:12:37,670 –> 01:12:40,710
political right in this country when it started out with people who are on the

1155
01:12:40,710 –> 01:12:44,510
political left. I think that’s true, actually. He has shifted

1156
01:12:44,510 –> 01:12:45,790
from the left to the right. Right.

1157
01:12:48,110 –> 01:12:51,830
Even in the way that he looks at the environment. So you look at. And

1158
01:12:51,830 –> 01:12:55,030
it’s interesting because I’m reading. I’M reading Fellowship of the ring with my 8 year

1159
01:12:55,030 –> 01:12:58,670
old now. I’m. I’m giving this, giving the gift to him. Right. And so I’m

1160
01:12:58,670 –> 01:13:02,510
having a chance to go through it one more time. And you look

1161
01:13:02,510 –> 01:13:06,110
at a character like Tom Bombadil and you look at the,

1162
01:13:06,270 –> 01:13:09,950
the descriptions of the, the Old Forest and the way

1163
01:13:09,950 –> 01:13:13,800
Tom Bombadil inherits the, or interacts with the force. That’s a very,

1164
01:13:14,680 –> 01:13:18,520
at least in America, politically rightist way

1165
01:13:18,520 –> 01:13:22,160
of looking at nature. Oh, oh, yeah. He’s almost a

1166
01:13:22,160 –> 01:13:25,960
survivalist. Right. He’s like, he’s. Yeah. And you could argue

1167
01:13:25,960 –> 01:13:29,560
he’s, he’s detached himself from the concerns of Middle Earth. Right. Because

1168
01:13:29,720 –> 01:13:32,800
Gandalf, when they’re debating what to do with the Ring, right, at one point they

1169
01:13:32,800 –> 01:13:35,400
say, well, let’s send it back to Bombadil because it seems to have no effect

1170
01:13:35,480 –> 01:13:39,250
on him. And Gandalf says, you can’t do that. He does. He

1171
01:13:39,250 –> 01:13:42,850
won’t understand such. I think the line is, such things have no hold on his

1172
01:13:42,850 –> 01:13:46,170
mind. Something like that. Yes. Where, yeah,

1173
01:13:46,170 –> 01:13:49,850
Bombadil is not interested, you know, in

1174
01:13:50,090 –> 01:13:53,849
the, the wars of the World. Neither

1175
01:13:53,849 –> 01:13:57,490
is Fangor. No. Well, and Bombadil is an interesting character.

1176
01:13:57,490 –> 01:14:01,210
I’ve seen Christian apologists over the last 20 years. There’s one

1177
01:14:01,210 –> 01:14:03,610
I’m thinking of in particular who wrote a book called in the House of Tom

1178
01:14:03,610 –> 01:14:07,180
Bobil, a guy named C.R. wiley. Yeah.

1179
01:14:07,180 –> 01:14:10,900
Christian apologists, I think, have, have, have caught on to

1180
01:14:11,940 –> 01:14:15,500
some of the more apologetic ideas in Lord of the

1181
01:14:15,500 –> 01:14:19,300
Rings. And, you know, Christian apologetics exists

1182
01:14:19,460 –> 01:14:23,180
to justify Christianity to the world. And

1183
01:14:23,180 –> 01:14:26,900
you see this, you know, in, in Lewis, obviously, in that hideous strength or the

1184
01:14:26,900 –> 01:14:30,700
Abolition of Man or obviously the Screwtape Letters. But then you

1185
01:14:30,700 –> 01:14:33,570
also see it in, you know, an eminently Catholic writer

1186
01:14:34,450 –> 01:14:38,130
who also is very familiar with Lewis’s work, G.K. chesterton.

1187
01:14:38,130 –> 01:14:40,610
Right. And so, you know, you’ve got.

1188
01:14:42,530 –> 01:14:46,370
And Christianity has had apologetics going all the way back to Augustine. That’s nothing new.

1189
01:14:47,250 –> 01:14:50,770
But what is new, I would dare say, is,

1190
01:14:51,410 –> 01:14:55,170
is Christians taking a look at Tolkien and

1191
01:14:55,170 –> 01:14:59,010
instead of rejecting, quote, unquote, Tolkien for

1192
01:14:59,010 –> 01:15:02,640
the magical elements, they begin to now, or there

1193
01:15:02,640 –> 01:15:05,720
has begun more to be a sense that.

1194
01:15:06,360 –> 01:15:10,200
No, wait a minute. What Tolkien is describing is

1195
01:15:10,360 –> 01:15:14,040
the, the

1196
01:15:14,040 –> 01:15:17,080
unredeemed world that can be redeemed through,

1197
01:15:19,480 –> 01:15:23,080
through the positive and dare I even say, spiritual

1198
01:15:23,560 –> 01:15:27,240
actions of genuinely believing people.

1199
01:15:28,960 –> 01:15:32,480
And we’re Americans, we would love those people to be Christian.

1200
01:15:34,880 –> 01:15:38,640
You know, Jewish folks can come along too. That’s fine. We’ll

1201
01:15:38,640 –> 01:15:39,680
argue with the Muslims

1202
01:15:43,440 –> 01:15:47,080
because we don’t want the violence. But Tom Bomb.

1203
01:15:47,080 –> 01:15:50,640
And Tom Bombadil represents that sense

1204
01:15:50,640 –> 01:15:54,380
of, particularly over the last 20 years, of being

1205
01:15:54,380 –> 01:15:58,140
exhausted with having to come up with or being tagged with from the

1206
01:15:58,140 –> 01:16:01,820
left, a. A blame for

1207
01:16:01,980 –> 01:16:05,100
continuous wars when it would just be easier

1208
01:16:05,740 –> 01:16:09,180
to just Tom Bombadil the heck out of the thing and just escape. To

1209
01:16:09,340 –> 01:16:13,060
escape to the. Because. Escape back to the land. And

1210
01:16:13,060 –> 01:16:16,860
this is something that’s very layered, that’s happening in Christian apologetics. Tolkien would reject that.

1211
01:16:17,020 –> 01:16:20,790
I’m talking. I think he would. Yeah. Yeah. I think he would say

1212
01:16:20,790 –> 01:16:23,350
you do not escape evil by

1213
01:16:24,550 –> 01:16:27,830
hiding from it, essentially, and

1214
01:16:29,030 –> 01:16:32,230
that you have to. You know, there’s a wonderful line

1215
01:16:33,110 –> 01:16:36,910
that Gandalf has at one point, and my Tolkien

1216
01:16:36,910 –> 01:16:40,350
fanatic friends are going to savage me for not getting this quite right. But it’s

1217
01:16:40,350 –> 01:16:43,750
essentially along the lines of, you know, we.

1218
01:16:43,910 –> 01:16:47,760
It’s after the battle of the Pelidor Fields. And he essentially says, look, we’re here

1219
01:16:47,760 –> 01:16:49,960
to. So I’m not going to get it right at all. So I’m not even

1220
01:16:49,960 –> 01:16:53,440
going to try. We’re here to solve the problem in front of us. And what

1221
01:16:53,760 –> 01:16:57,400
I think he says something like, we till the. We

1222
01:16:57,400 –> 01:17:01,200
till the fields, you know, of today. What.

1223
01:17:01,200 –> 01:17:03,920
Whether they, you know, it’s not under our control.

1224
01:17:04,720 –> 01:17:08,320
And again, I apologize, I did not get that quite right. But

1225
01:17:09,040 –> 01:17:12,720
it. But you have to. In some ways you have a responsibility for

1226
01:17:12,960 –> 01:17:16,800
standing for evil to evil, standing up to evil.

1227
01:17:17,120 –> 01:17:20,960
And I think the other marvelous thing about the. The Lord of the

1228
01:17:20,960 –> 01:17:23,920
Rings, and I’ve talked about this, I belong to a C.S. lewis

1229
01:17:24,720 –> 01:17:27,200
book group here in Massachusetts. And

1230
01:17:28,719 –> 01:17:32,280
the. The idea that there is. There’s this

1231
01:17:32,280 –> 01:17:36,040
intersection between human action and grace, you know, or the.

1232
01:17:36,040 –> 01:17:39,280
Or the. The idea that

1233
01:17:41,870 –> 01:17:45,630
maybe humanity on its own cannot fully overcome evil, that it does

1234
01:17:45,630 –> 01:17:49,230
need some intercession to do so. In fact, I.

1235
01:17:49,630 –> 01:17:52,990
I think, if I understand correctly, like the final scene where

1236
01:17:53,710 –> 01:17:57,550
Frodo is fighting Gollum on the edge of the. Of

1237
01:17:57,550 –> 01:18:00,270
the crack of doom was

1238
01:18:01,630 –> 01:18:05,270
the idea that Gollum was going to be there at that final scene. Tolkien

1239
01:18:05,270 –> 01:18:08,480
baked that in from the beginning. Like it wasn’t just a

1240
01:18:08,480 –> 01:18:12,320
fortuitous series of events that Gollum happens to end up there at the end. And

1241
01:18:12,320 –> 01:18:16,120
it was because he wanted very much to transmit this idea

1242
01:18:16,760 –> 01:18:20,400
that. That Frodo on his own. I

1243
01:18:20,400 –> 01:18:24,040
remember when I was a kid sort of going, you couldn’t do it,

1244
01:18:24,040 –> 01:18:27,760
Frodo. You couldn’t. You know, and I would come up with all

1245
01:18:27,760 –> 01:18:31,600
these alternate endings. I saw like, damn, push his Gollum into the

1246
01:18:31,600 –> 01:18:35,050
bed. You know, these sorts of things.

1247
01:18:35,290 –> 01:18:38,410
Because I, I wanted Frodo to ultimately go,

1248
01:18:38,890 –> 01:18:42,730
no, and toss it in. But I,

1249
01:18:42,730 –> 01:18:46,450
I, I think Tolkien from the beginning knew that, that he was

1250
01:18:46,450 –> 01:18:50,250
not going to be able to on his own. Ultimately, you know, you could, you

1251
01:18:50,250 –> 01:18:53,730
could argue that the triumph of Frodo is to get the Ring to the crack

1252
01:18:53,730 –> 01:18:57,530
of doom, just to get it there. Right? Yeah. Right.

1253
01:18:57,770 –> 01:19:00,890
Yes. So the, the line that Gandalf has

1254
01:19:01,580 –> 01:19:05,180
when he’s talking to Frodo in the Shire before they set out to,

1255
01:19:05,580 –> 01:19:07,420
on that log walk to Rivendell,

1256
01:19:09,260 –> 01:19:12,780
he says to Frodo, because Frodo says, why didn’t

1257
01:19:12,780 –> 01:19:16,580
Bilbo, I love that scene, kill Gandalf or not get all. But when he

1258
01:19:16,580 –> 01:19:20,380
killed Gollum, right. Why didn’t he kill him? Why didn’t he ask? Gandalf says

1259
01:19:20,700 –> 01:19:24,380
when he had the chance. Exactly. And

1260
01:19:24,620 –> 01:19:28,100
what does Gandalf tell him? He says it was grace that said that

1261
01:19:28,100 –> 01:19:31,430
stayed Bilbo’s hand. Right. Many who live

1262
01:19:31,990 –> 01:19:35,590
deserve death and many who die deserve

1263
01:19:35,590 –> 01:19:39,310
life. Are you going to give it to them? You know, do not be

1264
01:19:39,310 –> 01:19:42,070
too quick to deal out death and judgment. He said, I love it.

1265
01:19:45,030 –> 01:19:48,790
Fearing for your own safety. That’s right.

1266
01:19:48,790 –> 01:19:51,990
Not see all ends. That’s correct.

1267
01:19:53,670 –> 01:19:55,030
I want you to see. I could.

1268
01:20:00,220 –> 01:20:03,980
And so what you see there is that Christian conception

1269
01:20:04,620 –> 01:20:08,420
which, and I will be very blunt on this, my wife and I were

1270
01:20:08,420 –> 01:20:11,260
actually talking about something that was parallel to this but a different kind of context

1271
01:20:11,260 –> 01:20:13,540
which actually relates this. But I’m not going to bring it. We were talking about

1272
01:20:13,540 –> 01:20:17,220
it on Sunday and because American

1273
01:20:17,220 –> 01:20:20,300
Christianity is kind of going through some convulsions right now,

1274
01:20:20,860 –> 01:20:24,540
massive convulsions that you don’t notice if you’re in the secular atheist world.

1275
01:20:25,090 –> 01:20:28,370
You don’t notice it if you’re in a different religious tradition because you’re, I presume,

1276
01:20:28,690 –> 01:20:32,370
going through similar convulsions in your own religious tradition because there

1277
01:20:32,370 –> 01:20:35,090
is no new thing, as it says, Ecclesiastes, under the sun.

1278
01:20:35,970 –> 01:20:39,170
Everything that has been done now has been done before.

1279
01:20:41,570 –> 01:20:45,410
But, but there’s massive convulsions going on in American Christianity

1280
01:20:45,410 –> 01:20:48,650
where we are trying, where American Christians, and not just

1281
01:20:48,650 –> 01:20:52,050
evangelicals either, are trying to put together

1282
01:20:52,130 –> 01:20:55,140
what all of the things mean,

1283
01:20:55,620 –> 01:20:59,180
everything from grace to faith to

1284
01:20:59,180 –> 01:21:02,980
resilience, and trying to put it together into a box

1285
01:21:02,980 –> 01:21:06,300
for people who are, for the millennial generation. A lot of this is happening the

1286
01:21:06,300 –> 01:21:09,900
millennial generation right now because out of all of

1287
01:21:09,900 –> 01:21:13,180
the four major generations that are Currently, on this

1288
01:21:13,180 –> 01:21:16,780
continent, they are the first generation where the vast

1289
01:21:16,780 –> 01:21:20,280
majority of them either were unchurched or were

1290
01:21:20,280 –> 01:21:24,000
churched and left for the church because the church was a show for

1291
01:21:24,000 –> 01:21:27,800
them rather than. It was an entertainment complex rather

1292
01:21:27,800 –> 01:21:30,760
than a complex of grace. And what Lord of the Rings does,

1293
01:21:31,240 –> 01:21:34,680
interestingly enough, is it sets the table

1294
01:21:35,480 –> 01:21:39,160
for even secular people who will

1295
01:21:39,160 –> 01:21:42,360
not accept a triune, whatever conception

1296
01:21:42,680 –> 01:21:45,800
to begin to be infected with that idea that.

1297
01:21:47,190 –> 01:21:50,950
Oh, to your point, there’s something else that’s

1298
01:21:50,950 –> 01:21:54,710
running stuff here that I don’t understand and it ain’t totally agree. And

1299
01:21:54,710 –> 01:21:58,230
it does it in such a gentle way. It’s so right.

1300
01:21:58,390 –> 01:22:02,029
I mean, it’s just. Yes. You know, it’s just the, the,

1301
01:22:02,029 –> 01:22:04,550
the. It’s just a great adventure story.

1302
01:22:05,910 –> 01:22:09,430
It’s exciting. There’s even a love story in there if you want to go to

1303
01:22:09,430 –> 01:22:12,390
Faramir and Alen. The, you know,

1304
01:22:13,490 –> 01:22:17,090
and I think. And, and in some ways, in this way, it’s like Narnia,

1305
01:22:17,090 –> 01:22:20,410
you know, I mean, who wouldn’t want, you know, a world of talking animals? My

1306
01:22:20,410 –> 01:22:24,130
kids loved that when they were young. Yeah. Oh, yeah. And,

1307
01:22:25,410 –> 01:22:28,530
you know, the fact that Aslan was really a Christ figure, they didn’t,

1308
01:22:29,570 –> 01:22:31,250
they didn’t internalize any of that.

1309
01:22:33,730 –> 01:22:37,530
So I think that might also be some of the power of the

1310
01:22:37,530 –> 01:22:41,350
Lord of the Rings that takes these incredible, incredibly important and

1311
01:22:41,350 –> 01:22:44,710
deep concepts and it just, you know,

1312
01:22:45,750 –> 01:22:49,070
just gives them to you in such a gentle and

1313
01:22:50,430 –> 01:22:54,150
really pleasing fashion that you can’t resist. You can’t

1314
01:22:54,150 –> 01:22:57,950
resist. So let me ask you a question here. And we’re going

1315
01:22:57,950 –> 01:23:01,710
to turn the corner and get to some conclusions and some ideas for leaders coming

1316
01:23:01,710 –> 01:23:05,270
up here in a minute. So you’ve already mentioned, you mentioned

1317
01:23:05,270 –> 01:23:08,070
previously when we were talking about different genres

1318
01:23:08,870 –> 01:23:12,670
that were influenced or not different genres, the ways in which Lord of the

1319
01:23:12,670 –> 01:23:16,430
Rings all quiet on the western front and even Pink Floyd’s work

1320
01:23:16,430 –> 01:23:20,230
in that dark rock spot really sort of

1321
01:23:20,230 –> 01:23:23,950
set. They were tone setting. I love that term that you used, tone setting

1322
01:23:23,950 –> 01:23:27,470
for specific genres. And, you know, some of the books that have

1323
01:23:27,470 –> 01:23:31,110
followed on Lord of the Rings, where folks have been explicit either about

1324
01:23:33,520 –> 01:23:37,040
modeling them on Lord of the Rings or modeling them against Lord of the Rings

1325
01:23:37,680 –> 01:23:41,360
2 series, two fantasy series that sort of jump out in my head

1326
01:23:41,920 –> 01:23:45,520
immediately that I wrote down when you were talking about this was, of course,

1327
01:23:46,560 –> 01:23:49,840
George R.R. martin’s game of Thrones, which he will not finish.

1328
01:23:50,160 –> 01:23:53,400
I’m going to go on record. It will never be finished. He will die and

1329
01:23:53,400 –> 01:23:57,040
then someone else will pick it up and finish it. Maybe, if we’re lucky.

1330
01:23:57,680 –> 01:24:01,480
And by the way, he was explicit about being anti Lord of the Rings.

1331
01:24:01,480 –> 01:24:04,800
Interestingly enough, he doesn’t like the hobbits. He thinks it’s stupid.

1332
01:24:06,560 –> 01:24:09,440
And then on the other end, you have a person who

1333
01:24:09,760 –> 01:24:13,280
explicitly admitted that Lord of the Rings was a huge

1334
01:24:13,440 –> 01:24:17,000
part of the way in which he laid out his seven book

1335
01:24:17,000 –> 01:24:20,720
adventure series, of which I read all seven books. Stephen

1336
01:24:20,720 –> 01:24:24,170
King’s the Dark Tower. So, so

1337
01:24:24,570 –> 01:24:28,250
I haven’t read that. I’m sorry. So it’s okay. It’s all right.

1338
01:24:28,570 –> 01:24:32,050
George Martin. By the way, I, I, I

1339
01:24:32,050 –> 01:24:35,810
sometimes describe Game of Thrones. It’s the Lord of the

1340
01:24:35,810 –> 01:24:38,810
Rings, except it has sex and death is real.

1341
01:24:40,970 –> 01:24:43,770
You know, because when people die in the Lord, you know, the elves don’t even

1342
01:24:43,770 –> 01:24:47,410
really die. They just, you know, go to Palanor. You just sort of wander away

1343
01:24:47,410 –> 01:24:50,800
the western sea and go that way. Although

1344
01:24:51,200 –> 01:24:55,040
to this day the death scene of, of Aragorn,

1345
01:24:55,040 –> 01:24:58,640
which is in the appendix, will literally bring terrors to my eyes. And

1346
01:24:58,880 –> 01:25:02,680
that’s not an exaggeration. I was reading it for the, for the

1347
01:25:02,680 –> 01:25:05,680
book group and I was like, I’m sorry, I can’t get through this without

1348
01:25:06,320 –> 01:25:09,360
tears coming to my eyes. I mean, such a gorgeous scene.

1349
01:25:10,080 –> 01:25:13,360
But I’ll, I’ll throw another fantasy

1350
01:25:14,320 –> 01:25:17,600
series on the table which is Lord of the Rings influenced, but

1351
01:25:17,680 –> 01:25:21,520
interestingly I think tries to incorporate Eastern philosophy, which

1352
01:25:21,520 –> 01:25:24,000
is the Earthsea trilogy by Ursula again.

1353
01:25:25,200 –> 01:25:28,920
So, okay, yeah, it was originally three. And this is

1354
01:25:28,920 –> 01:25:32,480
again sort of an unfortunate byproduct of

1355
01:25:32,480 –> 01:25:36,280
our, of our capitalist system. Hasan once it made money, she

1356
01:25:36,280 –> 01:25:40,040
said, oh, maybe I’ll write a fourth. Oh, maybe I’ll write a fifth. You know

1357
01:25:40,040 –> 01:25:43,600
what, maybe there’s eight more. Never do that, you know, and then eventually it kind

1358
01:25:43,600 –> 01:25:46,680
of peters out. But the first three are brilliant. And it’s really,

1359
01:25:47,560 –> 01:25:51,400
that is, if you will, where the goal is not so much

1360
01:25:52,520 –> 01:25:56,240
good fighting evil as balance. The idea, the goal of the, the

1361
01:25:56,240 –> 01:25:59,840
goal of the wizards is to maintain balance in the work, in the world.

1362
01:25:59,840 –> 01:26:03,480
And it’s all about understanding things like the, the nature of

1363
01:26:03,480 –> 01:26:07,320
magic is to find something’s true name. Like the, like, you know,

1364
01:26:07,400 –> 01:26:11,250
your real name, you know, not the name you walk around with, but your

1365
01:26:11,250 –> 01:26:14,930
real name. And, but you know, there

1366
01:26:14,930 –> 01:26:18,410
are wizards and there are dragons and there are, you know, guys with swords. And

1367
01:26:18,410 –> 01:26:22,170
it’s very Lord of the Rings in that sense. But it’s a,

1368
01:26:23,130 –> 01:26:26,490
it’s got this very sort of Eastern Buddhist,

1369
01:26:26,890 –> 01:26:30,490
Eastern philosophy tinge to it. And I Always

1370
01:26:30,490 –> 01:26:34,130
think that’s, that’s another one to throw in

1371
01:26:34,130 –> 01:26:37,900
the. Throw in the hopper somewhere. Yeah, throw in the pile

1372
01:26:37,900 –> 01:26:41,460
somewhere. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, throw the pile. Okay, so the question.

1373
01:26:41,540 –> 01:26:44,420
So then the, just. So then this, this is the question then.

1374
01:26:47,700 –> 01:26:51,260
We now live in a bifurcated, fractured,

1375
01:26:51,260 –> 01:26:54,420
fragmented, attention span theater world.

1376
01:26:57,220 –> 01:27:00,660
We have fewer people reading. No.

1377
01:27:01,060 –> 01:27:02,980
Yes. Well, we have fewer people reading

1378
01:27:04,980 –> 01:27:08,660
and the people that we do have read than ever before in, in the history

1379
01:27:08,740 –> 01:27:12,420
of the, of America anyway. And, and

1380
01:27:12,500 –> 01:27:16,100
we also have. Of the few people who are reading,

1381
01:27:16,100 –> 01:27:18,580
they are reading less complicated material

1382
01:27:19,780 –> 01:27:22,900
than ever before. Matter of fact, page counts in novels are down.

1383
01:27:23,460 –> 01:27:26,820
A novel used to be 225 to 250. 250,

1384
01:27:27,620 –> 01:27:31,300
sometimes 300 pages. Now it’s down to 175. And the

1385
01:27:31,300 –> 01:27:34,820
type’s getting bigger. And the type’s getting bigger.

1386
01:27:35,460 –> 01:27:39,220
And the, and the plot, right. And the plot lines are all from Tick Tock.

1387
01:27:41,620 –> 01:27:45,300
Are we ever going to see, in your opinion, are we

1388
01:27:45,300 –> 01:27:48,660
ever going to see a trilogy

1389
01:27:49,780 –> 01:27:52,260
that will match the power of Lord of the Rings

1390
01:27:54,090 –> 01:27:57,890
ever again in the West? In

1391
01:27:57,890 –> 01:28:01,210
my opinion, I think. And that makes me sad,

1392
01:28:01,530 –> 01:28:05,370
but I. Or if it is, it’s going to require a work of genius

1393
01:28:05,370 –> 01:28:09,050
beyond my understanding. The, the.

1394
01:28:11,850 –> 01:28:15,690
Just. Just like I don’t think we’ll see a rock group like the Beatles again,

1395
01:28:17,210 –> 01:28:20,850
again because of time and place. I do think also it,

1396
01:28:20,850 –> 01:28:24,650
it has to come from someone like

1397
01:28:24,650 –> 01:28:28,010
Tolkien. First of all, this was Tolkien’s, you know, if you think about it. What

1398
01:28:28,010 –> 01:28:30,650
else? Yeah, he wrote a few other things, but let’s face it, that’s what he

1399
01:28:30,650 –> 01:28:34,170
wrote, right? I mean, I know there’s a few. Oh, yeah,

1400
01:28:34,570 –> 01:28:38,330
yeah. The Silmarillion is just nonsense. Yeah, there’s a few other. I think he, he

1401
01:28:38,330 –> 01:28:41,930
did something on Beowulf and I’m sure I read those when I was a kid,

1402
01:28:42,010 –> 01:28:45,850
but that, that’s his masterwork. This was

1403
01:28:45,850 –> 01:28:49,020
his life. It came out of his,

1404
01:28:49,500 –> 01:28:53,180
you know, his, his career as a linguist

1405
01:28:53,340 –> 01:28:57,140
and the love of languages is, you know, beyond all

1406
01:28:57,140 –> 01:29:00,940
the great philosophy and, and everything else, there’s just a sheer

1407
01:29:01,100 –> 01:29:04,660
love of languages, a love of, of

1408
01:29:04,660 –> 01:29:08,500
myth that is, you know, so embedded in the Lord of the

1409
01:29:08,500 –> 01:29:08,860
Rings.

1410
01:29:13,030 –> 01:29:16,070
To produce a Tolkien, I think took like all of

1411
01:29:16,630 –> 01:29:20,470
British culture. It took, it took like 1500

1412
01:29:20,470 –> 01:29:24,110
years of British culture to produce one Tolkien. I

1413
01:29:24,110 –> 01:29:27,750
don’t think we’re going to see something like that again in

1414
01:29:27,750 –> 01:29:31,510
our lifetimes. And that, frankly, makes me very sad. But

1415
01:29:31,510 –> 01:29:35,230
I will say this is a podcast and if anyone out there thinks there’s something

1416
01:29:35,230 –> 01:29:39,000
that is like that from. Send it to Hasan and he’ll send it to

1417
01:29:39,000 –> 01:29:42,600
me, because I would read that in a heartbeat. I absolutely

1418
01:29:42,600 –> 01:29:46,440
will. So. But and

1419
01:29:46,440 –> 01:29:50,200
also the other thing about these great works of literature,

1420
01:29:50,200 –> 01:29:53,840
and it’s of course, in our. In our other careers,

1421
01:29:53,840 –> 01:29:57,280
Hasan, you and I talk about, you know, intellectual property and patents quite a bit.

1422
01:29:57,520 –> 01:30:00,600
And the thing about a patent, as you know, is once it’s done, that’s it.

1423
01:30:00,600 –> 01:30:04,310
You can’t reinvent that, you know, and everything else has to

1424
01:30:04,310 –> 01:30:08,150
root around it in a way, because it exists now. And you can’t. You can’t

1425
01:30:08,150 –> 01:30:10,230
pull that back. You can’t.

1426
01:30:12,630 –> 01:30:16,070
I’m trying to think, you know, was there. You know,

1427
01:30:16,310 –> 01:30:20,030
Dune was. It was a good work of science fiction.

1428
01:30:20,030 –> 01:30:23,470
I don’t think it was a great work. I also think it was one of

1429
01:30:23,470 –> 01:30:27,270
those where Frank Herbert just kind of realized he had a

1430
01:30:27,270 –> 01:30:30,930
good thing going and kept writing books. And

1431
01:30:30,930 –> 01:30:34,010
in some ways, Tolkien was never. First of all, Tolkien was

1432
01:30:34,730 –> 01:30:38,490
not really that interested in the monetary success

1433
01:30:38,570 –> 01:30:42,370
of the Lord of the Rings. So he wasn’t. He. He wasn’t sort of

1434
01:30:42,370 –> 01:30:46,090
seduced into. Okay, now let’s write the sequel. What happens

1435
01:30:46,090 –> 01:30:49,770
after Sauron Falls? You know, you know, Sauron

1436
01:30:49,770 –> 01:30:50,730
2, the sequel,

1437
01:30:53,530 –> 01:30:56,890
he was never really particularly interested in that. And

1438
01:30:58,060 –> 01:31:01,900
that tends to dilute the great works. Even if, like I said, like I

1439
01:31:01,900 –> 01:31:04,860
was saying earlier, the Earthsea trilogy, I’m not comparing it to the Lord of the

1440
01:31:04,860 –> 01:31:08,380
Rings. I’m not saying it’s on that level, but it was a very

1441
01:31:08,380 –> 01:31:11,900
solid work of fantasy, and it sort of got diluted down a little bit.

1442
01:31:13,180 –> 01:31:14,380
Are we gonna see.

1443
01:31:16,780 –> 01:31:19,740
I’m just gonna go back to my original. No, I don’t think so.

1444
01:31:22,790 –> 01:31:26,310
I think you’ve hit on something. 1500 years of English culture

1445
01:31:26,550 –> 01:31:30,070
all reached its pinnacle out of Tolkien’s pen,

1446
01:31:31,670 –> 01:31:35,510
which. Which I mean, indicates to me that maybe 1500 years from

1447
01:31:35,510 –> 01:31:39,350
now, maybe something will come

1448
01:31:39,350 –> 01:31:40,630
out of an American pen.

1449
01:31:42,790 –> 01:31:45,590
Maybe. But even that person

1450
01:31:47,110 –> 01:31:50,700
will still be. I hate to say it,

1451
01:31:51,340 –> 01:31:53,820
but that person will still be influenced by

1452
01:31:55,180 –> 01:31:58,900
Lord of the Rings. They’ll still be reading it. Even if it’s. Even if. Even

1453
01:31:58,900 –> 01:32:01,900
if it’s. Even if it’s. Even if it’s generated by

1454
01:32:02,620 –> 01:32:06,300
some weird techno. Not weird. Some. Some cutting edge technology

1455
01:32:06,300 –> 01:32:09,740
that I cannot even conceptualize right now.

1456
01:32:11,100 –> 01:32:14,540
And maybe it will be a writer that will be

1457
01:32:15,180 –> 01:32:18,980
on some planet that is not even inhabited yet by human beings.

1458
01:32:18,980 –> 01:32:21,740
Let me ask you the same question. Or related.

1459
01:32:23,260 –> 01:32:26,860
Do you see Chat, GPT or any

1460
01:32:26,860 –> 01:32:30,340
large language model that Is, you know, son or daughter of Chat

1461
01:32:30,340 –> 01:32:34,100
GPT that comes along. Do you ever see it creating a work of

1462
01:32:34,100 –> 01:32:37,820
art that can stir you in the same way

1463
01:32:37,820 –> 01:32:41,380
that the Lord. I mean, are you going to be rereading that work of that

1464
01:32:41,380 –> 01:32:44,890
book. Book. To your. I’m sorry, eight year old. Your daughter Is she

1465
01:32:44,890 –> 01:32:48,530
ate. Yeah. To your eight year. My son. Excuse me, My

1466
01:32:48,530 –> 01:32:51,090
son. My son. Years years later.

1467
01:33:00,210 –> 01:33:03,330
I’m gonna seriously answer. I’m gonna take that question seriously. I’m gonna seriously answer

1468
01:33:04,130 –> 01:33:07,010
about it. Sarcastic, you know, sponsor.

1469
01:33:08,620 –> 01:33:11,980
Right. My sincere

1470
01:33:11,980 –> 01:33:15,220
answer. And I’m saying this in

1471
01:33:15,220 –> 01:33:18,460
2025 with the current

1472
01:33:19,420 –> 01:33:22,740
thing that is chat GPT. And I mess around with all the four large language,

1473
01:33:22,740 –> 01:33:26,460
the four major ones, perplexity, chat GPT, Claude and.

1474
01:33:26,460 –> 01:33:30,260
And Grok. I played around with them. You know,

1475
01:33:30,260 –> 01:33:34,020
I, I’m listening to and watching the arguments and the vicissitudes going back

1476
01:33:34,020 –> 01:33:36,110
and forth. That’s the context by which I say this.

1477
01:33:39,790 –> 01:33:42,710
Yeah, I don’t think so either. I was going to say, I don’t see me

1478
01:33:42,710 –> 01:33:46,510
reading to. So we have. Our. Our first granddaughter was born five

1479
01:33:46,510 –> 01:33:50,310
months ago, and I don’t see me reading something from Chat

1480
01:33:50,310 –> 01:33:51,710
GPT to her at eight years.

1481
01:33:54,270 –> 01:33:57,630
No, I do see me reading the rings. But, but here’s my. But.

1482
01:33:57,710 –> 01:34:00,830
Yeah, yeah. Yes, yes, absolutely.

1483
01:34:01,820 –> 01:34:04,620
And I think that we represent.

1484
01:34:05,500 –> 01:34:09,100
Because I’m in my. I’m in my mid-40s. We represent

1485
01:34:09,660 –> 01:34:13,380
the tail end. Or, or maybe I

1486
01:34:13,380 –> 01:34:17,020
should even. I won’t frame it as a tail end. We represent the oldest

1487
01:34:17,100 –> 01:34:20,900
end. I’m gonna say something that’s very terrible here. The

1488
01:34:20,900 –> 01:34:24,660
oldest end of a dying tradition, or, or at least the very

1489
01:34:24,660 –> 01:34:27,820
minimum, the oldest end of a tradition that the

1490
01:34:27,820 –> 01:34:31,420
technologists who name their companies after Lord,

1491
01:34:31,580 –> 01:34:35,260
after aspects of the Lord of the Rings, would seek to use their technology

1492
01:34:35,420 –> 01:34:38,940
to kill. They want to kill the

1493
01:34:38,940 –> 01:34:42,740
tradition because the tradition involves. And

1494
01:34:42,740 –> 01:34:45,860
this goes back to what I was talking with my wife about this weekend around

1495
01:34:45,860 –> 01:34:48,860
Christianity. The tradition

1496
01:34:49,020 –> 01:34:52,540
requires us to deal with messy,

1497
01:34:52,970 –> 01:34:56,330
unpredictable, buggy human

1498
01:34:56,330 –> 01:35:00,170
beings. And the technologists hate human

1499
01:35:00,170 –> 01:35:03,770
beings. From Marc Andreessen all the way

1500
01:35:03,770 –> 01:35:07,490
to Sam Altman all the way to Elon Musk, who.

1501
01:35:07,490 –> 01:35:10,730
I personally think he’s crazy and I admire what he’s doing.

1502
01:35:12,410 –> 01:35:16,010
All the way to Peter Thiel. I think every single one of those folks

1503
01:35:16,250 –> 01:35:19,940
all the way up and down the structure, they dislike human

1504
01:35:19,940 –> 01:35:23,700
beings because the, the, the messiness

1505
01:35:23,700 –> 01:35:26,820
of humanity for them is a

1506
01:35:27,060 –> 01:35:30,900
bug, not a. That’s a really. That’s an interesting insight.

1507
01:35:30,900 –> 01:35:31,940
And that fundamental,

1508
01:35:34,420 –> 01:35:38,100
fundamental insight. Yeah. He was Also entranced by technology.

1509
01:35:38,260 –> 01:35:41,700
They have a mind of metal, you know. Right,

1510
01:35:42,420 –> 01:35:46,020
exactly. And it led to. And, and then, and then, you know, he

1511
01:35:46,100 –> 01:35:49,790
winds up, you know, going back to the Shire and

1512
01:35:50,110 –> 01:35:53,870
getting run out of town. Because look, the

1513
01:35:54,430 –> 01:35:58,230
tension between the city and the country will never be

1514
01:35:58,230 –> 01:36:01,990
resolved. It just won’t be. And that’s okay, by the

1515
01:36:01,990 –> 01:36:05,390
way. Fortunately, we live on a third of a continent that’s big enough

1516
01:36:05,630 –> 01:36:08,830
to where freedom of movement is still unrestricted. So if you don’t want to live

1517
01:36:08,830 –> 01:36:12,590
in the city, you may move someplace else. You have freedom of association and

1518
01:36:12,590 –> 01:36:16,430
freedom of movement. If you don’t like the city you’re living in and the people

1519
01:36:16,430 –> 01:36:20,150
that you do not have a connection with, move, Move

1520
01:36:20,150 –> 01:36:23,190
somewhere else. Oh well, I’d have to get a new job.

1521
01:36:23,670 –> 01:36:27,390
Yeah, and we have the blood of pioneers in our

1522
01:36:27,390 –> 01:36:30,630
genetics. And these days, often you don’t have. To get a new job. Your job

1523
01:36:30,630 –> 01:36:34,470
just moves with you. Yeah, right. Often you don’t. It just moves

1524
01:36:34,470 –> 01:36:37,030
with you. Like. I’m reading a book, I’m reading a book right now which we’re

1525
01:36:37,030 –> 01:36:40,390
going to cover on the podcast called. It was a

1526
01:36:40,680 –> 01:36:44,520
Pulitzer Prize finalist a few years ago, Empire of the Summer Moon,

1527
01:36:44,840 –> 01:36:48,160
about how the, about how the US army basically destroyed the

1528
01:36:48,160 –> 01:36:51,840
Comanches and in, in west. In

1529
01:36:51,840 –> 01:36:55,440
West Texas and opened up the frontier. Good, bad, ugly and

1530
01:36:55,440 –> 01:36:59,080
indifferent in a post civil war United States.

1531
01:36:59,400 –> 01:37:03,160
The blood of those people still runs through our veins.

1532
01:37:04,200 –> 01:37:08,050
Move, go somewhere else, leave the cities. And by the

1533
01:37:08,050 –> 01:37:11,170
way, a lot of people have decided to do this with, with COVID and decided

1534
01:37:11,170 –> 01:37:14,850
to do that in 2020 and 2021 and 2022, great American move around

1535
01:37:15,170 –> 01:37:17,330
did occur. So people do understand this.

1536
01:37:18,770 –> 01:37:22,370
The, the thing that I think the technologists

1537
01:37:22,530 –> 01:37:26,210
don’t get is because they have that mind of metal,

1538
01:37:27,010 –> 01:37:30,570
they don’t understand all of the things that are outside the metal.

1539
01:37:30,570 –> 01:37:34,280
And, and I would, the comparison I would

1540
01:37:34,280 –> 01:37:38,000
make is the Eye of Sauron. They search everywhere

1541
01:37:38,000 –> 01:37:41,360
for anything because they are totalizing in their belief

1542
01:37:42,800 –> 01:37:46,480
that they must get rid of all the bugs and that is their

1543
01:37:46,480 –> 01:37:50,000
downfall. The hobbit that they don’t see

1544
01:37:50,960 –> 01:37:54,800
is the thing that is their downfall. And to your point earlier,

1545
01:37:55,120 –> 01:37:58,710
you’re right. Frodo just had to get the

1546
01:37:58,710 –> 01:38:02,230
ring to the crack right of Mount

1547
01:38:02,230 –> 01:38:05,790
Doom. And then anything else that happened after that

1548
01:38:06,510 –> 01:38:10,190
was, you know, what less religious people would just call

1549
01:38:10,190 –> 01:38:14,030
kismet or luck. I don’t believe in luck. I would instead

1550
01:38:14,030 –> 01:38:16,910
call it grace. That’s right. So.

1551
01:38:17,790 –> 01:38:20,870
So no, I don’t. I don’t believe that we will be. We’re not the generation

1552
01:38:20,870 –> 01:38:24,700
that will be reading chat GPT generated texts to our children. Now I

1553
01:38:24,700 –> 01:38:28,060
look at my 8 year old and I told him the other day,

1554
01:38:28,780 –> 01:38:31,620
part of the reason I’m reading you Lord of the Rings is because I want

1555
01:38:31,620 –> 01:38:35,060
to fill you with the old things. Because I have a feeling a lot of

1556
01:38:35,060 –> 01:38:38,540
people in your generation who were born to be, who have been born

1557
01:38:38,700 –> 01:38:42,140
eight years before you and are being born now will be seduced

1558
01:38:43,180 –> 01:38:46,780
to believing that the new thing is the best

1559
01:38:46,780 –> 01:38:50,590
thing. And I am fighting. I

1560
01:38:50,590 –> 01:38:54,270
am fighting a rear guard action. And so you may call me a reactionary if

1561
01:38:54,270 –> 01:38:58,070
you like fighting a rear guard action, fine.

1562
01:38:58,310 –> 01:39:01,910
I’m retreating and defilating all over the place. No, I’m

1563
01:39:01,910 –> 01:39:03,430
retreating and defilating all over the place.

1564
01:39:07,670 –> 01:39:09,430
Exactly. I’m looking good while I’m doing it.

1565
01:39:11,590 –> 01:39:15,110
All right, so we’re going to wrap up our conversation. This has been great,

1566
01:39:15,510 –> 01:39:18,370
wide ranging conversation, Fantastic. Talked about a lot of things.

1567
01:39:19,890 –> 01:39:23,010
This is fantastic. And this is what, this is what our bonus episodes are really

1568
01:39:23,010 –> 01:39:26,410
about. Right? We’re not focusing necessarily on a specific book or a specific idea or

1569
01:39:26,410 –> 01:39:30,050
specific things. We’re just having interesting conversations with, with interesting

1570
01:39:30,050 –> 01:39:33,810
folks on the long form again, my long

1571
01:39:33,810 –> 01:39:37,370
form podcast is part of that defilating and

1572
01:39:37,370 –> 01:39:41,130
retreating action. I’m using the 10. I’m right there with you, my friend.

1573
01:39:41,130 –> 01:39:44,960
I’m backing up with you. Talk about the firing as

1574
01:39:44,960 –> 01:39:48,760
I go. Talk about the old things. No

1575
01:39:48,760 –> 01:39:52,360
chat GPT used here. I write all my own scripts and this is the real

1576
01:39:52,360 –> 01:39:55,720
live me that you’re hearing. Okay,

1577
01:39:58,440 –> 01:40:02,280
what do we take from all of this melange, this

1578
01:40:02,280 –> 01:40:06,000
massage mashup, this, this mix that we’ve thrown in the

1579
01:40:06,000 –> 01:40:09,680
pot from Pink Floyd to Lord of the Rings to the battle of

1580
01:40:09,680 –> 01:40:13,480
Stalingrad TO World War I-20 year old

1581
01:40:13,480 –> 01:40:17,160
Hitler to, you know, Winston Churchill again having a bullet go

1582
01:40:17,160 –> 01:40:20,560
past his head to, you know, MI6

1583
01:40:20,880 –> 01:40:23,840
and the KGB and Vladimir Putin.

1584
01:40:24,960 –> 01:40:28,240
American intransigence, or maybe just naivete.

1585
01:40:28,720 –> 01:40:32,080
What do we take from all of this? This, this

1586
01:40:32,080 –> 01:40:35,800
goulash that we have? What do we, what do we, what

1587
01:40:35,800 –> 01:40:39,280
do we, what do we want leaders to know? As a, as a wrap up

1588
01:40:39,280 –> 01:40:42,720
from this episode today, what is the big idea for leaders here?

1589
01:40:43,300 –> 01:40:47,060
Or what are some big ideas for leaders here today? Two words, never

1590
01:40:47,060 –> 01:40:47,700
despair.

1591
01:40:50,980 –> 01:40:54,260
Denethor despairs in the Lord of the Rings and it’s his downfall.

1592
01:40:54,660 –> 01:40:57,940
He actually can’t see that there is a possible

1593
01:40:58,020 –> 01:41:01,660
victory because all he sees is the

1594
01:41:01,660 –> 01:41:05,460
triumph. You know, he has that Great line. You may triumph on

1595
01:41:05,460 –> 01:41:08,900
the pelenor fields for a day, but against the power that has now arisen, there

1596
01:41:08,900 –> 01:41:12,540
is no final victory. But he’s wrong. There is a final victory.

1597
01:41:14,140 –> 01:41:17,580
So I think that that would be

1598
01:41:17,820 –> 01:41:21,500
the. The. The takeaway, ultimately,

1599
01:41:21,580 –> 01:41:25,260
is that don’t despair.

1600
01:41:25,420 –> 01:41:28,860
Good can triumph over evil, and

1601
01:41:30,940 –> 01:41:34,780
there’s. There’s precedent for it in everything that you just

1602
01:41:34,780 –> 01:41:38,350
mentioned, as, you know, the.

1603
01:41:40,510 –> 01:41:44,310
Even in. Even in Pink Floyd, ultimately. And Pink Floyd could be

1604
01:41:44,310 –> 01:41:48,030
pretty dark. You know, they didn’t. There’s a lot of despair

1605
01:41:48,430 –> 01:41:51,070
in Pink Floyd ultimately, you know, throughout

1606
01:41:52,990 –> 01:41:56,590
their career, but there are sort of moments of,

1607
01:41:57,070 –> 01:42:00,270
you know, of triumph. And

1608
01:42:00,990 –> 01:42:04,350
I think that that’s important to focus on because

1609
01:42:04,430 –> 01:42:07,080
it’s very easy to just.

1610
01:42:08,200 –> 01:42:11,880
You can. Not only is it easy to despair, you can

1611
01:42:11,880 –> 01:42:15,560
fall in love with it, you know, in a very dark and weird way,

1612
01:42:15,880 –> 01:42:19,680
and it can become sort of your. All that

1613
01:42:19,680 –> 01:42:23,480
you. All that you can see. So that. That. That,

1614
01:42:23,480 –> 01:42:27,000
to me, is certainly the takeaway of the Lord of the Rings that, you know,

1615
01:42:27,480 –> 01:42:30,040
even when things look darkest, don’t despair.

1616
01:42:34,050 –> 01:42:37,810
You know, I think that’s a good takeaway for leaders, no matter whether

1617
01:42:37,810 –> 01:42:41,490
they’re reading Lord of the Rings, listening to. Listening to

1618
01:42:42,290 –> 01:42:45,970
classic music of whatever genre, or

1619
01:42:46,210 –> 01:42:49,850
reading histories of events that have

1620
01:42:49,850 –> 01:42:53,410
occurred long before them when people

1621
01:42:53,410 –> 01:42:57,050
did not despair and did behave what we would call now

1622
01:42:57,050 –> 01:43:00,610
heroically. And I think this is a direct shot to the

1623
01:43:00,770 –> 01:43:03,810
nothing ever happens. Nothing ever changes crowd. No, things happen.

1624
01:43:04,370 –> 01:43:07,650
Things change. Never

1625
01:43:07,650 –> 01:43:09,970
despair. I like that.

1626
01:43:11,250 –> 01:43:14,129
Okay, that’s gonna be our close. It feels like a mic drop.

1627
01:43:15,090 –> 01:43:18,890
Thank. I like to thank Neil. It does

1628
01:43:18,890 –> 01:43:22,650
seem like a mic drop moment. I would like to thank Neil for covering all

1629
01:43:22,650 –> 01:43:25,720
the podcast today that. Well,

1630
01:43:28,040 –> 01:43:29,560
okay, we’re out.