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

0:00 Hello.

0:04 My name is Jesan Sorrells and this is the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books Podcast Bonus. There is no book reading on these bonus episodes. Instead these are interviews, rants, raves, or general audio musings, and even conversations with interesting people that don't necessarily focus on a specific book or even a specific theme, but are still about leadership. Because listening to me muse or rant or speechify or talk to an interesting person about leadership is still better than reading and trying to understand yet another business book.

0:52 So at the beginning of the summer, we switched around the format of this show partially to perform deeper dives into literature in order to extract greater leadership insights and in order to have more engaging conversations with our guests. However, at the beginning of this year, before we switched up the format, we came up with a scheme, sort of an idea, right, to create a series of mashup episodes. I'm using air quotes there that would feature a guest that we had never yet talked to on the show.

1:23 And we will be discussing themes and topics from books that we had previously covered on previous episodes of this show. Mix it with a healthy dollop of insights from other mediums such as film and music. And if you've been listening to the show regularly, you know that my regular guest co host, Tom Libby, and I tend to somehow, every single episode wind up talking about a film that somehow relates to a theme that's in, that's in the book that we are covering on that particular day. So this is just going to be an extended version of, of that now mashup, for those of you who don't know what that term means according to the Internet's Urban Dictionary, which by the way, you can find out all kinds of fun stuff about current slang by going into the Urban Dictionary.

2:12 But the, the, the idea of a mashup or the concept or the term mashup according to Urban Dictionary is quote, to take elements of two or more pre existing pieces of music and combine them to make a new song. And that's sort of, kind of what we're going to be doing here today. This episode is the first of four of these episodes. And, and we're going to begin, as I said, with a doozy.

2:38 So the line, the lyric, right, that jumps out to me when we start thinking about these things that we're going to be putting together today is this one. Forward he cried from the rear and the front rank died and the general sat in the lines on the map moved from side to side Whenever I hear these words, whenever I repeat these words, whenever I sing these words badly when I'm out on my homestead, you know, moving around hay or predator proofing a turkey enclosure or just sweating in the 100 degree heat in the undisclosed location where I live.

3:20 I am repeating this line from us and them from Pink Floyd's iconic album the Dark side of the Moon from 1973. And when I do repeat this line, I always think about warfare, particularly World War I. There's something about that line that conjures up images of French generals and British generals with big old handlebar mustaches hanging out in trenches way in the back while folks bayonets go charging into the breach of barbed wire. And they just keep charging into the breach of barbed wire getting cut down repeatedly.

3:57 Now the song is about war, but it is really about war against the government. And Roger Waters lyrics can be applicable to any war where bureaucratic generals waste the flower of youth to achieve pointless strategic aims. And I think the war that proves the rule is probably World War I. Now, the intersection with a couple of books that we've covered on this podcast here is clear. We covered All Quiet on the Western Front in episode number 127. And in that episode we discussed the nature of warfare, loyalty, patriotism and meaning in the trenches of the Western Front as brought to us by Eric Marie Remarque.

4:41 And it's been a minute here, but we've also covered the Lord of the Rings trilogy. We did that in episodes number 76, 77 and 78 by J.R.R. tolkien, a book series written by a man who, like many of his generation in England, including a gentleman named C.S. lewis, experienced World War I directly at the Battle of the Somme and contracted trench fever for all of his efforts.

5:07 Matter of fact, he learned all the same lessons that C.S. lewis learned. He just came to different conclusions. And so I'm mashing all of that together because this is a mash up episode. And we're going to talk about the intersections between Pink Floyd and Lord of the Rings and World War I. And all quiet on the Western Front today with our guest. So today we are joined by Neil Kalachovsky. I was supposed to say it like that, throw my fingers up. You'll be able to see that on the video. Neil is the co founder of award.

5:41 I have to say it that way because there's a strong capital letter at the end Award. Its goal is to maximize their clients chance of a successful Sbir stt our award. He is also a Tolkien enthusiast. That's why he's on the show, not because of Sbir or sttr. And he also has an interest in the vagaries and the intricacies of World War I. He also has a background as a, if I'm not mistaken, Neil, a rock musician, right? This is true, yes. And so he will know quite a bit about Pink Floyd and he might have something to say about my favorite concept album probably of all time.

6:26 Probably the best concept album of all time. Other people will say the wall or whatever, it's Dark side of the moon, please. I mean, the T shirt is iconic just from the album cover alone, you know. Right. Can't beat that with a stick. And I think they'll still be selling those T shirts to disaffected 15 year olds 80 years from now. And of course they won't know that there is no dark side of the moon. It's actually all dark. It's all dark. It's all dark.

6:54 Really? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yep. So welcome to the show, Neil. How are you doing today? You. Jesan. Good to see you. Yeah, I'm doing great. Yeah. I'm in New York today, by the way. It's 95 degrees. 95 degrees in New York City. Actually, the person I was just talking to on the phone before we hit record on this was also in New York City and he was complaining while he was in traffic about how angry everybody gets when it's 95 degrees in New York City. Yeah, I'm in an air conditioned room, so.

7:26 So there. It's like 62 in here.

7:35 So. So we'll just, we'll just start off with our very first question here in the heat of the day. You're a huge Lord of the Rings Tolkien guy. Talk with us about the impact of Lord of the Rings on you. So there's a tendency for me to make some sarcastic remark like, well, I don't know, I just read them. But that's not true. I've been reading them all my life. I don't think I can recall when I first read them, but it was definitely pre fifth grade because I have a very strong memory of reading them.

8:07 My, I was up in Alberta, Canada. My father was a professor and we had, he took a sabbatical in Edmonton, Alberta, and this would have been 1973. And I would curl up, they would let you go home for lunch and I would curl up at lunch and read the Lord of the Rings in like a patch of sunlight in the house. And I remember this quite clearly. I, I think much of my moral philosophy, a lot of my politics, a lot of my General view of history is just very colored by the Lord of the Rings and CS Lewis and, you know,

8:52 all of that genre. I was a big Dungeons and Dragons guy. Yeah, I'm officially a nerd. Yeah. Back in, when I went to college and when you play Dungeons and Dragons, I discovered Dungeons and Dragons when I went to college. I actually didn't know it existed in high school. I would thought you would have thought that would have called out to me naturally, but somehow I missed it. But you were basically playing in Tolkien's. World. Even if it wasn't Tolkien's world. Elves were elves, hobbits were hobbits, dwarves were dwarves.

9:27 And there was a shared understanding that, you know, dwarves were surly and carried an axe and elves were handsome and tall and they carried a bow. And you just knew in advance, you know, so orcs were bad. You were pretty sure the orcs were bad and that carried on, you know, and that. And then of course, the original Dungeons and Dragons eventually became what were known as MUDs, multi user dungeons where we were playing by text and that eventually turned into World of Warcraft. And you know, the, the incredibly addictive games that we have did way of saying the influence on me is profound.

10:02 Just absolutely profound. So that challenge or that influence right now, that challenge. And you mentioned on the show, you said moral philosophy, politics and history. Right. Were the three areas that Tolkien most influenced you, influenced you in. And you said 1973, which is the same year the Dark side of the Moon came out. Yes, it is. I do know that in the 70s, when people were reading Lord of the Rings, they would write in the subway Frodo lives. Right? Oh, yeah. That was like one of the things that people would, that people would do.

10:43 Tolkien fans would do. And I do know that there had been intimations of intersections between Tolkien and Pink Floyd and even Tolkien and, and even, well, Pink. Not Tolkien, but Pink Floyd. You're thinking of Zeppelin. Zeppelin, that's it. Zeppelin, yes, Zeppelin. Although interesting enough, I associate. Why do I associate Zeppelin with the wizard of Oz? Why do I do that?

11:10 I don't know. But isn't there something where you can play Dark side of the Moon to Wizard of Oz and attracts. Yeah, yeah, right, yeah. Yes. Okay, so why somebody very high came up with that one? Very. You know, that's the interesting thing about cannabis. It always makes you better at engineering. Not much anything else, just. Just engineering. What are the intersections between, in your brain, right, Between Tolkien and music and these different genres of, of art. And by the way, you know, we're talking obviously in 20, 25 here, you know, you know, 20 years after, you know, the Lord of the Rings films came out, which I thought that property was unfilmable.

11:57 I just, I thought they couldn't do it. And somehow or another Peter Jackson did it and it was kind of insane. I was, I was working as a, as a part time film projectionist back in the day when they still had physical film. And I got a chance to put together the Lord of the Rings films, which was great. Oh, cool. Yeah. And so I sort of got to see them before other people did, all three of them, actually, before other people did. And it was just kind of astonishing what he was able to, what he was able to pull off.

12:29 But, but yeah, let's go back, let's go back to the 1970s. Let's go back to where you were starting. How does, how do those things intersect in your mind? What's that, what's that like rock music. And the Lord of the Rings. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I think on several of us, first of all, the early 70s, late 60s was explosion in musical creativity. And the Lord of the Rings is an intensely creative work. And what's funny is that that often got associated say with a little bit with the drug culture, with LSD and so forth, which would have horrified Tolkien, by the way.

13:09 Absolutely. By the way, 73 is also the year Tolkien died. Right. So the, So I, I don't think he would have had much time for the actual rock bands. It's hard to see Tolkien hanging out with Led Zeppelin or Pink Floyd. Or Pink Floyd, yeah. But there was definitely, you know, sort of a, it was a whole counterculture kind of thing. And

13:39 Middle Earth was this just, you know, if you wanted to get away, Middle Earth was a wonderful place to get away too. You know, by the way, you mentioned Frodo lives in the subways. I can remember hiking the Appalachian Trail in the seventies with my brother. And in the huts you would see Frodo lives carved. Yeah. In the, you know, in the wood of the hut that you were staying in. So I, I think first of all, just for sheer creativity and, you know, the late 60s, early 70s was such an experimental time for music.

14:12 I mean, people were trying all sorts of crazy things. Of course the Beatles were like, you know, cutting tapes and playing them backwards, which is, you know, just, you know, whoever thought of doing that? Jimi Hendrix, you know, basically invents feedback. I know the purists on here are going to say the Beatles did it first. I'm not my friend Who's a Beatles fan is going to kill me. But I can't remember the song. But they actually have a moment of feedback first. But let's. It was hendrix.

14:42 I'm sorry, 13 seconds of feedback at the beginning of a song does not. You know. But, you know, Hendrix basically invents the lead guitarist. Oh, yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah. And then Paige, you know, from Led Zeppelin, picks that up. But, you know, you can see Tolkien lyrics in some of the Led Zeppelin. Sorry? Well, you can see Tolkien lyrics in some of the Led Zeppelin lyrics or Tolkien illusions in some of the Led Zeppelin lyrics. And with Floyd, I think it was more, you know, they were sort of the leading edge of acid rock definitely during the Syd Barrett years, and even, you know, even Dark side of the Moon.

15:28 So I. I don't think you're gonna. I think you'd have to search pretty hard to find something in Florby. Go, oh, that's Tolkien right there. The. You know, I think certainly Tolkien and Lewis, and one thing they would have had in common for politics is a distaste for useless war, for pointless war. Yep. I don't. I don't think Tolkien would have felt that way necessarily, against the struggle against evil, which he saw as my view, anyway, necessary in part. Yeah. Basically human existence. But, you know, that there.

15:59 That there were. You know, that there were dumb wars and. And. And that those are just sort of useless wastes of human life. I think they would have. Would have agreed on that. So I. I think that's kind of it. I mean, you can see, you know, you could. But. So I think it's just a general. In. In the spirit of this episode, it's a general mashup of creativity as opposed to, you know, Roger Waters saying, I wrote this because I read the Hobbit and. Right. Yeah, well, Roger Waters. I mean, I looked.

16:33 I looked because I had forgotten a whole ton of stuff, you know, about him. So I. I looked up his. His Wikipedia page, which is always a fun and exciting adventure, as research for this show. And one of the things that you do note about Waters, and it's easy to note it, you know, it's easy to see it in his sort of. His posture. But I think more so when he was a younger man than he is now, but when he was a young man, you definitely got the impression that he wanted to use Pink Floyd as a vehicle for his creative vision.

17:17 And everybody else was just sort of along for the ride. Everybody else is in the back of the bus. Right. We're recording this episode, about two weeks after the death of Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys. Right? A man who, I was telling my wife, I remember watching an American Masterworks episode on PBS about the Beach Boys back in maybe like the 90s, the late 90s, early 2000s, one of those random Saturday afternoons I was at home probably hungover, watching pbs, trying to stop the pounding in my brain.

17:51 And, and one of the things that jumped out to me about the interview with Brian Wilson was just how angry he still was about the Beatles being more popular. He never lost that bitterness. He never. And he, and he didn't really care if you liked it or didn't like it. He was just sort of like, no, you know, love, love me do, Come on, let me do a composition for you. And then he like, would sit down and do like a whole composition, right? Yeah, yeah. Like, this is, this is an 18 bar composition. It's so much better.

18:19 And I'm just like, it doesn't matter, you lost. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. You lost, buddy. It, it is funny though. These insanely successful people, and yet they're still, you know, driven by the fact that, you know, 40 years before there was one, you know, one girl who didn't like them or something. Well, have you ever, have you ever heard the story about Michael Jordan? Because I was a basketball guy for years, but have you ever heard the story of Michael Jordan at the, at his, his induction ceremony in, in high school or something?

18:50 Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he invited the coach who benched him to the NBA induction ceremony. Yeah, like you're, you're Michael Jordan. You're, to paraphrase Allen Iverson, you're black. Jesus. Yeah, like, like you just, that's what. Makes you Jordan or Brady, maybe. Brian Wilson is still, you know, you know, you're still driven by that anger, you know. Right. So I hadn't heard that about Brian Wilson, but that's funny, especially because the Beach Boys, you know, when you think of nice rock and roll, you know, as opposed to.

19:23 Yeah, you go, oh, they were, they were nice guys. Even if they kind of sort of hung out with Charlie Manson maybe a little too much. Just a little bit of, a little bit of a tweak. Just a little bit too much. A little too, a little too close to the Manson. But, but, you know, you look back on their songs and, I mean, I don't think there's an angry song in the, in the repertoire anywhere. Oh, no, I, I, I think probably their best song, and they did a lot of different, obviously, a lot of different songs, but the song that probably sticks with me the most, I think I have it on my favorites list on Spotify is God Only Knows.

19:54 Yeah. Like, it's a beautiful song. Beautiful composition. Now, full disclosure, I am not a fan of the Beatles. I. I think that they were. I gotta go. Right, right. Well, I guess we're done for the day. Short interview and we're done. I think they were a Right Place, Right Time band. Yes. I think they could play. Yes. I think they could put together compositions. Right Place, Right Time. If they showed up 10 years earlier, they'd have been nobody. And if they showed up 10 years later, they'd have been nobody.

20:24 They hit the right place at the right time. You know, Ed Sullivan, the whole nine yards. They rode the wave. And I can't. I can't take away the wave from them. I can never do that. Okay. But I can judge the talent that's riding the wave.

20:42 And I think there was a lot of sharp talent during that time that sort of got overshadowed. Go right on ahead. I, I actually. So, so, you know, when I was thinking about this episode, I was thinking, well, what are the. What are the common themes between Pink Floyd or Dark side of the Moon? Yeah. Lord of the Rings and All Quiet on the Western Front? The one thing I came up with is that in some ways, they really set the tone for their genre, essentially, almost for the next, you know, 50 years going forward.

21:14 You know, when I read. So, you know, I was saying when you. And this is going to loop back to the Beatles in a second. Sure. But. So Lord of the Rings, I've been reading all my life, but All Quiet on the Western Front, I think I read when I was maybe in high school, and then when you asked me to do this episode, I said, well, I better, you know, brush up. So I reread it, and one of the things that struck me was if you look at almost any war movie from, like, 1930 on, it has all those, you know, the burnout, the guy who goes back to the home front, and they can't understand him.

21:50 You know, the craziness of the front, you know, the Brief Flower of Love, which is immediately destroyed by the craziness of war. You know, and it's like, oh, my gosh, you can just. Like, that's Platoon or that's Full Metal Jacket, or that's every single war movie ever. Right. In a way, you could almost trace it back to All Quiet on the Western Front front. And I would say almost every piece of Fantasy literature. And again, depending upon who your audience is, you might have some people, angry people calling in about this.

22:22 But almost every piece of fantasy literature, certainly for the rest of the 20th century and probably into the 21st century as well, heavily. Heavily influenced by the Lord of the Rings. You can see. Oh, yeah, you can. You can see it. And I could. I could give you examples of this, but I would say it to. As far as acid rock goes, or, you know, that sort of dark. Dark rock, if you want to call it that, Dark side of the Moon was. Was the Granddaddy. I mean, it was, you know, it is. It has some, you know, very depressing lyrics.

23:09 It's interesting. So I. I did not have a good understanding of who Pink Floyd was. Right. But I. I sort of. So the way I was raised. And I'll get back to this, is going to tie into my critique of the Beatles as well. The way I was raised. I was raised in a Motown household. I was not raised in a Beatles household. Right, right. Okay. So people don't understand this now because everybody listens to everything everywhere and no one cares. Right. Back then, it mattered kids. Back then, it mattered kids.

23:38 That's right. And so if you were in a Jewish house or a WASP house, you were probably listening to the Beatles. Maybe you were listening to the Doors. If you were really rebellious and a hippie. If you were super cool. If you were super cool. Right. But if you were African American, yeah, you weren't listening to any of that. You were listening to the Jackson 5. You were listening to Dionne Warwick. You were listening to what's her Name? Oh, well, yeah, you were listening to Aretha Franklin. You were listening to Marvin Gaye.

24:18 Kids. Yeah. You were listening to that. And. And those two things. And again, I have to. Because everybody's Spotify list crosses over. Now, those two things didn't cross over.

24:31 Except for the Beatles themselves. They were listening to those folks. Right. The Beatles. Absolutely. For sure. They were absolutely listening to those. As Elvis had listened to the gospel music of his time, as Johnny Cash had listened to the gospel music of his time, you know, the artists, for sure. You know, Dave Brubeck, Right. I'm a huge jazz guy. Right. So Dave Brubeck, you know, would hang out with Coltrane and Miles Davis and. All right, so you're right. Absolutely. The musicians all fed each other and understood that racial differences didn't matter when it came to actual musical talent.

25:10 If you could swing, you could swing. And that's just it. Right, right. Musicians have always understood this Comedians have always understood this. This is why Chris Rock hangs out with Jerry Seinfeld. And they're really good friends. Yeah. And they just will continue to be forever. Right. This is why Dave Chappelle and Bill Burr, you can put them in a room together, don't put them on stage together, because they're going to try to outdo each other. It's going to be really mess, but. I like to be in that room.

25:32 Oh, my God.

25:35 And they're going to say the most outrageous cutting things to each other, and there is going to be nothing that is going to be off the table. Yeah. But there's a second piece of this, and that's the viewer, the audience, and the audience makes all these separations. And so with the household that I was raised in, my father was not a Beatles fan. He was like, no, that's. That's white music for white people. Right. We listen to Marvin Gaye in this house. Right, Right. You know, so that was my influence.

26:01 Right. But it's interesting to talk about genre breaking, because when you think about books. Right. In my house, I was right. I was a bibliophile. I'm raising my kids files. I mean, I host this podcast, Read. We read books from everywhere. Like, my mother was always the kind of person who was like. Who always said. I was like, who always said, you can learn anything from any book anywhere. Just go read it. Right. So totally agree. We're going to have the Bible, but we're also going to have the Bhagavad Gita, and we're going to have the Book of Mormon.

26:31 Just go read it and then we can have a discussion about this. Right? Yeah. Very free thinking when it came to. When it came to books. That's a free thinking when it came to music. And so when I finally ran across Pink Floyd, I was in college in, like, the early 2000s when I finally ran across them. And obviously they were already, you know, sort of. I don't want to say past their prime, but they were, you know, recycling. Recycling the wall for the 350th time. Yeah. That was. The Wall was the Pink Floyd purists might kill me, but I. The.

27:08 The Wall was their high watermark. I mean, by the way, I think the Wall is brilliant. I think it's an absolutely brilliant album, but it's. It's very difficult to sustain that kind of, you know, like, you know, that kind of brilliance. They had some good songs, and then Roger Waters on his solo, on his own had some good songs, but it never Quite equaled that in my view. So. Yeah, well. And as I said before, I think he needed Pink Floyd as a container for all of his creative. Yeah. Energies. Right.

27:44 And once he got rid of Sid Barrett, whose brain fell apart, you know, once. You know, once that. I mean, if Sid Barrett's brain hadn't fallen apart, there was probably going to be a real battle in that. In that band between him and Roger Waters. Yeah, I think so. You know, and it would have been. Like Brian Jones and Mick Jagger in the Stone. Eventually they would. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And somebody's going to lose. Somebody's going to lose that, that, that. That game. And I. I wouldn't. I don't quite know who would have lost or won on that.

28:11 And it's one of those. Those things in rock culture that you're never going to know the answer to that. It's like. It's like in comic books, Superman, Batman, you know, you're never going to know. Yeah. But I say all that to say this. My critique of the Beatles is not, again, it does not come from a perspective of a lack of musical ability. I think they have musical ability. I just think they got caught up in right place at right time, and that sort of overlapped a lot of. Or allowed them to lap over a lot of things and gloss over a lot of things that would have killed other bands.

28:45 So I kind of agree with you on that. I mean, and it's almost hard to see through the.

28:55 Through the Beatlemania in a way. Right. Because it was so such a phenomenon. In fact, you'll get a kick out of this, by the way, for. I'm actually doing kind of a. For Halloween, I'm doing kind of a Beetle Mania thing in my hometown to try to transmit maybe to the next generation. Well, it's. It was in some ways kind of a cultural phenomenon. It was. Yeah. You know, like, what was this all about? I. I can tell you about that another time if you want. But. But we were talking about, say, in. In the spirit of the episode first.

29:28 Yeah, right. Getting there first. I think the Beatles got to a lot of places first. They were really early on the psychedelic thing. I mean, you can always say, did some. I mean, let's, let's. Sergeant Peppers was kind of the breakthrough album for the Summer of Love. It was the breakthrough album for the psychedelic influence in. In rock and roll. And it was in kind of really kind of one of the first themed albums. Right. You can see Dark side of the Moon, you can see the Wall. You know, I Mean, not directly, but the, the idea of an entire album or.

30:07 Tommy. Right, yeah, the idea of an entire album based around, you know, a single recurring theme. They were kind of the first. Here's, here's a great. I heard, I heard a podcast once. This was really interesting. Interesting. They were debating which beetle had the most cultural influence and you know what answer they came up with? George Harrison. Why? So one of the things the guys pointed out, and this is really true, he said in 1967, if you went through an American city, you didn't see Indian restaurants, you didn't see yoga studios.

30:43 Right? There was no, there was none of that. Where did that come from? It came from the Beatles going to India. And they went there because of George Harrison. You know, I know some Indians, A good friend of mine, he's Indian, he emigrated to the dispute. He immigrated to the United States in 1988. So he was a little bit before that, a little bit after that. But his father, new people who immigrated to, in. Immigrated from India to the United States back in the 60s. I'm gonna have to, I'm gonna have to check that out and see if he buys that theory.

31:19 Yeah, yeah, see if he buys the, the George Harrison theory. I'll give you one more. By the way, George Harrison is somewhat credited with taking the first selfie. He was at the Taj Mahal. He took a Polaroid camera, you can look this up, turned it around, took a picture of himself at the 1965 at the Taj Mahal. So I will say, I will say this. And this is going to be. People who are going to listen to this, were maybe a little bit younger, are going to be like, this is very boomer focused. I don't know any, about any of this.

31:50 This is ridiculous. And I get it. Sorry, kids. Well, you know, I get it. You don't. But they wear the cool bands, kids. Well, you know, I got, you know, Taylor Swift is better, Kanye is. Whatever, I get it again. And every, every generation has their own thing, right? Has to have their own thing. And the Beatles did benefit, just like the Beach Boys did. All the people that we've mentioned so far, even Zeppelin in the 70s benefited, but the Beach Boys, Marvin Gaye, anything coming, anything coming out of Motown, my God, the Doors, you know, even, even the Rolling Stones,

32:29 everybody benefited from the mid 20th century Peace dividend that America got for fighting a brutal war in Europe and in Asia, from defeating two world devouring powers and a war that, you know, if we really want to be honest, traced its roots to World War I. Absolutely. And so World War II is World War. Yeah, yeah. It's just. It's the bookend 22 years later. Exactly. Yeah. Well, you know, I mean, Hitler with different technology. Hitler had a chip on his shoulder, to say the least. And, you know, that may be the understatement of the.

33:11 It may be. And. And he, you know, he. He wanted. Well, he wanted vengeance. He wanted retribution against reality itself because of what he experienced in the trenches and what he saw in the trenches. Those, again, the same trenches, interestingly enough, that Tolkien was in. Yeah. And again, I. I think about World War I as this incubator for all of the 20th century. Right. So, you know, you've got Tolkien in there. You've got CS Lewis experiment experiencing things. You got Ernest Hemingway driving, you know, an ambulance.

33:51 You've got F. Scott Fitzgerald who would have gone to Europe, but he couldn't get past his commanding officer, who I believe was a gentleman named Dwight Eisenhower. Oh, is it true? Harry Truman served in World War I as a very. As a young man. Winston Churchill, obviously. I mean, the only reason Stalin didn't go to the front was because Lenin got shipped in a train through Finland by the Germans back to the Russians to kick them out of the war. But Stalin should have been at the front. If Stalin had been at the front, you probably wouldn't have had the purges in the 30s, or you might have had them, but they might have been more.

34:35 They might have been worse. And of course, my personal favorite character, not even character personality of World War I was T.E. lawrence. Lawrence of Arabia. My God. A man who sets the. To talk about genre, set the arch type of the adventurer, soldier, writer, the intellect and the fighter. The person who could shoot you on a Wednesday and then that same afternoon have tea with you and talk about how terrible, you know, the English are and how we should cut up Arabia and plan a revolution. Like all this got set with World War I, and I have a quote here, actually, from the First World War by John Keegan, a book I recommend everybody read.

35:22 Yeah, absolutely. Because it is a great book that talks about how World War I actually started based on, interestingly enough, train timetables. Yep. And I quote, John Keegan called the First World War a tragic and unnecessary conflict. Unnecessary because the train of events that led to its outbreak might have been broken at any point during the five weeks of crisis and that preceded the first clash of arms had prudence or common goodwill found a voice. Tragic because the consequences of the first clash ended the lives of 10 million human beings tortured the emotional lives of millions more destroyed the benevolent and optimistic culture of the European continent and left.

36:05 When the guns at last fell silent four years later, a legacy of political rancor and racial hatred so intense that no explanation of the causes of the Second World War can stand without reference to those roots. Close quote.

36:26 We'll never have. We'll never have a war like that again.

36:31 I hope not. It was really one of the most disastrous events in humanistry. I think it was also part. Part of the disaster was that, I mean, this is. This is kind of well established military doctrine had not caught up to military technology. And so you had, you know, the phenomenon of people charging machine guns and just getting moaned down in the thousands. I read a book recently by Andrew Roberts, who's a brilliant. He wrote. He wrote the. The biography of Napoleon and Churchill and he. He did an analysis of the first.

37:12 Just the first day of the sum. Just the first day, you know, what led up to it, what was the strategic thinking? And I'm going to. I assume this podcast is PG rated, so I won't cuss. It was a screw up and basically came down to a massive misunderstanding of, you know, of tactics in the age of artillery and the machine gun. They had no idea that, you know, they thought they were, you know, completely decimating the German defenses. The Germans had just gone underground. The artillery bombardment would pass overhead and they would, you know, wait for it to go by and then they would come up and get in their positions and they could just watch the British coming over and they would get tangled in the barbed wire.

38:00 They had no real. There was. There was some kind of terrible screw up that the snips that they put on the front of the bayonets to cut through the barbed wire were insufficient. So they were sitting there snipping away at the barbed wires. You know, the machine guns were just raking them and it was horrific. It was absolutely horrific. It was the biggest single loss of life in the history of the British Army. Thus the line, you know, forward. They cried from the rear and the front rank died. And the general sat and the lines on the map move from side to side.

38:35 Like, that's. That's World War I. That's the whole thing. You had generals who, like Patton, Right. Who had. Who were working out because of French problems with the Germans, because of the unresolved war of the summer of 1870. Yep. They were working out personal beefs they had with the Germans. Yeah. And then the Germans are working through at the time their idea of the right to rule Europe. Thank you, Von Bismarck. And the ability, or the, not the ability, the, the desire by the Kaiser to. And a lot of countries have this.

39:26 I'm looking at you, China right now. But the desire to be worshipped or, or, or have other folks bend the knee to you as the center of a particular continent. And then you had the British, who. And honestly, if the British had stayed out of World War I, it probably could have been just a continent, a bunch of continental nonsense, and no one would know anything about it. But the British felt they had to jump in because they protected the shipping lanes. I'm looking at you, United States of America, right?

39:58 And so you have all these dynamics at play and to your point, your new military technology. So submarine warfare started in World War I. The use of, to your point, machine guns and barbed wire trenches. I mean, you see all this aerial, Aerial warfare, Right. Whoever thought about using planes to do anything? Right. Brand new technology. I mean, Kitty Hawk happened when. I mean, your technology, you know, 1905. Oh five. Right. And so, you know, 10 years, not even 10 years, eight years later, they're taking that tech and they're flying over the battlefields and they're, they're having air, air raids.

40:38 And then of course, the technology that would be utilized to horrific means in the Second World War. Gas. Yeah. No one ever talks about the gas attacks in World War I. The gas attacks screwed up more people on both sides of, of the, of the, the dividing line there.

41:02 Including, including Hitler, right? Oh, yeah. I mean, look, I'm not talking about World War II Hitler. I'm not talking about the Hitler like in his 40s and 50s. I'm not talking about that guy Hitler in his 20s. I want to be very clear on this. I'm talking about Hitler in his 20s before being rejected from art school, before wandering around homeless in Vienna screaming about the Jews, before looking for a communist under every bushel basket that you could find before all that idealistic Hitler. So would say fun at a party Hitler, he was 20.

41:42 20 party when he was 20. That Hitler

41:48 served in a role as a runner of messages between lines. If you look it up, I think on Google, if I remember correct, I looked it up years ago and some people can, can check me on this. Runners had something like a 95% death rate. Oh, it's a very dangerous job. Yeah. And the question, of course, that, that almost never gets asked here because everybody always asks the time travel question. If you can go back and kill Hitler in the cradle, would you do it? Okay, yeah, whatever. Here's the question that nobody ever asks, why is it that Hitler was in that 5% that didn't catch a bullet?

42:25 That is an interesting question. Why do you think? I think because

42:33 I'm gonna push back on Albert Einstein a little bit. I think God does play dice with the universe. I'm gonna leave it at that.

42:43 Because Churchill. Churchill was there too. Yeah. Churchill also had close brushes with death. Right. Earlier in his. Earlier in his life, he was. In fact, I think Churchill had a famous line he said. Did he say something like, there's nothing so exhilarating as get. As someone shooting at you and missing. That's. That was one of his lines. So. So he was great with it. He was great with a quote. He was. He was definitely. He could. He could rail. He could rattle them off. So I want to be very clear.

43:12 I'm not admiring Hitler. I'm not admiring any of these people. Very clear. I know you're not, but I want to be very clear for folks listening, if you're coming into this raw. Okay. I'm merely saying that World War I set the table for a whole lot of different. Whole lot of different dynamics that then played out further and into the 20th, and I would even argue deep into the 21st century, so. Oh, absolutely. The current challenges that we are having with the remnants of the Ottoman Empire

43:41 go all the way back to the death of the Ottoman Empire in World War I. I mean, we would have not probably had the Iraq War

43:49 without. Without the Ottoman Empire. How about this? Churchill develops the Iranian oil fields to power the British Navy in World War I. There you go. That's. That's why he. He was. He was the guy, as the first Sea Lord who said, forget coal burning. We got a better. We got a. We got to pull that oil up out of the ground. Right? Yeah, yeah. And. And oil dominates, of course, a lot of the strategy of. Of World War II in the sense that, you know, one of the things that Hitler is trying to do when he drives into Russia is get to the, you know, the oil fields in the South.

44:25 Correct. Of the. Of the Union. I mean, he ends up screwing it up in. And in fact, how about this? I'm going to pull it to the Lord of the Rings, much like Sauron. Okay. Because he's so blinded by, you know, in some ways, his. His. His manias that, you know, so. So the whole, you know, the whole t. If you will, the tactic of Gandalf in. In. In the Lord of the Rings is to draw Soran away from Mordor because he knows that Frodo and. And Sam are bringing the ring, you know, to Aradruin, and so he wants to empty the land.

45:01 And that's. That's the whole tactic is. Is to pull him out, pull him out too soon. And that's kind of what happens at the Battle of the Pelenor Fields. He almost takes Minas Tirith, but he doesn't quite. Because he struck too soon. Right. And the.

45:18 Now, Tolkien would be the very first person in line to say that the Lord of the Rings was not an allegory for the Second World War. He hated allegory. He hated the. A lot of it was written before the Lord of the Rings. All of that. All of that is true. But there was sort of a similar sort of thing that, you know, Hitler could not decide in some ways whether he wanted the oil or whether he, you know. And of course, when the 6th army got to Stalingrad, there was that. It happened to be called Stalingrad.

45:49 Of all names. It had that name. Right. And it was tactically, probably not. It was not the smartest move to tie the. Well, of course, in retrospect, turned out to be a very bad move, but they couldn't know that at the time to bog the 6th army down in Stalingrad. And, you know, and by the way, it's not the topic of our podcast, but I am fascinated by Stalin. I'm probably the one person you'll ever meet who would love to go to Volgorad, which is what it's called today. It is. And it is. So the battle of.

46:25 Have you ever seen the movie about the enemy at the gates? Yeah. Okay. You knew. Yeah. You know, you read the book. Okay, okay. So one of the things that. And, you know, look, when you talk about World War I and World War II, particularly in the West,

46:44 Russia's contributions to world peace in the terms of blood and guts, to paraphrase from General Patton, my favorite World War II general,

46:59 the unreconstructed General Patton. And he fought in World War I. And he fought in World War I. Yes, he did. Yes, he did. He was another one. I'm going to keep pulling. He was another one. That's right. He was another one. He did.

47:14 The Russians are never given credit. You know, they're never. They're sort of an afterthought. And that's really too bad, A, because it shows a fundamental disrespect for their sacrifice. B, we have this weird thing in our heads in America that we can't compliment our enemy because that might mean that we Approve of what the enemy has done. But you can look at what the enemy has done and go, okay. I mean that's,

47:45 that was actually like, from their perspective, that was actually wisdom. No, that was, that was smart. That's what they should done. And Stalingrad, if you look at that battle,

47:56 they did exactly the right thing. I mean that's classic city siege tactics. I mean you would see that later on in Vietnam. You would see that later on in Baghdad the second time when the Americans went in and then Al Qaeda decided that they were gonna, they're basically gonna try to own that city. And then the Marines. The marines and the seals had to go back in and, and sort of, sort of take that sucker back. But you, you, this is, I mean Stalingrad sets the tone for city based door to door siege tactics.

48:34 If you want to defend your house. Yeah, it's still the most destructive battle I think in, in history. And you know, the Germans called it rotten Krieg, right? Rat war. Because the tactic of the Russian, the, the, the commander on the Russian side was a guy named Chukov. Most people think of Zhukov, who was the supreme commander, but Chukov was the guy on the ground like literally in charged with holding on to Stalingrad at all costs. And one of the things his tactic was you need to be right up with your enemy, like right there because, because the German artillery was superior.

49:11 But if you're 10ft away, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. They can't hit you with artillery because they'll be hitting their own guys, right? So they would very often have situations where what they call, they had, they had a term, they called it a Stalingrad wedding cake. Do you know what that is? No, I don't know that. Russians, Germans, Russians

49:29 in, in the same building all shooting at each other. So yeah, it was, I mean for, you know, I think there's something like a million casualties at Stalingrad. The, The Russians shoot 15, 000 of their own. Oh yeah, they do. Oh yeah. For quote unquote, cowardice. Again, if this is audio, I'm making inter quotes cowardice. Right. And yeah, it was, it was just. But if you'll forgive me, just a quick aside because my daughter may listen to this. My daughter Alexa may listen to this episode. She asked me a while ago to.

50:06 So I, I did all this traveling in, in the 80s and one of the places I went to, Hasan, was the Soviet Union in 1989. And I was at that time just starting my career as a physicist and they were opening up through glassnost. They wanted Western physicists to come and visit. And I was like, this much a physicist, but my brother was studying physics and he got invited, and he got me invited, and that's how I ended up there. And anyway, I'm actually writing her a bit of a memoir and I'm doing it as a.

50:38 As a movie script for fun, because a. I couldn't remember everything that actually happened. So I'm filling in the blanks, you know, sort of. Yeah, fictional, fictional moments. But there was. They did take us to see some of the World war. World War II was still close enough in 1989. And so, you know, when you say it's not remembered, it's not remembered in the west, right. But Russia, it is the defining,

51:06 you know, war of, of their, of their culture. And, you know, one of the things that they will point out, they'll say, out of every five Germans killed in World War II, four of them were killed on the Eastern front. Hey, look, you know, Vladimir Putin has been quoted, and I say this repeatedly about the man. It tells you sort of what his brain is like. He is consistently quoted, or not consistently, but he was quoted back in the 90s during the time of Yeltsin and others. And by the way, he's a former KGB guy.

51:47 So let's just be real about here, about what we're talking about here. You know, he was quoted as saying the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical disaster of the 20th century. Right. Now, just sort of let that stand because there were so many geopolitical disasters. That was the greatest one. But if you're Russian, if you're Russian, that is the greatest geopolitical disaster of the 20th century. Well, I will say this. I certainly understand the Russian concern about invasion from their West.

52:24 Oh, yeah, because it's happened every century for like the last four centuries. I mean, you can go back to Sweden invading, invading Russia, you know, during the time of Peter the Great, of course, the Napoleon, I was about to say, burns Moscow, but he didn't burn Moscow, they burned Moscow to deny it to him. But, you know, so. And, and in World War I, they also get invaded and lose. And that in some ways is what sort of, in some ways led to the tactics of World War II. Because in the German mind, oh, we're going to win, right.

53:00 Because look how easily we beat them. You know, 20 years ago, it's just going to be that. And now we have tanks and now we have better technology, and now we're definitely going to Win. Right. Well, I think they also fundamentally underestimated the. And I think this is another. And we'll move on after this piece, but I think, I think fundamentally the Germans underestimated the inter. Into war. German thinking underestimated the consolidation. No, not consolidation. They underestimated the intelligence and venalness of, of Vladimir Ilyich Ulanov Lenin.

53:45 And we've, we've covered some of Lenin's writings on this podcast. I'm fascinated by Lenin. A man who had zero military experience whatsoever and a man who if he was in a food fight, wouldn't bust a grape, but he would sign an order to kill 20,000 people and then go have lunch. Oh, sure.

54:16 And a man who. And we covered on this podcast, in a recent episode, we covered Animal Farm. Right. A great. George Orwell's great allegorical. We did like allegory, his great allegorical novel or fantasy novel about Lenin and Stalin and Trotsky.

54:37 And I think the Germans underestimated just how brutal Lenin was and just what kind of system he'd set up. I think they also underestimated the psychology of Stalin. They didn't, they didn't understand that. That in order to survive in a communist system that's built off of gulags and Siberia and just general Russian dowerness, just in general dourness, you've got to be. Well, like Stalin's nickname, you got to be a man of iron. And they just, they really underestimated that. Like they just thought, they just thought they were peasants or, or even worse, subhumans.

55:24 Are you talking about world war. During World War II. But, but that was, but that was, that was reflected in their attitudes. That was reflected in Bismarck and, and the Kaiser's attitudes towards them. In World War I, though, this is a long standing thing with, with, with the Germans. Yeah, there was always. And of course World two War War ii, this just became, you know, just, just got raised to the heights of absolute insanity. But there was always a sense of German racial. In their minds. German racial superiority over, over the Russians.

55:55 Right. And that they were simply peasants and they could just roll over them and that there was almost a natural by. By world by the time of Hitler that had transformed into. We have a natural right essentially to the lands to the east and you know, and lean. Strong. Yeah. Leaving. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Right. So, you know, the, so that was, that was certainly part of their thinking. They also felt that, you know, communism was an inherently decadent system. I think it was Goebbels who said, you know, all we have to do is kick the door in, and the whole structure will fall down.

56:39 And they really. But the one thing I will also say is that there is a deep Russian patriotism which might not attach to a government per se, but attaches to the land of Russia. Right. And that they will kill and die in defense of Russia in a way that I sometimes say that they're. They're. They're very bad at invading other countries. They're not. They're pretty good at defending their own. The. The. You know. Well, and, you know, that's. That's just me. That's my quote. No, no, no, I believe. I believe you're.

57:12 I believe you're fundamentally onto something there. I mean, every time Russia goes adventuring. So there was a great book I had back in the day, and I can't find it for the life of me. It might be in a box somewhere in storage. I would love to cover it on the podcast, but it was a collection. Of. KGB files that were declassified in the late 90s. And it's just. It just shows the level of Soviet adventurism that was going on in the world. From Angola to Cuba to Vietnam to China to places in South Africa.

57:47 South Africa. The KGB literally had its fingers in every pie you could possibly imagine in the world up to and including the American university system, by the way, folks. So just let's be clear on that. And. And the CIA was consistently playing catch up with these people. Consistently playing catch up. The KGB was running rings around the CIA everywhere in the world and was doing so because the KGB understood something that even the CIA of now has forgotten. Because the current generation of CIA agents, from what I understand, doesn't want to go talk to people.

58:36 They just want to search around on the Internet all the time, which makes sense, I guess. But the KGB did a really, really good job of developing what is known in. In the spy world as human human intelligence. They did a really awesome human human. They do a really good job of just showing up and just talking to you, giving you a cigarette. I'm gonna light it for you. Maybe we'll have some vodka. We'll just have a chat. Like 10 minutes. Yeah. And then all of a sudden, they're in your life. They're hooked in.

59:07 And this is the thing that we miss about intelligence work. And so the KGB put on a road show for damn near 40 years across the globe on how to do this. And it worries me. I got to admit, it worries me as an American. An American, First American, by the way. It worries Me that we don't seem to be as interested in investing that because you could take a 25 year. Old.

59:37 Gen Z and just be like, yeah, you're not going to have a computer today. We're going to drop you in the middle of like, I don't know, we're going to drop you in the middle of the Horn of Africa and you're going to have to hike your way out. You have a good luck, you have a good time. Well, what happens if I win? If you win, you live. If you fail? Well, I mean there's, there's, there's much more at Harvard that we can go get but we don't, we don't frame it that way. Instead what we do, from what I understand is we recruit those folks now into the whole digital thing because we think we can get more information off the phones than we can from human intelligence.

1:00:10 And there's a major gap there I think that we're missing in the case. So, so hey showed how to close that gap. You know, it's kind of a cool thought. So you know the number one company, right that's sort of championing the use of AI in say, you know, intelligence work. Palantir. Oh yeah, I know. And the other big, I find that in the other, one of the other big defense companies right now that's going to play a major role in Golden Dome and both named for Lord of. The Rings, you know, Paladin. Yeah, yeah, yeah, the seeing stones.

1:00:44 The far seeing. So I, so you talk about the influence of the Lord of the Rings. It's clearly influencing the tech entrepreneurs of today. And I'm sure we could come up with three or four more examples if we poked around. But I'll just add one thing to you said to what you were saying about the KGB outclassing the CIA, at least for a long time. I read a book, I have it somewhere like, I don't know, I'd have to dig deep. But anyway, it was written by a guy who is in charge of counter espionage under Stalin on the Eastern front and then was principally in charge of after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, principally in charge of trying to steal atomic secrets from the West.

1:01:35 And one of the, the, he had an interview at the back and the interview at the back was basically, you know, did the Soviet Union. So the, the, the idea was for a long time, oh, they didn't, you know, they didn't get nuclear secrets from, you know, spy work or craft work or anything like that. They developed it on their own and you know, basically this was a triumph of Soviet science. Blah blah, blah, blah, blah. He says in the book, oh no, we stole it all. We stole everything. And they had, and they had extremely high level contacts, including with some very famous physicists.

1:02:13 And it was who may or may not have known who they were giving information to. But some of the things that this, this guy talked about during the Second World War, they wouldn't. They invented. It's a fascinating story. They invented an entire. I may get a few of the details wrong, so forgive me, but there was a battalion of German troops that got caught behind the line and they wiped them out. And they kept them alive as a ghost battalion with radio traffic and communications and they would say, drop U.S. supplies.

1:02:45 Oh,

1:02:47 we could pull off this major thing here. And they were doing this up to 1945. The Germans never figured out they would send in like paratroopers. Paratroopers would get killed. You know, they'd send in supplies, the Soviets would turn it around. It was fascinating how, you know, they had the Germans completely cabalixed. But he basically said after the war we had the Americans cabalix as well. They did not. Yeah, we were playing chess, they were playing checkers basically. Well, in American idealism, I mean, this is what MI6, this is where the MI6 and Mossad Lapis all the time.

1:03:20 I even think even now that strain of American idealism that's built into us culturally and just comes as part of our DNA. And part of it is, part of it is because look for just by dint of geography, it is really hard. China's gonna find this out if they decide they're going to launch an amphibious attack across the Taiwan Strait. We found this out with Normandy. It's really hard to launch a successful amphibious landing across. Almost never been done. Almost right. Almost never been done. It's even harder to launch a successful continental landing across an ocean.

1:04:07 It's hard. Yeah, because I see you coming. It's hard. It's hard, it's hard. So you've got to be sneaky. You've got to build tunnels, you've got to, you've got to invest in human intelligence. You have to have a year, a multi year long process and even then it might not work because your spies and your human intelligence, which are embedded in the local population that lives across the ocean of the place you would like to invade, can easily become seduced by the local population. This is the challenge of human intelligence and American optimism because of the nature of us having two oceans that basically allow everybody to leave us alone, for want of a better term.

1:04:51 And North America basically being our backyard. South America, less said about that. Central America, less said about that. But I'm talking about Canada and Mexico. We're the big dog. And that's just it. There's very little. Been very little development. Right. Of the dirtier parts of. And that's not to say the CIA doesn't do dirty things or they haven't gotten some training and they haven't gotten better the last 20 years, but there's very little of that sort of venal cynicism that comes along and that's embedded in MI6 and M. Assad and what is now the FSB.

1:05:29 I mean, for God's sakes, during the time of Communism, the East German Stasi claimed that one out of every three East German citizens was a spy. That's nuts. That means, that means. That means if you're in a room with five people, three of them are reporting on you to someone. Yeah, that's ridiculous. Yeah. That's a level of cynicism and ideological commitment that most Americans can't get to. And I think this is why we struggle in the spy. In the spy realm. I think it also has to do with how existential it is for you.

1:06:06 I mean, if one of the things, and this might be to our detriment, as you point out, we are so isolated in terms of having oceans on either side that you get this false sense of security that you don't need to develop that kind of level of, you know, of, of constantly monitoring your enemy. And that can be very dangerous because you get lulled into a false sense of security. And, you know, the, the nations that are cheek and jowl with each other, they don't, they don't see it that way. They don't see it that way.

1:06:47 They don't see it that way. So Israel, I can tell you, you know, Israel, you know, you know, at one point was nine miles wide up until the Six Day War. I mean. Right. You know, at its narrowest point. I mean, you know. Oh, I've said they had to have exquisite spycraft. They had to know it was happening all the time because it could happen so fast. I've said repeatedly if, if the population of California, no, if the United States was crammed into the popular, into this, into an area the size of California and everything west of California, or, sorry, east of California, was basically bent on killing everybody in California, you damn straight we would have all kinds of different.

1:07:28 We'd be really good at it. And so I'm not naive. I know that because of the Patriot act, because of what happened with 9 11, how that freaked everybody out. Donald Rumsfeld's floating of memos everywhere. The Iran Iraq war or not Iran Iraq war, sorry, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. I understand that we have gotten better air quotes at the intelligence game of. And of course my conspiracy theory buddies will all say, well, we're all. The CIA is doing color revolutions and is at the bottom of the Epstein thing and all this.

1:08:03 Sure, maybe, maybe we are that sophisticated. But we're not as good as the Europeans and the Russians and the British and the. And the Israelis yet we're getting better. Of course though, even these. I mean look at 10-7-the. Right. You know. Yeah, I've heard the conspiracies theory too. I think that's nonsense. There is no way. If they had, if they had known that was coming that they wouldn't have prepared for it. Oh yeah, no, try to try. Disrupted and, and repel it. But you know, I mean Hamas was doing things like using old fashioned landlines to communicate and to really try.

1:08:41 So you know there's spycraft and, and there's counter spycraft but on the whole it's. I mean, you know, you probably heard as I did recently that Mossad had apparently had a. This blows my mind. Had a base in Iran. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. I'm not surprised because. So here's. Okay. And then we'll move on from this because this is not a spycraft. This is not a spycraft podcast. I'm wondering if there's spycraft in Lord of the Rings. Is it this spy? Is there. I mean maybe Gollum is kind of a spy. A little bit.

1:09:13 Yeah, I would say so. I would say Gollum is probably your. Oh, not Boromir. Is he a spy?

1:09:26 I got to admit he's not. He's not who he pretends to be, I guess. Yeah. And I got to admit like. Ah. When you read it, number one, I don't trust anybody in Gondor. I just don't like. Faramir was the most honorable person in Gondor. His father was a waste of time for a whole variety of reasons. Well, it's. It's okay. So to your point about being cheek to jowl with the enemy, right? Yes. Yeah. If you stare to. I'm gonna quote, quote that great gamma philosopher Nietzsche. If you stare too long into the abyss.

1:10:03 Okay. Yeah, it stares back. Exactly. Yeah. And there's something like that. Something like that. Some random thing and the Steward of Gondor stared too long into the abyss. He did. He did. And he despairs. And he despairs. Right. And that's what, that's where he. And that's what Tolkien wanted to. Wanted to make that point. It was like, you can't look at evil too long, otherwise you will have no hope. You'll be robbed of hope. And then all kinds of other dirty deeds open up for you. Because the right.

1:10:33 I love using this, this, this paraphrase, the door and the floor of your head opens up and then just. The thing just goes all the way down. It just goes all the way down at that point. And then you get into seeing stones. His, his arguments with Gandalf. You know, the whole deal with. Was it Pippin? Like it's, It's a whole thing. It's a whole thing. Yeah. You know, and, and Faramir. Faramir had hope, but he didn't have the strength of being the first son. Yeah. Yeah. How about this? I think I just figured out who the spy is.

1:11:03 Oh, who's the spy? Who's the spy In Lord of the Rings? I think it's Wormtongue in the. In the halls of King Theoden. Right? Yes. He's deliberately sent there to corrupt King Theoden. He is a man of Gondor, Rohan. Yep. He's actually a double agent of Saruman. I think He's. He's the spy. Yeah. And he, you know, he gets, you know, he gets the spy's end, I guess. I did not come through fire and shadow to bandy witless words with a witless worm or whatever. Yeah. Until the lightning falls. Yeah, that's right.

1:11:40 Yeah, that's right. That's a great line. I. The mentality that allows the Mossad to think they can set up a listening site in Tehran instead of a base in Tehran is the same kind of mentality that allows, to your point, Grimmel Wormtongue to show up and just set up. Right. And I think that the, the British, Tolkien from. Who has a thousand, more than a thousand, fifteen hundred years of European clamoring behind him, who is seeking to figure out how Christianity and goodness and evil all intersect.

1:12:33 I think this is the reason why Tolkien has been captured by people on the political right in this country when it started out with people who are on the political left. I think that's true, actually. He has shifted from the left to the right. Right.

1:12:48 Even in the way that he looks at the environment. So you look at. And it's interesting because I'm reading. I'M reading Fellowship of the ring with my 8 year old now. I'm. I'm giving this, giving the gift to him. Right. And so I'm having a chance to go through it one more time. And you look at a character like Tom Bombadil and you look at the, the descriptions of the, the Old Forest and the way Tom Bombadil inherits the, or interacts with the force. That's a very, at least in America, politically rightist way of looking at nature.

1:13:20 Oh, oh, yeah. He's almost a survivalist. Right. He's like, he's. Yeah. And you could argue he's, he's detached himself from the concerns of Middle Earth. Right. Because Gandalf, when they're debating what to do with the Ring, right, at one point they say, well, let's send it back to Bombadil because it seems to have no effect on him. And Gandalf says, you can't do that. He does. He won't understand such. I think the line is, such things have no hold on his mind. Something like that. Yes. Where, yeah, Bombadil is not interested, you know, in the, the wars of the World.

1:13:52 Neither is Fangor. No. Well, and Bombadil is an interesting character. I've seen Christian apologists over the last 20 years. There's one I'm thinking of in particular who wrote a book called in the House of Tom Bobil, a guy named C.R. wiley. Yeah. Christian apologists, I think, have, have, have caught on to some of the more apologetic ideas in Lord of the Rings. And, you know, Christian apologetics exists to justify Christianity to the world. And you see this, you know, in, in Lewis, obviously, in that hideous strength or the Abolition of Man or obviously the Screwtape Letters.

1:14:29 But then you also see it in, you know, an eminently Catholic writer who also is very familiar with Lewis's work, G.K. chesterton. Right. And so, you know, you've got. And Christianity has had apologetics going all the way back to Augustine. That's nothing new. But what is new, I would dare say, is, is Christians taking a look at Tolkien and instead of rejecting, quote, unquote, Tolkien for the magical elements, they begin to now, or there has begun more to be a sense that. No, wait a minute. What Tolkien is describing is the, the unredeemed world that can be redeemed through,

1:15:19 through the positive and dare I even say, spiritual actions of genuinely believing people. And we're Americans, we would love those people to be Christian.

1:15:34 You know, Jewish folks can come along too. That's fine. We'll argue with the Muslims

1:15:43 because we don't want the violence. But Tom Bomb. And Tom Bombadil represents that sense of, particularly over the last 20 years, of being exhausted with having to come up with or being tagged with from the left, a. A blame for continuous wars when it would just be easier to just Tom Bombadil the heck out of the thing and just escape. To escape to the. Because. Escape back to the land. And this is something that's very layered, that's happening in Christian apologetics. Tolkien would reject that.

1:16:17 I'm talking. I think he would. Yeah. Yeah. I think he would say you do not escape evil by hiding from it, essentially, and that you have to. You know, there's a wonderful line that Gandalf has at one point, and my Tolkien fanatic friends are going to savage me for not getting this quite right. But it's essentially along the lines of, you know, we. It's after the battle of the Pelidor Fields. And he essentially says, look, we're here to. So I'm not going to get it right at all. So I'm not even going to try.

1:16:50 We're here to solve the problem in front of us. And what I think he says something like, we till the. We till the fields, you know, of today. What. Whether they, you know, it's not under our control. And again, I apologize, I did not get that quite right. But it. But you have to. In some ways you have a responsibility for standing for evil to evil, standing up to evil. And I think the other marvelous thing about the. The Lord of the Rings, and I've talked about this, I belong to a C.S. lewis book group here in Massachusetts.

1:17:26 And the. The idea that there is. There's this intersection between human action and grace, you know, or the. Or the. The idea that

1:17:41 maybe humanity on its own cannot fully overcome evil, that it does need some intercession to do so. In fact, I. I think, if I understand correctly, like the final scene where Frodo is fighting Gollum on the edge of the. Of the crack of doom was the idea that Gollum was going to be there at that final scene. Tolkien baked that in from the beginning. Like it wasn't just a fortuitous series of events that Gollum happens to end up there at the end. And it was because he wanted very much to transmit this idea that.

1:18:17 That Frodo on his own. I remember when I was a kid sort of going, you couldn't do it, Frodo. You couldn't. You know, and I would come up with all these alternate endings. I saw like, damn, push his Gollum into the bed. You know, these sorts of things. Because I, I wanted Frodo to ultimately go, no, and toss it in. But I, I, I think Tolkien from the beginning knew that, that he was not going to be able to on his own. Ultimately, you know, you could, you could argue that the triumph of Frodo is to get the Ring to the crack of doom, just to get it there.

1:18:56 Right? Yeah. Right. Yes. So the, the line that Gandalf has when he's talking to Frodo in the Shire before they set out to, on that log walk to Rivendell, he says to Frodo, because Frodo says, why didn't Bilbo, I love that scene, kill Gandalf or not get all. But when he killed Gollum, right. Why didn't he kill him? Why didn't he ask? Gandalf says when he had the chance. Exactly. And what does Gandalf tell him? He says it was grace that said that stayed Bilbo's hand. Right. Many who live deserve death and many who die deserve life.

1:19:35 Are you going to give it to them? You know, do not be too quick to deal out death and judgment. He said, I love it.

1:19:45 Fearing for your own safety. That's right. Not see all ends. That's correct. I want you to see. I could.

1:20:00 And so what you see there is that Christian conception which, and I will be very blunt on this, my wife and I were actually talking about something that was parallel to this but a different kind of context which actually relates this. But I'm not going to bring it. We were talking about it on Sunday and because American Christianity is kind of going through some convulsions right now, massive convulsions that you don't notice if you're in the secular atheist world. You don't notice it if you're in a different religious tradition because you're, I presume, going through similar convulsions in your own religious tradition because there is no new thing, as it says, Ecclesiastes, under the sun.

1:20:35 Everything that has been done now has been done before.

1:20:41 But, but there's massive convulsions going on in American Christianity where we are trying, where American Christians, and not just evangelicals either, are trying to put together what all of the things mean, everything from grace to faith to resilience, and trying to put it together into a box for people who are, for the millennial generation. A lot of this is happening the millennial generation right now because out of all of the four major generations that are Currently, on this continent, they are the first generation where the vast majority of them either were unchurched or were churched and left for the church because the church was a show for them rather than.

1:21:25 It was an entertainment complex rather than a complex of grace. And what Lord of the Rings does, interestingly enough, is it sets the table for even secular people who will not accept a triune, whatever conception to begin to be infected with that idea that. Oh, to your point, there's something else that's running stuff here that I don't understand and it ain't totally agree. And it does it in such a gentle way. It's so right. I mean, it's just. Yes. You know, it's just the, the, the. It's just a great adventure story.

1:22:05 It's exciting. There's even a love story in there if you want to go to Faramir and Alen. The, you know, and I think. And, and in some ways, in this way, it's like Narnia, you know, I mean, who wouldn't want, you know, a world of talking animals? My kids loved that when they were young. Yeah. Oh, yeah. And, you know, the fact that Aslan was really a Christ figure, they didn't, they didn't internalize any of that.

1:22:33 So I think that might also be some of the power of the Lord of the Rings that takes these incredible, incredibly important and deep concepts and it just, you know, just gives them to you in such a gentle and really pleasing fashion that you can't resist. You can't resist. So let me ask you a question here. And we're going to turn the corner and get to some conclusions and some ideas for leaders coming up here in a minute. So you've already mentioned, you mentioned previously when we were talking about different genres that were influenced or not different genres, the ways in which Lord of the Rings all quiet on the western front and even Pink Floyd's work in that dark rock spot really sort of set.

1:23:20 They were tone setting. I love that term that you used, tone setting for specific genres. And, you know, some of the books that have followed on Lord of the Rings, where folks have been explicit either about

1:23:33 modeling them on Lord of the Rings or modeling them against Lord of the Rings 2 series, two fantasy series that sort of jump out in my head immediately that I wrote down when you were talking about this was, of course, George R.R. martin's game of Thrones, which he will not finish. I'm going to go on record. It will never be finished. He will die and then someone else will pick it up and finish it. Maybe, if we're lucky. And by the way, he was explicit about being anti Lord of the Rings. Interestingly enough, he doesn't like the hobbits.

1:24:03 He thinks it's stupid. And then on the other end, you have a person who explicitly admitted that Lord of the Rings was a huge part of the way in which he laid out his seven book adventure series, of which I read all seven books. Stephen King's the Dark Tower. So, so I haven't read that. I'm sorry. So it's okay. It's all right. George Martin. By the way, I, I, I sometimes describe Game of Thrones. It's the Lord of the Rings, except it has sex and death is real.

1:24:40 You know, because when people die in the Lord, you know, the elves don't even really die. They just, you know, go to Palanor. You just sort of wander away the western sea and go that way. Although to this day the death scene of, of Aragorn, which is in the appendix, will literally bring terrors to my eyes. And that's not an exaggeration. I was reading it for the, for the book group and I was like, I'm sorry, I can't get through this without tears coming to my eyes. I mean, such a gorgeous scene.

1:25:10 But I'll, I'll throw another fantasy series on the table which is Lord of the Rings influenced, but interestingly I think tries to incorporate Eastern philosophy, which is the Earthsea trilogy by Ursula again. So, okay, yeah, it was originally three. And this is again sort of an unfortunate byproduct of our, of our capitalist system. Hasan once it made money, she said, oh, maybe I'll write a fourth. Oh, maybe I'll write a fifth. You know what, maybe there's eight more. Never do that, you know, and then eventually it kind of peters out.

1:25:44 But the first three are brilliant. And it's really, that is, if you will, where the goal is not so much good fighting evil as balance. The idea, the goal of the, the goal of the wizards is to maintain balance in the work, in the world. And it's all about understanding things like the, the nature of magic is to find something's true name. Like the, like, you know, your real name, you know, not the name you walk around with, but your real name. And, but you know, there are wizards and there are dragons and there are, you know, guys with swords.

1:26:18 And it's very Lord of the Rings in that sense. But it's a, it's got this very sort of Eastern Buddhist, Eastern philosophy tinge to it. And I Always think that's, that's another one to throw in the. Throw in the hopper somewhere. Yeah, throw in the pile somewhere. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, throw the pile. Okay, so the question. So then the, just. So then this, this is the question then.

1:26:47 We now live in a bifurcated, fractured, fragmented, attention span theater world.

1:26:57 We have fewer people reading. No. Yes. Well, we have fewer people reading and the people that we do have read than ever before in, in the history of the, of America anyway. And, and we also have. Of the few people who are reading, they are reading less complicated material than ever before. Matter of fact, page counts in novels are down. A novel used to be 225 to 250. 250, sometimes 300 pages. Now it's down to 175. And the type's getting bigger. And the type's getting bigger. And the, and the plot, right.

1:27:36 And the plot lines are all from Tick Tock.

1:27:41 Are we ever going to see, in your opinion, are we ever going to see a trilogy that will match the power of Lord of the Rings ever again in the West? In my opinion, I think. And that makes me sad, but I. Or if it is, it's going to require a work of genius beyond my understanding. The, the.

1:28:11 Just. Just like I don't think we'll see a rock group like the Beatles again, again because of time and place. I do think also it, it has to come from someone like Tolkien. First of all, this was Tolkien's, you know, if you think about it. What else? Yeah, he wrote a few other things, but let's face it, that's what he wrote, right? I mean, I know there's a few. Oh, yeah, yeah. The Silmarillion is just nonsense. Yeah, there's a few other. I think he, he did something on Beowulf and I'm sure I read those when I was a kid, but that, that's his masterwork.

1:28:45 This was his life. It came out of his, you know, his, his career as a linguist and the love of languages is, you know, beyond all the great philosophy and, and everything else, there's just a sheer love of languages, a love of, of myth that is, you know, so embedded in the Lord of the Rings.

1:29:13 To produce a Tolkien, I think took like all of British culture. It took, it took like 1500 years of British culture to produce one Tolkien. I don't think we're going to see something like that again in our lifetimes. And that, frankly, makes me very sad. But I will say this is a podcast and if anyone out there thinks there's something that is like that from. Send it to Hasan and he'll send it to me, because I would read that in a heartbeat. I absolutely will. So. But and also the other thing about these great works of literature, and it's of course, in our.

1:29:52 In our other careers, Hasan, you and I talk about, you know, intellectual property and patents quite a bit. And the thing about a patent, as you know, is once it's done, that's it. You can't reinvent that, you know, and everything else has to root around it in a way, because it exists now. And you can't. You can't pull that back. You can't.

1:30:12 I'm trying to think, you know, was there. You know, Dune was. It was a good work of science fiction. I don't think it was a great work. I also think it was one of those where Frank Herbert just kind of realized he had a good thing going and kept writing books. And in some ways, Tolkien was never. First of all, Tolkien was not really that interested in the monetary success of the Lord of the Rings. So he wasn't. He. He wasn't sort of seduced into. Okay, now let's write the sequel. What happens after Sauron Falls?

1:30:47 You know, you know, Sauron 2, the sequel,

1:30:53 he was never really particularly interested in that. And that tends to dilute the great works. Even if, like I said, like I was saying earlier, the Earthsea trilogy, I'm not comparing it to the Lord of the Rings. I'm not saying it's on that level, but it was a very solid work of fantasy, and it sort of got diluted down a little bit. Are we gonna see.

1:31:16 I'm just gonna go back to my original. No, I don't think so.

1:31:22 I think you've hit on something. 1500 years of English culture all reached its pinnacle out of Tolkien's pen, which. Which I mean, indicates to me that maybe 1500 years from now, maybe something will come out of an American pen.

1:31:42 Maybe. But even that person will still be. I hate to say it, but that person will still be influenced by Lord of the Rings. They'll still be reading it. Even if it's. Even if. Even if it's. Even if it's. Even if it's generated by some weird techno. Not weird. Some. Some cutting edge technology that I cannot even conceptualize right now. And maybe it will be a writer that will be on some planet that is not even inhabited yet by human beings. Let me ask you the same question. Or related. Do you see Chat, GPT or any large language model that Is, you know, son or daughter of Chat GPT that comes along.

1:32:31 Do you ever see it creating a work of art that can stir you in the same way that the Lord. I mean, are you going to be rereading that work of that book. Book. To your. I'm sorry, eight year old. Your daughter Is she ate. Yeah. To your eight year. My son. Excuse me, My son. My son. Years years later.

1:33:00 I'm gonna seriously answer. I'm gonna take that question seriously. I'm gonna seriously answer about it. Sarcastic, you know, sponsor. Right. My sincere answer. And I'm saying this in 2025 with the current thing that is chat GPT. And I mess around with all the four large language, the four major ones, perplexity, chat GPT, Claude and. And Grok. I played around with them. You know, I, I'm listening to and watching the arguments and the vicissitudes going back and forth. That's the context by which I say this.

1:33:39 Yeah, I don't think so either. I was going to say, I don't see me reading to. So we have. Our. Our first granddaughter was born five months ago, and I don't see me reading something from Chat GPT to her at eight years.

1:33:54 No, I do see me reading the rings. But, but here's my. But. Yeah, yeah. Yes, yes, absolutely. And I think that we represent. Because I'm in my. I'm in my mid-40s. We represent the tail end. Or, or maybe I should even. I won't frame it as a tail end. We represent the oldest end. I'm gonna say something that's very terrible here. The oldest end of a dying tradition, or, or at least the very minimum, the oldest end of a tradition that the technologists who name their companies after Lord, after aspects of the Lord of the Rings, would seek to use their technology to kill.

1:34:36 They want to kill the tradition because the tradition involves. And this goes back to what I was talking with my wife about this weekend around Christianity. The tradition requires us to deal with messy, unpredictable, buggy human beings. And the technologists hate human beings. From Marc Andreessen all the way to Sam Altman all the way to Elon Musk, who. I personally think he's crazy and I admire what he's doing. All the way to Peter Thiel. I think every single one of those folks all the way up and down the structure, they dislike human beings because the, the, the messiness of humanity for them is a bug, not a.

1:35:27 That's a really. That's an interesting insight. And that fundamental,

1:35:34 fundamental insight. Yeah. He was Also entranced by technology. They have a mind of metal, you know. Right, exactly. And it led to. And, and then, and then, you know, he winds up, you know, going back to the Shire and getting run out of town. Because look, the tension between the city and the country will never be resolved. It just won't be. And that's okay, by the way. Fortunately, we live on a third of a continent that's big enough to where freedom of movement is still unrestricted. So if you don't want to live in the city, you may move someplace else.

1:36:10 You have freedom of association and freedom of movement. If you don't like the city you're living in and the people that you do not have a connection with, move, Move somewhere else. Oh well, I'd have to get a new job. Yeah, and we have the blood of pioneers in our genetics. And these days, often you don't have. To get a new job. Your job just moves with you. Yeah, right. Often you don't. It just moves with you. Like. I'm reading a book, I'm reading a book right now which we're going to cover on the podcast called.

1:36:39 It was a Pulitzer Prize finalist a few years ago, Empire of the Summer Moon, about how the, about how the US army basically destroyed the Comanches and in, in west. In West Texas and opened up the frontier. Good, bad, ugly and indifferent in a post civil war United States. The blood of those people still runs through our veins. Move, go somewhere else, leave the cities. And by the way, a lot of people have decided to do this with, with COVID and decided to do that in 2020 and 2021 and 2022, great American move around did occur.

1:37:15 So people do understand this. The, the thing that I think the technologists don't get is because they have that mind of metal, they don't understand all of the things that are outside the metal. And, and I would, the comparison I would make is the Eye of Sauron. They search everywhere for anything because they are totalizing in their belief that they must get rid of all the bugs and that is their downfall. The hobbit that they don't see is the thing that is their downfall. And to your point earlier, you're right.

1:37:56 Frodo just had to get the ring to the crack right of Mount Doom. And then anything else that happened after that was, you know, what less religious people would just call kismet or luck. I don't believe in luck. I would instead call it grace. That's right. So. So no, I don't. I don't believe that we will be. We're not the generation that will be reading chat GPT generated texts to our children. Now I look at my 8 year old and I told him the other day, part of the reason I'm reading you Lord of the Rings is because I want to fill you with the old things.

1:38:33 Because I have a feeling a lot of people in your generation who were born to be, who have been born eight years before you and are being born now will be seduced to believing that the new thing is the best thing. And I am fighting. I am fighting a rear guard action. And so you may call me a reactionary if you like fighting a rear guard action, fine. I'm retreating and defilating all over the place. No, I'm retreating and defilating all over the place.

1:39:07 Exactly. I'm looking good while I'm doing it.

1:39:11 All right, so we're going to wrap up our conversation. This has been great, wide ranging conversation, Fantastic. Talked about a lot of things. This is fantastic. And this is what, this is what our bonus episodes are really about. Right? We're not focusing necessarily on a specific book or a specific idea or specific things. We're just having interesting conversations with, with interesting folks on the long form again, my long form podcast is part of that defilating and retreating action. I'm using the 10.

1:39:39 I'm right there with you, my friend. I'm backing up with you. Talk about the firing as I go. Talk about the old things. No chat GPT used here. I write all my own scripts and this is the real live me that you're hearing. Okay,

1:39:58 what do we take from all of this melange, this massage mashup, this, this mix that we've thrown in the pot from Pink Floyd to Lord of the Rings to the battle of Stalingrad TO World War I-20 year old Hitler to, you know, Winston Churchill again having a bullet go past his head to, you know, MI6 and the KGB and Vladimir Putin. American intransigence, or maybe just naivete. What do we take from all of this? This, this goulash that we have? What do we, what do we, what do we, what do we want leaders to know?

1:40:38 As a, as a wrap up from this episode today, what is the big idea for leaders here? Or what are some big ideas for leaders here today? Two words, never despair.

1:40:50 Denethor despairs in the Lord of the Rings and it's his downfall. He actually can't see that there is a possible victory because all he sees is the triumph. You know, he has that Great line. You may triumph on the pelenor fields for a day, but against the power that has now arisen, there is no final victory. But he's wrong. There is a final victory. So I think that that would be the. The. The takeaway, ultimately, is that don't despair. Good can triumph over evil, and

1:41:30 there's. There's precedent for it in everything that you just mentioned, as, you know, the.

1:41:40 Even in. Even in Pink Floyd, ultimately. And Pink Floyd could be pretty dark. You know, they didn't. There's a lot of despair in Pink Floyd ultimately, you know, throughout their career, but there are sort of moments of, you know, of triumph. And I think that that's important to focus on because it's very easy to just. You can. Not only is it easy to despair, you can fall in love with it, you know, in a very dark and weird way, and it can become sort of your. All that you. All that you can see. So that.

1:42:22 That. That, to me, is certainly the takeaway of the Lord of the Rings that, you know, even when things look darkest, don't despair.

1:42:34 You know, I think that's a good takeaway for leaders, no matter whether they're reading Lord of the Rings, listening to. Listening to classic music of whatever genre, or reading histories of events that have occurred long before them when people did not despair and did behave what we would call now heroically. And I think this is a direct shot to the nothing ever happens. Nothing ever changes crowd. No, things happen. Things change. Never despair. I like that. Okay, that's gonna be our close. It feels like a mic drop.

1:43:15 Thank. I like to thank Neil. It does seem like a mic drop moment. I would like to thank Neil for covering all the podcast today that. Well,

1:43:28 okay, we're out.