The First World War by John Keegan w/Tom Libby & Jesan Sorrells

0:09 All right, giddy up. Leadership Lessons from the Great Books podcast, episode number 169 with Tom Libby. The First World War by John Keegan in three, two, one. Hello, my name is Jesan Sorrells and this is the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books podcast, episode number 169.

0:42 The author of our book today opens his seminal one volume history of the seminal war of the 20th century. And a war that fascinates me endlessly because of the dichotomies, disconnects and disruptions in leadership that it portends for all of us a hundred years later, he opens his book this way. And we've read this paragraph on the show before. In talking about books that circle around this book, and I quote, the First World War was 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 that preceded the first clash of arms had prudence or common goodwill found voice.

1:37 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 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. The Second World War, five times more destructive of human life and incalculably more than costly and material terms, was the direct outcome of the 1st.

2:18 On the 18th of September 1922, Adolf Hitler, the demobilized front fighter, threw down a challenge to defeat a Germany that he would realize 17 years later. It cannot be that 2 million Germans should have fallen in vain. No, we do not pardon. We demand vengeance. Close quote.

2:45 Today on the show, finally, after all this time, we are going to tackle the 25 year old volume. You can see it on the video right there if you're watching at home. The First World War by John Keegan Leaders. The First World War was an absolute waste of blood and treasure among the fields, the marshes and the villages of what we would call pre modern Europe. And the postmodern world we now enjoy wouldn't exist without that waste.

3:30 And of course, I'm joined today by my usual partner in crime and in book analysis, Tom Libby. How you doing today, Tom? I am living my best life, my friend. There you go. And I, I don't think you would be living that best life unless World War I had happened. I'm, I'm, I am thoroughly convinced of this now after reading Keegan's book. Interesting. I, I, I, I mean, I agree, but I may not agree for the same reasons. We'll see.

4:08 So as usual, what we do with, with copyrighted works is we summarize ideas and we, we bring larger ideas to, to our conversation. And we're going to do that today with the First World War when you open the book. And by the way, the volume that I have is published by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, and it was published in 1998. And it is a, some of the, some of the pieces in this book were published originally in Military History Quarterly and the Yale Reviews. You can actually go grab those online.

4:46 Most of Military History Quarterly is available, I believe, without subscription. And the Yale Review is available if you go to Yale University or you have access to the Yale University Review Library. This book has a ton of maps, it has a ton of illustrations. There's a ton of supporting documents. This book is almost 500 pages long. And so it is a comprehensive volume that covers everything from the beginning of World War I, which we of course notoriously associate with the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand by Serbian nationalist terrorists in, in, oh gosh, March, no, April, April of 1914.

5:36 Who moves all the way through to the armistice at the Treaty of Versailles in November of 1918. The battle maps are quite amazing in this book. So it actually shows where the Eastern Front was, where the Western Front was, where the German boundaries and borders were. And Keegan does a great job of showing the entirety of the empires that existed during the time of the World War I. So there was a British Empire with 400 million people. The British Empire covered countries as from, from Canada all the way to Australia and good chunks of Africa and of course the Middle East.

6:25 By the way, all the current problems we have in the Middle east can be blamed on British and German and French imperialism. Just in case you were wondering, actually had a conversation with some folks about this on Sunday. Are they basing that on the redrawing of like, of boundary lines and. Okay. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Because so again, I was talking with some folks with about this in a different context on Sunday. But one of the things that really strikes you is like Iraq didn't exist as a country before World War I. Right.

7:00 Iran didn't exist as a country before World War I. These countries were carved out of what was left of the, the, the, the, the Sick Old man of Europe, as the Ottoman Empire was called

7:19 because the Turks made the wrong decision in aligning themselves with the Central Powers, aligning themselves with Germany and so when Germany lost the war or just stopped fighting, which is actually kind of closer to reality, the Turks were carved up as part of the Treaty of Versailles. There's also the French Empire and the German Empire. And again, maps galore throughout this book, even down to, like, the smaller battles that I didn't know about. Like I knew about Damarne and Somme and Verdun, but smaller battles that I had no understanding of, like the Battle of the Frontiers, which was early in the war or right after the crisis of 1914, or the battles that occurred in the east, are well mapped in this book.

8:15 Also, Keegan does a really good job of building military history into sort of the biographies of people who are going in and out of this war. He does have quite a bit to say about the generals that ran this war. Folks like John French for the British, Doug Ha. Douglas Hague for the British, Pershing for the Americans eventually when they came into the war. And of course, Joffrey for the French. He was a interesting, interesting gentleman. And Tsar Nicholas II who was running the war for the. For the Russians.

8:56 And of course, a name that at first, first I was really shocked to see. But this just shows how little I still know about World War I. Hindenburg, the guy who eventually would capitulate 17 years after the end of World War I to Hitler. Hindenburg was a general. Matter of fact, he was the general who won one of the demonstrative and defining battles on the Eastern front in World War I. So one of the interesting things that you see in this book, and it really strikes you, is all of the players that eventually showed up later on in World War II started their careers, were running around doing all kinds of things.

9:46 Winston Churchill, you know, all those guys, they all had a role ultimately in World War I, and they all showed up there first. And of course, we see this in books that we've talked about. So F. Scott Fitzgerald, interestingly enough, served underneath Harry Truman. He also. Or not Harry Truman, sorry, Eisenhower, who he did not personally. Like, he did not personally care for Eisenhower when he served under him in World War I. Ernest Hemingway was an ambulance driver in World War I with the Italian Army.

10:24 And even. And Keegan even talks about this, he talks about how the generals were defined not by. Or General Ship. We're going to talk a little bit about General Ship today was defined not by actions on the field, but instead by the. They were defined by artists and others who had access to grind against people who had led them poorly. They believed in. In World War I. And so Keegan is upfront about that, but the book opens with something that after you get past the. The idea of a European tragedy, and chapter two opens up with this idea of war plans.

11:04 And I want to talk about this at. Right at the beginning. So

11:10 Stifflands. Yes, Shiflin's war plan. So war plans were based on this idea of mobilization, okay? And mobilization was described as the ability to use the new technology of the train and the new technology of rail to get troops to what would be a quote unquote, front right faster than the other party could get troops to the opposing, quote, unquote front right. And so Schliefland

11:47 created a. A plan. And one of the things that Keegan notes in the book, and I'll pull a couple of quotes here, just very briefly, he says this. All these, however, were plans made on the hoof when war threatened or had actually begun. All these war plans, right? By 1870, though Napoleon III, who was prime minister, I believe, of France at the time, did not appreciate it, a new era in military planning had begun, that of the making of war plans in the abstract. Plans conceived at leisure, pigeonholed and pulled out when eventuality became actuality.

12:26 The development had two separate, though connected, origins. The first was the building of the European rail network, which began in the 1830s. Soldiers rapidly grasped that railways would revolutionize war by making the improvement, the movement and supply of troops, perhaps 10 times as swift as by foot and horse, but almost equally rapidly grasped at such a movement would have to be meticulously planned. Then moving down railways needed to be timetabled quite as strictly in war as in peace. Indeed, more strictly.

12:58 19th century soldiers learnt mobilization required lines designed to carry thousands of passengers monthly to move millions of troops within days. The writing of railway movement tables therefore became a vital peacetime task. And then the next quote. Staff colleges, like industrial and commercial schools, were a creation of the 19th century. Napoleon's subordinates had learned their business from their elders, and as they went along, their practical mastery persuaded their competitors that expertise must be systemized.

13:29 So you had three things that came together, right? You had the development of the European rail network, you had the technology of the train, and you had the systemization of learning that was occurring between the 1830s and the 1890s in Europe. And where the hammer fell the hardest on this, and

13:50 Tom already brought this up. Where the hammer fell the hardest was in. Was in Germany. And Schliefflin's plan was developed as a way. Oh, no, as an outgrowth of the war that was briefly fought in the 1840s between France and Germany and Schlieflin created a mobilization plan that required. And this is how you know it's German engineering precision, timing, exactitude and had little room for error. And he did it at a war college without ever having to set foot on the grounds of war himself.

14:37 Well if you. Again, I'm pretty sure in the book they talk a lot about his, his education of himself. He educated himself quite a bit behind and those, a lot of those war plans were foundations for from other. The Punic wars and you know, all the other stuff. Like so he, he studied that stuff probably more than I've ever read anybody else studying that. That stuff. Like he what I understand he, like he, he. He could pinpoint failure points based on just logic. Right. Because of course hindsight is 2020 and you know, you can look back on something and definitely see your areas of.

15:15 Of era you. It's very difficult to do looking forward. But I also got the feeling from this part of the book that, that this is kind of where our modern day war games come from. Yes. If you think of like, like the, the joint we do a lot of naval war games with like you know, the other. The British Navy and etc. We'll invite, and we invite a lot of countries into these war games and mostly allied countries and we have allied countries play the, the evil empire, so to speak. Right. Like they'll play the enemy.

15:50 But, but I got the vibe like in reading I was like this has to be where this comes from because all a lot of stuff that Sheffin talks about is like is trying to use the past to have foresight into where you can visualize those mistakes before they happen. Now granted, Germany of course they lost the war, so they didn't do that really. Well, well, well, they did it. I would argue, I would assert that they did it better. They did it better on the Eastern front than they did on the Western front. Well, because they've kind of been there, done that.

16:26 Right? Because. Well, sort of. Yeah. But also because. Well also because they. And this is the other dynamic that he talks about in this first chapter or this first couple of chapters. Ambassadorship and diplomacy was great power oriented, which we don't think about great power diplomacy anymore. Like we're in a weird. We are, we're in a weird historical moment 111 years later that people back then who were diplomats and ambassadors would not recognize now. So back then There was no NATO, there was U.N.

16:57 there was no, none of that. And to be honest, it's not even 111. I remember as a kid and thinking that like the ambassador to England or the, whatever, the U. S. Ambassador, that, that was a pretty prestigious position. And today if you ask somebody, they're like, they don't even know who the ambassadors are anymore. Like, they don't care. Right? They don't care. Do we have an ambassador in Afghanistan? I don't know. I don't care. Oh yeah, we do. I know we do. I'm just saying, like, if you ask the majority of people, the, the ambassadors around, our ambassadors around the world have very little power, so to speak, or very little agency, you know.

17:32 Right. And that's as a result of World War I. They're supposed to speak for our leadership. Right. They're supposed to be there in their stead and yet none of us think that they have any authority whatsoever. Like, I'll tell you the weirdest thing that was ever said to me. The weirdest thing that was ever said to me. I belong to an organization. I don't know if you want me to name them or not. I don't care. But so, okay, if you, if you, if you've never met anybody who was on in Rotary. Like the Rotary.

17:58 Yeah, yeah. Okay. So I was in Rotary for a long time and I was told at one point or another that if I was ever in a foreign country and in trouble to find another Rotarian, don't worry about the US Ambassadorships, find a Rotarian, because the Rotarians will treat you better than the US Embassy in any country around the world. Like, and I'm paraphrasing people, by the way, but when I was, when I said that, I was like, hold on a minute. What kind of secret handshake club did I join? Seriously? Exactly, exactly.

18:30 That was really. I was like, is this like the modern day version of the Masons or something? Like, you know, like what the Masons used to be. Again, Masons aren't what they used to be either. But I'm like, I was very confused by this, but let me just tell you, I happened to be in a foreign country. I was not in any trouble. I just happened to see where a Rotary meeting was being held and I just asked a question. I was like, oh, this is you guys. I'm a Rotarian too. And this happened to be in a restaurant and I was treated like a king.

19:01 Like, it was, it was like, oh, come sit down, this is our best table. And I'm like, what the hell is going on right now? Like, I was really confused by this. But did lead me to believe that if I was ever in real trouble in a foreign country, if I could find a Rotarian, that they would help me in ways that a normal civilian wouldn't help another normal civilian. You know what I mean? Like, it's like. It's like the Rotarians are, are like the more buttoned up version of the A team. Like, it's, it's.

19:30 I mean, they go, yeah, you know. No, but like, so that. So then I started asking deeper questions and it was like, okay, so what is it? What exactly does that mean? And here's the thing. In some countries, if you are in trouble and you're. Let's say you're arrested in a country, the likelihood of you getting to an American embassy is slim to none. Like, right. It's very unlikely that you're. Now you can make your call to the American embassy and they can start political, whatever, dialogue, whatever.

19:55 But if you, if you're in trouble and you go to a Rotarian again, what I'm told is they will get you to the embassy no matter what. Like, they will find a way to get you to the embassy. They'll. They'll help you in ways that somebody like making a phone call can't help you. Yeah, yeah, it's. It. And, and I was really struck by that. And, and so what to go back to now, my previous statement, it. It alludes to what we think of as our embassy, as our ambassadors today. Like, we don't think of them the way that they did back in the early part of the.

20:26 The 20th century. Well, and this gets to sort of an idea that we talked a little bit about in. When we were talking about. Oh, gosh. And I'm not suggesting the governments think of them that way. I'm talking about this. No, the citizens. We don't view the ambassadors as having any authority, but. Right. Maybe our government still does. I don't know. Oh, no, no, our government does. I mean, those are still plum positions that people fight over in Washington D.C. or wherever. Mostly Washington, D.C.

20:55 and they are still positions that are delivered to. That are delivered to people as. Oh, gosh, they're delivered to people as. As rewards. Right, as plum rewards. You still have. It's still the spoils kind of scenario. Exactly. And every administration does this. Republican, Democrat, doesn't matter. No, this reminds me of something that BH Liddell Hart brought up. Right. And. And why we don't learn from history. And it's, It's. It's very stark. You can see it very starkly in World War I. So ambassadors and prime ministers.

21:34 And ambassadors, prime ministers and diplomats did not have. Yes. The League of Nations hadn't even, didn't even exist yet. So they didn't have a way to communicate quickly. Right. Or efficiently. And this is the other thing, even more than the lack of communication, because the telegraph was just becoming a thing and radio was just becoming a thing. As far as a method of communication, you saw this in sea battles between the German U boats and the British, the British, the British Navy, the British naval fleet later on.

22:11 And Kika does an awesome job of talking about those battles, which I had no idea about. That's just kind of amazing. But the, the diplomats and the ambassadors, they still operated as an aristocratic class. So the people that got those jobs, the people that were doing that diplomacy were like the cousin of the Kaiser. Right. Or the, or the, or the, the brother in law of the Prime Minister. Right. That person was the one that got that ambassadorial role, regardless of their talents or skills. Now you can say in our time, okay, Mitt Romney's brother probably shouldn't be the ambassador to like, I don't know, Sweden or something.

22:57 Right. I'm just gonna name an innocuous country here, not that Sweden's innocuous. We love all our Swedish listeners. And I like Swedish fish and Swedish women and Swedish food. Okay. Yes, thank you. And Mitt Romney, if he's a president, I don't know that his brother, by virtue of running a sovereign wealth management fund or whatever it is his brother is doing, I don't even know if it. Romney has a brother. It doesn't matter. Just the example I'm using, I don't know if that guy's qualified to run, to go be the ambassador of Sweden.

23:26 He's probably not, but that's, but it's interesting. We're more comfortable with the idea of an unqualified stranger who's connected or even an unqualified kid or a relative who's connected to the person in power. We're more comfortable of that in an American context now post World War I and people pre World War I and up to World War I, they didn't even think about, like the structure of all of that. And so you had diplomacy that was run basically on a summer schedule. People who were making war plans and mobilization plans based on the new technology of the rail and the telegraph and the telephone.

24:06 And then the third thing here, and this is at the War College piece. And then the fourth thing here, which by the way, Keegan brings up here, I Love this quote. He says this. The effect exerted by paper plans on the unfolding of events must never be exaggerated. Paper plans do not determine outcomes. The happenings set in motion by a particular scheme of action will rarely be those narrowly intended, are intrinsically unpredictable, and will ramify far beyond the anticipation of the instigator. This whole section, you're going to laugh at me, but this whole section reminded me of one quote from one.

24:47 This. Obscure quote from an American boxer that said, everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face. That's what it reminds me of. Like, because, because again, like you said, you could put all the plans you want on paper, but until you actually start, listen, you could have the best trained military in the world, and you're going to say, I'm going to send one battalion in there because I know this one battalion is going to beat up on their battalion, not understanding that that battalion has the support of all the citizens in that, like.

25:17 And now all of a sudden, you're not fighting one battalion, you're fighting half a country because they, like, they come out of the woodwork to defend their. Their land. Like, you can't. And you're telling me that you can't plan for that. Like, there's no way to know what that group of people are going to be able to do or not do because they're not military people that you can put on a piece of. Of paper and judge based on weaponry or training or whatever. Like, they're. They're a. They're an X factor.

25:41 Which is why, like, he was saying, like, none of this matters once you enact it, once you start, once you hit the go button, just like hell hits the fan. So Schliefen, speaking of him, he was a man without hobbies. All he liked doing was making paper plants. He had nothing. That was hilarious. He was the most boring guy on the planet. Even in his retirement, he was reading war books to his granddaughter. Know, he. He reminds me of the guy who. And you've known guys like this? I've known guys like this.

26:13 It is. And sorry, ladies who are listening, it is guys. It is always guys. Guys are this obsessive. Women can't get there from here. They just can't. I've never met a woman that obsesses about one thing the way a man does. Never met it yet. You haven't met my wife when she talks about cleaning. My wife literally watches cleaning videos on Facebook for fun. Like, it. She's obsessed. Okay, all right. That's okay. Okay. So you might have me there, but. She'S the only one I know though, just, I'm just, just saying.

26:41 But men will obsess about one thing to the point of them being, of them turning themselves into boring human beings about everything else. Yeah, like we were just talking about. We were just talking football before we, before we hit the record button on this episode today. And we're not going to talk about football today, kids. The folks, don't worry about it, it's fine. But, but like Tom Brady as a quarterback. No, not even that. Tom Brady as a human being has got to be the most boring human being on the planet.

27:09 Gotta be. Because what else does the guy know? Didn't know anything else. He has no other obsessions. He doesn't care about anything else. He eats, sleeps, breathes football. If you try to get him to talk about anything else. Snow, for God's sakes. The guy doesn't, he doesn't have an opinion about that. Can't even think about it. He'll tell you about the time in the snow game where they had to clear off a patch of grass for Adam Venateri to kick a field goal. He'll tell you all about that snow game.

27:33 That's his depth of knowledge about snow.

27:39 This is what I mean. And this was Schleepin sleeping was a guy who, who was so obsessed with warfare and war planning on paper and yet had no practical experience in this. And so when, when the practical as, as Keegan points out, when the, when the theory, at a certain point you have to go beyond theory, when the theory became actuality, events started moving. And I think of the great Jocko Willick quote the guy who wrote Extreme Ownership, the great Jocko Willa quote, the enemy gets a vote. Yeah, and that's what, yeah, that's what screws people up every friggin time.

28:22 Because to your point, I'll make plans all day or Mike Tyson, I absolutely, I'm going to make a plan to fight Mike Tyson. And yeah, it never survives first contact with Mike Tyson. We say this in business, a marketing plan never survives first contact with the customer. Like you could plan the greatest marketing plan for your product ever. And we work, work in another project where we do, we do that kind of work with, with startups. And the second your customer tells you something, that's something totally that you did not anticipate or expect or behaves in a way that you did not anticipate or expect, there goes your plan.

28:58 Now what most people do is what in marketing or in Fighting or in war planning. And in war planning, it has dangerous results, which is where the First World War came from. Most people don't know how to abandon their plan. They don't have the courage to let it go. And so I guess that's the first question is like, what's more, Is it, Is it current? Is it that they don't have the courage to let it go? Or is it the ego taking over, saying that, I know I'm right, I'm just going to continue on because, well, I mean.

29:29 Right. You know what I mean? Like, well, I mean, we talked about egos, we talked about eagles with why we don't learn from history. Right? Yeah. World War I presents itself even in the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Right? The egos of the Serbian terrorists who were convinced that they would get their independence because they were nationalists. If they just killed this guy who was representative of the Habsburg Empire, by the way, the Habsburg Empire and the Austro Germany, or not Austro Germany, Austro Hungary Empire, all of that, we don't even think about any of that stuff anymore because all those parts of Central Europe look totally different now.

30:08 Talk about redrawing lines on maps. But the Serbians, the Bosnians, the Greeks, all of those countries, all of them were hyper nationalistic, which means they were almost exclusively driven and represented. And even they even had their positions of power filled by men who had egos as big as the kings and queens of the big empires of England and France and Russia and Germany. And they would take the Pepsi Challenge against anybody else's ego on that continent. They were fine with that. And so

30:51 egos, right, like, how do you.

30:55 I do think it's courage. I do think it's courage to abandon a plan when it doesn't. When your ego, when it doesn't work.

31:03 But in business, because this is a business podcast, too,

31:09 how do you abandon that plan? Like, you put millions of dollars in there or hundreds of thousands, depending upon what level you're at. And now the customer says, no, I don't want this thing. My behavior says, I want this thing.

31:26 People have no answer. People struggle with this massive business. People struggle massively with this because you can either fight the market, you can and not get anywhere, or not get to the places you want to go. You can go with the market, and then you can be seen internally as sort of being wishy washy after you did all this planning, or you can do nothing and then the market just runs over you.

31:57 I mean, I think. I mean, I. It's interesting that you, that you Say that because I, you know, again, in the, the demographic of businesses that I work with, in my consulting business is usually smaller than, than most consultants want to work with. I have no problem working with the, you know, a five million dollar a year company which to most consultants they're not big enough to. They're a spec, They're a blip on a map, right. Of a specimen. One of the things that, that I think and I have conversations with them way before we transact any money or any money passes hands.

32:34 And one of the first questions I asked them is how willing are you to pivot? And if their answer is even remotely too tight for me beyond my, then I don't take them as a client. That's really what dictates whether or not they're a client for me is their intestinal fortitude of,

32:54 of openness. Right. Like a willingness to, to look at actual analytical data. To your point, because a lot of times people will look in business and to your point where they go down a certain path and they're not willing to leave that path. A lot of it is because whoever is leading them down that pathway, if they're, if they're asking them to change, they're not giving them enough data, usually it's because they're not getting enough information. Now to your point about, hey listen, if I said to you, hey son, you're running this company, I'm your marketing advisor and I say to you, hey listen, our customers are telling this, telling us this, we've got to change directions.

33:33 And you go, no, that's not enough to go by. We're not changing directions. And that's usually how it happens. But had I said to you, our customers are saying this, here's where all the analytical data lies. Our, all this, all the numbers are saying that we're in the, we're on the wrong pathway. And all indications say that if we shift over to this new path, we're going to gain traction here, here and here. And here's why that now you're, if you say no to that, by the way, as a, as your marketing consultant, I'm out.

33:59 If you say like I'm going, okay, then you, you don't need to pay me anymore. And by the way, I have literally said this to people. You are not taking my advice based on all the analytical data that I'm giving you. I'm not your guy. You want somebody that you want somebody to reinforce and double down on your area and your way and show you a pathway to success. Bullying yourself there instead of actually listening to. I'm not your guy. Right. So. So I step out, and I don't want to take your money anymore because that's the thing.

34:29 You're paying me for my expertise. You're paying me to give you the advice. And the end of the. Not just advice, but you're paying me to give you advice based on analytical data that I'm giving you. And if you're not willing to do that, then I'm not your guy, so I'm out. And so the. And the thing in World War I was the diplomats had their own silo, the kings and queens had their own silo, the war colleges had their own silo. And even inside the war colleges, there was class stratification like nobody's business, because this was a European war the Americans didn't get into late.

35:04 Woodrow Wilson infamously said, we're too proud to fight. Whatever. Okay, okay. So it's more like. It's more like it didn't impact us at all. At all. So why would we fight for something we had no. We had no. We had no skin in the game. Like, we had no. We had no dog in the fight, like. So why would we. Why would we fight in the first place? He was just being nice. I wouldn't. I wouldn't. Exactly, Frank. Woodrow Wilson is nice. We'll just leave that aside for just a minute. The comment was being nice.

35:31 I didn't say he was nice. But you had all this European stratification inside of an aristocratic worldview that said,

35:45 even with the Enlightenment, even with the American Republic, even with the revolutions that had been fought, even. I mean, Europe had enjoyed a long 19th century up to that point. Right. They had some systems post Napoleon, that sort of kind of in the middle of the 19th century kind of ameliorated some things. But they still had the Crimean War, they still had the Boer War, but those wars were far away in their colonies or in other countries that they didn't care about. Right. And so the bifurcation of.

36:19 And I loved how you use the term lack of data. Not only did they not have data in going forth on this war, they had an attitude. And Keegan nails this almost perfectly. They had an attitude where you, as a. If you would. If you could go back in time, Tom, outside of your own lifetime. Yeah. And talk to these people, not one of them would listen to you. And not because of your class status or because you're an American or a weirdo at a time. Not because of any of those reasons. Although they would layer those in.

36:53 They. You.

36:56 They were playing a game where the rules involved their egos and not data. And I don't think we're any better on that now, even with all the data we have at our disposal.

37:11 If you're talking strictly in warfare, I agree. I, I think, well, in anywhere. Anywhere. I mean, business warfare. Anywhere, like I was saying, in business. And again, I do think that there, I think. I think there's a split. I think there are people in business that will absolutely make judgments on data and will actually make business decisions based on the data that they're seeing. I do think that that exists in business. In warfare, I don't know so much. But the one thing, I think the other thing, too, that really comes into play, and I know you're.

37:43 I maybe want to talk. Maybe you want to wait until you ask the question, because I know there's a question later that you're going to ask about,

37:53 about, you know, leading, about leading team. What we're learning, like what the difference is learning between leading teams. And I don't, I don't remember how you phrased it, but the, the idea behind the. And what. I think one of the things that the Americans brought to that fight that surprised people and I still. And I think that, that leaders could learn from and still deploy today is, if you ever notice, it's like a next man up syndrome or a next man up kind of mentality where the Germans weren't ready for that.

38:22 The Germans weren't ready to kill a colonel or to kill a lieutenant in the field. And then the army keep coming at them because somebody else just took that lieutenant spot and they all in the. And the, the autonomy that happens in between, I think is another thing, right, where you basically say to, you know, you've got your generals down to the captain, down to the lieutenant, and by the time it hits the lieutenant, you're like, listen, here's the game plan. Your number one job is to take that hill, and number two job is to survive at any cost, Right?

38:52 Like take the hill, survive. That's in that order of importance, by the way. And all that stuff that happens in between, we don't care. Like, just do what you just do those two things. We're happy. And I think leaders in today's business could learn from that. Where you can take a. Take a sales manager, for example, and say, here's your quota. Hit your quota. I don't care how it happens, just go do it. You have some autonomy to make decisions for your team. To hit that quota. And some of it is hiring and firing people, some of it is tactical things like how, whatever, but, but allowing that next man up to actually have some autonomy and have some skin in the game.

39:27 That's, I think, of something that came out of that conflict that we didn't really have before. And even in, like, we talked a little bit about this on another episode of the podcast too. Even the, the US Military's fight on the westward expansion of our own country. Yeah, they didn't have a, they didn't have autonomy in a sense of decision making power. They just had melees and like stuff that happened because individual people just kind of did what they wanted to do. That's not the same thing as taking a military, like a military drive at something, say, go take that hill and then survive.

40:04 Those are your two, your two, you know, goals in this, in this, in this endeavor and you know, take the hill under, under any circumstance, under any means necessary. Survive under any means necessary. So at the end of the day, when you do capture that hill and you lost 20% or 15% of your, your battalion or whatever or your league, and the general comes in and says, nice job, you took the hill. How did, how did, how did question two go? Or in. In. In. I can't remember the term I was thinking of, but whatever.

40:39 Like goal number two was to survive. We lost 15. Okay, how, how can we make sure that doesn't happen again? Like there's that, that the whole idea of debriefing with those two primary objectives in mind,

40:52 the rest doesn't matter. Right. And, and that wasn't the case. When you look at all of the stuff that Schifflin and all those guys like the war, the war on paper, etc. Etc. There was never, there was never that clarity of this is your objective one objective. There was never a backup plan. There was never a secondary goal. Because if the secondary goal was to survive, then they would have known. You get to a certain point, if you can't take the hill, you go to objective two, which is to survive, and we're going to retreat and regroup before we make the next plan.

41:24 Like there was, it was very little of that and they didn't, they didn't learn on the fly. Which is another thing that happens when you have that next man up syndrome or that next man up component that the, that the allied forces had. It doesn't matter how many of them you knock down, there's going to be somebody there to take the place of the leadership role. Like that they weren't ready for that. And I think that's, I think that's the biggest thing. And again, I think, I think in today's business society we have, we have a, if you have a similar mentality, your company is going to thrive in a better, at a better, in a better clip.

41:58 It's, you know, it's not. And we see that with startups all the time. Hyun, right where startup founder thinks that they have to do everything themselves. They have, they have to have a hand in everything. And once they learn that delegating that stuff with clear objectives and then having them report back with successes and failures and then taking the analytics to make the next decision, it frees up the startup founder to, to really become that, that centerpiece and not, and not that. That you don't have to be everything, you just have to be everything.

42:30 Right? Right. Yeah. No, no, yeah, no, you're exactly right. Well and you brought up a couple of points that I was, I was looking through in Keegan's work here because there's a couple of things that jump out, right, that support what you're, what you're saying here and will allow us to transition into our next point. So the generalship, right? Let's talk about leadership. The leadership in World War I. The generals in World War I. Ha. Joffrey, Hindenburg, Ludendorff, even Brasilov in I believe in Russia.

43:05 Em all Ataturk down in Turkey who later on would become the, the founder of the country of Turkey. Ataturk. Interesting guy. Even, even Winston Churchill who of course later on would become in Winston Churchill who, who, who really pushed for. Well, you know, he really pushed for the battle in the, in the Dardanelles. In the Dardanelles straight at Gallipoli which, the, by the way, the battle at Gallipoli. I, I had, I had never fully appreciated just how much of a unmitigated slaughter that was.

43:45 And that's the thing that, the other thing that jumps out to you about World War I. And so I want to read about General Ship a little bit here and I want to talk about the Somme, because the Somme was one of the worst battles on the Western Front in, in the year of battles. In. Well, the, in the year of battles. So I'm going to read about this holocaust

44:11 and it starts of course with generalship. So General Haig, right. Douglas Haig. Right. Of the. Who was leading the, the British Expeditionary Force, by the way. People people misunder misunderstand this. The British army, the British Expeditionary Force, while hardened in Colonial battles was always second to the British Navy. And this is just sort of how it works, right? In certain. In certain countries we would see this, saw this in World War II, where, interestingly enough, the Air Force, as a discrete service, had to really fight to get out from underneath the auspices of the army and even the auspices of the Navy in the Pacific, like the Air Force, had to fight to become a discrete service and still has a chip on its shoulder to this day about being a discrete service in the.

45:03 In the US Military. So Haig ran the. The British Expeditionary Force in. In World War I. And Keegan says this about Haig, and it's interesting when he describes the personalities of these men. He says this, and I quote, Haig, whom his contemporaries found difficult to know, has become today an enigma. The successful generals of the First World War, those who did not crack outright or decline gradually into pessimism, were a hard lot as they had to be with the casualty figures accumulating on their desks.

45:44 Some nevertheless managed to combine toughness of mind with. With some other striking human characteristic. Joffrey, that was the leader of the French. Imperturbability, Hindenburg, gravity, folk fire, Khamel, certainty. Haig, in whose public matter and private diaries no concern for human suffering was or is discernible, compensated for his aloofness with nothing whatsoever of. And I love this term because this is so English, nothing whatsoever of the common touch.

46:24 Such. You can tell Keegan's an English historian.

46:29 Just a little this little things an American would never say.

46:35 And back to the book. He seemed to move through the horrors of the First World War as if guided by some inner voice speaking of a higher purpose and a personal destiny that we now know was not just appearance. Haig was a devotee of both spiritualistic practices and a fundamentalist religion. As a young officer, he had taken to attending seances where a medium put him in touch with Napoleon. As commander in chief, he fell under the influence of a Presbyterian chaplain whose sermons confirmed him in his belief that he was in direct communication with God and had a major part to play in a divine plan for the world.

47:11 Closed clip that was the general that was head of all the commander in chief of all the British Expeditionary Forces at the Psalm. That guy

47:25 in 1916. That guy. Now I'm not going to go into the whole entire battle of the Somme. You can read the whole thing. You can read how the Germans responded to the British moving forward. Forward. The Psalm is a muddy field. It is. It is a muddy field. And the Germans, by the way, held the high ground. And they held the high ground for the entire war. Talk about to Tom's point earlier, going up the hill and grab it. You know, they weren't given autonomy, the British soldiers were not given autonomy and the British infantry did not have tanks at this point of the war.

48:03 This was a year too early. And the, the Battle of the Somme dragged on through the summer, through that summer, in, in, in 1916. And. Well,

48:20 Keegan wraps up his analysis of the SOB with this line. By the 19th of November, when the Allied offensive was brought officially to a halt, the furthest line of advance at Le Boeufs lay only seven miles forward of the front line of attack on the 1st of July. Now you want to know how many men they lost to get 7 miles? This will make you sick. The Germans may have. We don't have clear numbers even now. The Germans may have lost over 600,000 killed and wounded in their effort to keep their solemn positions.

48:57 The Allies had certainly lost over 600,000. The French casualty figure being 194,451. The British 419,654. The Holocaust of the Somme was subsumed for the French in that of Verdun. To the British, it was and would remain their greatest military tragedy of the 20th century, indeed of their national military history. Then it goes down. There is nothing more poignant in British life than to visit the ribbon of ceremony of cemeteries that marks the front line of 1 July 1916, and to find on a gravestone after gravestone the fresh wreath, the face of a pal or a chum above a khaki surge collar staring gravely back from a dim photograph, the pinned poppy and the inscription to quote a father, a grandfather and a great grandfather, close quote.

49:55 The psalm marked the end of an age of vital optimism in British life that has never been recovered. And Keegan was writing this in 1998.

50:07 By the way you add up those figures, what that means at the psalm is that probably close to 1.2 million men died in one field, in one battle. That,

50:25 and there's no other way for me to frame this is piss poor leadership. That's, that's homicidal leadership. Yeah. And I don't care how much you think you're in touch with God. And I, I say this as a Christian. I don't say how. I don't care how much in touch a guy God you think you are. I don't care how many seances you go to and call up Napoleon. I don't care how class conscious you are and lack the common touch

51:00 to allow that to happen on your watch. For your part, the French do what they do, the Germans do what they do, but on your part, you're responsible for a third of that. I will frame it this way. After I read that, I wouldn't have wanted to be the soul, because I do think people have souls. I wouldn't have wanted to be the soul of Douglas Hag when he showed up at wherever it is he showed up at. I wouldn't want to be that guy because that's a lot of explaining to do. That's a lot.

51:34 I read that for 7 miles you expended 1.5 million people for 7 miles. And still didn't take the actual hill. Right, right, right. You did not actually achieve the objective. I mean, I, I, I, I don't know the com, the comparative numbers, but I'm thinking, like, think, think of that same thing. We, I don't know, I don't think the numbers are going to be the same, but think of like Normandy or Iwo Jima. Yeah, like Iwo Jima. We took the hill. That was the reference point that I was using in that for that and that.

52:09 This is, by the way, folks, this is World War II, not World War I, but. Right, but I would imagine the numbers of loss are going to be high. Yeah, I don't know if they're that high. I don't, I mean, even Normandy, where we knew we were walking into. Yeah, we knew, we actually knew going in that we were going to lose a good portion of people, of men in that, in that battle. We knew going in, but we also knew that if we took that beach that, that was going to basically spearhead the remaining part of the, the, the, the defense inland.

52:42 Right? So like, we, we had to have it and that, that's kind of what I was, you know, under any means necessary, you take the hill or you take the beach. But you know, objective number two is to survive it so that we can actually hold it after the fact that, Right. You know, there's, there's purpose behind objective number two. But I don't know, I don't know what the, I don't know what the orders were in the psalm. Like that doesn't make something there, There's a disconnect, right? Like that's the, the Battle of Normandy resulted in approximately226,386 Allied casualties and around240,000 German casualties with an additional20,000 French, French civilian deaths.

53:24 But actually killed on that day, not just in the whole battle, but actually killed on that day was around 72,000Americans and actually killed on D Day. On the day of the actual invasion itself was 25,000. 2500, yeah. 2,500Americans and 4,414 total Allied troops, with approximately 153,000 wounded. Significantly lower numbers in World War I. But still, to your point, we actually got on the beach. Right, right, right. And that's the thing. Like, Hague at the Somme is probably the worst, but you have Hindenburg in.

54:06 In the Western. On the Western Front and Ludendorff on the Western Front. Then you had the French at Verdun under Folk and Joffrey. Those guys. The generalship, the piss poor generalship in World War I

54:26 is just kind of stunning. And when you read these numbers, and consistently when I read these numbers in Keegan's wonderfully written, wonderfully written book,

54:37 I. The thing that came back to me was, this makes no sense. This makes no sense. This makes no sense. This makes no sense. Why are we exp. Bending men? And maybe this is something I don't understand, but

54:55 the men didn't understand why they were walking seven miles into barbed wire and machine guns. Like, at a certain point, the Germans would. And this was in battle, after battle, the Germans would stop firing the machine guns because the. The British troops or the French troops who were advancing would get caught in the barbed wire that hadn't been broken by the bombardments. By the way, the numbers of tons of material. They're still finding material in Europe from the battle, like from battles in World War I. Millions of tons of rounds, millions dropped on barbed wire.

55:33 And because the way the Germans burrowed and trenched into the side of the mountains and into the side of the grounds at the Somme, and particularly at Verdun, where the chalky soil was where they could just literally embed like, like wasps nests. They could just embed and stay in there, and then they come out and shoot you and just go right back in. Plus, there was no. There was no bombers. Like, that wasn't a concept that really, like, existed until World War II, which prevented a lot of trench warfare, World War II, from occurring.

56:05 Because now you could bomb from the sky, right, which totally obliterates all of that. But the tons of material you had expended and then the tons of men you had expanded. The Germans would literally watch the British walk across no Man's Land after they had shot off their. All of their cartridges, and then they just stopped firing and let Them just let them go back and carry their. Why are we. Why are we executing people now? It was literally a firing spot that you're sending guys into. And to be a general.

56:34 And I get it, you're at the back, you're having three meals a day, you're talking with some prime minister. You're managing the war. Telegraph lines of communication, which were a new thing that were being put down at the time, were cut by bombardments. So you would literally send out a message in the morning. You would get maybe one message in the middle of the battle, in the afternoon, and then you wouldn't find out about the outcome of the battle until the next day. In some cases, if you're a general in the rear with the gear.

57:07 Unlike the wars of the early 18th of the early 19th century, where, and Keegan even mentions this at, at Waterloo, Wellington actually rode out with his men. Like, he rode out. He saw Napoleon. He's like, oh, yeah, that's Napoleon. Yeah, I got you. Mfer you that right there. I could see the whites of his eyes. Hank never did that. Hank didn't go out to the front. That was not a concept for them because, again, they were aristocratic Europeans. He didn't have the common touch. He wasn't going to be dealing with the hoi polloi and the people.

57:45 And he was just fine with ex. With just executing people in order to achieve some objective that wasn't going to get a. That he didn't even know hadn't been. He didn't even know hadn't been achieved because the telegraph lines were cut. Because the main thing wasn't communication. The main thing was, well, just go out there and figure it out, maybe, or do actually figure out. Go out there and do what you're told. March to those lines. If you get caught in the barbed wire, well, it will be a glorious sacrifice for the British Empire.

58:16 And there were people willing to do that. Hell, on both sides. On the German side, on the French side, on the. On English, their work. And this is a mindset we can't comprehend. No, we just can't comprehend. It's like I said this to a buddy of mine who went to Iraq and was. Was a driver in Iraq for a couple of different tours. And I've said this to other buddies who went to Iraq and Afghanistan. Between Iraq and Afghanistan, I think we lost in America 8,000 people total over the course of 20 years.

58:47 We lost our minds as a country.

58:51 We haven't lost our minds like that since Vietnam, where we lost 50,000 people in like 17 years.

58:59 Numbers that a World War I general would be peachy keen with, or even. A World War II general, apparently. Well, and that's where. Right, and that's where we say they're made of different stuff. They were made of different stuff. Because now the generals you have. Now this is why we're all talking about drone warfare and sending robots to go fight for us. We don't want to expend any men at all. And I don't know how you do war without expending men. I don't know how you do the war between the robots, because eventually they'll wake up and be like, oh, we can just have our own war.

59:30 We don't need human beings. Like, why don't we just go shoot the human beings? That's my concern about that. Don't give a drone too much autonomy. That's going to be a wrong problem. Not for the drone, for you,

59:41 but exactly. But World War I, how do you. So this is a question, and it didn't really have it written down, but this is a question that jumps out of this. What do you do when the leader doesn't care? When the people have no clue what the vision is and the leader is so removed he can't explain it? I think of these CEOs, of these companies that have 50,000 employees, like Mark Zuckerberg has no idea what's happening in the front line of his company. He has no clue. He can't. Or, or if he does have a clue, he would be the most unique CEO ever by far.

1:00:24 Yeah. And I don't think he is. Well, I mean, or David Ellison or, or Larry Ellison or any of these guys running these big companies. What's his name, Nadella over at Microsoft? Any of those guys, I don't think any of them are unique. I think they're more like World War I generals than we want to, than we want to admit. Yeah. And I, I don't, I don't disagree with you. And, and I think it's interesting. That was the whole crux of the. Quite a few years ago. You remember the show Undercover Boss? Oh, yeah, yeah.

1:00:58 And what an eye openening experience it was for every one of those, especially season one, by the way, because after season one, everybody knew what the hell you were doing. So it wasn't really. Which I knew first for certain. That show had a very short shelf life because, yeah, you know, there's only so many times you're going to trick people that are actually watching these show anyway. But the point, first season in my opinion was very real. It was very like when these, or at least it seemed it maybe I'm just saying.

1:01:25 But when these CEOs of these bigger companies, like companies like Waste Management and whatever, like they go undercover and they go on the front lines and they realize what they're asking those frontline people to do for the money that they make and they're like this, this can't, this can't go on like this. We can't do this. Like it was very eye openening for them, which I don't see Mark Zuckerberg ever.

1:01:50 Bezos is probably a better example, right? Because I don't know what, I don't know what the front line of Zuckerberg's enterprise does, but I do know the front line of Jeff Bezos group are some of those delivery drivers that are getting dirt for pay, working their knuckles to, you know, knuckles to the bone day in, day out, six, seven days a week. And they're making barely enough money to live. You ask Jeff Bezos to go do that job and see what he thinks. But you know what? He won't. There's no way he would.

1:02:16 There's no way he would. No. And, and, and he may, he may be bereft of religion. I have no idea what his religious beliefs are, but the, the attitude. So, so we could read about a guy like Hank, right? And I picked him because he was the most. And I picked the song because it's just the most egregious example out of a whole pile of atrocious examples, right? Don't get me started on what happened in Russia and the nonsense with their. Oh my God, please, they, they got the Lenin that they deserved.

1:02:44 And I'm not talking about the Beatles guy either. So

1:02:50 that attitude, that posture of, and well, as Keegan said, not having the common touch, not being able to put aside

1:03:03 ego or class consciousness or whatever the hell to get out of your little box, your little office and to your point, get in the delivery drivers vehicle and do that job for 12 hours a day, every day. Like Bezos didn't even start doing that job. Like he, you know, he, he and I, I'm old enough to remember when Jeff Bezos had hair. So is Tom.

1:03:33 I remember that guy before he was Lex Luthor. And he, he never had the common touch. He was always an aristocrat. He always has had an aristocratic attitude, for God's sakes. The man was a finance major in college. Like you don't go into those kinds of, that kind of role because you really like human beings because you have the like, because you have empathy for people as people, right? Because you don't want to waste human capital. You go into that, into that realm. And by the way, all my finance people, I'm not knocking all of you.

1:04:06 I'm merely saying about the attitude in there. Yes, there's different attitudes among finance folks. I understand that. And because two things can be true at once, the vast majority of finance folks I work with or have engaged with over the course of my career have been folks who really want to take a human being and turn it into a one or a zero or put a dollar sign behind it. And if you can't, if they can't do that, they are confused by the question.

1:04:35 And that is a failure of leadership as a leader. You can't be confused by the human elements of the question. You could disagree with them, you can fundamentally dislike them, whatever, but you have to. You have to have it. You have to tear. Why do boards. Why do boards. I've often, I've often questioned this, and I've never asked this question of anybody else, ever. Hasan. Yeah. You're the first person to get this question. But I'm curious to your opinion about this, because I think you would know before most or people that I know anyway.

1:05:06 Most people that I know. Why then do board of directors of big companies often look at the CFO as the natural successor to the CEO? That makes no sense to me, but happens all the time. Because boards of directors are fundamentally uncomfortable with the idea of a founder that cares about. Not even a founder, a CEO that cares about people. Because they don't believe fundamentally, as business people themselves, that they can do business and have feelings at the same time. They believe that those.

1:05:40 They believe those two things are an anathema to each other and that they wouldn't be able to make. I remember the line from. It's. This is actually directly from Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goldman when he went researched this back in the 1970s. He said that when he would talk to CEOs about being more human and more emotionally intelligent, they would say, I can't be emotionally intelligent because it will prevent me from being able to make the, quote, unquote, hard decisions that business requires.

1:06:05 That's a bunch of hogwash and you know it. I know it's hogwash, but you have to take what people's words are. Right? Okay, so if I take you on your words, if I actually seriously believe you, then you're closer to Doug Haig sending out boy after boy after boy after boy in the psalm for a useless objective, then you are, then you are close to Mother Teresa trying to save people, you know, from an, from a convent in India. Yeah, because you think that Mother Teresa's weak and you think that Doug Hag is strong.

1:06:42 They must, they, they must all hate guys like Richard Branson then, right? Like Richard Branson philosophy about businesses. If, listen, when, when you, he was asked in an interview once, like, you know, shouldn't you, shouldn't the, you know, the customer is always right? Right. Like, shouldn't you worry about the customer more than anybody else, blah, blah, blah. And he said, no. If I treat my frontline employees like they matter more than anything else, if I treat my frontline employees like their family and I'm going to treat them with the utmost respect and then they naturally will take care of my client, my customers, if they're happy, if they're, if they're, if they're, if they're experiencing a positive work environment.

1:07:19 They are, they are just naturally going to provide my customers with a good experience. And now I'm not saying he was right 100% of the time. I'm sure there are still disgruntled employees, whatever. I get that. But at least his mental thought process had more to do with treating the boys going into battle better than most of the people that we're thinking of today. And by the way, he was a multi, he was a billionaire multibillionaire. He's not like, it's not like he. Yeah, but, you know, but you'll get that guy.

1:07:48 Okay, so you'll get Richard Branson on a stage, right? You've seen, you've seen this. You'll get Richard Branson on a stage with Jeff Bezos and Jamie Dimon. And the moderator will ask this august panel of brilliant wealthy entrepreneurs who have succeeded how they treat their people. They will give the three answers that, you know, those three people would give, and then they will walk off the stage and not talk to each other at all. Yeah, yeah.

1:08:28 And, and, and, or, or, or even worse. And this is what I think most of us on the bottom of these hierarchies think actually happens. They'll give the answer, they'll have the collapse, they'll walk off the stage. This is where the modern, the postmodern cynicism comes as an outgrowth of World War I and World War II and Vietnam. They'll walk off the stage and what we all imagine is they're all high fiving about how they've like fooled the Hoi polloi one more time. Yeah, that's what we all imagine.

1:09:01 And I think it's probably closer to the first example, the first outcome, than the second one. I don't think Jamie Dimon knows how to talk to a guy like Richard Branson because I think it's so far out of his wheelhouse, he just. It's easier to get into his chauffeured car and just drive home or to his mistress's house or whatever the hell he does. It's easy. Whatever, like, whatever. It's easier for Bezos to go on his yacht with Lauren Sanchez and whatever. With whatever he's doing with her. It's easier for Richard Branson to go buy another island instead of some ayahuasca retreat for Aaron Rodgers.

1:09:38 It's just easier to do those things. Because here's the thing. Haig and Joffrey and Foch and Ludendorff During World War I, those World War I generals all understood aristocracy and hierarchy in a way that I don't think we get, that we don't appreciate. And I think the reason why I'm drawing a parallel between them and the CEOs that we have now is because I think the CEOs get hierarchy and class in a way that we don't get. Things have become more democratized and egalitarian among the people below that rank.

1:10:12 But among the people above that rank, things have gotten tighter and tighter as wealth has increased. Things have gotten tighter and tighter and tighter and tighter and tighter where they are closer to those World War Generals in attitude. Maybe not in the ability to command people, but in attitude. They're closer to that. That's why Jeff Bezos has no problem with replacing every single one of his workers at Amazon with a robot. Yeah, he has. No problem. He won't lose a moment of sleep. He won't.

1:10:47 And people want him to lose sleep, but he can't because he's ascended to a different level of. Not to use the Marxist term, but I'm going to go ahead and use the Marxist term. He's ascended to a different level of class consciousness.

1:11:03 I, I would. I would agree with that, too. I, I guess if you take out. If you take out the. All that, all the, the nonsense at the billionaire level. Right. And you just come. Come back down to Earth at the Millionaire level. Right, Right. Yeah. Those guys. I, I feel. I feel like if I met a. We. We recently hosted an event for the other project we work on. Yeah. At the end of the table with me. And I'm not Going to mention names, I don't want to embarrass him or anything, but there was a gentleman at the end of the table that was probably worth, if I had to guess, 50 million.

1:11:36 That, that was. His net worth is probably 50 million. Now for those of you listening to this, mine, not even a fraction of that. So. But at that level, he sat at the end of the table with me, lowly nobody, and spoke to me like I was just another guy and he was just another guy. That could not happen at the billionaire level. No, I, I don't, I, I couldn't imagine a single billionaire that, that would do that, that would sit at a table like that. It was a dinner table. There was about 20 of us at dinner.

1:12:09 There was, you know, 20 of us at dinner. I sat at his end of the table and, and there's. I, I can't think of another. I cannot think of a single billionaire that would do.

1:12:21 Maybe there's one. I could say maybe,

1:12:26 maybe Musk would do it. Maybe. You think so? Maybe. But I, but I also think that he's cut of a slightly, only slightly like the, the colors. And like you have red and then you have like really, really red, like slightly, you know, slightly different colored cloth than the rest of them. Only because, and this is the only reason why, only because of the amount of debt he carries to fund all his projects and that if all of the markers were called tomorrow, he'd be the brokest man in the world. That's the only thing I gotcha.

1:13:10 But I, but, but again, I think is the difference between red and really, really red. Like, you know, so maybe he would sit at the end of the table. But even there I'm not quite sure. I'm sure he has the same attitude as rest of them. I thinking the billionaires. My thinking was that that guy is probably the top of the top that would sit at that table. Yeah. So 50 million in, in net, in like as a.

1:13:34 Jesus, what's the word I was just thinking of? Oh, net worth. Net worth. Sorry. Thank you. So somebody at around 50 million net worth. Once you get into even 100 million net worth. I am nobody to them, literally nobody. And they're not okay. Listen to a goddamn thing I say. Well, so. Well, okay, so let me, let me, let me frame this this way. I'll frame this this way. So I'm going to tell a little personal story and we can move into the next section here. So that kind of proves this point a little bit.

1:14:00 So

1:14:04 on my, my father's side's a little bit wonky. We don't. We're not really quite sure, or at least I'm not really quite sure. My mother might be quite sure, but I'm not quite sure. But I could definitely speak to my mother's side. So my mother's side of my family, right? My great. My great grandfather. So my grandmother's father was a sharecropper. If you know anything about sharecropping in America, you know that that was sharecropping in the 1920s, 1930s, 1910s. That was just a step above slavery in.

1:14:34 In the Jim Crow south, no less. Okay, so now we kind of know what framing we're working with, right? My grandmother was one of, I believe, 12 kids brought in the wash when she was like, 8 years old. My grandmother, now my. My great grandfather was a sharecropper. My grandmother got a master's degree. A huge story in our family. Educational attainment is a huge thing, as you can tell. That's why I do this podcast. That's why I talk the way I talk. Whatever. Grandma got the master's degree, right?

1:15:07 Mom got in the. In the 80s, took her till the 80s, but got a law degree while working for the federal government. I stopped with my master's degree. My mother wanted me to go on and do other things. Things. But I stopped the master's degree because I thought, well, we've had enough lawyers in the world. Think I'm good, think I think I'm set. And that was as much of a tussle as you can imagine anyway. But. But I stopped at a master's degree, right? And one day I may get a doctorate. I don't know.

1:15:39 Just depends. It depends if it's something interesting, maybe, and I don't have to pay for it. If someone wants to give me an honorary doctorate, I'll take that, too, thank you very much, but

1:15:50 I won't turn down the honor. But with each one of those steps from sharecropper to where I am now, over the course of. Let's just round it out a hundred years, right? Take it a hundred years for the. For the side of my family that my mother comes from and that I am now the descendant of, to go from probably making less than a. Less than five bucks a month to where my current net worth is, which I'm not going to say what that is on the podcast, but let's just say I could sit at one end of that table that Tom is talking about and be comfortable.

1:16:29 Now, I could always get more money, but I could sit at one end of that table and be comfortable and not feel as if I was an imposter sitting at that table.

1:16:41 There's a long way from sharecropper to that table. Long way. And maybe my kid, one of my kids will be a finance major. Maybe he will be. I have no idea. But he's going to go the next step up. He might get to that 50 million or 100 million.

1:17:06 And the challenge that I see with leadership is Kanye rapped about this. People forget where they came from. For sure. People forget where they came from. And it's. It's something as simple as that. Jeff Bezos forgets where he came from. So does. So does Bill Gates. Bill Gates absolutely has forgotten where he came from. Like, if you had to knock Bill Gates down all the way back to putting together computers for, you know, some club in the 70s, you know, because his dad was a Harvard professor or whatever, he wouldn't be able to do it.

1:17:46 He wouldn't be able to go back down there and start all over again. And I often think about that, like all these people, all these men who are our version of World War I generals in our time, they have forgotten where they came from. And that's the fundamental mistake. And so the question you asked originally about the boards, the boards are also full of people who are aspirational and want to forget where they came from. And the. The CEO to CFO change, or as I put, well, yeah, we'll just use that.

1:18:21 The CEO to CFO change. That shift reflects an aspirational desire to have their stock price go up so they can sit it, so they can move up chairs in that table.

1:18:37 Sometimes psychological explanations are just really simple. Sometimes they're not complicated. You know,

1:18:47 back to the book, Back to the First World War by John Keegan.

1:19:00 There's one other point I want to make, but I want to say this first. The book rounds out with a chapter entitled America and Armageddon about the entering of America into World War I. One of the points that is interesting in here, in this chapter, is Keegan's effort to pull apart why America's entry into World War I was so important and the role of great power politics in a country that is currently in our geopolitical thoughts and mines.

1:19:46 So Russia's exit from the First World War was because of German meddling and interference.

1:19:56 Germany knew that Russia was having a revolution, and so they put a guy named Lenin on a train and sent him out through, I believe it was Finland Station, ensured his safe passage and he wound up in Petrograde and started doing the things that, well, Lenin was going to do.

1:20:22 The Russian Revolution and the Russian Civil War drained at minimum 10 million men from the Eastern Front, pulled them back into the country and ensured that Germany would be able to, would be able to hold the Western Front and be able to hold out against both the French, the combined, the combined will of the French and the British by at least late 1917. That's why the Germans sent Lenin on a train to Petrograde Petrograd. It was a tactical move that had strategic implications. However, what the Germans did not anticipate was the Americans showing up.

1:21:11 Matter of fact, the chapter 10 opens up with this from the Secretary of State for the Navy of Germany. I believe he said this about the Americans and I quote, they will not even come. Admiral Capel, the Secretary of State for the Navy, had assured the budgetary committee of the German Parliament on 31 January 1917, because our submarines will sink them. Thus America from a military point of view means nothing. And again, nothing. And for a third time, nothing.

1:21:56 Town talked previously about a tipping point right of power. And initially, Germany's analysis of America was correct. At the beginning of 1917, four months before the United States entered the war on the side of the Allies its army, as opposed to its large and modern navy, by the way, all the navies in the world were in competition with each other to build better boats. It was kind of amazing, actually. Might indeed they still are. Have you seen stuff coming out of China right now? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

1:22:28 Oh, yeah. Well, and we're, we're, we're. We're busy trying to figure out how to basically put. Without getting too much into the details. Glad you follow some of this. We're busy trying to try to figure out how to, how to put a nuclear warhead on a missile you could fire out of a torpedo tube on the top of a ship and turn into like an arrow that travels at supersonic speed. Because that's how we're going to solve that problem. That's what we're working on anyway. Anyway. Sorry, go ahead. No, it's like so, so one of the things, just as I know, so one of the things at the, at the end of World War II, when we were doing the nuclear, nuclear tests before we came up with the hydrogen bomb.

1:23:17 Edward Teller came up with the hydrogen bomb a couple of years after the atomic bomb got dropped. In that couple of years, we were testing

1:23:26 nuclear warheads. We had the idea to put. I think I said this before on the show. But to put a nuclear warhead on a shell and shoot it out of the, the turret of a tank.

1:23:42 This is why we're the greatest country on the, on earth and also the most dangerous. This is why. Because some junior officer, not even a junior officer. And I bet it was a Marine Corps officer. Honestly, that's Marine Corps thinking. Why don't we just take this warhead and just put it on this thing and just shoot it at those guys? Yeah, yeah. Make them smaller. Why are you making these giant, like these giant. Make them smaller. Actually, you know what I mean, the logic and thinking there is not terrible.

1:24:08 Plus, plus that's an American right there. That's how you know you're an American. No, no, because think of, think about it. Plus the destruction is isolated, like, right, like, like, like you can, it's not like you're. Again, what we did to Hiroshima and Nagasaki was in my opinion just criminal. Well, maybe not criminal, but it was, ah, it was, I mean it was world changing. We, we now, we now have the option to have moral qualms about it, which we may not have had that option if we had not dropped the bomb.

1:24:41 Agreed. Agreed. And I'll leave it at that. That's my, that's my whole, that's why, that's my conclusion about it. Agreed, but, but again, fast forward to now. We don't need that same level of destruction to make the point. The same point. We put this, we put the war. We, we put them on arrowheads instead of, instead of moabs where we're taking out a square block, like a city block instead of, you know what I mean? It's, it's precision. It's just, it's right, it's instrumental. It's not, it's not like I, I, whoever came up with that idea, I, I think we should explore it.

1:25:19 Oh, I think they have been for a while now. Anyway, to finish the sentence about America, Its army ranked in size 107,000 men, 17th in the world. It had no experience of large scale operations since the armistice and Appomattox 51 years earlier and possessed no modern equipment heavier than its medium machine guns. Its reserve, the National Guard. The larger, with 132,000 men, was the part time militia of the individual 48 states, poorly trained even in the richer states and subject to the sketchiest federal supervision.

1:25:56 Again, understating it like a Britisher can only understate it. Those guys are running around in the woods like shooting at food. Okay, that was, that was the National Guard. Back in the day, the only first class American force, the United States Marine Corps. 1234. I love Marine Corps. 15,500 strong was scattered in America's overseas possessions and areas of intervention, including several Central American republics which the United States had decided to police in the aftermath of the Spanish American War of 1898.

1:26:29 By the way, one of those Central American republics was your friend in mind, Cuba.

1:26:36 Anyway, by the way, I met a guy the other day who's, who knew, who knew a guy whose grandfather rode with Pancho Villa. Oh, no kidding. Yeah, I was like, it's pretty awesome. That's awesome. Ah, we're not making guys like that anymore anyway, but the United States. And then I'll go to this. And he does say this, by the way, Keegan points this out to Tom's, to Tom's credit. Rare are the times in a great war when the fortunes of one side or the other are transformed by the sudden accrual accretion of a disequiliberating reinforce, a disequiliberating reinforcement.

1:27:16 Those of Napoleon's enemies were so transformed in 1813 when the failure of his Moscow campaign brought the Russian army to the side of British and Austria. Those of the United States against the Confederacy were transformed in 1863 when the adoption of conscription brought the North's millions into play against the South's hundreds of thousands. Those of an isolated Britain and an almost defeated Soviet Union would be transformed in 1941 when Hitler's intemperance declaration of war against America brought the power of the world's leading state to stand against that of Nazi Germany as well as Imperial Japan.

1:27:47 By 1918, President Wilson's decision to declare war on Germany and its allies had brought such an accretion to the Allied side. Capell's theory, quote, unquote. They will never come, have been triumphed or have been trumped in six months by America's melodramatic Lafayette. I am here. The United States had not wanted to enter the war. America, its president Woodrow Wilson had said, was, quote, too proud to fight, close quote. And it has sustained a succession of diplomatic affronts from the sinking of the Lusitania and its American passengers to the German attempts to foment a divisionary war in Mexico without responding to provocation by material means.

1:28:29 Now he does talk about black troops, interestingly enough in here, kind of does an interesting aside about that. You can read, you can read about that. But then he goes into a deep under, a deep dive into Russian Bolshevikism and into why Russia With Trotsky and Lenin at the. At the forefront, were having such trouble with the Germans and why they struggled to sign the Bre what is it? The Brest Litzlock Treaty. But one of the points that he made, which I did not know, I was not aware of, was that Finland, interestingly enough, was once part of Russia

1:29:13 before World War I. Did not know that they were also part of that nationalistic friction that began to grow because of the collapse of the aristocracies and the collapse of the aristocratic system in Europe as a result of World War I. Now, as America entered the war, the Turks began to collapse and the Ottoman Empire began to fall apart after Gallipoli. And of course the machinations of T.E. lawrence and the rise of the Arabs who wanted their own countries began as well towards the end of World War I. And of course has led to all of the current shenanigans we have around Palestine, Israel, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and on and on and on.

1:30:12 Also Russia, just to point this out, is still working through the exoduses of World War I in its current fight with the Ukraine, by the way, the Donbas region, all of that. Germany successfully pushed into that during World War I and was loathe to give it up. Matter of fact, the spot where Putin is now coming from, coming from east to west, the Germans made it to that spot in World War I, coming from west to east and were loath to give it up as part of the Treaty of Versailles. Ukraine has always had problems.

1:30:56 In the close of our episode today, a couple of things that I would like to point out as we've had a lively conversation, I would encourage you to pick up the First World War. I would also encourage you to pick up John Keegan's second volume, the Second World War, where he talks about in a one volume history about everything that went on in, went on in World War II. A couple of things to point out here. One of the real stories, and we didn't talk too much about this today, but one of the real stories of World War I that often doesn't get talked about is the story of the the friction that lay between local people who are focused on local battles versus elite people who were focused on more global concerns, right?

1:31:43 And we even have this friction and this challenge today. One of the things that's geopolitically lamented with the rise of quote unquote populism is the idea that somehow, and there is a hook underneath this, that somehow being focused on local things for local people in your local backyard somehow makes you provincial or unable to understand global concerns. But then there's also the opposite side of that, where being too focused on global concerns and being too cosmopolitan leaves you at a remove, like Mr. Hague and many of the other generals from what the actual local people who actually voted for you actually want.

1:32:33 And I don't know how you solve that problem, but what I do know is that when both positions are hardened, it makes you blindly arrogant, and then you wind up in a space where war can happen. And I think. I think over the last hundred years, we've been doing our damnedest as human beings to try to balance that and to try to avoid that blind arrogance. The other thing that we didn't point out too much, we kind of touched on it a little bit with the flattening of hierarchies when we had our conversation about CEOs, is this.

1:33:09 This is sort of the last point I would make today,

1:33:14 100 plus years later, after World War I, at the close of World War I, with the death of the European aristocratic class. Or maybe not death. Death's probably an over. An over exaggeration. It just goes into other places. Diminishment. Yeah, diminishment, Absolutely. The diminishment of the European aristocratic class. We live in a world where, particularly in America, where hierarchies are ruthlessly flattened in the pursuit of liberal egalitarianism. You see this in the way that. To go back to Bill Gates for just a minute, Bill Gates dresses.

1:33:48 He dresses like he's your uncle from the 1980s.

1:33:56 He may have forgotten where he came from, but he knows how to put on the uniform like he hasn't. And yeah, his Nikes are more expensive than yours, but they're still Nikes. H. There's something that has happened, and I think it's one of those un. Undiscussed, unmentioned outgrowths from World War I, where hierarchies,

1:34:23 no, you need leaders to do things, and you need leaders to be at least the way humans have the. Have the pyramid set up. You need leaders to be at the top. You need people to execute, to be in the middle. And then you have a whole bunch of people at the bottom that are just walking around waiting for direction. This is how we have our hierarchy set up. And hierarchy exists almost as a function of reality. But the pendulum that we live with now has swung far away from where it was originally in a pre1914 world.

1:34:58 And I think that this is the part that, like, frustrates us when we can see it. Other places. And we wonder, rightly so, probably why is it that even now, or that now kings and prime ministers want to wear Nikes and Cosby sweaters, but they don't seem to be willing to abandon the other aspects of their elitism? This is why there's a lot of chest thumping in the United States about billionaires and taxing the rich. Lot of chest thumping about this and very little ability to actually cross the gap and talk to those people because of hierarchies.

1:35:35 So those are some of the lessons that I have picked up from the war to end all wars. Tom, what do we need to learn from World War I we can apply to our leadership struggles 111 years on?

1:35:52 I think there's. Without getting, I mean, we could probably have another podcast episode just on this question alone, because I think there's a tremendous amount that we can think about from, from the technological advancements, right? Without World War I, we wouldn't have the tank. And every war, every subsequent subsequent war since then has, has introduced technology at, at a lightning pace, right? So like, so it's, it's like that whole necessity is the mother of invention thing, right? So on a, at a, at a company, at a corporate level, same idea, if your company is being threatened to go out of business, some sort of hostile takeover, etc. Etc. You're looking for some sort of technological advancement to save your skin, right?

1:36:37 Like, so we, we learned that from warfare that you can, you don't have to lean into. You can, you can lean into the technology version of your company in order to try to save yourself or, and save your, your people. The, the hierarchy thing. I, I don't think I could really say a lot more to. Other than the fact that I think it, I think it's changed from the bottom up, not the other way around. I think that the people on the bottom have forced the issue going up because it's. There is some realization somewhere along the line that, that somebody said, hey, without those people on the bottom, that company doesn't exist.

1:37:14 So we have to act. We have to. We. We should know that we're important and we should walk around as if we're no less important than the people above us. So like, now, that being said, I. The way that you described it is perfectly okay with that thinking because the people on the bottom that you are describing walking around aimlessly are still doing that, even though it's the, it's the middle, it's the middle section that, that ties the two, right? Meaning, like the middle section Kind of gets it.

1:37:41 They weren't at the bottom long enough ago that they don't remember and they want to get to the top so they still assume aspire. I think it's that middle section that really drives that. I think they drive it. I think they, they sharpen the knife at both ends because I think they drive the wedge. I think they drive the wedge at the top and I think they absorb the, the, the wants and fears from the bottom. Right. But I think they do it very calculatedly and I think that that's that middle part of the hierarchy that actually runs more of the world than we think it does.

1:38:11 Yeah. From a corporate level. I'm not talking about the military necessary. But from the war. No, I think every. I think, I think everywhere. No, I think you're right. I think everywhere. I also think it. And it just occurred to me, I just clicked over as you were saying it. This is the unintended consequence of, of the Marxist revolution in Russia. Because what Marx. Not Marx. Well, well, yeah, what Marx was proposing was a rejiggering of class structures. Sure. So that the proletariat would have, would have shared common power or the means of production or whatever fancy term Marxists are using now.

1:38:47 I think they're still using means of production. I think mom dummy recently said that the New York City mayoral candidate talking about how we will redistribute the means of production. And I was, yeah, I did hear that. And I thought, kiddo, you don't say that out loud. You don't, don't let your inside voice out. Gotta be careful about that. You gotta watch out for that anyway. But I think the knock on concept, the knock on effect of Lenin actually trying to make that happen in a nation state like Russia during the course of all the chaos of World War I,

1:39:24 weirdly enough, had a positive effect. And I almost never say anything positive about Marxism because I think it's a terrible theory for how humans should be organized. But I think it had a, that was the one positive effect is that the people from the bottom up could now push the issue more. Yeah. Because they actually had a material example of what pushing that issue meant. And by the way, I always, and I've always said on this, this on the show people pre1920, pre1950 even I'm willing to give grace to on Marxism, I really am.

1:40:01 Because you don't know what you don't know. You don't know what you don't know. Right. You just, you just don't hell, I'll not even 1950 I'll say pre1930 because by 1930 things are starting to like sort of pop up under Stalin where people were like oh this is not maybe the best thing. But up until that point they didn't know. They, they actually genuinely did not know what this would look like in, in reality. And they want. Wanted a chance to try it and Lenin, even though he was a sadistic sociopathic murderer, gave them a chance to try it.

1:40:35 Yeah. Anyway, go ahead. So yeah. So the middle folks. The knife sharpens at both ends. A couple, a couple other things I think of is like you know, again this is really where we start think. This is really the point in history where we start thinking we should play out scenarios in live action instead of just on paper. The war, I. E. The war games, things like that. So, so that led to. Again, so in corporate America you're starting to. When you lay out your. Earlier you talked about laying out the marketing plan, you're laying out these marketing plans.

1:41:07 There are environments where you can test these things before you go live so that you're. It's basically our version of war games, right? You. How would you. You have focus groups, you have all kinds of things. You can test these things and start before you deploy your actual hard earned money, so to speak. So between that the. And then I think the biggest thing honestly that, that, that we learned from World War I is that adaptability factor. Like you're going into something full steam ahead. Something happens, you have to change directions.

1:41:37 I, I think it's the, I think it's the first instance of where we can use the term we need to pivot like, like this is happening, we need to pivot. Let's focus our attention, let's change the focus. You know and because that's what they did, especially once the US Got involved in the war, you saw that much more clearly when the US Got involved in the war because the US Looked at and said hey, we got the smallest army in this game. We're not willing to lose our people, so we need to be better at this.

1:42:05 Like, and you saw that when, when you saw some of the, the US Generals get involved and you saw some of the. Was a clear. There was a clear. You're talking about the Psalm and like there's other battles in there. There was clear differences once the US Got involved in those war in that war that said we're not just going to throw caution to the wind. We're not just going to throw Our boys to the, to the wolves, so to speak. And you, you start in World War II as well. Like just, it happens throughout the course of our warfare here.

1:42:34 So I think, I think World War I was really the epitome of all of that. The, the adaptability, the planning, the structure, the all, you know, and again from a corporate environment, what you take out of that is the exact same thing. Adaptability, structure and planning, like the same lessons can be learned. It's just a matter of our deployment has less lively left lives at stake. Although, I mean if you have a 50, 000 person company that goes under now, you have 50, 000 people unemployed, those lives are, those lives are at stake.

1:43:00 So yeah, you know, you still got to think about from a leadership perspective. And, and I think the other thing is, you know, we saw it to your point about the communication and, and how communication was impacted in World War I warfare today. That's just not the same. It's not the same. Like we learned, we learned lessons from that, that, that we basically said that is never going to happen to us ever again. And again. If you look at, at companies that have been around for a significantly late leg of time, I'm thinking like the Hudson Bay Company that started in the 1800s, that is still in existence today.

1:43:33 It's a little bit different. I know, don't, don't come at me. I understand that it looks a little different today, but the foundation of that company still exists. The, you know, the telecommunications company that sprung up with Ma Bell and you know, things like that. Like companies that have been around, what is it? Rockport and some of these other companies that have been around for literally over a century. You think they do business the exact same way they did after World War. No. They like their entire business models have changed things.

1:43:59 They've adapted, they've shown that same level of adaptability and which is why they've been around 100 plus years. So it's, it's, there's a, there's mirrors involved in military tactics and military strategies to corporate tactics and strategies. There's direct correlations to how these things work between. Again, next man up we talked about like, so you get a, you get a great sales manager, leads a great sales team. He quits because, because he gets offered a VP of sales somewhere else and you got a next man up, you, somebody has to take their place.

1:44:31 So you gotta just, you move it and you're not gonna, you're not gonna stop the ship because one person jumps ship. You've got to figure out a way to move the wheel, to move the needle, to keep the cog moving. And, you know, and having those again, In World War I, it was one of the first instances of, like, that you. You have to have the backup plan. Right? Because plan, Plan one, if it fails, we need to know what we're doing. We can't be. We can't fail and then regroup. And in an environment like World War I, you can't just say, oh, just go for it, and we'll see what happens.

1:45:05 And if it fails, we'll regroup and we'll decide what. That. What to do next. That. That's. That is not a thing. Again, from a corporate perspective, you have to have. You have to be at the ready of. For that kind of. That kind of thinking at the same time. So I think there's a lot of lessons we can learn from World War I that we could move into the corporate world. Excellent. Well, with that, I'd like to thank Tom Libby for coming on our show today and joining me. Always a pleasure. Always my pleasure.

1:45:32 All right. With that, well, we're out.