#773: Andrew Roberts on The Habits of Churchill, Lessons from Napoleon, and The Holy Fire Inside Great Leaders

Andrew Roberts has written twenty books, which have been translated into twenty-eight languages and have won thirteen literary prizes. These include Napoleon: A Life https://www.amazon.com/Napoleon-Life-Andrew-Roberts/dp/0143127853/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20, Churchill: Walking with Destiny https://www.amazon.com/Churchill-Andrew-Roberts-audiobook/dp/B07K4DL8QP/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20, and most recently, Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to Gaza https://www.amazon.com/Conflict-Evolution-Warfare-1945-Ukraine/dp/0063293145, which he co-authored with General David Petraeus. Sponsors: Our Place's Titanium Always Pan® Pro https://fromourplace.com/tim using nonstick technology that’s coating-free and made without PFAS, otherwise known as “Forever Chemicals”: https://fromourplace.com/tim (10% off all products from Our Place using code TIM) Shopify https://shopify.com/tim global commerce platform, providing tools to start, grow, market, and manage a retail business: https://shopify.com/tim (one-dollar-per-month trial period) LinkedIn Jobs https://linkedin.com/tim recruitment platform with 1B+ users: https://linkedin.com/tim (post your job for free) Timestamps: [00:00:00] Start [00:06:14] Expelled from Cranleigh school. [00:07:14] Why MI6 considered Andrew for recruitment. [00:09:56] The teacher who made history exciting to 10-year-old Andrew. [00:13:05] Words Andrew avoids when writing about history. [00:14:20] Are steady-nerved leaders naturally born or nurtured? [00:16:05] The thinkers who influenced Winston Churchill and his sense of noblesse oblige. [00:18:26] What made Napoleon Bonaparte the prime exemplar of war leadership? [00:24:37] Lessons from Winston Churchill's autobiography, My Early Life. [00:26:22] Napoleon's relationship with risk. [00:29:26] Andrew's signed letter from Aldous Huxley. [00:30:49] When historical figures carry a sense of personal destiny. [00:33:07] The meeting Andrew wishes he could've witnessed as a fly on the wall. [00:34:30] When historical villains carry a sense of personal destiny. [00:37:14] What Churchill and Napoleon learned from their mistakes. [00:39:38] "Dear Diary..." [00:44:00] Maintaining creative flow during the writing process. [00:47:18] On working with brilliant publisher Stuart Proffitt (aka Professor Perfect). [00:52:53] Why are some significant figures immortalized while others go the way of Ozymandias? [00:57:59] Thoughts on personal legacy. [00:59:18] Fiction favorites. [01:02:05] Being objective about the history of imperialism. [01:03:31] The challenges of teaching and learning history today. [01:06:40] Why "Study history" is Andrew's coat of arms motto. [01:10:22] What Andrew, as a history expert, sees for the future. [01:14:01] Counteracting natural pessimism. [01:15:34] What to expect from Andrew's latest book Conflict (co-authored with David Petraeus). [01:19:21] Upcoming book projects. [01:20:26] Parting thoughts. * For show notes and past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show https://tim.blog/podcast, please visit tim.blog/podcast https://tim.blog/podcast/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=podcast-description. For deals from sponsors of The Tim Ferriss Show https://tim.blog/podcast, please visit tim.blog/podcast-sponsors https://tim.blog/podcast-sponsors Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (5-Bullet Friday) at tim.blog/friday https://go.tim.blog/5-bullet-friday-1/. For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts https://tim.blog/transcripts. 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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to deconstruct world-class performers, or deconstruct those who deconstruct world-class performers. In the case of today's guest, who is Andrew Roberts. Andrew Roberts has written 20 books, which have been translated into 28 languages and have won 13 literary prizes. These include Masters and Commanders, The Storm of War, A New History of the Second World War, Napoleon, A Life, Churchill, Walking with Destiny, George III, The Life and Reign of Britain's Most Misunderstood Monarch, and, most recently, Conflict, The Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to Gaza, which he co-authored with General David Petraeus.

• 0:45Tim Ferriss?

  Lord Roberts is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Historical Society, the Bonnie and Tom McCloskey Distinguished Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, and a visiting professor at the Department of War Studies at King's College, London. He is also a member of the House of Lords. You can find all things Andrew at Andrew-Roberts.net online, and he is also on X, the artist formerly known as Twitter, at X.com/A-Roberts underscore Andrew. And we're going to get to the interview, but quickly, before that, just a few words about our sponsors, who make this show possible. In the last handful of years, I've become very interested in environmental toxins, avoiding

• 1:27Tim Ferriss?

  microplastics, and many other commonly-found compounds all over the place. One place I looked is in the kitchen. Many people don't realize just how toxic their cookware is or can be. A lot of non-stick pans, practically all of them, can release harmful forever chemicals, PFAS, in other words, spelled PFAS, into your food, your home, and then ultimately, that ends up in your body. Teflon is a prime example of this. It is still the forever chemical that most companies are using. So our place reached out to me as a potential sponsor, and the first thing I did was look at the reviews of their products and said, "Send me one." And that is the Titanium Always Pan Pro.

• 2:11Tim Ferriss?

  And the claim is that it's the first nonstick pan with zero coating. So that means zero forever chemicals and durability that'll last forever. I was very skeptical. I was very busy. So I said, you know what? I want to test this thing quickly. It's supposed to be nonstick. It's supposed to be durable. I'm going to test it with two things. I'm going to test it with scrambled eggs in the morning because eggs are always a disaster in anything that isn't nonstick with the toxic coating. And then I'm going to test it with a steak sear because I want to see how much it retains heat. And it worked perfectly in both cases and I was frankly astonished how well it worked. The Titanium Always Pan Pro has become my go-to pan in the kitchen.

• 2:54Tim Ferriss?

  It replaces a lot of other things for searing, for eggs, for anything you can imagine. And the design is really clever. It does combine the best qualities of stainless steel, cast iron, and nonstick into one product. It's tough enough to withstand the dishwasher, open flame, heavy-duty scrubbing. You can scrub the hell out of it. You can use metal utensils, which is great, without losing any of its nonstick properties. So stop cooking with toxic pans. If they're nonstick and you don't know, they probably contain something bad. Check out the Titanium Always Pan Pro. While you're at it, you can look at their other high-performance offerings that are toxin-free, like the Wonder Oven Air Fryer, their Griddle Pan, and their precision-engineered German steel knives.

• 3:34Tim Ferriss?

  So go to fromourplace.com/tim and use my code TIM to get 10% off of the Titanium Always Pan Pro or anything else on the site. You can check out anything. More time, that's fromourplace.com, spelled out F-R-O-M-O-U-R. Fromourplace.com/tim and use code TIM at checkout for 10% off of everything on the site. Our Place also offers a 100-day trial with free shipping and returns. So take a look. This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Shopify is the all-in-one commerce platform that powers millions of businesses worldwide, including me, including mine. What business, you might ask? Well, one way I've scratched my own itch is by creating Cock Punch Coffee. It's a long story.

• 4:18Tim Ferriss?

  All proceeds on my end go to my foundation, SISI Foundation, to fund research for mental health, et cetera. Anyway, Cock Punch Coffee, it's delicious. The first coffee I've ever produced myself. I drink it every morning. Check it out. We use Shopify for the online storefront and my team raves about how simple and easy it is to use. It has everything we need and nothing we don't. Whether you're a garage entrepreneur or getting ready for your IPO, Shopify is the only tool you need to start, run, and grow your business without the struggle. Shopify puts you in control of every sales channel. Doesn't matter if you're selling satin sheets from Shopify's in-person POS system or offering organic olive oil on Shopify's all-in-one e-commerce platform. However you interact with your customers, you're covered.

• 5:00Tim Ferriss?

  And once you've reached your audience, Shopify has the internet's best converting checkout to help you turn browsers into buyers. Shopify powers 10% of all e-commerce in the United States. And Shopify is truly a global force as the e-commerce solution behind Allbirds, Rothies, Brooklinen, and millions of other entrepreneurs of every size across more than 170 countries. Plus, Shopify's award-winning help is there to support your success every step of the way if you have questions. This is possibility powered by Shopify. So check it out. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify. That's S-H-O-P-I-F-Y. Shopify.com/Tim. Go to Shopify.com/Tim to take your business to the next level today.

• 5:42Tim Ferriss?

  One more time, all lowercase, Shopify.com/Tim. At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.

• 5:52Speaker 01

  Can I ask you a personal question?

• 5:54Speaker 02

  No, it would seem inappropriate, Tim.

• 5:57Speaker 01

  What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 6:02Speaker 03

  The Tim Ferriss Show.

• 6:11Tim Ferriss?

  Pleasure to meet you. Thank you for taking the time.

• 6:12Speaker 02

  Thanks so much, Tim, for having me on this show.

• 6:15Tim Ferriss?

  I thought we would start with Cranley after your A-levels.

• 6:19Speaker 02

  Did you now?

• 6:20Tim Ferriss?

  What happened? What on earth happened?

• 6:23Speaker 02

  That's the way we're gonna make friends and get on with each other.

• 6:27Tim Ferriss?

  Roll up the sleeves and just get into it.

• 6:29Speaker 02

  You're gonna mention the reason I was expelled from school, or at least I'm gonna mention the reason, because you don't know.

• 6:34Tim Ferriss?

  I don't know the reason.

• 6:35Speaker 02

  Absolutely. Good. Okay. I don't think I'm the first person ever, as a young man, to get drunk and climb up buildings. You know, that-

• 6:43Tim Ferriss?

  Absolutely not.

• 6:44Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 6:44Tim Ferriss?

  Time-honored tradition, I think.

• 6:45Speaker 02

  Hallelujah that I'm not the only person this happened to. But quite understandably, the school chucked me out before I fell off one of them, you know, and they'd have got blamed. It led to actually one of my wife's most brilliant witicisms. She's a very funny woman, my wife, and she said, "Yes, and all Andrew's done since in life is to get drunk and social climb."

• 7:10Tim Ferriss?

  That is clever.

• 7:11Speaker 02

  It's not bad, is it?

• 7:12Tim Ferriss?

  All right. Well, we might come back to that.

• 7:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:14Tim Ferriss?

  It seems like also, maybe it's hard for me to tell, given the British school system, although I did go to St. Paul's in New Hampshire, where they do have the third, fourth, fifth, sixth form and so on. So that much I know. But I think in the same piece where I found the Cranley bit in doing the research, also found note that you were approached as a possible candidate for MI6 a bit later on?

• 7:36Speaker 02

  No, that was when I was at Cambridge.

• 7:38Tim Ferriss?

  Cambridge?

• 7:38Speaker 02

  Yes, yes, absolutely. That's the right time to be approached for MI6 is because Cambridge and MI6 have had a long and fairly disastrous career, needless to say. All of the worst spies in the 1930s, traitors of the 1930s, went to Cambridge. But yeah, it was a fascinating thing. I was just going down from university and somebody in my college, one of the Dons there, who's still there, actually, I'm thinking of it, approached me and said, "How about it? Would you be interested in becoming a spy?" And so automatically, needless to say, you just think of yourself as James Bond immediately. That sort of dun da la dun, dun dun dun dun da la dun da is going on.

• 8:18Tim Ferriss?

  The soundtrack kicks on.

• 8:18Speaker 02

  The soundtrack in the back of your brain, you're automatically there with your Beretta and the beautiful women and all of that kind of- But I then had to actually do the process of where you need to join, which I did get through. And it was completely hilarious. I mean, it was, you couldn't satirize it, basically. They asked you things like, there were hundreds of questions and you had to answer them very, very quickly. And some of them were things you'd expect, like, you know, what are the five longest rivers in the world? Kind of thing. Put them in order and all that. There were also things like place in order of social precedent. Prince, Duke, Viscount, Marquess, Baronet.

• 8:56Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, I'm out.

• 8:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, exactly.

• 8:58Tim Ferriss?

  I would have thrown in Cookie Monster. I wouldn't have gotten anywhere.

• 9:01Speaker 02

  You're American, you're allowed to. They're not going to ask that in the CIA. But in, for some reason, in MI6, back, this was, I hasten to add, back in the sort of mid 1980s. That was one of the questions.

• 9:12Tim Ferriss?

  What did the Don think made you a potential candidate?

• 9:17Speaker 02

  Well, that also was a little bit annoying, really, because he told me later about how he had been interviewed by MI6. And one of the things he'd been asked is, and is Andrew a kind person? And this person said, no, not really. And he saw the person interviewing him put a tick in the margin next to the question.

• 9:39Tim Ferriss?

  I wonder if that made you more or less desirable?

• 9:41Speaker 02

  Much more desirable, as far as they were concerned. They tick the thing.

• 9:46Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 9:47Speaker 02

  I can answer that. Well, James Bond, he's not a kind person, is he, really?

• 9:51Tim Ferriss?

  No, no, no. You view them as disposable pleasures? Well, perhaps. So let's see if we can take off the initial layers of the onion with respect to history. Christopher Perry, Mr. Christopher Perry, who's that?

• 10:05Speaker 02

  He was my first history teacher when I was at prep school, which in the English version means when you're sort of 10 to 13. He's dead now, but he was an inspirational history master. He taught history in the way that I think it should be taught. In a narrative way of explaining, really, you know, what happened next and why. He believed in the great events, the great sort of wars and battles and things like that. And he was a kind man. He wouldn't have made it into MI6.

• 10:37Speaker 02

  But he was a sort of old school history master of the best possible kind.

• 10:42Tim Ferriss?

  What characterized that? You said narrative, but maybe would you be able to contrast the status quo as it goes in terms of teaching history? And then how his style most differed from that?

• 10:54Speaker 02

  He taught it as the most exciting story you're ever going to hear, basically, which has the extraordinary added advantage of being completely true. He'd sort of sit cross legged on the table and give you the voice of Charles the First and then the voice of Oliver Cromwell. You know, Elizabeth the First and Mary, Queen of Scots, he would entrance you with the excitement of the unfolding story. Every word of which would be true, it would have loads of dates in it. At the end of the term, each of the terms, the semester, you'd be tested on 300 dates. And not a child in that class didn't get at least 298 of them right.

• 11:33Speaker 02

  Extraordinary way of teaching. He did it entirely through inspiration rather than through just sort of standing there on a blackboard, ordering people to remember, you know, what happened in 1356 or 1415.

• 11:45Tim Ferriss?

  Did he have any theater background?

• 11:47Speaker 02

  You'd have thought, wouldn't you? You'd have thought.

• 11:49Tim Ferriss?

  Cause just sitting cross legged on the desk is going to get a requisite minimal amount of attention from the students, which is brilliant.

• 11:56Speaker 02

  Automatically, of course, exactly. No, I mean, now I come to think of it, of course, he was overacting from day one. But he didn't seem to be at the time, at least as far as the, as the 10 year old Andrew Roberts was concerned.

• 12:11Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, we have a sort of rental library behind us in this room that I've rented. And one of the books sitting over there, The Power Broker, does an amazing job of end of chapter cliffhangers. That's, I think, Robert Caro over there.

• 12:24Speaker 02

  And he managed to make urban development, essentially that book's about urban development, isn't it? And he managed to make that interesting. But you've got a few other ones. You've got a great friend of mine there, Neil Bergerson, writing about, you know, his book, Colossus. You've got, you've got some pretty interesting people, a few people that I've met. And yeah, so you might have rented it, but it's a pretty good bunch of books.

• 12:47Tim Ferriss?

  And it's also quite surreal that Neil is featured here since he is, I'd say, partially responsible for us meeting in the first place.

• 12:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, he told me definitely to go on your show. He said loads of people watch it and you've got a good sense of humor. We'll see.

• 13:00Tim Ferriss?

  We'll see about the sense of humor.

• 13:02Speaker 02

  We'll see later.

• 13:02Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, the jury is out. The jury is out.

• 13:06Tim Ferriss?

  I found in writing history, and I'm paraphrasing here, but I believe you've said before that you're cautious around the words perhaps, maybe, possibly, especially, probably.

• 13:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:18Tim Ferriss?

  Could you explain why?

• 13:20Speaker 02

  Don't use them. They're cheat words. What they're saying to the reader is, I haven't worked hard enough on this. I don't know. I'm gonna just come up with some kind of theory here. Bear with me. You shouldn't do that. If the person's paid forty dollars for your book, he or she is going to want to think you know what you're talking about. So if something is a great story, and you're not sure it's true, but nonetheless, it's funny, or it shines a light onto personality, or for some reason, there's a great reason why you need to put it in the book, there are loads of ways that you can hint to the reader. You know, you can say, it is said that, or the story is told that, or, you

• 14:01Speaker 02

  know, anecdotally, people stated that, you know, and that's the signal to the reader, this is probably not true at all.

• 14:08Tim Ferriss?

  Someone's hedging their bets.

• 14:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, but it's too good to leave out. But perhaps, probably, and maybe, and so on. There you really are hedging your bets. I think it breaks the bond of trust that you need to have with your reader.

• 14:21Tim Ferriss?

  Would you mind speaking to the importance of steady nerves or self-control in crisis? It seems that that's something that recurs. And the reason I'm asking about it is, this would be, I suppose, a sub-question. How much of it do you think is nature versus nurture also? But feel free to take that in any direction you'd like.

• 14:43Speaker 02

  Both Napoleon and Churchill were educated in war. You know, they both went to military colleges. So as their level of command grew, as they grew older, the sense of responsibilities they had, the number of men essentially that they were controlling. Increased exponentially. So they had the intellectual background, they had the training as well. And as young men in both cases, they thought a lot about war, about Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great and so on. They had a egotism to look at it in the negative way, but a self-confidence to look at it in a positive way that gave them the ability to

• 15:26Speaker 02

  take these shatteringly important decisions. So I think it's much more nurture than the nature. And, you know, in both cases, as far as they were concerned, there was a sort of holy fire that they both had. There was a, not wholly in a religious sense, obviously, because neither of them were at all religious, but in a sort of deeper spiritual sense, a belief that what they were doing was so good and right and proper and had to be done, that they were not kept up awake at night over even the death of friends.

• 16:00Tim Ferriss?

  Hmm.

• 16:02Speaker 02

  Death of friends that they were responsible for.

• 16:04Tim Ferriss?

  They were responsible for. In the cases of Churchill and Napoleon, we could bring up other names, or I suppose I'm using the royal we here, you could bring up other names. Were there particular philosophers or writers that they found particularly instructive, that they leaned on in some sense, that they found solace in? Were there particular minds?

• 16:24Speaker 02

  Well, certainly Churchill did because he was a huge reader. He was a massive autodidact. He never went to university. And so therefore, when he was a young subaltern in India in his early twenties, he he sat down and read the great philosophers as well as writers. And he was particularly influenced by Gibbon and Macaulay, the two great 19th century historians, English historians. And that affected his writing style, and of course, later his oratorical style, but also his outlook on on life, philosophical outlook on life. With regards to Napoleon, he was even more literary, really, because he also wrote short stories and books and so on. And so he

• 17:10Speaker 02

  Was very much affected by what he read again as a young man. And in both cases, it's slightly, they were reading so much that it slightly cut them off from their contemporaries. Napoleon, you know, didn't have many friends when he was in his early twenties. And Churchill, when the other people were, were, you know, off sleeping in the, in the midday heat of India, his colleagues and comrades, he'd be sitting there reading, you know, Chopin hour and Gibbon and McCauley and so on.

• 17:43Tim Ferriss?

  How did Gibbon and McCauley inform his philosophical leanings?

• 17:48Speaker 02

  They made him into what was called at the time a Whig. We don't have them today, obviously. But they were, in modern sense, I suppose, liberal conservatives who believed in noblesse oblige, in the importance of

• 18:02Tim Ferriss?

  What is that? I'm sorry.

• 18:03Speaker 02

  Noblesse oblige, it's a, almost a medieval concept where your duty, if you have privilege, is to work for the greater good of the community, to protect widows and orphans, to, it's a sort of like the knightly chivalric concept that you get from the Middle Ages. And they very much believed in that, and so did Churchill.

• 18:26Tim Ferriss?

  Let me ask about Napoleon. So I know shockingly little about Napoleon. I'm embarrassed to admit, and I do want to ask more about Churchill as well, but you've described him as the prime exemplar of war leadership. Why do you say that?

• 18:39Speaker 02

  There were lots of military leaders who can do a lot of things, but he was the only one that I can think of who could do all of them. Of course, it helps if you're winning. He, in the last three years of his, of his military career, he was losing. But even then, even when he had far fewer troops, when he was retreating, when he was defending Paris in the eighteen fourteen campaign, for example, he was still able to win five victories in seven days in the eighteen fourteen campaign. That's two years after the retreat from Moscow. It's quite extraordinary capacity. And he was able to win, whether he was advancing or retreating, whether he was defending a town or attacking it, whether he was attacking on the right

• 19:22Speaker 02

  or left flank, or sometimes straight through the centre, as at Austerlitz, he had that. Capacity that that mind for military conquest, but also, of course, the greatness that was required completely to revolutionize French society. People think that the French Revolution revolutionized society, you know, the clues in the name, as it were. But in fact, the long lasting things that actually dragged France into the 19th century were things like the Code Napoleon, which were not a revolutionary concept, they were a Napoleonic concept.

• 19:58Tim Ferriss?

  This may seem like a lazy question, but since I'm operating from a deficit here with respect to knowledge of Napoleon, what do you think it was that allowed him to be a decathlete of war, as it were, being good at all of these different facets? And I think of how we might analyze different athletes and what allows them to exercise the capabilities we see, sort of breaking it down into its component parts. But how would you describe what enabled him to do that where others were unable?

• 20:28Speaker 02

  It was inspiration, but also perspiration. He really did put in the time, thinking about it and reading about it. By it, I mean, I mean warfare. And of course, he'd been educated in it. He read the key books. There's a guy called the Comte de Gierbert, who in 1772 wrote a book about strategy and tactics. And he, 30 years later, put these into operation. And so he was able to spot the sort of best of the best when it came to a modern thinking and to, or in this case, 30 year old thinking, in fact. That didn't matter because the weapons

• 21:07Speaker 02

  of war hadn't changed in in the intervening period. And he was able to put those thoughts and ideas into practical use. A classic example being the corps system. And when

• 21:20Tim Ferriss?

  What was it called?

• 21:21Speaker 02

  It's called the corps system. It's basically C O R E? Uh, C O R P S. And what he did with them was to create mini armies essentially, which were able to march separately but converge and concentrate for the battle. And so one of your corps would engage the enemy and then he would use the other corps to outmaneuver and envelop the enemy, sometimes double envelop the enemy. It was a brilliant concept and actually the Allies didn't start beating Napoleon until they had also adopted the corps system. He was always at the cutting edge of thinking of the new concepts.

• 22:02Speaker 02

  And at the same time, he had very old fashioned views about how to excite the men. And he, I mean victory obviously is the best thing when it comes to. Encouragement. Exactly. Nothing much works better than that. But as I say, he was still winning at the end of his career. But he had this belief that to appeal to the soul was the way to electrify the men. And so he was able to do that. And some people who he was against, Duke of Wellington, the British general, being the classic example, who won the Battle of Waterloo against him. He wasn't interested in electrifying the soul of the men at all. He rather despised his ordinary soldiers, but nonetheless. You're talking about Wellington or?

• 22:46Speaker 02

  The Duke of Wellington, he had some sort of choice negative remarks about his, about his own soldiers. And he was a rather sort of stuffy aristocrat. But they loved him because he cared about how many of them died in battle, you know? And he never lost a battle as well, which is a very useful thing in a commander, needless to say. And he didn't try, he didn't go out. He would think it beneath him to go out and try to inspire the men. Whereas Napoleon, his choice of hat and his grey coat and his way of taking off medal, his own medals and giving them to soldiers on the battlefield. And his orders of the day, his proclamations before the Battle of the Pyramids in seventeen ninety nine.

• 23:30Speaker 02

  He said, forty centuries look down upon you. And this is an extraordinary thing for a soldier, you know, in Egypt, far away from home. He looks up at the pyramids and thinks, yeah, he's placing the events of that day in the long historical parabola.

• 23:46Speaker 02

  And Churchill did that too, by the way, of course, to a great degree. In about 10% of all of the speeches that Churchill gave in 1940, there's some reference to history or the past. He too would summon up the idea that, yes, Britain is on its own, Britain and the British Commonwealth are on their own. And this, of course, was in the period before America and Russia were in the war. But we've been in terrible straits before. Look at Sir Francis Drake, look at Admiral Nelson, and so on. And we came through those and won. He also brought up the First World War a lot. So, yes, he too drew on history. And people knew that because he'd written history books and written biographies, including

• 24:28Speaker 02

  the biography of his great ancestor, the first Duke of Marlborough, who was with Wellington the best soldier that Britain ever produced, people trusted his view of history.

• 24:37Tim Ferriss?

  So instead of biographies, I'd like to ask about autobiography. It's my impression that you recommend that young people read my early life.

• 24:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:46Tim Ferriss?

  And that there are life lessons contained within it that perhaps might help young people. What types of good advice or life lessons can people expect to find in that book? Or does anything stand out to you?

• 25:01Speaker 02

  Oh, yes, well, loads of them. I mean, resilience is the classic one. Although he doesn't go in this book into criticizing his parents, even between the lines, Churchill was tremendously resilient because his father disprised him and his mother ignored him, essentially. But in the actual book itself, he talks about how wonderful it is to be young, 20 to 25, those are the years. He says, people will forgive you for mistakes you make in that period. It's not until you're 30 that people judge you on what you've achieved rather than your promise, and so on. So it's a, he writes about his time, his escape from prison, for example, which, let's face it, there is no young man or woman who hasn't at some stage dreamt about the idea

• 25:44Speaker 02

  of a successful prison escape. He took part in the last great cavalry charge of the British Empire, and so he writes about what it's like to charge with lances in. He himself had a pistol in a great cavalry charge. Now, these are, it's just the most exciting work. And it draws you along with life lessons that are very good, I think, even for today at a time when you're frankly unlikely to have to escape from prison or get take part in a cavalry charge.

• 26:16Tim Ferriss?

  Or you'll just be very unsuccessful at attempting to escape prison.

• 26:21Tim Ferriss?

  Modern lockdown. I can't let this go. It's sticking in my mind, the core strategy. I'm not sure strategy is the right modifier for that, but that Napoleon used. It seems like that was waiting to be used.

• 26:33Speaker 02

  But it took him to be in the position, of course, of Emperor of France whereby he could impose it. But equally, there are other things like the code Napoleon that were not really waiting to be used. He had to sort of work them up into a body of laws that completely revolutionized France.

• 26:50Tim Ferriss?

  Now, when he took the writing from thirty years prior and applied it, is it the position that enabled him to do it? Or did he think about risk differently than other people? And that is part of what allowed him to implement it.

• 27:06Speaker 02

  He'd taken huge risks. He was twenty six years old. And according to the Churchill view of life, you know, you can take risks when you're twenty six years old because people will forgive you. Actually, the French Revolution government would not have forgiven Napoleon if he'd lost the Army of Italy in seventeen ninety six. But nonetheless, he was a huge risk taker. He would attack when normal generals would have fallen back. He was very lucky in that he was fighting, he was twenty six, he was fighting generals who were Austrian generals who were in their seventies. He used to hit the hinge of enemy forces. If you have in an Austrian Sardinian army, for example, he would hit the point between the Austrians and the Sardinians, pushing them both back

• 27:51Speaker 02

  along their own supply lines and so on. He used psychology a great deal, trying to get into the minds of the generals he was opposed to. He was a great chooser of lieutenants, of divisional commanders and people who he felt he could trust. Superb sense of timing as well in a battle. He was, as I say, the sort of exemplar of so many of the leadership tropes.

• 28:15Tim Ferriss?

  Do you think he would have viewed? His decisions from the outside that look risky as risky. If someone takes sort of uncalculated risks over and over again, then you could call them reckless. But at least at face value, that's not maybe the adjective I would use. So just.

• 28:33Speaker 02

  If they came off, this is the thing in the Italian campaign, this first great campaign of his, he hardly lost a battle. He fought, you know, 20 and sort of won 19 of them. So if you do that, even though you have taken risks, it's a sort of force multiplier in a sense. You wind up thinking that they aren't as risky. He did believe in luck, which was very important. You know, he famously said that he wanted his marshals to be lucky and he would promote people if he thought they were lucky. And that, of course, is, I mean, it's runs against everything that we 21st century rationalists can possibly believe in, but you know, it worked for him.

• 29:11Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, seems to have worked.

• 29:13Speaker 02

  Until it didn't.

• 29:14Tim Ferriss?

  Until it doesn't.

• 29:14Speaker 02

  Of course.

• 29:15Tim Ferriss?

  Until it doesn't.

• 29:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, so.

• 29:17Tim Ferriss?

  Promoted the decision. Promoted the unlucky guy.

• 29:19Speaker 02

  The decision in 1812 to march on Moscow was hugely risky and of course it didn't pay off.

• 29:26Tim Ferriss?

  Is it true that you have a signed letter from Aldous Huxley?

• 29:30Speaker 02

  I do.

• 29:30Tim Ferriss?

  All right, now Aldous Huxley, I believe.

• 29:32Speaker 02

  Aldous, as we English.

• 29:33Tim Ferriss?

  Aldous.

• 29:36Tim Ferriss?

  You know, I've realized the longer I spend in England, I really need to, I think I should take TOEFL classes, test of English as a foreign language, need to brush up on the mother tongue, as it were. He died, if I'm not wrong, the year you were born, I think it was. Why do you have that letter and what does the letter say?

• 29:54Speaker 02

  The letter actually was written from Los Angeles, where he was living in the 1950s. It was in 1959 and somebody just wrote to him asking for his autograph. And obviously also asked, I don't have the letter from the autograph hunter, but he obviously asked for some sort of deep, meaningful thought. And the deep and meaningful thought that Huxley gave him, and I'm a huge admirer of Huxley, Eilish in Gaza and obviously Brave New Worlds and so on, are wonderful works. And he said in this letter, that men do not learn much from the lessons of history is one of the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach us. And that is so true, isn't it?

• 30:37Speaker 02

  I mean, there's not a book that I've written, I've written 20 books, there's not a book that I've written, and I haven't looked across at that framed letter in my study and thought, wow, that is just so perceptive.

• 30:50Tim Ferriss?

  So I have a question about the subtitle of your biography on Churchill, which you believe is Walking with Destiny. You mentioned this holy fire, I think is the term you used earlier, but do many of the leaders you've studied have this belief, and I may not be wording this the best way, but of being chosen by destiny in some fashion?

• 31:12Speaker 02

  The phrase comes from his remark in the last chapter of the last few pages of his war memoirs, the first volume of his war memoirs, The Gathering Storm, wonderful book. And he's referring to the day that he became Prime Minister, the day he was appointed by the King as Prime Minister, which happened to be, coincidentally, as it turned out, because Hitler didn't know he was going to become Prime Minister, on the same day that Hitler invaded in the West, invaded Belgium and Luxembourg and Holland, shortly afterwards, of course, to invade France. And he said, "I felt as if I were walking with destiny and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial."

• 31:54Speaker 02

  And he had a profound sense of personal destiny. Now, you and I might think, as 21st century rationalists, that this is a bit sort of mad to think that you're preordained to save, in this case, Britain and civilization. If you said that to me, that that was your belief about yourself, I would think that you were clinically insane. But enough things had happened to Churchill in his life, he had had so many close brushes with death, that it's not insane to think that. But it's not by any means just, and Napoleon also felt that he had a star to guide him, and he had the luck that we spoke about earlier, but that luck

• 32:36Speaker 02

  Who was a woman in his case, was somebody he needed to woo and to try to seduce. And of course, in eighteen twelve, she turns her back on him and and he speaks of her in that sense.

• 32:49Tim Ferriss?

  Really?

• 32:49Speaker 02

  Which is also a pretty, you know, insane way to look at life, isn't it? But they were both, as I mentioned earlier, devotees of the ancients of Caesar and Alexander the Great, both of whom also, of course, had this driving sense of personal destiny. And so it does exist in people.

• 33:07Tim Ferriss?

  If you could, I'll give you two options. Stand in, meaning take the place of one of the people you've studied in depth, or just simply witness them in a given moment or day or period in their lives.

• 33:22Tim Ferriss?

  What might you choose?

• 33:24Speaker 02

  Well, first of all, I wouldn't want to stand in their place at all. I know that I don't have the intestinal fortitude of these extraordinary people. But it would be it would be the day that I just mentioned. It would be the tenth of May nineteen forty, the day that Hitler's invading, the cabinet meets and recognizes that Neville Chamberlain is not the man to continue on the war now that it's turned to the West. And the meetings that took place the previous day and that day whereby Neville Chamberlain goes to the king and suggests Churchill. And the king wasn't terribly excited about Churchill either, because they'd fallen out over the abdication crisis and he thought Churchill was a bit of a loose cannon. But nonetheless, he's willing to call Churchill.

• 34:08Speaker 02

  Churchill then goes to Buckingham Palace and becomes prime minister and comes back and starts to organize his government as the news is coming in of the German success and victories in the on the Western Front. I mean, this is what a day, what a day in history that must have been. So if I could be a flower on the wall any day in history, that's the day that I would choose. Can we just go back, though, to this? Concept of of a sense of destiny because of course it isn't just great men as in good men, positive forces in history that has this Adolf Hitler also had a sense of destiny when he were in providence and luck and being watched over by bigger forces and so on. When he survived

• 34:53Speaker 02

  his assassination attempt on the 20th of July, 1944, when you remember Stauffenberg moves the briefcase with the bomb in it to a point in the table that just shreds Hitler's trousers when it goes off and doesn't kill him. He also put it down to providence that he had been allowed to survive and therefore to stay in charge and the Führer was going to save the Fatherland and the Reich. So it's not something I don't want your viewers and listeners to come away thinking that it's a really good thing to think that you know you're being watched over by a more powerful force who's saving you to become the world-saving figure.

• 35:30Tim Ferriss?

  You can cut a lot of different ways.

• 35:32Speaker 02

  I think so.

• 35:33Tim Ferriss?

  David Koresh and cult leaders and

• 35:35Speaker 02

  Well, exactly.

• 35:36Tim Ferriss?

  Exactly that. Jim Jones down in Ghana, wherever he was.

• 35:39Speaker 02

  All of these, all of these frauds and crooks and con men use it as well.

• 35:47Tim Ferriss?

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• 36:31Tim Ferriss?

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• 37:14Tim Ferriss?

  Are there any particular weaknesses or pathologies or failures that come to mind in say Churchill and Napoleon or others who helped to make them ultimately great in the ways that they were great?

• 37:29Speaker 02

  Oh, definitely, definitely. The key thing is learning from mistakes, which not all politicians do. I need scarcely point out that Churchill certainly did. He made mistake after mistake. He got female suffrage wrong, the abdication crisis that I mentioned earlier. He joined the gold standard at the wrong time, at the wrong level. The blackened hands in Ireland was a disaster, primarily, of course, the Dardanelles crisis of 1915 to early 1916, where over 100,000 Allied troops were killed, wounded or captured. And this was a series of mistakes. In every single one of them, he learned from those mistakes.

• 38:08Tim Ferriss?

  How did he do that? Like, because there's, there's probably, I would think, maybe some method behind the madness. Maybe it's just more self-awareness or reflection. But did he have a process for learning?

• 38:19Speaker 02

  He wasn't hubristic. That was the key thing. I think it probably helps also, of course, to use in a democratic system, unlike Napoleon or Hitler, whereby, you know, he was criticized the entire time in the House of Commons for all of those things. He had to defend them and therefore had to, in a logical and rational point. I mean, democracy works very well at pricking the pomposity and hubris of people if it's working properly. And Napoleon also learned from mistakes in his military career. And I don't believe that the decision to march on Moscow itself was hubristic. I'm slightly aside from a lot of military historians about this, but just to explain.

• 39:02Speaker 02

  He'd beaten the Russians twice before. He had an army twice the size of the Russians. He knew perfectly well that the winter was going to come. He stayed too long in Moscow, but if he'd gone to Moscow and then come back again immediately, he would not have had the climactic disasters that overcame him with the blizzards in the October and November of eighteen twelve. And so you have this sense that, yes, it was a appalling strategic error, but it wasn't done out of a drive to the, because he thought he was a sort of demigod. That, I think, is a misunderstanding of his personality.

• 39:39Tim Ferriss?

  So I'm going to ask something that Neil Ferguson of Colossus on the Shelf put in an email. "I would ask Andrew about the diary he keeps, which is a source of intense anxiety."

• 39:50Speaker 02

  He's obsessed with this. He's, okay, finish the rest of it.

• 39:52Tim Ferriss?

  "Which is a source of intense anxiety to all of his friends and even more to his enemies. Best wishes, Neil."

• 39:59Speaker 02

  Neil doesn't care about any of that. He only cares about what I say about him. He is the friend. He is the friend who is obsessed with the diary. Yes, I keep a diary. For God's sake, is it such a, is it such a crime?

• 40:15Speaker 02

  He, we went on the skiing holiday this year and it's all he talked about. He's obsessed.

• 40:22Tim Ferriss?

  Is it the forbidden fruit? I mean, what is, what is the story here?

• 40:26Speaker 02

  I think he's kicking himself that he didn't keep one, you know? You think of all these extraordinary people he meets, you know? Every time I see him, he's just been talking to President Xi or Bibi Netanyahu or, you know, President of America, and he doesn't write down and keep it all in the diary. So I think there's an element of envy going on here, frankly. But I find it very relaxing and calming to think that my life isn't just going to be a complete waste of time.

• 40:58Speaker 02

  And one of the only ways that I can

• 41:01Tim Ferriss?

  I can see that.

• 41:02Speaker 02

  Thank you. Well, that's kind of you. Thank you. Yeah, one of the only ways that I can, I can justify this concept that it's all not just a sort of, you know, nihilistic sort of

• 41:12Tim Ferriss?

  Boondoggle, right?

• 41:14Speaker 02

  Boondoggle, exactly, is by writing books, obviously, which I hope will survive me, but also noting down what I've done in the day. But Neil is convinced that every time he says anything embarrassing or something, I'm going to be

• 41:28Tim Ferriss?

  You're just loading the ammo into your diary.

• 41:31Speaker 02

  Exactly. And that when we're sort of 80, he's going to, he's going to go to the bookshop, buy the diary, flick to Ferguson, comma, Neil, and see sort of 40 entries, each of which is going to make his face go redder than

• 41:45Tim Ferriss?

  The following charges.

• 41:47Speaker 02

  Exactly. But which is, it's not going to be like that at all. What he's actually going to do is to immediately go to the diary and, and look up Ferguson, Neil. But see all the amusing, charming, intelligent remarks he's made, the witchisms, you know, and all that kind of thing. And not just him, obviously, everybody that I've ever met over the last 40 plus years. And how do you

• 42:07Tim Ferriss?

  So you're on, you're on your metal now. You're going to have to, I'm going to say, went on To be on, be on best behaviour.

• 42:13Speaker 02

  Exactly. What a, what an idiot.

• 42:15Tim Ferriss?

  Note, note to self, send chocolates to Andrew. Don't forget his birthday.

• 42:24Tim Ferriss?

  Now, there are many, many people who keep a diary. How do you keep your diary? Is it nightly exercise? Is it typed out?

• 42:32Speaker 02

  No, you mustn't do it nightly.

• 42:33Tim Ferriss?

  Quill pen?

• 42:34Speaker 02

  What is? You mustn't do it nightly because, or at least you, you might be able to, but I drink. And so

• 42:40Tim Ferriss?

  I like drinking.

• 42:41Speaker 02

  Good. Yeah. And so there's nothing worse than trying to write, if you've been drinking also, writing down the witchisms. Sometimes there's a bit of a problem, owing to the fact, yeah, I can't read my writing the next morning. But no, it has to be done pretty much the next morning. You can't leave it for two weeks or so.

• 42:58Tim Ferriss?

  Do you do it? How, with, what's your frequency?

• 43:00Speaker 02

  I used to, I, every day.

• 43:02Tim Ferriss?

  Every day.

• 43:02Speaker 02

  I used to write it. Oh, no. But if nothing interesting has happened, then I won't put anything down.

• 43:07Tim Ferriss?

  Nothing to report.

• 43:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, exactly. Or like Louis XVI on the 14th of July, 1789, the day of the fall of the Bastille. All he writes is rien, nothing.

• 43:20Speaker 02

  So I hope I'm not going to be quite as moronic as that. It's not really intended for publication, which is another thing that Neil doesn't understand.

• 43:27Tim Ferriss?

  He's gonna latch on to that really part of that sentence. He's gonna be like, you see, you see?

• 43:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, no, of course he is. But nonetheless, I do find it a, well, you mentioned earlier about how many words I write. It's never more than about 500 words maximum. And it picks the most interesting part of the day. And if somebody has has said or done something interesting, I'll I'll stick it in.

• 43:49Tim Ferriss?

  Do you do that before your book writing? Let's say you're on.

• 43:52Speaker 02

  Yes, first thing in the morning.

• 43:54Tim Ferriss?

  All right. And is that just like pajama slippers and a cup of coffee or?

• 43:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I see that.

• 43:58Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, all right, great.

• 43:59Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 44:00Tim Ferriss?

  And do you take, this seems like such a ridiculous question, but how do you think about taking breaks when you're writing? I mean, obviously you might have a bathroom break or something like that. Do you build in breaks? Do you ride the flow as long as you have it? What does it look?

• 44:14Speaker 02

  The flow as long as you have it? Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because it was, it might not come back if you deliberately have breaks. Sometimes, and I'm slightly loathe to admit this publicly, but nonetheless, sometimes if you are really flowing, I can go without, you know, washing for three days. I can be in my dressing gown and slippers. My wife finds it extremely unhygienic and I'm not allowed to sleep in the same bed. But I will, if I'm running, you know, hard at a really difficult chapter and I need to keep my thoughts in order, I will not waste time doing anything. I'll I'll get some breakfast, you know, and so on. But that will just be a dash to the kitchen and back again.

• 44:57Speaker 02

  Because you've got to get, if something's complicated and there are lots of occasions, another classic, as we go back to the 10th of May 1940, that in my Churchill book, you have to get it right because every minute, not just every hour, every minute, something is happening. They're getting news from what the Luftwaffe is attacking and he's then having to create his government. He then goes off to the House of Commons and so on. It's just relentless. And unless you encapsulate in your mind successfully what is important about that day, you'll never get it over to the reader. And if you're constantly going off and going for a walk or going to the gym or showering or whatever, there's a danger that you're going to fall out of the rhythm of creativity.

• 45:42Tim Ferriss?

  How do you think about that flow when you have the flow? I mean, there is-

• 45:46Speaker 02

  I hasten to add, it's never more than three days I've ever gone without a shower.

• 45:50Tim Ferriss?

  I wouldn't judge. I was just on a hiking trip. I went, I went 10 days without showering, so I don't judge. I won't throw stones in my glass house.

• 45:58Speaker 02

  Only when I'm writing the book. I hasten to add that as well, God. I don't want people to come up and go, artists hold their nose and go, hello, Andrew.

• 46:08Tim Ferriss?

  How do you think about that flow with writing? So there's, there's one reason not to interrupt the writing. If you have a hard task ahead of you and you have 47 balls in the air, and if you drop them, you're going to have to start the juggling process all over again. The boot up sequence takes a long time. How do you think about the flow of writing or that feeling that things are coming to you more easily or moving on to the page more easily?

• 46:36Speaker 02

  Sometimes it's a very bad thing, of course. Dr. Johnson did say, when you have written your most brilliant purple paragraph, read it again and rip it up. So, no, you must-

• 46:47Tim Ferriss?

  Tell me more about that.

• 46:48Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. No, well, if you think that you've just written something completely brilliant, there's a very good chance that it's rubbish. It has to be somebody else. It has to be your publisher or some, some other person who can read it and have a completely objective eye. Because there's a very good chance that you're hugging yourself with glee about something that actually you think sounds wonderful, but in fact is complete, is complete rot.

• 47:12Tim Ferriss?

  Do an in my memoir, hugging yourself with glee. And I write that down. Give you your customary 5%. That's fine. If you had to choose, maybe you don't want to choose from your darlings here, but if this question has an answer, you don't even need to name them, but you keep a person in mind. If you had to choose one person to act as your proofreader for your work, to be that sanity check.

• 47:33Speaker 02

  No, he's called Stuart Prophet. He's the most brilliant publisher in, in London. He's known by everybody to be the most brilliant. He's also the most irritating-

• 47:41Tim Ferriss?

  Makes sense to me.

• 47:42Speaker 02

  -he doesn't, he, oh my God, for my Napoleon book, he's going to listen to this, so I'm going to have to be as nice as possible, but oh my, he's good. He's Professor Perfect is my nickname for it, because he's a total professorial kind of figure. And for my Napoleon book, I remember a series of marginalia. And again, this is the thing where you think you've done something rather good, you know? And he writes, one of the things he writes in the marginalia, are you sure this joke is funny?

• 48:12Speaker 02

  Nothing more crushing than to have that. He also wrote.

• 48:17Tim Ferriss?

  Strikes me as very British also.

• 48:19Speaker 02

  Exactly. Question mark, you know. And you read it again, you chortle to yourself, yes, it is funny. Damn it. But he wrote, there were a whole series of them in the, well, we were talking earlier about the 1796 campaign of Napoleon. He said, how wide was the River Po in 1796? There was another one, did Napoleon take Herodotus to Egypt? He's thinking, oh, damn, I don't know. I'm gonna have to find out, you know. He's a genius, but also a very irritating person.

• 48:51Tim Ferriss?

  Could you say more about what makes him so good? I'll buy some time just by saying, if I can't find a writer friend of mine, let's just say, or an editor who can proofread my work, I'll very often give, and I write particular type of thing, but I would give my chapter, let's just say, to a friend who's a really good lawyer. And part of the reason for that is that they're very good at trimming out excess. And if anything is ambiguous, they're

• 49:17Speaker 02

  Or contradictory.

• 49:18Tim Ferriss?

  Or contradictory. They're very good at surgically excising that. Now, what makes this particular gentleman, what was his name again, Stuart?

• 49:26Speaker 02

  Stuart Prophet.

• 49:27Tim Ferriss?

  All right, great, ma'am. What makes Stuart so good at giving feedback? What, how does, does he see things differently?

• 49:35Speaker 02

  He's a profoundly committed to history. He loves history. So he has a sort of higher purpose to try to flood the world with great history books, which is, as far as I'm concerned, the greatest higher purpose that you can have. I mean, it doesn't get better than that. He has a very logical brain. He's very good on syntax. So anything that doesn't sound right in a sentence, he will point out, sometimes to a

• 50:06Tim Ferriss?

  Infuriating from a poetic perspective?

• 50:08Speaker 02

  From a poetic perspective, yeah. If there's a rhythm that isn't right, or if something rhymes as well. Sometimes you can use two words that have a rhyme in them and he will cut that automatically because it just Doesn't feel right.

• 50:22Tim Ferriss?

  And sit well with his sensibilities.

• 50:24Speaker 02

  Precisely, and mine, I hate to, you know, because I very rarely actually disagree with him. I did on the joke, by the way, and whenever anybody tells me that that particular joke is funny, I

• 50:35Tim Ferriss?

  Forward it to him.

• 50:36Speaker 02

  I forward it, I ping the email straight on to Stuart, of course I do, I'd be mad not to, wouldn't I?

• 50:44Speaker 02

  But no, there's a, I mean, and he's been doing it for forty years, so, and he's at the top of his trade, so you would expect him to be really good, but boy is he.

• 50:52Tim Ferriss?

  So there's two examples you gave, The Width of the River and Herodotus. Why did he ask those two?

• 50:58Speaker 02

  Um, because he is always trying to put himself into the mind of the reader and wondering what the reader would be thinking. And he thought, rightly or wrongly in this case, that the reader would be interested in The Width of the River and and whether or not Herodotus went with him, but there are loads more examples like that. You know, I will send him a hundred pages and he'll send me back a hundred pages of questions and criticisms and remarks. I almost sometimes think that I ought to put his name on the front cover of the book. He phoned me up actually about the Napoleon book and the original of Napoleon just had a huge N on it and lots of Bs.

• 51:38Speaker 02

  And he said, phoned me up, he said, I've got this idea for the front cover of the book, your name isn't going to be on it. And he said, and neither is Napoleon's. And I thought, over the phone, I thought, okay, he's finally gone completely mad.

• 51:52Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, exactly. That's right. Poor man, how long can he stay in his job if he's gonna come up with ideas? He can fake it for a while.

• 51:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right, exactly, but it can't be long now, you know, before, and it turned out to be a totally brilliant concept because if you see a gigantic N with Bs, you think of Napoleon, you know, and that's what.

• 52:11Tim Ferriss?

  Bs as in, I'm such an idiot, Bs, like honeybees.

• 52:14Speaker 02

  Honeybees, yeah, that was his symbol, it was Napoleon's symbol, because they could sting, but they could also give honey, you know, that was the idea. And it just captured people's imagination and sold an awful lot of copies, which was really great. That sold half a million copies, that book now.

• 52:28Tim Ferriss?

  That's incredible. That is incredible. Sounds like such a gift to have a Stuart. I need a Stuart.

• 52:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, everyone needs a Stuart.

• 52:34Tim Ferriss?

  Everyone needs a Stuart.

• 52:35Speaker 02

  Don't take mine, put whatever you do.

• 52:36Tim Ferriss?

  I don't, I don't, I think, I think he might find, might spend his entire first month on just the syntax errors in my first chapter, so.

• 52:47Speaker 02

  You do want to strangle him, by the way.

• 52:50Tim Ferriss?

  Is the sign of a very good proofreader often. Why do you think it is that some historical figures take on these mythic proportions where some who have huge impacts seem to sort of fall into obscurity over time? Are there particular characteristics? Is it self-made in a sense where people create that myth of themselves while they're still alive? How do you think about that?

• 53:17Speaker 02

  I haven't thought about that before. That's a really good question. I think that it's a bit like there are some things that are very difficult to get over to people on the printed page. Charisma is one of them. Charm is another one. Sexiness. These are things that we all know from our own lives matter enormously. If somebody is charismatic, charming and sexy, you're going to want to be interested in them, follow them much more than somebody who isn't. And yet, explaining how they are, any of those things, very famously hard to explain. And I think the same is true with historical characters.

• 53:55Speaker 02

  How can it be that this unprepossessing looking American president who happens to, with his strange beard but not moustache, who happens to be president at the time that the country is falling apart, manages to save the country through this terrible, see it through this terrible civil war and then is assassinated right at the end of the civil war? I mean, the story is so extraordinary, isn't it? And yet, to explain the charisma and charm, not sexiness, I don't think in our ram, Lincoln's case, but many of your readers or readers might disagree with you, nonetheless.

• 54:32Tim Ferriss?

  Just imagining him popping up on a dating app.

• 54:34Speaker 02

  If you swipe right or left for Abe Lincoln.

• 54:39Tim Ferriss?

  Might ride a fixed gear bike, make expensive cappuccinos. That's kind of the hipster look. Anyway, I digress. Yeah.

• 54:46Speaker 02

  It is difficult to explain how some people just grab the headlines and others don't. I mean, of course, it does help to be a leader in a war. That's true of Lincoln and Churchill and Napoleon and so on. The chance of coming a world historical figure if you are Prime Minister of Luxembourg in a time of peace is going to be much more difficult, of course. But yeah, there doesn't seem to be a hard and fast rule, does there?

• 55:14Tim Ferriss?

  Hard and fast recipe and I can follow. I'm just kidding.

• 55:19Speaker 02

  Well, don't take us to war on the fact that you're wanting to be remembered.

• 55:22Tim Ferriss?

  Capable, certainly not eager. Makes me think of, what is the title of that poem? Ozymandias, look upon my works in despair. I'll leave that alone.

• 55:34Speaker 02

  I met a traveller from an antique land who said, two vast and trunkless legs of stones stand in the desert, and near them on the sand, half shrunk, a shattered visage lies, whose wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command tells that its sculpture well those passions read, which yet survive. My name is Ozymandias, king of kings, look upon my works, ye mighty, in despair. Nothing besides remains round that eternal wreck, long and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away.

• 56:04Tim Ferriss?

  Hot damn, there you go, listeners.

• 56:06Speaker 02

  Can you point out to the listeners that you didn't tell me that this was going to happen?

• 56:10Tim Ferriss?

  I did not, I did not send a memo in advance. And I suppose the preface to that is that there are these ruins sticking out of the sands.

• 56:21Speaker 02

  The feet, the trunks of the legs. So there was obviously a huge magnificent kind of, you know, pyramid high glorious statue to Ozymandias. And now there's nothing. And it goes back to what I was saying earlier about not being remembered.

• 56:38Tim Ferriss?

  Did you remember the, now I'm gonna, I feel like I'm cross, not cross examining, but asking too much, but who is the author of that, of that poem?

• 56:46Speaker 02

  Jesse Bishelli.

• 56:47Tim Ferriss?

  I saw the one of, maybe the original or first, certainly a first draft in Oxford, because I was going through a program at Waddam College and there's an exhibit on right now, which is something like cut, paste, rewrite. And it shows the hand edited works of Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, and all these others. And I came across that.

• 57:10Speaker 02

  If anybody wants to see a first edition of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, it's just gone on exhibition at the, I was there this morning, Lambeth Palace Library. There's a thing called Her Book. It's about female, early female writers. It's a brilliant exhibition. And so if there's anyone in London who's interested in seeing that book, it's, it's there today.

• 57:33Tim Ferriss?

  Beautiful. And if you're near Oxford, Weston Library has the exhibit that I was mentioning. A lot of gems, a lot of gems. You have some really fun old stuff in the UK, it turns out.

• 57:43Speaker 02

  Thank you. I'm not going to take that personally.

• 57:46Tim Ferriss?

  No, no, it's a compliment. Yeah, old in the US is like 1970, you know, it's smaller.

• 57:54Speaker 02

  I thought you were talking about me.

• 57:55Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, no, no.

• 57:56Speaker 02

  Good, all right.

• 57:59Tim Ferriss?

  How do you think about legacy? Because I, along the lines of Anya the Ozzy Mandyas piece, I'm like, is it just sort of hubris to believe in the first place that that's something worth aspiring to, having something last and stand the test of time? I mean, how do you, how do you personally think about this?

• 58:18Speaker 02

  Well.

• 58:18Tim Ferriss?

  Especially as someone who studies history.

• 58:20Speaker 02

  Yes, and I obviously do want people to read my books long after I died. Now, I'm not going to know whether they are or not. So why on earth, it just seems so illogical to even think that, doesn't it? That it should matter to me that anything happens the second after I've died. But I know that I do, and it is one of the drives for being a writer, because words always live forever. And they're virtually the only thing that does. Ozzy Mandyas's statue is just two trunkless legs of stone. Whereas actually, his words, you know, look upon my works, ye mighty in despair, that goes to the heart of the human condition.

• 59:03Speaker 02

  And Shelley's poetry still survives in a way that Ozzy Mandyas's statue doesn't. So there is something about words that are immortal, and we're all sort of grasping for immortality in one way or another, aren't we?

• 59:17Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, that is true. Do you read fiction?

• 59:20Speaker 02

  Yes, yes, I do. When I go on holiday, which is usually hiking, actually, with my wife. She loves going to places that involve mountains. And in order to get history completely out of my system for the two weeks or so that we're hiking, I do read fiction. Sometimes if I I want to completely clear my brain. I'll have a detective novel and I've chosen the most complicated of all of the detective novelists, a chap called Robert Goddard. Have you ever heard of Robert Goddard? I have not. So complicated, to work out who done it or what groups of people done it. You know, it's very rarely just one person and why. And I try and make notes in the back

• 1:00:03Speaker 02

  of the book, connecting each person to everybody else. And so by the end of it, it looks like one of those really complicated sort of management. It's like an org chart. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Hundreds of people connecting to everybody else to try and work out who done it. And he always, always beats me. Yeah, that sounds fun. Yeah. But as far as sort of high culture writing is most concerned, I will occasionally do that. I'm president of the Clifton Literary Festival. And so we have lots of novelists come to that. And so if you've got William Boyd, or Salman Rushdie, or somebody who you know you're going to be bumping into at the festival, it's always a good idea to

• 1:00:46Speaker 02

  read their latest novel. We had Robert Harris recently. And so that's always well worth doing. And then there are a few writers like Michel Welbeck, who is just so great that you have to sort of read whatever he brings out. Is there, I don't recognize the name, I'm embarrassed to say. He's a French writer. It's pronounced Hellebec. And he's a genius, a very controversial and quite unpopular in France. And the latest one I'm reading is where it features his own murder. It's a great satire. It's very, very funny. Is there a book you might suggest starting with, if I were going to start with? The Map and the Territory. The Map of the Territory?

• 1:01:29Speaker 02

  The Map and the Territory of Michel Hellebec. The name starts H E double L E B. And yeah, it's a sort of satire on French intellectual customs and. I can see them loving that. It's very funny. It's very funny. Why is he controversial? Oh, because he's deeply politically incorrect as well. He just, he just doesn't care. He just doesn't care what he, what he writes. He's a honey badger in that sense. Do you know what I mean? I do, I do, I do. He's a, he's a literary honey badger, is Welbeck.

• 1:02:04Tim Ferriss?

  Harry Hunter Badger. All right. So speaking politically incorrect. How should we, in your mind, write about imperial history?

• 1:02:14Speaker 02

  We should try as far as possible to be genuinely objective. We shouldn't take the assumption that all white people, whenever they went abroad, did so solely in order to rape, murder, massacre, and exploit. Because certainly in the latter part, we were talking earlier about actually about Winston Churchill and the, and noblesse oblige, the concept that it was part of your duty as a privileged person to try to make the world a better place for other less privileged people. And that was, especially in the latter part of the British Empire, a driving force for a lot of people, especially obviously missionaries and Christians,

• 1:02:55Speaker 02

  but also other people, explorers and people who were involved in agriculture and so on. You know, they, they actually were not driven by rapacity and greed in the way that essentially the Marxist analysis of imperialism has made out. So be, be objective. Some of those people were like that, undoubtedly, of course they were. You know, especially some of the people in Southern Africa and elsewhere. But for a long period of the story of the British Empire, for much of that empire, it actually was a force for human good rather than evil.

• 1:03:31Tim Ferriss?

  What do you see as the challenges moving forward for the capturing of history? And/or how do you see it changing as we move forward?

• 1:03:44Speaker 02

  I am quite worried about it in Britain because first of all, fewer and fewer people seem to be taking it as a subject at university level. Secondly, we have this thing, it's nicknamed Henry to Hitler, where we jump from the Tudors to the Second World War and we don't do the very important intervening stages of the Stuarts, the Civil War, the Hanoverians, loss of America, the, really anything up to the outbreak of the First World War. And there's so much of really important history in that period that we seem to jump from one to the next. There was a survey quite recently of British teenagers, quite a big survey, you know, over a thousand of them. And twenty percent of them thought,

• 1:04:29Speaker 02

  it was like twenty-three percent of them, thought that the American War of Independence was won by Denzel Washington. You know, the Americans get a bad rap. Yeah, I know, I know, exactly. It's not just us. No. And also, there were twenty percent, there were twenty percent of these kids, and these are British schoolkids, who also thought that Winston Churchill was a fictional character, and that Sherlock Holmes and Eleanor Rigby were real people. So whatever's going on in, in, you know, British history teaching, I think there's, there's still a lot to be desired.

• 1:05:02Tim Ferriss?

  If you had never been able to write any books in that alternate reality, what have you personally, or what would you have gained personally from studying history?

• 1:05:14Speaker 02

  It's a lot of things, isn't it, history? It's, it can be a bit of a quicksand.

• 1:05:18Tim Ferriss?

  In what sense?

• 1:05:19Speaker 02

  Well, as soon as you think you understand a period, all it takes is one new set of papers, or a new book written by somebody else, friends especially, that can make you look again at the same period and completely change your mind about it. And that's a little unnerving at the age of sixty-one, I have to say. I'm just reading Ronald Hutton's second volume of his life of Oliver Cromwell, which has just been published. And I'd always thought of Cromwell as somebody who had a set of principles that he molded his times

• 1:06:00Speaker 02

  around in order to see through. And Ronald Hutton has completely exploded that thesis for me. And I realized that he was, like most politicians, just sort of grabbing the the coattails of history and hanging on as much as he could. And yes, he was a good soldier and so on, but he was, in terms of his politics, he was constantly trying to create alliances, of course, like all politicians do. And when opportunities came, he grabbed them. But he was at the mercy of events much more than creating them. Whereas I had for years, had the sort of image of Oliver Cromwell, like that statue outside Parliament, of this incredibly sort of solid figure. He wasn't like that at all.

• 1:06:40Tim Ferriss?

  What are other things that attract you or attracted you to history?

• 1:06:46Speaker 02

  It wasn't just Christopher Perry. My dad read history at Oxford and he used to take me around castles. We go on holiday to, you know, Wales and see the great Edward the First castles. And he would chat to, on journeys, we'd chat about history and what ifs, you know, counterfactuals and things like that. And so I grew up feeling very comfortable with it and recognizing that it's a beautiful and fascinating thing, you know. Whereas I think sometimes some people can be not scared of history, but they can be put off and history because they weren't taught it very well at school, or they just thought it was a succession of dates, or they can't see any relevance to their daily lives and so on. And I've never been one of those people.

• 1:07:32Tim Ferriss?

  So if you were doing a presentation, it could be anywhere, on why people, aside from conflicting, you know, Denzel Washington with other historical figures, why they should read history or engage with history? What would the thrust of the presentation be?

• 1:07:54Speaker 02

  I suppose it does come back to that Aldous Huxley quote, you know, about trying to learn some of the lessons. There's a marvelous moment when in 1953, June 1953, at the time of the late Queen's coronation, Winston Churchill is walking across Westminster Hall, this fabulous great hall that was, when it was built in the late 13th century, the largest room in Europe. And it's fused with history. It's where, of course, where Churchill himself was to be, to lie in state, but also where the monarchs lie in state, where Warren Hastings went on trial and Charles the First went on trial and people like Mandela and Zelensky have given speeches and things like that. It's compounded. Thomas More went on trial there, the Earl of Stratford.

• 1:08:39Speaker 02

  I just mentioned a whole load of people who were all decapitated, actually. William Wallace as well, he was decapitated as well. And so you've got this sense of all of British history, you know, summed up in a room essentially. And a young American student stops Churchill and asks essentially for a piece of life advice. And Churchill replies, "Study history, study history, for therein lies all the secrets of statecraft." And that would be one of the reasons that I would tell people, you know, that if you want to understand what's going on in the world, you do have to look and see what has happened before. And there's no person who doesn't want to have a better understanding of what's going on in the world or try to work out for themselves the great forces in in our

• 1:09:23Speaker 02

  planet today. So that I suppose would be the answer. That's why I've chosen study history as my as my motto of my coat of arms, for example, and why I I've got a podcast too, and I call it Secrets of Statecraft. I think that's a sort of motivating factor.

• 1:09:38Tim Ferriss?

  Secrets of Statecraft, that is.

• 1:09:41Speaker 02

  It's the Heather Institutions podcast, but it's great fun to do. Must have Neil Ferguson on at some stage, and I can tease him about not keeping a diary.

• 1:09:52Tim Ferriss?

  What is statecraft? I think I know, but I want to very often, I think I know something, and it is in fact not true at all. So.

• 1:10:00Speaker 02

  It's the ability to run a country. So you've got to juggle the diplomatic, the military, the economic, the cultural, all of these things, religious, all of these things together to create the kind of country that you want it to be. And that is statecraft. And so it's been going on as long as human history has and always will.

• 1:10:22Tim Ferriss?

  Looking forward, let's see, you've studied many great figures from history. You've looked at these different chapters of.

• 1:10:30Speaker 02

  Including your late king, your last king, George III. I wrote a biography of him a few years ago, which was great fun to do. Yeah, sorry, carry on.

• 1:10:39Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, no, that's all right. I was just going to ask you, looking forward, given how much you've reflected backwards, where do you think things are going for the UK and or for the US? Like, if you were a betting man, when you say, hmm, there's a good chance, it's not a certainty, but. Things can, if the dominos continue to fall the way they're falling, A, B, or C?

• 1:11:01Speaker 02

  I'm afraid I'm a bit of a pessimist.

• 1:11:03Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, not so much for the United States because you're still such a rich and innovative country. But I'm wondering in Britain, whether or not, and history pays an important part of this, especially the way in which history is used politically, to wonder whether or not we still believe in ourselves, certainly in the way that we did when I was growing up. In twenty, I'm gonna try and get the statistics right, I think it's 2015, as recent as 2015, maybe it's 2010, eighty-six percent of people were proud of British history. That has now fallen down to fifty-six percent.

• 1:11:45Speaker 02

  And I'm sure that the reason for this is the sustained attack on, well, the British Empire that we were discussing earlier, and people forgetting the part that we played in the abolition of slavery and concentrating just on the horrors and the monstrous things that happened. And we are therefore, if you're not proud of your past, you're not proud of your ancestors, you're not proud of the things that they produced, and Britain has produced some pretty extraordinary and wonderful things for the world, then it's difficult to see why anyone would want to be proud of the future of the country as well. And so I'm pretty pessimistic.

• 1:12:27Speaker 02

  And when I feel pessimism for America, it's for things like taking Thomas Jefferson's statue down from the New York City Hall, you know, and it's a form of cultural suicide. It strikes me not to admire the founders of your nation. And yes, of course, he owned slaves, but he also wrote a constitution that has survived for a quarter of a millennium. And he was brave enough, and Washington and all the others, brave enough to stand up against the most powerful empire in the world. Now, these things, you deserve your statue, it seems to me. And if you go around pulling these things down, I think you're breaking a kind of living link with the past that...

• 1:13:11Speaker 02

  Makes you a great country. And that's certainly happening in this country as well. I mean, I'm a bit of a pessimist anyway, because I'm a Tory. And pessimism is an essential part of Toryism. But not as big a pessimist I hasten to add as Neil Ferguson. Who, who I like to say, it's never terribly difficult to tell the, it's a quote from P G Wodehouse. Never terribly difficult to tell the difference between a ray of sunshine and a Scotsman with a grievance. And Neil always tells you that it's all doom and gloom and everything's going to be utterly disastrous. I wonder whether or not he truly believes it, because he's actually himself a very, you know, upbeat and personally sort of positive individual who does lots of things that imply

• 1:13:56Speaker 02

  that actually he does think the world's going to get better. But boy, oh, boy.

• 1:14:00Tim Ferriss?

  How do you personally, if you do, I mean, it seems like you examine or you have a fascination with counterfactuals, the what ifs. You read books that have the potential for upending sort of long-held theses, which can be uncomfortable, I would imagine. Do you have people around you or who you deliberately expose yourself to who offset perhaps some of your pessimistic tendencies with forms of optimism that they can defend?

• 1:14:33Speaker 02

  Oh, yes, my wife is the classic example. She's optimistic about the future. She's in business, she's a very successful businesswoman, so she actually sees a lot of the innovations that are taking place, the drugs that are coming online that are, you know, saving lives and taking on defeating pain and so on, you know. She's great at believing in the innate capacity of capitalism to reinvent itself in a positive way for more and more people and take people out of poverty and all of those positive things. It's an invigorating thing to talk about the world with her because it makes me much less sort of Eeyore-like and Ferguson-esque.

• 1:15:17Tim Ferriss?

  Feel like any other inside scoop that that people should know about Neil? What are what is his secret optimistic voice memos that he sends you?

• 1:15:27Tim Ferriss?

  You can annotate add to your diary. Please see audio reference forty seven.

• 1:15:34Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, Andrew, this has been great fun. You have many books that people can read, certainly, and they'll all be in the show notes. But the is it most recent conflict?

• 1:15:43Speaker 02

  Yes, that's a book I wrote with David Petraeus. And of course, him being a general who's commanded armies of over one hundred and sixty thousand in both Iraq and Afghanistan has been so fascinating intellectually for me because, of course, I've a military historian, I've never worn a uniform for one minute. So that was great.

• 1:16:02Tim Ferriss?

  And the subtitle for folks, just so they have that, the evolution of warfare from nineteen forty five to Ukraine.

• 1:16:09Speaker 02

  Well, it's now actually Gaza, the paperback.

• 1:16:11Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, it's Gaza.

• 1:16:11Speaker 02

  Takes us up to up to Gaza as well, about halfway through that campaign in Gaza. It was after the Russian invasion of Ukraine that I came up with the idea of writing the book and I got on to David, who I knew, and said, why don't we write this as a military history? There are going to be lots of political histories about this, but just the military side of it and put it into the context of all the wars that have happened since nineteen forty five. So we go through not all of them, there are four hundred of them, but all the key ones, you know, the forty or so key ones that that you would have heard of and that show how war has evolved and developed. And sometimes it leaps forward and other times it goes into sort of sideshows.

• 1:16:56Speaker 02

  But we went to the publishers and and they quite understandably said, well, how are you going to divvy up the chapters? And I said, well, David's going to write about all the countries he's invaded.

• 1:17:08Speaker 02

  And I'll, you know, fill in the rest. And he also did the Vietnam chapter as well, actually. And then we sent hundreds, maybe thousands of emails to one another over the course of the year or so that we were writing it.

• 1:17:20Tim Ferriss?

  That's very fast.

• 1:17:21Speaker 02

  It is fast. It is fast. But the thing was.

• 1:17:23Tim Ferriss?

  How did you do it so quickly?

• 1:17:24Speaker 02

  Well, because the situation in Ukraine was moving so quickly. And then the Gaza war broke out on the day of the publication of the Harback. So that was literally the seventh of October that we were bringing that out. So we then needed to get on with, with writing about that as well. And as you know, I tend to write quickly.

• 1:17:41Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:42Speaker 02

  And so does he, you know, he's a soldier scholar. He, he read, he went to your old university. He was at Princeton doing a post grad on military history. So he was very much able to, you know, keep sending back those emails.

• 1:17:55Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I suppose he's not lacking discipline, wouldn't.

• 1:17:59Speaker 02

  Say that again.

• 1:18:00Tim Ferriss?

  Would be my guess. What did you find were key ingredients to that successful collaboration? What made it work, especially with that type of pressure under deadline?

• 1:18:11Speaker 02

  Well, I think there was, I know there was mutual respect, which is very important. I'd never written a book with anybody before and, and I was.

• 1:18:18Tim Ferriss?

  I'm in the midst of doing that right now, which is part of the reason I'm asking.

• 1:18:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, well, it's, it's like nerve wracking, isn't it? Because one can get very sort of proprietary about one's work. But that wasn't the case with David, because the insights that he gave about what it was like to be a commander into wars at the absolute apex of command meant that he could then look back on wars like the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, to sort of place himself in the position of Matthew Ridgway, you know, in Korea, for example. And that was so fascinating that I knew that there was nothing that I could add to that. I, I just knew that the combination of the soldier and the historian

• 1:19:04Speaker 02

  would produce something that was really intellectually stimulating for me. And that's, you know, in the end, life is a constant battle against boredom, isn't it? It's a, it's a constant rear guard action against, um, against not being stimulated.

• 1:19:21Tim Ferriss?

  Do you think you will do more collaborations? How are you thinking about your writing moving forward?

• 1:19:26Speaker 02

  No, I know my next two books I've got are just going to be written by me. I've got Napoleon and his Marshals about how the emperor interacted with his marshals and how the marshals interacted with each other. They fortunately all hated each other, so that's much easier for a historian to write something interesting and hated each other in very imaginative ways.

• 1:19:46Tim Ferriss?

  The greatest reality TV show ever seen.

• 1:19:51Speaker 02

  And then after that, I'm doing Disraeli. And he's an extraordinary character who was a complete outsider, as a Jew, of course, didn't go to one of the British public schools or Oxford and Cambridge or any university. And through his own brilliance, and he's a novelist, of course, also, his own wit, he wound up becoming the most powerful man in the world.

• 1:20:14Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I look forward to reading that one.

• 1:20:15Speaker 02

  Good, thank you. Let me back on the show in 2030, which is when it's being published.

• 1:20:22Tim Ferriss?

  Hope I'll still be around, we'll see. Been here for a decade, we'll see how it goes. Andrew, this has been great. I really appreciate you taking the time. People can find you, correct me if I get any of this wrong, andrew-roberts.net. Would that be the main website? That's what I have here.

• 1:20:37Speaker 02

  Can't remember, but yes, I hope so.

• 1:20:38Tim Ferriss?

  Let's just say that's right. And if it's not, I will put the correct version in the show notes. And then is Twitter or X as it stands now, a good place for people to follow you as well?

• 1:20:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, that has things like my podcast and so on.

• 1:20:53Tim Ferriss?

  Perfect. So that's as I have it here, a- roberts underscore Andrew.

• 1:20:57Speaker 02

  Is it good?

• 1:21:01Tim Ferriss?

  Perfect. We'll fact check all of that, but we do have that. Is there anything else that you would like to add? Any requests of my audience? Anything at all that you'd like to?

• 1:21:11Speaker 02

  Absolutely not. Just thank you so much, Tim, for being on the show. I've really enjoyed it.

• 1:21:14Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, thank you so much for taking the time. This has really been great. And for people who are listening, as always, you can find the show notes at tim.blog/podcast. We will include links to everything we discussed. And also, as always, until next time, just be a little kinder than is necessary to others, but also to yourself. Thanks for tuning in. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel.

• 1:21:56Tim Ferriss?

  It is basically a half-page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered, or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange esoteric things end up in my field, and then I test them, and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog/friday,

• 1:22:37Tim Ferriss?

  type that into your browser, tim.blog/friday, drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Shopify is the all-in-one commerce platform that powers millions of businesses worldwide, including me, including mine. What business, you might ask. Well, one way I've scratched my own itch is by creating Cock Punch Coffee. It's a long story. All proceeds on my end go to my foundation, SISA Foundation, fund research for mental health, etc. Anyway, Cock Punch Coffee, it's delicious. The first coffee I've ever produced myself. I drink it every morning. Check it out. We use Shopify for the online storefront, and my team raves about how simple and easy it is to use. It has everything we need and nothing we don't. Whether you're a garage entrepreneur

• 1:23:22Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:24:04Tim Ferriss?

  Plus Shopify's award-winning help is there to support your success every step of the way if you have questions. This is possibility powered by Shopify. So check it out. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify. That's S-H-O-P-I-F-Y. Shopify.com/Tim. Go to Shopify.com/Tim to take your business to the next level today. One more time, all lowercase, Shopify.com/Tim. In the last handful of years, I've become very interested in environmental toxins, avoiding microplastics, and many other commonly found compounds all over the place. One place I looked is in the kitchen. Many people don't realize just how toxic their cookware is or can be.

• 1:24:48Tim Ferriss?

  A lot of non-stick pans, practically all of them, can release harmful forever chemicals, PFAS, in other words, spelled P-F-A-S, into your food, your home, and then ultimately that ends up in your body. Teflon is a prime example of this. It is still the forever chemical that most companies are using. So Our Place reached out to me as a potential sponsor. And the first thing I did was look at the reviews of their products and said, "Send me one." And that is the Titanium Always Pan Pro. And the claim is that it's the first non-stick pan with zero coating. So that means zero forever chemicals and durability that'll last forever. I was very skeptical. I was very busy. So I said, "You know what? I want to test this thing quickly. It's supposed to be non-stick.

• 1:25:33Tim Ferriss?

  It's supposed to be durable. I'm going to test it with two things. I'm going to test it with scrambled eggs in the morning, because eggs are always a disaster in anything that isn't non-stick with the toxic coating. And then I'm going to test it with a steak sear, because I want to see how much it retains heat. And it worked perfectly in both cases and I was frankly astonished how well it worked. The Titanium Always Pan Pro has become my go-to pan in the kitchen. It replaces a lot of other things for searing, for eggs, for anything you can imagine. And the design is really clever. It does combine the best qualities of stainless steel, cast iron, and nonstick into one product. It's tough enough to withstand the dishwasher, open flame, heavy-duty scrubbing.

• 1:26:18Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:26:58Tim Ferriss?

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