Pod Insights Dwarkesh Podcast Andrew Roberts — Why Hitler lost WWII, Churchill as applied historian, & Napoleon as startup founder About this episode Andrew Roberts is the world's best biographer and one of the leading historians of our time.
We discussed
* Churchill the applied historian,
* Napoleon the startup founder,
* why Nazi ideology cost Hitler WW2,
* drones, reconnaissance, and other aspects of the future of war,
* Iraq, Afghanistan, Korea, Ukraine, & Taiwan.
Watch on YouTube https://youtu.be/tM9ZMYUYhTk. Listen on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/andrew-roberts-leading-historian-on-warfare-from-napoleon/id1516093381?i=1000635692079, Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/4K7iPHdop3WnuBUXJmn7iJ?si=SAsedZ7qR4axISXsP-zYrA, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/andrew-roberts. Follow me on Twitter https://twitter.com/dwarkesh_sp for updates on future episodes.
Timestamps
(00:00:00) - Post WW2 conflicts
(00:10:57) - Ukraine
(00:16:33) - How Truman Prevented Nuclear War
(00:22:49) - Taiwan
(00:27:15) - Churchill
(00:35:11) - Gaza & future wars
(00:39:05) - Could Hitler have won WW2?
(00:48:00) - Surprise attacks
(00:59:33) - Napoleon and startup founders
(01:14:06) - Robert’s insane productivity
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.dwarkesh.com https://www.dwarkesh.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1
Transcript 12,412 words · 2 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 One of the reasons I'm proud to be a historian is that Churchill was one. History was a constant echo for him. It gave him endless signposts.
0:08 Dwarkesh Patel? In the startup community, there is a cult of Napoleon that is slowly emerging.
0:13 Speaker 00 Is there? I didn't know that. Seriously, is there?
0:15 Dwarkesh Patel? Your biography is the part of the canon here.
0:18 Speaker 00 If MacArthur had used nuclear weapons against the Chinese crossing the Yalu River, then yes, he might well have actually won that war. But it would have lowered the moral barrier so significantly that nuclear weapons would have been used an awful lot more. In the future, war will be fought between two sets of drones. And the humans won't be in the loop because decision making has to take place far, far faster than the human mind can work.
0:50 Dwarkesh Patel? Today, I have the pleasure of speaking with Andrew Roberts, who is most recently the author of Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to Ukraine. And this book is like Churchill's Histories of the Second World War, the First World War, in that one of the principal actors in the conflicts discussed here is the co-author, General David Petraeus, who commanded the US forces in Afghanistan and Iraq as one of your co-authors. And speaking of Churchill, Andrew is also the author of some superb and magnificent biographies of Churchill, Napoleon, King George, and an excellent book about World War II.
1:33 Dwarkesh Patel? But first, let's begin with conflict. Andrew, welcome to the podcast.
1:36 Speaker 00 Thank you very much indeed, Dwarke. It's an honour to be on your show.
1:40 Dwarkesh Patel? So my first question is this. When we look at the first half of the 20th century, it seems like we got unlucky many times in a row. You know, World War I, World War II, the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, the Maoist Revolution in China. All those things seem like they didn't have to happen from reading historians about those topics, that if you reversed a bunch of contingent factors a few years back, any one of them could have not happened. And in each of those cases, tens of millions of people died. When we look at the second half of the 20th century, which you write about in these books, it seems like we got lucky again and again, right? So the Cuban Missile Crisis doesn't go nuclear. We have all these proxy wars that don't go nuclear or result in a world war. China and India liberalize, communism falls.
2:23 Dwarkesh Patel? What explains why we had such different luck in these two different parts of the century?
2:27 Speaker 00 Um. The invention of the nuclear bomb. Uh. It's it's it's pretty much as easy as that. You have all of these wars take place in the post-nuclear age after nineteen forty five. And so as a result, you have an umbrella under which everybody acts. But although there are hundreds of wars that break out, about a hundred and forty wars, they have to be fought in a essentially limited way because of the existence of nuclear weapons.
2:56 Dwarkesh Patel? But couldn't you have said the same thing before World War One? And in fact, many did say that about World War One, where we have all this heavy artillery. We have these, you kill millions of people even then, and they still went to war. So how much does nuclear war explain the the absence of something escalating?
3:11 Speaker 00 Well, you're right that the First World War did come about in part because of the the arms race. But the knowledge that the nuclear bomb could obliterate the entire planet is something that has always managed to make wars limited post nineteen forty five. What happened in nineteen fourteen? The most people you could kill in a single moment would be as the result of a of an artillery shell, and that's nothing like a nuclear bomb, frankly. So it's it's it's apples and pears, I think.
3:49 Dwarkesh Patel? It's really interesting. In this book, you write about all these conflicts that have happened since World War Two. And in many cases, they're counterinsurgencies or civil wars. And it's interesting when one side gets to say that they're the legitimate force fighting for the country's independence against foreign aggressors, when both sides are getting foreign funding and support, you know. So I I'm curious how come the US has been bad at the propaganda here, where Hsi Minh or the Taliban get to say that they're the legitimate forces fighting for their country? Or how how does that determination get made?
4:20 Speaker 00 Yes, that's a very good point. It's, I mean, I think in both cases, obviously, Hsi Minh and the Taliban both were were local inhabitants in a way that the United States obviously wasn't in either place. But whether they represented the majority of the people in either North Vietnam or Afghanistan is a completely different issue. So. It's much more a question of whether or not they are totalitarian powers who are able to establish dominance and keep it in a in a difficult and dangerous part of the world. And that's what both of them were able to do. It didn't mean that they have a legitimacy in the kind of Jeffersonian democracy that
5:04 Speaker 00 one would like in a utopian world. But if they are the people that are wielding the power in the sense of a Marxist-Leninist clique, of course, in in North Vietnam, you have to deal with them. And they are the they are the established government.
5:23 Dwarkesh Patel? But it's interesting that South Vietnam or the the government in Afghanistan didn't seem to have that same sort of legitimacy that that these other insurgencies had, even though they were still local governments.
5:36 Speaker 00 Um, do you think not? I I'd rather think they do. I I mean, obviously, they're both immensely inefficient and useless and corrupt. But nonetheless, I don't think that that detracts from the fact that they were more legitimate than the than the forces that were rising up against them.
5:56 Dwarkesh Patel? Yeah, and in fact, this might be a good opportunity for you to discuss the four key tenants of strategic leadership that you discuss in the book.
6:03 Speaker 00 Yes, well, what we found in the book very much, very strongly, and it's interesting you should have mentioned the Chinese Civil War because you get that very powerfully as well, is that the side that wins wars very often is not the one that controls the cities or has the largest amount of men or has the best weaponry. As you mentioned, the Chinese Civil War, let's look at that for a second. It's the Guomindang nationalist forces at the outset of that war had all the major cities, they had four or five times the number of men, and they also had all the advanced weaponry that they'd taken off the Japanese at the time of the Japanese surrender in nineteen forty five, yet they still lost that war.
6:45 Speaker 00 And one of the reasons was that they didn't have very impressive strategic leadership. And Chiang Kai-shek, even when he did come up with good plans, often had warlords below him that refused to carry them out. So what we discovered in war after war is that the thing that matters most is this concept of strategic leadership, by which we mean.
7:10 Speaker 00 Having a leader at the top, either civil or military, but the ultimate decision maker. And it's usually best when there's somebody who's represents the civil and somebody who represents the military and they get on. And they need to get the big idea for the war right. They need to then be able to communicate that to their lieutenants effectively and indeed to the wider country. They need to be able to implement it aggressively and efficiently. And then they need as the fourth of the of the levels to continue to adapt the
7:52 Speaker 00 big idea to circumstances on the ground and to the way in which war develops, because obviously, you know, the war, no war carries out according to plan. The enemy always has a say. So and then and then to refine it again and again and again. And so that is the people who are able to do that are very often victorious, even though they start off the the campaign with many more disadvantages than their enemy.
8:22 Dwarkesh Patel? You know, I think this might be a good opportunity to start talking about Iraq and Afghanistan, which obviously your co-author can speak to like nobody else. I found it really interesting in reading his accounts of what happened in those two countries, especially Iraq, which was a premeditated invasion. It wasn't something we had to just immediately do, right? It was a completely different Cassus Belai with the weapons of mass destruction than nine eleven.
8:46 Speaker 00 Well, and and also the surprise attack on Kuwait, of course. I mean, that's the ultimate reason that that this took place, what had happened thirteen years before and the and the thirteen years in between, you know, it wasn't just WMD.
9:01 Dwarkesh Patel? Yeah, yeah. Although I guess that 13 years still leaves us enough time to have a plan of what to do. And I found it interesting that, you know, you're discussing that after the coup, the regime has been changed, you realize that there's not a plan for how to ensure security and stability in the country. And I just can't imagine, I mean, you have, obviously, you have really intelligent people like David Petraeus there who are working on this. How is it possible that there was an invasion of these countries without a good plan of how to secure them afterwards?
9:30 Speaker 00 Well, he wasn't working on it. He was working on how to destroy the Iraqi army and get to Baghdad. And the people who were working on it were a completely different set of generals who were failing to work out what to do once you had got to Baghdad, and who assumed that the thing to do would be to get rid of the Baath Party, which essentially ran the country, down to the sort of fourth level. It was all very well getting rid of Saddam's sons and some of the other people at the top level. But when you do that, and also you essentially send the army home and not tell them how they're going to feed their
10:11 Speaker 00 families, and allow them to keep their weapons, you've got a recipe for disaster, and sure enough disaster happened. But that can't be blamed on the sort of soldiers at the point of the sphere who did an extremely good job, who overthrew that regime in double quick time.
10:32 Dwarkesh Patel? Now, speaking of strategic leadership, why is it that we don't have a figure natively in Iraq and Afghanistan who had that level of leadership themselves, you know, Zelensky in Iraq and Afghanistan, where in the book, General Petraeus discusses the endless frustrations he had with Malaki in Iraq. And of course, Ghani leaves Afghanistan when the Taliban start routing the Afghani forces.
10:57 Speaker 00 And Qadsai, of course, also in Afghanistan. Yeah, these guys come in for a bit of a pasting, understandably, in our book, because they are not the sort of Churchillian figures that Zelensky is.
11:11 Speaker 00 I think it partly it's down to the sectarian nature of Iraqi and Afghan society, tribal nature of of society where however good a leader is, he doesn't automatically command the the attention and loyalty of other people in the same country. You know, the thing about Zelensky was that it was very clear very early on that he was speaking for the huge majority of the country. And it's very difficult for an Iraqi or Afghan leader, however good they are. And I'm not saying for one minute that Malaki and Karzai were any good, let alone the last chap who gets into his helicopter weighed down with
11:53 Speaker 00 suitcases full of money and and hightails it out of there, you know. By complete contrast, you do have Zelensky, who who shows all of those four qualities of leadership that I mentioned, and also, of course, who decided he was going to stay in Kyiv, fight in Kyiv, his family were going to stay in Kyiv, he wasn't going to let any military age male Ukrainians leave the country. And his big idea was, I need ammunition, not a ride.
12:23 Dwarkesh Patel? What is our big idea, the Americans' big idea in Ukraine? What is the ceasefire or end arrangement we are driving at, which we think would be plausible for both sides to accept?
12:35 Speaker 00 Good question. I don't think Biden has articulated one properly yet. Zelensky has, which is the obvious one, which is that we're not going to allow eighteen to nineteen percent of our country to forever be under the rule of the Russians, and we're going to throw them out. And when when David and I visited Kyiv about four months ago, we came across a huge level of national unity over that big idea. The all the generals, of course, and the ministers could subscribe to it, but they're sort of paid to, it's part of their job. But so also did everybody on the street and everybody that we spoke
13:18 Speaker 00 to. They all absolutely believed in ultimate victory. They didn't know how long it was going to take. They didn't know how much more blood was going to have to be shed. But they All believed that this would not stand and that they were going to ultimately be victorious, even if you, the Americans, cut off their their funding after the next election.
13:44 Dwarkesh Patel? Right, but so then, but what is the answer to the American question of what is our goal? Is that the same as the Ukrainian goal?
13:49 Speaker 00 No, I don't think it is at the moment. It seems to be to wait until other countries such as Britain give a new set of weaponry, then to give much more of the same kind of weaponry, then to wait until somebody else gives some more advanced weaponry. You saw this with anti-tank weaponry, later with tanks, then with artillery, then long-range artillery. Now you've been giving them this attackums, which are very impressive. But you've hung back a bit with with fighter aircraft and so on. So it's it seems to be a piecemeal approach where you where you wait until the Russians don't respond, then you give a bit more.
14:33 Speaker 00 Frankly, it would have been much better, I think, to have to have armed the Ukrainians earlier with the with the, you know, leopards essentially, and the tanks that they really needed for this big southern counter-offensive and and come out wholeheartedly for them. Now, you've given a lot of money, obviously. Forty-four billion is a very significant amount of money, and the Europeans have given as much or slightly more now. But still, the Russians are in in control of eighteen percent of the country, and they've been building what the Ukrainians were expecting, hundreds of yards of minefields. In fact, there are miles of minefields down in the south there. And so I'm afraid it is a it's a long and bloody slog.
15:16 Speaker 00 But we've seen wars like this before. This is one of the things that we write about, the Korean War being a classic example, where you just have to have to thrash it out.
15:27 Dwarkesh Patel? Actually, I want to ask you about Korea in a second, but yeah, this I guess you might have just answered this question right now. But it does seem weird that we're slowly funding a war of attrition. You know, it's classic Clausewitz to focus your effort on the point of attack. If you have, if you're just slowly building out this equipment, why not just give it to them all at once so they can have a successful counter-offensive?
15:47 Speaker 00 Because I don't think you've got the political will in the United States to do that, frankly. I think that, yes, you have a sort of nominal majority in both houses, but especially with your lower house at the moment, what's going on there? You don't have the sense of national will to do that. And so as a result, these poor Ukrainians are fighting and dying. And when you do give them stuff, it's extremely helpful and useful. But as I say, the key point is that they will carry on fighting and dying, even if you didn't give them the stuff, because they're not going to have America essentially dictating
16:30 Speaker 00 to them what their national destiny is.
16:33 Dwarkesh Patel? Now, speaking of the Korean War, the chapter you wrote about this in your book was really interesting and great. And I wonder if Truman had decided to use a nuclear bomb in Korea, had agreed with MacArthur to do so, whether the taboo that we have against nuclear weapons would, against tactical nuclear weapons, would not have emerged in the first place. And so, you know, the Soviets would have used it in Afghanistan, we would have used it in Vietnam, and Thatcher would have used it in the Falklands.
17:00 Speaker 00 No, I don't. I wouldn't go that far, because that would have wiped out the Falklands, and we were trying to win back the Falklands. But, yeah, no, you're quite right, of course. If MacArthur had used nuclear weapons against the Chinese crossing the Yalu River, then, yes, he might well have actually won that war. But it would have lowered the moral barrier so significantly that nuclear weapons would have been used an awful lot more. As it is today, although there's lots of sabre rattling by Lavrov and Putin.
17:38 Speaker 00 It doesn't really look as though, I mean, yes, there might be a catastrophic disaster at Chaperesia nuclear plant, but it's very unlikely for Putin actually to use tactical nuclear missiles in Ukraine, not least of course because the Chinese don't want him to. But but had they been a regular feature of the warfare in the nineteen fifty, sixty, seventies and so on, then then yeah, he might well do.
18:06 Dwarkesh Patel? I just think it's important when you're looking back in history to give credit at, you know, decisions that are not often discussed like this, where Truman just decided to lose Korea rather than, at the time, the taboo didn't even exist, but rather than to create a taboo against nuclear weapons.
18:24 Speaker 00 Exactly, he did, he did create it, as did Clement Attlee, actually, to give him his due, the British Prime Minister flew over to Washington, very concerned about this talk, MacArthur's talk about the using the nuclear bomb. And so he needs to get some credit as well. And also, actually, Truman needs credit for sacking MacArthur in the first place, because MacArthur did have some, I mean, he was a charismatic and impressive figure whose island popping policy in the Second World Wars was, you know, inspired and so on. But he was the classic example of the general who becomes too powerful, an over mighty
19:03 Speaker 00 subject, who who had political ambitions himself, who got the Chinese involvement in the war completely wrong, got the big ideas wrong essentially, and had to be and had to be sacked.
19:17 Dwarkesh Patel? And that's also another interesting point, how overwhelmingly popular he was. And I remember reading in Lyndon Johnson's biography that when MacArthur came to Congress to speak after he was sacked about the Korean War's progression, somebody said, you know, this is the closest thing, if he had wanted to, MacArthur was so popular that he could have just said, like, we're going to sack the capital and people would have just followed him.
19:38 Speaker 00 Well, having seen what, having seen what happened on January the sixth of last year, it's obviously not completely impossible.
19:47 Dwarkesh Patel? Okay, going back to Iraq and Afghanistan. How much have those conflicts, those counterinsurgency operations, prepared the American military for a war with a peer competitor like China?
19:59 Speaker 00 A great deal, obviously, but that's true of most wars. It's interesting, of course, China hasn't actually fought a major war for a very long time, really. And since the 1960s against India. So actual practice is an incredibly useful thing. If Ukraine were ever to be allowed into NATO, for example, we'd have 900,000 troops on the southern border of NATO. It would be a huge addition. So actually having troops that have fought is a... There's no amount of training that is the same as actual warfighting.
20:41 Speaker 00 What you mentioned earlier, actually, I was just thinking about that good question you asked about nuclear bombs. Of course, what we're seeing today in Gaza is a classic example of limited war in that however vicious and ghastly and painful and bloody it's going to be. It is the story of a group fighting against a country which has got the nuclear bomb, alone of all the countries in the region, and is on moral grounds not prepared even to threaten the use of it. So in that sense, the Netanyahu government has a...
21:24 Speaker 00 It's not doing what Lavrov and Putin are doing by sabre rattling the nuclear option, which does exist, you know. I mean, so much of what is happening is as a result of Tehran wanting it to happen. And Tehran doesn't have the bomb and Israel does. And yet Israel is not threatening Tehran.
21:48 Dwarkesh Patel? Yeah, and that's a really interesting point. I mean, as early as like 1973, you could have had Israel, you know, nuke the Egyptian beachheads. And it was a war of self-defense. It was like, you know, you either you die if you don't use it, or you if you lose the war.
22:03 Speaker 00 Exactly. Seventy-three was an existential war in the way that this one at the moment isn't. Now, obviously, we don't know what's going to happen within Israel, with the West Bank, with Hezbollah, with the Iranians and Syrians. It's not impossible that this could turn into a existential war for Israel. But but the possession of the nuclear bomb hasn't, you know, done Israel any favors. Equally, it hasn't weakened it, Israel either.
22:32 Dwarkesh Patel? Is deterrence dead? So, speaking of Israel, you know, Iran funded these Hamas terrorists to conduct this attack. And as far as I know, there's no serious repercussions on Iran itself for doing this, or funding Hezbollah, of course. Is deterrence as a doctrine, is that dead?
22:49 Speaker 00 No, because it's working very well in Southeast Asia, in Taiwan. It is only dead amongst people who are so irrational and illogical that they don't they don't mind essentially being extirpated in the way that the Israelis might soon be trying to extirpate Hamas. So if you if you sort of don't care, if you believe that God has given you the right and duty to kill Jews, then you're not going to be deterred in the same way that a much more rational and logical actor such as Xi Jinping is, where he wakes up every morning and thinks, right, should I be invading Taiwan?
23:34 Speaker 00 And he recognizes, looks to the world situation, to the might of America in the South China Seas, and looks to all his neighbors, all but North Korea, of which hate and fear him, and recognizes that today's not the day to do it. And that is that is what deterrence is. It's incredibly expensive, of course, deterrence, but it's immensely cheap at the same time compared to the alternative, which is war.
23:59 Dwarkesh Patel? So yeah, this is one of the points you make in the book is that deterrence, money spent on deterrence is seldom wasted, but deterrence also has to be credible. Now, regardless, separate from the question of whether America would actually intervene if China invaded Taiwan, is it rational for the Chinese to believe that America would intervene on behalf of an island with 20 million people, have a kinetic war with China over an island off the coast of China? Does that make sense? Like, is that deterrence credible for Chinese?
24:29 Speaker 00 It is. It certainly is because there is what's been called strategic ambiguity in the American stance. And that is something that no rational actor wants to have to deal with. An America which could be sucked into a major war, an America that could, that would have a, maybe act irrationally over Taiwan, or which one, which, as you can see with the AUKUS treaty, has got ambitions to stand up to China and feels that it needs to carry them out. The public statements are obviously not intended deliberately to provoke China,
25:14 Speaker 00 but they're pretty straightforward in being ambiguous enough that China doesn't want to take the risk. Whilst, obviously, the United States' military budget is so enormous, so vast, it's capable of deterring China. If it was to send the wrong messages, taking ships away and so on, then it might not. Look at what America's done in Ukraine. And Xi recognizes that it's led a coalition which has fought very hard and so far hasn't lost.
25:57 Speaker 00 And so, without a single American serviceman being involved, were American servicemen involved, which they would be in a Taiwan confrontation, the American president would be much, much more likely to go all in.
26:13 Dwarkesh Patel? Yeah, although if, for example, China blockades Taiwan and puts the onus on America to launch the kinetic war to break through the blockade. I I I wonder if then put in those terms, an American president would not intervene. And but or at least the Chinese wouldn't expect an American president to launch the kinetic war to break the blockade.
26:32 Speaker 00 Well, they've obviously um wargamed this a million times in the Pentagon. And um and I think that um your your remark about twenty million people is obviously an apocryphal one. But do let's also remember that Taiwan has eighty percent of the um semiconductor industry, or at least the high-level semiconductor industry. There were lots of good things being done to mitigate that against that now. But nonetheless, it would be catastrophic for China to be able to snaffle all of that in a single coup d'arm. And um obviously, the Biden administration knows that.
27:15 Dwarkesh Patel? Before we return to conflict, I do want to ask you some questions about Churchill and World War Two. And in fact, this is actually a good jumping off point because, you know, speaking of rational leaders. I I'm struck when reading your biography of Churchill of how much of his thinking is more emotive, less probabilistic, much more principled. And when I try to back test how I would have reacted, given my mindset to World War Two, if I was in Britain. I have to admit, I like to think in terms of probabilities and expected value. I would have said, you know, what's the expected value of fighting Germany in nineteen thirty eight over Czechoslovakia? What's the what would happen if he just didn't? That looks like probably uh it probably might just be best to run our odds with appeasement.
27:58 Dwarkesh Patel? And I wonder if this is just a one-off case, or do you think in general that illustrates a weakness in the more sort of probabilistic way of thinking about geopolitics compared to Churchill's more emotional, oratorical, principled way?
28:12 Speaker 00 I don't really agree with you, I think with the with the premise, because I think that Churchill, yes, he was emotional and and principled. But also, he recognized that the advance that the Germans um.
28:27 Speaker 00 Made between the Sudeten crisis, which ended in Munich in September nineteen thirty eight and the outbreak of war a year later in September nineteen thirty nine was so huge, especially in their creation of bombers and tanks and so on. And also, it was helped so much by taking the Skoda factories of the Czechs from Czechoslovakia and churning out tanks for Germany, that it was a rational thing to have tried to have stopped Germany invading Czechoslovakia. So what Churchill was doing, yes, he was emotional and a great rhetorician and so on, but he
29:12 Speaker 00 was also making a very, very hard-nosed decision with regard to balance of power, recognizing that in fact, Germany was in a much stronger position a year later than it had been at the time of Munich.
29:26 Dwarkesh Patel? Now, it's remarkable to what extent Churchill had read, and not only read but written, a tremendous amount of history. And I'm curious how concretely that history informed his decision-making as a leader. Was it at the level of tactics and geography, where you see how old battles in the same places are fought? Was it a level of grand strategy? Was it at the understanding of human nature? What level did that understanding of history help him?
29:52 Speaker 00 All of those and more, all of those and more. One of the reasons I'm proud to be an historian is that Churchill was one. And he used his, he was, I mean, primarily, that was his job, you know, in the nineteen thirties when he was out of office, was to write history books. And the one of his great ancestor, John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, is a, it's almost like an autobiography of the Second World War, and he's actually writing about his own ancestor two hundred years beforehand. But it is extraordinary how many things to do with tactics and strategy, of course, but also with how to deal with allies and how to deal with domestic political opinion and so on.
30:37 Speaker 00 All of these things are gone into. And then only five years after the publication of that book, he is Prime Minister and fighting a world war himself. History was a constant echo for him. It gave him endless signposts. It's mentioned in some ten percent of his speeches in the Second World War. He, uh, ten percent of those speeches do have, um, references to history. He was basically telling the British people that, uh, look back at the Spanish Armada, look back at, uh, Napoleonic wars. We have been in this dangerous situation before. The country has seen great perils
31:18 Speaker 00 before Elizabeth the first and the Spanish Armada, for example. And, um, and we've come through them and been victorious. So, yes, he, he recognized the sort of political power of, um, historical analogy. And, uh, and he bent it to his, to his overall overarching theme that we have to stand up to the Nazis.
31:39 Dwarkesh Patel? Uh, uh, actually, so speaking of this, think, if, if we think of Churchill as an applied historian, um, this isn't the question I was just planning on asking you, but you know, you are in the House of Lords. You've written about these, uh, I guess all basically everything that's happened in the last two centuries across your 20 books. Um, or would you ever consider getting more involved with politics?
31:56 Speaker 00 Well, I'm a politician. I mean, I, I go to the House of Lords from Monday, uh, to Wednesday lunchtime to dinner part, uh, dinner time. I, um, go and vote in the divisions, you know? And, uh, no, I mean, other than, other than, I can't see how much more involved in politics I can be than speaking and voting in, in one of the parliaments of our, of our parliament. If you want to refine that slightly, do, uh, to our question.
32:26 Dwarkesh Patel? Yeah. Uh, let me restate the question. Would you, uh, consider running for, uh, aspiring towards a leadership position in the UK, uh, given how successful past historians have been at, at that endeavor?
32:39 Speaker 00 Um, well, uh, we, we've just mentioned one past historian who's been successful. I assure you that there are an awful lot of other ones who haven't. No, I, uh, I'm, I'm very happy with the extent that I, uh, involve myself in, in politics in the UK. I, I've got to get back down to writing history books, frankly, is the, uh, is the, um, reason I was, I was put on earth, really.
33:03 Dwarkesh Patel? Now, uh, tying back Churchill and your, your most recent book. There's this interesting thing where wartime leaders, very successful wartime leaders, are kicked out of office after they win their wars. Churchill in 1945, de Gaulle resigns in 46, he led the French against the Nazis. And then, more recently, which you discuss in your book, George H. W. Bush possibly has the most successful foreign policy since World War II. The unification of Germany, the fall of the Soviet Bloc without a single shot being fired, and many others.
33:35 Speaker 00 David Lloyd George is the other classic example, of course. David Lloyd George led us to victory in the First World War. He was out by 1922.
33:43 Dwarkesh Patel? So what is this? Why are we in democratic countries, keen to kick out the people who win us these wars and foreign policy wins?
33:51 Speaker 00 Because we recognize that the skills you need in peace are completely different from the ones you needed in war. And what the Labour Party was offering in 1945, for example, this sort of New Jerusalem of socialism and the welfare state and nationalizing the Bank of England and free stuff, essentially, National Health Service, was going to be given by Clement Attlee. But although much of that actually was going to be done by Winston Churchill as well, they recognized that the Conservatives didn't have their heart in it in the same way that the socialists did. So it's completely rational, isn't it, in a democratic country to go for, when you've
34:34 Speaker 00 got a choice of leaders, to go for the one who's going to lead you through the peace, however well the person who led you through the war did.
34:44 Dwarkesh Patel? Although that particular example of socialism in Britain doesn't seem like the rational choice for the British population to have made.
34:51 Speaker 00 Well, it did after six years of grueling warfare, where people wanted to have a sort of more healthy and better life. And they assumed that socialism was going to be able to do that for them. It took us half a century before we grew out of that particular miasma.
35:11 Dwarkesh Patel? Now, let's talk about future wars, which is something interesting that you and John Petry survey in your most recent book. You mentioned that the balance of power has shifted more towards defense than offense recently. Why is that?
35:26 Speaker 00 And we're seeing that, aren't we? Or we will be about to see that, I fear, in Gaza. That in Napoleonic times, it was one in three. You needed three attackers for every defender. In the, that's probably stays true until the Second World War. But frankly, with, I think, taking Gaza as a indication, you know, with IEDs, with booby traps, with, certainly with all these tunnels, and with the capacity for ambush, it's, and for sniper fire as well, which has come on leaps and bounds since the old days of Stalingrad. You need, you need
36:10 Speaker 00 more than, certainly more than three to one in offense. It's a, it's an interesting fact, you know, that, that when Clausewitz was, was writing, three to one was a, was a perfectly reasonable ratio. But I think that's gone, gone to the birds now.
36:32 Dwarkesh Patel? Oh, interesting. This just preempted, and I guess answered a question I was about to ask you, which is, it's remarkable to me that a three to one ratio, which Clausewitz first came up with, has stayed consistent for, I guess the answer is that it hasn't. But I was about to ask, well, it's weird that for hundreds of years with all these new technologies, that that ratio is still the one that people use, that technicians still use.
36:53 Speaker 00 Yes. Well, they, as I say, they did until, until sort of well into our lifetimes. But they'd be mad to today because, because that has altered, especially of course, in built up areas, in the, in the kind of situation which one gets in Gaza with lots of high rise buildings. Fewer now than there were, to be frank, but lots of built up areas. You can look at, for example, the Battle of Monte Cassino, where because the Allies flattened the whole monastery, actually, the rubble was more easy for the Germans to defend with
37:37 Speaker 00 machine gun nests and so on than if the actual building had been left standing. So there is an argument, actually, that you do better if you don't blast the buildings. And as you saw also in Mariupol, which you mentioned earlier. And then there's of course Stalingrad, where they fight something called Ratskrieg, which is essentially rats war, because people are fighting down in the cellars. You know, it's hand to hand stuff, it's extremely vicious, where every building, every room has to be fought sometimes down with bayonets. So this kind of fighting, which of course is heavily, heavily
38:20 Speaker 00 full of high casualty rates, might well be the one that we're about to see the IDF enter in Gaza.
38:30 Dwarkesh Patel? That's a scary comparison, Gaza becomes Stalingrad. I didn't think of it that way, but that's wow.
38:35 Speaker 00 In my, in my house in London, I have an actual copy of one of Winston Churchill's speeches with his handwritten annotations. And one of the sentences is that London, fought street by street, could engulf and devour an entire hostile army. And one hopes that doesn't happen, obviously, to the IDF. But you know, that's the, that's the reality of house to house fighting.
39:05 Dwarkesh Patel? Actually, while we're on the subject, I have a few other questions on World War Two that I want to ask you before we return to future wars. You know, you have this really interesting book, I think probably my favorite book about World War II, The Storms of War, which I highly recommend. And in it, in it, you make the claim, you make the claim that were not for the ideologically inspired blunders of Hitler and the Nazis, that they could have won World War II. And then you detail a lot of the mistakes they made. But when we step back and look at, after America joins the war, the overwhelming industrial output of America, even if they didn't make these mistakes, is there really any chance that, you know, you have a country that has like 2X the GNP
39:48 Dwarkesh Patel? and is outproducing the rest of the world combined ships and planes, that you could have really stood up to that?
39:53 Speaker 00 Well, why did Hitler declare war against America? There wouldn't have been a war if he hadn't declared war against America. You'd have fought a war against the country that attacked you, Japan. And so, and the reason is because he was a Nazi, because he believed that Jews and blacks dominated the American decision-making process, which by the way is completely absurd when one looks at the Roosevelt administration. It had, it had very, very few Jews or blacks. But nonetheless, the Nazis didn't sort of do their factual accuracy. It wasn't, wasn't always their highest attribute.
40:37 Speaker 00 And they also thought that Americans were cowards and wouldn't be able to fight very well, which is extraordinary considering that the Americans had fought very well indeed in the First World War. Adolf Hitler told Molotov, when they were in a bunker in 1940 in Berlin, that the Americans wouldn't, if the Americans did come into the war, they wouldn't be able to actually put any troops into the Western theater until the year 1970.
41:10 Speaker 00 As it was needless to say, by November nineteen forty two, you had a quarter of a million GIs storming ashore in North Africa. So this sense of ideology, you see it also, of course, six months earlier in the June of nineteen forty one, where Hitler invades Russia in the belief that the Slavic people can't stand up to the to the great Germanarian master race. And is he, as Goebbels said to him, we'll kick in the door and the whole rotten edifice will come crashing down, talking about the Bolshevik state. But but that's not what happened, of course.
41:50 Speaker 00 And and the Russians fighting on their own territory, i.e. when they're not fighting an adventure, a foreign adventure, like in Poland or in Finland or now in Ukraine, are actually very good soldiers. So he got that wrong again and again. Hitler put his Nazi ideology before the strategic best interests of the of the German Reich.
42:17 Dwarkesh Patel? It was fascinating to read the different mistakes Hitler made. Obviously, from liquidating six million of his most productive, intelligent and well-educated people to the timing of Operation Barbarossa, or launching it in the first place, to the timing of launching World War Two in the first place. But even if he hadn't declared war on America, the the Lend-Lease Aid, on whose basis the Soviets were able to drive back the Germans, would still have continued. And that was, of course, a meat grinder where the overwhelming majority of German troops died. So I guess you could say, well, then he wouldn't have done Operation Barbarossa at all. But then are we still talking about the same war?
42:57 Speaker 00 He would have invaded Russia and be caught on in this enormous war. And but if he hadn't declared war on the United States, it's very difficult to work out how Roosevelt would have been able to have declared war on him, especially if you were fighting a full-scale war against Japan, which by that stage, by early nineteen forty two, covered one-eighth of the world's surface.
43:20 Speaker 00 It's a it's a it's a huge undertaking. Um, but by by the calendar year nineteen, you're absolutely right about the might of American production. By the calendar year nineteen forty four, when the British produced twenty eight thousand warplanes, the Russians and the Germans both produced forty thousand each. The United States produced ninety eight thousand warplanes. It's almost as much as the whole of the rest of the world put together, you know. They were building liberty ships at the rate of one a week. It was just truly extraordinary um uh thing in terms of just sheer production. So of course that was going to give them the um the final say over who commanded at
44:00 Speaker 00 D day, you know, when D day would happen um and what would happen once they landed um in uh in France. Uh, but it also had huge implications for um for everything else really in the Second World War as well. And you're also completely right to say for every five Germans killed in conflict, I by I don't mean bombed from the air, I mean killed on a battlefield. Four of them died on the Eastern Front.
44:27 Dwarkesh Patel? Now, uh, given how misled Hitler was by Nazi ideology, why weren't the Soviets as misled by communist ideology in the waging of World War Two?
44:37 Speaker 00 Because um communist ideology hadn't uh affected actual um Politburo, the way in which the Politburo worked under Stalin. Um, there was no sort of dictatorship of the of the proletariat or uh or anything uh like that, uh, let alone any equality. Um, he he was a obviously a totalitarian dictator, but what he did learn was um that the Hitlerian way of fighting the war um was not the most productive one. So what you get after Operation Barbarossa, in which after which he had some kind of a mini mental breakdown in the immediate hours that he learned about it, how the one
45:22 Speaker 00 man he trusted in politics, Adolf Hitler, had betrayed him. For a paranoid, you know, that's a, that's a difficult moment to take. But then what he does is to start to lean on those marshals such as Konyev and, and Zhukov and Rokosovski and others. And, and gives them a lot more power than they ever had before. And listens to them and takes their advice and actually has a, a much more kind of Western view. Um, Western, the relationship between Churchill, Roosevelt, um, Alan Brooke and George Marshall, which I write about in my book Masters and Commanders.
46:05 Speaker 00 Um, is a, is a, a big sort of give and take. Um, a much more sort of democratic and Western way of, of coming to military decisions. And that's the one that Stalin adopts, and quite rightly, and completely contrasted from what's going on in the Wolschanza, eighteen miles behind the, eighteen hundred miles behind the German front, which is actually the, the Fuhrer listening sometimes for hours to his generals, most of whom know strategy far better than he because they actually went to staff colleges. And they fought, of course, as officers in the First World War rather than just as a corporal.
46:49 Speaker 00 And men like Rundstedt and Gudarian and Manstein and so on. These, these people would be listened to by, by Hitler. And then right at the end of the meeting, Hitler would sum up and, and say that they were going to do exactly what he'd originally said right at the beginning of the meeting. And we have, they, we have the, every word said by everybody at the Fuhrer conferences because the stenographers, you know, took down every word that was said. And it's very clear that they would go into tremendous detail. Um, but ultimately the, the Fuhrer was the, um. His way was the way that the Wehrmacht went.
47:33 Dwarkesh Patel? This is actually interesting, and this is one of the points you discuss in Conflict about you talk about the different ways in which democracies, which are dictatorships, are able to execute wars. And World War II is obviously the the perfect example to evaluate this.
47:47 Speaker 00 Well, except for the Soviet Union was not a democracy, of course, and it was on the winning side. You know, there there is that sort of glaring glaring glitch in the argument.
47:57 Dwarkesh Patel? Right, right, right. Fair enough. But so, you know, you have the Allied, the the Western democracies have this strategy by committee. I think you described it in the in Storms of War. And that that obviously means that, you know, something as stupid as Operation Barbarossa never happens. You have to come to consensus between all these leaders. At the same time, in your Napoleon biography, you have this singular genius who is able to execute these moves that even his advisors and often are like, well, you shouldn't do that. I guess in the case of Russia, they were right. But yeah, so this
48:33 Dwarkesh Patel? maybe just you can talk generally about the the merits of strategy by consensus versus strategy by a singular mind.
48:41 Speaker 00 Yes. Actually, the interesting thing about Napoleon in 1812 is that he wasn't warned by his generals that it was a big mistake. What he and this was partly because he and they thought that this was going to be a three week campaign, and it was only going to go about 50 miles into Russian territory before the Russians capitulated or came to a big battle and were defeated. And he had absolutely no plans at all to go all the way to Moscow in 1812. That would have that would have seemed, as he was crossing the Niemen River, as a complete absurdity. But he was drawn in more and more into the
49:21 Speaker 00 Russian heartland until until finally they gave battle in September 1812 at Barodino. And and then he he went on and took Moscow. But he left enough time to get back from Moscow to Smolensk. And it was
49:43 Speaker 00 In fact, more time than he had taken to get from Smolensk to Moscow. There are other reasons which I go into in the book about why the retreat from Moscow turned into the catastrophe it did, but it wasn't actually primarily the the weather at the beginning at least. So so, yes, Napoleon is the classic example of the single-minded strategic leader who, like, I don't know, Alexander the Great or Julius Caesar, has the has the whole centrality of the of the campaign in his head, essentially. But of course, he does lose.
50:21 Speaker 00 And after eighteen twelve, you have the the various coalitions of eighteen thirteen and eighteen fourteen, which forced him to abdicate. Then he comes back, of course, in the Hundred Days and loses there as well. So that is by in contrast to the much more collegiate way that Wellington and Schwarzenberg and Blücher and so on interacted with with one another. But, yes, your your your overall thesis, I think, is is is absolutely right about democracies being better at fighting wars. But dictatorships, of course, and totalitarian ones are authoritarian as well, are much better at starting wars
51:05 Speaker 00 because they do have the element of surprise very often. One looks at the Om Kippur War, of course, you look at nine eleven, at Pearl Harbor, Barbarossa, that you mentioned earlier, the Falklands, the attack on on Kuwait by Saddam. You know, there's there's a great line of
51:26 Dwarkesh Patel? The Chinese sneaking into Korea.
51:28 Speaker 00 It's not the the Chinese crossing the Yalu, absolutely Yalu River, hundred and sixty thousand of them at the dead of night. I mean, it's the most extraordinary surprise attack. And there's that wonderful line of Paul Wolfowitz's, who, when he said that surprise attacks take place so often in history, that the only surprising thing is that we're still surprised by them. And and that is right. And democracies can do surprise attacks. Obviously, the the major exception to that rule is when is when Israel Did successfully carry out the Six Day War surprise attack at the beginning of that conflict, but otherwise democracies tend not to. And by the way, it's a good
52:13 Speaker 00 thing not to, because what it does do is light a fire under the country that's been surprised. Classic examples, of course, being Pearl Harbor, and makes them feel outraged and angry. And as a result, they tend to extract revenge. And by the way, Hamas, what Hamas did on the seventh of October is a classic example of that, of course. That's a surprise attack, which was by its own lights immensely successful, but which will have lit a fire under Israel that is going to be very dangerous for Hamas.
52:54 Dwarkesh Patel? This is actually an excellent opportunity to ask you about Bring Us Back to the Future of War, which you discuss in your newest book, Conflict. The question I have is, given you discuss in the book, we have, you know, satellite reconnaissance and drones and all this cyber espionage. Given how clearly we can see the world now with these new technologies, are large scale surprise attacks ever going to be possible again?
53:18 Speaker 00 That's a very good question. I'm tempted to say no, because you're quite right. Everything can be spotted on the battlefield today. Obviously, the Hamas surprise attack was a much, much smaller scale than a complete, you know, nation on nation kind of attack like Barbarossa or Pearl Harbor. But nonetheless, it is much more difficult to hide troops today than it ever has been in the past. That doesn't change, of course, the psychology of what happens when you are surprised in the way that Israel was. But yeah, in the
54:00 Speaker 00 10th chapter, the last chapter of our book, we call it the Future of War. We look at areas like cyber and space, but also sensors, AI, robotics, and drones, of course. You know, in the future, the war will be fought between two sets of drones. And the humans won't be in the loop. They'll be on the loop. They'll have written the algorithms, but of course, but they won't be.
54:28 Speaker 00 Uh in the loop because decision making has to take place far, far faster than the human mind can work. When if if a human is um is involved and at the controls of the weaponry of the future, then he'll lose. It has to be fought between um between two sets of machines. And of course, that has great advantages in terms of speed, but also um machines have no conscience. They don't feel fear or cowardice. They don't feel remorse or regret or pity. Um. It's going to be a much more um dangerous world in that sense.
55:05 Dwarkesh Patel? Yeah, well, and that has all kinds of interesting implications. You uh from the technical, which you discuss in the book, that the electromagnetic spectrum will be under much greater contention because then you can jam the electronics and the communications between these devices. To the strategic, I mean, you have these examples, I famously like, let's say that in the nineteen eighties, when the stock market crashes because uh an algorithm malfunctions, if that leads to a world war, the whatever that was, the equivalent of that leads to a world war. So what you discuss in your Ukraine chapter that, you know, the tech entrepreneurs are now having a bit much bigger impact on the uh on the waging of war, where obviously you have Elon Musk providing Starlink services
55:50 Dwarkesh Patel? to Ukraine and notably refusing to provide uh the service to help with the surprise attack, the naval surprise attack that um uh Ukraine was planning on launching in Crimea. Now, how will the ability of tech entrepreneurs to dictate where and how they will get involved in the um in lending their technology to governments? How will that play into the future strategy? Will they be a force for peace? Or will they not be a force at all? Because if the government really wants your technology, in the end, they can just expropriate it.
56:24 Speaker 00 Um. I don't think they'll they'll do that, except for in times of extreme stress but and crisis. But um. No, actually, there's a there's a very wide and, I think, overall, very positive um area that that tech entrepreneurs can play here. Um. And Starlink, yes, it's true that Mr. Musk did um refuse to help one attack in Crimea. But overall, Starlink has been invaluable in this in this war. I mean, in a way, it is the first proper internet war. You know, people with iPhones on the battlefield can upload um both images and and obviously also
57:07 Speaker 00 map references, which can prove extremely useful to um drones and artillery. And this is one of the reasons that Kyiv didn't fall in the opening um parts of the of the Russo-Ukrainian war. Um. Because the uh because Ukrainian artillery was being given um uh the accurate information on all sorts of open intelligence, um open sources. It's uh it's it was a new kind of warfare uh which the Russians took a very long time to uh catch up with. And of course, because they didn't have their own um people on the ground,
57:48 Speaker 00 whereas Ukraine did. The native population was one hundred percent opposed to um uh the Russian invasion in every area apart from four Donbass oblasts. You essentially had um just a um, you know, multitude of information sources that were proving to be incredibly useful. So so that's one aspect of of the modernity. The next one, obviously, is drones and and the use they've been put to um by the Ukrainians. But um the the sort of innovative uh stance of the Ukrainians has been really extraordinarily impressive. And when um.
58:30 Speaker 00 Tech people all across the world, not just obviously in the United States, came out very actively in support of Ukraine. It really did move the dial. And so I think with companies like Panantia and others that are really making huge advances, it's and the cutting edge still being with the with the West in terms of tech entrepreneurial ability. This is a good thing for the West. And that some individuals are going to be pretty much like Mr. Musk is.
59:09 Speaker 00 The the most important private individuals, I would say, to actually affect warfare since Tiesin and Krupp back in before the First World War. So it really is a new world, but it's not not a bad new world. It could actually be an extremely good new world for for the West and for democracy.
59:33 Dwarkesh Patel? Yep. Speaking of tech entrepreneurs and their personalities, let's discuss your biography of Napoleon. So I'm not aware if you're aware of this, but living in San Francisco, there is in the startup community, there is a cult of Napoleon that that is slowly emerging.
59:52 Speaker 00 I didn't know that. Seriously, is there?
59:54 Dwarkesh Patel? Your biography is a is the part of the canon here.
59:59 Dwarkesh Patel? So in the person of Napoleon, I think startup founders see the the most the best aspects of themselves resemble. You have somebody who is a young upstart, just stupendously energetic and competent, much more efficient than the bureaucracies and old systems around him, a reformer, tremendously intellectually curious, an autodidact. You can just go down the list. What is your reaction?
1:00:25 Speaker 00 I love that. I love that. That's exactly what, yeah, absolutely. He was totally fascinated by every new thing. He flung himself into, into, you know, ideas for balloons and submarines and anything that could be useful for agricultural development. He was fascinated by trying to build bridges faster and better and cheaper. He was a, he was a real go-getter when it came to giving prizes for new chemical components and so on. This was, this was somebody who created the Légende d'Enneur, not just for soldiers,
1:01:09 Speaker 00 but very much for inventors and entrepreneurs and people like that who he felt were going to help France outstrip Britain essentially, which had a head start on France in the Industrial Revolution. So it was, so there was a very strong sort of national, nationalist reasoning behind his embrace of, of science. But, you know, he got, he was made a, a fellow of the, of the French Academy on the basis of his genuine interest, not just because he was the first consul of, of France. And he used to attend all their meetings, you know, and this was an extraordinary thing. If there was going to be a meeting on,
1:01:50 Speaker 00 I don't know, electricity, sitting in the front there would be the first consul, taking notes. So I can understand why, why young tech entrepreneurs might, might like Napoleon. And I'm thrilled that my book might be helping with that.
1:02:09 Dwarkesh Patel? Yeah, no, I, I think you'd be surprised to the extent of it.
1:02:12 Speaker 00 Also, it's true that megalomaniacs also love Napoleon. So I'm not saying that there is a massive, you know, Venn diagram shaded area between tech entrepreneurs and megalomaniacs, but it doesn't necessarily, you know, liking Napoleon doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to be a great tech entrepreneur, shall we say.
1:02:36 Dwarkesh Patel? On the point of being a futurist, it's really remarkable in your Churchill biography, you discuss the ways in which he saw the influence of tanks and planes and even nuclear energy far before many others.
1:02:50 Speaker 00 His best friend was the Oxford professor for physics, Professor Linderman and later Lord Chawwle. He was a, I mean, when it comes to the people that he had around him, he loved having scientists surround him. He said that scientists should be on tap but not on top. So he did recognise that, you know, he didn't want to have a sort of world run by scientists, but he definitely wanted to know what they were thinking. And as early as the nineteen, mid nineteen twenties, so a good twenty years before the atom bomb, he talked about how an entire city could be destroyed by a nuclear bomb the size of an orange.
1:03:34 Speaker 00 And, you know, that was very advanced stuff, frankly. He, he of course was fascinated by the use of radar in the Second World War, especially at the very beginning of the Second World War. How one could bend the German rays to mean that their bombers were sent off target and didn't fly over British cities. He wanted to get into the real nitty gritty of all of that. And of course, the ultimate sort of mathematical genius machine, the enigma, the ultra machine that broke the enigma code.
1:04:14 Speaker 00 So, so in everything to do with that, he was also really interested in sort of learning and understanding the reasoning behind what was going on. It's, it's a, because it's very easy to think of Churchill as a bit of a reactionary figure, this sort of tubby Tory with his cigars and his brandy and wanting to hang on to India and all of these sort of very much sort of set in the past kind of attitudes and attributes. But really, he was somebody who was obsessed with the future.
1:04:48 Dwarkesh Patel? But on the point of Napoleon, it's, you know, it's interesting, the, the way you describe the way he would micromanage every aspect of the empire. And obviously his energy and efficiency, it's, it reads honestly like an Elon Musk biography. Where, you know, Elon is micromanaging the engines on his Raptors at the same time running these five other companies. Uh, I, I wonder what you think a person like Napoleon does today, if, if the, that, that, that seems out of genes is born today. Does he become an Elon Musk or does he do something else?
1:05:16 Speaker 00 No, that's exactly what he, of course he does, absolutely. He, he, he goes to Silicon Valley and sets up his own company and makes a billion out of finding something useful to, to advance mankind with. That's exactly what Napoleon does today. And, and by the way, if he has anything like the same acoustical techniques, he probably buys up lots of other companies around him in the way that Napoleon invaded country after country. But when he did invade those countries, what he would do, for example, in, in Italy after the Italian campaign.
1:05:52 Speaker 00 And he entered Milan, the first thing he did was to get together the Milanese intellectuals, the writers, the scientists, the chemists and so on. Uh, he was very interested in astronomy and, and so on. And would, and would talk to them about, about their thing. So you had an intellectual as leader, which frankly, the Bourbons for the last thousand years of French history, it's very difficult to think of, of more than one or two genuine intellectuals, um, uh, as ruler. And so one can understand why he became popular amongst the, amongst the middle class and the intellectuals themselves.
1:06:36 Speaker 00 And he would also, one of the other things he would do was to go into every town he went into. He would go into the ghetto and free the Jews and give them civil and religious rights and so on. Uh, and I think that was tremendously forward thinking for that day and age as well, and a very attractive feature about him.
1:06:56 Dwarkesh Patel? You know, obviously the biography of Napoleon, uh, must end tragically. And I noticed this about many other biographies of great people I read is often what makes them great in the first place is they keep making these double or nothing gambles that, you know, catapult them to, to the top. And then of course, at some point your luck runs out. That's obviously oversimplification in every single case, but I wonder if this is also a pattern you notice in the lives of great figures. You could say for Elon, having his reputation and fortune wasted away at the author of Twitter could be an example of one such thing. But what is your reaction to that?
1:07:33 Speaker 00 Yes, of course, hubris is the occupational hazard of hugely successful people, needless to say. I mean, it's probably also the occupational hazard of lots of other people, but we just don't know about it because they're not hugely successful. But one does tend to get stuck in one's ways. One can't necessarily, you know, old dog, new tricks. You can't necessarily reinvent yourself and therefore you go down the same old path. I would say in Napoleon's defense, of course, not least that idea that when he invaded in 1812, which is the key moment, you know, after that, nothing good happens, that before that, lots and lots
1:08:16 Speaker 00 of good things happen. But the key thing about that is that, look, he had beaten the Russians twice before. He was invading with an army of 615,000, which was the same size as Paris at that time. He didn't, he knew that the Russian army was only about half the size of his. And he didn't want to go too far into Russia, which of course, as I mentioned earlier, changed in the course of the campaign. But it wasn't an insane, hubristic, mad decision to go to war against Russia in 1812. What was hubristic, mad and insane was to try
1:08:56 Speaker 00 to beat Britain by imposing a continental blockade on the entirety of Europe and therefore attempting to sort of crush Britain by stopping smuggling, which was completely rife, and to stop every other country from entering into free trade with Britain. It was that belief in that protectionism could somehow win the war against Britain. That was the mad thing. And that's what led him into the Pennsylia campaign, which cost him a quarter of a million soldiers.
1:09:33 Dwarkesh Patel? Actually, so if you have somebody like Napoleon, who for his entire life has succeeded in, who is at the tail end of multiple bell curves, succeeded in ways that nobody else is succeeding or could anticipate, or people tell him, well, that's not possible, and he accomplishes it. Obviously, he has to take, you know, advisers with a grain of salt, knowing that he has been able to do things that others have not been able to do. But he also has to recognize his limits. And this is not just a question of Napoleon in particular, but just in general. How does somebody who is at the tail end of multiple distributions not fall back to mediocrity when making judgments about themselves, but also recognize their limits?
1:10:13 Speaker 00 It's always a question of choosing the right advisers, isn't it? In domestic politics, areas that he knew he didn't know that much about, legal codes and so on. Although it's called the Napoleonic code, actually, of course, it was his legal experts who drew it up and saw it through and passed the legislation and so on. And so areas that he wasn't particularly interested in, he did allow a considerable degree to be decided by, not decided by, no, that's one stage too far, but advised upon. He was the dictator, he had the ultimate decision.
1:10:54 Speaker 00 But he was very good at choosing advisers, quite regardless of what their status were in society, you know, or quite how respectable they were. There's a man called Cambassier, who was a truly powerful figure, and he was gay. And this was something that was pretty much unknown at that stage, he was outwardly gay, and at a time when, of course, that was against the law. But Napoleon didn't mind that, because he was so good at his job, that he kept him on as arch-chancellor. Some of the marshals, he was a true believer in meritocracy, and that some of his marshals, there were 26 marshals, 13 of them came...
1:11:40 Speaker 00 From the working classes, and in some cases below, they were peasants, they were the sons of innkeepers and barrel coupers and domestic servants and so on. And yet, if he saw that a man was lucky, was one of the things he always wanted in his generals, but also was a natural leader, he would appoint him. And they became marshals, and all the marshals, apart from a couple, became dukes and princes. Two of them became kings. You know, to be the son of a barrel cooper and to become a king in the early 19th century
1:12:20 Speaker 00 was a truly extraordinary thing in an army where, for the last thousand years certainly, your rank and status in life was very much the same as your father and grandfather.
1:12:33 Dwarkesh Patel? One thing I found really interesting in your biographies of Napoleon and Churchill, if I'm remembering correctly, both of them wrote a novel in their early twenties or thereabouts, where they save their country in battle, or not they, a character saves their country in battle and wins over a pretty maiden. I remember those details, but I thought, wow, both of them did that? That's a really interesting detail. What explains this?
1:12:58 Speaker 00 Yes, it's probably a terrible psychological disorder, but I've just realised that I did the same thing when I was in my twenties. I had a novel in which I saved the country and married the fair maiden. Gosh, I don't know what that makes me, probably a megalomaniac like Napoleon. But yes, they're both great reads, by the way. I love Clisson and Eugénie, the book you're referring to by Napoleon, but the best one by far is Savarola by Winston Churchill, where you see lots of rolling Churchillian phrases which come out again and again later on in life. And you're right, in both of them, they're very, very obviously autobiographical.
1:13:44 Speaker 00 And and the hero, actually in Severolet, the hero doesn't, he saves the country, but then he goes off into exile. And but with, and I think doesn't the Napoleon figure die heroically in battle after saving the nation? But there's a lot of nation saving going on in both of those youthful novels.
1:14:06 Dwarkesh Patel? Now that we're nearing the end of our time, I want to ask you about how is it possible, you're in the House of Lords, I just realized that, well, I knew you were in the House of Lords, but I just realized how much of your time that consumes. On top of that, you're writing these books that are, you know, your biographies are widely recognized as the best biographies of these people who are, have thousands of biographies written about them. And you're doing, you're writing 20 books, you're, how are you managing your time? How is this possible?
1:14:31 Speaker 00 Because I start work at 4am every day. You get five hours or so before anyone wants to bother you or or, you know, irritate you. And so that's the, that's the trick. It's time management. I have a nap every single day for about half an hour in the afternoon. I've been doing it since I was at Cambridge 40 years ago. And so I've trained my, my body to switch off and then switch back on again. And it means that you get two days, essentially, you know, of work out of, out of one day on earth. So it's, I mean, obviously, everybody's
1:15:12 Speaker 00 body clock is completely different. But I do recommend, if you're, if you're young enough to start, and as I say, I started when I was in my early twenties, you can, you can really squeeze more time out of the day than you think is mathematically possible.
1:15:28 Dwarkesh Patel? Yeah, I'm 23, so this might be a perfect time to launch this habit.
1:15:31 Speaker 00 It's, today's the day. Make sure after lunch, you, you put on an eye patch and literally go to bed and, and you will find that you've, you've squeezed an extra day out of, out of the day.
1:15:45 Dwarkesh Patel? So why is biography, which is a genre you've employed across many of your books, and of course, books that have become overwhelmingly famous, rightly so, why is that the best medium to understand an era or to understand that impact of the era on the present?
1:16:02 Speaker 00 Because it focuses the mind, concentrates the mind on one person, you emotionally connect with that person. You either love him or hate him or her, of course. I have done some, some work on, on writing about women. It's the great man and woman theory of history, of course. And I do believe in that because I think that although of course there are enormous historical movements that happen, you know, the decline of magic and the rise of science and so on, the industrialization and everything. Those come about as the result of the deliberate choices
1:16:44 Speaker 00 made by millions, indeed billions of people. And, and you can't look at something like the invasion of Russia we were talking about earlier in 1812, or Churchill's decision to fight on and not make peace with Hitler in 1940, and not recognize that the individual does play an absolutely central role in, in some major world-changing decisions. So I think it is intellectually justified to write biography. A lot of Whigs and determinists and Marxists don't. They, they think that, that biography is a, is far too anti-determinist.
1:17:26 Speaker 00 But in fact, you know, what are we but our decisions? Man is spirit, as Churchill said. And so I think it, it stacks up as a, as a reasonable way for me to spend my time.
1:17:42 Dwarkesh Patel? Yeah, indeed. I think that's a great place to close this conversation. This was absolutely fascinating. And the book, again, I highly recommend it. It was a really thorough and interesting and read about recent conflicts with insights from not only the, one of the best historians in the world, but also somebody who commanded the two most recent campaigns that are, that involves conflict since World War II. So the book is Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to Ukraine, available at Amazon and fine bookstores everywhere. Andrew, thank you so much.
1:18:19 Speaker 00 Thank you, Joel Keish. I really enjoyed it.
1:18:22 Dwarkesh Patel? Hey everybody. I hope you enjoyed that episode. As always, the most helpful thing you can do is to share the podcast. Send it to people you think might enjoy it, put it in Twitter, your group chats, et cetera. Just blitz the world. Appreciate your listening. I'll see you next time. Cheers.
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