Dan Jones on Why History Is Our Greatest Teacher And Henry V’s Legacy

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0:55I'm recording this on a Monday and Monday is our grocery store day in our family. I usually pick my kids up from school and we go over to Whole Foods, get all our groceries for the week. Although here very shortly, we're going to go over there to get our Thanksgiving turkey because they've got a bunch of great options. Turkeys start at$1.49 a pound if you have Prime with organic birds at$2.99 a pound. And they only carry no antibiotic ever turkeys that will bring quality to your table at a great price. Whole Foods has great everyday prices on all your Thanksgiving essentials, whether you celebrate with a massive family or just a few close friends.

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1:46Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are and also to find peace and wisdom in their lives.

2:32Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. Never a dull moment over here. I was out for a long bike ride on this dirt road that I live on. I was about an hour and change into it and I'm sort of zoning out. I'm locked in and then I see this movement kind of out of the corner of my eye, I hear this crash and this horse that's wearing like one of those hoods is like blinders, just barrels into a fence, like knocks it down. This is like five, 10 feet in front of me, careens through the fence, lands on the ground all akimbo, then pops up and then just takes off down the road in the direction that I was about to go riding, like right past my house so i had to stop and knock on the door and be like i don't know what happened but i think our horse just lost its mind and is freaking out and uh then i had to go calm down because i almost just got blindsided by a horse it reminded you ever see that movie the horse whisperer there's that like crazy scene at the beginning of the movie it was like a slow motion much less dangerous version of that so anyways that's what's going on over here that really has nothing to do with today's guest.

3:47I just can't really believe that it happened. Life's just weird, which is actually something I was talking about in the 10-year anniversary edition of Vopsicle. I wrote this sort of intro about what's transpired in my life in the last 10 years. I was joking about this actually when I was in Australia doing the talks. It was literally right as I was about to go on stage. The fire alarms went off, then we all had to evacuate, and then the whole thing started 40 minutes late. And I was saying like, I'm not saying I've been through, you know, horrendous adversity or extreme hardships in the last 10 years, but I would say it's been a lot of weird stuff like that.

4:25Just one weird thing after another. And, you know, there's that Chinese curse may live in interesting times. The times have been interesting. Life has been interesting. It's always weird. But I just had this really great guy out to the studio. He was doing a talk at book People in Austin. He's this huge historical author in the UK. He has this new book out about Henry V, who I know literally nothing about. It's Henry V, The Astonishing Triumph of England's Greatest Warrior King. So I was really excited to have him out. And just, I love books. I love people. I love things that tell me about something that I knew nothing about, like that I'd vaguely heard of.

5:08And then I go, oh, this is why this person has been famous for hundreds of years. This is why there's Shakespearean plays about this person. This is why there's the paintings and the myths and the legends. This is why. So I was excited to have him out. I thought it was awesome. And one of the things I think we talked about a lot in this show that I was really interested in is this fine line between popularizing history and then how some people are using, I think, this podcast medium to pervert history? How do you get people interested? How do you bring them in, especially something that maybe they think they're not interested in?

5:42But also, how do you stay true to it? How do I, on the one hand, bring people into the tent of stoicism while also remaining true to stoicism? How do I stay a good steward of it? That's what I think a lot about. And anyways, I love this. It's always awesome to get to know someone you didn't know anything about their work. And then you leave a fan, I think you'll feel the same way. You can check out his new book, Henry V, The Astonishing Triumph of England's Greatest Warrior King. He's written a bunch of other awesome books, The Best-Selling Powers and Thrones, which I know Mark Surrealist is featured in.

6:14Then he wrote a book called The Templars, Essek Dogs, and many more. And he also wrote and starred in the Netflix series, Secrets of Great British Castles. I'll link to that. You can follow him on Instagram. It's at D underscore A underscore N underscore Jones. But anyways, I'll link to that. You can check it out. It's easier to find. You can follow his newsletter, danjones.substack.com and listen to his podcast, This Is History, a dynasty to die for. I really enjoyed this conversation and I'm grateful to be here talking to you not having been killed by a horse, which I had to come in and tell my wife like you're never going to believe what just happened.

6:53But I just narrowly avoided being trampled to death by a horse, totally unprovoked. Or maybe I scared it with my bike. I don't know. I don't know where it came from, but it's quite an experience, let me tell you. Anyways, here's me talking to Dan Jones in the Daily Stokes studio.

7:12What drew you to history? Because usually most history people don't have tattoos. You know what I mean? Like usually, especially if I was talking to a guy that went to some Latin school or whatever, those British, you know, I'd be thinking more of like a Richard Dawkins. Of course. Yeah. No, look, and sometimes it still happens. like I was at a festival, in fact, just two weeks ago, and it was a big, prestigious, quite posh British literary festival. Salman Rushdie and Ian McEwen were in conversation here. They've flown people all over the world, and it's in Cliveden, a beautiful country house.

7:42I've been there. Right, you know Cliveden. It's Cliveden Literary Festival. And Aisha had driven like eight hours from Edinburgh to go talk at the festival. But because Salman was there, there's a special branch everywhere, because of course, personal security. And they just kept stopping me. I couldn't get around backstage like, I'm like, no, no, I know. And I wasn't mad. I know this doesn't appear plausible, perhaps even possible, but I'm actually a speaker. You want to know my weird Cleveland story? So I gave a talk for Google did some conference. This is right when The Obstacle is the Way came out.

8:15And my British publisher got me an invite. And it was this crazy audience. Like, I'm forgetting all the people there. They're busy saying. And so it was me, my wife, you know who Casey Neistat is? He's like a very famous YouTuber. Anyways, the younger speakers, they allowed us just to stay in the house after. So we stayed. And one of the people there was this sort of... So Cleveland, for people who don't know, Cleveland is famous. It's obviously a famous country house, but it's also where the Profumo scandal in part happens, right? So I talk about him in one of my books. But anyways, for people who don't know, there's like a famous British-Russian spy scandal that happens at this English country house.

8:53Okay. So I'm there. And one of the guys there is this sort of citizen journalist from the US named Tim Pool. Do you know who that is? Yeah. Yeah. So I'm like, oh, whatever. He seemed like a nice guy. We hung out, we talked. And then flash forward, I'm reading the newspaper, or reading the New York Times a couple months ago. He turns out to be an unwitting Russian agent who I met at Cleveland. There you go. History. It's the place for it. It rhymes. It does. It does. It does. And yeah, I just found, obviously what he did is not funny, but the idea that I met him there is hilarious. Where else would you meet him?

9:28Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, look, thanks for doing this. This is great. What do you think of history podcasts, by the way? Because that was the other thing I was going to talk to you about. I love, I think, what you do, what I try to do, is you try to take things that previously were academic and you make them accessible to people and you make them interesting to people. And so on the one hand, history podcasts are awesome. and then there was this other recent scandal. What's that guy who was on Tucker Carlson? Do you remember this one? Oh, God, I don't even know what his name is. No one had ever heard of this guy before he goes on Tucker and just starts spouting some absolute bullshit about the Second World War, which is like insane internet sort of comment garbage.

10:04Yeah. And Tucker's like out there legitimizing it. The greatest living historian or some nonsense. And you know what? And then like all the respectable Second World Wars, Andrew Roberts, Neil Ferguson, serious historians are pulling this to bits. And on the one hand, you're like, well, this is history, you're debunking. But we've been through this before with the Second World War, with David Irving back in the 90s. And that went, the Lipstadt trial, that went to court, Richard Evans. The British libel courts had to pull that to bits. And it was so damaging to the sort of, not just to the historical profession, but to important popular ideas about what the Holocaust was or was not.

10:42And like the idea we're back there again and it's now being legitimized like by serious broadcasters is seriously worrying. Or even just this medium that we were so optimistic about just a few years, like podcasts, like, you know, Hardcore History and Dan Carlin and who's the other guy who I like? I'm forgetting his name. He wrote The Storm Before the Storm, which is one of my favorite books. Anyways, they introduced ideas that unless you like to read thousand page books, you would have no idea about to so many people. And then it's like, this is why we can't have nice things. Now, people are seeing that medium as a way to introduce toxic or untrue ideas.

11:24You know, it's about more than just history, isn't it? I mean, the medium is neutral. The medium doesn't care. And I think in the main, like history podcasting has taken the ground that television has either abandoned or just sort of forgotten about, which is that there is a huge audience out there who wants to consume history, have complex history explained in an accessible way. Television, certainly in the UK, was really good at that even 10 years ago. We had a thing here called the History Channel that used to not do reality shows and had documentaries about history. And then that's gone. For the life of me, I don't understand why this has happened in television.

12:03I mean, it's sort of connected with budgets, but it's not really. There's more. But it doesn't really matter because podcasts have just shot into that space. But unfortunately, and I think this is more about the media in general, isn't it? Because there is no gatekeeping, no sort of patriarchal kind of decision making by a small number of people about what gets broadcast, great for experimentation, great for access to market for intelligent producers who might not get a break otherwise, but unpoliced and unregulated. And that's the story of the entire internet really, isn't it? And this is a fundamental question about how we operate now in the West, certainly in the 21st century.

12:47What do we want out of information? How do we want to regulate it? Yeah, it's like there's this kind of misinformation, disinformation energy that's always there. Like people who want to believe things that are not true. And then people who have an agenda in getting people to believe that untrue information. And it's sort of like, whenever there is an opening, it goes to, it's not always, sometimes it's cutting edge, but usually it's kind of a delay. And it's like, oh, people are here. How do we find our way to worm? How do we find a way to worm our way into it? And so it was interesting to see.

13:20Yeah, like you felt like there was this kind of generation of podcast historians that really took it seriously and were doing this awesome, like really important work. Yeah, Carlin being like the great model of it. Just such a brilliant guy. Yeah. And a trailblazer as well. Yeah, my son is obsessed with this podcast that Nat Geo does called Greeking Out. And it's just like Greek myths. We've listened to like hundreds of hours together as a family. And you're like, they're taking it not just seriously, but they're taking it seriously that it's for kids. And they're like, how do we make this accessible?

13:49Like that responsibility. And then when you read or watch those guys' comments, you're like, oh, you don't give a shit about any of this. You're just like, what's a contrarian, you know, sort of different for the sake of difference? and then probably also some other toxic energy in there. But you're just like, how can I differentiate myself? And the way you're differentiating yourself is by telling an utterly untrue version of history that some people want to be true. Well, and I mean, some of the gatekeeping is with the distribution networks, by which we really mean social media. And people talk about the algorithm as though it's some completely disembodied sort of independent abstract thing that decides that.

14:34But no, I mean, come on. These hate, negativity obviously gets a human response. It's rewarded both by the machines and the humans in those systems. And then everybody sort of, we're talking about Elon really, aren't we? When, you know, via Twitter in large part, a completely specious and probably evil interpretation of the second world war uh it becomes sort of it's there it's it could be popular for commercial reasons right it's allowed to circulate and then the defense is to throw one's hands up and say well free speech i mean that is that's like mendacious like low stuff and but that like i say you know it's not just history this is just one example of of the big problems like the big conceptual problems we've got as a species to do with information in the 21st century.

15:25I was reading that it's like Finland or some other country, like they have to spend a lot, being their proximity to Russia has forced them to always spend a lot of time on cultural literacy and media literacy. And I think the West is just beginning to struggle or come to terms with how fundamentally bad huge swaths of the population are at these basic skills, you know? And if you If you're hearing about the Second World War for the first time, there's a level of logic to what that guy's saying. I totally agree. So part of it comes from, I suppose, quite a poor, as you say, a poor level of cultural historical knowledge just within the educational system in the West.

16:08And that's certainly true where I live in the UK. I sense it's probably true here in the US as well. But it's sort of overlaid with, from within the professional, quote unquote, historical community, the embrace for several generations of what was originally postmodernism, which says there is no objective truth. It's found its way culturally into my truth, which is a stupid contradiction in terms. My truth is an oxymoron, right? But this idea that, well, all perspectives are valid and, you know, originally with good intentions, you know, opens the door for, well, I've got a completely poisonous interpretation of X thing, but my truth is just as valid as yours.

16:49And so that then kind of intersects with a general inability among large swathes of the population to judge for themselves and go, you know what, I know a little bit about this. And I know that the idea that Churchill is more culpable in Europe for the massive genocide committed by the Nazis than Adolf Hitler probably isn't true. No, you're right. There was a process that needed to happen, which was this sort of questioning of certain myths and lies. Obviously, in the U.S., we have the lost cause. But there is this sort of cultural baggage that every society has and all cultures have. And so the process of kind of poking holes, looking at how non-inclusive our version of history, all that stuff, you know, you start to poke around at the founders and you go, oh, you know, there's some real problems here.

17:41And you need to do that. But that – it's like you can chip away at everything and what's left is kind of a nihilism where you get your after truth. But then, yeah, it ends up in this kind of, well, here's my truth. Like you end up chipping away so much that there's nothing left. And then real bad actors step in and go, let me tell you like an equally untrue but mendacious version of history. It's very interesting. And so now you just choose what you believe. And this is what you see in history, but elsewhere, particularly in politics. Well, I choose to believe this and no one listens to each other.

18:18And so the foundation of the discipline of history when I was studying it, and I would hope this still holds true in some sense somewhere, but maybe that's hope rather than reality, is history is about discourse, debate, analysis, careful reasoning between individuals or even within your own study. and coming to a reasoned conclusion, which ought to be, we think to the best of our ability, that this is what's happened. Not, I believe X, you believe Y. Well, either we're going to agree to disagree or just hate each other and double down. That's fundamentally a huge diversion from Aristotle, the foundation of Western thought.

18:59So we've got some problems. Well, I thought it was interesting what you were just saying about you have to have this kind of, I know a little bit about this, I have a basis. It's always interesting to me when I read certain British historians, because it feels like we're on the same page. And then you read something, oh, you just learned nothing about Henry V in America. I know almost nothing about him as a person. Okay. But let me tell you this. In the UK, I would say the majority of people don't know the difference between the American Revolution and Civil War. Right. Yes. There's an astonishing degree of cultural miscommunication, misapprehension, ignorance that's masked by the common English language.

19:35Yes, yes. Well, I was fascinated by this when I read, I've talked about this before, when I read Andrew Roberts' book on King George. And I was like, oh yeah, you guys think, we don't have a common opinion, not just on this person, but on the American Revolution. It's not like you were like, yeah, we were wrong. Obviously you accept that it happened, but the moral legitimacy of it, we're not quite on the same page about it. And so reading Andrew Roberts sort of go through the Declaration of Independence. And he's like, obviously, all this part about human rights and stuff is great. And then he breaks down the specific arguments of Jefferson towards the bottom, the list of grievances.

20:13And he's like, I don't buy any of this. And I was like, I'd never heard someone who wasn't a fascist. I bet if you asked Stalin what he thought, he would agree. But it was like, oh, this is a good faith argument against the Declaration of Independence that is originating from you're on the other side of it. And it just culturally grew up on the other side, hearing other things about it. It was just so fascinating. Yeah, I was thinking, why don't we think about Henry V? Because we think about Alexander the Great, or we learn about Julius Caesar, but then there's that just sort of whole period of middle British royalty that I think America just instinctively decided we're opposed to because of, you know, our history with Kings.

21:07Thanks to Toyota Trucks for sponsoring this episode. When I bought my ranch in 2015 out here in Bastro County, I drove my car about halfway down the dirt road that we live on, thought this isn't going to work, stopped, parked it, walked the rest of the way home, borrowed my wife's car, drove into Austin and bought a truck. What I bought was a Toyota Tacoma. And this truck wasn't just transportation getting me to and from my house. It unlocked a whole different style of living for us, not just on the ranch, but in our little Texas towns. There were places I could go now that I couldn't go before, especially out here in the piney forests, through the fields, and on the unpaved roads like the one that I lived in.

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22:34Learn more at toyota.com slash trucks slash adventure dash detours. We just took our kids to an outdoor performance of the Nutcracker. They had a snow cone and then they went insane in the car ride home. And one of the things I try to remind myself when that's happening is that I don't control my kids' behavior, especially when they're too far gone like that, but I do control how I respond, right? That's stoicism, but it's also what Dr. Becky talks about. Dr. Becky is a clinical psychologist and a bestselling author, and she founded Good Inside, which is there to give parents practical, actionable tools for handling those everyday challenges with confidence.

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24:12What I've found over the years, and I'm coming on for 20 years of having been working, doing mostly medieval history and with success in the States. These books are getting on the New York Times bestseller list. I'm not saying that to brag, that's just a fact. We've got medieval history, European, British medieval history into the American historical book buying kind of world. Great. There are several roots, I think, that people have into it. And it's definitely not like this is our shared history that's common to us all. That's not the way in. Often it's like this is my family. So you get a lot of people get into medieval history because they've done family tree research, genealogy.

24:53And it's like, oh, I'm related to John of Gaunt or it's usually John of Gaunt. And so you have like a bazillion kids or something. Yeah, right. Three marriages and lots of kids. And they all spread out in different directions. Or I'm related to some of the more glamorous seeming women of the medieval period, Elizabeth Woodville or whatever. So people find their way in through family research to a degree among a particularly kind of literate English literature section of my readership. With Henry V, they might come in through Shakespeare. It's quite a regularly performed part of the Shakespeare canon.

25:28Game of Thrones has definitely helped. There was this moment when I was just getting started, really, where Thrones began and became the biggest show in the world. And it was part of the pitch that this derived from English medieval history, specifically the Wars of the Roses. There was a bit with Richard III being dug up from under the car park. So you find your way into the kind of cultural conversation, or the Middle Ages found their way into the cultural conversation somewhat at a good time for me. but yes the challenge with with writing medieval history particularly pitching to like the u.s is what have people even vaguely heard of yeah so i wrote a book about the templars seven years ago did great here because i think lots of people had heard of the templars indeed there are some americans who are members of revived templar organizations henry v seems to be having the same effect i mean there's a little bit of wait is that the guy with the six wives and you go oh no that's the this is the guy with the pudding bowl haircut who won in the battle of Agincourt.

26:26Right, right. Yeah, I get it. But at least there's a like, huh, yeah, a king called Henry with a number. I'm kind of ballpark here and I'm interested if I think it's going to be a good story. But then sometimes the pitch has to be with history generally different to that. And it's like, okay, I'm going to tell you a great story. If you buy into the story, you're going to really enjoy it. It's going to be exciting. You're going to be gripped. It's going to have novelistic characteristics in my telling. But there's also like, well, what else is it saying about the world. So in the case of Henry V, you know, I would say this is a story, yes, about England's greatest ever warrior king.

27:00If you like my books, it fills a gap between Plantagenets and Wars of the Roses, but it's actually a case study in leadership in a time of crisis. And I'm not saying it's a parable about the current election, but it's like, here's a world where you have polarized politics, where you have like the after effects of a pandemic, where you have a period of sort of climate change, you know, Little Ice Age in this case, where you have seemingly irreconcilable differences and sort of just this festering hatred between polarized camps. And yet, along comes a leader who seems able to triangulate between the best of two camps to combine them and through competence, diligence, probity, upright sort of character and being good at the job, charisma, drags this realm out of the doldrums.

27:50That speaks to a kind of current fantasy, well, maybe fantasy is the wrong word, a current like hope, deep hope in the hearts of people on both sides of the political divide at the moment. And so I think that's sometimes how you pitch history. And that's certainly what I'm thinking about and talking about a lot with regard to Henry V, not only the story itself, but the sort of broader themes in general that it elucidates. There's a letter that Churchill writes, sort of right as the Blitz is starting. And he was still a writer. He hadn't been called back yet exactly. And there's something about, he was like, I had to put a thousand years of history between me in this moment.

28:25He was writing, I think, the history of the English speaking peoples. And there is something very soothing about like, this world sucks. Let me go study a different world. I love that. And then I have found also though, that it's terrifying when you study history because you're like, oh it could get so much worse than you think like you find some okay it's always been like this and then it's like oh like it gets so much worse than this man i last time i was on a big full u.s book tour was when i did the templars book and i so i still cringe when i have this memory it was the last day of the tour where i was in like a little town called harbor springs michigan right up on the lake lovely town but you know once you're in you're in there's like two planes in and out so everyone goes to the festival of the i think it's called the festival of the book or something similar to that.

29:10And I'm on in the theatre, so it's like everyone goes from the bar in town to the theatre in town. I've got a whole town, right? And I'm talking about the Templars. It's a bit of a... This is 2017, so it's early in the first Trump presidency, and he's been beefing with Kim Jong-un about some stupid bullshit, right? But it's like tense, right? Yeah. Because you see maps in the New York Times, like, how far can these missiles get? Yeah. Could they hit Denver? And like... Anyway, so I'm up on stage and I give my talk about the Templars, and it's kind of like an hour's talk, and then there's some questions at the end, and there's a dude in the front row, and he's got his hand up and the moderator just keeps not picking him for the question i feel bad for the dude so it's the end of the show and they're like uh okay that's the end i'm like no no no this is guys had his hand up please and i see the moderators like uh they just their shoulders sink their eyes roll i this is like maybe the crank and he stands up and he goes i'm not going to do the accent but he goes hey you just told us this great story from history but i've got a question what's going to happen in the future oh no right well i give it my best shot and to talk to what you've just said.

30:08I'm like, well, you can look at the story of the Templars in one of two ways. On one hand, you can say this is just a sort of miserable example of how humanity constantly makes the same errors. It's just cruelty. It's hideousness. It's awfulness. It's people just abusing one another, and we never change. Humans are just destined to do this over and over again. Or I'm listening to myself doing this thinking, this is great material. Or you can say, look, 1312, 1314, this order was destroyed, and yet here we are we endure as a species no matter how bad things get we seem to find a way to come through and you can be hopeful about the future and i thought this is just a great end and then i sort of heard myself go unless unless trump starts a nuclear war and the whole theater is just silent yeah and i'm like that's the end of the show there's nothing else and just walk off to like a silent stage like oh man it was going so well but you know i tell you that because that's what, you know, there is the escapism of history.

31:07And then sometimes you get into it and you go down that wormhole of, oh, wow, sheer variety of badness within this, given that our discipline is the sum total of all human deed and achievement. I mean, you've got like almost an infinite landscape to survey for either good stuff or bad stuff. And a lot of how you react to it, I suppose, sometimes depends on your sort of constitution, your character, you know. Well, that's why I thought it was interesting. You did this book in the present tense. I actually wonder if more history should be done that way. David McCullough was saying that the one thing that a historian can never forget is that it could have been otherwise, like that it could go in a different direction.

31:48And so there is something about putting history in the past tense that makes it seem like this was the way it had to be. It was always going, as opposed to a thing that was happening and a series of choices. Do you know what I mean? I do know what you mean. And, you know, deciding to write a full book in present tense was like I had to give it careful thought. Now, when I narrate my podcast, This Is History, it's in the present tense. They do this, they do that because that's the kind of vibe of that medium. When I've done television, you know, almost every one of the dozens and dozens of hours of documentaries I've made, you narrate in the present tense because that's the feel of the medium.

32:28But we almost never do it in books. Or rather, some history books will start with like a prologue that's in the present tense to drop you in the moment, but then they'll retreat to the sort of authoritative past historical. Let me get boring. Yeah, let me be sober now. Well, I thought with a medieval biography, it's a bit of a contradiction in terms because if we're thinking like a modern biography is a sort of psychological portrait of someone's development over life, you usually have to hang that in the modern sense on thousands of documents. With a biography of someone like Henry V, you don't have those thousands of documents that pertain to his psychological state.

33:00You have lots of administrative documents and chronicles and such, but very little that tells you what he's thinking, how he's feeling. So how do you create, was my question to myself, this sense of proximity to your main character? And as you say, this sense of jeopardy. Because everyone, if they know anything about Henry V, knows who won the Battle of Agincourt. And you know the guy dies. He dies at 35. So the jeopardy is not inherent in the story. You've got to add it. And I started like when I was talking to myself, when I was sort of drafting in my mind the first chapter, I was doing it. in the present tense.

33:38I thought, well, let's try writing it. I thought it wouldn't work. I thought this is probably going to come across like a gimmick and it'll break one of my cardinal rules for historical writing, which is I believe that as a historical writer, you should try and disappear. You should vanish from the page and leave the material and your reader to commune with each other. And you should verbal tricks and, you know, great writing have no place in my history books. I'm like the invisible kind of conduit of this material so that the reader feels deeply immersed. And I thought present tense is going to kill that because it's going to feel like, oh, look, he's doing this trick.

34:12But actually, as I started writing the chapters and my brilliant, brilliant editor, Teresa, you know, he worked really hard, particularly in the early chapters with this. I was like, no, this is this is like total invisibility because now you are there with Henry. It's happening in real time and you're just next to him as a reader. So I don't know. I don't know if I'll ever use this technique again. Maybe I will. Maybe I won't. But it's been a fascinating sort of project. I read this great biography of Gandhi, and there was this line in the intro that really stopped me where he said, he basically, I'm forgetting the exact writing, but it was like, you know, now Gandhi, whatever he's been reincarnated as, you know, thinks X, Y, or Z.

34:53And I was like, oh. Wow. So instead of being like, this is a, and this is why representation and stuff matters so much. It was like, oh, because as an Indian writer with the same set of beliefs, or at least least a greater sympathy to it's not a western writer sort of condescendingly or or even not condescending attempting to understand the worldview of the person who lives is like taking it for granted and the idea of like reading it you just so you just so naturally default into your worldview and and our the greatest bias of our worldview has nothing to do with culture it has just to do with we live now.

35:33We forget that they didn't live in medieval Europe. They lived in what they thought was an advanced, wonderful society. No one woke up and said, this is the dark ages. Yes. And even more important, their worldview was the norm, just as in the 21st century. I mean, we cleave to this idea that, what is it, that Obama said that the arc of history bends towards the light or whatever. We believe in progress. We have this instinct and we think that it's a progress towards now. And if things are going wrong, then it might be like not enough progress or progress going backwards. But that's our view of history.

36:10Yeah. The Asians thought it was cyclical. Yeah. But by our sort of understanding of linear progress, we are almost by definition like the better society. And I try and sometimes stop and think, you know, let's go back in the Middle Ages is the present and you somehow manage to show somebody a portrait of 21st century England, let's say, they would be appalled. I mean, this would be like a vision of hell. Hell with inventions of tyrannous machinery and barbarous ideas and absolute heresy and unbelief everywhere. It would be the worst and most awful imagining of human society possible. because their norm would be their norm.

36:55And so I think it's helpful to have those things in mind. I often say when I talk to school kids and try and get them to think about history more generally, I try and make the pitch, you know we're living in the weirdest time in all of human history right now and almost every other generation that's ever lived in the history of humanity would have more in common with each other than they do with us because of even the basic, just go outside and look at a car. Like contemplate a car, how like mind-blowingly impossible that would seem to almost everybody who's ever lived more than four generations before us.

37:31And then you'll start to kind of get into your head what history is about, which is in some part is an empathy discipline. You've got to like put yourself into other people's worldviews, ideally without initial judgment, and try and understand their world on their terms. Otherwise, you're not really doing history. You're doing a sort of weird kind of time travel policeman job where you just go around like waving your angry stick or battle. Here's all the things you were wrong about. You were wrong about this. You were prejudiced about this. You're disgusting. You're bad. Like, okay, so. Meanwhile, they were actually incredibly progressive in forward thinking for that time.

38:08For that time. Yeah. Some people were and some people weren't. Yeah. You're beating up on this person. And that person, they're walking around the world thinking, just like we go, hey, I'm such a nicer, softer, more generous parent than my parents. That's how that person was walking around thinking about how they treated poor people, how they treated people who look differently. They thought of themselves as almost certainly not as harsh as the people who lived a generation, two generations. They found the past as inexplicable as we find them. Absolutely. But it's very hard to do. It's very hard to transport yourself.

38:45A book that really stuck in my mind when I read it, and this is historical fiction rather than history, but do you read Mary Renaud, The King Must Die? I say Mary Renaud, she wrote a whole bunch of, I mean, this is a vogue publishing genre again now, but of retelling of Greek myths and legends. Mary Renaud did a series of retellings of Greek legends, and The King Must Die is about the Minotaur. And her vision of what Bronze Age Greece was like is really powerful because she, better than almost anyone I can think of, manages to drop you into the world where the value system is completely different, utterly different to our own.

39:24But the story, there's never a sort of direct contrast drawn or judgment made on the value systems. You're just in these value systems. Like sci-fi or something. Yeah. They just get you to understand the world. Right. And so the characters operate according – and you judge them as the reader of fiction as good or bad characters morally, ethically, you know, are you on their side or not on their side, heroic or unheroic, according to the value system of the world which she creates. And it's an incredible book for that reason because she just manages such a difficult task. She managed to just – you blow away all your modern kind of thinking and you're just in the Bronze Age and it's wild.

40:05Yeah, I don't know why it took me so long to realize it, but obviously I talk a lot about the Stoics. And I was thinking, it occurred to me one day that Stoicism was ancient philosophy to Marcus Aurelius. Right? So if Zeno founds the philosophy in the fourth century BC, by the time Marcus Aurelius gets to it, it's like 500 years old. So it's like Shakespeare is to me. And so I think of that as this period that all shared a set of values and ideas and beliefs. And in fact, they were separated by hundreds and hundreds of years. And so they must have looked at that as classical antiquity in the way that I look at all of them as one large piece of classical antiquity.

40:51But they're not. And so it creates an empathy because you go, oh, you're thinking about the philosophy the same way that I'm thinking about it. What's the meme you sometimes see that Cleopatra was born closer to the iPhone than the pyramids being built, right? And that's often a good way of thinking. She's like, look at these beautiful old things. We don't know how they made them. She has the same bafflement. The English medieval version of that is Stonehenge. So like, oh, Stonehenge is kind of old and castles are made of stone and they're kind of old. So maybe the Middle Ages and the Stonehenge are quite close.

41:22No. In Henry V's time, Henry II's time, other end of the Plantagenet dynasty, they were looking at Stonehenge the same way we're looking at Stonehenge going, what the hell is that thing and who put it up and how? And their answer was like, well, maybe Merlin, Arthur's kind of magician transported the stones from Ireland and other people going, come on, give me a break. That didn't happen. But it's like a real head scratcher. And only a couple of years ago, I mean, there's still debate about how do they do this. There was just some research, what, two months ago that said some of the stones in Stonehenge didn't come from Wales.

41:54They came from Scotland. How? That's the great question of Stonehenge. You'll never be able to attack the question of why, I think. But you can get pretty close to how. And there was a great book called How to Build Stonehenge, which came out two years ago, which really got close to, okay, I think this is how. We can get quite close to how. Sort of a bit of experimental archaeology, a bit of sort of theory. But the why is the thing that's lost. Yeah, when Jefferson, when they started to discover some mammoth tusks and stuff in America, Jefferson doesn't necessarily know for sure that they're extinct.

42:31They just could be on the other side of the mountains that no one's been on the other side of. There's still this ongoing fucking mystery of it. Well, and here we are back again with, you know, we're such a weird, it's such a weird time to be alive in that we've mapped the whole world. oh, we haven't mapped the deep seas. But the land mass of the world is fully mapped. And that, again, separates us from almost everyone that's ever lived before. And just those sort of simple, basic assumptions of like, well, I know what the earth looks like. And it's not that other people, they thought it was flat.

43:03They just didn't know what was in most of it, or like a large parts of it. There was still this incredible mystery about the geography of the world, which is so different to our, you know, we have great anxieties about the state of the world evidently at the moment. But one of them is not, I wonder what lies beyond that mountain range. It's like, I'll just look at Google Maps. Yeah, like they say the seminal moment in America is the closing of the frontier. And really, that's a global thing. There isn't that vague sense of, well, I wonder if it's over here. There's not that pervasive mystery, I guess, even though there's so much stuff we don't understand.

43:40But it's not part of the psyche. Right. But it's so interesting. And then sometimes you'll kind of go too far in the other direction and go, well, this medieval world, this world of Henry V was incredibly parochial and people never went beyond their own village and international travel was unheard of. And then you'll, you know, there's a lot of global history historians now would say, well, Valerie Hansen was the most popular book recently. Well, no, actually a product, you know, around the time of the Vikings could theoretically travel from the Americas all the way around the entire world. It's not impossible.

44:12There is a sort of thin, thin, gossamer thin skein of globalization, which is totally the wrong word to use. How weird must have that have been? So it was a parochial world, just as it is now. I remember one time I was writing about Vicksburg. So my wife and I went to Natchez, Mississippi, and we were staying there for a night, and then we're going to Vicksburg. These are Civil War battlefields. And we're talking to the waitress, and we're like, we're going to Vicksburg tomorrow. you know anything about it? And she's like, I've never been. It was like 45 minutes away. She's just never been. And so, and meanwhile, we could have been talking to the person at the next table and they've been everywhere you could imagine in the world.

44:48And so like, it must've been so surreal though, in the ancient world where you did, people would live and die within like a five mile radius or something. And then there were people that had been to different, that had just recently discovered new continents. Yeah. Well, Henry V, because it's what I'm thinking about at the moment, great example. He's the guy who leads these armies predominantly made up of English and some Welsh longbowmen, many of whom, because they're peasant stock, are village guys. They haven't probably traveled in a wide radius away from the village. It'll be in the dozens of miles maximum.

45:23And then suddenly, they're traveling to France, wow, across the sea. To see the sea, for some people, would just be wild if you lived in the middle of England. And yet, You've got Henry himself, his father, Henry Bolingbroke, was a sort of great chivalrous knight of the late 14th, early 15th century. Well, that guy had been on, you know, he'd been to, he'd jousted in France with Boussico. He'd traveled to Prussia on Crusade of the Teutonic Knights. He'd been to Jerusalem. He'd actually been to Christ's sepulchre, you know, and seen the tomb and come back with exotic animals and kind of great stories and memories.

45:56And Jerusalem stuck in his mind all his life. And on his deathbed, he was in the Jerusalem chamber of Westminster Abbey. Henry V on his deathbed is talking about Jerusalem as well. So these ideas are like fixed in their minds of these faraway places, just as you're kind of rubbing shoulders of people who've never been anywhere. Yes. Yeah, people who believe in preposterous myths or monsters or whatever. And then, yeah, you're bumping into someone who's not quite this. But within a century, you're like, oh, I'm just back from the new world. But there's also, because in this sort of Christian, the particular sort of Christian mentality, Catholic mentality of the 14th, 15th century, because travel is not the norm, but there's a deep awareness of places that are important that are far away.

46:45and this is like the Holy Land, really. You end up, well, you have these interesting phenomena, which is like, a good example is the Temple Church in London, which is built to mirror, to model the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. So that going into it is a form of going into Christ's sepulchre. And you have it also, I mean, Henry V goes to, after he's seriously injured at the Battle of Shrewsbury, he goes on pilgrimage to Canterbury to see Thomas Becket Shrine. But then he goes to Walsingham to the little house of Our Lady where there's a shrine to the Virgin Mary. But the house has been built to represent Jesus's like family home in Nazareth.

47:24And going into it is in a sense going to Nazareth. And so the worldview of what does travel actually mean is in some senses less literal than today. If I say I'm going to Jerusalem and I say, right, I'm off to Jerusalem now. You know pretty well, I mean, you probably say that's not a great idea on this day, but put that aside, you know that I'm probably going to fly to Tel Aviv and then get a car across the Judean hills and then I'll be in Jerusalem. Not that I might go to some sort of shrine that's built in a model of Jerusalem and that will be a sort of proxy way of doing it.

48:12We'll see you next time.

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49:12Or in the same way that you would have a deep familiarity with a place that you've never been, but because you've watched movies about it and heard songs. Like, they still had visual representations and they had a culture that talked. And like today you might hear someone, oh yeah, I've read the Bible. Like their relationship even with the biblical text was so deep because they didn't have a thousand other books they would read that they kind of knew the places and the names. And there was a cultural resonance to ideas and places and names and descriptions that would have been very inconceivable for us.

49:49And the same applies with human relationships. So in the Middle Ages, you have this sense that you can really be in communion with the dead. And this is the basis for a lot of the wealth. But also the structure of the church in Europe is that you have things like chantry chapels and colleges of priests, which are the basis for the universities of Oxford and Cambridge now, where the benefactors paid money to have these things built so that their relatives could pray for their souls to move through purgatory. And this is a sort of intersection between the living and the dead. And we find it sort of mad and fantastical.

50:26I suppose that you could think, well, I can kind of talk to the dead. But flip it around to continue a theme of what we've been talking about so far. And imagine telling some – well, imagine even telling – how old are you? 37. Okay, I'm 43. You're probably just still of the right age. Imagine telling yourself as a child about FaceTime. Yeah. Video calling. or Zoom. What? I'll be able to talk to somebody 6 ,000 miles away just like they're sitting in the room? Come on, that's with the birds. Well, the interesting thought experiment is how unimaginable is that to someone in the Middle Ages? If they put aside the technological leaps you have to make to get to FaceTime, is it totally weird to them that you could talk to somebody so far away when they're so used to this idea that you can commune with the dead in a different realm.

51:18Or just, they clearly saw it as less crazy than we do to have visions or encounters or ghosts or sorcerers or witches. So there was a sort of a tacit acceptance of kind of other worldliness that now it's like we disabused ourselves of it and then recreated it with technology. Yeah. And there's a permeability to the different realms. But I suppose, again, Then, you know, what is our version of that? You know, if in the Middle Ages there's a permeable boundary between life and afterlife, and there's just like effectively a community-wide acceptance that this is true, what is our version of that?

51:59Maybe it's something like quantum physics where, you know, or even, you know, anything sub-microscopic, you know, the belief in germs, or it could be medical, it could be physics, it could be chemical. We are post-enlightenment people, still just about, and we believe in science that's been done with scientific methodology, even if there's no way for you or I to see it, prove it, experience it. We just sort of believe it's true. What I know about physics - I believe there's such a thing as an electron, don't you? Yeah, and I believe that because some guy told me about it when I was 11 or 15 or whatever.

52:33I heard about it and I was like, oh, that seems okay, and then everyone else seems to believe it, and so I'm like, that's how it is. Right, yeah. And then, of course, you have heretics in every society who say, I don't believe the thing that you will believe. And, you know, okay. Yeah, it's very surreal when you think about what they must have thought about. It can kind of blow your mind when you try to put yourself – well, as they say, the past is a foreign country. And, like, there's something about just the thought exercise of, yeah, what must it have been like to be a medieval peasant? what how like we think uh oh it must have been great to be henry v but like also his life would have been unimaginably inconvenient and difficult to us like like uh the the example i heard some historian goes like think about how difficult it would have been for like a roman emperor to read at night like he's like i want to read these books and then the the procession of torch torch bearers and just how many people had to be involved to do that and so you think we think of like on On the one hand, the king probably had the easiest life of anyone and had unimaginable luxuries and access to technologies and ease of life.

53:44And at the same time, just like when it was cold out, it must have been awful. Yeah. Again, we like to sort of imagine sometimes, well, if I had a time, classic question, if you had a time machine, where would you go and who would you talk to? And if it's Henry V, I might go, oh, I'll take a time machine back to 1415 and talk to Henry on the eve of Agincourt, whatever the answer might be. And then I heard something played the other day. There's been a scholarly attempt to recreate the English spoken in the 15th century. And, of course, Henry was a great proponent of English as the language of politics.

54:18A generation after Chaucer had made it the language of poetry. And he writes his letters back from campaign in English. And we're like, OK, well, I can sort of read this English now. It's not Beowulf-era English. It's not even Chaucer-era English. It's recognizably modern in its English forms. There's been an attempt to recreate the sound of it. It actually pertains to Richard III, 80 years on, 70 years on from Henry. And if you hear someone speaking English of the 1470s, 1480s, as would have been spoken by someone like Richard, who had a sort of Midlands, northern background, all the vowel sounds are different.

54:53The cadence of speech is different, and it just is impossible to hear. So you wouldn't have been able to have a conversation, even though you were normally speaking the same language. So maybe it's Faulkner that passes a foreign country, isn't it? But maybe it's actually Wittgenstein, which is if even if a lion could speak, we wouldn't understand it. You know, that all of the components of the worldview plus the difference even in the language would add up to mutual incomprehensibility between us and them. But now I'm sort of talking us out of a job because this is effectively to say that history is a futile pursuit.

55:25We strive, we try and it's like yoga. You practice, you can never complete the task. There's one historian that was looking, we think of these epic battle speeches, Alexander the Great or whatever, and he was looking at specifically the Greek ones and then he just sort of noticed the helmets don't have ear holes. And so just like you're just thinking like practical, like our thing is like, how do they have microphones? And then he's like, just imagine there's 100 ,000 dudes holding a bunch of metal armor and metal swords. No one's hearing anything from anyone. Yeah, you forget Colin Farrell or Brad Pitt or whoever it was, you know, charging on his horse, giving these great speeches.

56:04But then, look, Henry, again, Henry V is a great example of this in the romanticization, the dramatization of our historical imagination. Battle of Agincourt, so famous, and the speeches of Agincourt, so famous. We few, we happy few, we band of brothers and all of this. Well, you look at the original sources, and it does seem that Henry said stuff before the battle. There were four or five different accounts. They all differ. Probably he said four. You couldn't have addressed the whole army, so he probably had to say four or five different things. Some of them bear similarities in content to Shakespeare's great rhetoric, poetry.

56:39But my favourite is just he says, fellows, let's go. Because why not? What else is there to say? It's like, you know, we all know what we're doing. Let's get to it. So, again, that's the fun of history, isn't it? Particularly with historical eras, you know, you talk about Alexander the Great or Henry V, whoever it might be, Napoleon, where they've been dramatized many times over the years. You're always, as a historian, then kind of trying to strip away the history, to take away the lens of drama and try and look into the history beyond it. And it's very hard to do. If we're talking about the Middle Ages, if we're talking about Roman history, can you really talk to anyone about Roman imperial history and have them not think about Russell Crowe?

57:22Very difficult. And I'm not being totally facetious there. That is a lot of people's first and maybe only access to the world of high imperial Rome. Right. And probably all the historians before, it's funny, we're not uniquely guilty of that. You've got to imagine some historian writing in the 1800s is informed by having seen a really good play of Julius Caesar. We're always being shaped by fiction and art, and that forms our understanding of things. Just like somebody before would have seen some Renaissance painting, and that's what they thought. We thought Seneca looked one way because that's the only survivable bust.

58:01And then we realized, oh, that's not Seneca. That's just not him. He's actually fat. He looks totally different. Changes everything. But sometimes it's done really well. Did you see Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk? Yes. Do you remember there's the scene where they're all trying to line the men up on the beach and get them in an orderly fashion into boats to row them out to the desert? destroyer by the mole um i was i've i mean i've even got goosebumps thinking about that scene because maybe five six years before that movie came out i went to that beach with a guy called vic viner who was there he was one of the guys rowing the boats he'd been 15 16 and he was you know naval recruit and we i stood next to vic on a sunny day in dunkirk and there were french families of bicycling and picnicking and he was in his uniform he was in his mid to late 90s at that time and he described to me the scene as he recalled it from that day and he said you know over there you know we were trying to line the the army boys they didn't have much discipline up and some of them he said i saw one guy just lose it walk into the sea with his full pack on i'm going home i'm going home and disappear under the waves so the messerschmitts were up there you know be strafing us he said that such and such a ship was over there because i remember that one because because my brother was on board it and a German plane put a bomb down the chimney and it exploded and he burned to death.

59:23Over there, it was just like that. It was like really, it was a very memorable moving day for me. And then I saw Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk and he must have spoken to Vic or seen some of Vic's interviews as well because it was like exactly as the guy had described. And so sometimes the art actually does serve the history and that film may well end up being future generations, sort of first access points to the early sort of campaigns in the Second World War. And then whilst they'll have a very accurate picture of what the beach looked like during the evacuations, they'll also be overlaid with all Christopher Nolan's preconceptions about the sort of the variability of memory and the sort of the meaningless of real linear time.

1:00:06So they'll take away just as much of the subjective as the objective. Well, you know, like Patton, the famous general, he had these like visions that he was, he believed in reincarnation, right? And it's in the movie, but it's a real thing. He believed that he was this warrior spirit incarnate. So he would, he said, you know, I was here, I was there, I was with the Roman legions and he could describe it. And so there's this one scene where he's on a military visit between the wars, I think. And they're at a spot that was where part of the Battle of the Wilderness had been fought, which is one of Grant's great campaigns.

1:00:43And Patton is talking about it to this sort of, I don't know, park ranger or something. And they're kind of arguing about how it goes. And this man overhears him. And Patton goes, you know, no, I was here. I was here as a boy, you know, which he obviously was. It had happened like 30 years before he was even born. And this old man hears them and he walks over and he's like, no, no, no, the gentleman is quite right. Like, I was here. And he somehow figured out the essence of it, even though he wasn't there. I mean, so one explanation is you actually do kind of believe in this sort of spiritual thing.

1:01:18The other is like, no, he'd actually just read enough history that he'd triangulated some version of what actually, like, you can kind of get to the essence of what, you can't get exactly there, but you can get close. Well, there's, I mean, the great example from my specialty, which is medieval history, is Richard III, King in the Car Park, right? That whole story is, it's been documented and it's almost been mythologized already and slightly bent out of shape by Stephen Frears, which I thought was quite brilliant film, The King in the Car Park. That starts with Philippa Langley, who sort of coordinated the different, the university, the council, the people, the money, the Richard III Society to getting the dig started in Leicester.

1:02:03that eventually turned up Richard III. She walks through this parking lot, and as she walks over, supposedly, the R of parking written on the ground, she sort of feels the tingle. He's there, he's there, he's beneath my feet. Well, gee whiz, he really is, does turn out to be there. Now, what do we make of this? Is this like the one in the billion sort of crank who accidentally was right, and now that retro justifies all other crank behaviour? Yes, to an extent. but you can't argue with the fact that she was right. Why was she right? Is she telling the truth? And I don't mean that in a sort of, you know, like libelous way but is this just sort of memory coalescing around reality?

1:02:43A story she believes but... Yeah, and the story's kind of massaged and turned into that. Is it that she was really deeply immersed in this history and just instinctively had a sense, having there'd been a lot of desk-based research done by a scholar, I think at Leicester University, who'd overlaid old maps and was like, well, if the Greyfriars was here, it was here, and the altar would have been there, and X, and she must have pored over that research, and just known, whether she consciously knew or subconsciously knew, yeah, it's about here. And then that sort of, that mingles with her, like, deep emotional attachment with Richard III, and there you have this moment.

1:03:19So... If she hadn't found it, then she just conveniently ignored all this and kept looking. But listen, I mean, back in the day, I was young at this point, I got called into a production meeting, sort of a casting meeting really with Channel with Darlene Smithson was the company part of Endemol who made that King in the Car Park documentary and I remember going in to meet them because they were casting for a presenter if it ever got away and they hadn't been able to get this show away with anybody, any television network in the UK. Channel 4 who eventually commissioned it had given them I think three days shooting money with, they said well we might bump it up to nine if anything interesting comes up but I mean forget like fun we're not going to find a king obviously that's that's ridiculous and there are all these weird sort of cranky kind of characters around this so that's the chuck them a small amount of money to go filming and then you know i so i saw all this research and i was like this is the wildest thing i've ever seen and then i didn't hire me to present the show they got a guy called simon farnaby brilliant presenter but had much more back of a background in comedy because this was going to be a comedy documentary or sort of not you know quirky british kind of quixotic adventure of people going on a sort of weird...

1:04:30You have to compensate for the fact that there's obviously not going to be the pain. Yeah. So what's the thing? Well, it's going to be a story about British eccentrics in search of the past. And then literally day one of digging, they're like, oh, well, we found him. Oh my God, it is a history documentary after all. I mean, slightly circling back here to how we can get ordinary people interested in medieval history. But that was a huge, huge part of it. Do you know who Heinrich Schleiman is? He's the archaeologist who discovered Troy. it yeah yeah i read his memoir many years ago it's a surreal book because i mean he's insane like he just believes he just believes that he knows where troy is because he read the odyssey and the iliad really well you know and which is nuts and then he fucking found it right where he said it would be so it's it's another one of those things where like he did find it and that's and can't argue with that and you know definitively proved that this thing that everyone thought was fiction was, as the Greeks thought, a real place.

1:05:27And we don't know, obviously, if the events in the play are real, or in the poem are real, but there is a place called Troy. And he found it from the poem about Troy. How does that happen? I mean, obviously, there's been so many other prophets and predictors and people who were convinced this is where El Dorado is. And they're interesting too it just doesn't pay off but sometimes it does and yeah maybe the ancients would find that less crazy than we do they'd be like of course he knew where it was you know like just that yeah spirit or they'd certainly have had a different sort of apparatus for explaining so our explanations that we've just been going through king in the car park or you know maybe it's no the guy has just read so much and you're you know we would say your subconscious does a vast amount of work right and if i get stuck on i do a lot of crossword puzzles and such If I get stuck, you know, you come to a point where I can't do a single other clue.

1:06:21I put it away. Come back two hours later, I'm like, I fill in nine clues. And my explanation to myself will be, well, actually, when I'm not thinking about it, my subconscious is doing it. I get the same with when I hit a plot problem in writing historical fiction. I just put it away, go for a walk and come back. Oh, I know the answer. Oh, I do yoga particularly because it's like that's the right mental frequency for problem solving, I've found. And so we would have a kind of a chemical, psychological explanation for that. There would be a different apparatus for the ancients where they would say, you know, Zeus or Athena or whatever it would be, or God intervened and provided the answer.

1:06:57It's just different language at some level to explain really the same phenomenon. All right. So last question, does virtue conquer all? Well, that would certainly be the lesson that I think Henry would have wanted. He was a very unusual king. You know, whereas you'd had, you have sort of Plantagenet kings who are sort of sexually incontinent and unable to control their appetites. Henry is, he reminds me in many ways of a sort of, you know, like an alpha bro from, you know, he's like celibate, spare with his, you know, frugal with his eating, absolutely focused, totally disciplined, you know, goal oriented.

1:07:36and those are pious as well in a religious sense which probably doesn't fit the the analogy but uh virtue for him was the route to uh to success and virtue as in a life lived in accordance with principles yeah and it was said by a french spy that he was more like a monk than a king but that was sort of at the root of his success incredibly consistent incredibly sort of uh you know he just believed and he and he was he had this rare ability which you've seen so few people to set out what he was going to do and then actually do it and to keep himself from distractions and to bring people along with him.

1:08:14Does virtue actually conquer all? I'm afraid the great lesson of history is that no, that much conquest is done by the unvirtuous and the unrighteous and the devious and those possessed of rat-like cunning and rodent brains. But it's nice to have something to believe in. The Stoics said this thing about how the greatest empire is command of yourself. It's certainly rarer than it is common that you get someone in a position of power or influence or what have you that doesn't see the fruit of that as exemption from all the rules. And they go, no, no, actually, I have to be stricter with myself because of the responsibility and the obligations put upon me.

1:09:01And so, yeah, most kings almost fundamentally don't take the job seriously. It's like, oh, I just got to be me and do what I want. And then there are these kind of rare philosopher kings or monk-like kings, as you're saying, that are like, it's almost like they internalize, they are the final check and balance, that sense of virtue or those rules that they place upon themselves. Yes. And the disjuncture in modern leadership is that, you know, leaders will often talk such a good game. They want everyone else to be virtuous. And then when they're not virtuous, it's the hypocrisy that kills them.

1:09:36And that's why it's always interesting when along come, you know, a certain breed of politicians at the moment who have no shame. who are just like, I don't even pretend to be a good guy. And if you throw all these accusations at me of sort of morally reprehensible behavior, I just go, yeah, all right, whatever. And you can't, pressing that button of hypocrisy doesn't work. Heavy lifting, shame, like shame is the sort of final barrier that keeps us from sort of outright tyranny, you would think. You know, like, just like, oh, well, I wouldn't do that because I just wouldn't do that. And then someone's like, oh, no, I don't care.

1:10:17And you're like, oh, we don't have anything to stop you. No, no, no. The rules are incredibly sort of containing and powerful until someone just goes, I don't believe in that at all. On the big sense, the decline of popular religion in the West. I mean, the moral and institutional framework of Western religions just controlled people's behavior on a collective level and individual level because everyone just obeyed the rules. And now suddenly religion collapses. Well, what is the moral code that binds us all that replaces that? And that's something we're continuing to struggle with and will continue to struggle with for a while.

1:10:58Yeah, if you don't answer to God, who do you answer to? And there are some people there like I answer to whatever I fucking want to do. And that's a dangerous person to give nuclear weapons to or an army to or the economy to. Or the framework that replaces it is purely the law. Yeah. And this idea that the law is somehow a sort of abstract and pure concept rather than something that's malleable by politicians. Yeah. Yeah, I think we in America are really struggling with, oh, our system was much more, we thought we were a constitutional system, but we were constitutional with a strong set of voluntary norms that we never really talked about or explained or celebrated enough.

1:11:47We just assumed everyone was on the same page. Well, and it's hidden there, isn't it? We hold these truths to be self-evident. The mindset of the founders is like, well, I mean, there's some shit we just don't need to explain, right? I mean, come on, guys. Like, there is a sort of binding set of principles here, isn't there? And finally, here we are in a generation that goes, no, not our ain't. Yeah, yeah. Or they just assumed, hey, everyone's read these same classical thinkers, believed in these same examples, had the same heroes. And then, yeah, you flash forward a couple hundred years later, and we've done important work going, hey, well, you know, what about these myths?

1:12:23And we've democratized it, but basically what that does is dilute the power that the example of some of these kind of heroes and ideas and honor and virtue, these traits that were such an important complementary part of the system, they go away. And then someone's like, yeah, I'm just not going to leave office. What are you going to do about it? Well, and there's also, you know, alongside that, there's been a flipping in probably in the last 15 years of the understanding of what democracy means. Now, democracy to anyone in the Middle Ages, to the Greeks, would have been a word that we would understand to mean sort of populist tyranny, the rule of the mob.

1:12:59And that was why we didn't really want that. Democracy now has taken on this weird meaning, which is like, democracy is about protecting the rights of minorities, which is so mad because that's the opposite of what democracy is. They set up the system to counteract democracy. The founders set up a system, a constitutional republic, because they explicitly understood that that was the natural extension. And so they put in these checks of balances so that wouldn't happen. Yeah. And now we're in this funny place because words have detached from meaning. And it's like, well, on the one hand, you have a bunch of people who like democracy is the old school democracy, the rule of the mob, the rule of just 51 % of the people.

1:13:35My base says this is what we're doing. Yeah. So this is what we're doing. But hold on. That doesn't seem like the right thing to do. So, well, it's tough because democracy, you know, that was the story of Brexit in the UK, for example. And then on the other hand, you have this thing that, well, democracy is all about like putting safeguards around minorities. And so that, I mean, certainly in Europe and the UK, we have the human rights law, which has expanded to sort of stymie governments from acting in any particular way, because you can always be challenged on this expansionist view of human rights law.

1:14:04You've got democracy defined as something completely other, which is about, I mean, protecting them anyway. So this is a weird time to be alive, but like a fascinating one and one in which, you know, I mean, this isn't a sort of party political broadcast for the history party. But still, I don't think there's been a better time to or more important time for people to read good history and try and like understand, contextualize, look at other examples of human societies in flux, change or perplexity than right now. What I would say, you also have an obligation because you're not getting it in school and the news isn't steep.

1:14:41You have to create a historical basis or you're going to drown in information. You're going to be a mark for people. If you don't have a historical understanding, a good sense of the sort of arc of human history, the traps we fall into over and over again, the types of people. Like, if you're not familiar with the historical idea of a demagogue, you're much more susceptible to them in many different forms. And like, yeah, that's not something you learn about in school. You got to figure it out. You want to check out some books I want to show you? For real, yeah, I'd love to.

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