Sam Gwynne On Progress, War, And Zeppelins

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1:30Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers. We explore at length how these Stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space, when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal, and most importantly, to prepare for what the week ahead may bring.

2:24Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I've raved about a handful of books over the years that I have basically never heard anything but overwhelmingly positive feedback about. And one of those books is The Empire of the Summer Moon, one of the great narrative nonfiction books of all time. Sold millions of copies for a reason. And it's by a person I like quite a bit, Sam Gwynn. We're actually in a writer's group together here in Austin. been a long time since I've been able to see him. The group broke during the pandemic, and then I got busy with kids and writing, and I haven't been.

3:06So I said, hey, would you come out, sign like a million copies of Empire of the Summer Moon, do the podcast? And I wanted to talk to him about his new book, which I also tore through. It's called His Majesty's Airship, The Life and Tragic Death, The World's Largest Flying Machine, which tells the tragic story of a British rigid airship, a Zeppelin basically, that went down in a spectacular hydrogen-fueled fireball in 1930. Bigger, worse, more tragic than the crash of the Hindenburg. And just an absolutely fascinating and in some ways absurd book as we talk about in today's interview. I've read a ton of Sam's stuff.

3:48Actually, while I was here, I had him sign a copy of his book, The Perfect Pass, American Genius and the Reinvention of American Football, which is a fascinating book. I had him sign a copy of it for Buzz Williams, the basketball coach at Texas A &M, who was stopping by the store. Just a fascinating book that I thought he would enjoy. Sam's book Rebel Yell about Stonewall Jackson is really good. And then his Civil War book, The Hymn of the Republic, also beautiful and fascinating. And we really get into what makes those books so good and a bunch of the lessons that come along the way. So I was very excited for him to come out to the podcast and think you're really going to like this interview.

4:33You can go to scgwynn.com. You can follow him on Twitter, scgwynn, and enjoy this interview with the one and only Sam Gwynn.

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6:41Well, I loved the book. As I was reading it, the phrase that kept coming back to me was that expression, the triumph of hope over experience. That's what it seems like. Because the whole idea is insane. Completely insane. Yeah. Every part of the Zeppelin slash, what were the airships is what they're called? Well, rigid airships. Just every part of it is delusional and insane and contrary to any basic safety precaution. Like just that a human being would get in one of these things is deranged. It is. Isn't that amazing? So at some point you – I realized that I'm – I mean I'm normally writing a book about Lord Thompson, R101 and the imperial airship scheme and everything.

7:28But what I'm really writing a book about is human folly on an absolutely enormous scale. And at some point in the middle, that wasn't what I thought going in. But somewhere in the middle, I go, oh, okay, that's what I'm doing. The encapsulation of the folly, to me, is in a single sentence in the book, when you talk about the asbestos-lined smoking lounge inside R101. That's, you know, what they were going to do is they were going to put all this stuff up in there, you know, and this is the first airship where they all put it inside. They're going to put it all inside in the glamorous dining room and cocktail lounges and promenades with the cell and windows and the smoking lounge, which ironically, one of the survivors, there's only six, survived because he was in there having a butt and having a drink in the smoking lounge.

8:22The asbestos actually protected him from death. Well, that's just for people who haven't read the book yet, we're talking about like a 700 foot hydrogen filled balloon in which the hydrogen is actually in stitched together cow intestines. Yes. So it's not any stronger than like a sausage you would get from Smitty's or something. It's sausage casings. Yeah. So a little background. So what I'm writing about here are rigid airships, which is a thing. So the Hindenburg, if everybody knows that, that's a rigid airship. And the difference is, so in the 18th century, balloons were invented, right? So you would put air or hydrogen in them and they would go up, which was a total miracle in a world where gravity ruled and everything else goes down, right?

9:11You can see the earth from above a ground and not be on a mountain for the first time in human history. Ever. Yeah. And I mean, unless you were a bird, I guess. But the problem with balloons is that they went where the wind blew them or where God told them to go or whatever it was. And also they – I mean you could use them as let's say as they were used in the Civil War and the Crimean War as observation balloons, whatever. But that was a problem. 19th century, the French fixed this. They put a rudder on it and a propeller and now you have a steerable balloon, right? And by the way, a blimp and a balloon are things that don't have metal superstructures.

9:47A rigid airship does. But anyway, so the 19th century, the French fixed this, and now we have a steerable balloon. French verb to steer or direct is diriger, and therefore something that is steerable is dirigeable, right? Excuse my French accent, but dirigible. So that's where it comes from. And then in 1900, Count Ferdinand von Sempelin invented the rigid airship. Because another problem with the balloons was that you couldn't lift that much. The amount of lift you had was entirely dependent on how much gas you had in the balloon. And so von Zeppelin came up with this idea that you would, in a 400-foot-plus airship, have a hard metal structure that could hold lots of big hydrogen gas bags.

10:29And so you could lift a lot of weight. And in his case, the reason to do that was to carry bombs so we could bomb the hell out of Europe. Yeah. Anyway. So it's this giant balloon filled with incredibly flammable gas powered by primitive, comparatively, gas or diesel engines. Right. In the airship that I'm writing about, they actually were locomotive diesels. They were adapted. And the reason they did that - It's just a train car is just attached to the back. Or a train engine is just tacked on it. Well, it was. It was 650 horse diesel engine. The reason they used them was because the airship was going to go to India and go through the tropics.

11:13And the belief was that gasoline fumes were flammable and had a relatively low flashpoint, I guess. But diesel does not. And so that was the answer. They put all these diesels up in there. And again, this rigid airship with a metal skeleton covered by very thin cloth and then lifted by these gas bags that were made out of cattle intestines. So it was a weird combination of— Right, because the ship itself is not filled with the hydrogen. The balloons inside the ship— Right. So each one of these gas bags—think of a cheese wheel. Think of—with the airship that I'm writing about, R101, think of a cheese wheel 10 stories high, literally 10 stories high, made out of cattle intestines backed by a light film of cotton.

12:01and the ship had 17 of these stacked bow to stern, like just big cheese wheels going back inside the hard metal structure, which, you know, and this is what it, this could lift, you know, 100 tons. That was the idea. You know, if you take, just think of a recreational balloon, that can lift like you, me, and maybe one other person, the straw basket that you're in, and that's it. You put 17 10-story or whatever, multi-story gas bags together, you can start to lift a lot of weight. Yeah. And the reason I'd say it's the triumph of hope over experience is not just because it was this crazy idea once, but literally every single one of the balloons went down.

12:43Most of them, not every single one, but a very, very high percentage. Yeah. But over the hundred years, it's like they all go to zero. Over the development period of the rigid airships, like they all, all end in disaster for like, there's, there's one smaller one, maybe. It's like the Graf Zeppelin you have that can fly. There's a really only two that were successful. Yeah. Out of, of the, of the rigids you're talking, maybe, I don't know, 175 total that were built. Yeah. And it was, it was a, it was a bad idea and it was a bad idea from the start. And, and so in that sense, my book is about a bad idea and why it lived for 40 years.

13:23But when von Zeppelin first made these things, his idea was to, they were weapons. They were going to bomb Europe. And in World War I, they did indeed bomb Europe. They became the world's first long range bombers. They became the world's first weapons of mass terror. They were the first time that any human being, which goes back to a comment you made a minute ago, the first time that human beings understood that they could be annihilated from above by something other than a thunderbolt were these zeppelins. And they flew against seven European cities, mostly against England and London, and they bombed them.

13:55People think the first bombing of London was World War II, but it wasn't. It was zeppelins and World War. But these things were phenomenally vulnerable. I mean, if you have, let's say, three or four or five or six acres of surface area and a 50-mile-an-hour wind hits it, it's very difficult to see. And they're not going fast. They're going 60 miles an hour. And they're hard to navigate. They get blown all over the place. They blow up very easily. And one of the things that happened in World War I was that the British figured out what would happen if a fighter plane shot an incendiary bullet into the hydrogen, which is a very satisfying experience from the pilot's point of view.

14:33Because you have something – there was this techno race to see who could fly higher because the Zeppelins kept trying to go higher, 12 ,000, 14 ,000, 17 ,000, 18 ,000, 20 ,000, even 26 ,000 feet to get away from the British. Yeah. And this went on. But they lost invariably. And what would happen is the people down below would see these 600-foot things coming down slowly and looking exactly like the Hindenburg, the film that we all – it was looking like that, coming slowly to earth. And the poor German soldiers in them, the airmen, they didn't have parachutes because that would weigh too much. So as soon as the British fighter hit and they saw the spark, you had the choice, jump or burn.

15:13That was your choice. Yeah, we were just at the, actually yesterday we were at the Pacific Museum in Fredericksburg, the World War II Museum. And they had this game where you could do, you could practice being an anti-aircraft gun against, you know, ships. And so my six-year-old was playing it. And he was like not great at it because he's six. But I was just thinking like he could probably hit a 500-foot balloon in the sky. Like you just think, it's not just like kind of a big target. It's like the biggest target you could imagine. It's the biggest target. Imagine if you could sink the Titanic with one bullet from very far away.

15:54And it's just, and it can't turn around. I mean, it's absurd. It was an amazing moment in warfare. And it demonstrated what bad ideas Eplands were. But in the techno race to see who could fly higher, the Germans were just slightly ahead. And then the British, of course, the British planes would have to circle to get up to 10 ,000 first. and then 14 and then 18 ,000 feet. But when you got up there, these are unprotected human beings at 18 ,000 feet in wintertime. So we're at 30 below zero, 40 below zero. People are freezing. They're dying for lack of oxygen. They've got terrible frostbite. Their gauges are all freezing up.

16:35Their compasses are frozen. Their oil lines are frozen, everything. And they're up there. And British pilots also, because the British pilots are equally unprotected in these little, you know, biplanes going up to try to pursue this, as you say, these 650, 700 foot long Zeppelins up there. And, and it was this amazing piece of warfare. And it went on during, it went on for the most of World War I. And, and almost, I mean, the Zeppelins, 70 % of them were lost in combat to, to fire. And I mean, it just was, it was gruesome. Yeah. I mean, you're saying it was such an obviously bad idea, but it was like the world was over and over again going, this is not a good idea.

17:19And then people were like, but what if, you know, just like over and over and over again, not getting the message, which I just found endlessly fascinating. It's pretty amazing because you come out of the war, World War I, where the German Zeppelins have failed miserably. And you think, well, okay, that's the end of those things. Okay. But no, actually, there's a lot of nationalism and national pride swept up into these things. They're kind of equal parts engineering and ideology. And so after the war, you think, well, okay, they're gone. And after the war, the Germans were shut down. They were not allowed to fly them anymore.

17:51But the British say, aha, we can do this better than those guys. We're going to bring British technology to bear. And so in 1921, you have this attempt to fly the biggest and best in the world, the R-38, which goes down in flames. However, there were a few, it wasn't uniformly awful. I mean, there were a few examples and that everybody could point to and say, look, see, they work. I'll give you a good one. 1919, the only way the British could get, really build an airship, a rigid airship, was to copy down Zeppelin. So when a Zeppelin went down, the engineers would crawl all over the thing and then come on to sort of reverse engineer it or figure out how they did it.

18:32But of course, by the time they got their airship, they were years behind the Germans who were now on to height climbers that could go to 24 ,000 feet. But after the war, the British had this one that they were very proud of, that there was a straight Zeppelin knockoff called R-34. And these are really boring names, you know, rigid, R for rigid, 34. And they were sitting there going, okay, we got this 600 and whatever foot airship and there's no war anymore. We've got a great pilot named Herbert Scott. And he said, so let's fly it across the Atlantic, they said, which I had no business doing. It was meant to be a height climber, meaning something that could climb away from the English fighter planes.

19:14But it wasn't built to go across an ocean. They take it across the ocean. They've got so many near accidents, it's ridiculous. But they fly it across the ocean. And in 1919, it was the first east-west crossing. East-west is the hard way, right? going against the wind, right? West to east, which is what Lindbergh did eight years later. We're eight years in advance of Lindbergh. First east-west crossing. Then they flew it back. First double crossing of the Atlantic. And Herbert Scott was the pilot, and it was a British airship, and he was this global hero. Completely forgotten now, and I would say because he was overwritten by Lindbergh, as so many other people.

19:52People don't remember Alcock and Brown either, who were the first transatlantic crossing. Who were those guys? Who's Herbert Scott? Lindbergh, we all know. But anyway, so the point is a British airship crossed the Atlantic twice in 1919, eight years before Lindbergh. There must be something there. Yeah. There was always that little glimmer of something. Well, you know, the Germans ran this little kind of fake airline before World War I and they didn't have any deaths and it must mean that it really works. And it just kind of, as you were saying, it sort of hope springs eternal, even in the face of every evidence that the thing isn't going to work.

20:27Well, you have a Latin expression. I think you said it's the motto of the RAF, something about, what was it? Ad Astra Per Ardua? Yeah, basically through adversity to the stars. The whole point of doing something really hard is that you have to push through all this evidence that it's impossible. I was thinking of that other quote about how progress depends on the irrational man. Do you know that one? No. It's basically like a rational person adapts themselves to the world, an irrational person adapts the world to themselves. And so like - A rational person isn't getting into the X1. Yeah. Chuck Yeager did.

21:01Yes. Also isn't getting on the Wright's biplane, which was insane. So it's like, it's this weird thing where it selects the industry of pioneering and groundbreaking. You're inherently irrational people that ignore all the reasons you shouldn't do it. And sometimes it works, but then sometimes you really are going down a blind alley. Yeah, and in this case, what happens is this, you know, look at the development of the airplane. I mean, you had to be crazy to get in those early airplanes, and they crashed at enormous rates, but they persevered. And because the fundamental idea was sound, eventually wing loading and engine tech and all this stuff made it possible, and just safety, made it possible to have commercial airline service.

21:46You could look at the 40 years of the rigid airship from Count von Zeppelin's introduction, essentially to just beyond the Hindenburg. And it was the same thing, except the idea was fundamentally flawed. There was another thing going on there too, Ryan, which is that in those years, particularly after the war, there was just a different standard of risk. So nowadays, or somebody wrote this later, was writing from the 50s or something saying, You know, nowadays a captain who chooses not to fly into a storm is kind of patted on the head. Good boy, you didn't take a risk. You didn't endanger whatever.

22:19But back then it was you were expected to fly into the storm. I mean the RAF pilots, the early RAF pilots didn't even bother to look at the weather. They just went up and hoped that it was going to be okay. And there was this idea that risk, that a far higher, I guess, threshold of risk was acceptable than it is now to us. And so what might look like idiocy or straight folly isn't, on some level, is a willingness to accept a level of risk that we're not. But I think you put it really well, though. You stumble forward this way and you would never make any progress at all. And who knows, maybe the rigid airship idea was the world's greatest idea.

23:01But because they're going to, they proved that it wasn't. Well, I was just thinking even as an author, right? It's like you think this is a good idea and then you're going and you're going. And you have to be at some level a glutton for punishment. You have to be at some level irrational. You have to be some level, you know, believe you're smarter than everyone else or you would never – no books would ever be published. And yet the key – really the key differentiator is knowing when you've got a good idea or a bad idea. And that's so hard to distinguish. There's a certain, I mean, one of my favorite books that I've written, my personal, is a book that you and I have discussed, my biography of Stonewall Jackson.

23:46Embarking on a 680-page biography of Stonewall Jackson without having any Civil War background is insane. I now know. And as my wife said, if he had lived to Gettysburg, we'd be divorced now. But he didn't, so I didn't have to research Gettysburg. But there's an act of faith to jump off. And what, Gwen thinks he can do a biography of Stonewall Jackson? Well, I did do it, but I really don't know how. But it, I mean, all rationality should have said, don't do that. I mean, seriously. Do a book about some modern politician. Your other Civil War book, The Hymn of the Republic, is interesting to me because you look at Grant.

24:23What is Grant's secret weapon? It's that he doesn't quit. He just keeps going, even though everyone says it's a bad idea, even though they're stacking up the bodies. You know, and the statistics are ghastly, unfathomably bad. And he's just like, no, this is the way to do it. I'm going to fight it out on this line. And so that is this sort of key variable of success in basically any domain. But it's also what makes you get in a 700-foot long hydrogen-filled balloon against all warnings. Very good observation. I think it's, and Grant too, in his personal life, he didn't take the lesson that everybody else would.

25:03I mean, everything that happened to him in his life was a failure and he failed in business again and again and again. And he just, it got, he was selling firewood in the streets of St. Louis. And he was working as a lowly clerk in his father's tannery store a month before the Civil War began. He didn't take the lesson he should have, which is you can't do this. Just as at Cold Harbor, he didn't, or wherever, wilderness, he didn't take the lesson, which is that, okay, there's too many people dead. we can't do this. He took the other lesson and the lesson he took was that he could do it. Really, it's the most astonishing thing about him.

25:35And a rational person perhaps wouldn't have done that. Yeah. And then can you turn that off? Right. Because he happened to be right there and wrong pretty much everywhere else. And in this case, perseverance through all the doubt is what makes the airplane work. It's what makes all these other breakthroughs work. It's just not with the rigid airships. But what's also interesting about it is like simultaneously, there are all these other breakthroughs. Like this is happening not that far from, say, the invention of atomic weapons or, you know, like this wasn't happening in the 1800s and they had some like totally primitive sense or whatever.

26:21This was simultaneous with a lot of other much more rational, reasonable, iterative breakthroughs. And there was evidence along the way that those things were working. Whereas here, it was the preponderance of evidence every single day that they were just disregarding over and over and over again. Yeah. And it's one of the amazing things about it. But about, so the book is about, really, it's about this great airship R101, which was at the time that it flew the largest object that had ever flown, bigger by volume than the Titanic. It was part of what was known as the Imperial Airship Scheme, which was the British attempt to populate the skies of empire.

27:08They had this, they came out of World War I with this giant empire. I mean, 25 % of the world's landmass, 420 million people. and they won and they, but they were, they were on, they were declining. The British technological advantages and political advantages were declining. And they kind of looked out over this vast empire and they said, you know, we could stitch this all together in ways that no one's ever seen before, right? We could, we could compress the space-time continuum. So India, instead of 13 days is four days. Australia, instead of 30 is 11 days. I mean, 30 to 11 days to Australia from England.

27:42It's not so unwieldy anymore. Is radical. So you're going to stretch this empire. You're going to connect it rather South Africa and Egypt and New Zealand and Australia and Canada and all these places, right? And India. And you're going to connect it all together. And this was the great imperial airship scheme. And this goes right to the heart of what you were saying, which is when it was hatched in 1924, 1925, there were a total of two rigid airships flying in the world. Yeah. Okay. It gets to your point where, where are they all? Yeah. They're gone. Yeah. they chose this exact moment to launch what was going to be this glorious, and not only was it going to connect the British, this new gigantic British empire, but the thing that was going to connect it would be British technology.

28:29Yeah. Because the Germans had been put out of business. I mean, the Treaty of Versailles put them out of business. They weren't allowed to do this. So it's now going to be British technology up there, which goes back to, Look at the 19th century and why, you know, what were the British advantages? They were the kings of like the greased piston. They built boats and ships better than anybody. And they had bigger guns and they had faster machines and this global sea power that they built. And what they wanted to do was this was going to be air power, if you will. British technology in the air now, a different type.

29:01No longer the grease piston and the giant gun, but. And who was the main guy, Lord Thompson? Lord Thompson, yes. It was his vision. It struck me, too, that there's like, you know, they say there's always the reason and then there's the real reason. There's like behind every harebrained scheme, there is some profoundly human reason for doing it. Like I was reading about Elon Musk buying Twitter and there's this like moment where like his ex-wife texts him and she's like, they've banned the Babylon Bee, like this shitty conservative satire account. And I'm like, did he buy – did he spend$44 billion to like impress his ex-wife?

29:40Impress his girlfriend. And there's this part in the book where it basically sounds like he just wants to impress this princess that he's in love with. It is. And that's why he's forcing – like the trip itself may have worked, just not in the specific timeline that they set up in the specific weather that they met. And so why is he forcing it? there's no real political reason, financial reason at the end of the day. It's like, he wants to be back in time to like see this woman or something like there, there is this, the real reason is so pedestrian at the end of the day. There were, so, so what happens the book, I mean, I'm not spoiling anything.

30:21Cause I say it in the cover. The ship has a horrendous crash that looked just like the Hindenburg, but you know, and the reason it happens is because it's driven, it's pushed by Lord Thompson to take off on October 4th, 1930, which as you say, it doesn't have to, or why does it have to? It's a complex reason. And there is a woman in the middle of it, as you say. So what it is, is what Lord Thompson wants to do is take this untried, largely untested airship. He's going to fly it to India, one stop in Egypt to Karachi, which was back then in India, turn around and fly it back, 10 ,000 miles round trip.

30:56He's going to step off this airship, trailing clouds of glory, walk into the imperial conference, which was then all the grandees of the British Empire meeting in London. He's going to walk into the conference and he's going to give a speech on the future of air travel, having just proved that it was viable, right? Which was, okay, a fundamental reason to push it. But just below that reason is, say, what are the other advantages of having a four-day trip between India and Europe? Well, his girlfriend, the Romanian princess, the vastly wealthy Martha Babesco, toast of literary Paris, you know, who has two palaces.

31:34Suddenly he's closer to her. Yeah. And not only that, but he's about to be given, which no one knows. In fact, until my book, really no one explored this much. He was about to be given the viceroy ship of India. Yeah. Okay. The viceroy ship of India, you would rule over 320 million people. you would live in a 200 ,000 square foot 340 room palace the largest residence of any head of state in the world and you would be the head of India which is of course the key part of the British Empire because it's seething with revolution and discontent there's this guy Gandhi who's causing problems for you Gandhi, the Indian National Congress, all on the ascendant and we all know in 17 years India is gone from the British Empire so all these reasons his history with Martha Babesco was he meets her when he's a lowly military attache in Bucharest during the war.

32:27She's this glamorous princess. Again, the toast of Paris. Marcel Proust is writing poems to her. He's this lowly guy and a military lifer. And to some extent, the next X number of years are him trying to impress her with how cool he is or how powerful he is. She's drawn to power and wealth and money. He doesn't have any of those things. but he's about to get them all. He got the cabinet job as secretary of state for air, wonderful Shakespearean title. And now he's going to get the viceroy ship of India, basically the largest job in the British empire and one of the largest jobs in the world. And it is very much angled at impressing Martha Babesco.

33:06So you have this kind of tiered reasoning. It's very Gatsby-esque. It's the green light. Yes, yes. It's like Gatsby gets in a balloon and tries to do the impossible and then ends up dead in the swimming pool. It's true. It's true because Thompson was doing it himself, so he never made it.

33:31Thanks 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.

34:11and on the unpaved roads like the one that I lived in. We got to go deep into the hill country's wild beauty. We've driven all the way out to East Texas. We've driven across the country. And by we, I mean not just my wife, but both my kids who I drove home from the hospital in that truck. Toyota trucks are built for those who understand that the best adventures happen when you're willing to veer off course because you never know when you'll end up on a Toyota adventure detour. And of course, this is stoicism too, because every detour, every obstacle is an opportunity. But it's helpful if you can handle the difficulty inherent in that.

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35:39So, I heard once that the point on the top of the Empire State Building was supposed to be a landing dock for Zeppelins. Is that true? Was it there at the Chrysler? Or one of them, right? That's why they had those points? Because you mentioned the landing towers. It's true. Yeah, I think there was an idea that they could do that. I don't think that would have been weird. But yes, because masks were what airships? The Germans never used masks, but the British did and the Americans did. So you would put up a mast of, let's say, 200 feet and the airship could dock at the mast and then there'd be a stairway to come down.

36:12And I think that's what the Empire State Building had. Because it's such an absurd idea. You don't even think about it. But yeah, you can't land a fabric ship going 60 miles. Like it's not like an airplane that just – and then you apply the brakes. The only way you can land a 770-foot airship that is covered with very thin linen and full of hydrogen is – when there's absolutely no wind at all. One of the problems with airships was that unlike aircraft or boats, you can't land them in a storm. So if you're up in the storm, you can't go down. Because what, let's say, so R101, the subject of my book, has six acres of surface area.

36:57Okay, now let's take a 50 mile an hour wind. Now, if you've ever sailed a sunfish or a very small sailboat, you see what a puff of wind does to a small sailboat? I can now think six acres, 50 miles an hour wind. What happens to them when you take them down with wind is the wind just beats them to pieces across the landscape and then a spark hits it and then they blow up. Yeah. Static electricity. It doesn't have to be shot by a bullet. Just static electricity. Oh, no. If you're being sort of smashed around the landscape and smashed into your hangar and into the mast and all that stuff. So these guys couldn't go down.

37:29And I mean, theoretically, anyway, a boat can go into a safe harbor. and theoretically anyway, a plane can go down and land. But these guys couldn't. There was actually a really gruesome moment. The Americans figured out helium airships, and the reason they figured them out is because they had helium and they wouldn't give it to the Germans. The helium was all in like Amarillo. And I always thought it would be funny to do a skit on what people sounded like down in a helium mine, how they talked to each other. But anyway, we had the helium. They didn't have the helium. And so there was this joint venture company between Goodyear and the Zeppelin company.

38:09They built these two huge airships, one of which was called the Akron. And the Akron helium filled, so they thought, hey, can't blow up. Gee, this is great. This thing's going to be safe. But it has the problem that all airships have many shared problems that are independent of hydrogen. But one of them is this problem of landing in a storm. so the things in off new jersey and it's these terrible thunderstorms that come and thunderstorms are the worst of all because you have up and down drafts so these things go shooting up 5 000 feet then doing a nose stand at 6 000 feet then a tail stand none of this sounds real so they're back they're off they're off the shore of the off new jersey coast and they're being chased by thunderstorms and they go west to try to get away then east and south and for four hours they flee because they can't go down.

38:57Eventually, they get caught in a downdraft that just jams them into the 38-degree water in the North Atlantic, and that's it. 73 of 76 people die. But it was yet another vulnerable to wind, vulnerable to hydrogen, vulnerable to all these things, but can't land in a storm is a big one. Well, one more thought on the triumph of hope over experience, which struck me probably as the most absurd thing in all of it, and I don't think this is spoilers, But some of the people who died in R101 had been in the other terrible crashes, which proved definitively that this was a totally unworkable idea. And the thing they got in was no better or different.

39:38It was very similar. Both giant hydrogen filled airships. Yeah. So we don't learn. We never learn. But I think the point you bring up is really good. And it is the process of technology and the process of invention is basically, I mean, I think of it sometimes as forgetfulness. Because if you really, if anybody, for example, who went up in a commercial airliner in 1929 or 1930, you're taking your life in your hands. So somehow you have to forget about the fact that 52 of them went down the year before and think, oh, no, this is going to be great. Right. I mean, it's really important. It's an important way that humans evolve and particularly technology.

40:22But I mean, one of them is not made of bedsheets. That's true. You know what I mean? And cattle intestines. The features of the other things are also designed to reassure, right? It's like, I get it. You're on the Titanic and then you go in another boat. It's different than, you know. Oh, the other thing that struck me about the book was speaking of, you know, the Empire State Building having the landing dock or whatever. There's something similar to like the great influenza or some events in history where it's like it's so insane. It's so tragic. It was so widespread. And then it just disappears totally from history because it's so embarrassing and inexplicable, maybe, that we just don't – or tragic, that we just don't want to talk about it.

41:12And it's better that we just excise this from history. Like, I guess going into your book, I was like, the Hindenburg crash. That was obviously the only one of them and the only time it happened. That's all anybody knows. Yeah. It has been. It's been overwritten, expunged, whatever the word is. I mean, who's ever heard of the R101 or R34, the one that crossed the... There's hundreds of them? Whoever knew that, you know, the dozens and dozens of giant zeppelins went down and Hindenburg-like fireballs during World War I. Nobody knows these things. And it's interesting that it can sort of all be overwritten in that way.

41:50The Hindenburg you bring up, which is interesting, because that is everyone's marker. Because everyone knows what that is. and it's interesting the reason they know is because there was when it happened at lakehurst new jersey in 1937 seven years after r1 r101 went down when it happened at that time there was a guy with a film company called pathe who was shooting silent film and that's the thing that the world saw yeah that 30 seconds and the most incredible it was the most incredible thing anyone had ever seen it it played in movie theaters all over the world silently because there was no sound with it at all.

42:27Meanwhile, there's a guy from the AP over somewhere else who's going, oh, the humanity. Oh, no, it's going, oh, that guy, right? So sometime in the 1960s, I think it was in the 60s, some enterprising British producer married the sound with the, so now you've got the full thing going up in flames and the guy saying, oh, the humanity. Those weren't, those didn't occur in the same spot at the same time. But it's such a big kind of deal. And one of the interesting things about it is it was the only time anybody ever really saw this happen. So R101 goes up like this. You know, as I say, dozens, I don't know, more than 70 in World War I go up this way.

43:08A whole bunch before World War I go up this way. The American ships, I'm sorry, the first, well, R38, the first American ship, and then Roma, the Italian ship, the Americans, all go up with these giant hydrogen fireballs. It's like nothing but giant hydrogen fireballs, but nobody saw them. And so you have this weird kind of, it's this era that lasts about 40 years, 1900 to just before World War II. And it disappears because these things didn't work. Now you'll see the Goodyear blimp or the Fuji blimp or something. They are blimps though. They're balloons. you pump them up full of gas and they may have a rigid keel on the bottom but they don't they're not that big they're a couple hundred feet long actually the new generation of them the airlanders, they're going to take people to the North Pole for$500 ,000 which I don't think I'm getting on that point anyway, allegedly now these things can take off with Bernoulli's principle and they have surface area which isn't as vulnerable to wind but if you've got an extra$500 ,000 After reading your book, I'm not going anywhere near a blimp of any kind.

44:20Yeah, the whole thing is just so fascinating and so uniquely human that this is just like what we do. This is history just in a particularly absurd way. yeah it's uh it's just a history of a bad idea basically but but it you never would have known at the moment that the british launched their imperial airship scheme it all systems go everything was forgotten and then also there's also part of the technological advance is that this time we're going to get it right you know we're going to make this thing bloody invulnerable in the same way that i think you know two decades before was the titanic yeah they kind of thought it was indestructible too.

45:08And the, and the R101 people, the more they did, the more they put their diesels up and the more they put their smoking lounges in or whatever they did and all the things that they tried to do, they made it four times stronger than it needed to be in its superstructure. They just became convinced that it was, I mean, otherwise they never would have done it. They were convinced that this baby, as Lord Thompson, who was the driving guy behind this, he said, it's as safe as a house, but for the millionth chance. I mean, what? And then he said, and then he said - filled with hydrogen and you smoke a lot.

45:38And then he had another, he said, he said it was an all weather aircraft. Wait, all weather? So like a typhoon or a tornado? I mean, you know, a 70 mile an hour wind, these things, they came to believe. And I don't know, I'm not a Titanic historian, but I think there was a sense that you could make a ship indestructible. Well, Wright Thompson was in here a couple of weeks ago and we were talking about Walter Lord's book, A Night to Remember. And it's like the Titanic was unsinkable, except if the captain repeatedly ignores warnings about icebergs and then doesn't hit an iceberg, but scrapes alongside an iceberg for two or 300 feet.

46:22I mean, yes, it's unsinkable for ordinary things, but it's not unsinkable for gross recklessness and negligence. And it's like the airships could do the job. I mean, they'd seen it, but that was when everything went right. And in this case, not only did everything not go right, but they repeatedly ignored warnings that this was a bad idea. And then just to put a little caveat in here, which you talk about in the book, the main guy's also probably drunk. Yeah. Herbert Scott. Herbert Scott, the hero of R-34 was that great British airship that crossed the Atlantic, the Zeppelin knockoff. That was Herbert Scott, the most glorious pilot of his day.

47:08I mean, he was an airship pilot, but not an airplane pilot. But yeah, Herbert Scott was drunk when she left. Anyway, the whole thing is kind of a tale of folly, but it's very earnest folly. And they're trying very, very hard. And, you know, and as you said, there were, you know, I don't know when you're designing the Titanic where you get to the moment where somebody says, well, why do we really need to seal off those individual bulkheads? Why don't we just not use sealable bulkheads? Because why would we ever need the sealable bulkheads? Or do we need lifeboats for everyone? You know, that's right.

47:48You go, I don't know what moment where you get to that point and you go, well, you know, gee, what? Do you think part of the reason we were talking about the risk tolerance and that you were saying like, in this time, people did crazy things all the time. So it's hard to get a sense of what was truly crazy. But I think what happens with the Hindenburg is then you see it. And so it's so obviously crazy when you see it on fire, where each of these individual crashes in a world before truly mass media, it's terrifying and insane to the 20 people that watch it happen. And it's vivid to the people who can read or who, you know.

48:27But there's no image. Yeah, there's no image. And yeah, the best writer can only do so good at capturing what truly happened. And then with mass media happening just a couple years later, we're starting to go, hey, let's make sure pilots aren't drunk before they fly us. These just basic safety precautions that before we were either afraid to ask or too dumb to consider, and that kind of goes away. It's not safetyism so much as just basic common sense that the accountability of people writing and of what happened being widely known after that forces people to just operate on a different level of professional competence.

49:08Yeah. Because if you had, I mean, if you had seen all of the, I can't even remember, 70 or whatever ships that went up in hydrogen fireballs. And this is pre-war, peacetime, post-war, including the Zeppelin issues during the war. If you had seen that, or if people had seen film of it, the entire approach would have been different, but no one saw any of it. It was like Zeppelin goes down and over channel. Okay. You know, whatever that wasn't you, the, that the immediacy of watching the Hindenburg is seeing what hydrogen does. Yeah. And, and one of the things that was disturbing about the Hindenburg, which was the Germans afterwards just insisted that they had done everything right.

49:50Absolutely everything. They had nothing wrong. There was, the approach was good. The turn was good. It was perfect. I'm going, dude, if that's, you know, if that's perfect, good for you, but I'm not getting on that thing because that means you have no idea what it was that caused it. That was a realm of possibility that it could go down. It's insane. So when you do a book like this, I'd be curious, Empire of the Summer Moon was such a monster hit and it's so good and it's the perfect story. Are you able to just put that out of your mind and tackle each project independently or is that something that kind of hovers above you?

50:27Empire. Yeah. in some ways the uh in some ways there's there's a there are there is a parallel in the structure of this book and empire so one of the things that i uh with empire the summer moon um decided to do which actually makes the book work um and what i do is i alternate chapters so there's one chapter which is we're way back in time with the spanish and the development of the horse and whatever And the next chapter is essentially current time, 19th century, little nine-year-old girl with cornflower blue eyes gets kidnapped by Indians in Texas. And it's the story of the Parker family. So we're alternating chapters, the backstory, history of Texas, history of whatever, and the rise of the Comanches.

51:16And then the front story is this, is the Parker family. So you're never very far from the family. And the miracle of that book, which I only realized when it happened, was I'm going, okay, alternate, alternate, alternate, alternate. And then suddenly it's Quanah and the tracks just run together. I went, oh. Because in the person of Quanah, the entire backstory and the small family story unify. Right. It was, I mean, when I realized, I mean, I'm not claiming to be brilliant because I didn't know that's where it was going. Sure. But when I got there, I thought, oh, okay, well, then that's what I've done.

51:55So in this book, the challenge was, okay, you've got a crash on the night of October 5th, 1930 of an airship. And so, and that's about a seven hour flight before that happens. And so how am I going to do this? Am I going to start with kind of a scene setter just before the thing takes off or something, or maybe it's in the air, and then kind of go all the way back and just tell that kind of backstory from start to finish, right? From the earliest Zeppelins to the crash. And I thought that was making the reader wait too long to come back to the material. And so what I did was, again, alternating chapters.

52:38And we're on the airship, which the reader knows he's on the Lusitania. We're on the Lusitania. And a chapter about that and then a chapter about the Zeppelins and then a chapter about the development of the British airship system and World War I and all that thing. So we're alternating. So again, here we're never very far from that present moment, which in this case is we're up in the airship that's doomed and we know it's going to go down and we just don't know when or how. And so in that sense, I guess, that structure is somewhat parallel. I just mean like when you have a big hit, and I've had it a couple of times, you have a big hit, it can fuck with your expectations for what all your subsequent work.

53:20Oh, you mean in terms of commercial sales? Yeah, or just reception or like - Oh, it totally messes with that. Yeah, yeah. How do you think about that? Well, you can't, so I have some friends who, you know they're obsessed with their own numbers and nowadays of course we can all go find our numbers and they check it twice a day. And I don't do that because I don't think that so if you have a book like Empire of the Summer Moon which has sold a lot of copies you can start thinking well I'm a genius. This is the baseline. And then if you're going to set that up as that standard because Gwyn is a genius because he sold two and a half million copies.

54:02Well, okay, then if Perfect Past doesn't sell that well, then Gwyn is an idiot and has written a bad book. Sure. Well, Perfect Past is my favorite book. Yeah. But if I were to, because it's my most original book, but you know what I mean? If you set yourself up for being a genius because you sold a lot of, you know, whatever your first book on socialism was, you're setting yourself up for a fall. And you cannot believe that because there's, it's, it's, you know, the more, and the more I read about, I just read a biography of Kurt Vonnegut, but it's, you can be just so rocked and shattered by all of that if you, if you let that happen.

54:42And it's, it's, it's inevitable that you're going to try to think that way, I guess. I mean, you're going to, that you're going to try to associate your own glory and, you know, wonderfulness with straight sales or something. And you look back in history about how many incredibly great books didn't sell very well. And in fact, looking at Kurt Vonnegut, we're going through Player Piano and Sirens of Titan and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. Those all sold 2 ,000 copies each. So if we're going to say, well, Kurt Vonnegut, if you set up that standard, then he's not a very good writer, is he? No, the book I am most proud of that I think is my best book is the worst selling of all my books.

55:24But I try to think back, okay, the first time I was setting out to write, if you told me that book would sell – that any of my books would sell as many copies as my worst-selling book sold, I'd be like, done. I'll take that trade in two seconds. So it's very hard to keep a reasonable, humble baseline or a self-sufficient baseline that is not determined by what other people are doing, what you have done in the past, whatever projection somebody gave you, and to just go, it is what it is. And I'm proud of it because I feel like I did a good job. That's all you can do, I think. I mean, you can, I mean, I do look at, I mean, look at some numbers like print runs, you know, the print run here I was happy with.

56:13I mean, but, you know, you want to know that your publisher somehow thinks it's going to sell. But it's, you know, it's, it's, yeah, it's, it's a strange game. And it's not one that, that as a life, as a career long journalist, I mean, most of my life was as a journalist. Yeah. You're not really playing that game as a journalist. Pre-num, pre-page views. Right. So, well, now, now it is. I guess that's true. I didn't, I didn't grow up in that world though. So I'm working for Time Magazine and I write a story and by Monday night it's at the bottom of somebody's birdcage and we move on. And maybe it was the greatest thing in the world and maybe it wasn't.

56:47And, you know, I'll get calls from friends saying, so yeah, that was a great story. Okay. That's it. And you move on. Books are a whole different world, but you're right. Nowadays, those poor journalists have to, they're getting rated on how many, I had this, there was this poor person I worked at the Dallas Morning News with. And she was covering up really boring subjects like school boards or something, but she was rated, she was called on the carpet because she didn't have enough hits on her website. And it was like, I thought, God, anyway, I didn't really grow up in that world. Yeah. There's a story about some blogger was interviewing Robert Caro and they were describing, there's this thing, I don't know if people still use it, but it's called Chartbeat.

57:28and it would show you not just like how many views your stories got, but it would show you how many people were reading it at any moment. And it was actually like a speedometer. Like it would show it would like, if it was going well, like, so how many, there's a thousand people reading it right now. Ah, they're quitting, you know, it'd show you real time. And Robert Caro is just like aghast. He's like, how could you, how could any, this is a guy who spends, you know, a decade of his life writing about the most boring topic you could imagine, you know, the park supervisor of New York City and it works ultimately, but overall, like there is, but it's also kind of fundamentally irrational, right?

58:04Like what that is relying on is your gut. Like I know what's good. Forget what the market says. I got alarm. There's also something fundamentally irrational about being self-sufficient in that way and not listening to the evidence or the fact that no one's particularly interested. You, you know, there would never be groundbreaking work if people only looked at what the evidence told them was good. Yeah. It's, it's very hard. And there's, uh, I'll give you, I'll give you an example. I often give this example of, of getting the, you know, of, and, and I think a lot of writers and maybe you too, I don't know, have, have experienced this.

58:41This is part of what I do. And, um, uh, so, So this is years ago. I have a biography of Stonewall Jackson called Rebel Yell, which is also a bestseller up at the New York Times for nine or ten weeks, bestseller. So I've got two bestsellers in a row. The other one was a big Texas book too. So I'm in San Antonio with Rebel Yell. So I'm not a nothing at this point. I was a nothing in Texas before Empire, but I sold a bunch, and it's about Texas, so Texans like it. And I'm in this, I go to the Barnes and Noble at the, is it the Pearl Brewery? Whatever, that brewery north of San Antonio. And there's a Barnes and Noble there.

59:24So I walk in and I think there's, I thought there was going to be a book talk of some kind. But there's, you know, you realize very quickly there's no chairs set up for a book talk. But there is like a desk in the corner that has a sign that says author, literally says author. And there's a little stack of my books on one side of it. So they said, well, okay. hey, there's this like 28-year-old store manager who goes, he goes, well, okay, great, yeah. So look, we got a desk for you there. And here's a pen. You want a pen? You need a pen. Okay, get it. So you just go sit at the desk. And no one, I sat there.

59:59And I sat there and I sat there and a lot of time went by. No one came. Finally, finally, a lady comes over and she says, and she starts talking to me. She goes, well, I love your book. And I go, well, thank you. You know, because it really actually important to me at this point that someone liked the book. She got the thing. We talk for a while. At some point she says, I just have to ask you, have you written any books other than Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter? Which, as it turns out, was sitting just behind me in a little stack. So she had seen the stack and thought, oh, here's the guy who wrote Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter.

1:00:33And I said, well, you know, vampires haven't really been a big focus of my historical work so far. But, okay, so that is only two years removed from me in the green room, sitting in the green room with Karl Rove at whatever that big church. The Methodist church is just off the, in the middle of Austin, right near the Capitol. This giant, it's got 900 capacity in the sanctuary and 200 if you add the gallery in this thing. And Karl has drawn, you know, six or 700 people. I'm going, wow, that's incredible. And I go back into the green room. I come out because I'm following him speaking. It's full.

1:01:15And I did say hello Cleveland too, but it's full and there's people out in front. Okay. So which Sam Gwynn, I still, I've never had any moment like that in my life where this book was just an exploding bestseller and I hit it just exactly at the right moment. And I came out on stage and went, you have got to be kidding me. Okay. Which Sam Gwynn is the real one? Is it the one who is sitting in the little corner and no one knows who he is, the pathetic little sad author guy or the glorious Hello Cleveland guy? Yeah. And I did say it with a British accent too.

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1:03:58I did an event like that at Barnes & Noble in Hawaii and it was the same thing How did you go to a book tour to Hawaii? It was like I was supposed to go to Hawaii and so they were like, well do you want to do this event while you're there and there could be a tax write-off or something and I was like, sure and so I just expect them to take care of it and they take care of it and I get there and there's not even a poster and the manager doesn't and one person came and you have to sit there. You have this sense that your work is reaching people. You have some sense that you're good at what you're doing.

1:04:31And then there's this public reminder of the world's indifference to you entirely. And then there has to be some part of you that goes, this is not true, right? Like you've just gotten overwhelming evidence that the Zeppelin is a bad idea. It will crash into the, and you're like, no, I know better. I'm going to keep going. And then, yeah, a couple of years later, you're doing it in front of some huge audience or you're breaking these sales records or whatever. That's the tricky part is like you have to be a little irrational but not too irrational. You have to have a little bit that you're leading the target, faking it till you make it.

1:05:10But if you fake it till you make it too much, you're Elizabeth Holmes or something, right? Exactly. You're really playing with fire or hydrogen or something there. It's the ego, the pomposity of like the world wants to hear what I have to say is a very dangerous thing, but also a critical ingredient to doing it. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you have to have that ego in order to do it, and then you have to survive when apparently no one cares. Yes. So it's like interesting. So what you just said, though, your description was, so you've been through it. all authors I know, great and small, have been through this.

1:05:52And, you know, I was, in fact, I was talking to one, I won't name her, she's a very popular woman writer, Texas woman writer, but she was telling me about how she's been touring, tours all the time and goes to all these places. And I say, so do you draw crowds everywhere? And she says, no, sometimes I have two or three people. And I say, well, why do you do that? And her answer was because I'm teaching them how to, teaching the bookstore how to sell the books, which is a pretty smart answer. But on the other hand, there, she's, I mean, we all would know this name. She's a big deal. And so she had adjusted her ego.

1:06:28I mean, I'm sure she's got an ego that's just as big as all of our egos, but she had adjusted it to a world in which it wasn't all just high tide and green grass and glory for her, you know? Well, maybe it's, obviously I wrote a book about this, but the difference between ego and confidence, the confidence of going, whether 10 people come or a thousand people come, it doesn't say anything about me. It doesn't say anything about the book. Sometimes you have a good audience. Sometimes you don't. Sometimes it's your fault. Sometimes it's the bookstore's fault. Sometimes it's the publisher's fault.

1:06:59And I just had one at Barnes and Noble here not that long ago. And the publisher had done it as a ticketed event as opposed to just anyone. And then I had to remember, oh, wait, I'm not even doing this for the crowd. I'm doing it because Barnes & Noble did this special edition of the book. Like, I'm just supporting the account. Like, I promised them I'd do some stuff, so I'm doing some stuff. And I have to go, it is what it is. Like, you have to figure out what you're measuring and why you're measuring it, because you can so easily default to the vanity metric of, like, am I getting this stuff that other people say is important?

1:07:29Press and media attention being a great example. Right. Like, my best-selling books have gotten the least amount of attention, and my works that have gotten the most amount of attention have sold the least. because there's really true yeah because like when i write about media stuff i get lots of media attention oh i see yeah yeah right and but there's and those books sell but there's not the same word of mouth as if you do a book that just does something for people and at the end of the day word of mouth is not sexy but it's the only thing that pays the bills there's another thing too that is um i one of my favorite movies almost irrationally is is la la land partly because it it was filmed all around where I used to live.

1:08:09In downtown? Well, Griffith Park. I just took my kids on Angel's Flight. Oh, yeah. Okay, Angel's Flight. It was wonderful. But yeah, a lot of the kind of the atmospheric stuff in Hollywood and the Shakespeare Bridge and Griffith Park and all that stuff. Anyway, it's a great movie. But one of the big song and dance numbers is called Someone in the Crowd. And the point of it was that you're in Hollywood, everybody's trying to make it right. You never have any idea of who the person, who may help you. I mean, my whole career is just, it goes down to individual people helping me. I mean, somebody who bought, the editor of Harper's who bought my first article, it's a person.

1:08:47It's somewhere, and the point of this song, this long, big song and dance, is that you don't know who that's going to be and you don't know when it's going to be. There's someone here in this crowd who can open all the doors for you. And the great thing is, so Emma Stone, who won the Academy Award for the role, um, has a one woman show in Hollywood and six people come to it and she's crushed. Yeah. And she's, she's been failing. She's been going to auditions and nobody's hiring. And she goes to this thing and that's it. She says, that's it. I'm leaving. And so she leaves. She, she goes home. And so sometime in the next week, whatever the phone rings and there was one casting agent of the six yeah who's like the big casting agent who thought it was the greatest show she'd ever seen and immediately casts her in this great big three woman becomes a huge success but the point being that was all that mattered and so that whenever you start to think volume yeah um i mean i was at a bookstore once where there was like 10 people there and and there were three people that i met that actually changed things in my life i mean i'm not saying they made my book into a bestseller, but you can't assume that 600 is better than 11 necessarily.

1:10:05I mean, you know, maybe sell more books, but anyway. And you also can't assume success now is the same. Like, would you rather sell 10 ,000 books in one year or a thousand books a year indefinitely, right? Like, would you rather the books still be in print? Yeah. That's a good question. And I think a lot of people, well, it's funny, right? It's like you sell 10 ,000 books in a week, you hit a bestseller list. You sell 1 ,000 books a week for a whole year, you will never touch a bestseller list, but you will have sold many, many, many more copies. And if you can sell that many copies, if you can consistently sell that many copies for that amount of time, chances are you're going to keep selling copies.

1:10:45And so we often overestimate or over-index being the concentration of success and reach when really it's Empire of the Summer Moon that it continues. You want to get over the hump and become perennial and classic. You want to be on the nonfiction classics section or whatever or the dads and grads. You want to be in that conversation, not the everyone's talking about this book right now. Sometimes the one that everyone's talking about, they're still talking about, but often the reason they're talking about it is because it's very much of the moment. It's ephemeral, yeah. And that moment's going to fade.

1:11:25Yeah, very much so. Yeah. Speaking of great books, I just read Fehrenbach's Comanches. Oh, you did? I read the whole thing because I've read Empire of the Summer Moon and I've read Lone Star and I like his Korean War book too, which is also incredible. Fairback. Yes. Good Texas writer, San Antonio writer. But that's another – like the – not pomposity, but the confidence to make the sweeping statements that he makes about generations of people or civilizations. organizations that is the double-edged sword of doing any sort of creative work or any kind of where it's like it probably is so easy to get your head stuck up your own ass yeah well farenbeck was uh yeah i mean he was did you meet him no i never did and i came close at one point in fact he was he and i were supposed to be on a podium together somewhere i think and he died or he got, or he got very sick and then he died.

1:12:23He was older. Um, but, uh, yeah, he was, uh, so from my point of view, he was the, I think that book was this 1974 book or something. So, I mean, I looked at that when I was doing my book, I thought, well, okay, that's, it's so much time has passed here. I can legitimately undertake the same, the same topic as T.R. Ferenbach. But, But yeah, he's – there aren't very many of him. If you look at historians, the kind of the Dobie – I don't know. I mean whoever those – whatever. Webb, Dobie, Ferrenbach. There aren't that many of them around the mid-century. Yeah. The hard part for me in Comanches was the Lone Star book is so good.

1:13:08His reconstruction is so bad, so preposterously of its time, lost cause. It makes it hard for me to read the subsequent stuff and not go, how do I separate this from that? Yeah, that was true. But the ability to reduce sweeping periods of human history and sum them up in a sentence or two is both a superpower and probably also playing with fire. Who, Ferenbach? Just, I mean, for any – like to be – I mean, he's good at that. He's good at that. And he also – there's whole pages in him when I shouldn't run him down. And I don't – he's one of the reasons I wrote my book. But there were pages where I go, okay, this isn't right.

1:13:56That's what I mean. But he has the ability to look at the big picture that is very rare. And there are some stuff that's just flat brilliant. You go, God, nobody wrote that. Nobody looked at it that way. But yeah, interesting historian. Well, and yeah, there is, I think, probably a tendency in historians to get very bogged down in facts. Just like, let me give you this after this after this. And he understands narrative and human nature and the sort of the theatrics of it in a way. Like how do you make a 700-page book about Texas interesting? It can't be here's a bunch of facts about Texas. Right.

1:14:40You have to understand the essence of what's happening at a sort of like a Thucydidean level, which he is so, so good at. I read just a lot of stuff, particularly that I have to do for research. It's just all forest, all trees and no forest, you know, and you never, and you just never get the step back. Yes. It's just this obsessive, you know, and then this happened and then that happened and then they went here and then this, and this battle was won. And I mean, just go on the Civil War, a lot, a lot of Civil War books are like that. And you just go, and there's never, okay, step back now and tell me what that meant.

1:15:11Yes. What did, you know, second Manassas or second Bull Run mean as opposed to just, well, then he went here and then so and so and then the ninth Georgia attacked and then I mean it's just on and on forever yeah it's it's a form of insanity in a way it's just this undifferentiated nothingness that's coming by you I mean really it's a form of of craziness um and I I see a lot of it your civil war book is so good for the same reason that Bruce Catten is so good and uh this hallowed ground is so good where someone is able to actually get to what happened and why and what it means and what it says about people.

1:15:53That's what one of those books does. And you compare that. What's interesting about the Civil War is that you have a... So rarely do you get a bunch of people writing about the same finite amount of stuff, right? And so with the Civil War, you actually do have, like, you can, you can, you have a control group of like, you have all the people that did it badly, and then here's someone doing it well. And when you, when you see it done what you're like, yeah, this is just operating at another level. That's why Catton was the breakthrough. Yeah. I mean, in the two books, I would say Stillness at Appomattox and This Hollow Ground.

1:16:30Those two books, Stillness won the Pulitzer in 1954. I mean, it was, he was the first one to really do that well. Douglas Southall Freeman was good and all, but he was, books were dense and they were heavy and they were a bit academic, but Catton just gave, gives you the meaning of, he's good on detail too, but he's going to step back and you're going to see what the army of the Potomac really looked like or whatever it was. I mean, he's just, he's just brilliant. And, uh, he's the, he's gotta be the greatest to ever do it, right? And he's the reason, yeah, and he, I think, whenever you hear someone, you always hear someone say that, oh, I love the Civil War, my dad loves the Civil Wars, the reason will ultimately go back to Bruce Catton.

1:17:12I mean, Bruce Catton is who made that generation of Americans go, oh my God, this is really interesting stuff. It's just not, you know, and also he wasn't in that kind of lost cause school that dominated history in the early 20th century. He wasn't whatever they call him the centennial school, but he wasn't in that school either. He was relatively even-handed. Well, I think it's because he's a Midwesterner, and then he understands the South without

1:17:48sympathizing with the fundamental argument or something, which is a very important dance that I think a more reactionary writer today would have trouble doing. Like, it's ultimately clear where his sympathies lie, which is good. They're on the right side of it. But then you do understand why the other people were doing what they're doing. And in fact, it makes it much more damning, ultimately, because you understand them as people. And it's just the best. And that's right. Caton was Michigan, right? Yeah. Michigander. I just read his book about his boyhood in Michigan. Oh, yeah. That was really good.

1:18:27I've never read it. Yeah. I was trying to see if he'd written about anything other than the Civil War, because I would be very excited to read that. He wrote a book with his son about war defense contractors during World War II, but I haven't brought myself to read it. I mean, I'm sure it's great, but I can't be good. I think what I've read is there was the Mr. Lincoln's War trilogy, then there was the Stillness and Hell. I think those are like the five of his books that I've read. Every time I'm like, I really cannot read another book about the Civil War. And then I'll read one of his and I'll be like, oh, I can.

1:18:59There's something more here. He's just incredible. Anything else we should talk about? You got anything? No. I mentioned one more. So people asked me where the book came from. And this is another writer who does this brilliantly. So you ever heard of James Morris? No. Okay, James Morris became Jan Morris. He was one of the first, I think, trans historians. Big name trans historians. Recently or like how long? No, let's see. So I would have think she died, I would have said maybe 10 years ago, and was a historian active in the 60s, 70s, 80s, I guess, possibly the 50s too. But I may be born in 1910 or 1920, maybe born in 1920 or something.

1:19:48Anyway, I actually wrote for Texas Monthly at one point. But anyway, James Morris, under that name, wrote a trilogy called Pax Britannica of the British Empire. And the third one was called Farewell the Trumpets. And it's so good, it just knocks me down. I mean, if you were to pick up – talk about the big picture. Talk about the genius for tying it all together, stepping back and saying, this is what it all means. And so somewhere in the middle of there, there was a three-page run on R101. And what he did was he tied this whole thing to kind of the decline of the British Empire, about how they were trying to save themselves and that this crash was emblematic of the end of it.

1:20:29I mean, it just – it was brilliant. I read it. And I said, you know, I do what all trained historians do. I Googled it and Amazoned it right away, you know, to see like how many books had come out about R101. Because Boris was writing 40 years ago or something. And really almost nothing. I mean something in 82, but it was not written by a, you know, it was a lot of research, but not really written by a professional writer. And anyway, so that where I end up, I'm the only guy with this idea, that's for sure. And the only reason I think is because no one else reads James Jan Morris. Well, I'm definitely going to read that.

1:21:10Just pick up a little bit or anybody listening to this, pick up just a little bit of Farewell to Trubus. It's the third one. Should I read the whole three? I would say read the whole thing. It's brilliant writing. I mean, there aren't that many historians that kind of knock me down. Catton is one. Morris is another. Anyway, go on. But that's your superpower, right? Because Empire of the Summer Moon is basically the Quanah Parker story from Comanche. Right. The 1865 book, Hymn of the Republic, is basically a similar arc as one of the Bruce Catten books. And then you've – It's exactly the arc of stillness at Appomattox.

1:21:47Yes. Except that he sticks with Army of the Potomac and I go – And then in this case, you read these three pages and you go, that should be a whole book. You're, you're, you're like, you're, you're writing is like, you know, when you're like on a map, uh, on your phone and you go, or is it? Yeah. You're zooming, you're zooming in. Zooming. That's it. And you're like, that's a whole book right there. And I, I'm going to put a bunch of color on that. You know, it's another incredible book I just read. Have you read Anne Rose book on Pontius Pilate? No. Another thing where you're like, she just goes.

1:22:22Is there enough research to justify it? She starts the book and she's like, there's basically like one tablet. There's the Bible, which she's not treating as a historical source necessarily. And then there's like an aqueduct and like a couple letters. There's like Tacitus mentions it. And there's like a couple things. But she draws in every play. And she's talking about not just what Pontius Pilate was, but what everyone thought he was. Oh, the cultural history. But it's so – it was one of those books where I could read like three pages and I'm like, I'm going to take a break now. That's so – there's so much in these three pages.

1:23:00I have to like come back to it. Incredible. Even with the scarcity of research of primary stuff on it. Have you read Cleopatra's Daughter? No. Some new – some book that come out. And it was the same thing. Yeah. There's about that much about – some of the reviews have said that, well, this is really stretching it as far as you can possibly stretch it. I mean, were you just loaded up with backstory and backstory and backstory? Like, okay, obviously I write about the Stoics. So Seneca, I'm thinking about all the time. It never occurred to me that, so Seneca writes his letter. Seneca's letters to Lucilius, right?

1:23:32Lucilius, his friend, has the same job as Pontius Pilate, just in a different province, right? Seneca's brother, Gaio, also judges a case, like Pontius Pilate, not of Jesus, on St. Paul. And it's like, oh, yeah, so we don't know what's actually happening here. So there are parallels that you can look at. But yes, we can know so much about – and when you just read someone that just – they're like, this is my story and I'm going to zoom in. I'm going to give you all of it. And you're like, how did you manage to get 300 pages out of three days? And there's a genius to that that's like you just – wow.

1:24:08Is the title Pontius Pilate? I think so. Or it might just be called Pontius. But she writes the obituaries for The Economist. That's her day job, yeah. What a great job. Yeah. Cool. That's great. Well, this was incredible. Thanks again. Well, thank you, Ryan. Of course.

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