The Daily Stoic - Jack Weatherford on Genghis Khan and Learning From History | The Most Stoic Person In Marcus’ Life

Episode Date: June 1, 2022

Ryan reads today’s daily meditation and talks to author Jack Weatherford about his books Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World and Indian Givers: How Native Americans Transformed the World (which you can get at The Painted Porch), why we should learn from history and implement new solutions based on past failures, and more. Jack Weatherford is the New York Times bestselling author of Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, which sold over 300,000 copies and has been optioned by Wolf Films (producer of Law and Order), Indian Givers: How the Indians of the Americas Transformed The world, his first national bestseller, and The History of Money, among other acclaimed books that have been published in more than twenty-five languages.In 2006 he spoke at the United Nations to honor the 800th anniversary of the founding of the Mongol nation by Genghis Khan. In 2007 President Enkhbayar of Mongolia awarded him Mongolia’s highest honor for military or civilian service. Although the original Spanish edition of Indian Givers was banned in some parts of Latin America, nearly a quarter of a century later Bolivia honored him for his work on the indigenous people of the Americas. A specialist in tribal peoples, he taught for twenty-nine years at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota, where he held the DeWitt Wallace Distinguished Chair of Anthropology.Father’s Day is just two weeks away! The leather editions of The Daily Stoic and The Obstacle is the Way make the perfect gift for any of the fathers in your life. InsideTracker provides you with a personalized plan to improve your metabolism, reduce stress, improve sleep, and optimize your health for the long haul. For a limited time, get 20% off the entire InsideTracker store. Just go to insidetracker.com/STOIC to claim this deal.The Jordan Harbinger Show is one of the most interesting podcasts on the web, with guests like Kobe Bryant, Mark Manson, Eric Schmidt, and more. Listen to one of Ryan's episodes right now (1, 2), and subscribe to the Jordan Harbinger Show today.Since 2007, MyBodyTutor's daily accountability and 1:1 coaching has been the most effective way to get healthy and stay fit. To save $50 all you have to do is go to MyBodyTutor.com, join, and mention Daily Stoic when they ask how you heard about them.80,000 Hours is a nonprofit that provides free research and support to help people have a positive impact with their career. To get started planning a career that works on one of the world’s most pressing problems, sign up now at 80000hours.org/stoic.Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemailSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic Podcast early and add free on Amazon Music. Download the app today. Welcome 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 in wisdom in their actual lives.

But first, we've got a quick message from one of our sponsors. Hi, I'm David Brown, the host of Wonderree's podcast business wars. And in our new season, Walmart must fight off target, the new discounter that's both savvy and fashion forward. Listen to business wars on Amazon music or wherever you get your podcasts. The most stoic person in Marcus' life.

Antoninus Pius, Marcus Aurelius' adopted father and predecessor was not a stoic. He didn't identify as one, nor did anyone call him a philosopher. He left behind no writings. There are no anecdotes of him dropping in on lectures and greaser studying under some guru. And yet of all the people in Marcus' life, Antoninus was the most stoic. He was cool under pressure. He quietly

went about his business. He was hardworking and self-sufficient and never got worked up. He was a beloved leader. And his mere presence put other people at ease. From Antoninus, Marcus learned as he details in book one of meditations, everything from how to get the best out of people to how to keep a simple diet that minimizes bathroom interruptions, to maximizing time spent serving others.

Marcus learned the importance of compassion, of self-reliance, taking responsibility, of asking questions, of surrounding yourself with good people, of enjoying things but never over indulgent. Strength, perseverance, self-control, Marcus writes to close out everything he learned from his stepfather, the mark of a soul in readiness, from his stepfather, the mark of a soul in readiness, indomitable. Antonyna sounds like quite a person, doesn't he? And maybe he reminds you of the most stoic person in your life, a parent, a grandparent, an aunt, an uncle. Someone who doesn't actively study stoicism, someone who has no idea that the things they say sound exactly like what the Sturks say.

But someone who innately always grabs the smooth handle, who gives people the benefit of the doubt, always finds the opportunity inside an obstacle. Antoninus, like a lot of parents and grandparents adopted or biological, was what you might call a lower case sturk. He didn't know he was practicing philosophy. He just lived it, which as we frequently say is the whole point of stoicism. It's what you do. It's who you are. It's acts of virtue.

It's what Epitita said, don't talk about your philosophy and body it. How much better would we all be if we put less energy into being an uppercase stoic and more into being a lower case stoic? If we kept in mind that parent or grandparent that most stoic person in our life and tried to comport ourselves as their disciple striving to do as they did? It was this that helped Marcus become Marcus. All his life as one biographer put it, Marcus, strived to be like Antoninus, holding him up as the most beautiful model of a perfect life. Hold that person in your life today and every day do as they do.

Don't just talk about stosism and body. And look, I think it's fitting that we're talking about Marcus's biggest stoke influence and that it was his stepfather because as you may have noticed, Father's Day is just a couple of weeks away and the leather editions of the Daily Stoke and the obstacle is the way the perfect gift for any fathers in your life. If you're asking yourself what's special about these editions, well, they're the same books, you know, but we put a ton of work into making them extra special. It's a genuine leather cover with a new foil stamp logo.

It comes in a hard-bound box specifically made for both books. It's this eight-gram-monkin cream paper, one of the best papers in the world for books. It's got in sheets and a ribbon. You can mark your page. There's new illustrations for each of the sections in the books And there's a letter from for me the author the obstacles the way comes with a letter play press note for me And then the daily stow it comes with one for me and my co-author Stephen Hanselman and It's the same book that you know the book beloved by all sorts of great people out there hopefully yourself included and

by all sorts of great people out there, hopefully yourself included. And we just wanted to make a premium edition, ideally to give as a gift something to stand the test of time, something to give as a token of gratitude or thanks as a reminder of shared principles. And I hope you check it out. As you said before, these books go through quite a process to get to you, but if you order them today, they can arrive in time for Father's Day. Can't guarantee that if you live outside the US, but I think I can, if you buy it here shortly in the US, you can check that out at store.dailystoke.com or link in today's episode.

We should also have time to do some signed copies as well, but you gotta hurry and place that order store, dot daily stoke, dot com. Enjoy. I remember I was in college and I flew to New York and there was this author I admired and he took me. We went on a walk through you to the square in New York City and this is like sort of the first author I ever really met that was going to get a shot to work for. And he took me to the Barnes & Noble there, still there on, say 18th, right at the top of Union Square Park. And he bought me two books. He bought me hardcover of Robert Green's 33 Shrides of War,

which I still have to this day and book changed my life. And then another book that profoundly influenced me and I've referenced it many times, I wrote about it in Ego's The Enemy. But it's a book called Gangescon and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford. Loved this book. Obviously Gangescon is not a great reputation. We don't know a lot about him, but I love books that sort of rewrite history or allow you to see history from a new perspective. And that's what this book does. You think of Ganges Conn as this blood thirsty monster. You don't think of him as a strategist

on par with Napoleon or whomever. You don't see him as an innovator, as an effective leader of the way you might see a Julius Caesar. You don't see him as a revolutionary the way you might see George Washington or father of his people the way you might see a Seaman Bolivar. Anyways, that's what this book does. It allows you to see all, to get this from a new perspective. Fast and incredible book. Sold over 300,000 copies. It was optioned for film by Will Films, Dick Wolf being the founder of Law, or the creator of Law and Order. So I've loved that book for years and years and years. We sell it in the painting porch. If you

have it ready, you absolutely should read it. It's seriously an incredible book. But it wasn't until last year, actually for this podcast, I was interviewing Sebastian Younger that I even knew that Jack Weatherford had written another book. So Sebastian Younger recommended the book to me and then it wasn't until I was on vacation with my family in Big Bend.

We walked into the gift shop at Big Bend National Park. And they had the book in the book store. I was like, this is fate, I have to read it, and I read it. And I loved, it's called Indian Givers, how the Indians of the Americas transformed the world. I grant some people might be upset by the political incorrectness of the title. But if you give the book a chance,

you'll see where the author's coming from. And it was incredibly eye-opening. It gives you a whole new perspective on things just as Gang is kind of the making of the modern world does. I was just, I've been looking forward to this interview for a long time. I reached out as soon as I read Indian Givers. And we couldn't talk because Jack is in Mongolia where he's moved after a long academic career in the United States. He taught for 29 years at Macaulestra College in St. Paul, Minnesota, where he was the

Duwitt Wallace Distinguished Chair of Anthropology. And then COVID hit and obviously some of these smaller countries were overwhelmed. And Jack is not a super tech savvy individual. He was very nice. I'll read you this actually. And this is, I'm also saying this as a way of apology. This is not the best audio that I've done. I could barely hear him. We've had to jiggle around. It's worth straining your ears to hear this, I promise. He emailed afterwards.

He had to stay up late, so I appreciate him giving the time because the massive time difference. I enjoyed our talk last night. It was a little past my bedtime, but I hope I made sense. He said, I'm sorry about the technology. I have no phone, no TV, no car, and my computer has no subscriptions. I bought the best headphones I could hear at a small market. They were only $17, but they failed. Technology and apologies aside, I enjoyed

tremendously. I would say right back at you Jack, I enjoyed this conversation so much. I'm very excited to bring it to you. And seriously, go right now to the paininports.com, click the links in the show notes by Indian givers, by Gangs Con in the Making of the Modern World. By the money Amazon, wherever, but you should definitely read these two books. I absolutely adore them and I very much enjoy this conversation and I know that you will too. Well, you know, I still have my copy of Ganganges Con in the Making of the Modern World, which has got to be 15 years old now.

I know I bought this at the borders in Union Square in New York City, and it was just such a fascinating, incredible book, because you take this mostly reviled historical figure or poorly understood historical figure and you really figure out what makes him tick and I just I loved the book so much. Well, I appreciate that, and I really do. You have been a great blessing to authors everywhere. You yourself have written so many outstanding books, but you promote everybody. And that's, I think, unusual among authors. We tend to promote ourselves and not everybody.

And you really give us all big boost. And you help a lot of people who are aspiring to be authors. I see the work that you've done. Wow, that means a lot. Yeah, I mean, to me, the idea, like authors are not in competition with each other We're in competition with people not reading so I feel like I want them to read period Yes, yes, and I don't know a better spokesperson or getting people reading and writing You're also pushing that Thank you So as you sat down to

Well, thank you. So as you sat down to tackle Ganges Khan all these years ago, what did you feel like, why did you feel compelled to do that? Some people might go, I mean, some people compare him to Hitler. It's like, why would you write a book about the genius of Hitler, right? Like why sitting down and writing about this figure that so many people have not only not studied but feel like people shouldn't study? I lived in the years in Germany when the university there and I was a sense of how people feel about Hitler and that's very negative. But I went to Mongolia. I realized that the people there love him, honor him, worship him. that the people there love him, honor him, worship him. Here's a tremendous influence in daily life in Mongolia.

And I had to think about my own perceptions then. Okay, then why do we see it this way? And they see it that way. How can they be such opposite perspectives? And I was a little bit slow to change my perspective. And I really did not head out to write a biography of anybody, much less of him, because it was such a strange, different world for me.

I wanted to write about a trade. I wanted to write about the silk route and what was happening there. And the more time I spent in the whole silk route, I realized his importance in that history. And then slowly I began. And then Mongolian friendship, really was scholars and friendship, again to tell me, you should write the biography. Not to well, no, I can't write the biography.

But you're an American. You can speak to people. We can't speak to it. You can speak in English. And finally, I was somehow just a yes, I'm going to do it. I may not be an expert, but I'm going to do it. And as I understand it in Mongolia, when it was part of Soviet Russia,

the history of Genghis Khan was deliberately suppressed. So people don't know about it, not just because it's controversial, but people don't know about it, not just because it's controversial, but people didn't know about it because they were not allowed to know about it for a very long time. Absolutely correct. It was forbidden. The sentence you could be found at him, where killed, almost all of them were killed, very few escaped from that. And almost every nature of Jim was banned. Was it a terrible repression for the people of Mongolia?

Yeah, it's somewhat ironic, given one of the things I most admired about Ganges in the book, which was his openness to ideas, right? And his love of the scholarly tradition, there is some irony that this great conqueror who people thought was what sort of pro-censorship and suppression would himself then later be the country he founded with territory conquered would itself be conquered and he be the one that is suppressed and and covered over Yes, history so full of iron like that and that that's certainly what for him, but I

I just wanted to look at the other side of the story examine the other side and try to make it known and side of the story, examine the other side, and try to make it known. And readers are smart enough to teach for themselves, the bright path and the truth. And they, based on their own experience, their own knowledge, they go forward. I'm just saying, this is what I think, this is what I believe, this is my research. And then, leave it to the people to this side for themselves. One of my similar books, since we were talking about recommending books, I don't know if you have read Tolstoy as a calendar of wisdom, but at the end of Tolstoy's life, Tolstoy wrote this book, A Calendar of Wisdom, that was also suppressed by the Communists for almost a hundred years.

And so there is this kind of rich tradition of ideas or things that may otherwise have spread globally as these works of art made their way to people throughout the 20th century that we're just sort of lost and we're only kind of rediscovering them now. This book was published in like 1989. That's when the first time it was published in English. It's kind of incredible. There was the same decade that the secret history of the Mongols was published in English by Oxford University. Oh, sorry, by

Harvard University. But, you know, I think our century and communism did not have a monopoly on that kind of censorship. I think it's been going on for a while. I think it's just those homes today and the bill. And it's very unfortunate. I think one of the path that me is often I hope to be is the const of the, the, the looking at the underside of the story, constantly be looking at what else is out there. I sort of envision it as, go into the darkness, go into the darkness.

That's where we have to, you know, we can't just hang around the lamppost like that famous antichode of the drunk looking for the car trees who lost a lot of strength, but looks because it's under the lamppost, but I think that many scholars, I hate to say this because I was a professor for a long time, but many scholars, they just look under the lamppost. They're just looking where there's already light and they're just comparing what others have said and this has been said. And I really believe, no, we have to find a new way each time we have to find

some new type of evidence. Don't just compare the same words from the past, but go out there and look for something and find it. You don't know what you're looking for, but go look for it and find it. And I think that's part of our job. I see it. Yeah. And Nietzsche said that too much of philosophy is arguing over the definition of words with other words.

And I think a lot of even nonfiction and narrative nonfiction, it's just treading over the same ground, saying the same story slightly differently. And I think the best books, not just even from an intellectual standpoint, but even from a sales perspective, it's like when you find that blue ocean, the stuff that's not churned up by other people, not only do you add something to the wisdom and knowledge base of humanity, but also you differentiate

yourself and you allow, you know, like, I think what was, it's not like there's, this is one of 20 great books on Ganga's Khan that you can read. The irony is, even though it's, you know, it's more than a decade and a half old and it's sold very well, it's kind of still like the category, like it's the main book. And, and I think that's a sign that you carved out in new space or a new way of thinking about a thing. Well you make me feel very proud and if that is true I do hope it's a transitory moment because I think one of the things that as again as an office that we should be doing is as you encourage other people to write it's also to encourage other voices to come along.

They say, okay, this is how I did it. This is my voice. I want to make it heard. What the greatest effect I could have is, if I stimulate other people, have a voice, even to say, no, no, no, you're wrong. This is what I think. Yes. This is what I've done. I believe in that very much. You want to start a conversation with your work, not be the end of a conversation. I agree completely. I mean, I've always faced it slightly differently

that it's a journey and I want to start the journey, but it's up to the other side to the reader to finish the journey. They take it where they want. I don't want to tell them where to go with it. That's very well said. You know, I'm going to actually do this passage because I used it in one of my books. I was thinking about, let me find this here, what strikes me about, when you think about, let's say, a gang, sorry, when you think about a Napoleon or a Julius Caesar,

you kind of get this sense that they came out of the womb that way. They were just these subants or these geniuses. What I found most striking about your portrayal of gangus con is the sort of iterativeness of it, the growth of it. There's a passage that BH Ladell Hart had. He was talking about William to come to Sherman, the American general. And he said, among men who rise to fame and leadership, two types are recognizable. Those who are born with a belief in themselves and those in whom it is a slow growth dependent

on actual achievement. To the men of the last type, their own success is a constant surprise, and it's fruits the more delicious, yet to be tested cautiously with a haunting sense of doubt, whether it is not all a dream. In that doubt lies true modesty, not the shame of insincere self-deprecation, but the modesty of moderation in the Greek sense.

It is poised, not posed. And he was contrasting the sort of slow burn accumulation and discovery process of William to come to Sherman with a Napoleon who's just like, believes he's destined to conquer the world. Where do you see Ganges fitting in in that economy? Because he strikes me as more of the slow burn. Yes, it was a slow growth.

I think that he accumulated this over time based upon his own experiences. Now, the problem with saying that, is of course, once it's over, once these things have happened, then people look back and write it as though it was pre-destined. And then we get them saying, well, he was born with a blood clot in his hand. And things such as that. And all that may have been true. I do not think that there was any sign at all among the people around him when he was born, that he was destined for this kind of greatness.

I don't think he saw it. I think it just grew over life as he faced one problem and overcame that, that he faced another. You know, his wife was kidnapped and then he had to get her back. He got her back and then there was a feud with that tribe and then he had to overcome that and their allies. And then it just kept growing over his life. Yeah, it seemed like he, and it was mostly defined to me by his hunger to learn. He wasn't someone who was necessarily born with all of the tools or the understanding, but he acquired them quite quickly.

And he never had to be taught something twice. Now that's a good way to say that. I agree with that. He had no formal education, of course. He had no one to teach him to read a write because there was even a written language for the Mongolian language at that time. So he had no one to teach him in that formal sense, but he did have some good people around him who influenced him, and he began to learn from them,

but he had that ability that we all think we have, we all claim it, and that is to learn from our mistakes. But so often we make that mistake, and then we're just kind of determined to do it again. No, if it hadn't rained that day, it would have worked kind of determined to do it again. No, it was, if it hadn't rained that day, it would have worked. I'm going to do it again. No, he recognized over and over where he made a mistake. And I think that was, that's a power that most of us do not have. And he also had that ability to recognize the power of other people and where they surpassed him in

something and to help channel their ability into the same mission that he had. And people were extremely loyal to him. That's a thing that he was able to create to help them. So it wasn't just his own knowledge but his ability to accumulate people around him with different kinds of knowledge and to put it together. He was the core nature of all that. One thing the Stokes all have in common is that they love to learn. They love to learn from people who had experiences, had insights, had interesting lives.

That's one of the things I love about podcasts. It's like an hour or two hours or three hours sometimes right into the brain of a person who thinks very differently or has experienced things very different from what you've experienced. And that's something I always feel when I listen to my friend Jordan Harbinger's podcast, the Jordan Harbinger Show, which is the sponsor of today's episode, is show as interviewed basically everywhere. You can listen to his episode with Robert Green on the laws of human nature, or both my episodes. We talk about solving for what you want in life. You talk about my book Conspiracy, you're still in the Suzuki. I mean, he's had literally everyone you can imagine on professional art foragers to billionaire entrepreneurs, to mafia, hitmen, to models,

to professional athletes. He did this episode about birth control and how it alters the partners we pick and how medicine can affect elements of our personalities. He talks about just everything you can imagine, it's just a great show, I recommend it. The podcast covers a lot, but I think the one thing that's constant is it always pulls useful bits of advice from his guests, and I can say that from experience. I always feel like the interviews I do

on the Jordan Harbinger show get something out of me that I didn't talk about the interview I did just a few days earlier. Like, when I would point you to those interviews, if I would say, hey, someone's like, hey, what's a podcast you are on? I connect you, I might link you to one of my episodes of Jordan, because it would be different from all the other ones. And I think that's all you can really ask for from a podcast. I enjoy it. I recommend it. There's so much there you can check out JordanHarbinger.com slash start for episode

recommendations or just look for the Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts. Thank you to Jordan for sponsoring this podcast. And I hope you give it a listen. Yeah, there's an epic teedist quote that I love. He says, it's impossible to learn that what you think you already know. And it strikes me as as gang is con.

I mean, I don't think anyone would say he's going around like Socrates. What do I know? I know nothing. But it did seem like if someone was better than him at something or did things differently but more effectively than him, almost immediately, he stole that from them and incorporated it into what he was doing or he tried to learn and modify what he was doing

based on this new information that he got. Oftentimes, not from his friends, but from his foes. Yes, he was very quick to learn from them, especially you see that is the warfare where he was able to start incorporating some firepower from the Chinese example and to use the siege engines and other things that the Mongols had no experience with at all. I'm going to even re-channeling of rivers in order to turn the force of the river against city walls. He had so many ideas that he was able to accumulate.

And I think part of it is because he had no commitment to one ideology. He had not studied one book of strategy that he then was following that one book, the way that it's taught in military school or something. No, he just had to go out there and figure it all out. Yeah, he assumed a kind of formlessness, which is kind of how people saw the Mongol Horde,

this like adaptive, changing water-like thing that was unstoppable. He would take whatever would work and change. It didn't have this picture of how things should go. You know, like whatever that, that when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. It feels like he was the opposite of that. I agree, I agree, he was the opposite.

And when you come in, you'd already have a written language. There's nothing you could read to help guide you. You don't have one of those big world religions, which is going to teach you this is the right way to do it. And this is where I think going into the darkness is helpful to me because I was no scholar of this. I was no scholar of Asia.

I've never taken a course on anything Asia, not even the art, or the economy, nothing. And then there I am in Mongolia, and I'm thinking I'm going to write this book. Well, instead of just going back to all of those old manuscripts, and I chose the one, the oldest one, so called secret history of the Mongols, and it was impossible to understand. I would read that thing, and I mean, it's like trying to read the Bible in Hebrew or something. It was so difficult struggling through it. But what I decided to do was go to those places, go to those places in there. And immediately I saw by perceptions where wrong. I thought of King of the Sun as a person on the step. This great bass plane that's open all the way across the Eurasia. That's how we see him.

I went to where he grew up and it's the mountainous area on the edge of the plane. And it's all trees around there. You can't have herds of animals out there crazy. And then I looked very closely at the secret history and I realized most of the early mentions were of hunting, not of herding. And there was about bows and arrows. And when you look at something like the Hebrew Bible,

which is based upon real nomadic people who are herders and you have, you know, they, they, they rotted my staff, who comfort me. You know, they're talking about things that pertain to pastoralism, whereas in the secret history it was all things that pertain to hunting, to bow an arrow, to the whistling arrow, to all of these details. And then I looked at his, the animal he did own, he owned some horses, but then I realized, just when reading it, they were gilding. Okay, that tells you right away he has not heard him. The gilding doesn't reproduce, you don't have a mayor to produce offspring or milk. They are using those to hunt. Why else would you have a gilding, just a little hunk? And so he grew up in that

world on a mountain, a hunting, and doing these kind of activities were much different than being a shepherd. And so this was the beginning of going into the darkness, of seeing this place that he had actually lived and where he had done things. And then you begin to see what makes sense in this case, in the secret history. I began to feel it come alive as I was there in the place. No, I love that. I don't know if you're familiar with the work of the scholar, Victor Davis Hanson. He's written a lot of books mostly about

the Greeks. I sort of become this strange partisan political figure now in the US. But I remember to go to your point about going in the darkness or seeing things firsthand and the conclusions that can come from that. He was talking about how, okay, let's say you read the history of the Peloponnesian War and it says, you know, then the Spartans raised the Athenian fields and leveled them or whatever, right? And he's like, well, how hard is it actually to like uproot in all of tree? Like he just went and tried to do it

with the tools that they had. And he's like, this is impossible. He's like, so this is actually, it's probably much more performative than we thought. Or for instance, he was writing about Alexander the Great the Great, and he put on one of those helmets, right, like the helmet that the troops had wear. And then he was writing something about those battle orations, the speech that the general would give to the army before the speech.

And he realized, and it's like it doesn't have earholes. Like the helmet doesn't have earholes. So like it would have been a set, not only is like one general can't give a speech to 100,000 troops, but like he couldn't, he couldn't have given a speech to any of the troops, right? Like no one could hear. And so it's just realizing that, oh,

sometimes when you just read stuff, or when you just accept it from second hand, you're not really getting the full understanding of how something works, you have to actually go to the source, get to the bottom of it, which strikes me as one of Khan's strategies as well. I'd say many people, in the case of his jujube, especially many people would assume, okay, Thucydides is the source. He's our oldest, he's telling us the speeches, but Thucydides himself said that he

could remember all these speeches correctly, that he had to give them the way he thought they should have been given. Right. And so we're already starting off with this manufactured thing. I mean, facilities, whether or not he ever tried on the helmet in order to see how he could hear, I don't know. But these are the things we need to do. I, you know, someone once told me that Earth speaks rest of our feet. It's by being there, standing in that space that you begin to feel what happened. And I think, unfortunately, scholarship in the Western world has really

drifted very far from that experiential base. And they've left that kind of open for journalists, and for adventurers, and other people. I think it's important for real scholarship that we experience what we are going to talk about. Well, it's so easy for it to become a refraction of a refraction of a refraction in unless you go put feet on the ground as you're saying. Like, for instance, like, obviously I've written now about Marcus Aurelius and for many, many years

and I've read meditations a hundred times, I've been to some of the places that he's talks about, et cetera, but it wasn't until, you know, the pandemic happens that all of the illusions and mentions he has of the plague, what was then the Antonine plague, I came to understand in a different way, right? In one of my favorite passages, he says, you know, a plague can take your life, but there's another kind of pestilence that can destroy your character. Now, reading that in 20,

in 2010, right, your understanding of it is fundamentally different than watching people lose their mind or their character in the midst of COVID, which isn't nearly as bad as the Antenine plague. And you go, oh, he wasn't just speaking figuratively, he was speaking about an actual process or a thing that he witnessed as a human being

that is a pretty universal thing. Like COVID, a plague, the diseases that probably traveled in gangus, cons time, that that affects human behavior and that diseases and people have not changed that much in the thousands of years since. Exactly. And this is how these different experiences give us a new life. Yeah. I mean, that's like, with me, me suddenly just realizing the importance of the bows and arrows

and the hunting that you mentioned before. It was just like, yeah, okay, they're hunting. So I thought, it was absolutely no importance. And then I began to realize, yes, that's important. Because then I saw the exact same strategies you used for hunting. You later used it worth there. So one of my other favorite parts of the book is some of the lessons that he gives his children,

specifically about pride. And what it did seem remarkable for someone who was so successful, so powerful, and so feared, he tried, it seemed like he tried to cultivate a kind of a modesty or an intellectual humility and for the most part escaped what they call the dictators trap, right, where you are surrounded by sycophants, you believe your own BS, and you end up fundamentally overreaching or endangering all the things you've built and done because

you're no longer living on planet earth. Yes. He prided himself, I think, in his living exactly the way he showed us, he said, I eat what they eat, I wear what they wear, he sleeps in the kind of tent they sleep in. He did not have special, special life prepared to do. He had no palace, he did not wear silks, he did not eat other food. Everything was like this. He was very proud of that. But at the same time, he also recognized, later in life, that his children and grandchildren would not be that way. Right.

They will be clad in beautiful clothes, and they will think that they deserve it, just the same way that the goat on top of the mountain thinks that he is taller than the mountain. the mountain thinks that he is taller than the mountain. And this was a problem, unfortunately, for him late in life. He didn't. It's one of the things he was not able to solve. I think for many of us, we really about those kinds of things that are true to the children or the future generation of the country. And it hasn't been solved yet. Yeah, and in Meditations, Marcus Aurelius talks about not wanting to be cesarified, not

being stained purple by the cloak of the emperor. And it does seem that he escaped it, but his son, right, what's so interesting about this period of the five good emperors is five emperors in a row don't have a male heir and they have to choose the heir. And so we get five emperors in a row because they chose it. And then the second that Marcus Aurelius has a son, the Pax Romana ends and he's not able to pass on the discipline, the humility, the hunger to learn, all of that to his son.

It ends in disaster. And that's something that plagued Jigatana at the end of his life. If he could see his sons, even though they had many good attributes, he could see that it wasn't at sufficient. Do you think there's something he could have done differently or do you think it's just like a law of history or circumstances that you can't pass that on? I think that when you're so busy building a life the way he was building an empire and a life, you don't have time or it just doesn't

occur to you to think about that future of after you're gone. You're just thinking about life while you're here. And then as you get older you'll be getting to think about what's going to happen when I'm gone. And so I think that in some ways perhaps you was not as as attentive a father as he would have wished to do later in life, that he was so busy creating an empire that he just thought the sons would go up the way he did. But in fact, they were growing up as the sons of a conqueror. And so they were enjoying a lot of life while he was still working hard. They were beginning to enjoy the silks a little bit, they're

beginning to enjoy drinking more, debauchery. They were not completely bad, I don't want to say that, but they were certainly not as good as he was. Raising kids can be one of the greatest rewards of a parent's life. But come on, someday's parenting is unbearable. I love my kid, but is a new parenting podcast from Wondry that shares a refreshingly honest and insightful take on parenting.

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So if you like to laugh with us as we talk about the hardest job in the world, listen to, I love my kid, but wherever you get your podcasts, you can listen ad free on the Amazon Music or Wondery app. Yeah, and obviously this is the sort of absence in all of history, but you do feel like you tried to address it in your book on the Mongol women. It does feel like we see them, it's like, well, why didn't gangus khandu better, and then we sort of go, well, and then what was his mother doing, and what was the female situation? It is interesting how we sort of ignore that part of the equation, but I'm not sure ignore that part of the equation, but I'm not sure Ganges Khan could have done any of it

all on his own. Right, right. I think he just kind of let everybody grow up in their own way. He developed a much greater affection that seems for his daughters than for his sons, but he's still, he was very concerned about his sons. He was still a concerned father always,

especially when they went off the fight if they were wounded or something, he could kill the wounded and set about it. But he did not spend the time early on teaching them, and then he realized later in life that he needed to actually to be more of an active teacher rather than just an example. And he would take them out on the battlefield and show them what they have done incorrectly or how they should have done it or get them to explain to him.

But it's too late. These are middle-aged men. They already said in their ways. They already have their rivalries with each other. There's too much going on. I think his own emotional life, he's been put a lot of emotional hope into one of his grandsons and quite unfortunately for him that that grand son was the first member of the royal Family that would be killed in the battle. And it was killed in the battle, and it was gone around in that kind of stand. I'm the greatest ship in the time, but they're just crazy.

So, resulting in some of the worst acts of revenge of his whole career, because he lost his glory. Having read a fair amount about the Spartan women, I find their contributions to that warrior culture very fascinating. And perhaps the Spartan warrior culture does not exist without the backbone of the Spartan wife and daughter. What did the Mongol women bring What did the Mongol women bring to this force, this empire? What was their contribution? I think we go back to the beginning of the Upchinkertown flight. He was raised by his mother. His father was killed very early on, and the mother was cast out because she was a war captain.

She wasn't a legal wife, she was a ranged super eminent. She was a war captain. She wasn't a legal wife, who was in a range to her family. She was a war captain from, she was her father. And so she and her children were cast out to die. She raised those children. When he grew up in a household with her, there was another wife from his father who was there, a thumb up the pine, those two women. And then there happened to be another woman who might, it's really hard to identify it, so ought to just suddenly appear, but

they just call it grandmother blockchain. And I'm not sure who grandmother blockchain was, but she did have an influence on him also, and we see that. So he had three older women raising him, and he respected them throughout his life. You know, even to the end, in the last scene in which his mother appears in his life, he's already a great conqueror, and she came to argue with him about his treatment of his mother and he said, he was afraid. He was afraid.

It's right there in this history, you know, they pull no bones about it And I mean it was a great scene. She was she her camp was far away and she heard he was perhaps going to demote this brother So that also and said she she hitched her white camel to a cart and she rode all night long and she showed up at his tiff the next morning and she walked in. You can just imagine. Here he is, conquer the world, mom shows up and she is outraged. She's pissed. So these were strong, strong women. And he realized he had to depend upon, just as he had to depend upon his mother for life. And since there are very few people, can ever imagine, have heard, digging up roots to feed them.

And he had to depend upon her that he realized also that his daughters had great strength. And he depended upon them to rule many areas of his empire. So to transition to the other book of yours that I loved and that I wish someone had assigned to me in high school, I feel like it should be an assigned reading to every American in high school, Indian givers, what struck me the most about that book, to go to our point about learning from everyone, is at the end of the book, and I don't think this is a spoiler, you sort of talk about this sort of dying old native woman, and you're sort of speculated, she's kind of the last of her kind, not really been Westernized, and you speculate about

the wisdom that's dying not just in her, but in what she represents, generations, years, millions of people like her. And the stupidity and the self-destructiveness of the sort of Western conquering of the continent and those people, and what it actually deprived us of. I can compare and contrasting those ideas. I mean, obviously, as you talked about in the book, we got so many ideas from the people who are here, right down to the confederation of colonies. But there's sort of this bitter ending of it to me, which is what are all the things we could have learned that we thought we already knew or we thought we knew better, and thus we did not learn from the people who had hundreds of thousands of independent self-contained time on this

on this continent learning and discovering things and we just destroyed it. Well, you know, you presented the ideas, I think, stronger and better than I did. And for me, it was sort of, it was really, I was relating a very emotional experience, to sort of, to shadowed what you were seeing in the sense that I was there in the jungle in Bolivia. And here was this elderly lady, this old woman in her hamac, just very close to death. And I looked around me and I thought,

how could she live in this place? How did anybody live in this jungle? It is so hot, there are things calling all over the ground and up your leg and on your arm, there are things eating at you. Every step you take, you're either in mud or there... How did she live when I find it so hard? I am just amazed that she could do it.

And there was just something about, it's wanting to ask her of course, it was too late. You know, how did you do this? How did you do this? And knowing that her, she had spent most of her life with no contact to the outside world at all. She was a very small band of beauty people who had no contact with me. And it's a say brought into contact very late in her life. And so she had little experience with the idea of our sins. And I couldn't talk to her about it anyway,

but it was that feeling of just watching some unknown knowledge disappear, knowledge that I could not survive in that place for three days. I knew if they left me there alone in three days, I'd be gone. And yet she had lived there for, I have no idea how many years and she didn't either, I'm sure. But yes, there's so much knowledge. And I think our very word civilization,

etymologically coming from cities, no, that's not where knowledge comes from. Maybe books come from there and things like that. But the food we eat do not come from, maybe books comes from there and things like that. But the food we eat do not come from, does not come from cities. The clothes that we wear, those materials don't come out of the cities. You know, our life has been shaped by people on the margins of the people who were doing things that now we've forgotten how to do and where to do them. And this is in a way where the Mongols, the Chigas Han, those people, are where the tribal

group and the jungle of Amazon are. I wanted to see their place in the history of the world and their contribution to civilization of what they have done for us. I wasn't searching for this lady at the end that she appeared to me and then I realized there was so much more we could have possibly learned from these people that we did not learn. And then that was a kind of a sad moment for me too. No, it's a tragic moment. And it's a reminder, I think, of the cost of conceit or the sense of superiority, right? I remember reading Jack Davis has a history of the Gulf of Mexico.

One of the Pulitzer Prize a few years ago. It's a great book. And he describes this scene where friendship, Spanish, I forget these explorers come into the Gulf of Mexico for the first time, and they reach the entrance to the Mississippi, and they're down to their absolute last, out of water, out of food, they're dying of scurvy, et cetera. And these native people who are strapping and tall and succeeding are eating this shellfish

that they can just pick up, you know, lobsters and oysters and clams are just picking it right out of the ocean. And the explorers died instead of doing that, right? Like they looked at that and they said that's gross, or that's obviously backwards, or there's something wrong with it. And they literally died instead of learning or trying a new way of doing things, which sadly is not a kind of hubris limited only to explorers conquering new lands.

Yes. It's just the point that you made before about that. If we are not going to search for any deep information or truth, if we think we already know it all. Yes. I think that's going to, well, it's a conceit of many people in many places. But it's a problem for all of us from the world, or that we have these kinds of fears. I see it in Mongolia.

I see it here in Cambodia. I've seen it in Bolivia, in the jungles, and in the mountains, that people have this knowledge that, not even the Syrian knowledge that I want to know, but knowledge that if I was stuck in that place, I would need to know it. When I see how people can go out here and fish in Cambodia, and all the fish that they can bring in, I'm absolutely amazed. Or even in Mongolia, I remember one day, oh there was 51 below zero, 51 below zero. And it's 12 year old boy went out with his iron pick and dug a hole, I must have ended at least two feet deep into the ice, dropped the line in and call it a fish. And then, oh, oh, wow, must be a lot of fish, I could do that. Well, he had already done the hole, I have to do that,

and he had built a fire on top of the ice because it was so cold and big melted foot. And so I went there and sat down, I caught nothing, the whole day, nothing. And then I'm a 12 year old boy Made dinner for the whole family and I come home with nothing, but Well, yeah, it was cold So you began to see the kind of knowledge that people have in these places that they did not get out of the city or out of the university or out of reading our books. They have an innate, it's an innate to their culture, not even in their culture, a way of learning things. It's just amazing to me. Amazing. And again, the irony is that the native peoples were incredibly hungry and flexible and adaptable to the technologies

that the colonialists and the settlers were bringing. The horse wasn't here. I mean, the horse had been here for evolutionarily for many years and then it was bringing back. That's what thrives in the environment. But it's not like they went to, they got writing lessons, right? They figured out how to re-adapt the horse into what they're doing. And then later the rifle and iron, like they, we were the closed-minded ones. They were the ones that were adapting and changing. And obviously not all the technologies

were beneficial. Some of the things we brought were deeply harmful and disrupted old ways of doing things. But there wasn't that impediment, the same direction, going the other direction. I find the irony of that fascinating. But the native people so often save the columnist. Yes. Because now they've certainly in New England with people, most famous case in Squanto, but the native people showing the Puritans how to grow crops

and giving them food until they could do it. And I think probably something like that happened that grew in North Carolina, that there's no sign of any violence that the people probably simply could not feed themselves. They were just absorbed into the Native people. So there was an openness to helping all of those polymers, and that's one of the irony of it, you know, but you take a snake to your bosom and you're going to be good.

It's the irony and the tragedy of it, right? Yes, yes, yes. And we are on the tragic side of death. Yeah. It's our loss. It begins, our loss. They're lost immediately. Yes. But in the end, it's our loss. It begins, our loss. They're lost immediately.

But it begins, our loss. It's a whole world civilization. Who is this from? Well, the Stoics talk about the idea of the common good, that we're citizens of the world, that we're all have a role. We all are valuable. And when you think about it that way,

you know, Mark's realises what's bad for the hive is bad for the bee. There's a certain element of cutting off our nose despite our face in the closed-mindedness of it all because yeah, ultimately we suffered, they suffered. And the continent's still big enough for everyone, right? And so there is a pointlessness to all of it, I feel. Yes, it's part of the tragedy of civilization.

Yeah. And what's also weird to me is, like we tend to think of these, it's like this was happening in the world, and that was the only thing happening in the world. And in fact, a lot of this is kind of overlapping, right? Like I forget the exact beginning and end of the Mongol period, but one of the fascinating parts I took from the book as you're pointing out, like, what's happening in France? You know, France is persecuting the Jews precisely as Ganges Khan is holding these

religious debates, you know, inside his territories, but that, you know, a lot of these events happening in the Americas were not that far from or removed from the stuff that was happening in Europe. And when you go, oh, you know, this, you know, Shakespeare is writing at the same time that these colonies are being formed in the Americas, and this exchange of knowledge between the natives and the settlers is happening. It's like the greatest art of all times also being created, but they're also fighting bears in theaters in London. We like to think one is so much more advanced than the other that it happened in these distinct phases,

and that's a historical fiction. Yes, I mean, but it's a argument in Shakespeare. So today, for whatever reason, I was reading Timono of Athens, Shakespeare's work. And most people think it's just a worthless book or one of these because it doesn't have all of the artistic. So the scenes don't open correctly and the voices don't tell. But intellectually I thought it was one of the most challenging things that I ever read by him, because it's such a critique of civilization in there, in that Tim and his very rich man,

and he has given away all of his wealth to help other people. And then nobody helps him when he has nothing left. And he retreats into the countryside and he finds gold. And then of course everybody comes back to him again. But he ends up giving it to Al-Tavide until it's in order to help finance his conquest of Athens. Or there was very interesting, I could see, I felt like Shakespeare was struggling with something there that he didn't struggle with the other books. I mean, he has a lot of melodrama and he has a lot of romance and different things that are more emotional than deeply intellectual. And he was there at the beginning of capitalism, the beginning of the modern world, and he was seeing the effect that money had on people. I thought there was a very insightful thing and the critique then of the civilization,

and he didn't phrase it in terms of the tribal people, but of this retreat to the countryside and living back in a cave again? Yeah, or Montenia, you know, he has his essay on cannibals, which is about the people being discovered in the Collins, and it's obviously somewhat of offensive title, and I don't think they were actually cannibals or whatever, but he's like, well, what do these people have to teach us? What do they think that's different? You know, and that's in the 1500s.

And it's just so crazy. Again, we think about, maybe in America, because we think Native Americans, we think settling of the West, we think mid to late 1800s. We don't think the 1500s, and we don't think Europe. And it's just interesting how long this process that you detail in the book was really going.

We're not talking about a hundred years of civilizations clashing with each other. We're talking about 500 years, maybe more. Yes. Our images, I think in American society so so much of the images based upon 19th century our years of Native America. And that was the worst century of persecution and genocide. I use that word. That was the industrial revolution version of it.

Yes, it really got into just wiping them out with possible. That was the 19th century. Even in the 18th century, you know, I say it's been very dependent upon the help, help them fight the American Revolution, for example, to keep some from fighting with the English. There were all these issues that were very important for the Congress and the AP such as, but by the 19th, they were no longer rooted. Well, when I was saying, I think this is a book that should be assigned in schools.

I think one of the things, and I've read a lot about people reckoning with the history of slavery, or reckoning with the history of slavery, et cetera. Like obviously what happened was tragic, it was unjust, it was disgusting and cruel and stupid in all these different ways. But studying it and looking at it with open eyes, it's not an indictment of me as a person, right? And like I think when we talk about conceit or we talk about close mind, we go talk about closed-minded, we go,

okay, these settlers were so dumb that they didn't learn these things that they could have learned from the people who are here. Some cases they did. But it's also dumb not to study what happened and to lie to yourself about what happened. Do you know what I mean? We can take for granted,

I don't think it's controversial to go, the Soviets lost out and were foolhardy to suppress the history of the Mongols and not study it and celebrate it and learn from it. But we do a version of that ourselves by, where there's this big debate in America about what we study in schools and they don't want things to make kids uncomfortable.

It's like, it should make you uncomfortable. It doesn't mean you're a bad person, but if you don't go into the darkness like you're saying, you won't discover light. And you need, look at the tragedy and the genocide in some cases and the awfulness of what happened because there's something to learn from that too and lying to yourself about it certainly doesn't make

and it doesn't, doesn't make it not happen, it doesn't make you not better and it doesn't prevent stuff like that from happening in the future. Yes, you know, I think very few people realized that in the same week That we had the emancipation of the slaves in America by Abraham Lincoln He signed the order for the largest mass execution of Indians with a very interesting. I didn't know that so yes with the effect of New Year's, and they hung these people in Mankato, Minnesota, the Dakota people on the day after Christmas. Wow.

The same week, the same week. But the massive persecution of 40-something Indians, but he was sending a real message, you cannot revolt against United States during our time of civil war. We will kill you, and we did. And so this greatest achievement brought from one of the greatest achievements of our history was the emancipation of the slaves after so many centuries. And yet it came at the same time of this almost the beginning of the final effort to kill off all of the Native Americans. We need to see that in ourselves and we are not guilty of anything that happened before us, but we are guilty if we pass it on. Yes. We are guilty if we just live in ignorance then we begin to share that guilt. It's a very uncomfortable feeling. We don't have to atone for everything that happened in the past, but at least try to learn from it so

we don't do those things. We don't repeat those things. And I see some of the things that America did with many people and then some of the things that they have done in the wars and other places, even in recent times, some of the things that happened in Afghanistan and Iraq and before that would be a norm, or here where I live in Cambodia now. To share. And every week, every week, somebody has an arm blown off or a leg or their keel. But weapons left over from this time, this week, they dug up 1,000 pound bomb out of the river. Last week, a tractor hit some unexploded ordinance and the tractor blew up and killed

it. A week before that 12 year old boy, this is still going on today. And I may out, I think I feel it so much because of course it happened in my lifetime. And also my father was a soldier, a common soldier in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. Wow. He was a soldier. And he was, well, the time it got to Vietnam, he was only a cook. He could go love their father. He was a cook. But he was feeding people who loaded these airplanes, he feed it. And I feel that.

I mean, how can I blame him and get these are crimes against people, yes, and the end my father died from aging orange disease. It's our own weapons. You know, killed him. And they killed people here. I go into the Eastern part of Camp Boney now. There are no birds. There are no birds. Even after all these years with it, chemical spray, and it's a strange feeling, and we just kind of go on with life, and we forget about it. And no, these things that happened with native people in the 19th century, I hate to say that we still carry them on into our own water world. No, it's still there.

I gave a talk at a NATO Air Force Base. This would have been in January 2020 and they were sort of showing me the planes and showing me the stuff. And he's like, see this bomb right here? And he was like, look at this date. You know, and it said blah, blah, blah, you know, 1971. And he was like, this bomb was manufactured to drop over Vietnam.

And he's like, we're still, he's like, this is still in the arsenal. We haven't, this is a, this is almost a 50 year old bomb. And you go, wow, how big did they think this was gonna go? How much longer did they think this was going on? We still have leftover munitions. Now put aside the ones we dropped that haven't exploded, but like they still exist.

Like they're still, maybe they dropped, they should, they would have dropped some over Afghanistan or Iraq and realizing like, it's like what Faulkner said that the past is not only not dead. It's not even past. It's still with us. It's still there. And to stick your head in the sand about it and ignore it, it deprise you of knowledge. It also in some ways, it does make you complicit. It does make you, because you're allowing it to continue as opposed to facing it and studying it and learn from it. Yes.

And I'm not a pacifist. And I realize there's probably going to be wars, as long as it's going to be humans. And I'll, but still, we have to learn how to be somewhat just as we can. That should be a goal in our mind, not just to kill people, but somehow bring some justice to the situation. And I, it is sometimes, I don't know what to feel here in a place like Cambodia. What to feel about what my country did, and I still love my country.

I love my father. You know, I mean, he's not long dead, but it just doesn't fit together. It doesn't fit together, but we need to be aware of the bad that happened. My father told me. It's a very Western idea that it should fit together, that it should be clean and logical and perhaps we can learn from some that we can learn to handle the ambiguity and the uncertainty and the moral complexity that is the human experience. uncertainty and the moral complexity that is the human experience. And that's why in some ways, some of the Buddhist ideas are still ecstasy,

these begin to give us some notion, not that we're going to have a perfect world, what, how to try to live in this world, if it is, is the best way that we can. And I think that the way should be our goal, not the medical, the perfect world, it's not just aid for something that's not possible, but to try to do the best that we can, the world that we're in. That's perfectly said, and the perfect place to stop. Thank you, seriously, so much.

I'm a huge fan of your work. I sell both your books in my bookstore and they've influenced me, they've shaped my writing and in live and wide in my perspective and I appreciate it so much. Well, I wish I could be as productive as you are, right? I am just amazed at what you have produced. But I thank you.

I enjoyed talking with you, and I wish you all success with encouraging people to read and encouraging people to think and to write. Thank you so much. Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it.

And I'll see you next episode. Hey, prime members, you can listen to the daily stoic early and ad free on Amazon music. Download the Amazon music app today, or You can listen to the Daily Stoic early and add free on Amazon Music, download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and add free with Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts.