The Daily Stoic - Sam Gwynne On Progress, War, And Zeppelins

Episode Date: June 24, 2023

Ryan speaks with Sam Gwynne about his new book His Majesty’s Airship: The Life and Tragic Death of the World's Largest Flying Machine, the triumph of hope over experience, why progress is based in irrationality, the fascinating history of the zeppelin, and more.Sam Gwynne is a writer, journalist, and historian. After earning a bachelor’s degree in history from Princeton University and a master’s degree in writing from Johns Hopkins University, Sam worked for Time magazine as a correspondent, bureau chief, and senior editor. His journalism has appeared in the New York Times, Harper's, Los Angeles Times, Outside Magazine, Dallas Morning News, California Magazine, and the Wall Street Journal. He has written seven non-fiction books, including the New York Times Bestsellers Empire of the Summer Moon and Rebel Yell, the former of which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in the General Nonfiction category. Sam’s work can be found on his website scgwynne.com and on Twitter @scgwynne.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee 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 Stoke podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoke. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stokes. Something to help you live up to those four Stoke 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. 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. Hey it's Ryan Holiday welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoke Podcast. I've raved about 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. So millions of copies for a reason. And it's by a person. I like quite a bit Sam Gwyn, 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've got busy with kids and writing, and I haven't been. So 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 a 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 the absolutely fascinating and some ways absurd book as we talk about in today's interview. I've read a ton of Sam stuff. Actually, while I was here, I had him sign a copy of his book, The Perfect Pass, American Genius in the Reinvention of American Football, which is fascinating book. I had him sign a copy of it for Buzz Williams, the coach, the passable coach at Texas A&M, who's stopping by the store. Just a fascinating book. I had him sign a copy of it for Buzz Williams, the coach, the basketball coach at Texas A&M, who's 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 Him 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 podcast and think you're really gonna like this interview you can go to SCGwin.com you can follow him on Twitter SCGwin and Enjoy this interview with the one and only Sam Quinn and enjoy this interview with the one and only Sam Quinn. Life can get you down. I'm no stranger to that. When I find things are piling up, I'm struggling to deal with something. Obviously, I use my journal, obviously, at Tournestosism, but I also turn to my therapist, which I've had for a long time, and has helped me through a bunch of stuff. And because I'm so busy and I live out in the country, I do therapy

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get 80 bucks off your first month and show your support for the day stoke. That's ToxPace.com slash stoic. It's funny. I talked to lots of people and a good chunk of those people haven't been readers for a long time. They've just gotten back into it. And I always love hearing that and they tell me how they fall in love with reading. They're reading more than ever. And I go, let me guess, you listen audio books, don't you? And it's true. And almost invariably, they listen to them on Audible. And that's because Audible offers an incredible selection of audio books across every genre from bestsellers and new releases to celebrity memoirs, and of course, ancient philosophy, all my books are available on audio, read by me for the most part.

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A text daily stoke to 500-500. That's audible.com slash daily stoke. A text daily stoke to 500-500. What 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. Like, completely insane.

Yeah, every part of the Zeppelin slash, what the airships is what they're called. Well, rigid airships is what they're called well rigid airships I mean just every part of it is delusional and insane and contrary to any basic safety per caution like just that a human being would get in one of these things is deranged is is not amazing so in some point you I realize that I'm I mean I'm normally writing a book about, or Lord Thompson, or one of one of the imperialer ships

scheme and everything, but what I'm really writing a book about is human folly on an absolutely enormous scale. And at some point in the middle, I, that wasn't what I thought going in, but somewhere in the middle I go, oh, I think that's what I'm doing. The encapsulation of the folly, to me me is in a single sentence in the book when you talk about the Asbestos lined smoking lounge inside R101

That's you know That what they were gonna do is they were gonna put all this stuff up in there You know and they and this is the first airship where they all put it inside They're gonna 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 smoking,

he was in there having a butt and having a drink in the smoking lounge. The S-bestus actually protected him from the explosion. 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. So it's not any stronger than like a sausage you would get from smitties or something. It's sausage casings. Yeah.

So a little background. So what I'm running about here are rigid airships. It's just 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 could 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? The problem is you could see the earth from above a ground and not be on a mountain for the first time in human history. Forever, yeah. And I mean, unless you were bird, I guess. But you, 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, an original 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 dirige, and therefore something that is steerable is dirige,

obli, right? Excuse my French accent, but dirigeable. So that's where it comes from. And then in 1900, Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin 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, and so you could lift a lot of weight. And in his case, the reason to do that was to carry bomb, 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. They in the the airship that I'm writing about were they actually were locomotive diesels. They were adapted and the reason they did just a train car is just attached to the back. They were adapted and the reason they did train cars just attached to the back or a train a train engine Well, it was 650 horse diesel engine the reason they use them was because the airship was gonna go to India and go through the tropics and the the belief was that you know gasoline fumes were were flammable and had a had a Relatively low flashpoint I guess guess, but diesel does not. And so that was the,

so 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 and testing. So it was a weird combination of, 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 in with the, where ship that I'm writing about, R101. Think of a cheese wheel, 10 stories high. Literally 10 stories high. Made out of Catalan Tessons backed by a light film of cotton. And the ship had 17 of these stacked boudre 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, a hundred tons. That was the idea, you know, if you take just a little 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, whatever multi-story gas bags together you can start to lift a lot of weight. Yeah. And the reason I 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. Like most of them, not every single one of the balloons went down. Most 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.

Like over the development period of the rigid airships, like they all end in disaster. For like there's one smaller one, maybe, there's like the graph Zeppelin you have that can fly. There's really smaller one, maybe. There's like the graph Zeppelin, you have the conflite. There's really only two that were successful. Out of the ridges you're talking, maybe I don't know, 175 total that were built. And it was a bad idea. It was a bad idea from the start.

And so that's not my book, it's about a bad idea. And why it lived for 40 years. But when von Zeppelin first made these things, his idea was to they were weapons. They were gonna bomb Europe. And in World War One, 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, 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 the Zeppelons and they flew against seven European cities, mostly against England and London, and they bombed them.

People think the first bombing of London was World War II, but it was Zeppelons and World War. But these things were phenomenally vulnerable. I mean, if you a, 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 going fast.

They're going 60 miles an hour. And you hear their 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 One 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 for the pilots' friend of you, because

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, 17, 18, 20,000, even 26,000 feet to get away from the British. And this went on, but they lost invariably. And what would happen is you'd, 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 German, 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, is you had the choice jump or burn. That 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 not great at it because he's six, but I was just thinking like, he could probably hit a 500 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 if you could sink the Titanic with one bullet from very far away. And it's just, it can't turn around. I mean, it's, it was an amazing moment in warfare. And it demonstrated how, but what a demonstrated how bad ideas uplands 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 winter time. 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, their 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 biplanes going up to try to pursue this, as you say, these 650, 700 foot long zeppelons

up there. And it was this amazing piece of warfare. And it went on for the most of World War One. And almost, I mean, the Zeppelin's, 70% of them were lost in combat to fire. And I mean, it just 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. And then people were like, but what if, 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 One, where the German zeppelants 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. But the British say, 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 invest in the world, the R38, 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 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 sort of reverse engineer it or figure out how they did it. But of course by the time they got their airship, there were years behind

the Germans who were now onto 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 R34. And these are really boring names, you know, rigid, R for rigid, 34. And they were said they're going, okay, we got this 600 and whatever foot airship and there's no war anymore.

We got a great pilot named Herbert Scott. And they said, so let's fly it across the Atlantic. They said, which I had no business doing. This thing had no, it was, it was meant to be a height climb, remaining something that could climb away from the German fighter, other, or the English fighter planes, but it wasn't built to go across an ocean. They take it across the ocean. They've got so many near accidents that's ridiculous, but they fly it across the ocean. And you know, in 1919, it was the first east-west crossing, east-west is the hard way, right? Going against the wind, west-west east, which is what Lindberg did eight years later, or eight years in advance of Lindberg. 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. You don't remember, people 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. Yeah. But anyway, so the point is a British airship across the Atlantic twice in 1919. Eight years before the Olympics. 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, sort of hope springs eternal. Yeah. Even in the face of every evidence that the thing isn't going to work. Well, you have a Latin expression. I think you said it's the model of the RAF, something about what was it? Ad Astra per Ardua. Yeah, basically through adversity to the disorders. 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 and irrational person adapts the world to themselves. And so like, irrational person isn't getting into the X-1. Yeah. Chuck Yeager did. Yes. Also, it's getting on the right's biplane, which is what's insane. So it's like, it's this weird thing where it selects the industry of pioneering and ground bringing.

You're inherently irrational people that ignore all the reasons you shouldn't do it. Right. 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 it 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. You could look at the 40 years of the rigid airship from Count von Zeppel and the introduction essentially to just be on 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, and it was writing from the 50s or something, saying, you know, nowadays a captain who chooses not to fly into a storm is kind of padded on the head, good, good, you didn't take a risk, you didn't endanger whatever. But 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. And I think you put it really well, though, that's it is you 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, but because they're going to, they prove 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. And barking on a 680 page biography of Stonewall Jackson, without having any civil war background is insane. I now know. And it's my wife said, if he had lived to Gettysburg, we'd be divorced now. But he didn't. So I didn't have to do

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 coming seriously. Do a book about some modern politician. Your other civil war book, the Himalayan Republic, is interesting to me because you look at Grant. What 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 and basically any domain, but it's also what makes you get in a 700 foot long hydrogen fuel balloon. It's very good. It's 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.

I mean, everything that happened to him in his life was a failure and he failed in business again and 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 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, and 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 break. Like this is happening not that far from, say,

the invention of atomic weapons. Or, you know what, like this wasn't happening in the 1800s and they had some, like, totally primitive sense or whatever. This 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 about. So the book is about, really it's about this this great airship R101, which was at the time that it flew the largest object that it 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. They had this, it came out of World War I with this giant empire. I mean, 25% of the world's land mass, 420 million people, but 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 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. It'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 Airships scheme. And this goes right to the heart of what you were saying,

which is when it was hatched in 1924 and 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, um, uh, uh, and not only was it going to connect the the British, this new gigantic British empire, but the thing that was going to connect it would be British technology. Yeah. 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 what were the British advantages. They were the kings of the Greece 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. The British technology in the air now, different type, no longer the grease piston and the giant gun. But, uh, and who is the main guy, Lord Thompson? Lord Thompson, yes, it was his vision.

Oh, it struck me too, that there's like, you know, they say there's, there's always the reason and then there's the real reason. There's like behind every hair brain scheme, there is some profoundly human reason for doing it. Like I. I was reading about Elon Musk buying Twitter and there's this moment where his ex-wife texts him and she's like, they banned the Babylon B, this shitty conservative satire account. And I'm like, did he spend $44 billion to impress his ex-wife?

Press 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. 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 is this, the real reason is so pedestrian at the end of the day. There were, so what happens the book? I mean, I'm not spoiling anything because I say it in the cover. The ship has a horrendous crash that looked just like the Hindenburg, but you know, the

reason it happens is because it's driven, it's pushed by Lord Thompson to take off on October 4th, 1930, 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 gonna 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.

He's gonna step off this airship, trailing clouds of glory, walk into the imperial conference, which was then all the grandees of the British Empire, in London. He's kind of walking to 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. Suddenly, he's closer to her. 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. 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. And there's this guy Gandhi, who's causing problems for you. Gandhi, the Indian National Congress, all in the ascendant. And we all know in 17 years, India is going to be gone for the British Empire. But so all these reasons, he, his history with Martha Bibesco was he meets her when he's a lowly military attaché

in a book arrest during the war. Jesus glamorous princess. Again, the toast of Paris, Marcel Proust, is writing poems to her. He's this lowly guy in a military lifeer. To some extent, the next X number of years are him trying to impress her. With how cool he is or how powerful is, he's drawn to power and wealth and money. He hasn't had any of those things,

but he's about to get them all. He got these cabinet job as secretary of state for air, wonderful Shakespearean title. And now he's going to get the vice-wraith ship of Indy, the 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 Martin Pabesco. So you have this kind of tiered reasoning.

It's not a Gatsby-Yes. It's a green light. Yes, it's like Gatsby gets in a balloon and tries to do the impossible and then ends up dead in swimming pool. It's true. It's true because, yeah, Thompson was doing it himself, so he never made it. [♪ Music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, I'm Matt Bellasai. And I'm Sydney Battle. And we're the host of Wonder E's new podcast, Dis and Tell, where each episode we unpack a different iconic celebrity feud from the build up, why it happened, and the repercussions.

What does our obsession with these feud say about us? The first season is packed with some pretty messy pop culture drama, but none is drawn out in personal as Brittany and Jamie Lynn Spears. When Brittany's fans form the free Brittany movement dedicated to fraying her from the infamous conservatorship, Jamie Lynn's lack of public support, it angered some fans, a lot of them. It's a story of two young women who had their choices taken away from them by their controlling parents, but took their anger out on each other.

And it's about a movement to save a superstar, which sets its sights upon anyone who failed to fight for Brittany. Follow Dissentel wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or The Wondry app. Raising kids can be one of the greatest rewards of a parent's life. But come on, someday, 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.

Hosted by myself, Megan Galey, Chris Garcia, and Kurt Brown-Oller, we will be your resident not-so-expert experts. Each week we'll share a parenting story that'll have you laughing, nodding, and thinking. Oh yeah, I have absolutely been there. We'll talk about what went right and wrong.

What would we do differently? And the next time you step on yet another stray Lego in the middle of the night, you'll feel less alone. 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. So, is the, I heard once that the, the, the point on the top of the Empire State Building was supposed to be a landing dock for Zeppelin's. Is that true?

It was there, the Chrysler World. One of them, right? That's why they had those points. Because you mentioned the land. It's true. It's true. Yeah, I think there was an idea that they could do that. I don't think that, boy, 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 mask of, let's say, 200 feet, and the airshipship could dock at the mast and then there'd be a stairway to come down And I think that's what the Empire State Building had because it's an absurd idea You don't even think about it, but yeah, you can't land a Fabric ship Go in 60 miles like it's not like an airplane that is Then you probably have the brakes like you the only way you can land a the breaks. Like 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. Okay, now let's take a 50 mile in our 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 sail. Yeah. Okay, now think six acres, 50 miles in our 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, yeah. If you're if you're being sort of smashed around the landscape and smashed into your hanger and into the mast and all that stuff. So these guys couldn't go down. And I mean, theoretically, any way 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. This was a, the Americans figured out helium airships. And the reason they figured the amount is because they had helium. And they wouldn't give it to the Germans. The helium was all in like, emeraldo. And I always thought it would be funny to like do a skit on what people sounded like down in a helium mind. You know 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. They built these two huge airships, one of which was called the Akron. And the Akron, Helium Felt, so they thought, hey, can't blow up. Gee, this is great. You know, this thing's gonna be safe. But it has the problem.

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 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 at, I mean, this is real. So 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. Eventually they caught in a down draft 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, you know, vulnerable to win, 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 it's this boy or just, but some of the people who died in R01 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. It was very similar. Both giant hydrogen-filled airships. Yeah. So, we don't learn. So, yes.

But I think the point you bring up is really good. And I, you know, it is the process of technology and the process of invention. Yeah. It's 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 gonna be great. Right. I mean, it's really important, it's an important way that humans evolve and particularly technology. So.

But I mean, one of them is not made of bed sheets. That's true. You know what I mean? Like the, the, the, the, the, 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 on another boat. It's different than, you know, the, the other thing that struck me about the book was, it's speaking of, you know, the Empire State, having the landing doctor, whatever. There's something similar to 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 or tragic that we just don't want to talk about it and 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 that I've been.

That's all anybody knows. Yeah, it has been it's been overwritten Expunge whatever the word is is the I mean Who's ever heard of the R101 or R34, the one that crossed the rules? There's not a rule. Like, whoever knew that, you know, the dozens and dozens of giant zeppelants went down and Hindenburg like fireballs and rule or one. Nobody knows these things.

And it's interesting that it can sort of all be overwritten in that way. The Hindenburg you bring up, which is interesting, is that is everyone's marker because everyone knows what that is. And it's interesting the reason they know is because when it happened at Lakehurst, New Jersey, in 1937, seven years after R101 went down.

When it happened, at that time, there was a guy with a film company called Pate who was shooting Silent film and that's the thing that the world saw. Yeah that 30 seconds And it's the most incredible it was the most incredible thing anyone had ever seen It played in movie theaters all over the world silently because there was no sound with it at all Meanwhile, there's a guy from the AP over somewhere else who's going, oh, the humanity, oh no, it's going like 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, it was the only time anybody ever really saw this happen. So R101 goes up like this. As I say, dozens, I don't know more than 70 in World War One go up this way. A whole bunch before World War One go up this way. A whole bunch before World War One go up this way. The American ships, the first, well, R38, the first American ship and then Roma, the Italian ship, the Americans, all go up these giant hydrants. 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 good year blimp or the Fuji blimp or something They are blamps though. They're balloons. Yeah, you pump them up full of gas and they they may have an rigid keel on the bottom, but they don't, they're not that big. They're a couple hundred feet long and they don't actually, the new generation of them, the air landers, so they're going to take people to the North Pole for $500,000, which I don't think I'm getting on that place. Yeah. Anyway, allegedly now they need to learn some lessons.

These things can take off with Bernoulli's principle and they have surface area which isn't as vulnerable to wind but you have to get an extra 500,000. Go to the corner. Yeah, after reading your book, I'm not going anywhere near a blimp of any kind. Yeah, 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 just a history of a bad idea basically, but you never would have known. At the moment that the British launched their Imperial Airships scheme, all systems go.

Everything was forgotten. And then also part of the technological advances that this time we're gonna get it right. We're gonna make this thing bloody and vulnerable. In the same way that I think two decades before was the Titanic, they kind of thought it was indestructible too. 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 and its superstructure. They just became convinced that it was, I mean, otherwise they'd 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, your house is filled with hydrogen, so smoke a lot. And then he had another said, he said, he said it was in 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, I write Thompson was in here a couple weeks ago and we're talking about Walter Lorde'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. I mean, yes, it's unsinkable for ordinary things. 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're talking about in the book, the main guy is also probably drunk.

Yeah. Herbert Scott. Herbert Scott, the hero of our 34 was that great British airship that crossed the Atlantic, the Zeppelin knockoff. That was Herbert Scott, the most glorious pilot of his day. I mean, he was an airship pilot, but not an airplane pilot, but yeah, Herbiska was drunk when she left,

but anyway, the whole thing is kind of a tale of folly, but it's very earnest folly, and they're trying very, very hard. Yes. And as you said, there were, 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? You know, you're going to need lifeboats for everyone? You go, I don't know what moment, where you get to that point and you go, well, you know, it's right. You go, I don't know what moment, you know, where you get to that point and you go, well, you know, I do want to do. What do you think part of the reason we were talking about the wrist tolerance so that you were saying like, and this time, people do 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 to the, it's vivid to the people who can read or who, you know, but 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 of years later, we're starting to go, Hey, let's make sure pilots aren't drunk before they fly us or, you know, these are basic safety precautions that before we read their afraid to ask or too dumb to consider. 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 to be widely known after that forces people to just operate on a different level of professional competence. Yeah, because if you would, I mean, if you had seen all of the, I can't even say 70 or whatever ships that went up in hydrogen fireballs. Yeah. And this is pre-war, peacetime, post-war, including the Ezeklian 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, that the immediacy of watching the Hindenburg is seeing what Hydrogen does. And one of the things that was disturbing about the Hindenburg, which was the Germans,

after were just insisted that they had done everything right, absolutely 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. And that was a realm of possibility that it could go, that like, you know, it's insane.

So when you do a book like this, I'd be curious, of possibility that it could go that like, you know, it's insane. So when you do a book like this, I'd be curious, like, 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? Empire. Yeah. In some ways, the, in some ways, there's there's a there is a parallel in the structure of this book

and empire. So one of the things that I with Empire, the summer moon, decided to do, which actually makes the book work. And what I do is I alternate chapters. So there's one chapter, which is where 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 corn flour, 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 command cheese.

And 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, alternate. And then suddenly it's Kwana and the tracks just run together. I went, oh, because in the person of Kwana, the entire back story, and the, 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. But when I got there, I thought, oh, okay, well, then that's, that's what I've done. So 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, you know, 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, and we're on the airship, which the reader knows he's on the Lucitania. We're on the Lucitania and a chapter about that and then a chapter about Zeppelin's, and then chapter about the development of the British airship system, and World War I and all that things.

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 gonna go down, and we just don't know when or how. And so in that sense, I guess, though, that structure is somewhat parallel.

I just mean like when you have a big hit and I've had it a couple times, you have a big hit, it can fuck with your expectations for what all your subsequent work. Oh, you mean in terms of commercial sales? Yeah, or just reception or like totally messes with that. Yeah, yeah, how do you think about that? Wait, you can't, so I have some friends who, you know, they're, they're, they're, they're obsessed, they're obsessed with their own numbers. And nowadays, of course, we can all go find our numbers.

And they check it out. Twice a day. Yeah. Um, and I don't do that because I don't think that, so if you have a book like, um, Empire of the Summer Room, which has sold a lot of copies. You can start thinking, well, I'm a genius. This is the base line. 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, well, okay, then if perfect pass doesn't sell that well, then Gwyn is an idiot and is written a bad book.

Well, perfect pass is my favorite book. Yeah. But if I were to, because it's my most original book, but you know what I mean? You can't, if you set yourself up for being a genius because you sold a lot of, you know, whatever your first book on SoSys and was, you're setting yourself up for a fall and you cannot believe that because there's, it's, you know, the more, more and the more I read about I just read a biography of Kurt Vonnegut and but it's You can be just so rocked and shattered by all of that if you let that happen and it It's it's inevitable that you're gonna try to think that way I guess

I mean you're gonna that you're to try to associate your own glory and, you know, wonderfulness with straight sales or something. And that, and that, and you'll look back at 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 also 2000 copies each. Okay, so if we're gonna say, well, Kurt Von, if you set up that standard, then he's not a very good writer, is he? Yeah, but I mean, you know.

No, the book I am most proud of, I think is my best book, is the worst selling of all my books. And like, but 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, the base, 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 do look at some numbers like print runs, you know, like the print run here,

I was happy with, I mean, but you know, you want to know that you're publisher somehow thinks it's gonna sell, but it's, you know, it's, yeah, it's a strange game, and it's not one that, as a life, as a career long journalist, I mean, most of my life was as a journalist. You're not really playing that game as a journalist.

Pre-age views. Right. So, well, now, now it is. I guess that's true. 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 bird cage and we move on. And maybe it was the greatest thing in the world and maybe it wasn't.

And 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, right now, 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, you know, she was covering up really boring subjects like school boards or something, but she was rated, she was, 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 grew up in that world. Yeah, there's a story about some, some blogger was interviewing Robert Carro and they were describing, there's this thing, I don't know if people still use his best called chart beat. And it would show you not just like how many views your story's got, but it would show you how many people were reading it at any moment,

and it was actually like a spedometer. Like it would show, like if it was going well. Like so how many, there's a thousand people reading it right now, they're quitting, you know, it showed each real time, and Robert Carrows just like a guest. 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 over a lot. Like, there is, but it's also kind of fundamentally irrational, right? Like, what that is relying on is your gut. Like, I know what's good. Forget what the market says.

I got a lot of, 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. There would never be groundbreaking work if people only looked at what the evidence told them was good. Yeah, it's very hard.

And there's, I'll give you an example. I often give this example of getting the, you know, and I think a lot of writers, and maybe you too, I don't know, have experienced this, this is part of what I do. And so, this is years ago, I have a biography of Stonewall Jackson, I would call it Rebel Yale, this is years ago, I have a biography of Stonewall Jackson, I call it Rebel Yell, which is followed, which is also a best seller up the New York Times for nine or nine or ten weeks best seller.

So I've got two best sellers 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 at nothing at this point. I was at nothing in Texas before Empire, but I sold a bunch and it's about Texas, so Texans like it. I'm in this, I gotta think, I gotta 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. 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 a 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, there's this like 28-year-old store manager who goes he goes well, okay, great. Yeah yeah I so we got a desk for you there and yeah look what we here's a pen you want a pen you need a pen okay get it well so you just go sit at the desk and no one I bet I sat there and I sat there and I sat there and a little minute a lot of time went by yeah no one came finally finally a lady comes over and she says she starts talking to me.

She goes, well, I love your book. I go, well, thank you. Because it really actually important to me at this point that someone like the book, she goes, thank you, we talk for what I talk. And 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. And I said, well, you know, vampires aren't really been a big focus of my historical work so far. But okay, so that is, and that is only two years removed from me in the green room sitting with a agreement with Carl Rove at the whatever that big church the method of church is just to 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 Carl has drawn You know six or seven hundred people. I'm going wow this incredible

And I go back into the green room. I come out because I'm following him speaking. It's full. Yeah. And I did say hello Cleveland too, but it's full. And there's people out in front. Okay, so which Sam Gwynn? Yeah.

You know, 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 the right moment, and I came out and said, you have got to be kidding me. Okay, which Sam Gwynne 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. I did an event like that at Barnes & Noble in Hawaii. And it was the same thing. They made it. How did you get 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 they're going to be like a tax write off or something. It was like I was supposed to go to Hawaii and so they were like, well, do you wanna do this event while you're there?

And they're gonna get 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 like a poster in the manager, and one person came. And you have to sit there. You have this sense that your work is being reached,

is reaching people, you have some sense that you're good at what you're doing. And 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 in the end.

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 at some, 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 can

leading the target, faking it to you make it. But if you fake it to you make it too much, your Elizabeth Holmes or something, right? Like, the, the, you're, you're really playing with fire or hydrogen or something there. It's, it's, it's, it's the ego, the pomposity of like the world wants to hear what I have to say is, 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

so apparently no one cares. Yes. So it's like, it's 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. And, you know, I was in fact, I was talking to one I won't name her, she's 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, so do you draw crowds everywhere? And she says, no, sometimes I have two or three people.

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, they're, she's, I mean, we all would know this name. She's a big deal. And so she had adjusted her ego. Yes. I 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-tight and green grass and glory for her, you know. Well, maybe it's, I'll obviously have a book about this, but the difference between ego and confidence, the confidence of going whether 10 people come or 1,000 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 bookstores fault, sometimes it's a publisher's fault.

I just had one in 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 and Noble did this special edition of the book. Like, I'm just supporting the account. Like, I promised them I 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? Press and media attention being a great example. Like, my bestselling 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 when I write about media stuff, I get lots of media attention. I might say, yeah, yeah, right. 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 one of my favorite movies almost irrationally is La La land. Partly because it was filmed all around where I used to live in part in downtown. Well, Griffith Park. I just took my kids on Angel's flight.

Oh, yeah. Okay. I love it. Yeah. It's 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 move. But one of the big song and dance numbers is called someone in the crowd. And the point of it was that in you're in Hollywood, everybody's trying to make it right. And 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. It's a somewhere, and the point of this song, this long big song and dance is that you don't know who that's gonna be and you don't know when it's gonna 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 plays, who won the Academy Award for the role, has a one woman show in Hollywood and six people come to it. And she's crushed. And 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. So she leaves. She should go home. And so sometime in the next week, whatever the phone rings and there was one casting agent of the six. Who's like the big casting agent? Who thought it was the greatest show she'd ever seen and immediately

cast 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. I mean, I was at a bookstore once where there was like 10 people there. and there were three people that I met that actually changed things in my life. I mean, I'm not saying they made my more books, but anyway, 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. And I think a lot of people, what's funny, right? It's like, you sell 10,000 books in a week, you hit a bestseller list, you sell a thousand books a week for a whole year, you will never touch a best seller 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. And so we often overestimate or over index being the concentration of success and reach when really it's a, you know, empire of the summer moon that it continues that you want to get over the hump and become perennial in classic. You want to be on the nonfiction classics section or whatever or the dads and grads. 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 a femoralian fate. Yeah, very much so. Yeah. Speaking of great books, I was, I just read Farron Vox, Command cheese. Oh, you did?

I read the whole thing because I read Empire of the Summer of Moon and I read Loan Star and I like his Korean War book too, which is also incredible. Farron back. Yes. Good.

Texas writer, St. Antonio writer. But that's another, like the, not Pomposite, but the confidence to make the sweeping statements that he makes about generations of people or civilizations, that is the double edge sort of doing any sort of creative work or any kind of where it's like, I've probably is so easy to get your head stuck up your own ass.

Yeah, well, Farron back was, yeah, I mean, he was, did you meet him? No, I never did. And I came close at one point. In fact, 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. He was older.

But, yeah, he was, so from my point of view, he was, I think that book was a 1974 book or something. So I mean, I look at that when I was doing my book, I thought, well, okay, that's so much time has passed here. I can legitimately undertake the same topic as T.R. Fair and Back. But yeah, he's, there aren't very many of him. Yeah. If you look at historians, you know, the kind of the dobi, I don't know, I mean, whoever those, whatever,

Webb, the dobi, you know, Farron Beck, there aren't that many of them around the mid century. Yeah, the hard part for me in Command Sheez was, the, the Loan Star book is so good. His reconstruction is so bad, so preposterously of its time, lost cause. It makes it hard for me to read these subsequent stuff and not go, like how do I separate this from that?

Yeah, no, it's 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 fair and back? Just I mean, for Ant like to be good at that. He's good at that. And he also, there are all pages and when I should 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.

That'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. So, 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 the theatrics of it in a way. Like how do you make a 700 page book about Texas interesting? You it can't be here's a bunch of facts about Texas. You have to understand the essence of what's happening at a sort of like a through-citadian 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, and you never, and you just never get the step back.

Yes. It's just a subscessive, you know, and then this happened and then that happened and then they went here and then this and this battle was one and then you just go on the Civil War, a lot of Civil War books are like that and you just go, there's never,

okay, step back now and tell me what that meant. Yes. What did, you know, second the Civil War, 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. What did, you know, Second Manassas, or Second Bull Run mean, as opposed to Justa, what was it that anyone here and then so and so, and then the ninth to the Rejordi attack, and then I mean, I just on and on forever. 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 craziness. And I see a lot of it. Your civil war book is so good for the same reason that Bruce Catton is so good

and this howled 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, that's what one of those books does. And you compare that. What's interesting about the Civil Wars is that you have a sort of, 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 hear someone doing it well. And when you, when you see it, then what you're like, yeah, this is just operating at another level. That's why Canton was the breakthrough. Yeah, I mean, in the two books, I would say, stillness at Appomattox and the Salah Graham those two books Stillness one the Pulitzer in 1954. I mean it was He was the first one to really do that well Douglas South Hall Freeman was good and all but he didn't

Books were dense and they were heavy and they were a bit academic but Catten just gave gives you the the meaning of he's good on detail too, but he's gonna step back and you're gonna see what the army of the Potomac really looked like or whatever it was. I mean, he's just brilliant. And he's got to be the greatest tap or do it, right? And he's the reason, yeah, and I think, whenever you hear someone, you always hear someone say,

that, oh, I love the Civil War, some of my dad loves the Civil Wars, the reason we'll ultimately go back to Bruce Catton. Yes. I 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, he was relatively even handed. But, well, I think it's because he's a Midwesterner. And then he's just, he understands the South without sympathizing with the fundamental argument or something, and 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.

So that's right, Ken was Michigan, right? Yeah, Michigan. I just read his book about his boyhood in Michigan that was really good. I 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. I think what I've read is there was the Mr. Lincoln's War trilogy. Then there was the stillness and how I think those are like the five of his books that I've read So every time I'm like I really cannot read another book about the Civil War and then I'll read one of his I'll be like, oh, I can there's there's something there's something more here. He's just incredible Anything else we should talk about you got anything? No, I mentioned one more so that people ask me where the book came from and what what's You got anything? No, I mentioned one more. So people asked me where the book came from and what's this is another writer who does this brilliantly.

So you ever heard of James Morris? No. Okay, James Morris became Jan Morris, who's one of the first, I think, trans historians. Big name trans. Recently or like how long? No, let's see. So I would 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 can maybe born in 1910 or 1920. Maybe born in 1920 or something. Anyway, 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. If you want, I mean, if you were to pick up, it, it, it, it talk about the big picture,

talk about the genius 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 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 the, I mean, it just, it was brilliant. I read it. And I said, you know, I do what, you know, train historians do. I googled it in Amazon, that right away, you know, to sleep like how many books have come out about R101? Because Boris is writing 40 years ago or something. And really

almost nothing. I mean, something in 82, but it was not written by, 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 gonna read that. Try just pick up a little bit, or anybody listening to this pick up, just a little bit of farewell to Trombas. 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. Catten is one. Morris is another. Anyway, go ahead. But that's your superpower, right? Because Empire of the Summer Moon is basically the Quanteparker story from Command cheese. The 1865 book, Himalayan Republic is basically a similar arc as one of the Bruce Catten books. And then you've, you're reading the arc of

stillness and epimatics. Yes, I accept that he sticks with Army, 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 like, you're writing is like, you know, when you're like on a map on your phone and you go, where is it? Yeah, you're zooming, you're zooming in. That's a whole book right there. And I'm going to put a bunch of color on that. You know what's another incredible book I just read? Have you read Anne Rose's book on Pontius Pilate? No. Another thing where you're like, she just goes, is there enough research to justify

the book? She starts the book and she's like, there's basically like one tablet, there's the Bible, which is she's not treating as a historical source necessarily. And then there's like an aqueduct and like a couple letters, there's like tacitist 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 of those. But it's so, it's, 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. I have to like come back to it. Even with the credible scarcity of research of primary stuff on.

Have you read Cleopatra's daughter? No. Some new, some book that come out. It was the same thing. 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? Well, just like, okay, obviously I write about this book. So, Seneca, I'm thinking about all that. It never occurred to me that so so Sennaq writes his letter. Sennaq has letters to Lucilius, right?

Lucilius, his friend, has the same job as Pontius Pilate, just in a different province, right? Sennaq's brother, Gio, also judges a case like Pontius Pilate, not a Jesus, on St. Paul. And he's like, oh, yeah, so we don't know what's in the actual that you can look at. But yes, we can know so much about. And you're just, 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, you know, three days? And that there's a genius to that that's like, you just, wow. Is the title Punches pilot? I think think so or it might just be called Pontius But she's the she writes the obituaries for the economist

Cool, that's great. Well, this was incredible. Thank you, right of course 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 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.