Latest / Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar / 10/12/26: OpenAI $20 Billion Short Of Promises, Historian On Collapse Of Weimar Germany

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10/12/26: OpenAI $20 Billion Short Of Promises, Historian On Collapse Of Weimar Germany · Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar

• 0:06
  Speaker 1: So this morning, we've got a new warning that the
• 0:09
  Speaker 1: AI bubble may end up being a bust. Let's put
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: this up on the screen. This is a write up
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: from Bloomberg. The headline here is Jeffrey's Chris Wood sees
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: massive capital destruction in AI. They write the most likely
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: long term outcome of the AI boom will be massive
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: capital destruction in the U.S. with market share going to
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: cheaper open source Chinese models, according to Jeffrey's Financial Group, Inc. Initially,
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: the focus was on the cheapness of China models and
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: the related commoditization threat facing large language models. Chris Wood,
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: global head of equity strategy, wrote in a report on Friday.
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: But now there is also a growing realization that China
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: has become a technological peer to the U.S.
• 0:49
  Speaker 2: In AI.
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: So, Sagar, this has been, you know, in recent times,
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: this has been one of the big financial fears about
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: the AI development, which really has like eaten the entire U.S.
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: economy alive. If you look at just construction build, what's
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: getting built in America and what's not, it's all like
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: data centers. If you look at the stock market and
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: how much of it is built on the AI boom,
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: we really have placed just a massive bet on these
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: frontier AI model companies really paying off. And while they
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: continue to lead development, they continue to sort of set
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: the pace of technological change, there's been this question now
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: of whether the Chinese models aren't good enough And much,
• 1:30
  Speaker 1: much cheaper and open source and more flexible, by the way,
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: because you can, since they're open source, you can sort
• 1:36
  Speaker 1: of adapt them to your own needs. They don't have
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: the same sort of filters and safety mechanisms in place
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: as the, as Anthropic and OpenAI's models do. whether they
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: don't effectively undercut the business model of those leading frontier companies.
• 1:51
  Speaker 1: So that's what they're sounding the alarm about here. And
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: then they also say, and by the way, the Chinese
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: company's models are also really good. You may be pushing
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: the bleeding edge of the frontier, but they also have
• 2:01
  Speaker 1: products that are fairly comparable to what you're up to
• 2:04
  Speaker 1: here as well.
• 2:05
  Speaker 2: Exactly.
• 2:05
  Speaker 3: And I think one of the things we've always tried
• 2:07
  Speaker 3: to emphasize here on the show is technology does not
• 2:11
  Speaker 3: equal business model.
• 2:12
  Speaker 2: They actually are uniquely separate.
• 2:14
  Speaker 3: And so while we cover day in, day out, the
• 2:17
  Speaker 3: transformative effects of the technology in terms of its capabilities
• 2:21
  Speaker 3: of alleged risk or all of that in the vision
• 2:24
  Speaker 3: of those founders, that doesn't equal the immediate current business
• 2:28
  Speaker 3: that things are, which could set us up for a crash.
• 2:31
  Speaker 3: Let's put the next element up here on the screen, guys,
• 2:33
  Speaker 3: which is D5. OpenAI, this was a pretty shocking report,
• 2:38
  Speaker 3: has now signaled that their annualized revenue is actually $ 20
• 2:43
  Speaker 3: billion less than they had previously told investors. They said
• 2:48
  Speaker 3: that the critical figure was nearing $ 50 billion in September.
• 2:51
  Speaker 3: far less than the $ 70 billion that was widely supported.
• 2:55
  Speaker 3: The $ 70 billion figure had been reported by the Financial
• 2:58
  Speaker 3: Times and other media outlets last month, quote, based on
• 3:01
  Speaker 3: information that was provided directly to investors, the metric is
• 3:06
  Speaker 3: the most important indicator of the overall actual demand for
• 3:09
  Speaker 3: AI and underpins the infrastructure growth and the growth of
• 3:13
  Speaker 3: the public equities markets. And here is what's interesting. All
• 3:17
  Speaker 3: of the chip stocks declined dramatically as a result of
• 3:21
  Speaker 3: this report.
• 3:22
  Speaker 4: Why?
• 3:23
  Speaker 3: Because their business models, the infrastructure that funds the AI developments,
• 3:29
  Speaker 3: people supposedly paying for AI, is the backbone of the
• 3:32
  Speaker 3: entire US equities market. Remember, NVIDIA is like the most
• 3:36
  Speaker 3: valuable company already in human history. It's like some ridiculous
• 3:40
  Speaker 3: percentage of the entire S & P 500. Their stock
• 3:44
  Speaker 3: fell 2.9%. Oracle dropped 5.5%. Micron dropped by 5%. And
• 3:49
  Speaker 3: all of this is because of their annualized revenue. Remember,
• 3:53
  Speaker 3: OpenAI had already said, hey, by the way, we're not
• 3:55
  Speaker 3: even going to go public this year because of alleged risk.
• 3:58
  Speaker 3: When in reality, it might just be that they don't
• 4:00
  Speaker 3: have the goods whenever it comes to their annualized revenue.
• 4:04
  Speaker 3: To be clear, what they're also pointing out, I want
• 4:07
  Speaker 3: to return to the Bloomberg story, is something that he
• 4:10
  Speaker 3: pointed out, which is so important. is that the majority
• 4:14
  Speaker 3: of these deals they're striking for hyperscalers, for these data centers,
• 4:18
  Speaker 3: is all debt financed, right? So he says that the
• 4:22
  Speaker 3: credit risk is actually a huge problem behind these AI companies.
• 4:26
  Speaker 3: AI hyperscalers are not paying cash based upon what their
• 4:30
  Speaker 3: customers are giving them. They are financing them with this
• 4:34
  Speaker 3: high interest debt. Quote, with the emergence of these Chinese models,
• 4:39
  Speaker 3: and falling token prices, it raises a concern over whether
• 4:43
  Speaker 3: long-term profitability actually can be achieved. And so, you know,
• 4:48
  Speaker 3: this actually is something that happens many times in history
• 4:52
  Speaker 3: is a technology or company can be at the forefront
• 4:54
  Speaker 3: of a technology, but somebody can come along either with
• 4:57
  Speaker 3: the cheaper or a more refined or a more efficient
• 5:00
  Speaker 3: way of doing that. And it will grow the industry,
• 5:04
  Speaker 3: but it will crush that very specific first mover. You know,
• 5:08
  Speaker 3: being first to market or being at the bleeding edge
• 5:11
  Speaker 3: is super expensive. And it may just be that the
• 5:14
  Speaker 3: everyday costs that, and the everyday use of AI, at
• 5:18
  Speaker 3: least as we currently know it, people are not using
• 5:20
  Speaker 3: it to solve math problems. People are using it as
• 5:23
  Speaker 3: a better Google. And that I would say is what 99.9%
• 5:28
  Speaker 3: of the global population uses AI for. 0.1 are using
• 5:32
  Speaker 3: it for agents to book things and.
• 5:34
  Speaker 2: Blah, blah, blah, and all the cool stuff.
• 5:36
  Speaker 3: We cover here but that's why the business concerns for
• 5:39
  Speaker 3: them have always been you know really at the forefront
• 5:42
  Speaker 3: and i think that's what we're beginning to see right now.
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: Yeah i mean to your point the models that are
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: out now for the public are good enough to do
• 5:50
  Speaker 1: what the public wants them to do like they're already
• 5:52
  Speaker 1: really quite smart they can do quite a lot for
• 5:55
  Speaker 1: the glorified google that most of us are using it
• 5:58
  Speaker 1: for it's already more than sufficient and you wouldn't pay
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: a lot more to have a you know somewhat smarter
• 6:04
  Speaker 1: model or even a wildly smarter A lot of the
• 6:07
  Speaker 1: thinking at OpenAI and Anthropic in particular has been effectively
• 6:11
  Speaker 1: this sort of zero sum game where whoever achieves artificial
• 6:15
  Speaker 1: super intelligence first, they just win and all of the
• 6:19
  Speaker 1: market share goes to them. And they're the ones that,
• 6:21
  Speaker 1: you know, automate us all out of existence and all
• 6:23
  Speaker 1: of those sorts of things. And one thing that I'm
• 6:26
  Speaker 1: kind of grappling with, with the conversation around artificial general intelligence,
• 6:31
  Speaker 1: which I think most people feel has now been achieved
• 6:34
  Speaker 1: is at some level is that these terms are very squishy.
• 6:38
  Speaker 1: It's not like there's a bright line. Okay, congratulations, you've
• 6:41
  Speaker 1: achieved AGI, OpenAI, you did it, like you're the winner.
• 6:44
  Speaker 1: It doesn't quite work like that. Maybe ASI will be
• 6:47
  Speaker 1: slightly different because there's a recursive self-improvement and there's this
• 6:52
  Speaker 1: instantaneous intelligence explosion that or near instantaneous that really separates
• 6:57
  Speaker 1: them from the pack. That is a possibility, but that's
• 7:00
  Speaker 1: really the way that they've been thinking about it. And
• 7:02
  Speaker 1: then I think there's also been an assumption that there
• 7:05
  Speaker 1: would be a willingness, a mass willingness to pay for
• 7:08
  Speaker 1: the very, very, very best technology. Whereas for many, not
• 7:13
  Speaker 1: just ordinary consumers, but a lot of businesses too, the
• 7:17
  Speaker 1: not quite as good technology may be good enough for
• 7:19
  Speaker 1: them to use to replace human workers. Another possibility here, though,
• 7:23
  Speaker 1: just to make the other argument on the other side
• 7:25
  Speaker 1: is We've seen recently these models solving all of these
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: outstanding math problems by the hundreds, like the open AI models,
• 7:34
  Speaker 1: internal models in particular, solving these math problems by the hundreds.
• 7:37
  Speaker 1: We may also get to a place where the best
• 7:41
  Speaker 1: models are not being put out to the public, where
• 7:43
  Speaker 1: they're not really available for sale for you to get
• 7:46
  Speaker 1: access to, or even for companies to get access to,
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: that they keep them internally and you have to run
• 7:51
  Speaker 1: your business processes through them. And that is the way
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: that they earn revenue. So I, you know, I think
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: it is very possible that this is a bubble, that
• 7:59
  Speaker 1: there is some sort of major financial reckoning, not because
• 8:02
  Speaker 1: the technology isn't powerful, but because it does become more
• 8:05
  Speaker 1: of a commodity with the much cheaper Chinese predominantly open
• 8:09
  Speaker 1: source models.
• 8:11
  Speaker 2: That the people who end up making the.
• 8:13
  Speaker 1: Most money are the ones like, you know, meta pursuing muse,
• 8:16
  Speaker 1: creating applications that people actually want to pay for and
• 8:19
  Speaker 1: use and that businesses actually want to pay for and use.
• 8:21
  Speaker 1: But I just want to put, you know, put a
• 8:23
  Speaker 1: hedge there that I do think it's possible that there
• 8:26
  Speaker 1: is a revenue model that works out for these bleeding
• 8:28
  Speaker 1: edge frontier companies. And I also think that is a
• 8:31
  Speaker 1: possibility of what happens here. Turning to another major market
• 8:35
  Speaker 1: implications here. This is some wild stuff that's going on
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: right now in the software space. Let's put D1 up
• 8:42
  Speaker 1: on the screen. So you had some guy who's an
• 8:46
  Speaker 1: engineer who's good with this stuff who got pissed off,
• 8:49
  Speaker 1: as one does, at Adobe. And they're sort of notorious
• 8:54
  Speaker 1: for being quite exploitative of their customer base. And so
• 8:58
  Speaker 1: he said, screw it. I am going to use AI
• 9:02
  Speaker 1: to reverse engineer the entire Adobe software suite. And so
• 9:08
  Speaker 1: this tweet here says, AI is now being used to
• 9:10
  Speaker 1: recreate Adobe software. Developers released seven free open source apps
• 9:14
  Speaker 1: as clean room alternatives to Adobe's main tools, Photoshop, Illustrator,
• 9:18
  Speaker 1: Premiere Pro, Lightroom, After Effects, InDesign, and Acrobat Pro. Built
• 9:22
  Speaker 1: in Rust with help from Claude Opus 5.5, run on Windows, Linux,
• 9:25
  Speaker 1: and Mac OS under MIT Apache licenses without using Adobe
• 9:29
  Speaker 1: source code. Now, to be clear, the bugs are not
• 9:34
  Speaker 1: all worked out here. He's sort of seeking collaboration to
• 9:37
  Speaker 1: improve upon the products. But it just begs the question,
• 9:41
  Speaker 1: for any software company, how are you going to protect
• 9:44
  Speaker 1: your product? How are you going to protect your business
• 9:46
  Speaker 1: model when one guy pissed off one day can just
• 9:49
  Speaker 1: go out there and create reasonable facsimiles of them using
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: AI and put them out to the market? Similar thing
• 9:57
  Speaker 1: is happening right now with video games as well, where
• 9:59
  Speaker 1: they're able to go in and reverse engineer and mash
• 10:02
  Speaker 1: up multiple video games together. This is going to have
• 10:05
  Speaker 1: tremendous economic implications. And you can see here some of
• 10:09
  Speaker 1: the Other people who know video games can tell you
• 10:12
  Speaker 1: what these things we're looking at are. But apparently this
• 10:15
  Speaker 1: is like video games, two different video games being mashed
• 10:18
  Speaker 1: together so that you can play one game with a
• 10:20
  Speaker 1: character in the other landscape, etc. So this is all
• 10:24
  Speaker 1: already going on and could have a major impact. And Sagar,
• 10:28
  Speaker 1: there's previously been kind of a freak out around software
• 10:32
  Speaker 1: and whether AI was just going to totally destroy the
• 10:34
  Speaker 1: software industry. And I still think that that is a
• 10:36
  Speaker 1: very open and likely result of what's happening here.
• 10:41
  Speaker 3: I'm loathe to play a Chamath clip in a positive way,
• 10:45
  Speaker 3: but he actually summed it up pretty well.
• 10:47
  Speaker 2: So we'll kick it to Chamath to explain. Let's take
• 10:49
  Speaker 2: a listen.
• 10:50
  Speaker 5: The more important point I want to make, though, is
• 10:52
  Speaker 5: I sent this to Nick. There's been a couple of
• 10:54
  Speaker 5: things that happened in the last couple of days, which
• 10:57
  Speaker 5: I think are incredibly important. There have been people that
• 11:02
  Speaker 5: decompiled the entire big five. What is the big five?
• 11:08
  Speaker 5: Adobe has five very, very important products in their product suite.
• 11:13
  Speaker 5: Freeberg may know them all, but I just know Photoshop.
• 11:15
  Speaker 5: There's like a bunch of others, okay?
• 11:17
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 11:18
  Speaker 5: And these folks decompiled it, distilled it, and published open
• 11:22
  Speaker 5: source versions of these things. And I was so shocked
• 11:25
  Speaker 5: because I was like, hold on a second. These are
• 11:27
  Speaker 5: like profound products that have existed and have had moats
• 11:31
  Speaker 5: for years. And now they're just open source versions. And
• 11:35
  Speaker 5: then Nikita was, I think, trolling. And he was building
• 11:39
  Speaker 5: on that idea and just talking about GTA because it's
• 11:42
  Speaker 5: about to get released.
• 11:43
  Speaker 3: Yes.
• 11:44
  Speaker 2: I think GTA 6 is about to come out.
• 11:45
  Speaker 5: In November, yeah. we'll reconstruct this. Why is this important?
• 11:51
  Speaker 5: I think that IP and software was effectively rendered worthless.
• 11:56
  Speaker 2: Two days ago.
• 11:57
  Speaker 5: Because if you think about it, when everything is headless,
• 12:00
  Speaker 5: so when Elon makes his services headless, Benioff made Salesforce
• 12:04
  Speaker 5: headless a few months earlier. When all of these things
• 12:07
  Speaker 5: are headless and you can wrap them in agent tools
• 12:11
  Speaker 5: and you can connect them via MCP to other experiences,
• 12:14
  Speaker 5: The value of IP does no longer exist in software.
• 12:18
  Speaker 2: It doesn't exist.
• 12:20
  Speaker 5: And I think that that probably is the most profound implication.
• 12:24
  Speaker 5: So like even in our business, we would argue with
• 12:28
  Speaker 5: some of our customers all the time because we'll say, oh,
• 12:30
  Speaker 5: we'll build this for you. We'll own the IP. They'll say, no,
• 12:32
  Speaker 5: we want the IP. We don't know how to negotiate it.
• 12:35
  Speaker 5: And two days ago, I walked into the 8090 guys.
• 12:37
  Speaker 2: I said, who cares? Who cares? And solve the problem.
• 12:41
  Speaker 5: But before it was always a negotiation and a set
• 12:44
  Speaker 5: of trade offs. Now it's a who cares thing where
• 12:45
  Speaker 5: like the IP is irrelevant. It still takes a while
• 12:48
  Speaker 5: for the machinery of a business and frankly, the market
• 12:52
  Speaker 5: to understand. But that is the most important thing that
• 12:55
  Speaker 5: happened this week in my opinion.
• 12:57
  Speaker 3: So, you know, again, bombastic, as always, I think from
• 13:01
  Speaker 3: the guys, but I'm not so sure that they're really wrong.
• 13:04
  Speaker 3: I mean, to say useless is not completely correct because
• 13:08
  Speaker 3: it's not going to happen overnight. Nobody knows how to
• 13:11
  Speaker 3: run GitHub and go and set all this stuff up
• 13:14
  Speaker 3: all that easily. There needs to be a consumer interface,
• 13:17
  Speaker 3: a way to be able to easily do this. But
• 13:19
  Speaker 3: that is generally how technology progresses. People will remember like
• 13:24
  Speaker 3: downloading music. People were illegally downloading music for years before
• 13:29
  Speaker 3: Napster and LimeWire. But the infrastructure or Pirate Bay or
• 13:33
  Speaker 3: any of these things that was eventually created made it
• 13:36
  Speaker 3: very easy for normal people to just go on and
• 13:40
  Speaker 3: kind of figure it out. I could easily see something
• 13:43
  Speaker 3: like that where AI, I mean, I was thinking about
• 13:45
  Speaker 3: the textbook industry as well, or even cheating, how, you know, Chegg,
• 13:49
  Speaker 3: that entire software company, which was basically designed to sell
• 13:52
  Speaker 3: textbooks and, you know, basically so-called not cheating, but kind
• 13:56
  Speaker 3: of cheating services has been destroyed by AI. But IP
• 14:00
  Speaker 3: itself now basically just seems illegitimate. I have noticed with
• 14:05
  Speaker 3: Claude or any others, especially when there's a very rare
• 14:08
  Speaker 3: book that I cannot find, I will ask it. And
• 14:11
  Speaker 3: because of the stories that we've done here, you know,
• 14:13
  Speaker 3: for summaries or for excerpts, it has it because we've
• 14:17
  Speaker 3: pointed out AI companies buy all of these rare books,
• 14:21
  Speaker 3: take the spines off, scan them, and then shred and
• 14:24
  Speaker 3: destroy them. So it is the only thing that still
• 14:27
  Speaker 3: has a lot of the IP can use that to
• 14:29
  Speaker 3: reconstruct and do various different things. I don't know.
• 14:32
  Speaker 2: I think it is fascinating.
• 14:34
  Speaker 3: I don't fully wrap my head around all of it,
• 14:36
  Speaker 3: but software IP, as they point out, Adobe, even operating
• 14:41
  Speaker 3: systems and others, these are multi-billion dollar 30-year businesses that
• 14:46
  Speaker 3: have been around for decades.
• 14:47
  Speaker 2: Can they survive this? Maybe.
• 14:49
  Speaker 3: I didn't even know if they would be able to
• 14:50
  Speaker 3: survive moving from the CD to Apparently, they figured it out.
• 14:54
  Speaker 3: So it's certainly possible the legal system will give them
• 14:57
  Speaker 3: their ability to sue and all of that. So I'm
• 14:59
  Speaker 3: not sure that we're going to see total widespread adoption.
• 15:03
  Speaker 3: But it's possible that AI just moves so quickly that
• 15:05
  Speaker 3: we don't actually get to that point at all.
• 15:06
  Speaker 2: And I think that's pretty crazy.
• 15:08
  Speaker 4: Yeah, agreed.
• 15:09
  Speaker 3: All right. Let's get to Victor Sebastian standing by. Let's
• 15:12
  Speaker 3: get to it. I'm very excited now to be joined
• 15:17
  Speaker 3: by Victor Sebastian. He's the author of a new book,
• 15:20
  Speaker 3: Weimar Germany. The Death of a Democracy. As I said
• 15:24
  Speaker 3: in our introduction to the show, Victor wrote the book
• 15:27
  Speaker 3: on Lenin, which I have recommended to countless people across
• 15:31
  Speaker 3: the aisle. We are a bipartisan show here, and every
• 15:33
  Speaker 3: single person is a fan of this author, which is
• 15:36
  Speaker 3: a very difficult feat, I think, and it speaks to
• 15:39
  Speaker 3: his deep credibility, research, and his storytelling abilities as a historian.
• 15:43
  Speaker 2: Victor, thank you so much for joining us. We appreciate it.
• 15:46
  Speaker 6: Well, thank you very much for asking me and for
• 15:49
  Speaker 6: your very kind introduction.
• 15:51
  Speaker 2: Absolutely.
• 15:52
  Speaker 3: So, sir, one of the topics specifically with Weimar is
• 15:56
  Speaker 3: it seems like something which people think they know about,
• 15:59
  Speaker 3: they don't know a ton.
• 16:00
  Speaker 2: Everybody likes to draw a historical parallel.
• 16:04
  Speaker 3: Something that you draw upon in your book and that
• 16:06
  Speaker 3: has been very popular in the discourse is this idea
• 16:09
  Speaker 3: of Weimar America, or at the very least, Weimar of
• 16:12
  Speaker 3: the West of what we're living in right now. Here
• 16:15
  Speaker 3: is an excerpt I would love your specific reaction to
• 16:18
  Speaker 3: of Rod Dreher, who recently wrote a book on the
• 16:21
  Speaker 3: subjects interviewed in the New York Times. Let's take a listen, sir,
• 16:24
  Speaker 3: and we'll get your reaction based upon the book.
• 16:26
  Speaker 7: When we hear Weimar, we think of the film Cabaret
• 16:29
  Speaker 7: and corruption, and we think it all ended up in Nazism.
• 16:33
  Speaker 7: But that is a superficial understanding of it. We have
• 16:38
  Speaker 7: created in America today, perhaps throughout the West, the psychosocial
• 16:43
  Speaker 7: conditions of Weimar without having suffered the traumas that Germany did,
• 16:48
  Speaker 7: losing the First World War, hyperinflation, and the Great Depression. Well,
• 16:53
  Speaker 7: what I mean by that, and this also goes back
• 16:55
  Speaker 7: to Hannah Arendt and her famous 1951 book, The Origins
• 16:58
  Speaker 7: of Totalitarianism. She tried to explain how it was that
• 17:03
  Speaker 7: right-wing totalitarianism in Germany and left-wing version in Russia rose.
• 17:07
  Speaker 7: And she said, these are the factors. Social atomization is
• 17:13
  Speaker 7: by far, said Arendt, the most important factor. We have
• 17:16
  Speaker 7: done this with our young. And not only that, but
• 17:18
  Speaker 7: the loss of trust in institutions, a feeling of wanting
• 17:23
  Speaker 7: to tear it all down. There's nothing for me there.
• 17:26
  Speaker 7: It's all here. And it made me think, it made
• 17:29
  Speaker 7: me fear that we are one economic crash away from
• 17:33
  Speaker 7: something very ugly. It may not be Hitler 2.0. It
• 17:36
  Speaker 7: may not be Stalin 2.0. It might be something all American,
• 17:40
  Speaker 7: but it's not going to be what we're used to.
• 17:42
  Speaker 7: And people of my generation and yours are really don't
• 17:45
  Speaker 7: understand what's happening.
• 17:47
  Speaker 2: What do you think of that argument, sir? Do you agree?
• 17:48
  Speaker 6: I agree with some of it. I think history doesn't
• 17:56
  Speaker 6: repeat itself either as tragedy or farce, as Marx would
• 18:01
  Speaker 6: have put it, or as Mark Twain would have put it,
• 18:04
  Speaker 6: it doesn't rhyme either. However, there are lots and lots
• 18:08
  Speaker 6: of similarities, but I've written specifically about Weimar Germany readers
• 18:15
  Speaker 6: now can make their own judgment after they've digested it
• 18:21
  Speaker 6: about what it says about today. I've tried to draw
• 18:26
  Speaker 6: an interesting, there are interesting parallels, but there are all
• 18:30
  Speaker 6: kinds of things that actually were quite different. So just
• 18:37
  Speaker 6: to think that we're in the Hannah Arendt, was in
• 18:44
  Speaker 6: her great insight in that marvelous, marvelous book is that
• 18:49
  Speaker 6: actually the far right and the far left are almost
• 18:52
  Speaker 6: exactly identical. They're just two sides of the same coin anyway.
• 18:59
  Speaker 6: We are, as I draw, some of the parallels are
• 19:04
  Speaker 6: kind of obvious, but there are significant differences. We are,
• 19:09
  Speaker 6: I agree that we're in a time of revolutionary change.
• 19:13
  Speaker 6: And these have nothing, not necessarily anything to do with
• 19:21
  Speaker 6: the political turmoil we're in. One of the big ones
• 19:27
  Speaker 6: that's probably going to have the biggest effect is who
• 19:31
  Speaker 6: knows what the result of the AI revolution is going
• 19:37
  Speaker 6: to bring to the world.
• 19:40
  Speaker 4: What happened in....
• 19:42
  Speaker 6: In Germany after the First World War was that they
• 19:46
  Speaker 6: were defeated by the worst war in human history, where
• 19:52
  Speaker 6: death was on an industrial scale, which we haven't had
• 19:56
  Speaker 6: in the West. In fact, we've had nearly three generations
• 20:04
  Speaker 6: of a.
• 20:05
  Speaker 4: Piece of.
• 20:10
  Speaker 6: Security, the like of which we haven't had maybe any
• 20:14
  Speaker 6: time in history. So there are similarities, but there are
• 20:17
  Speaker 6: a great number of differences.
• 20:20
  Speaker 2: I think what is.
• 20:21
  Speaker 6: It's brilliant just to say we're heading for the same thing.
• 20:25
  Speaker 3: Right. I totally agree with that. And there are a
• 20:27
  Speaker 3: couple of takeaways from the book. To me, the key
• 20:31
  Speaker 3: observation that you make, which is intuitive, but is not
• 20:36
  Speaker 3: always the case whenever it's cast... historical fashion, is that
• 20:39
  Speaker 3: Weimar was killed, it was not doomed. And I would
• 20:42
  Speaker 3: be really interested to hear how you could maybe lay
• 20:45
  Speaker 3: some of that out, especially, and by the way, I'm
• 20:47
  Speaker 3: recommending everybody needs to read this book, regardless of what
• 20:51
  Speaker 3: But that key insight is that humans have agency and
• 20:55
  Speaker 3: that specifically leaders themselves matter dramatically. The way that Hindenburg
• 21:00
  Speaker 3: is cast as a villain throughout your entire story is
• 21:04
  Speaker 3: very important because a lot of people can look at
• 21:07
  Speaker 3: history as a tide, as a wave which breaks and
• 21:10
  Speaker 3: it flows as if we can't stand in front of it.
• 21:13
  Speaker 3: And the key point that you make is that is
• 21:15
  Speaker 3: absolutely not the case. I'd love for you to be
• 21:18
  Speaker 3: able to lay some of that out.
• 21:20
  Speaker 6: Yeah, I feel very strongly that almost nothing is inevitable
• 21:29
  Speaker 6: in history. There's contingency in almost anything that happens except
• 21:35
  Speaker 6: maybe death and taxes. Everything else, there are what-ifs, there's luck,
• 21:42
  Speaker 6: there's happenstance. And this Weimar is a particular case. Often
• 21:49
  Speaker 6: in the past, it has been written as though there
• 21:52
  Speaker 6: is something inevitable, as an inevitable journey from Weimar Germany
• 21:59
  Speaker 6: to the Nuremberg trials, for example. But there certainly is,
• 22:03
  Speaker 6: there's all kinds of things might have happened. For example, Hitler,
• 22:10
  Speaker 6: after his failed insurrection in 1923, there was a big
• 22:12
  Speaker 6: demonstration and Hitler was at the front of it, and
• 22:24
  Speaker 6: it got into a fight with the police, and the
• 22:28
  Speaker 6: man right next to Hitler was shot dead. If that
• 22:34
  Speaker 6: bullet had gone a foot nearer, we might have been
• 22:39
  Speaker 6: in a much happier situation.
• 22:43
  Speaker 4: In the world.
• 22:45
  Speaker 6: Hindenburg, who I do cast as one of the guiltiest
• 22:50
  Speaker 6: men in history, because he paved the way and eventually
• 22:56
  Speaker 6: allowed Hitler to take power, was he was elected president
• 23:02
  Speaker 6: in 1925. He'd always been an ardent monarchist. He didn't
• 23:07
  Speaker 6: believe in the republic. He did not believe in democracy.
• 23:11
  Speaker 6: He hated the very idea of democracy and politicians. And
• 23:15
  Speaker 6: he got himself elected in 1925. with the purpose of
• 23:19
  Speaker 6: destroying them both. Now, he won an election. It was
• 23:25
  Speaker 6: a close contest, and he only really won it because
• 23:29
  Speaker 6: there was a spoiler candidate by the Communist Party that
• 23:33
  Speaker 6: also didn't want democracy and the kind of republic that.
• 23:40
  Speaker 4: Weimar paid.
• 23:42
  Speaker 6: If the Communists had not decided to stand, all the
• 23:46
  Speaker 6: opinion polls at the time and And all the more
• 23:48
  Speaker 6: acute political observers thought that Hindenburg's opponent would win. So
• 23:56
  Speaker 6: this is contingent. They're all a lot of the way through.
• 24:02
  Speaker 6: One of the most able statesmen in the Weimar period
• 24:07
  Speaker 6: in Germany, a man now almost forgotten, but was an
• 24:11
  Speaker 6: extremely clever and able man called Gustav Stresemann, who who
• 24:17
  Speaker 6: charted a path that got Germany out of its prior
• 24:23
  Speaker 6: status into a respectable country again. After the incredible hyperinflation,
• 24:30
  Speaker 6: he stabilized the currency.
• 24:32
  Speaker 4: He oversaw the golden.
• 24:34
  Speaker 6: Period in Germany between 1924 and 1929, where it was
• 24:41
  Speaker 6: the fastest growing economy in Europe. receiving vast amounts of
• 24:47
  Speaker 6: money and help from America, by the way. And he
• 24:54
  Speaker 6: died in 1929, a few weeks before the Wall Street crash.
• 24:58
  Speaker 6: He could have had the ability and the confidence of
• 25:01
  Speaker 6: the people to have, I mean, he was very popular
• 25:05
  Speaker 6: at the time, who might have weathered the worst of
• 25:13
  Speaker 6: that storm without without Hitler. So there are all kinds
• 25:19
  Speaker 6: of things that might have happened, what ifs, that it
• 25:22
  Speaker 6: was not inevitable. And lots of history books, some very,
• 25:28
  Speaker 6: very good history books of this period. There have been
• 25:30
  Speaker 6: hundreds written about the Weimar period. But I think a
• 25:35
  Speaker 6: lot of them look at it backwards. I've relied on
• 25:40
  Speaker 6: many of them, and I have mine. I owe a
• 25:44
  Speaker 6: little bit of gratitude to many of those books, but
• 25:46
  Speaker 6: if there is a fault in many of them written,
• 25:51
  Speaker 6: certainly in the last 50 years, is that it looks
• 25:55
  Speaker 6: at everything backwards as though we all know what happened
• 25:59
  Speaker 6: and therefore that was inevitable.
• 26:01
  Speaker 4: 100%.
• 26:03
  Speaker 6: My line has been, well, actually that isn't the case.
• 26:05
  Speaker 6: People living in that time, very, very, very few, They
• 26:11
  Speaker 6: didn't like Hitler, but very, very few saw what was
• 26:16
  Speaker 6: going to happen. It didn't seem inevitable to people at
• 26:20
  Speaker 6: the time. Almost nobody could have predicted it. Certainly in
• 26:24
  Speaker 6: this country, the idea in a country that had such
• 26:28
  Speaker 6: a civilization and a culture as Germany, that 10 years
• 26:32
  Speaker 6: later there'd be slaughtering millions of people in concentration camps
• 26:38
  Speaker 6: and death camps, would have been utterly inconceivable. Nobody would
• 26:41
  Speaker 6: have thought that would be remotely a possibility. So nothing, sorry.
• 26:49
  Speaker 3: Well, I just want to pick up on this. Something
• 26:52
  Speaker 3: that Rod Dreher had pointed out in that interview is
• 26:55
  Speaker 3: he said we're one economic crash away. My biggest takeaway
• 26:59
  Speaker 3: from your book is that the economics, I wouldn't say
• 27:02
  Speaker 3: it was secondary. It was certainly a factor. But you
• 27:06
  Speaker 3: extensively write about the culturally progressive change that happened within
• 27:11
  Speaker 3: this society. It's almost difficult to describe to people, if
• 27:15
  Speaker 3: you're not familiar with Prussian militarism, what German culture was
• 27:20
  Speaker 3: like before the outbreak of the First World War. And
• 27:24
  Speaker 3: to go from that to what happened in Weimar, which
• 27:28
  Speaker 3: became one of the most progressive societies, I don't know,
• 27:31
  Speaker 3: in human history, like really at the time, Was genuinely
• 27:35
  Speaker 3: psychologically shocking. And so, you know, you point out, you know, maybe,
• 27:39
  Speaker 3: you know, you're not politics might differ a little bit here.
• 27:42
  Speaker 3: I look at that as a very cautionary tale about
• 27:46
  Speaker 3: how cultural elites specifically should try. you know, to embrace,
• 27:52
  Speaker 3: you know, so-called progress or message or degeneracy, libertinism, to
• 27:58
  Speaker 3: embrace these things, to popularize them or at the very
• 28:01
  Speaker 3: least celebrate them, because it invited a mass reactionary social backlash,
• 28:07
  Speaker 3: which is what you ascribe as one of the key
• 28:10
  Speaker 3: tenets of Nazism and of its rise. So I would
• 28:14
  Speaker 3: love to hear, you know, how you work through that.
• 28:16
  Speaker 3: Cause you know, correct me if I'm wrong, sir, you
• 28:19
  Speaker 3: kind of cast these, you're like, look, these were all
• 28:20
  Speaker 3: good things. You know, we had these, this cultural progressive
• 28:23
  Speaker 3: and women's rights movement, a lot of it born out
• 28:25
  Speaker 3: of a shitload of men were just killed, you know,
• 28:27
  Speaker 3: on the Western front or on the Eastern front.
• 28:29
  Speaker 2: So it's kind of a female ruled society.
• 28:32
  Speaker 3: But you know, I wonder how much blame you put
• 28:34
  Speaker 3: on the cultural elites of that time for trying to
• 28:36
  Speaker 3: push the Vanguard so forward when, as you write very specifically,
• 28:41
  Speaker 3: they are responsible in some part for the reactionary tide.
• 28:44
  Speaker 2: That follows with the rise of Hitler?
• 28:47
  Speaker 4: Well, yes.
• 28:47
  Speaker 6: I mean, modernism was being challenged by traditional cultural values
• 28:52
  Speaker 6: and political values by forces that could not or would
• 28:57
  Speaker 6: not accept the pace of change. That's a big part
• 29:01
  Speaker 6: of it. And I write so much about the culture
• 29:07
  Speaker 6: because it was so significant.
• 29:11
  Speaker 4: To what was going on.
• 29:13
  Speaker 6: It seems peculiar because Art, the edges of modernist art
• 29:20
  Speaker 6: is not a thing that many Germans at the time
• 29:25
  Speaker 6: would necessarily have been remotely interested in. Yet it became,
• 29:31
  Speaker 6: because it challenged so much of the traditional values, everything
• 29:38
  Speaker 6: became a culture war. Everything became political from the cuts
• 29:42
  Speaker 6: of a woman's hair to the shape of a roof, um, um,
• 29:47
  Speaker 6: you know, on a, on a building. What happened in,
• 29:50
  Speaker 6: in Germany, the, uh, the Vilhelmina empire was, was, was,
• 29:55
  Speaker 6: was very stayed at stayed. And, and, um, culturally very conformist,
• 30:01
  Speaker 6: although they were great artists. It had a monumental high culture,
• 30:08
  Speaker 6: of course, but it was very stuffy, very staid. Overnight,
• 30:13
  Speaker 6: the big thing that happened was overnight after the revolution
• 30:18
  Speaker 6: in 1918, which brought the empire down, they removed censorship
• 30:25
  Speaker 6: straight away. Having been a very stuffy atmosphere to anything
• 30:32
  Speaker 6: goes happened with a remarkable suddenness. There were, there were
• 30:38
  Speaker 6: the beginnings of kind of modernism in, in various art
• 30:42
  Speaker 6: movements before, but really they, they were confined to tiny
• 30:46
  Speaker 6: bits of, of, of the avant-garde in Berlin. It didn't
• 30:51
  Speaker 6: get into the, into the mainstream. And what the far
• 30:54
  Speaker 6: right did was, was, was, um, was pick up on
• 31:00
  Speaker 6: this so much as yet another thing that the cultural
• 31:03
  Speaker 6: elites in.
• 31:05
  Speaker 4: Berlin and the other big cities.
• 31:09
  Speaker 6: Were forcing down upon us and it was changing everything.
• 31:15
  Speaker 6: And to some extent, yes, the artists were guilty, but
• 31:20
  Speaker 6: they didn't consider themselves as a movement. They were not,
• 31:25
  Speaker 6: I think this again gets back to my point point
• 31:29
  Speaker 6: that I've just made earlier about the inevitability of it.
• 31:35
  Speaker 6: They didn't see themselves as a movement. There were various different...
• 31:40
  Speaker 6: They saw themselves as individual working artists. They didn't think
• 31:43
  Speaker 6: of themselves with that responsibility that if I carry on
• 31:48
  Speaker 6: with this, drawing my line that way, or nude women
• 31:54
  Speaker 6: or gay sex or whatever, it was automatically going to
• 31:57
  Speaker 6: bring bring about a very far-right reaction. They didn't see themselves,
• 32:05
  Speaker 6: or I don't see them, as a movement, a political
• 32:09
  Speaker 6: movement in that way. It became one later when they
• 32:12
  Speaker 6: were under threat, and it was fairly obvious by the
• 32:18
  Speaker 6: early 30s that their days were going to be numbered.
• 32:22
  Speaker 6: Then they formed themselves into into movements.
• 32:26
  Speaker 4: But I don't think one can blame them.
• 32:28
  Speaker 6: They were individual artists that were allowed now for the
• 32:32
  Speaker 6: first time to express whatever they wanted. And yeah, many
• 32:36
  Speaker 6: of them were irresponsible. Many of them were doing really
• 32:39
  Speaker 6: crazy things. But it wasn't as though they were a
• 32:42
  Speaker 6: political party all about to change the world. So I don't...
• 32:48
  Speaker 6: And many of them were.
• 32:53
  Speaker 6: Loathed by the far left just as much as the
• 32:56
  Speaker 6: far right.
• 32:59
  Speaker 2: You know, that is an important point.
• 33:01
  Speaker 3: It's not, well, I guess, you know, if we were
• 33:02
  Speaker 3: to care to our modern culture war, you know, it began,
• 33:05
  Speaker 3: I don't think there are a lot of activists or
• 33:07
  Speaker 3: these others are part of any broader political movement in
• 33:10
  Speaker 3: the beginning.
• 33:10
  Speaker 2: They're just doing what they want to do.
• 33:12
  Speaker 3: But it does become, you know, something that starts to
• 33:14
  Speaker 3: become part of the vanguard of the progressive or the
• 33:17
  Speaker 3: democratic elite, right? And that becomes and invites a reactionary... Artists.
• 33:21
  Speaker 4: Like to shock. Artists like to shock.
• 33:23
  Speaker 6: Artists like to say something in order to get themselves
• 33:26
  Speaker 6: heard and to get themselves, their art shown and to
• 33:30
  Speaker 6: get their books read. They want to say something that people,
• 33:32
  Speaker 6: you know, rather outrageous in many cases that people want
• 33:37
  Speaker 6: to read. It's not, sorry, I interrupted your point.
• 33:41
  Speaker 2: No, no, it's fine.
• 33:42
  Speaker 3: I think you're making an important point because you're separating
• 33:45
  Speaker 3: the art from the leaders. And I think that's kind
• 33:47
  Speaker 3: of where I want to return to, which is ultimately,
• 33:50
  Speaker 3: you know, it comes down to leadership. I mean, if
• 33:52
  Speaker 3: I were to, I actually think this is one of
• 33:54
  Speaker 3: the most important leadership books ever written because if you
• 33:56
  Speaker 3: were to read this book, what you come away from
• 33:59
  Speaker 3: is a small group of people can make a dramatic
• 34:01
  Speaker 3: amount of difference. It's that discernibility for your– discernibility in
• 34:06
  Speaker 3: leadership may itself be one of the most key important
• 34:09
  Speaker 3: things that you should decide upon whenever you're voting or
• 34:12
  Speaker 3: you're looking for. It's specifically around like the management of
• 34:16
  Speaker 3: these titanic problems. And to that point, one of the
• 34:19
  Speaker 3: key elements that you identify in the book is that
• 34:22
  Speaker 3: fear of communism, of the Red Scare, you know, Goebbels himself,
• 34:26
  Speaker 3: I believe he coins the phrase like cultural Bolshevism, cultural Marxism,
• 34:30
  Speaker 3: which is used often.
• 34:32
  Speaker 2: Throughout, you know, the way that he writes about Berlin.
• 34:35
  Speaker 4: It's still used all the time.
• 34:36
  Speaker 2: I know.
• 34:37
  Speaker 3: The way he writes about Berlin, I'm like, that's how
• 34:39
  Speaker 3: I feel about San Francisco. I'm like, maybe I should
• 34:41
  Speaker 3: check my own, you know, biases, maybe, you know, even
• 34:44
  Speaker 3: by reading your book. But what I'm fascinated by is
• 34:48
  Speaker 3: the actual state of communists in Germany. I got to
• 34:51
  Speaker 3: be honest, sir, I really didn't know much about it.
• 34:53
  Speaker 3: I assumed that this was, at least these are people
• 34:56
  Speaker 3: who are willing to street fight. I thought it was
• 34:58
  Speaker 3: a legitimate movement. You point them out as some pretty
• 35:01
  Speaker 3: pathetic characters, which people were very afraid of.
• 35:05
  Speaker 2: I'd love for you to be able to go into that.
• 35:06
  Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah. I mean, another thing you've got to remember,
• 35:10
  Speaker 6: especially in America, is the geography. Communism wasn't just an
• 35:19
  Speaker 6: idea or a thing out there. Communism and the chaos
• 35:25
  Speaker 6: of the Russian Revolution in 1918 and 1919 was right
• 35:32
  Speaker 6: on the doorstep. They were right next door. There were
• 35:39
  Speaker 6: bits of Poland right on Germany's borders. was a foreign
• 35:44
  Speaker 6: country wanting to basically take over Germany. And the Communist
• 35:52
  Speaker 6: Party was relatively strong, but nowhere as strong as the
• 35:57
  Speaker 6: right or the center actually believed. But it was very strong.
• 36:01
  Speaker 6: And they mounted one of the first things that happened
• 36:04
  Speaker 6: after the empire. Again, just a bit to go back
• 36:08
  Speaker 6: with some factual stuff that people may not, be aware
• 36:13
  Speaker 6: of there was a communist uprising immediately after the um
• 36:20
  Speaker 6: after the empire fell um and most of it was
• 36:25
  Speaker 6: most of the communist party was subsidized by what you
• 36:29
  Speaker 6: know by russia revolutionary russia which was still going through
• 36:33
  Speaker 6: a civil war um bloodletting on a vast goal more
• 36:37
  Speaker 6: than 20 million people died in the in the in
• 36:40
  Speaker 6: the russian civil war at that time it was extraordinary
• 36:43
  Speaker 6: And they were right next door.
• 36:46
  Speaker 4: And they were.
• 36:46
  Speaker 6: Financing an armed insurrection within Germany to take over the state.
• 36:54
  Speaker 6: So a fear of Russia was not a theoretical thing.
• 37:00
  Speaker 6: It was a very, very real threat. However, it wasn't
• 37:06
  Speaker 6: as real a threat and as grave a threat as
• 37:09
  Speaker 6: it looked. And it initiated a response that was far
• 37:20
  Speaker 6: greater than it did. Also, what happened is that it
• 37:24
  Speaker 6: fractured the left, which was the opposing for all the
• 37:29
  Speaker 6: period of the Weimar Republic. The communists were fighting against
• 37:36
  Speaker 6: the soft left socialist government. Most of the Weimar period
• 37:42
  Speaker 6: has a soft left socialist government of the Social Democrats.
• 37:47
  Speaker 6: And they were as bitter enemies as the communists and
• 37:51
  Speaker 6: the right. Most of the street fighting that we read
• 37:53
  Speaker 6: about in the Weimar years, many of it was between
• 37:58
  Speaker 6: the communists and the socialists who never joined up together,
• 38:03
  Speaker 6: even when the threat of the Nazis and the far
• 38:06
  Speaker 6: right was so great and it looked very much like
• 38:10
  Speaker 6: they would run out. The far left and the more
• 38:12
  Speaker 6: moderate left never, never united in any way to confront
• 38:17
  Speaker 6: the Nazis.
• 38:19
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 38:20
  Speaker 3: One of the things you were mentioning there was about
• 38:23
  Speaker 3: leadership also, you know, previously. And what I'm curious about
• 38:27
  Speaker 3: in the West is I feel that we have a
• 38:31
  Speaker 3: complete lack of leadership on the level of many of
• 38:36
  Speaker 3: the great statesmen. that eventually builds the post-World War II order. Now,
• 38:42
  Speaker 3: I think there's a lot of critiques of that. And
• 38:43
  Speaker 3: many of the people who took on that legacy themselves
• 38:46
  Speaker 3: were very foolhardy and have put us in a very
• 38:48
  Speaker 3: bad situation some 80 years later. But when I read,
• 38:51
  Speaker 3: and I'll be honest, even when I read of the
• 38:55
  Speaker 3: 1914 outbreak of the war. I think all of these
• 38:57
  Speaker 3: people are really criminal, many of the leaders and the
• 39:00
  Speaker 3: reason why much of this happened. But the level of seriousness,
• 39:04
  Speaker 3: which people even undertook the decision to go war, I
• 39:07
  Speaker 3: don't see that even when our country launches a full
• 39:09
  Speaker 3: hearty war in Iran. I'm sitting here in the United States.
• 39:13
  Speaker 3: Am I projecting here on leadership as it is today?
• 39:17
  Speaker 3: I'm curious, because that seems to be, if I were
• 39:20
  Speaker 3: to read your book and take one takeaway, it's that leadership,
• 39:22
  Speaker 3: like I said, matters more than anything. At a time
• 39:25
  Speaker 3: of precarious change, social change and economic change, you need
• 39:28
  Speaker 3: people to think about these bigger questions. actually guides you
• 39:31
  Speaker 3: in a good direction does our current leadership in the
• 39:34
  Speaker 3: west give you any inspiration you don't just have to
• 39:36
  Speaker 3: make it about america you can look at it you
• 39:38
  Speaker 3: know broadly across different systems because that if it seems
• 39:41
  Speaker 3: to me that this were to ever happen again it
• 39:43
  Speaker 3: would be specifically because of the leadership conditions like it
• 39:46
  Speaker 3: did under weimar.
• 39:48
  Speaker 6: Um I think perhaps there were some great and significant
• 39:53
  Speaker 6: leaders and there were some impressive.
• 39:56
  Speaker 4: People.
• 39:59
  Speaker 6: I picked Gustav Stresemann out particularly, but before that there
• 40:02
  Speaker 6: were some. Many of them were assassinated, which was another
• 40:07
  Speaker 6: factor that was a very, very significant factor in the
• 40:12
  Speaker 6: history in Weimar. But the people that took over immediately
• 40:23
  Speaker 6: after the revolution in 1918, after Germany had lost, they
• 40:32
  Speaker 6: were well-intentioned. But I can't see Friedrich Ebert, who was
• 40:38
  Speaker 6: the first president, was a fundamentally decent man who absolutely
• 40:44
  Speaker 6: believed in democracy and believed in the Republic and the
• 40:48
  Speaker 6: rule of law. But actually, he wasn't a great leader
• 40:54
  Speaker 6: and he didn't, he put off decisions. The main one
• 41:01
  Speaker 6: is that he made two very significant mistakes. The first
• 41:08
  Speaker 6: was that he did nothing much to challenge this idea
• 41:12
  Speaker 6: that Germany was in a state of denial about having
• 41:14
  Speaker 6: lost the war, the stab in the back. I didn't
• 41:18
  Speaker 6: know many people. He never really challenged that. So he
• 41:22
  Speaker 6: never put the blame of what happened in the war,
• 41:27
  Speaker 6: the defeat in the war and where it belonged on
• 41:32
  Speaker 6: the military leaders, Hindenburg and his other generals and the
• 41:38
  Speaker 6: elite that got them into the war and the imperial court.
• 41:44
  Speaker 6: He kind of accepted that because Germany, none of the
• 41:49
  Speaker 6: fighting and the wars were placed in Germany. So there
• 41:52
  Speaker 6: was the infrastructure was great. The whole stab in the
• 41:55
  Speaker 6: back idea is actually quite believable because there were no
• 42:00
  Speaker 6: allied soldiers set foot in Germany. But it was still
• 42:06
  Speaker 6: a defeated country and refused to accept that it was a.
• 42:11
  Speaker 4: Defeated country.
• 42:12
  Speaker 6: The other real strategic error that they made, the moderate
• 42:17
  Speaker 6: social democrats and the moderate right centrists in a coalition made,
• 42:24
  Speaker 6: and that formed most of the government for the first
• 42:27
  Speaker 6: 10 years of the Weimar period. They continued to see
• 42:37
  Speaker 6: the communist threat and all the middle classes continued to
• 42:40
  Speaker 6: see that as the principal danger to their lives. The
• 42:45
  Speaker 6: whole middle class saw that it was the fault of that.
• 42:49
  Speaker 6: But actually, as turned out, the right was great. Actually,
• 42:54
  Speaker 6: the real threat was the right, the far right. So
• 42:58
  Speaker 6: they never did anything much to challenge them. They never,
• 43:01
  Speaker 6: until it was way, way, way too late. The strategic
• 43:04
  Speaker 6: error of actually seeing where the danger came from was
• 43:11
  Speaker 6: a fundamental.
• 43:11
  Speaker 4: So they were grave.
• 43:13
  Speaker 6: They may have been more serious people than we might
• 43:17
  Speaker 6: have now. But there was certainly no better in judgment.
• 43:26
  Speaker 4: Right.
• 43:26
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 43:27
  Speaker 2: It's so, so interesting.
• 43:29
  Speaker 3: Sir, if you're a young person, we have a younger audience,
• 43:32
  Speaker 3: and they read this book, what would you tell them
• 43:36
  Speaker 3: to do differently than maybe that they are right now?
• 43:39
  Speaker 6: Well, to be aware that a civilization that you think
• 43:45
  Speaker 6: of as having lasted a period, to be aware how
• 43:51
  Speaker 6: easy it is to get way too fragmented and how
• 43:56
  Speaker 6: fragile it can be.
• 44:00
  Speaker 2: Well, very poignant.
• 44:01
  Speaker 3: Do you have anything hopeful that you take away from
• 44:05
  Speaker 3: the book?
• 44:05
  Speaker 2: I don't want to leave people depressed.
• 44:06
  Speaker 4: Actually, I kind of do. Not necessarily.
• 44:11
  Speaker 6: I mean, this is the problem with it. I'm not
• 44:14
  Speaker 6: giving the game away. You know, it's not exactly a
• 44:16
  Speaker 6: cheerful book in many places. However, a lot of the
• 44:20
  Speaker 6: art and a lot of the amazing, this book has
• 44:25
  Speaker 6: as much about Thomas Mann or Bertolt Brecht or Marlene
• 44:31
  Speaker 6: Dietrich or Cabaret and all that than it does about
• 44:36
  Speaker 6: the propaganda skills of Goebbels or Hitler. And there are
• 44:41
  Speaker 6: lots about it, the joy of writing it, even though
• 44:44
  Speaker 6: it was depressing to do in places. The joy of
• 44:47
  Speaker 6: writing was seeing some of these amazing films. And it's
• 44:53
  Speaker 6: how whatever's going on in the world, however we think
• 44:57
  Speaker 6: it's all falling apart, creativity is always there, can always
• 45:03
  Speaker 6: be there and can thrive in the most, appalling circumstances.
• 45:11
  Speaker 6: And that gave me such, such pleasure as I was
• 45:15
  Speaker 6: writing this and looking at the doom that was about
• 45:18
  Speaker 6: to happen. The process of creativity was going on just
• 45:28
  Speaker 6: as the place was falling apart, which is always one
• 45:33
  Speaker 6: of the reasons why I wanted to write it.
• 45:35
  Speaker 3: I think that's so great. I encourage everybody to read it.
• 45:39
  Speaker 3: It will challenge you, and at the very least, it
• 45:40
  Speaker 3: will inform you. And as I said, he's got some
• 45:43
  Speaker 3: phenomenal books out there, and this just happens to be
• 45:46
  Speaker 3: one of the latest. Sir, I really appreciate your time
• 45:48
  Speaker 3: and engaging with some of my questions.
• 45:51
  Speaker 2: So thank you, sir. Appreciate your time.
• 45:52
  Speaker 4: Well, thank you very much indeed for having me.
• 45:56
  Speaker 3: Thank you guys so much for watching. We appreciate it.
• 45:58
  Speaker 3: Crystal had a family thing just come up, so she
• 46:00
  Speaker 3: had to step away. We'll do the AMA tomorrow for everybody.
• 46:03
  Speaker 3: So we'll see you all then.