← Everybody's Business
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- [00:00]
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- [00:48]
Bloomberg Audio Studios Announcer
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Stacey Vanek Smith
Stacey Vanek Smith here from everybody's business. And today we have a very special episode for you on this fourth of July. Max Chaff can sat down with Dan Carlin, who you might know from the hardcore history podcast which is going for a long time. It's a huge and really important podcast. They deal with all kinds of historical things. We thought it would be perfect for today. They will be talking about what we can learn from the past to help us make sense of this current moment in the U.S. so sit back, relax, enjoy and have a great holiday. We will see you next week with a brand new episode.
- [01:35]
Max Chaffin
Dan, welcome to everybody's business.
- [01:37]
Dan Carlin
Thank you for having me.
- [01:38]
Max Chaffin
So as we record this, the United States is getting ready to mark its 250th anniversary. And to me, I'm possibly to you as well, it's, it feels like a weird moment. You know, we have this norm breaking president, we have this ascendant populist movements and even this, you know, 250th anniversary feels very strange. And I'm curious as you think about our present day in this like the present moment. Like what historical periods or moments or sort of work that you have explored in the podcast over the years do these times remind you of?
- [02:20]
Dan Carlin
I like that phrase, the quote that history doesn't repeat but it sometimes rhymes. And I like that because it helps us understand that any comparisons are going to be screwed up by the variables.
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Public.com / The Hartford Announcer
Right?
- [02:32]
Dan Carlin
I mean, every era is different. If we want to compare ourselves to the Gilded Age or to Rome or whatever, there's going to be a bazillion things that are not the same. That doesn't mean that we can't see similarities. And that's of course what the rhyme means for me. I've always Assumed that this reminds us of the declining years of the Roman Republic. And I do want to emphasize republic because people will say Roman Empire and this is nothing like the end of the Roman Empire, but it's a lot like the end of the Roman Republic. And I think part of the reasons why is because you see many of the same systems in place, the same things that a salesman would use to target you today to sell you something would work on an ancient Roman too, right? Greed, envy, heartstrings, whatever, all those things are still in play. And you throw human beings into a system that's similar to ours in the sense that it's a republic and you're going to see similar dynamics. For example, if you want to say, and I don't know how you couldn't, that corruption is an element of our system right now that's causing problems. The Romans would have recognized that too, for example. So yes, the answer is points of departure more than points of similarity. But, but if we're gonna make any historical comparisons, I think that's always gonna be the case.
- [03:39]
Max Chaffin
First of all, I'm wondering, do you think there have been periods in history when the business world had this kind of power? I mean, you think about like I've in stories written that, you know, Facebook is the biggest and most powerful media company in history. Just cuz it has this huge, you know, global footprint. You have businesses operating at a scale that is, that feels, you know, new. We published a story a couple of months back about Bloomberg did about Elon Musk's wealth. Essentially he is about as rich as Rockefeller was during the, you know, basically the height of the Gilded Age. Have we had periods of this, this level of dominance where business guys had this amount of sway?
- [04:28]
Dan Carlin
Yes, but the difference. So the part that we're ignoring here with these comparisons is the difference in the US government at the time. So if you're playing within the normal constitutional guardrails in the Gilded Age, for example, the late 19th century, then your power is constrained vis a vis the Rockefellers or the Vanderbilts or those people. We're not playing by those rules anymore. And so when we talk about the relationship of the ability of the Vanderbilts or the Carnegies or any of those people to influence government. Government was less powerful back then and it's not now. And truthfully, one could have expected a Supreme Court or a Congress to come in if the President stepped on the toes of too many important business leaders. I don't think we're there anymore. I think part of what happens when the president becomes more powerful than the president has ever been, is is everyone else around him is diminished.
- [05:21]
Max Chaffin
One of the things that when I think about some of these big tech companies that I've noticed is that they're sometimes explicitly or implicitly framed as empires. Mark Zuckerberg kind of famously is a huge fan of classical history down to the haircut. So what are some of the ways in which that kind of popular idea of what Greek and Roman culture or history is versus the reality?
- [05:52]
Dan Carlin
Well, I mean, I think it's the difference between, and I think we all fall into this category, the difference between some of the high water marks of those earlier civilizations that we noticed that made it in the history books, that are famous, that roll off the tongue of some people, that are shown in movies and the reality of most people on the ground and what life was like back then. I think we forget about that kind of stuff. So for example, I'll run into some of these guys that will talk about the dangers of immigration or mixed societies and all this sort of stuff, or they'll say things like, one of the things I'll hear is the Roman Empire fell because of mass immigration. I heard that from one of these guys.
- [06:25]
Max Chaffin
Yeah.
- [06:26]
Dan Carlin
But what they're ignoring is that all the way back to the Republic. So we're talking centuries and centuries and centuries before. These are multicultural empires with many religions, many. So in other words, none of that, none of that sort of matches the actual historical vibe that happened. If you wanna get the big picture and you wanna really understand this era, you can't ignore those kind of things. Otherwise you're sort of playing a little dress up game here in your head.
- [06:52]
Max Chaffin
Do you think the kind of wealth disparity that we have in this country, how does that compare to the wealth disparity during the, at other points in American history or even world history?
- [07:04]
Dan Carlin
It's the worst in American history. I saw something the other day comparing Vanderbilt's wealth to some of the wealthy people today, and it's a fraction, but that was part of the problem that happened. That's one of the theories of what destroyed the Roman Republic is the wealth getting out of control. I mean, there's a reason why over and over and over again you had these reformers in Rome, Saturninus, the Gracchii, all those kinds of people, over and over you had these cycles come forward. Where and what really made the cycles particularly nefarious was many of these poor people who were angry at the rich and poor divide, were legionaries, right? Were military men and People who. You were able to get on your side as a reformer by saying. And the exact line I'm trying to go from memory was something. I forgot who it was. I think it was one of the Gracchii brothers who said to the soldiers, you people have won an empire for Rome, and yet you do not even have a little plot of land you can call your own. We would call that class warfare today in the modern American society. But this is exactly what tore Rome to pieces. Right? Because a conservative would call them demagogues, a liberal might call them reformers. But they were basically making the case that these soldiers fought for the empire and they deserve a piece of it. And the rich were suggesting, well, why should they have a piece of it? We bought that land. It's our. In other words, they were. They were hiding behind the same things you would hide behind a day. And the soldiers were basically saying, we're veterans, we deserve this. And then when generals would come in and say, you're being mistreated, you deserve this. Well, that's how all of a sudden you get an army fighting for you, Right?
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Max Chaffin
Yeah.
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Dan Carlin
When the current president was even suggesting little things to help the military, I mean, they almost seemed. When we talk about rhyming history, rhyming, it almost seemed like, how can we make these soldiers have a certain loyalty maybe to the president rather than to the constitution of the country? And that is what destroyed Rome. When all of a sudden the armies had allegiance to individuals and not the state. That's the beginning of the end right there.
- [09:15]
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- [09:44]
Public.com / The Hartford Announcer
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- [10:40]
Dan Carlin
Investing Brokerage Services by Open to the Public Investing Inc. Member FINRA and SIPC Advisory Services by Public Advisors, LLC. SEC Registered Advisor Complete disclosures available at public.com disclosures get the news you need in just 15 minutes. Start your day with Bloomberg Daybreak, the podcast with a global view on the stories that matter. I'm Nathan Hager. And I'm Karen Moscow. Join us each morning for curated stories on current events, politics, business and foreign relations, plus one conversation on the day's biggest developments, all in just 15 minutes. Subscribe to Bloomberg Daybreak for precise, precise,
- [11:16]
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- [11:18]
Public.com / The Hartford Announcer
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- [11:23]
Max Chaffin
Just to come back to the kind of wealth disparity we're seeing a lot of different populist movements, both left, right and so on. You've seen a lot of these rich guys get behind aspects of the right wing populist movement like kind of fan the flames. And I'm kind of curious, like what do you think, whether looking at the Rome story or any other historical parallel, is there a way this ends that isn't, that isn't where we don't have another sequice centennial of America in 250 years.
- [12:02]
Dan Carlin
There's a fork in the road, right? The fork in the road is either things get fixed or they don't. And you can pull historical examples of both of those things if we're sticking with Rome. I mean, I mentioned all those reformers earlier, the Saturninuses, the Gracchii, all those people. Well, all of those were eras in Roman history where if you look at the fortunes of the Republic, it's like a stock market. And there are times when it's going well and times where it's going badly. And oftentimes, I mean, let me use a US History example. I don't know what history books in high school look like anymore, but when I was in high school, you know, you divide those things in chapters because otherwise it's just one big book. And the chapters are usually based on things that sort of summarize the age or the era. And in the history high school textbook I used to read, you'd have the Gilded Age, the Vanderbilts, the Carnegie's, the late 19th century, all that and what Age was that followed by what was the next chapter in your high school history book? The Progressive Era. Now, unfortunately, the terms have all acquired all sorts of modern meanings that didn't apply back then. The Progressive Era had presidents from both parties. Woodrow Wilson was a progressive, Theodore Roosevelt was a progressive, both from different parties. But that era was a pendulum swing and a reaction to the previous age, I.e. correcting the imbalances of the previous age. When it goes wrong, when it goes sideways, is when the self correction mechanism is broken. So if we live in a new Gilded Age and we can't follow that with an age of reform that takes a look at what went wrong and corrects it, well, then you're screwed. And so that's where the question is, can we fix this? Absolutely. And we have before. But if we don't, well, then we're in trouble.
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Max Chaffin
We talked about the Progressive Era. I'm kind of curious other, not necessarily even American history, when the fork went in the right direction.
- [13:51]
Dan Carlin
I think the best one to use as an example is the most recent, the post Watergate era, because I think that was a perfect example of something that appeared to a lot of Americans as something that screamed for some sort of reform afterwards. You know, when you have a president resigning under pressure from being impeached, when the country discovers a whole bunch of things that have been going on in secret that seem to run totally contradictory to the American spirit and all these sorts of things, it seemed positively negligent to not then do something about it. I mean, how can you acknowledge that situation and then just say, oh, well, I mean, it's incumbent upon you then to repair the damage, right? Once the damage is exposed, once you see that hole in the pool in your backyard and you realize it's leaking, it's negligent to walk away from that, right? And the post Watergate era had a ton of reform. What a lot of people don't realize, but you can go look at YouTube and see some of the original news stories, is that there were congressional hearings. There were, I mean, the Church and Pike Committee hearings in the post Watergate era, which only happened because Nixon's resignation and the need to reform things. That's where we know the majority of stuff. We know about CIA activities going back to the creation of the CIA. I mean, they were showing weapons that we use to assassinate foreign leaders in public on the news. And the number of people in the intelligence community that must have been ready to jump off a bridge. Seeing that on television must have been intense. Except that was what was needed to sort of shine the sunlight, the great disinfectant, on what had happened and to cleanse ourself, if we want to look at it this way, of the sins of not just the Nixonian era, but what the Church and Pike Committee hearings were showing was all the previous administrations from the last few.
- [15:45]
Public.com / The Hartford Announcer
Right.
- [15:45]
Dan Carlin
So they were showing the dirty laundry of our country as a way to help us change and not go down that route again. And the only way to do it was to show everybody what had happened. But the only reason you could do it is because of the momentum generated by the fall of Richard Nixon and the need to repair the damage that had cropped up as a result of that. And Nixon always screamed that he wasn't doing anything that Johnson wasn't doing and, and that Kennedy wasn't doing. And he might have had a point, but that just exemplifies even more that there needed to be a repair situation. I hesitate and flip flop on whether Iran contra in the 1980s counts as something like that also. But there's no doubt that the post Watergate era is a period where the pendulum swung and we went to a reform era and tried to correct some of the imbalances. And that's what's been missing on, over the last two or three decades, I think.
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Max Chaffin
It's funny when I think about the news, maybe this is just a kind of like present day bias or something, but whenever I think about Watergate, it seems so quaint, like they broke into a hotel. Like, I mean, it just seems like so small compared to like some of the more recent, you know, a, you know, a mob breaking into the U.S. capitol, you know, whatever, like some of the pardons and crypto stuff. But perhaps that's just.
- [17:10]
Dan Carlin
Well, you're falling into the trap Nixon would have wanted you to fall into. Right. It's just a burglary. We're forgetting the firebombing of the Brookings Institution. There's a wonderful book, I think it's called the Poisoning of the Press. And one of the things it talks about in there is that there was a. And it got as far as the President, a plot to kill reporters. Jack Anderson, G. Gordon Liddy had suggested putting poison on his steering wheel. So to suggest that we're talking about a third rate burglary, which is what all of Nixon's people wanted it to sound like, ignores the fact that, no, no, no, no, he had an enemies list he was gonna go after. I mean, like I said, his close inner circle is talking about ways to Kill news reporters. That's not a third rate burglary. Right. So I feel like some of that is the propaganda that was thrown out there almost as a political sense. I mean, look, if you're Gerald Ford trying to run a political campaign against Jimmy Carter in 1976, do you want that to be the way the Watergate situation was portrayed? No. It ran smack dab into our political need to frame this in a way that didn't hamstring the Republicans for more than it had to hamstring them. Right. No one was gonna vote for a Republican in 76 right after the Nixonian situation. But you didn't want it to hamstring the Republicans for a generation. So you portray it as a third rate burglary. It wasn't. There was a lot more to it. And the third rate burglary part is just what exposed. It was the tip of the iceberg that exposed everything else. And then when you have the Church and Pike Committee hearings and everything else, you're not just exposing the Nixonian era. Like I said, you're exposing lbj, you're exposing Kennedy. I mean, in other words, that was the thing that allowed us to open up the door and examine what had gone wrong really since the 1950s, maybe 48.
- [18:53]
Max Chaffin
Dan Carlin, thank you so much for joining us.
- [18:55]
Dan Carlin
Let me just say one thing in closing here, and that's that I am a fan of what I call the myth of of America. And I'm really invested in hoping that we turn this around in exactly the ways you and I have talked about all this time. Do we still have it in us to do this? That's the big question of our era. And I'm hopeful and I'm pledged to do what I can to help. This is the test of our time as Americans and this is the crucible for us. And so we'll see what happens. But we need a reform era after this and it has to focus on the corruption, it has to focus on the two parties. You can't just say this is a Trump because he's just the guy who proved that the guard rails were mythical. We have to deal with the fact that the guard rails were mythical. And otherwise we're going to resign ourselves to having no guard rails. And that's not a good thing.
- [19:49]
Max Chaffin
Dan, thanks so much for being here.
- [19:51]
Dan Carlin
Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.
- [19:59]
Max Chaffin
This show is Produced by Jasmine J.T. green and Stacy Wong. Magnus Henriksen is our supervising producer. Sam Rogich handles engineering and Dave Purcell fact checks. Special thanks to Jeff Muskus, Julia Rubin, Angel Recchio, and Maria Ling. If you have a minute, please rate and review the show. It'll mean a lot to us. And if you have a story that should be our business, email us@everybody's bloomberg.net that's everybody with an sloomberg.net thank you for listening. We will see you next week.
- [20:31]
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- [21:10]
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