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The Tim Ferriss Show
#773: Andrew Roberts on The Habits of Churchill, Lessons from Napoleon, and The Holy Fire Inside Great Leaders
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- [00:00]
Tim Ferriss
Hello boys and girls, ladies and germs, this is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss show where it is my job to deconstruct world class performers or deconstruct those who deconstruct world class performers in the case of today's guest, who is Andrew Roberts. Andrew Roberts has written 20 books which have been translated into 28 languages and have won 13 literary prizes. These include Masters and Commanders, the Storm of A New History of the Second World War, A Life Churchill, Walking With Destiny, Destiny, George iii, the Life and Reign of Britain's Most Misunderstood Monarch and most recently, Conflict the Evolution of warfare from 1945 to Gaza, which he co authored with General David Petraeus. Lord Roberts is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Historical Society, the Bonnie and Tom McCloskey distinguished fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford and a Visiting professor at the Department of War Studies at King's College London. He is also a member of the House of lords. You all thingsAndrewDrewRoberts.net online and he is also on X the Artist formerly known as twitter.com arobertsandrew and we're going to.
- [01:16]
Andrew Roberts
Get to the interview, but quickly.
- [01:18]
Tim Ferriss
Before that, just a few words about our sponsors who make this show possible. In the last handful of years, I've become very interested in environmental toxins, avoiding microplastics and many other commonly found compounds all over the place. One place I looked is in the kitchen. Many people don't realize just how toxic their cookware is or can be. A lot of nonstick pans, practically all of them, can release harmful forever chemicals. PFAS, in other words, spelled PFAS into your food, your home, and then ultimately that ends up in your body. Teflon is a prime example of this. It is still the forever chemical that most companies are using. So our place reached out to me as a potential sponsor and the first.
- [02:03]
Andrew Roberts
Thing I did was look at the.
- [02:04]
Tim Ferriss
Reviews of their products and said, send me one. And that is the Titanium Always Pan Pro. And the claim is that it's the first non stick pan with zero coating. So that means zero forever chemicals and durability that'll last forever. I was very skeptical. I was very busy.
- [02:22]
Andrew Roberts
So I said, you know what, I.
- [02:22]
Tim Ferriss
Want to test this thing quickly. It's supposed to be non stick. It's supposed to be durable. I'm going to test it with two things. I'm going to test it with scrambled eggs in the morning because eggs are always a disaster in anything that isn't non stick with the toxic coating and then I'm going to test it with a steak sear because I want to see how much it retains heat and it worked perfectly in both cases and I was frankly astonished how well it worked. The Titanium Always Pan Pro has become my go to pan in the kitchen. It replaces a lot of other things for searing, for eggs, for anything you can imagine and the design is really cle. It does combine the best qualities of stainless steel, cast iron and nonstick into one product. It's tough enough to withstand the dishwasher open flame heavy duty scrubbing. You can scrub the hell out of it. You can use metal utensils which is great without losing any of its non stick properties. So stop cooking with toxic pans if they're nonstick and you don't know they probably contain something bad. Check out the Titanium Always Pan Pro. While you're at it. You can look at their other high performance offerings that are toxin free like the Wonder Oven Air fryer, their griddle pan and their Precision Engine German steel knives. So go to fromourplace.com Tim and use my code Tim to get 10% off of the Titanium Always Pan Pro or anything else on the site. You can check out anything more time. That's from our place.com spelled out F R O M O U r from our place.com Tim and use code Tim at checkout for 10% off of everything on the site. Our place also offers a 100 day trial with free shipping and returns. So take a look. This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Shopify is the all in one commerce platform that powers millions of businesses worldwide. Including me. Including mine. What business, you might ask? Well, one way I've scratched my own itch is by creating Cockpunch Coffee. It's a long story. All proceeds on my end go to my foundation, Saisei foundation to fund research for mental health, et cetera. Anyway, Cockpunch Coffee. It's delicious. The first coffee I've ever produced myself. I drink it every morning. Check it out. We use Shopify for the online storefront and my team raves about how simple, simple and easy it is to use. It has everything we need and nothing we don't. Whether you're a garage entrepreneur or getting ready for your ipo, Shopify is the only tool you need to start, run and grow your business without the struggle. Shopify puts you in control of every sales channel. Doesn't matter if you're selling satin sheets from Shopify's in Person POS system or offering organic olive oil on Shopify's all in one e commerce platform. However you interact with your customers, you're covered. And once you've reached your audience, Shopify has the Internet's best converting checkout to help you turn browsers in into buyers. Shopify powers 10% of all E commerce in the United States and Shopify is truly a global force. As the e commerce solution behind Allbirds, Rothy's, Brooklinen and millions of other entrepreneurs of every size across more than 170 countries. Plus Shopify's award winning help is there to support your success every step of the way. If you have questions, this is possibility powered by Shopify. So check it out. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify. That's S H O P I f y shopify.com Go to shopify.com Tim to take your business to the next level today. One more time. All lowercase shopify.com Timing at this altitude.
- [05:49]
Andrew Roberts
I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I answer your personal question now?
- [05:55]
David Petraeus
What is the appropriate time?
- [05:57]
Tim Ferriss
What if I did the opposite?
- [05:59]
David Petraeus
I'm a cybernetic organism.
- [06:00]
Tim Ferriss
Living tissue over metal endoskeleton.
- [06:11]
Andrew Roberts
Pleasure to meet you. Thank you for taking the time.
- [06:13]
David Petraeus
Thanks so much Tim for having me on this show.
- [06:15]
Andrew Roberts
I thought we would start with Cranley after your A levels.
- [06:20]
David Petraeus
Did you now? What happened? What did you know? That's the way we're gonna make friends and get on with each other.
- [06:27]
Andrew Roberts
Roll up the sleeves and get it done.
- [06:29]
David Petraeus
You're gonna mention the reason that I was expelled from school. Or at least I'm gonna mention the reason. Cause you don't know who the reason.
- [06:35]
Andrew Roberts
I don't know the reason.
- [06:36]
David Petraeus
Oh absolutely. Good. Okay. I don't think I'm the first person ever young man to get drunk and climb up buildings. You know that?
- [06:43]
Andrew Roberts
Absolutely not.
- [06:44]
David Petraeus
Thank you.
- [06:45]
Andrew Roberts
Time honored tradition. I think.
- [06:46]
David Petraeus
Hallelujah. That I'm not the only person this happened to. But quite understandably the school chucked me out before I fell off one of them. You know. And they. And they'd have got blamed. It led to actually one of my wife's most brilliant witticisms. She's a very funny woman, my wife. And she said yes. And all Andrew's done since in life is to get drunk and social climb.
- [07:11]
Andrew Roberts
That is climbing.
- [07:11]
David Petraeus
It's. How bad is it?
- [07:13]
Andrew Roberts
We might come back to that. It seems like also maybe it's hard for me to tell given the British school system. Although I did go to St. Paul's in New Hampshire, where they do have the third, fourth, fifth, sixth form and so on. So that much I know. But I think in the same piece where I found the Cranly bit, in doing the research, also found, note that you were approached as a possible candidate for MI6 a bit later on.
- [07:36]
David Petraeus
No, that was when I was at Cambridge. Cambridge, yes. Yes, absolutely. That's the right time to be approached for MI6 is because Cambridge and MI6 have had a long and fairly disastrous career. Needless to say, all of the worst spies in the 1930s, traitors of the 1930s went to Cambridge. But, yeah, it was a fascinating thing. I was just going down from university and somebody in my college, one of the dons there, who's still there actually, come to think of it, approached me and said, how about it? Would you be interested in becoming a spy? And so automatically, needless to say, you just think of yourself as James Bond immediately, that sort of Dandelanda, dun dun, dun, dun dun dun. The soundtrack in the back of your brain. You're automatically there with your Beretta and the beautiful women and all of that kind of thing. But I then had to actually do the process of where you need to join, which I did get through. And it was completely hilarious. I mean, it was. You couldn't satirize it. Basically, they asked you things like, there were hundreds of questions and you had to answer them very, very quickly. And some of them were things you'd expect, like, you know, what are the five longest rivers in the world kind of thing. Put them in order and all that. There were also things like place in order of social precedent. Prince, duke, viscount, marquis, baronet. Oh, I'm out. Yeah, well, exactly.
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Andrew Roberts
I would have drawn in Cookie Monster. I wouldn't have gotten.
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David Petraeus
You're American, you're allowed to. They're not going to ask that in the CIA. But for some reason, in MI6, back, this was, I hasten to add, back in the sort of mid-1980s, that was one of the questions.
- [09:13]
Andrew Roberts
What did the don think made you a potential candidate?
- [09:18]
David Petraeus
Well, that also was a little bit annoying, really, because he told me later about how he had been interviewed by MI6, and one of the things he'd been asked is, and is Andrew a kind person? And this person said, no, not really. And he saw the person interviewing him put a tick in the margin next to the question.
- [09:40]
Andrew Roberts
I wonder if that made you more or less desirable.
- [09:42]
David Petraeus
Much more desirable. Desirable. As far as they were concerned. They ticked the thing right. I can unsightly well, James Bond, he's not a kind person, is he really?
- [09:51]
Andrew Roberts
No, no, no. We view them as disposable pleasures. Well, perhaps. So let's see if we can take off the initial layers of the onion with respect to history. Christopher Perry. Mr. Christopher Perry, who's that?
- [10:06]
David Petraeus
He was my first history teacher when I was at prep school, which in the English version means when you're sort of 10 to 13. He's dead now, but he was a inspirational history master. He taught history in the way that I think it should be taught, in a narrative way of explaining really, you know, what happened next and why. He believed in the great events, the great sort of wars and battles and things like that. And he was a kind man. He wouldn't have made it into MI6, but he was a sort of old school history master of the best possible kind. Mind.
- [10:42]
Andrew Roberts
What characterized that? You said narrative, but maybe would you be able to contrast the status quo as it goes in terms of teaching history and then how his style most differed from that.
- [10:55]
David Petraeus
He taught it as the most exciting story you're ever going to hear, basically, which has the extraordinary added advantage of being completely true. He'd sort of sit cross legged on the table and give you the voice of Charles I and then the voice of Oliver Cromwell, you know, Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots. He would entrance you with the excitement of the unfolding story, every word of which would be true. It would have loads of dates in it. At the end of the term, each of the terms the semester, you'd be tested on 300 dates and not a child in that class didn't get at least 298 of them right. Extraordinary way of teaching. You did it entirely through inspiration rather than through just sort of standing there on a blackboard ordering people to remember what happened in 1356 or 1415.
- [11:45]
Andrew Roberts
Did he have any theater background?
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David Petraeus
You'd have thought.
- [11:49]
Andrew Roberts
You'd have thought, because just sitting cross legged on the desk is going to get a requisite minimal amount of attention from the students, which is brilliant.
- [11:57]
David Petraeus
Automatically, of course. Exactly. No, I mean, now I come to think of it, of course he was overacting from day one, but he didn't seem to be at the time, at least as far as the 10 year old Andrew Roberts was concerned.
- [12:12]
Andrew Roberts
We have a sort of rental library behind us in this room that I've rented and one of the books sitting over there. The Power Broker does an amazing job of end of chapter cliffhangers. That's I think Robert Caro over there.
- [12:24]
David Petraeus
And he managed to make urban development. Essentially that book's about urban development and he managed to make that interesting. But you've got a few other ones. You've got a great friend of mine there, Neil Ferguson, writing about in his book Colossus. You've got some pretty interesting people, a few people that I've met. And so you might have rented it, but it's a pretty good bunch of books.
- [12:47]
Andrew Roberts
And it's also quite surreal that Neil is featured here since he is, I'd say, partially responsible for us meeting in the first place.
- [12:56]
David Petraeus
Yeah, he told me definitely to go on your show. He said loads of people watch it and you've got a good sense of female. We'll see.
- [13:01]
Andrew Roberts
We'll see about sense of humor.
- [13:02]
David Petraeus
We'll see later when we're out.
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Andrew Roberts
Yeah, the jury is out. The jury is out. I found in writing history, and I'm paraphrasing here, but I believe you've said before that you're cautious around the words perhaps, maybe, possibly, especially probably.
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David Petraeus
Yeah.
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Andrew Roberts
Could you explain why?
- [13:21]
David Petraeus
Don't use them. They're cheat words. What they're saying to the reader is, I haven't worked hard enough on this. I don't know. I'm going to just come up with some kind of theory here. Bear with me. You shouldn't do that. If the person's paid $40 for your book, he or she is going to want to think you know what you're talking about. So if something is a great story and you're not sure it's true, but nonetheless it's funny, or it shines a light onto personality or for some reason, there's a great reason why you need to put it in the book. There are loads of ways that you can hint to the reader, you know, you can say it is said that or the story is told that, or anecdotally people stated that and that's the signal to the reader, this is probably not true at all.
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Andrew Roberts
Someone's hedging their bets.
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David Petraeus
Yeah, but it's too good to leave out. But perhaps, probably a maybe and so on there. You really are hedging your bets. I think it breaks the bond of trust that you need to have with your reader.
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Andrew Roberts
Would you mind speaking to the importance of steady nerves or self control in crisis? It seems that that's something that recurs. And the reason I'm asking about it is this would be, I suppose, a sub question. How much of it do you think is nature versus nurture? Also. But feel free to take that in any direction you'd like.
- [14:44]
David Petraeus
Both Napoleon and Churchill were educated in war. They both went to military colleges. So as their level of command grew, as they grew older, the sense of responsibilities they had, the number of men essentially that they were controlling, increased exponentially. So they had the intellectual background, they had the training as well. And as young men, in both cases, they thought a lot about war, about Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great and so on. They had a egotism to look at it in the negative way, but a self confidence to look at it in a positive way that gave them the ability to take these shatteringly important decisions. So I think it's much more nurture than the nature. And in both cases, as far as they were concerned, there was a sort of holy fire that they both had. There was not holy in a religious sense, obviously, because neither of them were at all religious, but in a sort of deeper spiritual sense, a belief that what they were doing was so good and right and proper and had to be done, that they were not kept up awake at night over even the death of friends. Death of friends that they were responsible.
- [16:04]
Andrew Roberts
For, they were responsible for. In the cases of Churchill and Napoleon. We could bring up other names, or I suppose I'm using the royal we here, you could bring up other names. Were there particular philosophers or writers that they found particularly instructive, who they leaned on in some sense that they found solace in? Were there particular minds?
- [16:24]
David Petraeus
Well, certainly Churchill did because he was a huge reader. He was a massive autodidact. He never went to university. And so therefore, when he was a young subaltern in India in his early 20s, he sat down and read the great philosophers as well as writers. And he was particularly influenced by Gibbon and Macaulay, the two great 19th century historians, English historians, and that affected his writing style and of course later his oratorical style, but also his outlook on life. Philosophical outlook on life. With regards to Napoleon, he was even more literary, really, because he also wrote short stories and books and so on. And so he was very much affected by what he read, again as a young man. And in both cases it's slightly. They were reading so much that it slightly cut them off from their contemporaries. Napoleon didn't have many friends when he was in his early 20s. And Churchill, when the other people were off sleeping in the midday heat of India, his colleagues and comrades, he'd be sitting there reading Schopenhauer and Gibbon and Macaulay and so on.
- [17:44]
Andrew Roberts
How did Gibbon and Macaulay inform his philosophical leanings?
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David Petraeus
They made him into what was Called at the time a Whig. We don't have them today, obviously, but they were in modern sense, I suppose, liberal conservatives who believed in noblesse oblige in the importance.
- [18:03]
Andrew Roberts
What is that?
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David Petraeus
I'm sorry? Noblesse oblige? It's almost medieval concept where your duty, if you have privilege, is to work for the greater good of the community, to protect widows and orphans, to. It's sort of like the knightly chivalric concept that you get from the Middle Ages. And they very much believed in that. And so did Churchill.
- [18:27]
Andrew Roberts
Let me ask about Napoleon. So I know shockingly little about Napoleon, I'm embarrassed to admit, and I do want to ask more about Churchill as well, but you've described him as the prime exemplar of war leadership. Why do you say that?
- [18:39]
David Petraeus
There are lots of military leaders who can do a lot of things, but he was the only one that I can think of who could do all of them. Of course, it helps if you're winning. In the last three years of his military career, he was losing. But even then, even when he had far fewer troops, when he was retreating, when he was defending Paris in the 1814 campaign, for example, he was still able to win five victories in seven days in the 1814 campaign. That's two years after the retreat from Moscow. It's quite extraordinary capacity. And he was able to win whether he was advancing or retreating, whether he was defending the town or attacking it, whether he was attacking on the right or left flank or sometimes straight through the center, as at Austerlitz. He had that capacity, that mind for military conquest. But also, of course, the greatness that was required completely to revolutionize French society. People think that the French Revolution revolutionized society, you know, the clues in the name, as it were. But in fact the long lasting things that actually dragged France into the 19th century were things like the Code Napoleon, which were not a revolutionary concept. They were a Napoleonic concept.
- [19:59]
Andrew Roberts
This may seem like a lazy question, but since I'm operating from a deficit here with respect to knowledge of Napoleon, what do you think it was that allowed him to be a decathlete of war, as it were, being good at all of these different facets and I think of how we might analyze different athletes and what allows them to exercise the capabilities we see, sort of breaking it down into its component parts. But how would you describe what enabled him to do that where others were unable?
- [20:28]
David Petraeus
It was inspiration, but also perspiration. He really did put in the time thinking about it and reading about it. By it I mean warfare and of course he'd been educated in it. He read the key books. There's a guy called the Comte de Gilbert who in 1772 wrote a book about strategy and tactics and he 30 years later put these into operation. And so he was able to spot the sort of best of the best when it came to modern thinking and to, or in this case 30 year old thinking. In fact, that didn't matter because the weapons of war hadn't changed in the intervening period and he was able to put those thoughts and ideas into practical use. The classic example being the core system. And when.
- [21:21]
Andrew Roberts
What was it called?
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David Petraeus
It's called the core system. It's basically C O R E C O R P S and what he did with them was to create mini armies essentially which were able to march separately but converge and concentrate for the battle. And so one of your corps would engage the enemy and then he would use the other corps to outmaneuver and envelop the enemy, sometimes double envelop the enemy. It was a brilliant concept. And actually the Allies didn't start beating Napoleon until they had also adopted the core system. He was always at the cutting edge of thinking of the new concepts and at the same time he had very old fashioned views about how to excite the men. And he, I mean victory obviously is the best thing when it comes to exciting. Exactly. Nothing much works better than that. But as I say, he was still winning at the end of his career. But he had this belief that to appeal to the soul was the way to electrify the men. And so he was able to do that. And some people who he was against, Duke of Wellington, the British general being the classic example who won the battle of Waterloo against him, who wasn't interested in electrifying the soul of the men at all. He rather despised his ordinary soldiers. But nonetheless you're talking about Wellington or the Duke of Wellington. He had some sort of choice negative remarks about his, about his own soldiers and he was a rather sort of stuffy aristocrat, but they loved him because he cared about how many of them died in battle, you know, and he never lost the battle as well, which is a very useful thing in a commander, needless to say. But he didn't try, he didn't go out. He would think it beneath him to go out and try to inspire the men. Whereas Napoleon, his choice of hat and his gray coat and his way of taking off medal his own medals and giving them to soldiers on the battlefield and his orders of the day, his proclamations before the Battle of the pyramids in 1799, he said, 40 centuries look down upon you. And this is an extraordinary thing for a soldier, you know, in Egypt, far away from home, he looks up at the pyramids and thinks, yeah, he's placing the events of that day in the long historical parabola. And Churchill did that too, by the way. Of course, to a great degree. In about 10% of all of the speeches that Churchill gave in 1940, there's some reference to history or the past. He too, would summon up the idea that, yes, Britain is on its own. Britain and the British Commonwealth are on their own. And this, of course, was in the period before America and Russia were in the war. But we've been in terrible straits before. Look at Sir Francis Drake, look at Admiral Nelson and so on. And we came through those and won. He also brought up the First World War a lot. So, yes, he too, drew on history. And people knew that because he'd written history books and written biographies, including the biography of his great ancestor, the 1st Duke of Marlborough, who was, with Wellington, the best soldier that Britain ever produced. People trusted his view of history.
- [24:38]
Andrew Roberts
So instead of biographies, I'd like to ask about autobiography. It's my impression that you recommend that young people read My Early Life and that there are life lessons contained within it that perhaps might help young people. What types of good advice or life lessons can people expect to find in that book? Or does anything stand out to you?
- [25:01]
David Petraeus
Oh, yes, well, loads of them. I mean, resilience is the classic one. Although he doesn't go in this book into criticizing his power, parents, even between the lines. Churchill was tremendously resilient because his father despised him and his mother ignored him, essentially. But in the actual book itself, he talks about how wonderful it is to be young, 20 to 25. Those are the years, he says, people will forgive you for mistakes you make in that period. It's not until you're 30 that people judge you on what you've achieved rather than your promise and so on. So it's a. He writes about his time, his escape from prison, for example, which, let's face it, there is no young man or woman who hasn't at some stage dreamt about the idea of a successful prison escape. He took part in the last great cavalry charge of the British Empire, and so he writes about what it's like to charge with lancers in. He himself had a pistol in a great cavalry charge. These are. It's just the most exciting book, and it draws you along with life lessons that are very Good. I think, even for today, at a time when you're frankly unlikely to have to escape from prison or take part in a cavalry charge, or you'll just.
- [26:17]
Andrew Roberts
Be very unsuccessful at attempting to escape prison. Modern lockdown. I can't let this go. It's sticking in my mind. The core strategy. I'm not sure if strategy is the right modifier for that, but that Napoleon used, it seems like that was waiting to be.
- [26:33]
David Petraeus
But it took him to be in the position, of course, of Emperor of France, whereby he could impose it. But equally, there are other things, like the Code Napoleon, that were not really waiting to be used. He had to sort of work them up into a body of laws that completely revolutionized France.
- [26:51]
Andrew Roberts
Now, when he took the writing from 30 years prior and applied it, is it the position that enabled him to do it, or did he think about risk differently than other people? And that is part of what allowed him to implement it.
- [27:07]
David Petraeus
He'd taken huge risks. He was 26 years old, and according to the Churchill view of life, you can take risks when you're 26 years old because people will forgive you. Actually, the French Revolution government would not have forgiven Napoleon if he'd lost the army of Italy in 1796. But nonetheless, he was a huge risk taker. He would attack when normal generals would have fallen back. He was very lucky in that he was fighting. He was 26. He was fighting generals who were Austrian generals who were in their 70s. He used to hit the hinge of enemy forces. If you have in an Austrian Sardinian army, for example, he would hit the point between the Austrians and the Sardinians, pushing them both back along their supply lines and so on. He used psychology a great deal, trying to get into the minds of the generals he was opposed to. He was a great chooser of lieutenants, of divisional commanders and people who he felt he could trust. Superb sense of timing as well in a battle. He was, as I say, the sort of exemplar of so many of the leadership tropes.
- [28:16]
Andrew Roberts
Do you think he would have viewed his decisions from the outside that look risky as risky? If someone takes uncalculated risks over and over again, then you could call them reckless, but at least at face value, that's not maybe the adjective I would use.
- [28:34]
David Petraeus
Yeah, but they came off. This is the thing. In the Italian campaign, this first great campaign of his, he hardly lost a battle. He fought 20 and won 19 of them. So if you do that, even though you have taken risks, it's a sort of force multiplier in A sense you wind up thinking that they aren't as risky. He did believe in luck, which was very important. You know, he famously said that he wanted his marshals to be lucky and he would promote people if he thought they were lucky. And that, of course, is a. I mean, it runs against everything that we 21st century rationalists can possibly believe in. But, you know, it worked for him.
- [29:12]
Andrew Roberts
Yeah, seems to work.
- [29:13]
David Petraeus
Until it didn't.
- [29:14]
Andrew Roberts
Until it doesn't, of course. Until it doesn't.
- [29:17]
David Petraeus
Yeah.
- [29:17]
Andrew Roberts
So promoted the unlucky guy.
- [29:20]
David Petraeus
The decision in 1812 to march on Moscow was hugely risky, and of course, it didn't pay off.
- [29:26]
Andrew Roberts
Is it true that you have a signed letter from Aldous Huxley?
- [29:30]
David Petraeus
I do.
- [29:31]
Andrew Roberts
All right, now, Aldous Huxley.
- [29:32]
David Petraeus
I believe Aldous is the English Aldous God.
- [29:36]
Tim Ferriss
You know, I've realized the longer I.
- [29:38]
Andrew Roberts
Spend in England, I really need to. I think I should take TOEFL classes. Test of English as a foreign language. Need to brush up on the mother tongue, as it were. He died, if I'm not wrong, the year you were born, I think it was.
- [29:52]
Tim Ferriss
Why do you have that letter?
- [29:53]
Andrew Roberts
And what does the letter say?
- [29:55]
David Petraeus
The letter actually was written from Los Angeles where he was living in the 1950s. It was in 1959. And somebody just wrote to him asking for his autograph and obviously also asked. I don't have the letter from the autograph hunter, but he obviously asked for some sort of deep, meaningful thought. And the deep and meaningful thought that Huxley gave him. And I'm a huge admirer of Huxley. Bylas in Gaza and obviously Brave New Worlds and so on, are wonderful works. And he said in this letter that men do not learn much from the lessons of history is one of the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach us. And that is so true, isn't it? I mean, there's not a book that I've written. I've written 20 books. There's not a book that I've written when I haven't looked across at that framed letter in my study and thought, wow, that is just so perceptive.
- [30:50]
Andrew Roberts
So I have a question about the subtitle of your bio refound Churchill, which I believe is Walking With Destiny. You mentioned this. Holy fire, I think is the term you used earlier. But do many of the leaders you've studied have this belief, and I may not be wording this the best way, but of being chosen by destiny in some fashion?
- [31:13]
David Petraeus
The phrase comes from his remark in the last chapter of the last few pages of his war Memoirs, the first volume of his war memoirs, the Gathering Storm. Wonderful book work. And he's referring to the day that he became Prime Minister, the day he was appointed by the King as Prime Minister, which happened to be, coincidentally, as it turned out, because Hitler didn't know he was going to become Prime Minister. On the same day that Hitler invaded in the west, invaded Belgium and Luxembourg and Holland, shortly afterwards, of course, to invade France. And he said, I felt as if I were walking with destiny and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial. And he had a profound sense of personal destiny. Now, you and I might think, as 21st century rationalists, that this is a bit sort of mad to think that you're preordained to save, in this case, Britain and civilization. If you said that to me, that that was your belief about yourself, I would think that you were clinically insane. But enough things had happened to Churchill in his life. He had had so many close brushes with death that it's not insane to think that, but it's not by any means just. And Napoleon also felt that he had a star to guide him, and he had the luck that we spoke about earlier, but that luck, who was a woman in his case, was somebody he needed to woo and to try to seduce. And of course, in 1812, she turns her back on him and he speaks of her in that sense, really, which is also a pretty insane way to look at life, isn't it? But they were both, as I mentioned earlier, devotees of the ancients, of Caesar and Alexander the Great, both of whom also, of course, had this driving sense of personal destiny. And so it does exist in people.
- [33:07]
Andrew Roberts
If you could, I'll give you two options. Stand in, meaning take the place of one of the people you've studied in depth, or just simply witness them in a given moment or day or period in their lives. What might you choose?
- [33:24]
David Petraeus
Well, first of all, I wouldn't want to stand in their place at all. I know that I don't have the intestinal fortitude of these extraordinary people, but it would be. Would it be the day that I just mentioned? It would be the 10th of May, 1940, the day that Hitler's invading the Cabinet meets and recognizes that Neville Chamberlain is not the man to continue on the war, now that it's turned to the west, and the meetings that took place the previous day, and that day whereby Neville Chamberlain goes to the King and suggests Churchill, and the King wasn't terribly excited about Churchill either, because they'd fallen out over the abdication crisis and he thought Churchill was a bit of a loose cannon, but nonetheless he's willing to call Churchill. Churchill then goes to Buckingham palace and becomes Prime Minister and comes back and starts to organize his government as the news is coming in of the German success, success and victories on the Western Front. I mean, this is what a day. What a day in history that must have been. So if I could be a fly on the wall any day in history, that's the day that I would choose. Can we just go back though, to this concept of a sense of destiny? Because of course, it isn't just great men, as in good men, positive forces in history that has this Adolf Hitler also had a sense of destiny when he was in Providence and luck and being watched over by bigger forces and so on. When he survived his assassination attempt on 20 July 1944, when you remember Stauffenberg moves the briefcase with a bomb in it to a point in the table that just shreds Hitler's trousers when it goes off and doesn't kill him. He also put it down to Providence that he had been allowed to survive and therefore to stay in charge. And the Fuhrer was going to save the Fatherland and the Reich. So it's not something I don't want your viewers and listeners to come away thinking that it's a really good thing to think that, you know, you're being watched over by a more powerful force who's saving you to become the world saving figure.
- [35:31]
Andrew Roberts
You can cut a lot of different ways. David Koresh and cult leaders and, well, exactly that. Jim Jones down in Ghana, where all.
- [35:40]
David Petraeus
Of these frauds and crooks and con men use it as well.
- [35:47]
Tim Ferriss
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- [37:15]
Andrew Roberts
Are there any particular weaknesses or pathologies or failures that come to mind in, say, Churchill and Napoleon or others who help to make them ultimately great in the ways that they were great?
- [37:29]
David Petraeus
Oh, definitely. Definitely. The key thing is learning from mistakes, which not all politicians do. And he scarcely point out that Churchill certainly did. He made mistake after mistake. He got female suffrage wrong. The abdication crisis that I mentioned earlier. He joined the gold standard at the wrong time, at the wrong level. The blackened hands in Ireland was a disaster. Primarily, of course, the Dardanelles crisis of 1915 to early 1916, where, where over 100,000 Allied troops were killed, wounded or captured. This was a series of mistakes in every single one of them. He learned from those mistakes.
- [38:08]
Andrew Roberts
How did he do that? Because there's probably, I would think, maybe some method behind the madness. Maybe it's just more self awareness or reflection. But did he have a process for learning?
- [38:20]
David Petraeus
He wasn't hubristic. That was the key thing. I think it probably helps also, of course, that he was in a democratic system, unlike like Napoleon or Hitler, whereby, you know, he was criticized the entire time in the House of Commons for all of those things. He had to defend them and therefore had to in a logical and rational point. I mean, democracy works very well at pricking the pomposity and hubris of people if it's working properly. And Napoleon also learned from mistakes in his military career. And I don't believe that the decision to march on Moscow itself was hubristic. I'm slightly aside from a lot of military historians about this. But just to explain, he'd beaten the Russians twice before. He had an army twice the size of the Russians. He knew perfectly well that the winter was going to come. He stayed too long in Moscow. But if he'd gone to Moscow and then come back again immediately, he would not have had the climactic disasters that overcame him with the blizzards in the October and November of 1812. And so you have this sense that, yes, it was a appalling strategic error, but it wasn't done out of a drive because he thought he was a sort of demigod. That I think is a misunderstanding of his personality.
- [39:39]
Andrew Roberts
So I'm going to ask something that Neil Ferguson of Colossus on the Shelf put in an email. I would ask Andrew about the diary he keeps, which is a source of intense anxiety.
- [39:50]
David Petraeus
He's obsessed with this. He's. Okay, finish the rest of it.
- [39:53]
Andrew Roberts
Which is a source of intense anxiety to all of his friends and even more to his enemies. Best wishes, Neil.
- [40:00]
David Petraeus
Neil doesn't care about any of that. He only cares about what I say about him. He is the friend. He is the friend who is obsessed with the diary. Yes, I keep a diary, for God's sake. Is it such a crime? We went on the skiing holiday this year and it's all he talked about. He's obsessed.
- [40:23]
Andrew Roberts
The forbidden fruit. I mean, what is the story here?
- [40:26]
David Petraeus
I think he's kicking himself that he didn't keep on. You know, you think of all these extraordinary people he meets. You know, every time I see him, he's just been talking to President Xi or Bibi Netanyahu or, you know, President of America, and he doesn't write down and keep it all in the diary. So I think there's an element of envy going on here, frankly. But I find it very relaxing and calming to think that my life isn't just going to be a complete waste of time. And one of the only ways that I can.
- [41:01]
Andrew Roberts
I can see that.
- [41:02]
David Petraeus
Thank you. Well, that's kind of you. Thank you. One of the only ways that I can justify this concept that it's all not just the sort of nihilist, sort of male diagonal boondoggle. Exactly. Is by writing books, obviously, which I hope will survive me, but also noting down what I've done in the day. But Neil is convinced that every time he says anything embarrassing or something, I'm going to be.
- [41:29]
Andrew Roberts
You're just loading the ammo into your diary.
- [41:31]
David Petraeus
Exactly. And when we're sort of 80, he's going to. He's going to go to the bookshop, buy the diary, flick to Ferguson, Neil, and see sort of Ferrari, 40 entries, each of which is going to make his face go redder than the following charges. Exactly. Which. It's not going to be like that at all. What he's actually going to do is to Immediately go to the diary and look up Ferguson Neill. But see all the amusing, charming, intelligent remarks he's made, the witticisms, you know, and all that kind of thing. And not just him, obviously, everybody that I've ever met over the last 40 plus years and how do you. So you're on your metal now. You're going to have to. I'm going to say, went on to.
- [42:12]
Andrew Roberts
Be on best behavior.
- [42:13]
David Petraeus
Exactly. What an idiot.
- [42:16]
Andrew Roberts
Note to self, send chocolates to Andrew. Don't forget his birthday. Now there are many people who keep a diary. How do you keep your diary? Is it nightly exercise?
- [42:31]
Tim Ferriss
Is it typed out?
- [42:32]
David Petraeus
Is it pen?
- [42:33]
Andrew Roberts
Is it a quill pen?
- [42:35]
David Petraeus
You mustn't do it nightly because at least you might be able to. But I drink and so I like drinking. Good. Yeah. And so there's nothing worse than trying to write if you've been drinking. Also writing down the witchcism. Sometimes there's a bit of a problem owing to the fact that I can't read my writing the next morning. But no, it has to be done pretty much the next morning. You can't leave it for two weeks or so.
- [42:58]
Andrew Roberts
Do you do it with. What's your frequency?
- [43:00]
David Petraeus
I used to. Every day I used to write it. Oh, no, but if nothing interesting has happened, then I won't put anything down.
- [43:07]
Andrew Roberts
Nothing to report.
- [43:08]
David Petraeus
Yeah, no, like Louis XVI on the 14th of July, 1789, the day of the fall of the Bastille. All he writes is rien. Nothing. So I hope I'm not going to be quite as moronic as that. It's not really intended for publication, which is another thing that Neil doesn't.
- [43:27]
Andrew Roberts
He's going to latch onto that really part of that sentence. He's going to be like, you see, you see?
- [43:32]
David Petraeus
Yeah, no, of course he is. But nonetheless, I do find it. Well, you mentioned earlier about how many words I write. It's never more than about 500 words maximum and it picks the most interesting part of the day. And if somebody has said or done something interesting, I'll stick it in.
- [43:49]
Andrew Roberts
Do you do that before your book writing? Let's say you're on.
- [43:53]
David Petraeus
Yes, first thing in the morning.
- [43:54]
Andrew Roberts
All right. And is that just like pajama slippers and a cup of coffee or.
- [43:57]
David Petraeus
Yeah, so I see that.
- [43:58]
Andrew Roberts
Yeah. All right, great.
- [43:59]
David Petraeus
Exactly.
- [44:01]
Andrew Roberts
And do you take this seems like such a ridiculous question, but how do you think about taking breaks when you're writing? I mean, obviously you might have a bathroom break or something like that, but do you build in breaks? Do you Ride the flow as long as you have it.
- [44:14]
David Petraeus
What does it look the flow as long as you have it. Absolutely, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because it might not come back if you deliberately have it sometimes, and I'm slightly loath to admit this public, but nonetheless, sometimes if you are really flowing, I can go without, you know, washing for three days. I can be in my dressing gown and slippers. My wife finds it extremely unhygienic and I'm not allowed to sleep in the same bed. But I will. If I'm running, you know, hard at a really difficult chapter and I need to keep my thoughts in order, I will not waste time doing anything. I'll get some breakfast, you know, and so on, but that will just be a dash to the kitchen and back again. Because you've got to get. If something's complicated and there are lots of occasions not a classic, we go back to the 10th of May 1940, that in my Churchill book, you have to get it right because every minute, not just every hour, every minute, something is happening. They're getting news from what the Luftwaffe is attacking and he's then having to create his government. He then goes off to the House of Commons and so on. You know, it's just relentless. And unless you encapsulate in your mind successfully what is important about that day, you'll never get it over to the reader. And if you're constantly going off and going for a walk or going to the gym or showering or whatever, there's a danger that you're going to fall out of the rhythm of creativity.
- [45:43]
Andrew Roberts
How do you think about that flow? When you have the flow? I mean, there is a hasten to.
- [45:47]
David Petraeus
Add is never more than three days I've ever got without a shower.
- [45:50]
Andrew Roberts
I wouldn't judge. I was just on a hiking trip. I went 10 days without showering. So I don't judge. I won't throw stones in my glass house.
- [45:58]
David Petraeus
Only when I'm writing the book. I hasten to add that as well. God, I don't want people to come up and show parties hold their nose and go, hello, Andrew, how do you.
- [46:09]
Andrew Roberts
Think about that flow with writing? So there's one reason not to interrupt the writing. If you have a hard task ahead of you and you have 47 balls in the air and if you drop them, you're going to have to start the juggling process all over again. The boot up sequence takes a long time. How do you think about the flow of writing or that feeling that things are coming to you more easily or moving onto the page more easily.
- [46:36]
David Petraeus
Sometimes it's a very bad thing. Of course, Dr. Johnson did say, when you have written your most brilliant purple paragraph, read it again and rip it up.
- [46:47]
Andrew Roberts
So you must tell me more about that.
- [46:48]
David Petraeus
Oh, yeah. No. Well, if you think that you've just written something completely brilliant, there's a very good chance that it's rubbish. It has to. To be somebody else. It has to be your publisher or some other person who can read it and have a completely objective eye. Because there's a very good chance that you're hugging yourself with glee about something that actually you think sounds wonderful, but in fact is complete.
- [47:11]
Andrew Roberts
It's completely the name of my memoir, Hugging Yourself With Glee. And I write that down, give you your customary 5%. That's fine. If you had to choose. Maybe you don't want to choose from your darlings here, but. But if this question has an answer, you don't even need to name them. But you keep a person in mind. If you had to choose one person to act as your proofreader for your work, to be that sanity check.
- [47:33]
David Petraeus
No, he's called Stuart Proffitt. He's the most brilliant publisher in London. He's known by everybody to be the most brilliant. He's also the most irritating.
- [47:41]
Andrew Roberts
That makes sense to me.
- [47:42]
David Petraeus
Peasant. He. Oh, my God. For my Napoleon book, he's going to listen to this, so I'm going to have to be as nice as possible. But oh, my. He's. He's Professor Perfect is my nickname for it, because he's a total professorial kind of figure. And for my Napoleon book, I remember a series of marginalia. And again, this is the thing where you think you've done something rather good, you know, and he writes one of the things he wrote in the marginal. Are you sure this joke is funny? Nothing more crushing than to have that he also wrote.
- [48:17]
Andrew Roberts
Strikes me as very British also.
- [48:19]
David Petraeus
Exactly. Question mark, you know, and you read it again, you chortle to yourself, yes, it is funny, damn it. But he wrote there were a whole series of them in the. Well, we were talking earlier about the 1796 campaign of Napoleon. He said, how wide was the river Po in 1796? There was another one. Did Napoleon take Herodotus to Egypt, you think? God damn, I don't know. I'm going to have to find out. You know, he's a genius, but also a very irritating person.
- [48:51]
Andrew Roberts
Could you say more about what makes him so good? I'll buy some time just by saying if I can't find a writer Friend of mine, let's just say, or an editor who can proofread my work. I'll very often give, and I write a particular type of thing, but I will give my chapter, let's just say, to a friend who's a really good lawyer. And part of the reason for that is that they're very good at trimming out excess. And if anything is ambiguous, they're great.
- [49:18]
David Petraeus
Or contradictory.
- [49:18]
Andrew Roberts
Or contradictory. They're very good at surgically excising that. What makes this particular gentleman. What was his name again? Stuart.
- [49:27]
David Petraeus
Stuart Prophet.
- [49:28]
Andrew Roberts
All right, great, ma'am. What makes Stuart so good at giving feedback? Does he see things differently?
- [49:36]
David Petraeus
He's a profoundly committed to history. He loves history. So he has a sort of higher purpose to try to flood the world with great history books, which is, as far as I'm concerned, the greatest purpose that you can have. I mean, it doesn't get better than that. He has a very logical brain. He's very good on syntax. So anything that doesn't sound right in a sentence, he will point out sometimes to have right.
- [50:07]
Andrew Roberts
From a poetic perspective.
- [50:09]
David Petraeus
From a poetic perspective, yeah. If there's a rhythm that isn't right, or if something rhymes as well, sometimes you can use two words that have a rhyme in them, and he will cut that automatically because it just doesn't feel right.
- [50:23]
Andrew Roberts
Doesn't sit well with his sensibilities.
- [50:24]
David Petraeus
Precisely. And mine, I hasten to argue, because I very rarely actually disagree with him. I did on the joke, by the way, and whenever anybody tells me that that particular joke is funny, I forwarded it. I forwarded. I ping the email straight on to Stuart. Of course I do. I'd be mad not to, wouldn't I? But no, there's a. I mean, and he's been doing it for 40 years, and he's at the top of his trade, so you would expect him to be really good, but, boy, is he.
- [50:52]
Andrew Roberts
So there's two examples you gave, the width of the river and Herodotus. Why did he ask those two?
- [50:59]
David Petraeus
Because he is always trying to put himself into the mind of the reader and wondering what the reader would be thinking. And he thought, rightly or wrongly, in this case, that the reader would be interested in the width of the river and. And whether or not Herodotus went with him. But there are loads more examples like that. You know, I will send him 100 pages and he'll send me back 100 pages of questions and criticisms and remarks. I almost sometimes think that I ought to put his name on the front cover. Of the book. He phoned me up, actually, about the Napoleon book and the original of Napoleon just had a huge N on it and lots of bees. And he said. He phoned me up and he said, I'm going to. I've got this idea for the front cover of the book. Your name isn't going to be on it. And he said, and neither is Napoleon's. And I thought over the phone, I thought, okay, he's finally gone completely cracked. Yeah, exactly. That's right. Poor man. How long can he stay in his job? If he's going to come up with.
- [51:58]
Andrew Roberts
Ideas, he can fake it for a while.
- [52:00]
David Petraeus
Yes, that's right, exactly. But it can't be long now. And it turned out to be a totally brilliant concept because if you see a gigantic N with B, you think of Napoleon, you know, and that's what.
- [52:11]
Andrew Roberts
Bees, as in. I'm such an idiot. Bees. Like honeybees.
- [52:15]
David Petraeus
Honeybees, yeah, that was his symbol. It was Napoleon's symbol because they could sting, but they could also give honey, you know, that was the idea. And it just captured people's imagination and sold an awful lot of copies, which was really great. That sold half a million copies, that book.
- [52:29]
Andrew Roberts
Now that's incredible. Yeah, that is incredible. Sounds like such a gift. To have a Stuart. I need a Stuart.
- [52:34]
David Petraeus
Yeah, everyone needs a Stuart.
- [52:35]
Andrew Roberts
Everyone needs a Stuart.
- [52:35]
David Petraeus
Don't take mine.
- [52:36]
Andrew Roberts
But whatever you do. I think. I think he might find he might spend his entire first month on just the syntax errors in my first chapter.
- [52:48]
David Petraeus
You do want to strangle him, by the way.
- [52:50]
Andrew Roberts
It's the sign of a very good proofreader often. Why do you think it is that some historical figures take on these mythic proportions where some who have huge impacts seem to fall into obscurity over time? Are there particular characteristics, is it self made, in a sense, where people create that myth of themselves while they're still alive? How do you think about that?
- [53:18]
David Petraeus
I haven't thought about that before. That's a really good question. I think that it's a bit like there are some things that are very difficult to get over to people on the printed page. Charisma is one of them, Charm is another one. Sexiness. These are things that we all know from our own lives matter enormously. If somebody's charismatic, charming and sexy, you're going to want to be interested in them, follow them much more than somebody who isn't. And yet explaining how they are any of those things very famously hard to explain. And I think the same is true with historical characters. How can it be that this unprepossessing looking American president, who happens to with this strange beard but not mustache, who happens to be president at the time that the country is falling apart, manages to save the country through this terrible. See it through this terrible civil war and then is assassinated right at the end of the civil war. I mean, the story is so extraordinary, isn't it? And yet to explain the charisma and charm, not sexiness, I don't think it outram Lincoln's case. But you know, many of your readers might disagree with me nonetheless.
- [54:32]
Andrew Roberts
Just imagining him popping up on a dating app.
- [54:35]
David Petraeus
Would you swipe right to your left for Abe Lincoln? Exactly.
- [54:40]
Andrew Roberts
Am I ride a fixed gear bike, make expensive cappuccinos. That's kind of the hipster look. Anyway, I digress.
- [54:46]
David Petraeus
Yeah, it is difficult to explain how some people just grab the headlines and others don't. I mean, of course it does help to be a leader in a. That's true of Lincoln and Churchill and Poland and so on. The chance of becoming a world historical figure, if you are Prime Minister of Luxembourg in a time of peace is going to be much more difficult, of course. But yeah, there doesn't seem to be a hard and fast rule, does there?
- [55:14]
Andrew Roberts
Hard and fast recipe that I can follow. I'm just kidding.
- [55:19]
David Petraeus
Well, don't take us to war on the back of you wanting to be remembered.
- [55:22]
Andrew Roberts
I think I'm capable. Certainly not eager. Makes me think of. What is the title of that poem? Ozymandias. Look upon my works in despair. I'll leave that alone.
- [55:35]
David Petraeus
I met a traveler from an antique land who said two vast and trunkless legs of stone stand in the desert. And near them on the sand half shrunk a shattered visage lies, whose wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command tells that its sculptor well those passions read which yet survives. My name is Ozymandias, king of kings. Look upon my works, ye mighty in despair nothing besides remains Round that eternal wreck long and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away.
- [56:05]
Andrew Roberts
Hot damn. There you go, listeners.
- [56:07]
David Petraeus
Can you point out to the listeners that you didn't tell me that this was going to happen.
- [56:11]
Andrew Roberts
I did not send a memo in advance. And I suppose the preface to that is that there are these ruins sticking out of the sands.
- [56:21]
David Petraeus
Am I getting the feet? That's right, the trunks of the legs. So there was obviously a huge, magnificent kind of, you know, pyramid high, glorious statue to Ozymandias. And now there's nothing. And it goes back to what I was saying earlier about not being remembered.
- [56:39]
Tim Ferriss
Did you remember the.
- [56:40]
Andrew Roberts
Now I'm gonna. I feel like I'm not cross examining but asking too much. But who is the author of that poem?
- [56:46]
David Petraeus
Piercey Bischelli.
- [56:48]
Andrew Roberts
I saw the. One of maybe the original or certainly a first draft in Oxford because I was going through a program at Wadham College and there's an exhibit on right now which is something like cut paste rewrite and it shows the hand edited works of Mary Shelley, Frankenstein and all these others. And I came across that if anybody.
- [57:11]
David Petraeus
Wants to see a first edition of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, it's just gone on exhibition at the. I was there this morning, Lambeth Palace Library. There's a thing called her book. It's about female, early female writers. It's a brilliant exhibition. And so if there's anyone in London who's interested in seeing that book, it's there today.
- [57:33]
Andrew Roberts
Beautiful. And if you're near Oxford, Weston Library has the exhibit that I was mentioning. A lot of gems. A lot of gems. You have some really fun old stuff in the uk, it turns out. Thank you.
- [57:45]
David Petraeus
I'm not going to take that personally.
- [57:47]
Andrew Roberts
No, that's a compliment. Yeah. Old in the US is like 1970. It's smaller.
- [57:55]
David Petraeus
I thought you were talking about me. Oh, no. Good. All right.
- [57:58]
Andrew Roberts
Not you. How do you think about legacy? Because along the lines of any of the Ozymandias piece, I'm like, is it just sort of hubris to believe in the first place that that's something worth aspiring to, having something last and stand the test of time? I mean, how do you personally think about that? This? Well, especially as someone who studies history.
- [58:20]
David Petraeus
Yes. I obviously do want people to read my books long after I've died. Now I'm not going to know whether they are or not, so why on earth. It just seems so illogical to even think that, doesn't it? That it should matter to me that anything happens the second after I've died. But I know that I do. And it is one of the drives for being a writer because words always live forever and they're virtually the only thing that does. Ozymandias statue is just two trunkless legs of stone, whereas actually his words, you know, look upon my works, ye mighty in despair. That goes to the heart of the human condition. And Shelley's poetry still survives in a way that Ozymandias statue doesn't. So there is something about words that are immortal. And we're all sort of grasping for immortality in one way or another, aren't we?
- [59:17]
Andrew Roberts
Yeah. And it's true. Do you read fiction?
- [59:21]
David Petraeus
Yes, yes I do. When I go on holiday, which is usually hiking actually with my wife, she loves going to places that involve mountains. And in order to get history completely out of my system for the two weeks or so that we're hiking, I do read fiction. Sometimes if I want to completely clear my brain, I'll have a detective novel. And I've chosen the most complicated of all of the detective novelists. Chap called Robert Goddard. Have you ever heard of Robert Goddard?
- [59:52]
Andrew Roberts
I have not.
- [59:52]
David Petraeus
It's so complicated to work out who done it or what groups of people done it. You know, it's very rarely just one person and why. And I try and make notes in the back of the book connecting each person to everybody else. And so by the end of it it looks like one those really complicated sort of management.
- [60:12]
Tim Ferriss
Oh, it's like an org chart.
- [60:13]
David Petraeus
Yeah, exactly, exactly. With hundreds of people connecting to everybody else to try and work out who done it. And he always, always beats me.
- [60:24]
Andrew Roberts
That sounds fun. I've been getting as far as sort.
- [60:27]
David Petraeus
Of high culture writing novels concerned. I will occasionally do that. I'm president of the Cliveden Literary Festival and so we have lots of novelists come to that. And so if you've got William Boyd or Salman Rushdie or somebody who you know you're going to be bumping into at the festival, it's always a good idea to read their latest novel. We had Robert Harris recently and so that's always well worth doing. And then there are a few writers like Michel Welbeck, who is just so great that you have to sort of read whatever he brings out.
- [61:02]
Andrew Roberts
Is there. I don't recognize the name. I'm embarrassed.
- [61:05]
David Petraeus
He's a French writer. It's pronounced Hellabeck. And he's a genius. A very controversial and quite unpopular and in France. And the latest one I'm reading features his own murder. It's a great satire. It's very, very funny.
- [61:24]
Andrew Roberts
Is there a book you might suggest starting with? If I were going to start with.
- [61:27]
David Petraeus
The Map and the Territory. The Map of the Turtle, the Map and the Territory of Michel Heleck. The name starts H E double L E B and yeah, it's a sort of satire on French intellectual customs and.
- [61:43]
Andrew Roberts
I can see them loving that.
- [61:44]
David Petraeus
It's very funny. It's very funny.
- [61:46]
Andrew Roberts
Why is he controversial?
- [61:47]
David Petraeus
Oh, because he's been deeply politically incorrect as well. He just doesn't care. He just doesn't care what he writes. He's a honey badger in that sense. Do you know what I mean?
- [61:58]
Andrew Roberts
I do, I do, I do.
- [62:00]
David Petraeus
He's a literary honey badger. He's Welbeck.
- [62:04]
Andrew Roberts
Very honey badger. All right, so speaking of politically incorrect, how should we, in your mind, write about imperial history?
- [62:15]
David Petraeus
We should try, as far as possible to be genuinely objective. We shouldn't take the assumption that all white people, whenever they went abroad, did so solely in order to rape, murder, massacre and exploit. Because certainly in the latter part, we were talking earlier about, actually about Winston Churchill and the noblesse oblige, the concept that it was part of your duty as a privileged person to try to make the world a better place for other less privileged people. And that was, especially in the last part of the British Empire, a driving force for a lot of people, especially obviously, missionaries and Christians, but also other people, explorers and people who were involved in agriculture and so on. You know, they actually were not driven by rapacity and greed in the way that essentially the Marxist analysis of imperialism has made out. So be objective. Some of those people were like that. Undoubtedly. Of course they were, you know, especially some of the people in southern Africa and elsewhere. But for a long period of the story of the British Empire, for much of that empire, it actually was a force for human good rather than evil.
- [63:31]
Andrew Roberts
What do you see as the challenges moving forward for the capturing of history and. Or how do you see it changing as we move forward?
- [63:44]
David Petraeus
I am quite worried about it in Britain because, first of all, fewer and fewer people seem to be taking it as a subject at university level. Secondly, we have this thing it's nicknamed Henry to Hitler, where we jump from the Tudors to the Second World War, and we don't do the very important intervening stages of the Stuarts, the Civil War, the Hanoverians, loss of America, really anything up to the outbreak of the First World War. And there's so much of really important history in that period that we seem to jump from one to the next. There was a survey quite recently of British teenagers, quite a big survey, you know, over a thousand of them, and 20% of them thought, like 23% of them thought that the American War of Independence was won by Denzel Washington, you.
- [64:39]
Andrew Roberts
Know, and the Americans get a bad rap.
- [64:41]
David Petraeus
I know, I know, exactly.
- [64:42]
Andrew Roberts
It's not just us.
- [64:43]
David Petraeus
No. And also there were 20% of these kids, these are British school kids, who also thought that Winston Churchill was a fictional character and that Sherlock Holmes and Eleanor Rigby were real people. So whatever's going on in British history teaching, I think there's still a lot.
- [65:02]
Andrew Roberts
To be desired if you had never been able to write any books in that alternate reality. What have you personally, or what would you have gained personally from studying history?
- [65:15]
David Petraeus
It's a lot of things, isn't it, history? It can be a bit of a quicksand.
- [65:19]
Andrew Roberts
In what sense?
- [65:20]
David Petraeus
Well, as soon as you think you understand a period, all it takes is one new set of papers or a new book written by somebody else, a friend especially, that can make you look again at the same period and completely change your mind about it. And that's a little unnerving at the age of 61, I have to say. I'm just reading Ronald Hutton's second volume of his Life of Oliver Cromwell, which has just been published. And I'd always thought of Cromwell as somebody who had a set of principles that he molded his times around in order to see through. And Ronald Huckham has completely exploded that thesis for me. And I realized that he was like most politicians, just sort of grabbing the coattails of history and hanging on as much as he could. And yet, yes, he was a good soldier and so on, but he was, in terms of his politics, he was constantly trying to create alliances, of course, like all politicians do, and when opportunities came, he grabbed them. But he was at the mercy of events much more than creating them. Whereas I had for years had the sort of image of Oliver Cromwell, like that statue outside Parliament, of this incredibly sort of solid figure, he wasn't like that at all.
- [66:41]
Andrew Roberts
What are other things that attract you, you or attracted you to history?
- [66:46]
David Petraeus
It wasn't just Christopher Perry. My dad read history at Oxford and he used to take me around castles. We go on holiday to, you know, Wales and see the great Edward the First castles. And he would chat to on journeys, we'd chat about history and what ifs, you know, counterfactuals and things like that. And so I grew up feeling very comfortable with it and. And recognizing that it's a beautiful and fascinating thing. Whereas I think sometimes some people can be not scared of history, but they can be put off history because they weren't taught it very well at school, or they just thought it was a succession of dates, or they can't see any relevance to their daily lives and so on. And I've never been one of those people.
- [67:33]
Andrew Roberts
So if you were doing a presentation, it could be anywhere, on why people, aside from conflating Denzel Washington with other historical figures, why they should read history or engage with history, what would the thrust of the presentation be?
- [67:54]
David Petraeus
I suppose it does come back to that Aldous Huxley quote, about trying to learn some of the lessons. There's a marvelous moment when, in 1953, June 1953, at the time of the late Queen's coronation, Winston Churchill is walking across Westminster hall, this fabulous great hall that was when it was built in the late 13th century, the largest room in Europe. And it's fused with history. It's where, of course, where Churchill himself was to be to lie in state, but also where the monarchs lie in state, where Warren Hastings went on trial and Charles I went on trial, and people like Mandela and Zelensky have given speeches and things like that. It's compounded. Thomas More went on trial there, the Earl of Strafford. I just mentioned a whole load of people who were all decapitated. Actually, William Wallace as well, he was decapitated as well. And so you've got this sense of all of British history summed up in a room, essentially. And a young American student stops Churchill and asks essentially for a piece of life advice. And Churchill replies, study history. Study history. For therein lies all the secrets of statecraft. And that would be one of the reasons that I would tell people, you know, that if you want to understand what's going on in the world, you do have to look and see what has happened before. And there's no person who doesn't want to have a better understanding of what's going on in the world or try to work out for themselves the great forces in our. Our planet today. So that, I suppose, would be the answer. That's why I've chosen Study History as my. As my motto of my coat of arms, for example, and why I've got a podcast, too, and I call it Secrets of Statecraft. I think that's a sort of motivating factor.
- [69:39]
Andrew Roberts
Secrets of Statecraft, that is, it's the.
- [69:42]
David Petraeus
Hoover Institutions podcast, but it's great fun to do. Must have Neil Ferguson on at some stage and I can tease him about.
- [69:50]
Andrew Roberts
Not doing a diary. What is statecraft? I think I know, but I want to very often, I think I know something and it is, in fact not true at all.
- [70:00]
David Petraeus
It's the ability to run a country. So you've got to juggle the diplomatic, the military, the economic, the cultural, all of these things, religious, all of these things together to create the kind of country that you want it to be. And that is statecraft. And so it's been going on on as long as human history has and.
- [70:21]
Andrew Roberts
Always will, looking forward. And so you've studied many great figures from history, you've looked at these different chapters of.
- [70:31]
David Petraeus
Including your late king, your last king, George iii. I wrote a biography of him a few years ago, which was great fun to do. Yeah. Sorry, carry on.
- [70:39]
Andrew Roberts
Oh, no, that's all right. I was just going to ask you, looking forward, given how much you've reflected back words, where do you think things are going for the UK and or for the us? If you were a betting man, wouldn't you say?
- [70:52]
David Petraeus
Hmm.
- [70:53]
Andrew Roberts
There's a good chance it's not a certainty, but if the dominoes continue to fall the way they're falling, A, B.
- [71:01]
David Petraeus
Or C. I'm afraid I'm a bit of a pessimist. Yeah. Not so much for the United States because you're still such a rich and innovative country, but. But I'm wondering in Britain whether or not. And history pays an important part of this, especially the way in which history is used politically to wonder whether or not we still believe in ourselves, certainly in the way that we did when I was growing up in 20. I'm going to try and get the statistics right. I think it's 2015. As recent as 2015. Maybe it's 2010. 80, 86% of people were proud of British history. That has now fallen down to 56%. And I'm sure that the reason for this is the sustained attack on the British Empire that we were discussing earlier and people forgetting the part that we played in the abolition of slavery and concentrating just on the horrors and the monstrous things that happened, happened, and we. Therefore, if you're not proud of your past, you're not proud of your ancestors, you're not proud of the things that they produced, and Britain has produced some pretty extraordinary and wonderful things for the world, then it's difficult to see why anyone would want to be proud of the future of the country as well. And so I'm pretty pessimistic. And when I feel pessimism for America, it's for things like taking Thomas Jefferson's statue down from the New York City Hall. You know, it's a form of cultural suicide. It strikes me not to admire the founders of your nation. And yes, of course he owned slaves, but he also wrote a constitution that has survived for a quarter of a millennium. And he was brave enough and Washington and all the others brave enough to stand up against. Against the most powerful empire in the world. Now, these things, you deserve your statue, it seems to me. And if you go around pulling these things down, I think you're breaking a kind of living link with the past that makes you a great country. And that's certainly happening in this country as well. I mean, I'm a bit of a pessimist anyway, because I'm a Tory and pessimism is an essential part of Toryism, but not as bigger. Pessimist, I hasten to add, is Neil Ferguson, who I like to say it's never terribly difficult to tell the. It's A quote from P.G. woodhouse. Never terribly difficult to tell the difference between a ray of sunshine and a Scotsman with a grievance. And Neil always tells you that it's all doom and gloom and everything's going to be utterly disastrous. I wonder whether or not he truly believes it because he's actually himself a very upbeat and personally positive individual who does lots of things that imply that actually he does think the world's going to get better. But boy, oh boy, how do you.
- [74:02]
Andrew Roberts
Personally, if you do, I mean, it seems like you examine or you have a fascination with counterfactuals, the what ifs. You read books that have the potential for upending long held theses, which can be uncomfortable, I would imagine. Do you have people around you or who you deliberately expose yourself to who offset perhaps some of your pessimistic tendencies with forms of optimism that they can defend?
- [74:34]
David Petraeus
Yes, my wife is the classic example. She's optimistic about the future. She's in business. She's a very successful businesswoman. So she actually, she sees a lot of the innovations that are taking place, the drugs that are coming online that are saving lives and taking on defeating pain and so on. You know, she's great at believing in the innate capacity of capitalism to reinvent itself in a positive way for more and more people and take people out of poverty and all of those positive things. It's an invigorating thing to talk about the world with her because. Because it makes me much less sort of Eeyore like and Fergusonesque.
- [75:17]
Andrew Roberts
Feel like any other inside scoop that people should know about Neil. What are his secret optimistic voice memos that he sends you you can annotate. Add to your diary. Please see audio reference 47 well, Andrew, this has been great fun. You have many books that people can read, certainly, and they'll all be in the show notes. But is it most recent conflict?
- [75:44]
David Petraeus
Yes, that's a book I wrote with David Petraeus. And of course him being a general whose commanded arm is of over 160,000 in both Iraq and Afghanistan has been so fascinating intellectually for me because of course, I'm a military historian. I've never worn a uniform for One minute. So that was great.
- [76:03]
Andrew Roberts
The subtitle for folks, just so they have that, the evolution of warfare from 1945 to Ukraine.
- [76:09]
David Petraeus
Well, it's now actually Gaza, the paperback. Oh, it takes Gaza, takes us up to, up to Gaza as well. About halfway through that campaign in Gaza, it was after the Russian invasion of Ukraine that I came up with the idea of writing the book and I got onto David, who I knew, and said, why don't we write this as a military history? There are going to be lots of political histories about this, but just the military side of it and put it into the context of all the wars that have happened since 1945. So we go through not all of them, there are 400 of them, but all the key ones, the 40 or so key ones that you'll have heard of that show how war has evolved and developed and sometimes it leaps forward and other times it goes into sort of sideshows. But we went to the publishers and they quite understandably said, well, how are you going to divvy up the chapters? And I said, well, David's going to write about all the countries he's invaded and I'll fill in the rest. And he also did the Vietnam chapter as well, actually. And then we sent hundreds and maybe thousands of emails to one another over the course of the year or so that we were writing it.
- [77:20]
Andrew Roberts
That's very fast.
- [77:22]
David Petraeus
It is fast. It is fast. But the thing was, why did you.
- [77:24]
Tim Ferriss
Do it so fast?
- [77:24]
David Petraeus
Well, because the situation in Ukraine was moving so quickly and then the Gaza war broke out on the day of the publication of the hardback. So that was literally the 7th of October that we were bringing that out. So we then needed to get on with writing about that as well. And as you know, I tend to write quickly. Yeah, and so does he. You know, he's a soldier scholar, he read, he went to your old university, he was at Princeton doing a postgrad on military history. So he was very much able to keep sending back those emails.
- [77:55]
Andrew Roberts
Yeah, I suppose he's not lacking discipline.
- [77:59]
David Petraeus
He'd say that again would be my.
- [78:01]
Andrew Roberts
I guess what did you find were key ingredients to that successful collaboration? What made it work, especially with that type of pressure under deadline?
- [78:12]
David Petraeus
Well, I think there was, I know there was mutual respect, which is very important. I'd never written a book with anybody before and I was, I'm in the.
- [78:19]
Andrew Roberts
Midst of doing that right now, which is part of the reason I'm asking.
- [78:21]
David Petraeus
Yeah, no, well, it's, it's slightly nerve wracking, isn't it because one can get very sort of proprietor about one's work. But that wasn't the case with David because the insights that he gave about what it was like to be a commander into wars at the absolute apex of command meant that he could then look back on wars like the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, to sort of place himself in the position of Matthew Ridgway in Korea, for example. And. And that was so fascinating that I knew that there was nothing that I could add to that. I just knew that the combination of the soldier and the historian would produce something that was really intellectually stimulating for me. And that's, you know, in the end, life is a constant battle against boredom, isn't it? It's a constant rearguard action against not being stimulated.
- [79:21]
Andrew Roberts
Do you think you will do more collaborations? How are you thinking about your writing moving forward?
- [79:26]
David Petraeus
No, my next two books are just going to be written by me. I've got Napoleon and His Marshals about how the emperor interacted with his marshals and how the marshals interacted with each other. They fortunately all hated each other. So that's much easier for a historian to write something interesting and hated each other in very imaginative ways.
- [79:47]
Andrew Roberts
The greatest reality TV show I've ever seen.
- [79:51]
David Petraeus
And then after that I'm doing Disraeli. And he's an extraordinary character who was a complete outsider as a Jew, of course, didn't go to one of the British public schools or Oxford and Cambridge or any university. And through his own brilliance, and he was a novelist, of course, also his own wit, he wound up becoming the most powerful man in the world.
- [80:14]
Andrew Roberts
Yeah, I look forward to reading that one.
- [80:16]
David Petraeus
Good.
- [80:16]
Andrew Roberts
Thank you.
- [80:17]
David Petraeus
Let me back on the show in 2030, which is when it's being published.
- [80:21]
Andrew Roberts
I hope I'll still be around. We'll see. I've been here for a decade. We'll see how it goes. Andrew, this has been great. I really appreciate you taking the time people can find you. Correct me if I get any of this wrong, Andrew Roberts.net would that be the main website? That's what I have here.
- [80:37]
David Petraeus
Can't remember, but yes, I hope so.
- [80:38]
Andrew Roberts
Let's just say that's right. And if it's not, I will put a correct version in the show notes. And then is Twitter or X as it stands now, a good place for people to follow you as well?
- [80:50]
David Petraeus
Yeah, that has things like my podcast and so on.
- [80:53]
Andrew Roberts
Perfect. So that's as I have it here. ARobertsAndrew.
- [80:57]
David Petraeus
Is it good?
- [81:01]
Andrew Roberts
Perfect. We'll Fact check, all of that. But we do have that. Is there anything else that you would like to add? Any requests of my audience? Anything at all that you'd like to.
- [81:11]
David Petraeus
Absolutely mention, Absolutely. Just thank you so much, Tim for being on the show. I've really enjoyed it.
- [81:15]
Andrew Roberts
Yeah, thank you so much for taking the time. This has really been great. And for people who are listening, as always, you can find the show notes at Tim Blog Podcast. We will include links to everything we discussed. And also, as always, until next time, just be a little kinder than is necessary to others, but also to yourself. Thanks for tuning in.
- [81:37]
Tim Ferriss
Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take all off and that is five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between 1 and a half and 2 million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange, esoteric things end up in my field. And then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short. A little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. Something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to Tim Blog Friday, type that into your browser. Tim Blog Friday. Drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Shopify is the all in one commerce platform that powers millions of businesses worldwide. Including me. Including mine. What business, you might ask? Well, one way I've scratched my own itch is by creating Cockpunch Coffee. It's a long story. All proceeds on my end go to my foundation, Saise foundation, to fund research for mental health. Etc. Anyway, Cockpunch Coffee. It's delicious. The first coffee I've ever produced myself. I drink it every morning. Check it out. We use Shopify for the online storefront and my team raves about how simple and easy it is to use. It has everything we need and nothing we don't. Whether you're a garage entrepreneur or getting ready for your ipo, Shopify is the only tool you need to start, run and grow your business without the struggle. Shopify puts you in control of every sales channel. Doesn't matter if you're selling satin sheets from Shopify's in person POS system or offering organic olive oil on Shopify's all in one e commerce platform. However you interact with your customers, you're covered. And once you've reached your audience, Shopify has the Internet's best converting checkout to help you turn browsers into buyers. Shopify powers 10% off all E commerce in the United States and Shopify is truly a global force as the e commerce solution behind Allbirds, Rothy's, Brooklinen and millions of other entrepreneurs of every size across more than 170 countries. Plus, Shopify's award winning help is there to support your success every step of the way. If you have questions, this is Possibility powered by Shopify so check it out. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify. That's S H O P I f y shopify.com Tim go to shopify.com Tim to take your business to the next level today. One more time. All lowercase shopify.com Tim in the last handful of years I've become very interested in environmental toxins, avoiding microplastics and many other commonly found compounds all over the place. One place I look is in the kitchen. Many people don't realize just how toxic their cookware is or can be. A lot of nonstick pans, practically all of them, can release harmful forever chemicals. PFAS in other words, spelled PFAS into your food, your home, and then ultimately that ends up in your body. Teflon is a prime example of this. It is still the forever chemical that most companies are using. So our place reached out to me as a potential sponsor and the first thing I did was look at the reviews of their products and said send me one. And that is the Titanium Always Pan Pro. And the claim is that it's the first non stick pan with zero coating. So that means zero forever chemicals and durability that'll last forever. I was very skeptical, I was very busy.
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Andrew Roberts
So I said, you know what, I.
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Tim Ferriss
Want to test this thing quickly. It's supposed to be non stick, supposed to be durable. I'm going to test it with two things. I'm going to test it with scrambled eggs in the morning because eggs are always a disaster in anything that isn't non stick with the toxic coating. And then I'm going to test it with a steak sear because I want to see how much it retains heat. And it worked perfectly in both cases and I was frankly astonished how well it worked. The Titanium Always Pan Pro has become my go to pan in the kitchen. It replaces a lot of other things for searing, for eggs, for anything you can imagine. And the design is really clever. It does combine the best qualities of stainless steel, cast iron and non stick into one product. It's tough enough to withstand the dishwasher open flame heavy duty scrubbing. You can scrub the hell out of it. You can use metal utensils which is great without losing any of its non stick properties. So stop cooking with toxic pans if they're nonstick and you don't know they probably contain something bad. Check out the Titanium Always Pan Pro while you're at it. You can look at their other high performance offerings that are toxin free like the Wonder oven air fryer, their griddle pan and their precision engineered German steel knives. So go to fromourplace.com Tim and use my code Tim to get 10% off of the Titanium Always Pan Pro or anything else on the site. You can check out anything more time. That's FromOurPlace.com spelled out F R O M O U R FromOurPlace.com Tim and use code Tim at checkout for 10% off of everything on the site. Our place also offers a 100 day trial with free shipping and returns. Let's take a look.