Habits of Churchill, Lessons from Napoleon, & The Holy Fire Inside Great Leaders — Andrew Roberts

I'm afraid I'm a bit of a pessimist um yeah not so much for the United States because you're such a still such a rich and Innovative country 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 recently as 2015 maybe it's 2010 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 on well 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 on the horrors and and the Monstrous things that happened and we are 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 PR pessimistic and when I feel pessimism for America it's for things like taking Thomas Jefferson statue down from the New York City Hall and it's a form of cultural suicide it strikes me not to admire the founders of your nation and yes of course he owns slaves but he also wrote a constitution that has survived for a quarter of a millennium and as and he was brave enough and Washington and

all the the others brave enough to stand up against the most powerful Empire in the world these things you deserve your statue it seems to [Music] me hey everybody this is Tim Ferris welcome to another episode of Tim ferah show we're going to get started very shortly what follows is a conversation and interview with Andrew Roberts he is an incredible historian he is also a prolific author and we talk about his creative process but also Lessons Learned and life lessons from the subjects of his books which include Napoleon and Churchill we cover a lot of

ground I hope you enjoy it as much as I did you can find his full bio many more links in the description and here it is well pleasure to meet you thank you for taking the time thanks so much Tim for having me on this show I thought we would start with cranley after your A Levels did you now what happen what did you know that's the way that's the way you're going to kick that's the way we're going to make friends and uh and get on with each other the sleves and you're going you're

going to mention the reason that I was expelled from school or at least I'm going to mention the reason CU you don't know re absolutely good okay well I don't think I'm the first person ever as a young man to get drunk and climb up buildings you know that absolutely not thank you on a tradition 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 and it led to actually one of my

wife's most brilliant criticisms 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 that is clever it's not bad is it all right well we might come we might come back to that yeah 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 yeah but I think in the

same piece where I found the cranley bit in doing the research also found note that you approached as a possible candidate for MI6 a bit later on no that was when I was at Cambridge Cambridge yes yes absolutely that's the right time to be approached for MI6 is cuz Cambridge and MI6 have had a a long and and fairly disastrous career he to say all of the worst spies in the 1930 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 comes think approached me and said how about it would you be interested in in becoming a SP so automatically needless to say you just think of yourself as James Bond immediately you know that sort of D going the soundtrack in the back of your brain you're automatically there with your Beretta and the beautiful women and all that kind but I then had to actually do the do the process of where you need to to join which I did get through and it was completely hilarious I

mean it was you couldn't s 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 but there were also things like place in order of social precedent Prince Duke vicount Marquis baronet oh I'm out exactly I would have dra in Cookie Monster I would have you're American you're allowed to that they're not going to ask that

in the CIA but in 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 what did the Don think made you a potential candidate 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 not really and he saw the person interviewing him put a tick in the in the margin

next to the question wonder if that made you more or less desirable much more desirable as far as they were concerned they they tick the the thing know I can well James Bond he's not a kind person is he really 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 a wonderful man who's that he was my first history teacher mhm when I was at prep school which in the English version means

when you're sort of 10 to 13 M 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 next and why he believed in the great events the great sort of wars and battles and things like that and he was a he was a kind man he wouldn't have made it into my my6 but he was a a sort of old school history Master of the best possible kind mm 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 style most differed from that 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 mhm he'd sort of sit cross-legged on the on the table and give you the voice of Charles I and then the voice of Oliver crumble you know you Elizabeth the First and Mary Queen of Scots he would entrance you with the with the excitement

of the unfold 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 that's wild extraordinary way of teaching he did it entirely through inspiration rather than through you know just sort of standing there on a Blackboard ordering people to remember you know what happened in 1356 or 1415 did he have any theater background you'd have thought would You'

have thought just sitting cross laging on the desk is going to get a requisite minimal amount of attention from the students which is brilliant 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 as the 10-year-old Andrew Roberts was concerned yeah 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 br does an amazing job

of end of chapter Cliffhangers uh that's I think Robert Caro over there and he managed to make you know um Urban Development essentially that book's about Urban Development it 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' got you've got some pretty interesting people few people that I've met you might have rented it but it's a pretty good um Bunch books yeah and it's also quite surreal that Neil is featured here since he he

is I'd say partially responsible for us meeting in the first place 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 humor we'll see we'll see of we'll see later 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 yeah could you explain why 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 I'm going to just come up with some kind of theory here and you know bear with me you shouldn't do that the person if the person's paid $40 for your book he or she is going to want to think you know 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 just it's funny or it's 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 you can hint to the reader you know you can say it is said that or the story is told that or you know anecdotally people stated that you know and and that's the signal to the reader this is probably not true at all butg it's but it's too good to to leave out but perhaps probably and maybe and so on there you really are hedging your bats and and I I think it breaks the bond of trust that you need to have with your reader

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 the 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 both Napoleon and Churchill were educated in war know 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 MH 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 about war about Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great and and so on they had a egotism to look at it in the negative way but a self-confidence to look at it in the positive way that gave them the ability to take these these shatteringly important decisions and so I think it's much more nurture than than nature in both cases as far as they were concerned there was a

a sort of Holy Fire that they both had there was a not holy in a 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 the death of friends death of friends that they were responsible 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 Wei 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 with a particular Minds well certainly church church 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 subon in India in his early 20s he he sat down and and read the great philosophers as well as writers and he was particularly influenced by Gibbon and McCoy the two

great 19th century historians English historians and that affected his his writing style and of course later his oratorical style but also his outlook on on life philosophical outlook on life with regard to Napoleon he was even more literary really because he also wrote short stories and and books and 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 uh Napoleon you know didn't have many friends when he

was in his early 20s and church or when the other people were off sleeping in the in the midday heat of India his colleagues and comrades he'd be sitting there reading you know shophow and Gibbon and mcol and so how did Gibbon and mccol inform his philosophical leanings they made him into what was called at the time a wig we don't have them today obviously they were sort of in in modern sense I suppose liberal conservatives who believed in no bless of Le in the importance what is that I'm sorry no no bless of B

it's a almost a 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 a sort of like the nightly shival rck concept that you get from the Middle Ages and they very much believed in that and so did so did Churchill 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 there are lots of military leaders who can do a lot lot of things but he was the only one that I can think of who could do all of them mhm of course it helps if you're winning in the last 3 years of his military career he was losing but 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 uh in the 1814 campaign that's 2 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 a town or attacking it whether he was attacking on the right or left flank or sometimes straight through the center as it alits he had a he had that capacity that that mind for military conquest but also of course the greatness that was required completely to revolutionize French society people think that the French reevolu ution revolutionized Society you know the clues in the name as it were but in fact the longlasting things that Al that actually

dragged France into the 19th um century were things like the code Napoleon which were not a revolutionary concept they were a Napoleonic concept H this may seem like a lazy question but since 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 yeah sort of breaking it down into

its component parts but how would you describe what enabled him to do that where others were unable it was inspiration but also perspiration he really did put in the time thinking about it and and reading about it by it I mean I mean Warfare and of course he'd been educated in it he read the key books there's a guy called the comp de who in 1772 wrote a 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 in the intervening period and he was able to put those thoughts and ideas into into practical use classic example being the core system and when what was it called it's called The Core system it's C CPS oh go and what he did was to create mini armies essentially which were able to march separately but converge and concentrate for the battle and so one of your core would engage the

enemy and then he would use the other cores to outmaneuver and envelop the enemy sometimes double envelop the enemy it was a it was a brilliant concept and actually the Allies didn't start beating Napoleon until they had also adopted the core system and so he was always at The Cutting Edge of thinking of the new Concepts and but at the same time he had very old-fashioned views about how to excite the men I mean Victory obviously is the is the best thing when it comes to exciting exactly no nothing much works better than that but

as I say he was still winning at the end of his career but he had this 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 the Duke of Wellington the British general being the classic example who won the Battle of waterl against him wasn't interested in electrifying the soul of the of the men at all he he rather despised his ordinary soldiers but nonetheless you're talking about Wellington or Wellington he had some sort of choice

negative remarks about his about his own soldiers and he was a a rather sort of Stuffy Aristocrat but but they loved him because he cared about how many of them died in in battle you know and he never lost a 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 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 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 for a soldier you know in Egypt far away from home he looks up at the pyramids and thinks yeah I'm 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 you in about 10 ENT 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 this of course was in the period before America and Russia in the war but we we've been in terrible Straits before look at s Francis Drake Look at adal Nelson and so on and and we came through those and and won he also brought up the first world war a lot and so 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 first Duke of Moro who was with Wellington the best soldier that Britain ever produced people trusted his his view of History instead of biographies I'd like to ask about an autobiography so I it's my impression that you recommend that young people read my early life yeah and that there are life lessons contained within it that perhaps might help young people what what types of good advice or life lessons can people expect to find in that book or is does anything stand out to you

resilience is the the classic one although he doesn't go in this book into criticizing his 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 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 that people judge you on what you've achieved rather than your promise and he writes about his escape from prison for

example which has 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 he writes about what it's like to charge and with Lancers he himself had a pistol in a great cavalry charge it's just the most exciting B and it makes you it draws you along with 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 get take part in a cavalry charge or you'll just 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 used 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's not really waiting to be used he had

to sort of work them up into a into a body of laws that completely revolutionized France now when he took the writing from 30 years prior and applied it is 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 he had taken huge risks he was 26 years old and according to the the church view of life you know you can take risks when you're 26 years old because 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 he was a a huge risk taker he would attack when normal generals would have fallen back he was very lucky and that he was fighting he was 26 he was fighting generals who were Austrian Generals in their 70s mhm and 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 own

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 of left tenants of divisional commanders and people who he felt he could trust superb sense of timing as well in a in a battle he was as I say he the sort of Exemplar of so many of the leadership tropes do you think he would have viewed his decisions from the outside that look risky as risky if someone takes sort of calculated risks over and over again

then you could call them Reckless but at least to face value that's not maybe the ad jective I would use so I'm just 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 you know 20 and and sort of won 19 of them so if you do that even though you have taken risks it's it's a sort of force multiplier in a sense you know you wind up thinking that 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 and he would promote people if he thought they were lucky and that of course is a I mean it's run runs against everything that we 21st century rationalists can possibly believe in but you know it it worked for yeah seems to have worked until it didn't until it doesn't the decision in 1812 to march on Moscow was hugely risky and of course it didn't pay off is it true that you have a signed letter from alus Huxley

I do all right now Huxley I believe alus is we English Al God you know I've realized the longer I spend in England I really need to I think I should take TOEFL classes test of English is 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 why do you have that letter and what does the letter say 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 MH and 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 the deep and meaningful thought that Huxley gave him and I'm a huge admirer of Huxley Isis and Gaza and and obviously Brave New worlds and so on wonderful books and so are his very minor minor books as well 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 there's not a book that I've written I've written 20 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 question about the subtitle of your by refound Church which I believe is walk 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 the phrase comes from his remark in the last chapter of last few pages of his War Memoirs the first volume of his War Memoirs the Gathering storm wonderful book 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 this hour and for this trial and he had a profound sense of of personal Destiny now you and I might think again as as 21st rationalist 21st century rationalists that this is a bit sort of mad to think that you're pre-ordained 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 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 and he speaks of her in

that sense really which is also a pretty you know insane way to look at to look at life isn't it but they were both as I mentioned earlier devotes of 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 existing people if you could I'll give you two options stand in mean 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 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 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 the war now that it's turned to the west and the meetings that took place the previous day and that day that 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 bakan Palace and becomes prime minister and comes back and starts to organize his government as the news is coming in of of the German success and victories in the 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 a

fly on the wall any day in history that's the day that I would I would choose can we just go back though um to this concept of 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 were in Providence and luck and being watched over by bigger forces and so on when he survived his assassination attempt on the 20th of July 1944 when you remember staenberg 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 and the furo was going to save the Fatherland and the 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 yeah

can cut a lot of different ways think of David David Kesh and cult leaders and well exactly exactly that Jim Jones down in Ghana or wherever he was all of these all of these frauds and Crooks and conmen use it as well 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 key thing is learning from mistakes which not all politicians do and he scarcely point out but 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 blacken hands in Ireland it was a disaster primarily of course the D El's crisis of 1915 to early 1916 where over 100,000 Allied troops were killed wounded or captured I mean this was a series of of of mistakes in every single one of them he learned from those mistakes how did he do that 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 he wasn't hubristic that was the key thing he had I think it probably helps also of course that he was in a democratic system 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 points democracy works very well at pricking the pomposity and hubus of people if it's 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 um just to explain he'd beaten the Russians twice before he had an army twice the size of the um of the Russians he knew perfectly well that the winter was going to come he stayed too long in Moscow but if he' gone to Moscow and then come back again immediately he would not have had the climactic disasters 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 to the because he thought he was a sort of demigod that I think is a misunderstanding of his personality so I'm going to ask something that Neil Ferguson of of Colossus on the Shelf put in an email I would ask ask Andrew about the diary he keeps which is a source of intense anxiety's obsessed with this he's okay Finish finish the rest which is a source of intense anxiety to all of his friends and

even more to his enemies best wishes Neil yeah Neil Neil doesn't care about any of that he's only cares about what I say about him he's he is the friend he is the friend who is obsessed with the diary yes I I keep a diary for God's sake is it such a is it such a crime um you know he know he told went on the skiing holiday this year and it's all he talked about it's obsessed um the forbidden fruit I mean what is what is the story here 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 G or BBY 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 I can see that thank you

well that's kind of you thank you um one of the only ways that I can uh I can justify this concept that it's all not just a sort of nihilistic sort of M Bo exactly is is by writing books obviously which I hope will um survive me but also noting down what I've 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 no loading the Amo into your diary exactly and then when we're sort of 80 he's going to he's going to go

to the Bookshop buy the diary flick to Ferguson comma Neil and see sort of um 40 entries Each of which is going to make his face go redder than charges exactly which it's it's not going to be like that at all what he's actually going to do is to uh is to immediately go to the diary and look out Ferguson Neil 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 I've I've ever met over the last 40 plus years

and how do you so you're you're on your metal now you're going to have to I'm going to say went on Behavior exactly what a what an idiot not note to self send chocolates to Andrew don't forget his birthday now there are many many people who keep a diary how do you keep your DIY is it a nightly exercise is it typed out is it qu pen you mustn't do it nightly because or at least you you might be able to but I drink MH and so so uh I like Dr good yeah and so

there's nothing worse than trying to write if you've been drinking also writing down the witticisms sometimes there's a bit of a problem to the fact that I can't read my writing the next morning but but no it has to be done pretty much the next morning you can't leave it for two weeks or so what's your frequency every day I used to write it oh no but if nothing interesting has happened then I won't put anything down nothing to report yeah no well yes or like Louis the 16th on the 14th of July 1789 the

day of the fall of the bastile all he writes is ran 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 he's going to lat onto that really part of that sense he's going to be like you see you see yeah yeah no of course he is but um but nonetheless I 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 I'll stick it in do you do that before your book writing let's say you're on yes first thing in the morning all right and is that just like pajama slippers and a cup of coffee or yeah precisely that yeah all right great exactly this seems like such a ridiculous question but how do you think about taking taking brakes when you're riding I mean obviously you might have a bathroom break or something like that but do you build in brakes do you ride the

flow as long as you have it what does it look the flow as long as you have it absolutely yeah yeah yeah because because it might not come back if you deliberately have breaks sometimes and I I'm slightly loath to admit this in public but nonetheless sometimes if you are really flowing I don't I can go without you know washing for 3 days I can be in my dressing gown and and slippers my wife finds extremely unhygienic and I'm not allowed to sleep in the same bed but 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 I'll get some breakfast 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 classic we go back to the 10th of May 1940 that in my church 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 love f 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 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 gy or showering or whatever there's a danger that you're going to fall out of the rhythm of of creativity how do you think about that flow when you have the flow I mean there is i

h to it's never more than 3 days I've ever got without to shower I wouldn't judge I I was just on a hiking trip I went I went 10 days without showering so I don't judge I won't throw stones in my glass house only when I'm writing the book I Hast to add that as well God I don't want people to come up and know par is hold their nose and go hello Andrew how do you 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 the flow of writing or that feeling that things are coming to you more easily or moving on to the page more easily 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 so you must tell me more

about that 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 and that it has to be somebody else it has to be your publisher or so 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 it's complete the name of my Memoir hugging yourself with Glee me write that down give you your customary 5% that's fine

if you had to choose uh maybe you don't want to choose from Your Darlings here but uh 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 proof reader for your work to be that sanity check no he's called steuart profit he's the most brilliant publisher in in London he's he's known by everybody to be the most brilliant he's also the most irritating that makes sense to me peasant um 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 Professor perfect is my nickname for it because he is a total professorial figure and for my Napoleon book I remember a series of jilia again this is the thing where you think you've done something rather good know and he writes one of the things he wrotes in the M are you sure this joke is funny nothing more crushing than than to have that he also wrote strikes me is very British exactly question mark

you know and and you read it again you chle to yourself yes it is funny any damn it but um he wrote there was there were whole series of them in the well we were talking earlier about the 1796 campaign of Napoleon he said how wide was the river Poe in 1796 there was another one did Napoleon take Herodotus to to Egypt damn I don't know I'm going to have to find out he's a genius but also a very irritating person could you say more about what makes him so good and I'll buy some time

just by saying if 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 particular type of thing but I would 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 or contradictory or contradictory they're very good at surgically excising that what makes this particular gentleman what was his name again Stuart steuart Prophet great ma'am what makes

Stuart so good at giving feedback what how does does he see things differently he's a profoundly committed to history and he he loves history and so he has a sort of higher purpose to try to to flood the world with great history books and 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 a infuriating a poetic perspective from

a poetic perspective yeah if there's a rhythm that that isn't right or if something Rhymes as well sometimes you can use two words that have a a rhyme in them and he will cut that automatically because it just doesn't feel right sit well with his sensibilities and mine I hasten to you know cuz I I I very rarely actually disagree with him I did on the joke um by the way and and whenever anybody tells me that something that that particular joke is funny I um I for it I ping the email straight on to

uh to Ste of course I do I'd be mad not to wouldn't I I mean and he's been doing it for 40 years so and he's at the top of his trade so you would expect him to be to be really good but boy is he so there's two examples you gave the width of the river and Herodotus why did he ask those two 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 I mean there are loads more examples like that you know I will send him 100 pages and he'll send me back a 100 pages of of questions and criticisms and and remarks and so I almost sometimes think that I ought to put his name on the on the front cover of the of the book he F me up actually about the Napoleon book and the original of Napoleon just had a huge n on it and lots

of B's and he said f me up he said I've 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 napoleons and I thought over the phone I thought okay he's finally gone complet mad yeah exactly that's right poor man how long can he stay in the in his job if he's going to come up with ideas fake it for a while yeah that's right exactly but it can't be long now you know before and it turned out to

be totally brilliant concept because if you see a gigantic n with bees you you think of Napoleon bees as an I'm such an idiot bees like honey bees at honey bees yeah that was his symbol it was Napoleon symbol because they could sting but they could also give honey you know 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 now that's incredible yeah that is incredible sounds like such a gift to have a steuart I need a

steuart yeah everyone needs a steart every don't take mine but no I don't I don't I think think he might find might spend his entire first month on just the syntax errors in my first chapter so you do want to strangle him by the way this is the sign of a very good proof reader often why do you think it is that some historical figures take on these mythic proportions where some who have huge impacts seem to sort of 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 I haven't thought about that before that's a really good question 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 uh 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 you know and so on 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 in with historical characters how can it be that this unprepossessing looking American president who happens to uh with his 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 in Lincoln's case but you know many of your listeners or readers might disagree with you nonetheless just imagine him popping up on a dating app you swipe right or left for a Lincoln exactly might ride a fixed gear bike make expensive cappuccino that's kind of the Hipster look anyway I digress it is difficult to explain how some people just grab it grab the headlines and others don't I mean of course it does help to be a leader in a war that's true of Lincoln and Churchill and Pon 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 a hard and fast rule does that hard and fast recipe and I can follow I'm I'm just kidding well don't take us to war on the back of your want to be remember I think I'm capable certainly not eager makes me think of what is the title of that poem azy mandus look upon my works and despair ah I'll leave

that alone 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 snare of cold command tells that its sculpture well those passions read which yet survive my name is oie Mandy ask King of Kings look upon my Works ye Mighty in despair nothing besides remains around that Eternal wreck long and bare the lone and level sand stretch far away hot damn there you go listeners can you point out to

the listeners that you didn't tell me that this was going to happen I did not 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 am I getting the feet you well the trunks the trunks of the legs so there was obviously a huge magnificent kind of pyramid High glorious statue to oim mandas and now there's nothing and it it goes back to what I was saying earlier about not being remembered who is the author of that of that poem

Bish I saw the maybe the original or a first certainly a first draft in Oxford because I was going through a program at WM 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 Shelly Frankenstein and all these others and I came across that if anybody wants to see a first edition of Mary Shel Frankenstein it's just gone on exhibition at the I was there this morning Lamberth Palace Library there's a thing called her book it's about 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 it's there today 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 I'm not going to take that personally no oh no no that's a compliment yeah old in the US is like 1970 I thought you were talking about me oh oh good all right not you How do you think about Legacy because

I along the lines of Ana the azim mandus piece I'm like is it just sort of huous 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 how do you personally think about this especially as someone today's history 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 you know died but I know that I do and it is one of the drives for being a writer because words always live for ever and they're virtually the only thing that does ozymandias's Statue is just two trunkless legs of stone whereas actually his words you know look upon my Works he Mighty in despair that goes to the heart of The Human Condition and Shell's poetry still survives in a way that ozymandias's 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 yeah that is true do you read fiction yes I do when I go on holiday which is usually hiking actually with my my wife she loves going to 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 I'll have a detective novel and I've chosen the most complicated of all of the detective novelists trap called Robert Godard have

you ever heard of Robert Godard I 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 in the back of the book connecting each person to everybody else and it so by the end of it it looks like one of those really complicated sort of management um uh take an or chart yeah exactly exactly with hundreds of people connecting to to everybody else to try and work out who done it and he always

always beats me that sounds fun but as far as sort of high culture novel concerns I will occasionally do that I'm president of the Clon literary festival and so we have lots of novelists come to that and so if you've got William Boyd or salmon rashley or somebody who you know you're going to be bumping into at the festival it's all always a good idea to read their latest novel we had Robert Harris recently and 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 I don't recognize the name I'm embarrass he a French he's a French writer it's it's pronounced helc helc he's a genius very controversial and uh quite unpopular in France and he the one I'm reading is it where features his his own murder it's a great satire it's very very funny is there a book you might suggest starting with we going to start with one uh the map and the territory the map of the the map and the territory of Michelle elbec the name starts h e

l e I'll find them it's a sort of satire on French intellectual customs and I can see them loving that it's very funny it's very funny why is he controversial because he's been deeply politically incorrect as well he just doesn't care he just doesn't care what he what he writes he's a honey badger in that sense do you know what I mean I do I do I he's a he's a literally honey badger is wellbe Larry Honeybadger all right so so speaking of Politically Incorrect how should we in your mind write about imperial history we

should try as far as possible to be genuinely objective we we shouldn't take the assumption that all white people whenever they went abroad did so solely in order to to rape murder Massacre and exploit because certainly in the latter part we were talking earlier actually about um Winston Churchill and the no blessa B the concept that it was part of your duty as a privileged person to 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 involved in agriculture and and so on you know they actually were not driven by by rapacity and and greed in the way that the 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 uh 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 what do you see as the challenges moving forward for the capturing of History Andor how do you see it changing as we as we move forward 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 a university level secondly we have this uh thing it's nicknamed Henry to Hitler where we jump from the tuders to the second world war and we don't do the very important intervening stages of the steuarts 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 as was like 23% of them thought that the American War of Independence was won by en Washington you know and the Americans get a bad rap I I know exactly it's not just us and also there

were 20% of 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 and Ellena Rigby were real people so whatever's going on in in you know British history teaching I think there's there's still a lot to be desired if you had never been able to write any book books in that alternate reality what have you personally or what would you have gained personally from studying history well it's a it's a lot of things isn't it history it's it can be

a bit of a quick sand in what sense well as soon as you think you understand a period all it takes is is one new set of papers or 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 huon has completely exploded that thesis for me and I realized that he was like most politicians just sort of grabbing the the coattails of history and hanging on as much as he could and yes he was a good soldier and so on but he was in terms of his his politics he was constantly trying to create alliances of course like all politicians do but 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 ol of Cromwell like that statue outside outside parliament of this this incredibly sort of solid figure he wasn't like that at all what are other things that attract you or attracted you to history 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 and he would chat to on Journeys we'd chat about about history and what ifs

you know counterfactuals and things like that and so I always 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 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 their daily lives and so on and I've never been one of those people so if you were doing a presentation could be anywhere

on why people aside from conflating you know Denzel Washington with other historical figures why they should read history or engage with history what would the the thrust of the presentation be I suppose it it does come back to that all the hutley quotes you know about about trying to learn some of the lessons there's a marvelous moment in June 1953 at the time of the lake Queen's coronation Winston church 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 of course where Church himself was to lie and State but also where the monarchs lie in state where Warren Hastings went on trial and and Charles the went on trial and people like Mandela and zalinsky have given speeches and things like that it's compounded this this Thomas Moore went on trial there the ear of straford I just mentioned a whole load of people who were all decapitated actually as William Wallace as well he was decapitated as well and so you've got this this sense of all of British history you know sums

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 that if you want to understand what's going on in the world you do have to look and see what 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 to work

out for themselves the great forces in in 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 I've got a podcast too and I called it secrets of statecraft I think that's a that's a sort of um motivating factor secrets of statecraft that is it's the H institutions podcast but it's great fun to do must have Neil Ferguson on at some stage and I can I can tease him about not a diary what is

statecraft just so I I think I know but I want very often I I think I know something and it is in fact not true at all so it's the ability to to run a country to run a country yes so you've got to juggle the Diplomatic the military the economic the cultural all of these things the religious all these things together to create the kind of of country that you want it to be and that is statecraft and so it's been going on as long as human history has and and always will looking forward

and see you've studied many great figures from history you've looked at these different chapters of including your late King your last King George III I wrote a biography of him a few years ago which was which was great fun to do yeah sorry carry on oh no that's all right I was just going to ask you looking forward given how much you've reflected backwards where do you think things are going for the UK and or for the US like if if you were a betting man and you say hm there's a good chance it's not

a certainty but if the dominoes continue to fall the way they're falling a b or c do you have any I'm afraid I'm a bit of a pessimist um yeah not so much for the United States because you're such a still such a rich and Innovative country 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 going

to try and get the statistics right I think it's 2015 as recently as 2015 maybe it's 2010 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 on well 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 on the horrors and and the Monstrous things that uh happened and we are 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 statue down from the New York City Hall it's a form of cultural suicide it strikes me not to admire the founders of your nation and yes of course he own slaves but he also wrote a

constitution that has survived for a quarter of a millennium and and and he was brave enough and Washington and all the the others brave enough to stand up against the most powerful Empire in the world 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 and I and I I mean I'm a bit of a pessimist anyway because I'm a Tory

and pessimism is an essential part of toryism not as big a pessimist I hasten to add as Neil fer who who I like to say it's never terribly difficult to tell the it's a quote from PG Woodhouse never terribly difficult to tell the difference between a ray of sunshine and a Scotsman with a grievance and and Neil always tells you that it's all doom and gloom and everything's going to be utterly disastrous I I wonder I wonder whether or not he he truly believes it because he's actually himself a very upbeat and personally uh sort

of positive individual who does lots of things to imply that actually he does think the world's going to get better but boy oh boy how do you personally if you do I mean it seems like you examine or you have a fascination with counterfactuals the wh ifs you read books that have the potential for upending sort of long held thesis which can be uncomfortable I would imagine yeah do you have people around you or who you deliberately expose yourself to who offs set perhaps some of your pessimistic Tendencies with forms of optimism that they can

defend yes my wife is the classic example she's she's optimistic about the future she's in business she's a very successful business woman so she actually sees a lot of the things that are being innovations that are taking place the drugs that are coming online that you know saving lives and taking on defeating pain and so on you know she's great at in the innate capacity of capitalism to reinvent itself in a positive way for more and more people than take people out of poverty and all of those positive things so yes it's it's an invigorating

thing to talk about the the world with her because it makes me much less sort of eore like and F Fergus esque feel like feel like any other inside scoop that that people should know about Neil what are what his secret optimistic voice memos that he sends you you can annotate add to your diary please see audio reference [Laughter] 47 Andrew this has been been great fun you have many books that that people can can read certainly and they'll all be in the show notes but the is it most recent conflict that's a book I

wrote with David trus and of course him being a general who's commanded armies of over 160,000 in both Iraq and Afghanistan has been so fascinating intellectually for me because of course I've a military historian I've never worn a uniform for for one minute so that was great the subtitle for folks just so they have that the evolution of warfare from 1945 to Ukraine well it's now actually Gaza the paperback takes us up to Gaza as well about halfway through that campaign in in Gaza and yeah we it was after the Russian invasion of Ukraine that

I came up with the idea of writing the book and I got on to 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 but just you know the the military side of it and 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 you know the 40 or so key ones that that you'll have heard of

and that show how War has evolved and developed and sometimes it leaps forward and other times it goes into into sort of sidh shows but we went to the Publishers and and they quite understandably said well how are you going to divvy up the chapters and I said well David is going to write about all the countries he's invaded and I and I'll you know fill in the rest and he also did the Vietnam chapter as well actually and then we sent hundreds maybe thousands of emails to one another uh over the course of the

year or so that we were writing it that's very fast it is fast it is fast but the thing was well because the situation in Ukraine was moving so so quickly and then the Gaza war broke out on the day of the publication of the hardback and so that was literally the 7th of October that we were bring that out so we then needed to get on with 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 went to

your old University he was at Princeton doing a postgrad on military history so he very much able to keep sending back those emails yeah I suppose he's not not lacking discipline would say that again would be my guess what did you find were key ingredients to that successful collaboration what made it work especally with that type of pressure under deadline 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 and I was I'm in the midst of doing that right now which

is part of the reason I'm asking yeah no well it's it's slightly nerve-wracking isn't it because one can get very sort of proprietorial about about one's work but that wasn't the case with 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 Iraq 1 and other Wars to the Gulf War to sort of place himself in the position of Matthew Ridgeway you know in Korea for

example 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 of the soldier and his storian 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 it's a constant rear guard action against um against not being stimulated yeah do you think you will do more collaborations how are you thinking about your writing moving forward no I know 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 the greatest reality TV show never seen exactly 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 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 yeah I look forward to reading that one good thank you let me back on the show in 2030 which is when it's being published I hope hope I'll still be around we'll see Ian 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 and andreen roberts. net

would that be the main website that's what I have here can't remember but yes I hope so let's just say that's right and if it's not I will I put correct version in the show notes is Twitter or X as it stands now a good place for people to follow you as well yeah that has things like my my podcast and so on perfect so that's as I have it here A Roberts Andrew is it good perfect we'll fact check all 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 mention just thank you so much Tim for being on the show I've really enjoyed it 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