--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: One of the reasons I'm proud to be an historian is that Churchill was one. History was a constant echo for him. It gave him endless signposts. In the startup community, there is a cult of Napoleon that is still emerging. Is there? I didn't know that. Seriously, is there? Your biography is the part of the canon here. If MacArthur had used nuclear weapons against the Chinese crossing the Yalu River, then yes, he might well have actually won that war, but it would have lowered the moral barrier so significantly that nuclear weapons would have been used an awful lot more. In the future, war will be fought between two sets of drones, and the humans won't be in the loop because decision-making has to take place far, far faster than the human mind can work.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Today, I have the pleasure of speaking with Andrew Roberts, who is most recently the author of *Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to Ukraine*. This book is like Churchill's histories of the Second World War and the First World War, in that one of the principal actors in the conflicts discussed here is the co-author, General David Petraeus, who commanded the U.S. forces in Afghanistan and Iraq. Speaking of Churchill, Andrew is also the author of superb biographies of Churchill, Napoleon, King George, and an excellent book about World War II. But first, let's begin with *Conflict*. Andrew, welcome to the podcast.
--:-- Andrew Roberts: Thank you very much indeed, Dwarkesh. It's an honor to be on your show.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: So my first question is this. When we look at the first half of the 20th century, it seems like we got unlucky many times in a row. World War I, World War II, the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, the Maoist Revolution in China. From reading historians about those topics, it seems like they didn't have to happen. If you reversed a bunch of contingent factors a few years back, any one of them could have not happened. In each of those cases, tens of millions of people died. When we look at the second half of the 20th century, which you write about in this book, it seems like we got lucky again and again. The Cuban Missile Crisis doesn't go nuclear. We have all these proxy wars that don't go nuclear or result in a world war. China and India liberalize. Communism falls. What explains why we had such different luck in these two different parts of the century?
--:-- Andrew Roberts: The invention of the nuclear bomb. It's pretty much as easy as that. All of these wars take place in the post-nuclear age after 1945. As a result, you have an umbrella under which everybody acts. Although there are hundreds of wars that break out—about 140 wars—they have to be fought in an essentially limited way because of the existence of nuclear weapons.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: But couldn't you have said the same thing before World War One? Many did say that before World War One, where we have all this heavy artillery, you can kill millions of people even then, and they still went to war. So how much does nuclear war explain the absence of something escalating?
--:-- Andrew Roberts: You're right that the First World War did come about in part because of the arms race. But the knowledge that the nuclear bomb could obliterate the entire planet is something that has always managed to make wars limited post-1945. In 1914, the most people you could kill in a single moment would be as the result of an artillery shell. That's nothing like a nuclear bomb, frankly. It's apples and pears, I think.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: It's really interesting in this book, you write about all these conflicts that have happened since World War II. In many cases, they're counterinsurgencies or civil wars. It's interesting when one side gets to say that they're the legitimate force fighting for the country's independence against foreign aggressors, when both sides are getting foreign funding and support. I'm curious, how come the U.S. has been bad at the propaganda here, where Ho Chi Minh or the Taliban get to say that they're the legitimate forces fighting for their country? How does that determination get made?
--:-- Andrew Roberts: That's a very good point. In both cases, Ho Chi Minh and the Taliban were local inhabitants in a way that the United States obviously wasn't in either place. But whether they represented the majority of the people in either North Vietnam or Afghanistan is a completely different issue. It's much more a question of whether or not they are totalitarian powers who are able to establish dominance and keep it in a difficult and dangerous part of the world. That's what both of them were able to do. It doesn't mean that they have a legitimacy in the kind of Jeffersonian democracy that one would like in a utopian world. But if they are the people that are wielding the power in the sense of a Marxist-Leninist clique—in North Vietnam, of course—you have to deal with them. They are the established government.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: But it's interesting that South Vietnam or the government in Afghanistan didn't seem to have that same sort of legitimacy that these other insurgencies had, even though they were still local governments. Do you think not?
--:-- Andrew Roberts: I rather think they do. Obviously, they're both immensely inefficient and useless and corrupt. But I don't think that detracts from the fact that they were more legitimate than the forces that were rising up against them.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: This might be a good opportunity for you to discuss the four key tenets of strategic leadership that you discuss in the book.
--:-- Andrew Roberts: Yes. What we found in the book very strongly—and it's interesting you should have mentioned the Chinese Civil War because you get that very powerfully as well—is that the side that wins wars very often is not the one that controls the cities, has the largest amount of men, or has the best weaponry. Let's look at the Chinese Civil War for a second. The Kuomintang Nationalist Forces at the outset had all the major cities. They had four or five times the number of men. They also had all the advanced weaponry they'd taken off the Japanese at the time of the Japanese surrender in 1945. Yet they still lost that war. One of the reasons was that they didn't have very impressive strategic leadership. Chiang Kai-shek, even when he did come up with good plans, often had warlords below him that refused to carry them out.
--:-- Andrew Roberts: What we discovered in war after war is that the thing that matters most is this concept of strategic leadership. By that, we mean having a leader at the top—either civil or military, but the ultimate decision maker. It's usually best when there's somebody who represents the civil and somebody who represents the military and they get on. They need to get the big idea for the war right. They need to be able to communicate that to their lieutenants effectively and to the wider country. They need to be able to implement it aggressively and efficiently. Then they need, as the fourth level, to continue to adapt the big idea to circumstances on the ground and to the way in which the war develops. No war carries out according to plan. The enemy always has a say. So you refine it again and again. The people who are able to do that are very often victorious, even though they start off the campaign with many more disadvantages than their enemy.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: I think this might be a good opportunity to start talking about Iraq and Afghanistan, which obviously your co-author can speak to like nobody else. I found it really interesting in reading his accounts of what happened in those two countries. Especially Iraq, which was a premeditated invasion. It wasn't something we had to immediately do. It was a completely different *casus belli* with the weapons of mass destruction than 9/11.
--:-- Andrew Roberts: And also the surprise attack on Kuwait, of course. That's the ultimate reason this took place, what had happened 13 years before and the 13 years in between. It wasn't just WMD.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Although I guess that 13 years still leaves us enough time to have a plan of what to do. I found it interesting that after the regime has been changed, you realize that there's not a plan for how to ensure security and stability in the country. I just can't imagine—you have really intelligent people like David Petraeus there who are working on this. How is it possible that there was an invasion of these countries without a good plan of how to secure them afterwards?
--:-- Andrew Roberts: He wasn't working on it. He was working on how to destroy the Iraqi army and get to Baghdad. The people who were working on it were a completely different set of generals who were failing to work out what to do once you had got to Baghdad. It was assumed that the thing to do would be to get rid of the Ba'ath Party, which essentially ran the country down to the sort of fourth level. It was all very well getting rid of Saddam's sons and some of the other people at the top level. But when you do that, and you essentially send the army home without telling them how they're going to feed their families and allow them to keep their weapons, you've got a recipe for disaster. And sure enough, disaster happened. But that can't be blamed on the soldiers at the point of the spear, who did an extremely good job and overthrew that regime in double quick time.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Speaking of strategic leadership, why is it that we don't have a figure natively in Iraq and Afghanistan who had that level of leadership themselves? Like a Zelensky in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the book, General Petraeus discusses the endless frustrations he had with Maliki in Iraq. And of course, Ghani leaves Afghanistan when the Taliban start routing the Afghan forces. And Karzai, of course, also in Afghanistan.
--:-- Andrew Roberts: These guys come in for a bit of a pasting, understandably, in our book, because they are not the sort of Churchillian figures that Zelensky is. I think it's partly down to the sectarian nature of Iraqi and Afghan society, the tribal nature of society, where however good a leader is, he doesn't automatically command the attention and loyalty of other people in the same country. The thing about Zelensky was that it was very clear very early on that he was speaking for the huge majority of the country. It's very difficult for an Iraqi or Afghan leader, however good they are. And I'm not saying for one minute that Maliki and Karzai were any good, let alone the last chap who gets into his helicopter weighed down with suitcases full of money and hightails it out of there. By complete contrast, you have Zelensky, who shows all of those four qualities of leadership that I mentioned, and who decided he was going to stay in Kyiv. His family were going to stay in Kyiv. He wasn't going to let any military-age male Ukrainians leave the country. His big idea was, "I need ammunition, not a ride."
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: What is our big idea, the Americans' big idea in Ukraine? What is the ceasefire or end arrangement we are driving at, which we think would be plausible for both sides to accept?
--:-- Andrew Roberts: Good question. I don't think Biden has articulated one properly yet. Zelensky has, which is the obvious one: we're not going to allow 18 to 19 percent of our country to forever be under the rule of the Russians, and we're going to throw them out. When David and I visited Kyiv about four months ago, we came across a huge level of national unity over that big idea. All the generals and the ministers could subscribe to it, but they're sort of paid to—it's part of their job. But so did everybody on the street and everybody that we spoke to. They all absolutely believed in ultimate victory. They didn't know how long it was going to take. They didn't know how much more blood was going to have to be shed. But they all believed that this would not stand and that they were going to ultimately be victorious, even if you, the Americans, cut off their funding after the next election.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: So what is the answer to the American question of what is our goal? Is that the same as the Ukrainian goal?
--:-- Andrew Roberts: No, I don't think it is at the moment. It seems to be to wait until other countries, such as Britain, give a new set of weaponry, then to give much more of the same kind of weaponry, then to wait until somebody else gives some more advanced weaponry. You saw this with anti-tank weaponry, later with tanks, then with artillery, then long-range artillery. Now you've been giving them these attack arms, which are very impressive. But you've hung back a bit with fighter aircraft and so on. It seems to be a piecemeal approach where you wait until the Russians don't respond, and then you give a bit more. Frankly, it would have been much better to have armed the Ukrainians earlier with the Leopards and the tanks that they really needed for this big southern counteroffensive and come out wholeheartedly for them.
--:-- Andrew Roberts: Now, you've given a lot of money, obviously. $44 billion is a very significant amount, and the Europeans have given as much or slightly more now. But still, the Russians are in control of 18% of the country. They've been building what the Ukrainians were expecting: hundreds of yards of minefields. In fact, there are miles of minefields down in the south. So I'm afraid it's a long and bloody slog. But we've seen wars like this before. This is one of the things we write about—the Korean War being a classic example—where you just have to thresh it out.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: I want to ask you about Korea in a second. But it does seem weird that we're slowly funding a war of attrition. It's classic Clausewitz to focus your effort on the point of attack. If you're just slowly doling out this equipment, why not just give it to them all at once so they can have a successful counteroffensive?
--:-- Andrew Roberts: Because I don't think you've got the political will in the United States to do that, frankly. You have a sort of nominal majority in both houses, but especially with your lower house at the moment—what's going on there? You don't have the sense of national will to do that. As a result, these poor Ukrainians are fighting and dying. When you do give them stuff, it's extremely helpful and useful. But the key point is that they will carry on fighting and dying, even if you didn't give them the stuff, because they're not going to have America essentially dictating to them what their national destiny is.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Speaking of the Korean War, the chapter you wrote about this in your book was really interesting. I wonder if Truman had decided to use a nuclear bomb in Korea, had agreed with MacArthur to do so, whether the taboo that we have against nuclear weapons—against tactical nuclear weapons—would not have emerged in the first place. The Soviets would have used it in Afghanistan. We would use it in Vietnam. And Thatcher would have used it in the Falklands.
--:-- Andrew Roberts: No, I wouldn't go that far because that would have wiped out the Falklands, and we were trying to win back the Falklands. But you're quite right, of course. If MacArthur had used nuclear weapons against the Chinese crossing the Yalu River, then yes, he might well have actually won that war, but it would have lowered the moral barrier so significantly that nuclear weapons would have been used an awful lot more. As it is today, although there's lots of sabre-rattling by Lavrov and Putin, it doesn't really look as though—yes, there might be a catastrophic disaster at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, but it's very unlikely for Putin actually to use tactical nuclear missiles in Ukraine, not least because the Chinese don't want him to. But had they been a regular feature of warfare in the 1950s, 60s, 70s, and so on, then yeah, he might well do it.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: I just think it's important when you're looking back at history to give credit to decisions that are not often discussed like this, where Truman just decided to lose Korea rather than—at the time the taboo didn't even exist—rather than to create a taboo against nuclear weapons.
--:-- Andrew Roberts: Exactly. He did create it. As did Clement Attlee, actually. To give him his due, the British prime minister flew over to Washington very concerned about this talk—MacArthur's talk about using the nuclear bomb. He needs to get some credit as well. And Truman needs credit for sacking MacArthur in the first place. MacArthur was a charismatic and impressive figure whose island-hopping policy in the Second World War was inspired. But he was the classic example of the general who becomes too powerful, an overmighty subject who had political ambitions himself, who got the Chinese involvement in the war completely wrong, got the big ideas wrong, and had to be sacked.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: That's an interesting point, how overwhelmingly popular he was. I remember reading in Lyndon Johnson's biography that when MacArthur came to Congress to speak after he was sacked about the Korean War's progression, somebody said this was the closest thing. If he had wanted to, MacArthur was so popular that he could have just said, "We're going to sack the Capitol," and people would have just followed him.
--:-- Andrew Roberts: Well, having seen what happened on January the 6th of last year, it's obviously not completely impossible.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Going back to Iraq and Afghanistan, how much have those conflicts, those counterinsurgency operations, prepared the American military for a war with a peer competitor like China?
--:-- Andrew Roberts: A great deal, obviously. But that's true of most wars. It's interesting, of course, China hasn't actually fought a major war for a very long time—really since the 1960s against India. Actual practice is an incredibly useful thing. If Ukraine were ever to be allowed into NATO, for example, we'd have 900,000 troops on the southern border of NATO. It would be a huge addition. Having troops that have fought—there's no amount of training that is the same as actual war fighting.
--:-- Andrew Roberts: What you mentioned earlier about nuclear bombs—of course, what we're seeing today in Gaza is a classic example of limited war. However vicious and ghastly and painful and bloody it's going to be, it is the story of a group fighting against a country which has the nuclear bomb, alone of all the countries in the region, and is on moral grounds not prepared even to threaten the use of it. In that sense, the Netanyahu government is not doing what Lavrov and Putin are doing by saber-rattling the nuclear option. So much of what is happening is as a result of Tehran wanting it to happen. Tehran doesn't have the bomb and Israel does. Yet Israel is not threatening Tehran.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: That's a really interesting point. As early as 1973, you could have had Israel nuke the Egyptian beachheads. It was a war of self-defense. It was like, you either die if you don't use it, or you lose the war.
--:-- Andrew Roberts: Exactly. '73 was an existential war in the way that this one at the moment isn't. Now, obviously, we don't know what's going to happen within Israel, with the West Bank, with Hezbollah, with the Iranians and Syrians. It's not impossible that this could turn into an existential war for Israel. But the possession of the nuclear bomb hasn't done Israel any favors. Equally, it hasn't weakened Israel either.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Is deterrence dead? Iran funded these Hamas terrorists to conduct this attack. As far as I know, there's no serious repercussions on Iran itself for doing this or funding Hezbollah. Is deterrence as a doctrine dead?
--:-- Andrew Roberts: No, because it's working very well in Southeast Asia, in Taiwan. It is only dead amongst people who are so irrational and illogical that they don't mind essentially being extirpated in the way that the Israelis might soon be trying to extirpate Hamas. If you don't care, if you believe that God has given you the right and duty to kill Jews, then you're not going to be deterred in the same way that a much more rational and logical actor such as Xi Jinping is. He wakes up every morning and thinks, "Right, should I be invading Taiwan?" He looks to the world situation, to the might of America in the South China Seas, and looks to all his neighbors—all but North Korea hate and fear him—and recognizes that today's not the day to do it. That is what deterrence is. It's incredibly expensive, of course, but it's immensely cheap at the same time compared to the alternative, which is war.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: This is one of the points you make in the book: money spent on deterrence is seldom wasted. But deterrence also has to be credible. Regardless of the question of whether America would actually intervene if China invaded Taiwan, is it rational for the Chinese to believe that America wouldn't intervene on behalf of an island with 20 million people, have a kinetic war with China over an island off the coast of China? Does that make sense? Is that deterrence credible for the Chinese?
--:-- Andrew Roberts: It is. It certainly is, because there is what's been called strategic ambiguity in the American stance. That is something that no rational actor wants to have to deal with. An America which could be sucked into a major war, an America that might act irrationally over Taiwan, or which—as you can see with the AUKUS treaty—has ambitions to stand up to China and feels that it needs to carry them out. The public statements are obviously not intended deliberately to provoke China, but they're pretty straightforward in being ambiguous enough that China doesn't want to take the risk. The United States military budget is so enormous, so vast, it's capable of deterring China. If it was to send the wrong messages—taking ships away and so on—then it might not.
--:-- Andrew Roberts: Look at what America's done in Ukraine. Xi recognizes that it's led a coalition which has fought very hard and so far hasn't lost. Without a single American serviceman being involved. Were American servicemen involved, which they would be in a Taiwan confrontation, the American president would be much, much more likely to go all in.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: If, for example, China blockades Taiwan and puts the onus on America to launch the kinetic war to break through the blockade, I wonder if put in those terms, an American president would not intervene. Or at least the Chinese wouldn't expect an American president to launch a kinetic war to break the blockade.
--:-- Andrew Roberts: They've obviously war-gamed this a million times in the Pentagon. Your remark about 20 million people is obviously an apposite one. But let's also remember that Taiwan has 80% of the semiconductor industry, or at least the high-level semiconductor industry. There are lots of good things being done to mitigate against that now. But nonetheless, it would be catastrophic for China to be able to snaffle all of that in a single coup d'état. The Biden administration knows that.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Before we return to *Conflict*, I do want to ask you some questions about Churchill and World War II. This is actually a good jumping off point. Speaking of rational leaders, I'm struck when reading your biography of Churchill by how much of his thinking is more emotive, less probabilistic, much more principled. When I try to back-test how I would have reacted given my mindset to World War II if I was in Britain, I have to admit—thinking in terms of probabilities and expected value—I would have said, "What's the expected value of fighting Germany in 1938 over Czechoslovakia? What would happen if you just didn't? It looks like it probably might just be best to run our odds with appeasement." I wonder if this is just a one-off case, or do you think in general that illustrates a weakness in the more probabilistic way of thinking about geopolitics compared to Churchill's more emotional, oratorical, principled way?
--:-- Andrew Roberts: I don't really agree with you on the premise. Churchill, yes, he was emotional and principled, but he also recognized that the advance the Germans made between the Sudeten crisis, which ended in Munich in September 1938, and the outbreak of war a year later in September 1939, was so huge—especially in their creation of bombers and tanks. It was helped so much by taking the Skoda factories of the Czechs from Czechoslovakia and churning out tanks for Germany. It was a rational thing to have tried to stop Germany invading Czechoslovakia. What Churchill was doing—yes, he was emotional and a great rhetorician—but he was also making a very hard-nosed decision with regard to balance of power, recognizing that Germany was in a much stronger position a year later than it had been at the time of Munich.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: It's remarkable to what extent Churchill had read, and not only read but written, a tremendous amount of history. I'm curious how concretely that history informed his decision-making as a leader. Was it at the level of tactics and geography, where you see how old battles in the same places are fought? Was it at the level of grand strategy? Was it at the understanding of human nature? What level did that understanding of history help him?
--:-- Andrew Roberts: All of those and more. One of the reasons I'm proud to be an historian is that Churchill was one. He used his—primarily that was his job in the 1930s when he was out of office, to write history books. The one about his great ancestor John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, is almost like an autobiography of the Second World War, and he's actually writing about his own ancestor 200 years beforehand. It is extraordinary how many things to do with tactics and strategy, of course, but also with how to deal with allies and how to deal with domestic political opinion—all of these things are gone into. Only five years after the publication of that book, he is prime minister and fighting a world war himself. History was a constant echo for him. It gave him endless signposts.
--:-- Andrew Roberts: It's mentioned in some 10% of his speeches in the Second World War. 10% of those speeches have references to history. He was basically telling the British people: look back at the Spanish Armada, look back at the Napoleonic wars. We have been in this dangerous situation before. The country has seen great perils before—Elizabeth I and the Spanish Armada, for example—and we've come through them and been victorious. He recognized the political power of historical analogy, and he bent it to his overall overarching theme that we have to stand up to the Nazis.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Speaking of this, if we think of Churchill as an applied historian—this isn't a question I was planning on asking you, but you are in the House of Lords. You've written about basically everything that's happened in the last few centuries across your 20 books. Would you ever consider getting more involved with politics?
--:-- Andrew Roberts: Well, I am a politician. I go to the House of Lords from Monday to Wednesday, lunchtime to dinner time. I go and vote in the divisions. I can't see how much more involved in politics I can be than speaking and voting in one of the chambers of our parliament.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Let me restate the question. Would you consider running for, aspiring towards a leadership position in the UK, given how successful past historians have been at that endeavor?
--:-- Andrew Roberts: We've just mentioned one past historian who's been successful. I assure you that there are an awful lot of other ones who haven't. No, I'm very happy with the extent that I involve myself in politics in the UK. I've got to get back down to writing history books, frankly. That's the reason I was put on earth, really.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Tying back Churchill and your most recent book, there's this interesting thing where wartime leaders—very successful wartime leaders—are kicked out of office after they win their wars. Churchill in 1945. De Gaulle resigns in '46 after leading the French against the Nazis. More recently, George H.W. Bush possibly has the most successful foreign policy since World War II—the unification of Germany, the fall of the Soviet bloc without a single shot being fired. David Lloyd George is the other classic example, of course. He led us to victory in the First World War and was out by 1922. Why are we in democratic countries keen to kick out the people who win us these wars and foreign policy wins?
--:-- Andrew Roberts: Because we recognize that the skills you need in peace are completely different from the ones you need in war. What the Labour Party was offering in 1945—this sort of new Jerusalem of socialism and the welfare state, nationalizing the Bank of England, free stuff essentially, the National Health Service—was going to be given by Clement Attlee. Although much of that actually was going to be done by Winston Churchill as well, they recognized that the Conservatives didn't have their heart in it in the same way that the Socialists did.
--:-- So it's completely rational in a democratic country, when you've got a choice of leaders, to go for the one who's going to lead you through the peace. However well the person who led you through the war did. Although that particular example of socialism in Britain doesn't seem like the rational choice for the British population to have made. Well, it did after six years of grueling warfare, where people wanted to have a more healthy and better life. And they assumed that socialism was going to be able to do that for them. It took us half a century before we grew out of that particular miasma.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Now, let's talk about future wars, which is something interesting that you and General Petraeus survey in your most recent book. You mentioned that the balance of power has shifted more towards defense than offense recently. Why is that?
--:-- Andrew Roberts: We're seeing that, aren't we? Or we will be about to see that, I fear, in Gaza. In Napoleonic times, it was one in three—you needed three attackers for every defender. That probably stayed true until the Second World War. But frankly, taking Gaza as an indication, with IEDs, with booby traps, with all these tunnels, and with the capacity for ambush and sniper fire as well, which has come on leaps and bounds since the old days of Stalingrad, you need more than certainly more than three to one in offense. It's an interesting fact that when Clausewitz was writing, three to one was a perfectly reasonable ratio, but I think that's gone to the birds now.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Interesting. That just preempted and answered a question I was about to ask you. It's remarkable to me that a three-to-one ratio, which Clausewitz first came up with, has stayed consistent for hundreds of years. I guess the answer is that it hasn't, but I was about to ask, well, it's weird that for hundreds of years with all these new technologies, that ratio is still the one that people use, that technicians still use.
--:-- Andrew Roberts: Yes, well, as I say, they did until well into our lifetimes, but they'd be mad to today because that has altered, especially in built-up areas, in the kind of situation one gets in Gaza with lots of high-rise buildings—fewer now than there were, to be frank—but lots of built-up areas. You can look at the Battle of Monte Cassino, where because the Allies flattened the monastery, the rubble was actually easier for the Germans to defend with machine gun nests and so on, than if the actual building had been left standing. So there is an argument that you do better if you don't blast the buildings, as you saw also in Mariupol, which you mentioned earlier.
--:-- And then there's Stalingrad, where they fought something called *Ratskrieg*, which is essentially "rat's war," because people are fighting down in the cellars. It's hand-to-hand stuff. It's extremely vicious, where every building, every room has to be fought sometimes down with bayonets. This kind of fighting, which is heavily, heavily full of high casualty rates, might well be the one that we're about to see the IDF enter in Gaza.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: That's a scary comparison. Gaza becomes Stalingrad. I didn't think of it that way, but that's wow.
--:-- Andrew Roberts: In my house in London, I have an actual copy of one of Winston Churchill's speeches with his handwritten annotations. And one of the sentences is that "London fought street by street could engulf and devour an entire hostile army." One hopes that doesn't happen to the IDF. But that's the reality of house-to-house fighting.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Actually, while we're on the subject, I have a few other questions about World War II that I want to ask you before we return to future wars. You have this really interesting book, probably my favorite book about World War II, *The Storm of War*, which I highly recommend. In it, you make the claim that were it not for the ideologically inspired blunders of Hitler and the Nazis, they could have won World War II. And then you detail a lot of the mistakes they made. But when we step back and look at, after America joins the war, the overwhelming industrial output of America—even if they didn't make these mistakes, is there really any chance? You have a country that has like 2x the GNP and is outproducing the rest of the world combined in ships and planes. Could you have really stood up to that?
--:-- Andrew Roberts: Well, why did Hitler declare war against America? There wouldn't have been a war if he hadn't declared war against America. You'd have fought a war against the country that attacked you, Japan. The reason is because he was a Nazi, because he believed that Jews and blacks dominated the American decision-making process, which is completely absurd when one looks at the Roosevelt administration—it had very, very few Jews or blacks. But the Nazis didn't sort of do their factual accuracy. It wasn't always their highest attribute.
--:-- They also thought that Americans were cowards and wouldn't be able to fight very well, which is extraordinary considering that the Americans had fought very well indeed in the First World War. Adolf Hitler told Molotov when they were in a bunker in 1940 in Berlin that if the Americans did come into the war, they wouldn't be able to put any troops into the Western theater until the year 1970. As it was, by November 1942, you had a quarter of a million GIs storming ashore in North Africa.
--:-- This sense of ideology, you see it also six months earlier in June of 1941, where Hitler invades Russia in the belief that the Slavic people can't stand up to the great German-Aryan master race. As Goebbels said to him, "We'll kick in the door and the whole rotten edifice will come crashing down," talking about the Bolshevik state. But that's not what happened, of course. The Russians fighting on their own territory—when they're not fighting a foreign adventure, like in Poland or in Finland or now in Ukraine—are actually very good soldiers. So he got that wrong. Again and again, Hitler put his Nazi ideology before the strategic best interests of the German Reich.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: It was fascinating to read the different mistakes Hitler made—from liquidating six million of his most productive, intelligent, and well-educated people, to the timing of Operation Barbarossa or launching it in the first place, to the timing of launching World War Two in the first place. But even if he hadn't declared war on America, the Lend-Lease aid on whose basis the Soviets were able to drive back the Germans would still have continued. And that was a meat grinder where the overwhelming majority of German troops died. So, I guess you could say, well, then he wouldn't have done Operation Barbarossa at all. But then are we still talking about the same war?
--:-- Andrew Roberts: He would have invaded Russia and been caught in this enormous war. But if he hadn't declared war on the United States, it's very difficult to work out how Roosevelt would have been able to declare war on him. Especially if you're fighting a full-scale war against Japan, which by early 1942 covered one-eighth of the world's surface. It's a huge undertaking.
--:-- But by the calendar year 1944, when the British produced 28,000 warplanes, the Russians and the Germans both produced 40,000 each, the United States produced 98,000 warplanes. It's almost as much as the whole of the rest of the world put together. They were building Liberty ships at the rate of one a week. It was a truly extraordinary thing in terms of sheer production. So of course that was going to give them the final say over who commanded at D-Day, when D-Day would happen, and what would happen once they landed in France. But it also had huge implications for everything else in the Second World War as well. And you're also completely right to say that for every five Germans killed in conflict—I don't mean bombed from the air, I mean killed on a battlefield—four of them died on the Eastern Front.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Given how misled Hitler was by Nazi ideology, why weren't the Soviets as misled by communist ideology in the waging of World War II?
--:-- Andrew Roberts: Because communist ideology hadn't affected the actual Politburo, the way in which the Politburo worked under Stalin. There was no dictatorship of the proletariat or anything like that, let alone any equality. He was obviously a totalitarian dictator. But what he did learn was that the Hitlerian way of fighting the war was not the most productive one.
--:-- So what you get after Operation Barbarossa—after which he had some kind of mini mental breakdown in the immediate hours that he learned about it, how the one man he trusted in politics, Adolf Hitler, had betrayed him. For a paranoiac, that's a difficult moment to take. But then what he does is start to lean on those marshals, such as Konev and Zhukov and Rokossovsky and others, and gives them a lot more power than they ever had before, and listens to them and takes their advice. He actually has a much more Western view—the relationship between Churchill, Roosevelt, Alan Brooke, and George Marshall, which I write about in my book *Masters and Commanders*—a big sort of give and take, a much more democratic and Western way of coming to military decisions. That's the one that Stalin adopts, and quite rightly, and it's completely contrasted from what's going on in the Wolfschanze, about 1,800 miles behind the German front.
--:-- That was the Führer listening sometimes for hours to his generals, most of whom know strategy far better than he because they actually went to staff colleges and fought as officers in the First World War, rather than just as a corporal. Men like Rundstedt, Guderian, and Manstein. These people would be listened to by Hitler. And then right at the end of the meeting, Hitler would sum up and say that they were going to do exactly what he'd originally said right at the beginning of the meeting. We have every word said by everybody at the Führer conferences because the stenographers took down every word. It's very clear that they would go into tremendous detail. But ultimately, the Führer's way was the way that the Wehrmacht went.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: This is actually interesting. And this is one of the points you discuss in *Conflict*—you talk about the different ways in which democracies versus dictatorships are able to execute wars. And World War II is obviously the perfect example to evaluate this.
--:-- Andrew Roberts: Well, except for the Soviet Union was not a democracy, of course, and it was on the winning side. There is that glaring glitch in the argument.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Right, right, right. Fair enough. But so, you have the Western democracies with this strategy by committee—I think you described it in *The Storm of War*. And that obviously means that something as stupid as Operation Barbarossa never happens. You have to come to consensus between all these leaders. At the same time, in your Napoleon biography, you have this singular genius who is able to execute these moves that even his advisors often said, "Well, you shouldn't do that." In the case of Russia, they were right. But maybe you can talk generally about the merits of strategy by consensus versus strategy by a singular mind.
--:-- Andrew Roberts: Actually, the interesting thing about Napoleon in 1812 is that he wasn't warned by his generals that it was a big mistake. This was partly because he and they thought that this was going to be a three-week campaign, only going about 50 miles into Russian territory before the Russians capitulated or came to a big battle and were defeated. He had absolutely no plans at all to go all the way to Moscow in 1812. That would have seemed, as he was crossing the Niemen River, a complete absurdity. But he was drawn in more and more into the Russian heartland until finally they gave battle in September 1812 at Borodino. Then he went on and took Moscow. But he left enough time to get back from Moscow to Smolensk—it was, in fact, more time than he had taken to get from Smolensk to Moscow. There are other reasons, which I go into in the book, about why the retreat from Moscow turned into the catastrophe it did. But it wasn't actually primarily the weather at the beginning, at least.
--:-- So, yes, Napoleon is the classic example of the single-minded strategic leader who, like Alexander the Great or Julius Caesar, has the whole centrality of the campaign in his head. But of course, he does lose. After 1812, you have the various coalitions of 1813 and 1814 which force him to abdicate. Then he comes back in the 100 Days and loses there as well. That is in contrast to the much more collegiate way that Wellington, Schwarzenberg, and Blücher interacted with one another.
--:-- But yes, your overall thesis is absolutely right about democracies being better at fighting wars. But dictatorships, of course, and totalitarian ones, are much better at starting wars, because they do have the element of surprise very often. One looks at the Yom Kippur War, 9/11, Pearl Harbor, Barbarossa, the Falklands, the attack on Kuwait by Saddam. The Chinese sneaking into Korea—160,000 of them crossing the Yellow River in the dead of night. It's the most extraordinary surprise attack. There's that wonderful line of Paul Wolfowitz's who said that surprise attacks take place so often in history that the only surprising thing is that we're still surprised by them.
--:-- Democracies can do surprise attacks. The major exception to that rule is when Israel successfully carried out the Six-Day War surprise attack. But otherwise, democracies tend not to. And by the way, it's a good thing not to, because what it does is light a fire under the country that's been surprised. Classic examples being Pearl Harbor—it makes them feel outraged and angry, and as a result they tend to extract revenge. And by the way, what Hamas did on the 7th of October is a classic example of that. It's a surprise attack which was immensely successful by its own light, but which will have lit a fire under Israel that is going to be very dangerous for Hamas.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: This is actually an excellent opportunity to bring us back to the future war, which you discuss in your newest book, *Conflict*. The question I have is, given you discuss in the book that we have satellite reconnaissance and drones and all this cyber espionage—given how clearly we can see the world now with these new technologies—are large-scale surprise attacks ever going to be possible again?
--:-- Andrew Roberts: That's a very good question. I'm tempted to say no, because you're quite right. Everything can be spotted on the battlefield today. Obviously, the Hamas surprise attack was a much, much smaller scale than a complete nation-on-nation kind of attack like Barbarossa or Pearl Harbor. But nonetheless, it is much more difficult to hide troops today than it ever has been in the past. That doesn't change the psychology of what happens when you are surprised in the way that Israel was.
--:-- In the 10th chapter, the last chapter of our book, we call it "The Future of War." We look at areas like cyber and space, but also sensors, AI, robotics, and drones. In the future, the war will be fought between two sets of drones, and the humans won't be *in* the loop. They'll be *on* the loop. They'll have written the algorithms, but they won't be in the loop because decision-making has to take place far, far faster than the human mind can work. If a human is involved at the controls of weaponry of the future, then he'll lose. It has to be fought between two sets of machines. Of course, that has great advantages in terms of speed, but machines have no conscience. They don't feel fear or cowardice. They don't feel remorse or regret or pity. It's going to be a much more dangerous world in that sense.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah. And that has all kinds of interesting implications. From the technical, which you discuss in the book—that the electromagnetic spectrum will be under much greater contention because then you can jam the electronics and the communications between these devices—to the strategic. You have these examples famously, like in the 1980s when the stock market crashes because an algorithm malfunctions. If the equivalent of that leads to a world war...
--:-- You discussed in your Ukraine chapter that tech entrepreneurs are now having a much bigger impact on the waging of war. Obviously you have Elon Musk providing Starlink services to Ukraine and notably refusing to provide the service to help with the naval surprise attack that Ukraine was planning on launching in Crimea. How will the ability of tech entrepreneurs to dictate where and how they will get involved in lending their technology to governments play into the future strategy? Will they be a force for peace, or will they not be a force at all? Because if the government really wants your technology, in the end, they can just expropriate it.
--:-- Andrew Roberts: I don't think they'll do that except for in times of extreme stress and crisis. But no, actually, there's a very wide and, I think, overall very positive area that tech entrepreneurs can play here. Starlink—yes, it's true that Mr. Musk did refuse to help one attack in Crimea. But overall, Starlink has been invaluable in this war. In a way, it is the first proper internet war. People with iPhones on the battlefield can upload both images and map references, which can prove extremely useful to drones and artillery. This is one of the reasons that Kyiv didn't fall in the opening parts of the Russo-Ukrainian war—because Ukrainian artillery was being given accurate information from all sorts of open intelligence, open sources. It was a new kind of warfare, which the Russians took a very long time to catch up with. Because they didn't have their own people on the ground, whereas Ukraine did—the native population was 100% opposed to the Russian invasion in every area apart from the Donbas. You essentially had a multitude of information sources that were proving to be incredibly useful.
--:-- So that's one aspect of the modernity. The next one is drones and the use they've been put to by the Ukrainians. The innovative stance of the Ukrainians has been really extraordinarily impressive. When tech people all across the world, not just in the United States, came out very actively in support of Ukraine, it really did move the dial. I think with companies like Palantir and others that are really making huge advances, the cutting edge is still with the West in terms of tech entrepreneurial ability. This is a good thing for the West. Some individuals are going to be pretty much like Mr. Musk—the most important private individual, I would say, to actually affect warfare since Thyssen and Krupp back before the First World War. So it really is a new world. But it's not a bad new world. It could actually be an extremely good new world for the West and for democracy.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Speaking of tech entrepreneurs and their personalities, let's discuss your biography of Napoleon. I'm not aware if you're aware of this, but living in San Francisco, in the startup community, there is a cult of Napoleon that is solely—
--:-- Andrew Roberts: Is there? I didn't know that. Seriously, is there?
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Your biography is part of the canon here. In the person of Napoleon, I think startup founders see the best aspects of themselves. You have somebody who is a young upstart, stupendously energetic and competent, much more efficient than the bureaucracies and old systems around him. A reformer, tremendously intellectually curious, an autodidact. You can just go down the list. What is your reaction?
--:-- Andrew Roberts: I love that. I love that. That's exactly what he was. He was totally fascinated by every new thing. He flung himself into ideas for balloons and submarines and anything that could be useful for agricultural development. He was fascinated by trying to build bridges faster and better and cheaper. He was a real go-getter when it came to giving prizes for new chemical components and so on. This was somebody who created the legend, not just for soldiers, but very much for inventors and entrepreneurs and people like that who he felt were going to help France outstrip Britain, which had a head start on France in the Industrial Revolution. So there was a very strong nationalist reasoning behind his embrace of science.
--:-- But he was made a fellow of the French Academy on the basis of his genuine interest, not just because he was the First Consul of France. He used to attend all their meetings. This was an extraordinary thing—if there was going to be a meeting on electricity, sitting in the front would be the First Consul, taking notes. So I can understand why young tech entrepreneurs might like Napoleon, and I'm thrilled that my book might be helping with that.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah, I think you'd be surprised to the extent of it. It's also true that megalomaniacs also love Napoleon. So I'm not saying that there is a massive Venn diagram shaded area between tech entrepreneurs and megalomaniacs, but liking Napoleon doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to be a great tech entrepreneur.
--:-- On the point of being a futurist, it's really remarkable in your Churchill biography—you discuss the ways in which he saw the influence of tanks and planes and even nuclear energy far before many others. His best friend was the Oxford professor for physics, Professor Lindemann, later Lord Cherwell. He loved having scientists around him. He said that scientists should be "on tap but not on top." He recognized that he didn't want to have a world run by scientists, but he definitely wanted to know what they were thinking. As early as the mid-1920s, a good 20 years before the atom bomb, he talked about how an entire city could be destroyed by a nuclear bomb the size of an orange. That was very advanced stuff.
--:-- Andrew Roberts: He was fascinated by the use of radar in the Second World War, especially at the very beginning—how one could bend the German rays to mean that their bombers were sent off target and didn't fly over British cities. He wanted to get into the real nitty-gritty of all of that. And of course, the ultimate mathematical genius machine, the Enigma—the Ultra machine that broke the Enigma code. In everything to do with that, he was really interested in learning and understanding the reasoning behind what was going on. It's very easy to think of Churchill as a bit of a reactionary figure—this tubby Tory with his cigars and his brandy, wanting to hang on to India, all these very much set-in-the-past attitudes. But really, he was somebody who was obsessed with the future.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: On the point of Napoleon, it's interesting the way you describe the way he would micromanage every aspect of the empire. His energy and efficiency—it reads honestly like an Elon Musk biography, where Elon is micromanaging the engines on his Raptors at the same time running these five other companies. I wonder what you think a person like Napoleon does today. If that genius is born today, does he become an Elon Musk, or does he do something else?
--:-- Andrew Roberts: No, that's exactly what he does. Absolutely. He goes to Silicon Valley and sets up his own company and makes a billion out of finding something useful to advance mankind with. That's exactly what Napoleon does today. And by the way, if he has anything like the same acquisitive techniques, he probably buys up lots of other companies around him in the way that Napoleon invaded country after country.
--:-- But when he did invade those countries, what he would do—for example, in Italy after the Italian campaign, he entered Milan. The first thing he did was to get together the Milanese intellectuals, the writers, the scientists, the chemists. He was very interested in astronomy and would talk to them about their thing. So you had an intellectual as leader, which frankly, for the Bourbons over the last thousand years of French history, it's very difficult to think of more than one or two genuine intellectuals as ruler. So one can understand why he became popular amongst the middle class and the intellectuals themselves.
--:-- One of the other things he would do was to go into every town he went into, he would go into the ghetto and free the Jews and give them civil and religious rights. I think that was tremendously forward-thinking for that day and age, and a very attractive feature about him.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: The biography of Napoleon must end tragically. I noticed this about many other biographies of great people I read—often what makes them great in the first place is they keep making these double-or-nothing gambles that catapult them to the top. And then, at some point, your luck runs out. That's obviously an oversimplification in every single case, but I wonder if this is also a pattern you notice in the lives of great figures. You could say for Elon, having his reputation and fortune wasted away as the author of Twitter could be an example of one such thing. What is your reaction to that?
--:-- Andrew Roberts: Yes, of course. Hubris is the occupational hazard of hugely successful people. It's probably also the occupational hazard of lots of other people, but we just don't know about it because they're not hugely successful. One does tend to get stuck in one's ways. You can't necessarily teach an old dog new tricks. You can't necessarily reinvent yourself, and therefore you go down the same old paths.
--:-- I would say in Napoleon's defense, not least that idea that when he invaded in 1812—which is the key moment, after that nothing good happens, before that lots and lots of good things happened—the key thing is that he had beaten the Russians twice before. He was invading with an army of 615,000, which was the same size as Paris at that time. He knew that the Russian army was only about half the size of his, and he didn't want to go too far into Russia, which of course changed in the course of the campaign. But it wasn't an insane, hubristic, mad decision to go to war against Russia in 1812.
--:-- What was hubristic, mad, and insane was to try to beat Britain by imposing a continental blockade on the entirety of Europe, attempting to crush Britain by stopping smuggling—which was completely rife—and to stop every other country from entering into free trade with Britain. It was that belief that protectionism could somehow win the war against Britain. That was the mad thing, and that's what led him into the Peninsular Campaign, which cost him a quarter of a million soldiers.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Wow. Actually, if you have somebody like Napoleon, who for his entire life has succeeded in ways that nobody else could anticipate—people tell him, "Well, that's not possible," and he accomplishes it—obviously he has to take advisors with a grain of salt, knowing that he has been able to do things that others have not. But he also has to recognize his limits. This is not just a question of Napoleon in particular, but just in general: how does somebody who is at the tail end of multiple distributions not fall back to mediocrity when making judgments about themselves, but also recognize their limits?
--:-- Andrew Roberts: It's always a question of choosing the right advisors, isn't it?
--:-- Andrew Roberts: In domestic politics, areas that he knew he didn't know that much about, legal codes and so on. Although it's called the Napoleonic Code, actually, of course, it was his legal experts who drew it up and saw it through and passed the legislation and so on. In areas that he wasn't particularly interested in, he did allow a considerable degree to be decided by—not decided by, no, that's one stage too far—but advised upon. He was the dictator. He had the ultimate decision. But he was very good at choosing advisors quite regardless of what their status were in society, or quite how respectable they were.
--:-- There's a man called Cambassiere who was a truly powerful figure, and he was gay. This was something that was pretty much unknown at that stage. He was outwardly gay, at a time when, of course, that was against the law. And Napoleon didn't mind that because he was so good at his job that he kept him on as arch chancellor.
--:-- Some of the marshals—he was a true believer in meritocracy. There were 26 marshals; 13 of them came from the working classes, and in some cases below that—they were peasants, they were the sons of innkeepers and barrel coopers and domestic servants and so on. Yet if he saw that a man was lucky—that was one of the things he always wanted in his generals—but also was a natural leader, he would appoint him. They became marshals, and all the marshals, apart from a couple, became dukes and princes. Two of them became kings. To be the son of a barrel cooper and to become a king in the early 19th century was a truly extraordinary thing in an army where for the last thousand years, certainly, your rank and status in life was very much the same as your father and grandfather.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: One thing I found really interesting in your biographies of Napoleon and Churchill, if I'm remembering correctly, both of them wrote a novel in their early 20s or thereabouts where they saved their country in battle. A character saves their country in battle and wins over a pretty maiden. I remember the details, but I thought, wow, both of them did that? That's a really interesting detail. What explains this?
--:-- Yes, it's probably a terrible psychological disorder, but I've just realized that I did the same thing when I was in my 20s. I had a novel in which I saved the country and married the fair maiden. Gosh, I don't know what that makes me.
--:-- Andrew Roberts: You're probably a megalomaniac like Napoleon. But yes, they're both great reads, by the way. I love *Clisson and Eugenie*, the book you're referring to by Napoleon. But the best one by far is *Savrola* by Winston Churchill, where you see lots of rolling Churchillian phrases which come out again and again later on in life. And you're right. Both of them are very, very obviously autobiographical. The hero in *Savrola* saves the country, but then he goes off into exile. And doesn't the Napoleon figure die heroically in battle after saving the nation? But there's a lot of nation saving going on in both of those youthful novels.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Now that we're nearing the end of our time, I want to ask you about how is it possible? You're in the House of Lords—I just realized that, well, I knew you were in the House of Lords, but I just realized how much of your time that consumes. On top of that, you're writing these books that are widely recognized as the best biographies of these people who have thousands of biographies written about them. And you've written 20 books. How are you managing your time? How is this possible?
--:-- Andrew Roberts: Because I start work at 4 a.m. every day. You get five hours or so before anyone wants to bother you or irritate you. That's the trick. It's time management. I have a nap every single day for about half an hour in the afternoon. I've been doing it since I was at Cambridge 40 years ago. I've trained my body to switch off and then switch back on again. It means that you get two days essentially of work out of one day on earth. Obviously everybody's body clock is completely different, but I do recommend if you're young enough to start—and as I say, I started when I was in my early 20s—you can really squeeze more time out of the day than you think is mathematically possible.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah, I'm 23, so this might be a perfect time to launch this habit. Today's the day.
--:-- Andrew Roberts: Make sure after lunch you put on an eye patch and literally go to bed, and you will find that you've squeezed an extra day out of the day.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: So why is biography, which is a genre you've employed across many of your books—and of course books that have become overwhelmingly famous, rightly so—why is that the best medium to understand an era or to understand the impact of that era on the present?
--:-- Andrew Roberts: Because it focuses the mind, concentrates the mind on one person. You emotionally connect with that person. You either love him or hate him or her, of course. I have done some work on writing about women. It's the great man and woman theory of history, of course, and I do believe in that. I think that although there are enormous historical movements that happen—the decline of magic and the rise of science, industrialization, and everything—those come about as the result of the deliberate choices made by millions, indeed billions of people. You can't look at something like the invasion of Russia we were talking about earlier in 1812, or Churchill's decision to fight on and not make peace with Hitler in 1940, and not recognize that the individual does play an absolutely central role in some major world-changing decisions.
--:-- So I think it is intellectually justified to write biography. A lot of Whigs and determinists and Marxists don't; they think that biography is far too anti-determinist. But in fact, what are we but our decisions? "Man is spirit," as Churchill said. So I think it stacks up as a reasonable way for me to spend my time.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah, indeed. I think that's a great place to close this conversation. This was absolutely fascinating. The book again, I highly recommend it. It was a really thorough and interesting read about recent conflicts with insights from not only one of the best historians in the world, but also somebody who commanded the two most recent campaigns that involved conflict since World War II. So the book is *Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to Ukraine*, available at Amazon and fine bookstores everywhere. Andrew, thank you so much.
--:-- Andrew Roberts: Thank you, Dwarkesh. I've really enjoyed it.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Hey everybody, I hope you enjoyed that episode. As always, the most helpful thing you can do is to share the podcast. Send it to people you think might enjoy it, put it on Twitter, in your group chats, etc. It just splits the world. I appreciate you listening. I'll see you next time. Cheers.
