Julian Dorey Podcast - #303 - Churchill Historian UNLOADS on “Biggest WW2 Coverup” | Martin Dugard

Episode Date: May 20, 2025

SPONSORS HERE: 1) American Financing: Go to https://www.AmericanFinancing.net/Dorey or call 888-991-9788 today! PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/JulianDorey (***TIMESTAMPS in Description Below) ~ Martin Dugard is the New York Times #1 bestselling author of the Taking series, now available at all book retailers. In addition, Martin is co-author of the mega-million selling Killing series: Killing Lincoln, Killing Kennedy, Killing Jesus, Killing Patton, Killing Reagan, Killing England, Killing the Rising Sun, Killing the SS, Killing Crazy Horse, and Killing the Mob. MARTIN'S LINKS: BUY MARTIN'S NEWEST BOOK (MIDWAY): https://shorturl.at/RWsyZ BUY MARTIN'S OTHER BOOKS: https://shorturl.at/qjA0r X: https://x.com/martinjdugard Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/authormartindugard/ FOLLOW JULIAN DOREY INSTAGRAM (Podcast): https://www.instagram.com/juliandoreypodcast/ INSTAGRAM (Personal): https://www.instagram.com/julianddorey/ X: https://twitter.com/julianddorey JULIAN YT CHANNELS - SUBSCRIBE to Julian Dorey Clips YT: https://www.youtube.com/@juliandoreyclips - SUBSCRIBE to Julian Dorey Daily YT: https://www.youtube.com/@JulianDoreyDaily - SUBSCRIBE to Best of JDP: https://www.youtube.com/@bestofJDP ****TIMESTAMPS**** 00:00 - Martin’s Lowkey Profile & Most Famous American Historian 10:49 - Rewriting History Today (Issues & Setting Record Straight) 17:38 - Who was Winston Churchill, WW1 Story of Churchill & Turks 29:39 - Writing About British Explorers (Story of Getting Arrested) 41:36 - Churchill Recognizing Hitler’s Rise, Charles Lindburg 51:23 - Hitler & Germany’s Way More Advanced Technology 01:01:21 - Mistrial About Not Going to War, Writing About “Killing the SS” 01:11:27 - Mossad, Devil’s Chessboard Book 01:19:30 - Churchill’s Visited Germany w/ Spies 01:38:40 - Change from Isolation to Joining War (Impossible) 01:46:04 - Hitler’s Massive Mistakes that Lead to Fall 01:57:31 - Martin’s Newest Book Focused on Churchill 02:17:01 - Greatest Story Tellers, Hunter S. Thompson 02:24:51 - Next Stage of Writing, Getting Connected to Bill O’Reilly 02:36:10 - Writing Book “Killing Lincoln,” “Kill Jesus”, & “Killing JFK” 02:48:03 - Historical Take on Geopolitics Today CREDITS: - Host, Editor & Producer: Julian Dorey - In-Studio Producer: Alessi Allaman - https://www.youtube.com/@UCyLKzv5fKxGmVQg3cMJJzyQ Julian Dorey Podcast Episode 303 - Martin Dugard Music by Artlist.io Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

And I've studied a guy. What made Churchill such a brilliant wartime leader? When you look at the lead-up to World War II, Churchill saw what was coming and nobody listened to him. Nobody wanted to believe that what he was saying was true. He even had like a secret army of spies just kind of reporting back to him about what was going on in Germany, trying to make sure that people knew the danger because Hitler told everybody he was a man of peace. The British people believed him. Joseph Kennedy, the American ambassador, he was a huge Hitler fan. So the first bombing of London was September 7th. That's when the Blitz begins.

If you pull up a map that shows places in London that were bombed, it's everywhere. That's it right there. Whoa. He was very much behind the idea of, you know, we need battleships. We need to build a standing army. He just wanted to let people know

he wasn't just a politician. He actually went into the military himself. He went and fought in the First World War. That's an ignored part of history, how insane that warfare was. And they don't take the time to really drill down and see what the real story is. Hey guys, if you're not following me on Spotify, please hit that follow button and leave a five-star review. They're both a huge, huge help. Thank you. Martin, you have a long, long bibliography. Like I said, I've got a mortgage.

It makes me tired looking at it. How many books total have you written and co-written with Bill O'Reilly? I think I did 14 with Bill. And I've done a few for other people. I did one with James Patterson. Legend. Yeah, and great guy, too. Super smart about what it takes

to be a best-selling writer. Pull that in just a little bit. I wrote The Survivor book with Mark Burnett. I lived on the island during the first season. Mark's an old friend and asked me to come. So when they filmed Survivor, I was there the first one. And I did a couple more for him,

but my name isn't on three or four. So I've got about 30-ish books total. How old are you, 150? I'm 63. I was going to say, you don't look 150. 30 books is nuts. I didn't start writing books until I was 35. You didn't start until 35? No. Weren't you working in corporate America or something like that? I was. I started, I got out of, I took my time getting through college. You know, I would skip school and go to the beach and drink beer and

read Hemingway at Hunter S. Thompson and wish I could do what they did. And then when I finally got a shitty corporate job, I hated it within two weeks. And my wife said, do something about it. So I began writing magazine articles on the side just to write, just to try the whole writing gig. And sooner, one thing led to another, led to another. And then I got a call out of the blue, Mark Burnett. He had no money at all at the time, but he another. And then I got a call out of the blue, Mark Burnett. He had no money at all at the time, but he had seen an article I'd written. And he wanted me to fly to Madagascar to cover this adventure race he was going to be a part of. And he was taking a team of Navy SEALs with him.

And I had to tell my boss I needed three weeks off to fly to Madagascar. I went there. And my boss was not just a mid-level manager. He was like the top guy in the company. It was this big Fortune 500 company. And so I'm flying back from Madagascar wondering how in the world I can ever go back to the corporate life after this great three-week adventure, you know, crocodiles and heat and just, you know, living really rough for three weeks. And I should not have worried because they fired me the first day back. And they did it like Jerry Maguire style, like right in the middle of a restaurant. So I couldn't make a scene.

And I didn't care. I went home and told my wife. I said, I want to make it as a writer. And she said, I'm all in, but you can't look at the want ads. You can't be looking for jobs on the side. If you're going to do side if you're gonna do it you gotta do it so it's a good wife right there it's she's solid i mean she she she's got my back uh we had two kids at the time and you know so it wasn't like it was just the two of us yeah this

carefree couple uh and then you know and i started doing books about five years later just because I was traveling so much. And then we had a third child. And being gone three months out of the year is not conducive to being a good dad. So I wrote a book on spec. It sold. And then it kind of off to the races. Here we are. What was that first book on spec?

It was called Surviving the Toughest Race on Earth. And it was about that race I'd gone to in Madagascar. It's actually a pretty good book. I mean, I went back and read it. I made a lot of choices in that book I wouldn't make now. And I think I doubled down on some of the details, but it still reads, I think it reads well. Had you trained at any point in your life, like in college or even in high school to be like a writer? Because obviously people got to check out your books. We're going to have the links in description, including your brand new one that

somehow you said you wrote in six months. We'll get to that. But you know, your writing style is incredible. Like you sit, you, you do things in a very punchy, fast paced storytelling way. Like that's something I really enjoy reading. So like, where did you develop that? You know, I didn't – I felt like when I first got into like freelancing as a journalist, I was at a disadvantage because most of the people I was working with had gone to journalism school or they had an MFA or something like that. I didn't take any – I never took a writing class in my life. I just liked to read and I had this dream that I could make it as a writer. And I think if I knew how bad I was when I left the corporate world, I would never have left the corporate world. I just, I was not good. But, you know, it's like when you're training for something, if you do it every day, you know, it becomes a muscle and you get better

and better and better. And when I did my first history book, it was like the third book I did. I've got a big bone to pick with most historians because most people write history as if you have to over explain and you have to be academic and you have to, I don't know, it's just boring. And it makes me mad because I think history is as good as any great novel and any great piece of fiction. So with that first book, which is about Captain Cook, I think it was 2000, 2001, I tried to write a fast-paced narrative. And then when we started doing the killing books, it really gave me – because those are so far-ranging. You go from Lincoln to Kennedy to Jesus to Patton. I learned, you know, it's one thing to have an area of history that is yours, like let's say you're a Lincoln scholar and you do nothing but Lincoln books. Well, those killing

books, they were so wide ranging, it taught me how to write in a style that could cover, worked for any kind of area of history at all. And so the style I concocted is, you know, keep it present tense as much as possible. Short, declarative sentences. A lot of this is James Patterson talking to me, too. Always end with a cliffhanger. At the end of a chapter, pick up, boom. You know, everything is movement, movement, movement. There's nothing ponderous.

There's emotion. It's not like it's dry or just only action, but you've got to keep the reader turning the pages. And I like to write history as a beach read or something on an airplane. You're going to read that instead of a 400-page book that is going to put you to sleep. It's a lot of pressure though too because you're not just – you're not writing fiction. You can't make it up as you go. You have to take the research that you do and put it in a storytelling format and then also people can look at your bibliographies. Like you're going through all different perspectives of history and you kind of have to put your finger on what seems to be the most accurate because there's always going to be

some different stories to some level. Like how do you organize all that before you even put the pen to paper? I don't. It keeps me up at night. It's in every book. It's, you know, Midway. I was halfway through Midway and I was completely lost and I didn't know where I was going. And then I thought, you know, we need to go back. And there's a I didn't know where I was going. And then I, I thought, you know, we need to go back. And there's a whole section in there where I just describe, I go full James Missioner and I describe Midway Island, Midway Atoll from, you know, the beginning of time to now, just so the reader has a frame of reference. And it gave me 80 good pages, but at the same time it it allowed me to sit back and let the story talk to me so that when we got to the battle there were stakes involved so

yeah that's i i can't imagine doing something like that without having it fully outlined before well like the book i'm working on i'm working on a book about the running boom of the 1970s right now which is is really hard because you don't – there's no beginning. Everybody knows there was a running boom, but nobody knows when it began or when it ended or if there's another one going on right now. So that's a different kind of history. But with a book like Midway or like Taking London about the Battle of Britain, I knew the events. So, you know, when it started, you know, when it ended, you know, the stuff that happened in between. And then it's up to me to do the research and then weave the story together in such a way that it carries the reader from beginning to end without them getting bored, without them saying, I'd rather watch TV. That's where I have

to lift the characters up to start grabbing the people and making them read the book. Right. But story, no matter how you do it, effectively what you're putting out there, people just look through your bibliography and the range of history you've looked at, you are, to me, taking on the role of being a historian. I mean, there's some pressure with that too because that's the record forever, you know? Yeah, I'm kind of – I am technically an historian. I mean, I'm actually – someone told me this. Other than O'Reilly, I'm the second best historian in modern American literature, but nobody knows my name, which is kind of funny. Well, we found you.

Yeah, you did. It was great. So that's the thing is I love history, but I don't just write history. I tell a story. And I'm reading a Rick Atkinson book right now, the final book of his World War II trilogy. And it is amazing. I mean, it is such great history. And the detail and the level of research is fascinating. And he tells great stories within it. But that's not what I do. I don't bog people down in minutia. I like to write something that, you know, I like to find sex.

I like to find romance. I like to find anger and rage and all the things that make people care about a story. Humanity. Humanity, exactly. Yeah. It's an interesting time we're talking to right now as far as how people look at history because, you know, the beauty of the internet is that – and you can say like the social media era is that people have more access to information and peeling through things than ever before. And so that goes far beyond books. It goes to people sharing ideas and spreading those ideas. But I've been really struck this year in particularly with how people have been re-litigating World War II and the buildup to it. And I try not to

just have the instant emotional reaction, which I do every goddamn time. But then I calm myself down and I'm like, OK, well, how are we looking at this? And I've studied a guy like Winston Churchill throughout my life. I've studied a guy like Adolf Hitler throughout my life. It fascinates me that this wasn't that long ago and these types of things could happen where you have the villain archetype every way. And then what seems to be the hero archetype in every way. So when I see people starting to come out and being like, no, no, no, no, you know, Hitler wasn't great, but Churchill was a real villain too. I'm almost like, you know, it makes you go into an empty room and, and like, look at the, look at the wall and wonder if you're looking at a white wall or if it was black the whole time,

you know, like, like it's kind of crazy of crazy. What do you think that is that makes us question every single thing that's ever been put out there? Oh, I was just going to focus on Churchill with that one. We're going to go to Churchill. Don't worry. I just think is – I think people like to be contrary. I feel like as someone who spends a large amount of my time immersed in history, I feel like most people don't know anything about history. And they make stuff up based on a fact or something they read on the internet, and then they just go with it. And they don't take the time to really drill down and see what the real story is. I mean, if you look at what's going on in the world right now,

you look at Russia, you look at the stuff going on in the Middle East, all of this has been done a thousand times throughout history. It's repeating itself over and over and over again. But people think that they just like to make a good guy or a bad guy. You know, is Putin a good guy? Is Putin a bad guy? And is Zelensky a good guy? Is Zelensky a bad guy. Yes. You know, is Putin a good guy? Is Putin a bad guy? You know, and is Zelensky a good guy? Is Zelensky a bad guy? Everybody's, nobody, it's this, we don't live in a world of absolutes, but people are trying to make everything absolute. Yes. Debt doesn't just show up one day. It builds little by little. Credit cards, car loans, medical bills, and suddenly

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that's 888-991-9788 or you can go to AmericanFinancing.net slash Dory. That link is in the description below. So call that number today and take back your peace of mind with American Financing. I think that's a great way to put it. It's like, you know, we should go to Churchill and talk about this because obviously like you're a historian of him. You've written about him in several different books at the least. But like people want their hero to be absolutely perfect. There's nothing wrong with them.

There's nothing wrong with them related to the time they lived in, whatever. And to me, it's like every human being who's ever lived is flawed. There are things you're going to find that are like, oh, well, that wasn't too positive about everyone. And Churchill is no different. He had some interesting opinions on India in particular and some of the people that lived there and certainly I think was a part of his time period, if you will. But to then tear – to throw out the baby with the bathwater and tear down the fact like the leadership, a guy like that seems to have shown in World War II, taking – basically like leading the way for the Allies as it would turn out.

I think that's, I think that's really counterintuitive. I think, like you said, like the stuff with India, and even when I was doing Taking Midway, I learned that Churchill knew absolutely nothing about the Japanese other than, you know, just the fact that, you know, as a colonialist and imperialist, that they were just another one of those countries that could have been a British, you know, part of the empire, you know. So was Churchill a racist? Yeah, you could say that, because he was of a, and again, I know people who want to attack that. Someone like me says he was a man of his time and they're saying, well, his time is wrong.

It's like, you can't say that because if the people, what we believe right now may seem utterly crazy to people and wrong in 50 to 100 years. That's right. You just have to live where, you have to stay in your lane, let's put it that way, just to make it real simple. Do you think there were even any leaders of major countries at that time who weren't completely kind of racist at that time? I think everybody was, yeah, I think it went both ways. Right.

Like when I was writing the book about Stanley Livingston in Africa, we talked about the African slave trade. But most of the Africans who fell into slavery were actually captured by other African tribes. That's a great way to get rid of your enemies is just capture them all and give them to slave traders or sell them to slave traders. So all of that stuff, I mean, racism, you can't escape racism. I will say this. I naively thought that we as a nation, as America as a nation, had gotten over its racism sometime during – because we elected a black president. I thought, okay, now we have arrived. We have achieved.

I know. So dumb. So naive. And it seems like that only triggered more racism. And then now, you know, it's full blown. It's everywhere. We're all about race right now. So it's different.

And like you said, we try to look at it perfectly through the lens of history and apply today's standards, which obviously have come a long way, which is great. There's always work to do there. But we try to take that and then almost completely across the board say yay or nay to anything in history if it's slightly off in that category. Yeah, we want to cancel everybody. It makes no sense because, I mean, you lookin luther king you know great man achieve great things notorious womanizer and so do you want to cancel him just because in addition in addition to all the other things he did he he liked to to screw around yeah i mean everybody has something and it's it's fun when you research history to find out because

everybody's got a little thing that they do, a little quirk. And I try to find that when I get to know these characters, because it humanizes them. You know, like Eisenhower chain-smoked, you know, camels all the time. And now, and then, but when it came, I mean, literally, the kind of guy who just smells like cigarettes is everything about him. And then when he quit, he quit cold turkey, which I found really admirable. But at the same time, there are some people who would say, like, he is flawed. You never see a picture of him with a cigarette in his hand. Right.

But if the American public knew that, they wouldn't have cared. But at the same time, now we look back and say, ah, but he was a smoker. We think like that. It's like everyone was doing it though. Yeah, exactly. You know what I mean? It's nuts. It's nuts.

But the reason I did find you in the first place was because you were one of the guys who he was, where he came from, what his worldview was and how he ended up in the position he did in World War II. Oh, that's a lot. We got a lot of time. Well, he was the son of a man. Well, actually, his mother was American, you know, and she was actually kind of ties all the books together. The Stanley Livingston book, the guy who sent Stanley into Africa to find Livingston was James Gordon Bennett Jr., who was the publisher of the Herald Tribune, which became the International Herald Tribune. And he loved to go through Central Park in his coach and four, you know, his coach with his four horses and race it and drunkenly. And one of his paramours at the time was Churchill's mother.

Yeah. So, yeah. And so, but she eventually marries Randolph Churchill, who also a womanizer, had a syphilis issue, was supposed to become the prime minister and just didn't play his cards right. Notoriously ignored his son. They sent him off to boarding school, and young Winston struggled a great deal. And then he went off to the Boer War as a journalist. He became first Lord of the Admiralty during World War I and famously thought up the Gallipoli campaign through the Dardanelles, which a great tragedy.

And the story is interesting. So the Admiralty building in London, if you know it, is right near Trafalgar Square, right by Pall Mall. And his office was in there. And he loved to play Admiral. So he had his ships, his sea maps, he had everything all out. And so when he was fired as first lord of the admiralty, he put all

his maps into a secret cupboard and locked them away. And when he returned as first lord of the admiralty, just before the start of World War II, they brought him into the cabinet. The first thing he did was go back to his office and unlock that door. The maps are still there 25 years later. Pretty cool. Yeah. And what was that Gallipoli thing in World War I? I forget that story, what happened there exactly. The British were just trying to find a better way to get through the Bosporus, and they were trying to get rid of the Turks and basically

find a shortcut to win the war. And it could have worked, but it was just, and Churchill ended up taking the blame for it, though I don't think he was actually completely at fault. It was just poorly managed. To this day, the people of New Zealand and Australia are very upset about it because the bulk of the forces that died were the Anzac forces. And it was such a blemish on Churchill because he was this up-and-coming young guy, and he was not the little heavy guy that we think of now. He was kind of, I wouldn't say dashing, but just more handsome, let's say. And he was married to Clementine, a very strong woman. So he had children of his own,

but he was still always kind of his own guy doing his own little thing. I don't think he, at that time, wanted to be prime minister as much as he just wanted to rise in the conservative party. Anyway, I go on and on about Churchill. But the thing about him is that he – after the whole Gallipoli thing, he actually went into the military himself. He went and fought in the First World War, was in the trenches just because he was trying to atone. He just wanted to let people know he wasn't just a politician. He was somebody who was going to try to make things right. About that life. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Did he ever write a lot about what he saw in the trenches and how he felt about that? Because that's an ignored part of history, like how insane that warfare was. You know, it's funny. I was talking to a friend last night, and we were talking about there aren't enough World War I books. I agree. I mean, it's appalling the conditions that they had to fight in.

I mean, imagine you're literally living in mud that is up to your knees. And if you fall down in the mud, there's a very good chance you may not be able to get back up. And you'll just, you know, drown in the mud. And that happened all the time. I mean, that's just appalling. And that's what life in the trenches was like. It wasn't like they lived in these these dry holes in the dirt. It was it was miserable rats and shit and, you know, urinate.

You know, it's crazy. Yeah. And also the fact that, you know, this this is right. I guess World War One is right when they were first really using airplanes for real. They were doing they were using that as as a weapon of war and everything but it was it was such a precursor to what would come because it was the first time where the world was legit kind of connected right so they could all come together and come together it's the wrong term but they could all like get into this fight and have so many different geopolitical implications happening everywhere and that to me it's it's like it's the ultimate if you look at it like a Lord of the Rings kind of thing, it's the ultimate prequel to what we ended up getting.

It's true. By the way, Churchill became a pilot as well during that era until his wife told him you can't fly anymore because he was just a bad pilot. So like you're going to die. Was he drinking whiskey up there? He probably was. I mean he started every day with a little Johnny Walker, just enough to cover the bottom of the glass and then a big splash of soda. And he would nurse that throughout the morning. And then he would go to champagne and then he would take his two hour nap. And then he'd come back and have dinner with, you know, Brandy.

And the only thing he hated was beer. He drank anything else. So. He liked the good stuff. Liked the good stuff. There's a picture of him during the North African hated was beer. He drank anything else. He liked the good stuff. He liked the good stuff. There's a picture of him during the North African campaign in 1942. He goes to visit Montgomery just before El Alamein. And it's one of the few times I've actually seen a picture of him drinking a beer. And it's – he's just – you can just tell he doesn't like it. He's doing it because he's in front of the men. This is the peasant's beer.

Yeah, that's true. That's funny. So he got removed from the the men. This is the peasant's day. Yeah, that's true. That's funny. So he got removed from the Admiralty. He goes into the actual army. He also becomes a trained pilot technically. World War I ends. Where's he like when the Treaty of Versailles is happening and all that? Where's his career?

You know, that's a really good question. He's out of parliament. He's about to go back in, but he's about to enter a political wilderness that lasts almost 20 years. So when we think of Churchill, we think of the mid-'60s Churchill who becomes prime minister May 10, 1940, and through the end of World War – almost the end of World War II. And that's through Churchill, we know. But the Churchill of the previous, you know, like 1920 to 1940, he was the laughingstock of Parliament because he was the guy that said, Germany is going to rearm, Germany is going to come back, and we're going to wage war on them again.

We need to really pay attention to this guy, Adolf Hitler. So people thought he was a warmonger. And he became part of the laughingstock. He lost all of his money in the stock market crash of 1929. But he had enough friends that people actually helped him. He was making bad trades on that day. And he had a friend who was canceling those trades to make sure Churchill didn't. Oh, my God.

Yeah, because he just wasn't good with money. He was sitting there day trading? Yeah, pretty much. He's the kind of guy literally who – you think of him as a British gentleman. He had bespoke suits. He had his big champagne allowance, all this money. He was almost always broke. He had very little family money. And to

the point where even after he died, his wife had to start selling off his possessions just to kind of stay afloat. Whoa. Yeah. What do you think made that guy tick? He was just, well, he was, there's a lot of things. He was a romantic in many ways. You know, he's descended from the Duke of Marlborough, one of, you know, Britain's great, you know, like 15th, 16th century leaders. So that's in his blood. But I think he was also really – he's one of those guys, not to psychoanalyze him too much, was really driven by the fact that his mother just didn't get – his mother loved him, but his dad didn't give a shit about him. And he basically had to become a self-made man. And it was just – he became very antagonistic to people who opposed him.

But one of my – when I was researching taking London, my wife came to London with me and we were – we had just gone to Windsor to – because there's a lot of stuff I need to see at Windsor. And if you go to London, you have to go to— You're talking about Windsor Castle? Yeah. If you go to London, you have to go to Windsor Castle just to see it once. Once you've seen it once, it's too much. Like, you just don't need to go back there ever again. And that was our second—I went with my wife because she had never seen it.

So I went with her. Just because it's, like, ostentatious? It's cool. And there's so much history. You know, for instance, in the chapel there, beneath the chapel is in the crypt, beneath the chapel is where Henry VIII is buried and George III.

And I wouldn't say buried. They're in coffins, you know, sarcophagus beneath the floor of the chapel. And there's a little elevator that you can go down and get it. And I actually tried to get down in there. It's a private family burial vault. You were breaking in? I was trying to get in there.

No, I went through the right channels. And it really got all the way up to the queen level. Because I had friends who, I have a friend, ask a friend, ask a friend. And finally, it got all the way up to the queen level because i had friends who i have a friend ask a friend ask a friend and finally got all the way up to the queen level where the reply came back no it is completely but it would have been so cool can you imagine the queen shut you down queen shut me down can you imagine though like who is this martin duggan who is he yeah it's that wow can we actually pull that up alessi windsor castle it's great like the royal family we actually pull that up, Alessi Windsor Castle? It's great. Like the royal family stuff and like the real estate they own, the places.

I'm so fascinated by that. It's like it's this crazy old world tradition that you can't believe is still around, but it is. And they own all this. Yeah, there you go. It's cool. So do you, I guess they have like their own like tour times and stuff where you can go into certain areas. It's hard to get the perspective here, but there's a part of the castle that is just where the royals live when they're out there. Okay.

And then there's a large part of the castle that is open to the public. So those gardens back there, that's the East Lawn. And I don't know why I know that, but I do. And then, but the tourist area has all the kind of touristy things. Like you get inside, you can see St. George's Chapel. You can see the changing of the guard. It's all very cool and it's beautiful. And Eaton, the famous playing fields of Eaton are just there in the background there.

That's like the school, right? Yeah. Eaton? Yeah. But like I said, if you go there, it's fabulous. But after you've done it one time, that's pretty much it. So to finish that story, we came back to the hotel and my wife was like, let's have high tea. We've never had high tea. I said, hold that thought. So she sat down and ordered tea. And I went to find, Churchill had an apartment in a place called Morpeth Mansions, which is about two blocks from Westminster Abbey in the Houses of Parliament. And I wanted to find it.

And so while my wife was ordering high tea, I went and I found Churchill's place. Air raid sirens came over London in May 1940. Churchill went up on the roof instead of going down to the underground bunker, went on the roof with a bottle of brandy to watch the Germans come in. And I just wanted to see the building where it took place. And it's still there. It's pretty fabulous. Do you – is it important to you like writing a lot of these books? Because that's the other thing. You've written so many. And as you were telling me, you write some of them in such an amazingly short period of time which is incredible but i wonder

like do you get to travel to a lot of the places that you write about oh always yeah that's my um the one of like if you look at some of my early books they don't seem like they have a common thread you know know, you have like the explorers, you've got Columbus and Stanley Livingston and Captain Cook. The reason I chose explorers wasn't because I was, wasn't because it was this big fan of exploration. It was just places I wanted to go. I'd never been to Australia. I'd never been to, you know, the Caribbean. So I'd never been to, seen a lion in the wild in Africa, which I got to see for Stanley Livingston and managed to get myself arrested with a couple of buddies of mine.

Oh, wait. You got to tell that story. It's a good story. So I was trying to find – to follow the path of Stanley and Livingston in 1860, 1870. You've said it a few times. By the way, can you just give context on who they were exactly? Oh, sure. So at the time, David Livingston was a British explorer famous for discovering,

I mean, exploring the uncharted, you know, the dark continent. It wasn't called that because of the color of people's skin. It was called that because on maps, Africa was just completely black because nobody knew what was in the middle. It was just unknown. Heart of darkness. Heart of darkness. Yeah, exactly.

And Livingston was so famous as an explorer that the only person in England more famous than him at the time was Queen Victoria. He was a rock star. He would walk down the street and be mobbed by people. He was that famous. And he goes on this one last, and not too much backstory, but there's this epic debate about the true source of the Nile and between Richard Francis Burton and John Henning Speak, who had explored together, Speak killed himself the morning of the debate. And they still didn't know what the true source was.

They hadn't solved the debate. So the British, the Royal Geographical Society sends Livingston in to find the true source, to see who's telling, you know, who's right. He gets lost for five years. For five years. And he's not really lost. He just, you know, his wife is dead. His kids are grown up.

He has nothing to come back to. So he stays in Africa. And so they finally, James Gordon Bennett Jr., publisher of the Herald Tribune, pays Stanley, a journalist, to go into Africa to find Livingston. So he starts at Bagamoya, which is right now next to Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. And Stanley goes in, marches all the way, about a third of the way across Africa, finds Livingston. You know, that's where we get the line, Dr. Livingston, I presume. So that's why I went to Africa. I wanted to follow that path.

So a couple of buddies went with me. We start in Bag of Moyo. We hire a driver slash guide. We get in this Toyota Land Cruiser. We start driving Bagamoyo. We hire a driver slash guide. We're getting this Toyota Land Cruiser. We start driving across Africa. And then the driver says, oh, you know, there are bad people on the road ahead. We need to go this way instead. And I said, no, we need to go that way.

Oh, no. And so, long story short, we're going through this town, and our driver speeds up and hits a child, hits a child. And it was one of those towns where people gather in the middle of the street, you know, and then if a car comes, they, they spread and then they come back together when the car goes, well, this little girl didn't get out of the way and the driver hit her. And I remember I was in the back passenger seat and I watched her literally fly through the air, and her shoes flew off. And it was just one of those things where, you know, the driver's name was Chow. It's like, Chow, you need to stop the car right now.

So he stopped the car. But as we got out to go help the child, the whole mob started running after us with knives and clubs and pipes. It's like, all right, we need to get in the car. And so we literally drove five hours. The town was called Tunduma, and Tunduma is where the road ends. And then you start driving. Do you know if she was okay or not? I'll get to that.

Okay. So we follow these dirt roads, like, literally into, at the time it felt like the darkest part of Africa. It was just like we were on dirt roads, like, literally into, at the time, it felt like the darkest part of Africa. It was just like we were on dirt roads. We're going absolutely, just trying, we don't know if we're going to get arrested, if we'll be able to leave the country. And we kind of thought, we developed a plan where we were just going to go find the police and tell them what happened and hope for the best. So when we finally get to the town of Sembawanga after five hours of off-road driving, there's a checkpoint. There's four men with AK-47s and uniforms, you know, and they basically

started talking to the driver. And I didn't know it at the time. The driver was telling them that he had been asleep in the back and that I was driving. Oh, no. Yeah. So these guys get in. So I was in the back. My buddy was next to me. But two other soldiers got in with their guns. And the barrel of the rifle was kind of pointing up my head. I kind of moved it into the bed liner. I didn't want us to hit a jolt and have a bullet.

Anyway, they held us. They held us in the prison, in the jail. You just moved it. Yeah, please move the guy. Sir, do you mind? That's exactly what happened. And they held us in the jail at Samoanga for three days. Probably not a nice jail, right? It was not nice. And the worst part of it was every morning they would take some guys out to take them to the penitentiary and they would be shackled, arms and legs, and be wearing just like a loincloth, nothing else. And we were wondering, like, is that us?

You know, we had no idea what was coming next. They finally let us go, and it turned out the reason they arrested us was not because we hit the girl, who lived, by the way. She did live. She did live. She's fine. All right, that's good. It was because somebody else had done a hit and run on a car. They were more concerned about the car than the girl.

So anyway, so they got us another, but they arrested our driver because they thought he might have, so they kept him. And you're like, yeah, keep him. Yeah, you can have him. Fuck that guy. Fuck that guy. It was literally like that. And they gave us another car and we drove.

It was cool because it was like six hours through nothing but giraffes and hippos and elephants everywhere. It was like land country safari. It was super cool. And then, like my friends were like, yeah, let's stick around. Let's go to Zanzibar. I go, I'm getting the fuck out of this country because we'll be getting good so yeah that was how i got arrested in africa oh my god so the reason i bring this up though is because i think it's so cool when as an author you're covering especially something in history something that happened a long time ago it wasn't yesterday

but even that like when you go to the place and you're just kind of standing there and it's almost like metaphysical, I would imagine, where you can feel the things that happen and it puts it in perspective and maybe brings the ideas from the universe to let you write that on the page a certain way. That's exactly why I do it. Because there's something about smelling the air and saying, oh, this is what it smelled like. Because it smelled like that. If you go to the African savanna, oh, this is what it smelled like. Because it smelled like that. If you go to the African savanna right now, it smells. Nothing's changed. It's pure wilderness. It's the same place.

And it's like when I was doing Taking Midway, my wife and I took a trip to, there we go. Great cover, by the way. Yeah, it's really good. There are no pictures of the American dive bombers hitting the Japanese aircraft carriers, but that's a destroyer. But I think it's still a great cover. But the place where the Japanese pilots made landfall on the Pearl Harbor attack is a place on the north shore called Kahuku Point. Okay. And so I literally didn't even realize that my wife and I took a Hawaiian vacation just after I finished this book.

And I was sitting on the balcony. I was looking at a map wondering where Kahuku point was. And I realized it was like 200 yards away, 200 yards away. And I said, we need to just take a a walk but then like you stand there and you can imagine okay this is where you know these 400 japanese planes came over just before before dawn and it puts you right in the moment yeah yeah yeah it's so cool it's like you know and it adds a it adds a gravity to it as well because you can imagine what other people must have been thinking who were there witnessing this, weren't necessarily a part of it, but how scary something like that could be. And it also – again, when you're studying something like World War II, I said this at the beginning, but this isn't that long ago.

No. And the world is so inner even more interconnected in many ways now and the fragility of how quickly some everything you know to be reality of peace or whatever it is you want to call it obviously other places in the world don't know that right now but we do here it can go like that and you don't know when it's coming and then it's like you have this god forbid that ever happened like you have this before and after and before you never saw it but afterwards it's like yeah everything went dark sure well you look at um the lead up to world war ii and we look back

and we go oh yeah the japanese um they went into china then they went into vietnam and they're doing oh so of course they're that's what's going to happen. But at the time, we're like, hmm, I wonder what's next. I wonder, you know, it's the same thing with getting back to Churchill for a second. You know, Churchill saw what was coming. Churchill was a student of history, and he was like, Hitler is doing this. These are the things that are about to happen. We need to start making airplanes like the Spitfire and the Hurricane that can compete with these great new German planes that they're building.

And other people were like, oh, he's just, you know, don't listen to him. He's a crazy man. But it's going on in the world right now. I mean, all the stuff going on in the Middle East, that's going somewhere. I mean, right now it seems like isolated events. You know, this happened. But they they all they're interconnected yeah they get a force behind them and the next thing you know we're at war and people like you said they look back and go we should have seen it coming that's the thing though i i feel like you know in doing this job and talking to a lot of people who are

out there doing cool things and covering things like this as well and actually understand it's like alessi and i are lucky enough to have more of an understanding of potentially what these dominoes could look like but when i talk to people to your point it doesn't feel like they understand that like how interconnected you think of this 20 mile strip of land in gaza and that's basically where this war is being litigated right now but how interconnected that is to multiple other countries who are interconnected to multiple other countries. The money's flowing. The economic incentives are obviously flowing. And, like, you put the wrong match on that.

Oh, yeah. I mean, it's, I mean, and again, that goes back to biblical times. I mean, it's the same people fighting the same people. The Philistines back then are the Palestinians now. I mean, that's, it's. Wait, they are? What are the Palestinians now. I mean, that's... Wait, they are? What's the history there? I don't know. I read it somewhere. I can't tell you. That's the thing. That's the thing about being a historian. You can't know everything. You can't know everything.

But you store those nuggets away. That's right. I appreciate that. I can't put that one. There's some other people that would have sat there and said, well, let me just try to make this one up and go with it. That's great. No. But yeah, so to your point, Churchill was sounding the alarm on Hitler a long time before. What was the earliest that Hitler got on his radar?

Was it in the 20s or did it take until the 30s when he took power? Well, he would have known what was going on in the 20s because, you know, all the stuff, you know, Hitler got thrown in jail. So Churchill knew what was going on in Europe. But I think it was 1931 or 1932, Churchill was on vacation in Germany. And Churchill, I mean, and he knew of Hitler and he knew Hitler was a rising star.

And he requested to meet with Hitler. Really? At the time, he was just a member of parliament, kind of a disgraced member of parliament. And Hitler refused to meet with him, thinking he was of no importance. It was a waste of his time. Ooh. So it's – and that's how – so all of a sudden now Churchill – he's even angrier. That was personal.

And he never spoke Hitler's name. He just called him that man. And so it became – he was just paying attention. And he was very much behind the idea of we need better battleships. We need better aircraft. We need to build a standing army. And all those things that people didn't want to do because nobody wanted another World War I. Too many people had died.

And they thought that, you know, and as a matter of fact, Hitler told the people of the world. And remember, he was Time Magazine's man of the year. I want to say 1930 something. Yep. He told everybody he was a man of peace. And the British people believed him. And Hitler was very popular for a time in Britain. Really?

Yep, people believed him. Joseph Kennedy, the American ambassador to the Court of St. James during the time of – he was one of Roosevelt's ambassadors. I want to say he was there in 1940. He left late 1940. I can't remember when he was appointed. I think to say he was there in 1940. He left late 1940, but I can't remember when he was appointed. I think it was 1938. He was a huge Hitler fan, huge Hitler fan. He didn't think that England would be able to stand up to Hitler. He thought Hitler was the future. And so the future, the father of John F. Kennedy was basically a huge Hitler guy. How much at that kind of time, I'm going to come back to Churchill in a minute, but just in general for some of these other people you're mentioning

as well who admired him. If we're talking about like 1930, 1931, 1932, before he actually rises to take power in 33, how much of his racial purity politics were these people actually aware of, do you think? They should have been very aware. You know, it's in Mein Kampf. Yeah. So, which was a, he wrote that, I think it was published in 1923. Don't quote me, but I mean. I think, I think we can check that. I think it was published after he was writing it in 1923. Yeah.

In prison. Yeah. Yeah. So, but it's, it was out there, you know, in that term about the big lie that was Hitler. If you want to tell a lie, make sure it's big and just keep repeating it and then people will believe it. Yeah, 1925 was published. But it was right in 1925. So it was out there. Yeah.

But it's a – it's one of those things where I think a lot of people said, well, he doesn't really mean it. Like, you know, they don't know the extent to – it's like this 2025 stuff that's taken on right now, the Project 2025. During the campaign, all that crazy stuff would be out there and people go, well, they're really not going to do that. And it's happening. And it's just – it was the same thing with Hitler. All the stuff that he said he was going to do, he did it you know on a on a scale people could never have envisioned why do you think people ignore what's right in front of them sometimes it happens again and again throughout history like what what draws them to be like nah but i think this i think this guy's cool i i really i feel like he's gonna make the right moves it's It's like when Biden was visibly losing his mind.

Yes. We're all like, I think he can hold it together. And you kind of wanted to believe it. I think we have a bias towards the things that we favor personally. You know what i mean and it's the reason that sometimes when people know that a huge forest fire is heading towards their house they don't leave the house because there's like now my house is good my house is good it won't happen to me i got a garden house so i'm good and it's it's the same thing i think also unfortunately it seems to come back to this

over and over again but hitler when you look at his rise, obviously he tries with the Beer Hall push in the early 20s. It doesn't work out, but they basically make his trial. He becomes this figure in the papers because he got to do a political speech while he's basically in court every day. He goes to prison, writes Mein Kampf as you laid out. But when he comes out, the economy somehow – like it had been really bad but the economy had improved in Germany. It wasn't amazing but like it improved. So people, they weren't out there going like where is my next meal coming from? So a guy like him and his strong message of like we got fuck with Treaty of Versailles, like everything is over.

It didn't resonate as much. But then the 1929 stock market crash happens. It finds its way to affect Germany as well and he kind of gets this new air behind him where now he's like, see? We're all fucked and it was always going to be this way. Forget that this thing just happened. It was long before that when this happened. And so when he comes up, one thing you have to – it's like you don't like to give Hitler anything, but he had an economic message. And he did, even though he used like a dictatorial way to do it, he did act upon that message upon getting into office and made their economy boom.

And people respond to what's in their wallet. Well, he did the same thing that Reagan did kind of in the 80s on a different level, but he built a wartime economy in peacetime. If you do something like that, you create jobs, you create things like airplanes. The Germans became the leaders in airplane technology, and they were allowed to have an air force, but they could have a passenger airline. And people couldn't train to be pilots but they could be glider pilots glider pilots yeah if you train to be a glider pilot you know you were technically i don't even know what that is you know what glider is it's just it's a plane that you tow it behind another plane and then you let it go it has no engine it flies

just on the currents of the wind oh wow yeah So they had a lot of glider pilots. And they began building all these weapons of war. And we stopped paying attention. Well, we. Just the world stopped paying attention to poor Germany because everybody thought that they were on the verge of ruin. But as they were building, you know, actively like sending men and material into the Soviet Union to develop tank technology. They couldn't do it in Germany because they're being watched, but they did it in the Soviet Union. Wait, they did it there?

Yeah. Remember at the time, Stalin was a friend of Hitler's. What year are we talking, like 35, 36? Everything kind of came to a head in about 1937, so previous to that. Remember, tank technology in World War I was primitive. I mean, it was, they barely moved. Yeah. By the time, you know, Hitler came in through the Arden Forest in 1940,

they had actual tanks. Right. The tanks that we think of now as being tanks. But you said Stalin, I've never heard this before, Stalin and Hitler were friends? They were not enemies at the time. Remember, they deepened it just before the start of World War I by signing an alliance where basically they would not attack each other. Before World War I.

I'm sorry, World War II. Okay. Yeah, yeah. That was 1939, the pact. Right, yeah. Yeah. So what I'm just saying is that Hitler ingeniously built up – and he violated all the Versailles Treaty codes to do this, but he ingeniously built up a military and prepared for war. And then he sent those same – think about this. You sent the same pilots and some of the soldiers into the Spanish Civil War. So they actually learned how to wage war by waging war.

And that was 1936, 1937. Francisco Franco, all that? Yeah. And so, you know. That's another ignored part of history, Germany being involved in that. But it's huge. Yeah. You know, like the Stuka pilots that bombed Poland to start, you know start the Second World War. They trained by bombing people.

The Guernica thing that – the Picasso, the huge painting of all the people who were killed in this. Those are German Stuka dive bombers, Ju-87s. Yeah. And what was the story in Spain again? So Franco was fascist and he – did he overthrow the government? Was that what caused it to tell you the truth i only see it through the eyes of hemingway because they're for whom the bell tolls but i just know that yeah the there was a group supported by the communists in i don't know i

again what was forgotten part of history one one of the ways that i I fill in my gaps in history is I write a book about it. So when I do my Spanish Civil War book, I'll tell you all about it. Let's do that one. I will read the shit out of that one. It happened at a nuts time too, for sure. So Hitler built all this up. And again, to me, when I look at the history, maybe I'm making a leap here. But if you look at like 33, 34, 35, 36, when he was really building the full-blown wartime economy, the world was still reeling from the Great Depression.

So countries like powerhouses, like the United States, they're focused on the New Deal. They're focused on building internally. They have a society that – and we'll get to this in a little bit. But they have a society that's largely isolationist as well as a result of World War I, right? So it's like, oh, yeah, the crazy guy with the mustache doing some shit. All right, good for them. It's almost like a blah, blah, whatever. It'll happen. And yet they did technically have this poorly written, but a document in the Treaty of Versailles that says like, like if you do this we're coming after you and no one did no one did well it's just like you said there the world was the world

economy had collapsed but you know it was just thinking about you talked about the isolationist one of the biggest isolationists was charles lindbergh and the pilot the pilot yeah and he had gone to germany and he was just and he spent some time with Goering who was in charge of the Air Force, the Luftwaffe. And so he came home and he was violently isolationist because of what he had seen. He said there's no way we're going to beat Germany because their power was just getting so great. So you think about it. Germany went from a broken country within six or seven years. You have people like Lindbergh who knows everything there is to know about global aviation at the time coming back and saying, we're never going to beat these guys.

Nobody can beat them. And the same Joseph Kennedy, he took a trip through Germany. Same thing. When did he go? Mid-30s maybe? No, it would be late 30s because I know John F kennedy was part of that trip too um i don't know it's the it's all sometime in the bill sometime yes sometime before i mean hitler was in hitler was in charge when he was hitler was in charge yeah now now churchill like we were saying at the beginning of this tangent he was there in 31

or 32 ish right somewhere in there so that that is a year or two before Hitler actually takes power. But I believe the Nazis had started to get some parliamentary or whatever they called it at the time power. So what did – Hitler wrote down – not Hitler. Churchill wrote down a lot throughout his life between his personal diaries, keeping records of things, and obviously was a part of history. But what, outside of the personal affront to Hitler not meeting with him, what kinds of things, positive and negative, did he take away from Germany at that time? Oh, he was scared. And it's interesting, what he began to do is keep really close eye on German production statistics. And he even had like a secret army of spies

just kind of reporting back to him about what was going on in germany as just a member of parliament at the time just as a member of parliament because he was so sure we're going to go to war and he wanted to be able to share those statistics and nobody listened to him nobody wanted to believe that what he was saying was true and he was very fastidious about this, and he did a number of BBC radio addresses on this very topic, and nobody wanted to listen to him. Again, he was in a political wilderness. He was that guy that nobody paid attention to. So if he got on the BBC, it was not like it was the great Winston Churchill. It was kind of like that hack who won't stop crying wolf about the war or a war.

It's crazy to think about, but I believe it. I mean he really didn't – he was persona non grata in some ways. But that's – so he comes back and then I think – and you wrote about this in your book, Taken London. He – I think it was in like 1934 after Hitler was in power. He really went after – I want to say it was like trying to sound the alarm bells particularly on the Luftwaffe and the air capabilities and the fact that Britain he felt could be attacked by this new thing that Hitler had created. Well, it's interesting the growth of the Royal Air Force because up until the late 1930s, a lot of their planes were still biplanes, you know, World War I era things. And the best, before the introduction of the hurricanes and the Spitfires, which were just revolutionary in their design and changed everything about Britain's military capacity as a fighter, not bomber, but as a fighter entity. Before that, they had planes that were barely going 150, 100 miles an hour.

Germany had planes going 100 miles an hour faster. And so if not for the Spitfire and the hurricane, if they'd been flying those other planes that were introduced only in the late 1930s, if they'd been flying those slower planes, the British would have been annihilated in the air. There would have been no – we would never even have fought the war in Europe. We would have been stuck in the Pacific because Britain would have been overrun. What would you say to people? I'm just like picking holes in how people could attack Churchill or something like that. What would you say to people who would be critical and say, well, if Churchill was trying to sound the alarm bells in even 31 and 32 and then publicly in 34 at the very front end of Hitler being in power, regardless of what you think of Hitler,

you know, does that prove that Churchill was just a total warmonger, military industrial complex guy? Do you think there's anything to that argument? No, I think Churchill is very pragmatic. He, I think above all, he was a British patriot. I mean, and by the way, he was very aware that he was half American. And, you know, he actually became an American citizen during the Kennedy administration. They had a special ceremony in the Rose Garden to grant him American citizenship, which I think is pretty cool. But he wanted the best for his country. unrelenting in trying to make sure that people knew the danger because he he he was an historian himself and he he had a feeling for the greater scope of history and the fact that the british nation was really vulnerable if in a hitler swept across and it was only and it came down to just

britain against hitler who dominated he almost every country in Europe, was under Nazi rule. And if they had successfully crossed the Channel, and they had the landing craft prepared to go, to come across the Channel and invade Britain. If Britain had fallen, the plan was for Churchill to evacuate and run the country from Canada. But Hitler also had him on a kill list. So people who talk about isolationism. So Churchill wasn't – by trying to yank Roosevelt into the war and get him to come onto the British side, he wasn't doing it just for England. He was doing it because, A, if Britain fell, America would have been next. Hitler wasn't going to stop. And it was just one of those things where he was just fighting for his very survival, the survival of his nation and everything that

Britain stood for. Yeah. Now, you and I were talking before we got on camera about your book, Taken London, and then The Splendid and the Vile by Eric Larson, which is about the Battle of Britain. And you were saying your book basically leaves off where his begins on May 10th, I guess, 1940, when the bombing started, right? No. So I kind of start in the year before World War I. May 10th, 1940 is when – World War II.

World War II, yeah. Let's stay with the right war. May 10th is when the Germans invade France. They come through the Ardennes Forest and they, boom, next thing you know, they're at the English Channel. That is also the date, you know, coincidentally that Churchill's name is made prime minister. Yes. Okay. That's right.

So my book goes from prior to that, a little back story. Then we go through the Battle of Britain, which takes place from the actual starting date. Let's say July 1940, late June 1940, up until September 17th is when they called off Operation Sea Lion, which is the invasion of Great Britain, because the English Channel was getting too stormy. So the first bombing of London was September 7th. And that's where, and I don't know, I haven't read Splintered in a while, a long time, but I don't do the Blitz. I just do the Battle of Britain and he focuses on the Blitz. So I do everything leading up to the Blitz. He does, and he does all the Blitz. Got it. So point being though, one of the things that really struck me when I first started looking into this because I did not know this history is how rabid the isolationism in America was all the way up to that point, basically until December 7th, 1941, if we're being honest.

But like Churchill was pleading with FDR to help out Britain because he's like, this guy is starting a war on our front. If we fall, all of Europe is going to fall. And like you said, we're next. And FDR did want to help him, but he was politically like basically handcuffed. I think he had an election on coming up on November 5th, 1940 at the time, his Republican opponent had run hard to the isolationism side, which means that he had to kind of use that same language as well to not get flanked there. And it was so bad to the point that there was even a story where, this one blew my mind, where Congress and the US had voted or were going to have a vote on like two completely unusable ships somewhere in the Caribbean or something to destroy them or not.

It wasn't like, oh, are we going to use them? It was like, are we going to destroy them or not it wasn't like oh are we going to use them it was like are we going to destroy them or not they tabled the vote and churchill desperate goes to fdr and he says i don't care if they can't work we want them and fdr says yeah i can't even give you those they had to find some backward like trade deal to get them there so the fdr could say well no it's not supporting the war or whatever like it is nuts how much america was just like not our problem at all well it was the the america first movement um henry ford was a big one behind it lindbergh was a big one behind it and you you had literally hundreds of thousands of americans who were were part of this movement you know active members of of those things Remember also, too, we had the Neutrality Acts in the late 1930s. Can you explain them?

I'm going to go into the weeds on this, but we had a series of Neutrality Acts, and I want to say there were three that basically said we couldn't go to war. We are a neutral nation. These are the things we can and cannot do. And one of the things we can't do is we can't help England. And again, Roosevelt was not above going around those, but he was also a political animal and he was determined to get reelected before he did anything else. So he didn't fire Joseph Kennedy as his ambassador to England, despite the fact that

Kennedy was so pro-Hitler. And if you read his journal entries, he was just mesmerized. And he wrote to his son, Bobby Kennedy, about the curtain is about to rise on this great Nazi invasion. It's crazy. But he doesn't recall him until just before the election. And he doesn't really officially boot him until he's been reelected, just because Kennedy is a political opponent. So, alas, I forgot where I was. Anyway. We were talking about the isolationism. Yeah, but isolationism, it was a big deal.

But again, back to World War I, and it's one of those things where it's Europe's problem. And we look at it right now. We're looking, if you go to London right now now and if you walk down Downing Street, all the major public buildings fly two flags. They fly the Union Jack and the flag of the Ukraine. It's everywhere. And they're ready to go in and help the Ukrainians because they see the future if Russia takes over the Ukraine because that's just crazy time. But here we're reluctant. It's the same thing.

We're reluctant to send men in to help in the Ukraine because we're getting back to an isolationist point of view. Yeah, I think it's – there's a lot going on there. And we talk about this a lot because I'm one of these people that really is in the middle of the road on almost every issue because I just – I understand where the balance is there. On the one hand, you have the isolationist side, which is – let's just put a label on it. Like let's say very hardcore libertarian, stay away. That's not our problem. America first. Everything happens here, whatever.

That's like the purest form take of it. On the other side, you have the military industrial complex. It's like war. Never saw one we didn't like. Let's profit off of it. People dying, good for business, right? I don't like either of those things. I love the idea. I will say I love the idea of libertarianism and saying we don't have to worry about anything because it means more peace for us. I love that. But in practice, I know that doesn't work. But when people see us funding a war to the tunes of hundreds of billions of dollars with people dying, corruption clearly happening, and also this is the other point here. A big difference between Russia and 1930s Germany.

Not to say Russia is not a threat and not a problem. They are. They have a GDP the size of Italy though. 1930s germany not to say russia is not a threat and not a problem they are they have the they have a gdp the size of italy though yeah germany had the biggest growing gdp in the world right they could take things over they were moving wars on multiple fronts it's not to say russia couldn't develop to that but the difference between those two for people of like do we want to get involved or not want to get involved i do do think that there's a little bit of a level to it that's not the same. I agree. Okay.

Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's important to note, too, before the start of World War II, America had the 17th biggest army in the world, right? Even with Romania. 17th. 17th. Wow. We were not the military that we like to think we were at that time.

So that's why, it's another reason that took us a while to catch up. When we finally, like the aircraft that we used in taking Mid-Lewy, were largely untested, and the Japanese Zero was a much better aircraft because they, again, just like with the Germans in Spain, they had tested the aircraft and their men.

Well, they had, the Japanese had all that time in China and into China to do the same thing. How does this arrow work? So you had all these veteran pilots, those guys bombing Pearl Harbor, that was not their first big raid. Those guys were trained veteran pilots who knew what it was like to fight in wartime. Yeah, that's huge. Now, you've written, obviously, you've written a lot of books on World War II and things related to that. I think you wrote one on like the Nazi war weapons.

Is that right? I wrote about, yeah, Killing the SS was about – it was more about kind of the Nazi hunters. Okay. Like getting all the guys who did the bad stuff. Got it. Okay. I'm going to have to check that out. I love that stuff. Yes, it's interesting. Okay. So – It's creepy, by the way.

Why is it creepy? And for instance, I was talking to my co-author on the phone, and I was reading a section back, and it was the notes of Mengele about some of the experience he was doing on people. You're talking about cutting people open, putting knives in their heads, and all this kind of stuff. And it was just – my wife was appalled. She was looking at me. But I'll tell you what, when you write that stuff, it has to inhabit you. It's your daily life for six or seven months. It leaves a mark in you.

Because if you're writing about bad stuff all the time, it kind of seeps into your unconscious and it takes a while for that to go once you're finished. When you say it seeps into your unconscious, meaning like you're living with what the horrible things human beings are capable of or you're getting desensitized to it or both? Both. And the fact that it becomes really normal, but then you find the things that people are willing to do that are just phenomenal, you know, like just the meanest things. And we all say, and just real quick on this, you know, you think about these concentration camp guards, especially, you know, some of the women guards who were just really horrible people. Yeah.

But you think about, you know, and they were not 35 or 40 or 50. They were mostly in their early 20s or even teenagers. But if you've grown up your whole life and the only leader you've ever known in your whole life is Adolf Hitler, you're going to think that guy is a god. You're going to do whatever that guy says. And that's how it happened. Right. I talk about this a lot with current events we have around the world. I never empathize with, let's say, the terroristic act. I don't empathize with that what i try to learn from is asking the question how did this person get there right so how does a 23 year old get to the

point where they blow up a building with 400 people in it because a la wakbar or whatever right like what environment did they come from because i feel like if we can empathize with the environment and there's a way that we can then just improve it even two percent moving forward you can save two percent of those types of situations that keep trying to improve that throughout time so I do think it's fair to say it's a good point you make like you know I think we have this fat this this fallacy today when we all look at this and say for example example, oh, I would have never done that or been a part of that. As sad as this is, psychologically, unfortunately, you don't know that. I would like to think if you were 40 years old or something like that and had known a different

world, you wouldn't have fallen into that trap. But like you said, if you're 23, 24 and you came up and it was HH, that's what you know. And you're going to follow that guy into the gates of hell literally and figuratively. Well, you think about all the Hitler youth and the brown shirts that used to roam the streets even well before the war. So you kind of – it becomes a terror mentality. You're going to alter your behavior so you don't get hit. That's right. Just to minimize it, you know?

So maybe by altering that behavior, you have to join them. And to join them, you have to adopt their code, which may be not your code. But after you do it long enough, you go, well, you know, I don't mind this one so much. And then I don't mind that one so much. Next thing you know, you're fully in. And we all say it wouldn't happen to us. much and then i don't mind that one so much next thing you know you're you're fully in yeah and and we all say it wouldn't happen to us but if we came down to a completely let's say the power grid completely shut down we had we had nothing i'm pretty sure at some point i would do whatever it took to make sure my family was taken care of yes you know and and my ethics will go right out the window. My buddy, Matt Cox, who is reformed, he was a longtime – what do you call it?

Mortgage identity thief, mortgage fraudster, all that stuff. Did a lot of terrible things. Did a lot of time in prison for it too. But he talks about the threshold for crime that every human being has. And he said what he learned about himself is that he has a very low threshold for crime meaning like the smallest thing could go wrong he's going to turn to crime oh right which is not something he knew about himself before he started doing this whereas he's like that has levels to it in the sense that a level could be for example you're a mother and your child's starving and you're next

to a grocery store you're going to steal a loaf of bread? Probably. Right? So when people get pushed to something and they get pushed to that cliff, it may take a lot of people way longer, way more steps to get to that cliff. But when they do, you're susceptible to it. Yep. We're just lucky right now that we, the way that we are as a nation, we don't normally have to make those choices. But that day could come. You never know.

Yeah. I like this tangent though on that book you wrote. You wrote this one with O'Reilly, right? Yeah. About hunting the SS? Yeah. So was this all about, I guess, the 20, 30 years after that where they're trying to track down the rat lines and things like that? Yeah, and it kind of starts during the war and then it just goes into – the Israelis and the book is escaping.

The guy is escaping. There was a – there was one of the big Nazi criminals. Again, I wrote this book 15 years ago. Eichmann? Was it Eichmann? Argentina in 1960? Eichmann, yeah. When the Israelis went in to get him, they actually wore gloves because they didn't want their hands to be on the body of this reviled person. They didn't want any part

of him, his DNA touching their DNA, which I thought was really powerful. And here's the thing to write that again, you have to go into the minds of the guys who were doing the kidnapping. And then you also have to go into the mind of this guy who did all these terrible things. And he's hiding in Argentina. He's trying to raise a family. And he's trying to, he worked in a, I think a Volkswagen factory or something like that. He was just a regular guy. So am I going to sympathize with him now because he's just a guy trying to raise a family just like me? Or is like, yeah, he did all these things to all these people and he has to pay. And so it makes for a little, you know, moral back and forth. Of course. Yeah. How did these guys get out though too? Like so many of them, so many high-level people just escaped to places and lived sometimes uncaught for the rest of their lives.

For a long time. I was in the Argentine city of Bariloche one time, which is way inland. And it looks like you're in Germany. Everything there looks so Teutonic. It's not reassuring. So it's like they found a way out. Germany. Everything there looks so Teutonic. It's not reassuring. They found a way out. I think things were planned well ahead of time. People knew where to go. One of the ways out was Genoa. It was one of the things.

We helped a lot of these people, too. Don't forget that. The whole NASA space program was nazi science you don't say yeah i never knew that yeah right that's like one of the ultimate moral just i mean dilemma doesn't even begin to describe it but you ever read devil's chess board by talbot yeah you should read that oh really no good yeah yeah because. Because I hadn't known this until before. It was before I read that book, but I hadn't known it until shortly before I read that book how much like the Dulles brothers were in bed with the Nazis for a long time. And then when the war broke out and Germany declared war on the US, they were basically like, all right. Well, all right.

All right. You want us to go to – we'll go to war with them. But they weren't excited about it. Right. Well, and Patton wanted to keep going because he knew the Soviets were the next threat. So when he pushed into Czechoslovakia and Eisenhower had to tell them to stop, he was like, let's take all these Nazis and put a uniform on them, fight with us against – because we're going to fight the Soviets sooner or later. That's the other thing too. It's like that was the unholy alliance because the Soviets were critical to winning World War II and yet America and the UK and some other countries as well.

But particularly those two were always completely concerned about the Bol saddest, getting back to Churchill real quick, is when towards the end of the war, one of Roosevelt's great flaws was the fact that he trusted Stalin. And towards the end of the war, he began turning his back on Churchill and Great Britain because he thought Stalin was America's friend. And they were going to— He really thought that? He really did. And if you look at pictures of the three of them all together, I want to say the one I'm thinking about is Yalta. Yalta. Yeah. Can we pull that up?

Yalta Conference? It's – Churchill looks like he's just happy to be there. And Stalin looks like he's the boss in a very old, visibly fading – if you see this picture in color – The third one. Yeah. Up there. Yeah. Up there. Perfect. See, look how... That's just a few months before Roosevelt dies. Look how ill he looks.

But clearly, the man in charge is Stalin there on the right. Do you think that Roosevelt was... I don't know, maybe... What's the word I'm looking for, moved by the enormous sacrifice of life, let's say, that the Soviets had made? I'm sure there was something to that.

But, you know, from a pragmatic point of view, you think about it, they wouldn't allow our planes to land in Soviet territory. And they began holding people prisoner, you know, keeping people prisoner towards the end of the war. A lot of— U.S. people? No, not U.S. people. Okay. Yeah, but people, you know, the Germans, Hungarians, all the people on that side, they went to war and never came back. So he was doing a lot of things at that time, which were just not in line with U.S. policies,

but he was willing to bend a lot to ignore things like that. Like the simple fact that, you know, we gave through the Lend-Lease thing, we gave them, you know, trucks and clothes and all sorts of stuff. And there was no reciprocity on his part other than committing his troops to being the first to berlin but the only reason he wanted to be the first one to berlin which we gave to him was because it was revenge for what hitler had done yeah and you know the fall of berlin as you know is just horrifying what they did to the people so what does fdr seeing him then if he's like he's just a fucking friendly guy when he's around him like what is it you know i don't i honestly don't understand this because fdr is is the world's consummate political animal he he understands real politic like nobody else and this is and i think what he saw was

britain was on its knees at the end of the war they were an impoverished nation they had lost you know tons of men but they're they they just poor, and they suffered from the war for a long time. Whereas the Soviet Union was this dynamic force that was equal to the United States. And I think he was trying to put us in a position to be in an alliance with them. But Stalin, as you know, had no intention of an alliance. Nor did FDR's entire government and bureaucracy, apparently. Yeah, well, and then when he dies, I think Truman

was a great president because he came in and he turned everything around right away. Like, he stood up to Truman from, I mean, to Stalin from day one. He had no fear of him. Maybe they whacked FDR. No. You know, he was,

his arteries were so clogged they couldn't even get a needle in to embalm his body. Yeah, he was just sickly. He was super sick. Very sickly. It's kind of crazy that he hung in there for so long in power, too. I guess he was in power for like 14, 15 years, something like that. 32 through 45.

Yeah, 13. Yeah. But, you know, he made bad martinis martinis didn't drink too much but he smoked like a fish and plus with with his illness so he's not being able to really move around too much it was only a matter of time yeah yeah it's kind of crazy though because it is if you look at just from a military standpoint when i've looked at this history i'm grateful he was the guy in charge because what it seems like to me is he really did let his generals be generals and lead the war and be on the ground and know what's going on,

give them the power to litigate the war. And curiously, that was not Churchill. Churchill was a notorious meddler and he was always coming up with schemes and like, let's do this, let's do this. He was always going to the front lines. And it probably one of the reasons Roosevelt trusted George Marshall completely. And Marshall ran the war, you know, as his proxy, I think, is the best way to put it. So, but you never heard of Roosevelt coming up with a battle plan. Yeah, I don't think I've ever seen history about that. No, you never have. He wasn't the architect of D-Day, I know that.

Just crazy. Well, we had actually, you had mentioned this a little bit ago, and we got on some other stuff, but you were saying after Churchill visited Germany, and he was just in Parliament, a little bit persona non grata, he had his own spies on the ground in Germany to try to build this case it's in taking London and it's um it's kind of secondhand stuff so it's not like the names of spies but he basically was receiving data from

within Germany that that he would regularly share with parliament you know and these were statistics that the British government themselves did not have and people are always amazed that he would regularly share with Parliament. And these were statistics that the British government themselves did not have, and people are always amazed that he had these statistics. But, yeah, that was how he – that gave him credibility. So when he would speak in Parliament and he would use these statistics, he wasn't pulling them out of his ass. They were actually real. They were numbers.

How much have you written about across your books, or not even written about but heavily researched, I guess, like the full rise of Hitler? Kind of tangentially. Tangentially. Because I've written about Churchill on several different occasions, but like in episodic ways, like Churchill doing this or Churchill doing this, but it's never been that linear thing like, you know, what is the rise of Hitler, you know, all the way up through the war. Yeah. Now, do we know,

do we know what Churchill was saying? I don't want to put like an exact time on it, but let's say in that 1935, 1936, 1937 period about Hitler vis-a-vis Hitler's racial purity politics, was he commenting on that a lot or did he always just kind of look at the military strength and the fact that it was a dictatorial regime? I don't remember seeing anything about racial purity. So I think that that was something that wasn't even on Churchill's – I'm sure someone's going to watch this and say, no, you know, on March 12, 1937, Churchill said this. He said something, yeah. But he may have.

But it would have been minor. It wasn't his main focus at the point. That didn't bother him in the slightest. He was completely intent on stopping Churchill from waging war and destroying Great Britain. Now, when Neville Chamberlain is obviously the prime minister who comes in charge infamously in a way because of the whole appeasement thing. We'll talk about that in a minute. But Churchill ends up taking over for him and Chamberlain dies shortly afterwards, I think of cancer. But obviously, Churchill wrote a very nice obituary about or eulogy about him and you know they were from the same party but in the build-up before chamberlain actually goes and makes a deal with germany did churchill

think he was a moron like what was he was he politicking behind the scenes like guys this prime minister's walking us right into the into the lion's den right here i'm sure there was some behind-the-scenes stuff, but Churchill knew the danger. You have to remember, because they were from the same party and Churchill later served on the War Cabinet, he would never publicly denigrate Chamberlain. But at the same time, there would have been discussions behind.

And if you go back and look at that Munich thing, Churchill played Chamberlain completely. You know, just, you know, you're going to come to my place, you're going to be on my turf, we're going to do all these things. And Chamberlain was just, again, trying to do the right thing by the people, by trying to avoid war at all costs. And even though everything that Hitler was doing was all about war, Chamberlain played right into his hands. And in many ways, I see Chamberlain as a sympathetic figure because he was trying to do the right thing. You know, when Churchill added him to his war cabinet after he – so even though he replaced Chamberlain, he pulled Chamberlain onto his team as part of the war cabinet.

And then he died of stomach cancer. Yeah. So what a horrible way to die. Yeah. I actually – I agree with you. I think – I feel bad for Chamberlain and how history looks at him sometimes because yes, he made the wrong move. Yes, he went and negotiated on everything you said. I agree completely. But it was like the last step to try to avoid tens of millions of lives being lost and then when Hitler did cross that line, he declared war on them. Yeah.

You know what I mean? Like he was like, okay, I tried to avoid it. We went and made this deal. Obviously, it was a shit deal. But I said, you go into Poland, you do something like this, we're going to war. And that's what he did. So in a way, then Churchill just kind of takes over for him shortly after that. But sometimes I feel like that gets a little bit forgotten for him. It does. And if you listen to that speech, I think it was like 11 in the morning on a Sunday.

It was like a 15-minute speech or something like that. But if you listen to Chamberlain, he sounds so pained by having to say this. It's not like, hey, we're going to war. We're going to kick some ass. It was more like, oof, I did everything. Do we have that speech? can we actually pull that up that's a really I remember listening to that Chamberlain declares war

on Germany recording so that's September 1st 1939 and then Churchill comes in May 10th 1940

yeah that first one's probably good Alessio let's hear that I'm calling to you from the cabinet room at 10 Downing Street. This morning, the British ambassador in Berlin handed the German government a final note stating that unless we had found them by 11 o'clock –

Is that von Rubinstein? Oh, I know. I thought about it. No. That they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us. I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received. And that consequently, this country is at war with Germany.

That's perfect. Yeah, you can hear it. Yeah. That's just, I mean, think about if you're a high-level diplomat like that and, you know, you don't sleep at night, you've got some kind of stomach thing, you don't even know it's cancer yet, it's already eating away at you, and then you have this. I mean, you've just utterly failed, you know, on a very public stage, and now you know what's about to come for the nation. And it's interesting because, you know, again,

that phony war period between that and May. Phony war, you call it? Yeah, that's the term for it, the phony war. It's basically they had declared war, but nobody fought. You know, the British really didn't do anything until Norway in, like, February. But, you know, everythingish really didn't do anything until norway in like february but you know everything was we were at war but nobody we didn't the fighting didn't start for a long time they're just in there stared out yeah it's pretty much what it was yeah yeah waiting for someone to move yeah and not and you think about it all the technology we have now you know satellites

and stuff like that who knew that you had this whole army, you know, massing on the French border, you know, at the end of spring or the middle of spring? This is going to come pouring across and completely annihilate France. Didn't they? Maybe I am mixing this up right now. So please correct me if I'm wrong, because I know you wrote a book on this. But wasn't it like a weird geographical location that had to do with belgium that they thought couldn't be crossed and then the nazis crossed am i right it's the arden forest and it's the it's the same place where the battle of the bulge took place so but again um people thought oh the roads are too narrow you know the bridges are not strong enough to support. And they just surrounded, you know, they had literally miles and miles, you know, cars lined up for miles just

waiting to go across and men getting ready to go. So when the signal came to go, they just, they just went full speed ahead. And they took France pretty quick. Really quickly, you know, in the French people, you know, Churchill kept flying back and forth to Paris to talk to the French leadership. And all the French wanted was more planes. We need more stuff and all this. And finally, he had to give up because there was just no way the French were going to hold on. But Rommel was one of the tank commanders who led the charge.

And he made it from one side of France all the way to the ocean in a week. And so it was amazing how fast they moved. Wow. So that's – and what month was that again when they crossed? That was May. May. So that's right when Churchill comes in, May 10th. So it's at the same time.

Same time. And how – I forget. Did Chamberlain resign or – We should check that. I totally blanked question on that did neville chamberlain because like you said he became a part of the war cabinet but did he resign neville chamberlain resigned as prime minister on may 10th 1940 so churchill i guess was then was chosen replace him. It wasn't like an open election or anything like that. Yeah, he was asked to come to the palace to meet with the king,

and the king asked him to form a government. Got it. Okay. So Churchill comes in charge, and the Battle of Britain, I think you said this, doesn't begin technically until September when they bomb London? No, that's when the Blitz begins. So the Blitz is the nonstop bombing of British cities, and it started September 7th, an accidental bombing. Basically, some German pilots kind of got off course and just dropped some bombs on London. And we were so, Churchill was so enraged by the whole thing that it kind of raised the level of the conflict.

And then that's when Hitler shifted his air targets away from the Air Force bases and onto the population. Got it. So when they did that, though, they had to be really tactical. I always read about this because the planes and gas could only last a certain amount. I think the geography was like they could get just past london and back across the channel before they'd run out so it was very like i don't remember the numbers that they would send but they would like send in a line of basically planes drop the bomb and get the fuck out and that was it yeah and the royal air force like you said have been developing non-world war one planes now to try to compete with this. And that's how, that's part of the reason they were able to end up staving this off.

Right. So, and if you look at it in a map of England, the Southern, all the, most of the Air Force bases, the Royal Air Force fighter bases were on the coast or close to the coast. So, and they had a whole, you know, they had what is, what we now call radar along the coastline. It was IDF at the time. Just these huge towers that could tell when the Germans were coming in. It could, actually, and they had a control center. Hugh Downing, one of my favorite characters, Air Vice Special, Hugh Downing was in charge

of fighter command at the time. He had this huge underground command post, you know, deep in the countryside where all that information that came in about through the radar of a number of planes coming in, what angle, where they, you know, where they headed, they would, all that would be filtered through that. And then from his underground command post, it would go back out to the Air Force bases where they would scramble planes so they can anticipate it. So instead of sending every plane into the air at the same time, they would sendramble planes so they could anticipate it. So instead of sending every plane into the air at the same time, they would send small

squadrons just to mess with these guys in that way because the British Air Force was so small at the time, they were afraid if they sent every plane up there to fight the Germans, they'd be out of planes. They'd all get shot down sooner or later. It was called the small wing version of air stuff.

And there was another group who liked the big wing idea, which is where you just launch everything. But it proved to be effective the few times they did try it. As these attacks started, though, like what kinds of things were the general public in Britain doing to, I don't know, as best you can prepare for potential incoming bombings. I know they had technical like bomb shelters and stuff in London, but you know, if you're out in some of these other towns in the country where they're dropping bombs and things like that, was, was there anything they could do to try to be ready for that? No, not really. I mean, because like you said, in, in the heart of London,

there were, there were shelters you go to, you could, you could go into the underground. But out in the countryside, people actually would stop what they were doing and watch the dogfights with the planes that were taking place so high in the sky. They were anywhere between 510,000 feet, but they would watch for entertainment. For entertainment. Yeah. And very often, a British pilot would get shot down. He'd bail out.

He'd land. And somebody, some farmer would pick him up and take him back to his base and he'd get in a plane to fly again the same day. Oh, my God. Yeah. That's nuts. Yeah. I can't even, you're just out there one day and you're just watching. It's not a show.

It's not a show. But it's real. And, you know, one of the best parts, again, about writing these books is not just going to places, but I got to fly in a Spitfire. Oh, you did? It's part of my research. Those things still work? Yeah.

It was the coolest thing ever. And it was in the pilots like, hey, do you want to do a roll? I said, yeah, let's do a roll. Oh, fuck that. You know? And my wife was kind of flying. She was in the, they had like a video plane, taking a video. And there's, so she's flying along here.

Oh, you dragged her up there too? Yeah, I did. She took a video of it. I'll show it to you later. And so she's here. She's taking the video. And the guy who's flying my plane, I'm in the back seat. He goes, you want a break?

I said, what does that mean? All of a sudden, he just flips it, and we just go over like this. It is the coolest thing. That doesn't sound cool at all. It was amazing. I feel like I would throw up. Yeah, I like my planes modern day. Even that these days, you never know. But still, that's cool, though, that you did it because, you know, you're writing about it like crazy.

Well, and again, you don't want to just, you know, be in the plane. You want to, okay, what is the experience of being in the plane? Is it snug? You know, where are the, no, I did get to fly it for a little bit, just like two seconds. So I was able to use the rudders. He let you fly it? He did. I don't like this guy.

Yeah. He goes, okay. He basically gave me the controls for like two seconds. Oh, my God. I said, okay, I get it back. But I had that moment. But, you know, in a gun, too, like, you know, the gun button on the stick is called the tit because it's like a little nipple there right on the thing.

And so you want to be able to see, okay, what hand would they use for that? How would they activate the gun button where would you know if they had to bail out what was the procedure all those things it was just you only learn it by being in the cockpit i don't know how they see anything up there even today let alone back then when they had access to way fewer resources it's like you know there was a show on apple i didn't really watch it i think i watched like one episode last year about the World War II pilots. I forget what it was called. Like something in the air, something like that.

Can we pull it up, Alessi? The Apple show on World War II pilots. About the bomber pilots, yeah. Yeah. And I was watching footage. Like it's a show. It's not real. Yeah.

But I'm watching footage of them like from their perspective flying the plane and shooting at shit in the clouds. You can't see anything. Yeah. It feels almost like a monkey throwing darts at a board. You have as good a shot with that. I don't even know what skill you can have. Obviously, it's an incredible skill to fly the plane and control it and all that. But how can you even see what you're shooting at or where the plane is?

The guys who could actually do that, that's a whole other level. It's called Masters of the Air. Yeah, that's it right there. Yeah, they had – there were certain rules. They had the Browning machine guns on the Spitfires and the Hurricanes. And the pilots were taught how to kind of track somebody, never to fly even or level for very long because that's how you got shot down. You're always moving. And never do like a prolonged burst.

You did small bursts. Otherwise, you'd be out of ammunition in like five seconds. Yeah. Yeah. Now, how did this last like a year roughly, the air attacks on Great Britain where they were getting hit? Yeah, May, I want to say May 10th, 1941 was the end of it, somewhere right around there. And why did it end?

That's a really good question. Oh, because Hitler was getting ready to invade Russia. But in the middle of all that, you have to remember that parts of parliament burned down. I mean the very place where people were gathering was bombed. I mean, the whole city. If you pull up a map of places in – there are maps that do exist that show places in London that were bombed. It's everywhere. Can we do that?

Map of places London was bombed, Battle of Britain? Oh, whoa. That first one right there? That's it right there. Whoa. So, and you can see it today. If you walk through London, you'll notice that some areas have an Edwardian look or Georgian look, and then abruptly in the middle of it, you'll see. So look at that. I mean, it's amazing. I don't understand. That's nuts. That's actually crazy. This is what I don't get. And maybe, I don't know, maybe I'm looking at this too simply, but I feel like I'm not.

I don't know how you can look at stuff like this and then try to make the argument that, well, you know, there was a way to avoid World War II. Exactly. Okay. If you want to be isolationist, this is the heart of a major city, you know, city that has existed for a thousand years, and you're going to tell me that we don't need to help these people just because we had bad feelings that still exist from World War I. I mean, why would you not? And these, by the way, these are our allies, our staunch allies.

These are people that Churchill literally risked his life to sail across the ocean in August 1941 to meet in Newfoundland with Roosevelt. This is before Pearl Harbor, but these are sworn allies. I mean, the two, Churchill and Roosevelt, exchanged thousands of telephone calls and cables throughout the war. I mean, just the two of them conversing about the future of the war, it's not like he was simultaneously making a call to Hitler or somebody else playing it both ways or Stalin. He was focused on America because he saw us as the only people who could help him. And why wouldn't we? Yeah. Now, like we said earlier, while this is all happening, Hitler takes France. Right. Quickly.

What kinds of, like... Well, Becca, Hitler already has France. He was done with France by June of 1940. Right. Yeah. Very, very quickly. So while this is all going on, meaning he's in control of the country. Right.

Any governments that are there are Nazi-friendly governments at this point. Right. Right. So not even real governments. But he's, you know, he's evacuating Jews from the country. He's putting the Nazi stamp on everything they do. And I would imagine, obviously, Churchill's getting a lot of intelligence about that, which means it's making its way to the U.S. I guess the question is, outside of even just Britain being bombed, I understand we were so isolationist, but how did the point not get across until December 7th when we actually got attacked? And even then, we didn't declare war on Germany. Germany declared war on us. How did this point not come home by, I don't know, the end of 1940? Everybody hoped we could just stay out of war. Again, it's that whole World War I hangover that was just part of that isolationist thing.

And it was like Edward R. Murrow reported from London during the Blitz. And so Americans knew what was going on because very often he would be out in this. He wouldn't be in the studio. He'd be out in the streets, and he would like hold up a microphone to hear the clatter of people rushing to the air raid shelters, or you could hear the air raid siren going off. So Americans knew what was going on, and at the same time, it was like it was their war, and we're not going to – and Roosevelt was to the point that he't even give churchill the 50 old decrepit destroyers that he wanted you know so it was i think as a nation we just needed to be jolted like we needed to feel attacked you know we weren't going to do anything until we were the we were on the the bombs were following us. That was Pearl Harbor. Yeah. Now, when we get into the war, obviously like the allies set up. You have USSR.

You have the US and you have the UK. And whenever I look at this, it's like everyone kind of brought their own thing to the war, right? Like the US brought the military might. The Soviets brought the bodies and the UK brought the espionage in a way. And I know they brought, they all brought pieces of that themselves, but it was kind of like the perfect marriage of strengths or whatever. But what made Churchill such a brilliant wartime leader?

This is where I fall in love with Hitler a little bit. Fall in love with Hitler? No little bit he um fall in love with hitler but no does he hitler yeah yeah let's be real careful okay kanye west is gonna walk in next oh no this is where i fall in love with churchill he uh yeah have you heard that song no oh you haven't listened to that one the latest one one? No. By Kanye? Don't listen to it. It's a little too catchy. Oh my gosh. Between Kanye and P. Diddy, there's stuff going on

in this world. But I think the biggest thing, you know, people make much of it, but for a good reason. Those speeches he gave, you know... We'll fight in the beaches. Yeah. Which, by the way, he stole from Rudyard Kipling. No, that's, that's a line in the jungle book. So yeah, he, he cribbed that it's, it's beautiful,

but, um, you know, he used to write his speeches out like, like Psalms or sonnets, like just a few lines, you know, just for emphasis. So when he read them, he knew just how to hit each note and, um, everybody around him, you know, Lord Halifax was not a Nazi sympathizer, but he was – Lord Halifax was the first choice to be prime minister when Chamberlain stepped down. But he was in the House of Lords instead of the House of Commons, and he would not have been as effective. And that's why they gave it to Churchill instead. Halifax was completely in favor of a negotiated peace with hitler and even after even after blitzkrieg and all that no up until about i want to say there was a there was a meeting a very definitive meeting where

basically churchill put halifax in his place. And the thing that Churchill, and Churchill gained steam, like the first month he was in office, the first month of the war, people really weren't sure about Churchill. Like, was he going to hang on? Was he going to be the guy? But with those speeches where he empowered the nation and he basically said, we will not quit. No matter what, we will not quit. We will not back down. And it had a huge impact on the nation. It really did. And at no point would he discuss surrender. It's fascinating that at this time when you have these two very opposite figures in like a Hitler and a Churchill, the thing that really separated them, and it just goes back to humans and what we're attracted to and whatever, is the fact that

regardless of what their messages were, obviously Churchill's I think was positive and Hitler's was negative, but they were incredible communicators. And they knew how to take complete control of an audience and put it in the palm of their hand. And so it just goes to show you, you can be the smartest strategist, the most brilliant, well-read guy, the best in position to be a leader in whatever country it is. But if you can't get in a room and make people eat out of the palm of your hand. You're never going to be that guy. You know, and you think about with Churchill, too, because he shouldn't really be that guy because he had a little bit of a lisp. He was a little bit of a bully. He loved to tell everybody his opinions. He's not the guy that you naturally say, I like that guy.

I want to hang out with him. He basically pushed people away at all times. He was very good at politics, though, and he very good at um using the radio as a medium yes you know because people couldn't see him they just heard his the power of his voice yeah and in some ways this is not the best parallel but like let's say you're a fucking amazing actor yeah and when those cameras start going you're great and then the minute they yell cut and us the audience don't see it you know you're an asshole to everyone and suck like you can still end up being the great actor because that's what the masses see right so if you're but if behind the scenes he's a pain in the ass which it does seem like he was

to a lot of people it matters less when he's the guy who comes out and says no i'm gonna stand right here on the roof and smoke a cigar and drink some brandy while they drop the bombs on us. And I'm going to talk about it on the radio tomorrow. Yeah, that's him. And they took – the British people took great pleasure in hearing him. There's a moment in – gosh, I can't remember. There's an area of London where basically he gave a public speech. And I've seen a picture of it where everybody stopped what they're doing.

They broadcast it on speakers over this public plaza by the Bank of England. And everybody stopped what they were doing just to hear him talk. And if you look at around, nobody's making conversation. No one's commenting. Everybody is standing straight up, mouth closed, listening to what he had to say instead of gossiping with the person next to him about, oh, I don't like this guy or I'm sick of his speeches. No, everybody's wrapped. They're totally focused on what he has to say. I wonder if that could happen today just because of how many distractions we have and how much noise on random shit at the click of a button sitting here right on our phones.

Yeah. We have. Like back then, that was the one thing that everyone could listen to if they wanted to. Yeah. You know, it's like priorities almost. Yeah. Somebody would be, you know, recording it on their phone or videoing everybody listening to it. That would be different.

Yeah, it would definitely be different. But he, you know, he ends up being the leader through the war. Do you, in looking at World War II from the lens that you've looked at, what do you think were the biggest strategic mistakes Hitler made? He made a bunch. But I think one thing about Hitler was he started to believe that he was a great general. He had all these really great generals. And he started trying believe that he was a great general. You know, he had all these really great generals, and he started trying to dictate policy. And it was, I think, to his downfall.

He did make some good choices, but for instance, you know, repelling the D-Day invasion. I mean, word didn't get to him until too late, but he still kept the tanks, I think the 15th Panzer or something like that, you know, because he thought we were going to come across the Calais where he thought Patton was going to come. I think if Rommel had gotten through to the Suez Canal, that would have changed the war in a big way.

But Hitler was still very much playing politics with the Italian generals who didn't care so much for Rommel. And so a lot of the supplies Rommel needed, like especially oil and gas, weren't getting to him in time. And that would have been, I mean, if he had gotten the Suez Canal, think about that. Germany would have just, every shipping lane into the Mediterranean would have been shut because they would have had Gibraltar as well. That would have been just a different kind of war. Yeah, it could have been game over. Yeah, it really would have been just a different kind of war. Yeah, it could have been game over. Yeah, it really would have been different. I don't know if I'm looking at this too simplistically, but you talk about him as a thinking of himself as a general.

When I've looked at the timelines of how easily he was able to take places at the beginning, but then also how quickly he got involved on other fronts to me he essentially started like a forefront war he was in north africa he was he went west through france he was going trying to go north to britain and then and also declaring war on the u.s when they got caught in the middle of it and then tries to go east into the soviet union and sometimes i'm grateful he was like a methed out crackhead because if he had taken his time and done one at a time, this could be, maybe I'm looking at it too simplistically,

but this could be a very different world right now. I agree. I think that if invading the Soviet Union when he did was a bad idea, then might, and again, remember, he had a pact with Stalin. Stalin wasn't going to attack him anytime soon. But I think he was paranoid about it. And I also think, too, he wanted to do the Napoleon thing, like capture Moscow, which turned out to be the ultimate failure just to get so close and then get stuck out there. And their supply lines were you know forever long

you know on top of that they they had you know so brutalized the soviet people all the way through the you know you know burning buildings and with people inside and you know raping and pillaging basically the soviets couldn't wait to get revenge and when you look at the Soviet Union, it is a very, very big place. Like the Ukraine is so far away from Moscow. And Ukraine was the Soviet Union's breadbasket just before the war. So it was vitally important to get all these things. So Hitler wasn't just driving towards Moscow. He was fighting a war across that whole Soviet front. And it doesn't matter how many, and you think that all the men in Germany are doing all this fighting, but the Russians had so many more bodies

and they lost so many people. Yeah. What was the number? Can we look that up, Alessi? Total number of casualties, Soviet Union, World War II. It's an insane number. Because obviously then we had the whole cold war with them so this was a little bit ignored politically but yeah soviet union suffered around 27 million casualties

during world war ii including both military and civilian deaths from war-related causes which is you know all nazi germany yeah basically which is just like it's And, and we lost a lot of men, but nowhere near 27 million. Not like that. Yeah. Yeah. That's one of the arguments you hear now with, I guess like Neo history or whatever, where I was not trying to do that, but that did land a certain way. Sorry.

But like, you know, they talk about, well, you could have avoided having 40 million people die or whatever. And to me, I'm like, so 40 million people could have died over the next 20 years while he's like trying to take control of other shit around the country, including around the world, including here, maybe. Yeah. You know, like, is that, am I wrong? Am I going crazy here? Or is that a common sense thought? No, it's a common sense thought. I just don't think a lot of people, like I said before, a lot of people don't know history. And they kind of make up their own history in their heads as they go along. Or their, whatever the latest thing they hear on the internet or some newscast, you know, and they just go with it. Now, here's the other thing there, psychologically,

and I wonder if you've run into this, like, when you're doing your research throughout your many books, but it's like history is written by the victors, and so the cliff notes of it are always going to sound 100% one way versus 0% the other way for the most part. Sure. But the reality is even the good guys have some bad people or do some bad things along the way.

I always give the example of the Revolutionary War, which is another one I study really closely. It's like we were definitely the good guys. I'm very glad we did that. The revolution was great. A lot of amazing people on our side. Glad George Washington was the general. But it's like we did some violent shit too.

We did some stuff, yeah. Right? And there are even things that are recorded in history. They're written about in the books. It's not like they're ignored. That it's just when you're giving, again, like the cliff notes of it, no one ever brings that one up. Right. And so my point is people are not perfect.

Even the most obvious situations have some little nuance somewhere just because something got ignored after the records were put down. But the reality is let's say 90% to 95% of what we're told is mostly true or completely on the right track. What I find now is that people will maybe find that 5, 10 percent and then because they find that, lift that up and take that and say, therefore, none of it's true. Right. I agree with that. Just because I was, as you're talking, I was thinking about how it was very common for the U.S., for Americans to shoot German prisoners if there was no place to put them. So, and because we won the war,

there were no prosecution for war crimes. Germans did the same thing, you know, and now they stand at like the Malmedy Massacre, you know, the Battle of the Bulge. We look at that as this huge atrocity, and it was, but, you know, the Battle of the Bulge, we look at that as this huge atrocity, and it was, but, you know, it's wartime. And, you know, kind of putting this all back into the book world, you talk about that 5%, the 95% is what most history books are about, you know, like Taking Midway. Pull that in just a little bit. Okay, yeah.

And so Taking Midway is, you know, it's the history. But if there was 5% that was different, and somebody found that 5% and said, oh, this is a great book because they want to blow it up. So they write a book just about that 5%. And what that does is that book gets out there, gets in the, you know, so what I'm saying is that you take that 5%, you make a book about it, you make a documentary about it, then people begin shifting the argument. It's like, oh, that's the real story. That's not just the fringe story. That's the real story. Right.

That's what we need to think about it. Right. We should create an environment though, and we don't always do this in fairness where it's okay to ask questions on things to try to delve deeper. And what I feel like happens is people will ask questions on some narrative about something and they'll be told, fuck you, shut up. You're not allowed to ask that. And then they go, well, fuck you. I am going to ask that. And it creates this bigger and bigger problem. And then they become cognitively incentivized to find the confirmation bias that they're feeling about, Oh, maybe this,

I need to look at this a lot deeper. And so I empathize with where that comes from. I just wish we could have more like, I don't know, like not academia, but like academic meaning productive discussions about these things in the open where people where different people, whether it be you or other historians, can talk about this and say, well, I found this. Oh, you found that? I found this. That's interesting.

I wonder if those – you know what I mean? Like an exchange of ideas. Yeah, that doesn't happen anymore. No. And here's a good point. Like if I – the neighborhood I live in is politically mixed. You know, everybody, you know, we have firefighters, we have cops, we have construction workers, we have, you know, me, the lone writer. But, you know, we have people who do, you know, an executive for Home Depot.

We have all these people in this neighborhood. But when we get together in the subject of history or modern history comes up or in comparisons to other stuff, people like me who spends all his time studying history, who makes a living being focused and immersed in history, I'm not going to speak up because what happens is in a situation like that, you become the know-it-all and no one wants to listen to the know-it-all. They want to listen to whatever they heard on TV or the internet and you get just this thing. And there's so many times, and not just with my neighborhood, but in public discourse where

I want to correct people or say, no, you're not right. But again, I don't want to be the know-it-all guy. And it's really not my place, you know, unless it's a forum like this where I can actually talk freely about history without sounding like a pompous ass. Right. So you're making an amazing point right here, which is that if you're just a good sport about things and then happen to know some things as well, people are going to ask you questions and then it's going to be able to get out there as truth. Unfortunately, in the defense of the people who do go full contrarian, there are a lot of people sitting in a seat like yours who have access to a lot of information and have studied it throughout their life and written all these books who are like, no, no, no, you can't talk with us. And they do want to be the know-it-all who tells everyone, no, this is how it is, which causes that endless loop. I kind of actually get into that, you know, because I don't have a PhD.

You don't? Get the fuck out. Right, exactly. So if I get into a room of academics, I'm just a guy who writes history books. I'm not like Mr. Smarty Pants. And it's almost like I don't have a voice. And I want to say, but yeah, I do that. Like every book is a graduate degree. Yes. I completely agree with that.

It's like you said, there are no dialogues. There are no conversations. Everybody wants to find their place in the pecking order and make sure that nobody else kind of usurps them. Yeah. And by the way, we've been talking about this all day. We've been going through World War II and everything, but your new book, as you've said, is Taking Midway, which, you know, first of all, what made you want to cover this story right here? Churchill. That's perfect. And I'll tell you why. The end of Taking London is when, like I said, August 1941, Churchill gets

on the HMS Prince of Wales, sprints across the Atlantic, meets with Roosevelt in Newfoundland, and there's a huge American and British contingent gets together. It's a remarkable moment. And then that's how Taking London ends, because that's kind of when, because the two of them get together, they form the Atlantic Charter on that. And before the US is even in the war, they're making plans about how the war is going to be waged and what the world's going to look like afterwards. So that's how I opened this book, because the HMS Prince of Wales left that engagement, sailed to Singapore as a show of force, gets there just in time for the attack on Singapore that took place parallel to Pearl Harbor. Because there were numerous attacks that day.

It wasn't just Pearl Harbor. I don't know much about that. What happened? So when the Japanese launched their wave of attacks, so we think of December 7, 1941 as Pearl Harbor Day. Simultaneously, and it was December 8th because of the time zone change, they attacked Hong Kong,

Singapore, the Philippines, a couple other places. But there were numerous attacks all taking place within, including the Malay Peninsula. So what happens is Churchill sends the HMS Prince of Wales, which is the world's biggest and baddest battleship, is a show of force to make sure the Japanese know their place

and stop this crazy shit. And they sink it. And it sends shockwaves around the world, this amazing battleship. It goes down just because of an aerial attack. And so that's how the book opens. And the reason it opens like that, A, to carry the continuity of Churchill into this book. But also when Singapore ultimately fell a couple months later, the Japanese controlled all of the Pacific. The only thing that was left to get was to kick the Americans out of Hawaii, and the way to do that was to take Midway.

So Midway is the battle after Pearl Harbor. Can we pull Midway up on the map so people can see that? Yep. Just to give context. And Midway, as you probably know, gets its name because it's halfway between Tokyo and San Francisco. Right. I remember I haven't watched it in years, but it's making me want to go watch it again.

The World War II in Color, the Pacific, when they go battle by battle, it's insane. Insane. If you want to watch a really good short documentary, John Ford, the director, was on Midway during the fight. And he filmed it. and it's super cool. Whoa. And Henry Fonda is one of the narrators. Oh, that's really cool. Ironically, when they made the movie Mr. Roberts, they went back and filmed parts of it on Midway, and Fonda was on the ship.

Wow. Kind of cool. All right, so we got it on the map right there, like you said, halfway. Through how far approximately from Hawaii would that be? About 1,200 miles. It's like 1,200. And how big is Midway? It's tiny.

There are three islands, and, you know, it's an atoll, so it's surrounded by a ring of coral. And so that's what atolls are. It's an island surrounded by coral. And they're beautiful. They're the kind of stuff of postcards. And at one time, Midway was a Pan Am Clipper base visited by, among others, Ernest Hemingway on his way on a Pan Am Clipper across the Pacific. Is that why they called that island Bikini Atoll, I guess? Remember where we did the

nuclear test? Yeah, the nuclear stuff. We blew it up. It's gone. Yeah, H-bombs. Wow. I never knew that. Okay.

Yeah. So it's not that big, and this is where the first battle occurs. And so did your book focus, I assume, on the whole buildup to that and then the full battle itself? You know, like I said, I get stuck. And so I opened with Prince of Wales and I was like, yeah, this is a great opening. We had Churchill. The books are all linked because taking London goes straight into taking Midway. And then where do I go next?

And the natural thing to do was tell some backstory, but I decided to go all the way back to millions of years ago when lava formed this island, and then the atoll was formed with the coral, and then the people who had visited that over the years, including an amazing bird population, like the population, you can't go to Midway Island now as an individual because the huge bird population there, like literally millions of

seabirds make that their home and they nest on the ground. So almost everywhere you walk, you're about to step on a bird. And they're nice birds. I mean, they're not aggressive. They don't fly away. They just stay on their nest. And so it's a big bird sanctuary now. Oh my God. Yep. That's wild. But at one time, the birds have been there for a long time. And when it became very popular at the turn of the 20th century for women to put a feather in their hat, you know, that was the look with, you know, ladies had hats with big elaborate tropical feathers. Japanese poachers came to Midway and would kill birds by the hundreds of thousands just for the feathers.

And so we actually had to send the U.S. Marines in. In like 1903, Teddy Roosevelt sent the Marines in to stop the bird poaching. So the Japanese involvement with Midway didn't just start in June 1942. It started, you know, 50 years earlier. A long time before. Yeah. It's so crazy how all these little minute parts of history end up tying together. Well, I'm going to go on a complete tangent.

But the reason we, 1803, I want to say, Alexander von Humboldt is an explorer. He's on the coast of South America. And he sees this ship that has this hold filled with yellowish material. And it turns out it is bat guano, or I'm sorry, bird guano, which is bird poop, which is being used as fertilizer by the local farmers. He takes them home with him to Germany, gets it tested. It turns out like it's super fertilizer. It's like the magic girl of its time.

And so European farmers start using it. American farmers start using it too. And all of a sudden, the search for bird guano to fertilize crops becomes a worldwide pandemonium. It's even in the, I can't remember the name of the president, one of the presidents even used it

in his State of the Union address to say we need more bird guano. We need more bird poop. Yeah. Mostly it's because farmers in the South, their cotton crop would leach the soil of all the nutrients. Farmers in the South needed more fertilizer. So the reason an American ship went and found the island of Midway in 17, 1859 was because he was looking for bird poop and he found bird poop. And so it became an American protectorate. So there we go.

Always leave it to America. We're going to find the capitalistic levers. You're going to find where that money is. Find that bird poop. That's it. So you were telling me though, you wrote this in six months? Six months. Yep. How the hell do you write? How many pages is this? 350 pages? 348? Something like that? I think so. Yeah, right around there.

About 90,000 words. All right. 90,000 words, six months. That's at least 500 a day. But again, fully edited, all done in six months? Done. Historical research done, which means you're not writing necessarily every day. All that other stuff involves stuff where you're not writing. How the hell do you get this done in six months?

What's your process? Every book takes me about six months. That's just the number. And I just figure out the story and I do a little pre-research. I mean, I want to know in broad brushstrokes what I'm about to write about. But then I literally research word by word, line by line, paragraph by paragraph. So if I have a question, you know, what was the temperature that day? I find out what the temperature was and what did they have for breakfast that day? I find that out. So I just do it, you know, then you throw in the travel, then you throw in... Where do you organize that, by the way? Like, do you have like a Word document where you keep in your sources or?

No, you give me too much credit. It's like it's in there somewhere. I have, I literally have, I used to do actual physical books. Now I'm starting just to do more digital books, do my research. But next to my chair in my office, I have a large bag of just books.

And when I'm done with that current book, all those books go to the friends of the library from my local library. So I just give them, you know, 50 books, 60 books. But I also have a big sheet of butcher paper, about six feet long, seven feet long, that covers one wall of my office. And I take a Sharpie and I outline the book, I outline the chapters. And once I outline it, I don't really look at it that much unless I'm stuck, and then I kind of move some stuff around. But it's really just a process of getting out there and writing every day. And I don't write on Saturday and Sunday, so it's five days a week of just,

you know, four to five hours of just getting lost. And when I come out of my office— You don't write on Saturdays and Sundays ever. I don't really, you know. It's just at some point, at some point you got to take a break, right? Good for you. Yeah. I like to enjoy my weekends.

But, you know, when you go deep in the weeds and you're really, like, between the writing and the research, it's full immersion. Like, I'm mentally and physically, you know, I should say emotionally transported to whatever time I'm writing about. When I leave my office, my wife says I look like a crazy person, and she literally won't let me drive for about an hour after I get out of there just because I'm not present. I'm not physically in the same place. It's just full immersion. It's just my superpower is just hyper focus. So probably the ADD.

Do you have a routine when you wake up every morning that gets you to your desk eventually? Yeah. You know, like I hear the Tim Ferriss stuff with all the routines. And, you know, everyone's just like, can I take five milligrams of this and ten milligrams? Yeah, people are different. Yeah, yeah. All different shit. So I wake up.

I still read the newspaper. So I read the LA Times. I do. Good for you. Yeah. It's like this thin now. It's eclectic. Yeah.

It's it. And when I drink some coffee. Wait, so O'Reilly knows you read the LA Times and he still works with you? That's cool. Yeah, he doesn't. We don't work together anymore. We're done. He didn't tell you that was a rag or something like that oh he says he says yeah he doesn't he doesn't like

anything can i say that i don't know what does the nda say can mean a lot of things for him yeah no. No, I just – look, I just have coffee. I feed my dogs and I go sit down and write. Is there like a mental switch that goes off like when you sit down in that chair? I really nerd out over this stuff where you're just like I'm now the professional doing this. This is the only thing that I'm put on this earth right now to do, like a presence that comes over you. Yeah. Well, it's a slow process. Like I'll sit down and I might kind of, you know, check some sports scores or something like that online or just check some stuff out,

you know, do some emails. But then slowly it's like, hmm, I wonder, what about this angle? You know, like with military books, learning the proper name of an armament or like the caliber and all the real minutia. If I go back – and so what I do is I take what I wrote the day before and I'll print it out, like literally print it out. So that's the first thing I do every morning when I start to write. And I'll read it out loud, you know, just because it usually sucks. You know, then you start fixing and massaging. And as you do that, it takes you back into the story so that when you fix those three or four pages, and then you kind of just transition. And then that's when you just kind of dive off the cliff and there's no going back because once you really plunge into what you're researching,

it just takes hold. And my wife, every now and then will come knock on the door of my office, but she knows that if she does it, she's going to break the spell. So she just leaves me alone most of the time. How many hours do you usually stay in there? About 8 to 1230 or 1. Yeah, about 1. I live near a really nice, wild, you know, stretch of canyon. So about then I'll either go, you know, hike in the canyon for a little bit just to clear my head. And then I also coach the cross-country and track teams at my local high school. And so I go down and I coach for a couple hours,

which is good because it gets me out of the geek nerd writer isolationism. And I have to deal with, you know, high school kids. You guys have no idea what happened in midway. Give me a hundred. Every now and then I will like, do you guys know what happened? Let me tell you about the HMS Prince of Wales. And they're like, Dugard, just shut up. And then what I'll do is I'll take that day's writing.

I'll print that out again, and I'll take it with me. If I stop on my way home from practice and have a beer, I'll just sit at the bar, and I'll edit right there. And everybody thinks I'm a schoolteacher editing, like grading papers. Oh, you're grading papers. That's so cool It's like we're gonna fucking book man. Sleep It's way more important no Teachers of the world forget what I just said No, but but then because it's good because then I put closure on it's like alright, it's okay We'll fix it in the morning. Then I'll start again the next morning, print it out again, and off we go. So you keep looping each section basically.

Yeah. Every day is a loop of that section where it just builds another layer to it. Right. And then you just re-improve that layer the next day. But like a lot of people struggle with the concept of trying to get not even necessarily perfect but trying to get it mostly right and getting the cadence right, right when it's coming out. And they get they struggle with that, because then they're like, they'll write 250 words, and they're like, this sucks, and they rip it up, and they got to start over. But it sounds like you're more correct me if I'm wrong here,

you're more of the mindset of, let me get all the ideas like that outline floating in my head of what this is onto the paper. I don't care if it's fucking terrible. I'm going to look at it tomorrow. And the clarity of having got that out, I'm going to be able to go back in and be able to say, oh, no, now that I've had a day to process this, this would sound better if I wrote it that way or this way. That's it. Hunter S. Thompson used to say pages are prog means pages means progress. And I agree with that because if you, you can spend all you want and it's, it's the worst feeling in the world because let's say on Monday you're on page five. And by the time you're on the Friday, you're on page six, you waste the whole week. Just get it out. Like I can't remember who the author was in 19th century guy said, you know, vomit on the page in the morning,

clean it up in the afternoon. And that's exactly it. But, you know, like just today though, I, um, I was, I was editing the first 150 pages of the book I'm working on now. What's that about? It's about the running boom of the 1970s. Oh, that's right. You tell me. It's kind of a big departure and it's a big, it's a big historical challenge, but super fun. It's just a complete departure. But I felt like it was a very tight document,

and I only printed them out because I was going to be on a plane for six hours, and I thought I'd have time to edit it. And I've gone through those pages, and as good as I thought it was, I found so much that could be better. So many, so many, you know, so many words that can be taken out so many, so many thoughts that could be expanded and clarified. And it, it actually gives you a breath of fresh air about what you're going to go into next. Yeah. And I think part of what you're getting at here is the complexity versus simplicity thing. Like there's this idea with like the creative writing endeavor.

You got to not necessarily use big words or whatever, but you got to be so descriptive on every little thing because that's what makes people picture stuff. But in reality, it's the same as everything else. It seems like where it's like you can do that, but can you do that with great brevity and can you be taking away from things to allow the reader to capture more with their mind rather than being told what to do? Totally agree. Because when you, you know, one of the ways that you kind of touched on this, I like to write in a very cinematic way. I want the reader to be with me in the moment. And if you have too many words, too many thes and its, or just a dumb, plain statement, the reader can feel it. And if it's too busy, you take the reader right out of it. And I want people to just be turning the pages. I want them to be in the moment completely. So if I'm saying something redundant, or if I have a paragraph that is beautiful but unnecessary, it has to go.

It's just anything that takes the – it's just about the story, period. Do you ever run into struggles writing where you hit writer's block or something like that? You know, I have a mortgage. So, you know, but David Mamet one time said, he goes, I go to my office every day. Some days I don't get anything done and I just take a nap. But I'm in my office every day. And that's kind of the same thing. Like if I go in my office and things really aren't working, I don't start going online and kind of poking around.

I just stay there. And maybe I'll look at it, go sideways. It's like, okay, what do we know about the Spitfire that we didn't know before and just kind of find a way to weave it into the story. And usually it kind of pulls you out of any blockage. So you're finding places of inspiration to bring on new ideas. Yes. Just wherever they may be. Yeah. And it's always fun.

And I read voluminously away from history. So when I read for pleasure, I tend to read things that have nothing to do with history. Usually like a Robert Ludlum book or a spy thriller just because I want to feel the pace and stuff like that. And every now and then when I'm doing my own writing and I start getting really artsy-fartsy and I kind of feel like, man, my words are so pretty, it's like to stop it. Just really focus on building this story. What layer can we add? What layer can we subtract? Just what is going to make this feel so three-dimensional that people feel like the characters are standing right in front of them? pace, stuff like that, that helps with storytelling. But maybe outside of some of the minute details like that, like what, as someone who clearly reads a lot and reads a lot of great authors as you have throughout your life, like what makes the best storytellers? Oh, that's a good point. You know, I would have said, you know, I like brevity, but sometimes you read great, like Tom Wolfe, you read his stuff and it's beautiful, but it's not brief.

Like he can kind of ramble on a little bit, but then you're reading, oh man, this is pretty awesome. You know, and I don't know. I just, I think it's not really the way they tell the story. It's the way they make you they pull you into the story. You don't feel like you're reading writing. You feel like you're in, you know, it's like I love that book, A Gentleman in Moscow, you know, by Amor Tolles. Oh, I've heard of that. Who read that?

Who wrote that? Amor Tolles. It is a wonderful story, and it takes place in a Russian hotel in Moscow. Things I don't know anything about, but I've read the book three times because every time I read it, and I don't just read a couple pages, and then I literally get sucked into it for like hours at a time. It's just because he creates this world that all of a sudden I'm a part of it. I'm not a guy reading a book.

I'm transported, and that's what the great a part of it. I'm not a guy reading a book. I'm transported. And that's what the great storytellers do. I would agree. I think that's perfectly said. No, you also keep mentioning Ernest Hemingway throughout the conversation. So it feels like that's your... And you mentioned Hunter S. Thompson a lot too, but it seems like that's your main inspiration. What do you think made him so great you know what i used to like so when i was you know in my early 20s pondering life as a writer and that was the benchmark was like you know ernest hemingway was the best american you know writer of all time and and i think to an extent you know heming Hemingway's great, but I don't love Hemingway like I used to. Just because, you know, as you grow, you kind of like, you take to different authors. And

same with Thompson. I dare you to try to write like Hunter S. Thompson. It's almost impossible. You need a lot of cocaine. You need a lot of cocaine. But you know, his work, his stuff is so smart. It's so intelligent. And everyone thinks, oh, gonzo journalism, like he's off the rails somewhere. But it's really, really smart stuff. But I think my point is that I tried to write

like Ernest Hemingway. I tried that when I was 21 and I sucked at it. I tried to write like Bruce Springsteen. You know, I love Bruce. I tried to write like Thompson. Then all. I love Bruce. I tried to write like Thompson. Then all of a sudden I realized at some point you get your own voice. And you realize, and I keep trying to improve my voice and make it better, make it, but at the end of the day, when I read it, it's still my voice, but at least it's my voice. And I'm not writing as if I'm trying to be somebody else.

I'm very comfortable with the words I put on the page, the words I choose to make my voice come through. That's kind of almost a curse sometimes of being someone who's so eclectically aware, meaning like – it's not really the right way to use that term. But you have so many different influences of greats, people who do the job in a different way, at a really high level, and you feel what they do. So then naturally when you write, you're almost taking inspiration for all those things subconsciously. But as you said, you've got to find a way to amalgamate that and create something new where it's like someone later

will be sitting in that chair and saying, yeah, no, I was really inspired by Martin Duggar, but I had to find my own voice, you know? Yeah, that would be nice. I, uh, you know, that, that would be really cool. I just, um, I'm just, I, this is one of the things I'm just glad that I found writing because, you know, like I said, I had that corporate job and I know tons of people that get a corporate job and they get the paycheck and you got the cubicle and you get your little computer and you have security. And without my wife kind of pushing me a little bit, I might still be in a cubicle someplace, you know. But instead, I get to travel the world. I get to write these stories I love to write.

And I get and there are days when I sit down and go, okay, man, we got a deadline coming up. We got to write 5,000 words today, which is stupid. I mean, 2,000 is a big day. 1,000 is a nice day. But, and I start trying to write fast. And then after 15 minutes, like this little voice in my head says, just stop. Just one word at a time, take it easy, tell the story. It might take a while, but just tell the story. And I'm just glad that I've learned enough about how I work that process that it really, it almost calms me. It almost soothes me at times when the writing is hard. Well, it's also really inspiring hearing how you did it too because you didn't leave till you were 35 you had a wife you had two kids as you said like there's a lot of people who and i and i hear this sometimes from people in comments fans that'll reach out because like i saw i burned the

boats to do what i do but i also was able to pick that out when i was like 26 and be like this is the last time in my life i'm not gonna have a wife and kids and i can actually like be devoted to my thing. But people will come back and say, well, you're lucky because you figured that out then. And now, you know, I'm 38 and I have this talent, but I got a wife, I got kids, I got bills and I hear them. I empathize with that, but it's still not that I can personally relate to that, but guys like you show it's still possible to go after what you want. Like, why do you think, was it just like a, I can't fail mentality that got you through, you think? Like I said, I thought I was better than I was, but, but no, and I, I love that burn the boats

comparison because it was kind of like that when my wife challenged me, you know, full speed ahead, you know, don't be looking at one end. Don't be looking at other jobs. I had no choice, you know. And at the end of the day, too, you know, you still have to feed a family. You still have to pay the mortgage. You know, all those things. And so I just, until I really got into books and began, you know, getting advances and things that you could live on for a little bit.

I mean, I hustled. I took any magazine assignment, whether it paid a nickel a word or $2 a word. I was your guy. And I'd be juggling 10 or 12 assignments at the same time, which also means calling editors and saying, when am I going to get paid? You know, all those things. And it's not an easy life. But at the same time, neither is going to work at

a shitty job that you hate. And, and so, I mean, I don't know, things have worked out well for me. I've been very, very fortunate, but, um, the fact that I still love what I do and, and I think it's funny because I've spent the last 30, so I left the corporate world in February 24th, 1994. I've spent the last 31 years doing whatever the fuck I want. You know, it's pretty awesome. That's great. I travel the world.

You know, I'm married to the woman I love. I write for a living. And all these people I know are starting to retire. And they're saying stuff like, man, you've got to go to Europe sometime. I go, what the fuck? I've been talking about Europe for 30 years. You guys have been working all the time. Yeah. Do you ever think about that though? Or is this like, it seems to me with creative endeavors, especially when you're great at them and you enjoy them. It's like a lot of people I talk

to like retirement, like, nah, I'll just do this as long as I want to. Like, do you ever think about, oh, there's a point where I want to cut off or are you just open to keep writing as long as your little heart desires i want to keep going i want to do i want to challenge myself i want to do a fiction piece you know i want to just just to see if i can do it you know do you know what you want to write about yet no i just know that i want to make up a story and tell it. And I don't know. But I don't have any plans to retire. I don't. But what people do when they retire is they write a book.

You're already ahead of the game. I'm just doing my thing. No, it makes me really happy to do this. And as long as it doesn't feel like work, and it doesn't. There's not a day that I sit down and go, oh, geez, this is, this is horrible. It's always like, hey, I'm going to my office. I'll see you in five hours. You know, you seem, you seem calmly happy about your life. Like it just comes across, like it's kind of bounce around having a good time. Like there's a certain vibe that comes with creatives like you, where it's like, ah,

he figured it out. Yeah, I appreciate that. appreciate that what was the you know some of these books though they'll like you said they'll kind of translate into each other like midway is born out of taking london and it makes sense like chronologically in a way so you bump into the story but as you've pointed out today you've written such a wide range of different stories. How do you identify, not to put like an exact example on it, but how does it like come to you to say, oh, I'm going to write a book on the rise of running? Like how do you identify a story at the source and say to yourself this qualifies for a book? Oh, it's not an easy process. And first of all, I'm a very, I like to be curious, you know, you know, I just, I like to investigate things and go down rabbit holes and see, but the process of going to my, my agent or my editor and saying, this is the next book.

It's, it can take a long time. I mean, it's, it's sometimes it's months because it's just got to have the right feel to it. And it's going to be something that I want to write, but it's going to be something you want to read. And then I, and can I tell this, is it big enough? Because if you have a small story, no one gives a shit. It has to be a big story, you know, something that really, you know, has a, an emotion to it. And when you find it, and like, for instance, the running boom book, like I said, it's a departure, but you know up as a runner. And again, I'm a high school coach, so I'm still actively involved in the running community. I'm getting to talk to some of my childhood heroes, Frank Shorter and Bill Rogers and all these people who were at the heart of it. And it's a fun thing,

but at the same time, now it's incumbent upon me to make it something that you want to read. So when I tell people I'm working on a book about the 1970s running boom, a lot of people look at me like, that's really cute. But when it comes out, people go, I want them to say, have you read that book? That is amazing. I didn't know that I would be interested in that. And that's the challenge is to find that book that people don't know they care about until you make them care about it. You also got to get the window dressing right, too. You know, like how you end up titling that, even what the cover looks like and how it's marketed in the 30-second elevator pitch, like that can take a story that on the surface sounds like almost

like a case study and turn it into its whole universe. That's part of my process too, is I don't worry about any of that until the book is written. And right now my publisher has come up with covers and titles and subtitles and I'm, you know, I'm, you know, responding. I mean, I'm not completely shut off. But at the same time, I will give my full focus to it when I write the whole book. Right.

And then I can say, this is what it's really about. This is what the cover should look like. This is what the font should look like. You know, everything. And the elevator pitch, too. How many months into that are you again writing this one? About three. So you've got three left.

I've got three left. Somehow you make it six months every time. What's it like though when you're not just writing alone? Like you did all these books with Bill O'Reilly. I think you said it was like 13, 12, 13, 14. That was a really weird thing. I didn't think I was somebody who was good at collaborating. Like when I worked with James Patterson, when you work with him.

Just such a flex. When I work with James Patterson, you know. Well, but what he does is he calls you up and said, I want to write a book about this. You know, he gives you an outline. This, you know, and then, you know, this is how much we're going to pay you. And then you have, you know, this much time to do it. And he gave me a year and a half. It's like, dude, that's – I can write three.

I can write three. But I wrote it. Then I would send him chapters and he would kind of fuss with them and make them sound like James Patterson. But with Bill, the process was that I would research the topic, write the book, and then send pages to Bill, and then we would get on the phone together. And it became a true collaboration because he would take what I had written, and he would put in stuff to make it sound like his voice, and then we would merge the two documents. So you're the base writer, and then he's the touch-ups guy. Yeah. He wouldn't like that description.

I know he would not, but I'm going to give it. But I think it was a really great way to collaborate. And so when you tell people, right with Bill O'Reilly, there's this cosmic reaction because of the political stuff. And I will say this, right up until the very end of our partnership, we never once talked politics. Not once. It was always history. Wow. As a matter of fact.

How many years was this partnership? 2010 until last year. About 14 years, 15 years. So you did 14 in 14 years while you're writing all your own books. That's. Yeah. Wow. So, you know, like I said, it's fun.

And so it doesn't feel like I'm, you know, so prodigious. It just feels like I'm just, you know, going to work every day. How did you get connected with Bill? At the time, we had the same agent. So the story goes, I was in Mammoth Lakes, which is way up in the high sea area with my team. We were doing a distance camp, a high altitude camp. The story goes, I was in Mammoth Lakes, which is way up in the high Sierra with my team. We were doing a distance camp, a high altitude camp. And I got a call from my agent saying, a client would like to meet you about doing a book with you.

Can you be in New York in two days? So I had to drive through the night to Reno to catch a flight. He didn't tell you the client? No. And so I go to lunch. And there's Bill, 6'3", Bill O'Reilly. He's a tall man. And we sat down at lunch, and my agent was there, and Bill's across the table.

How many words did you say at lunch? Five? I didn't speak very much at all. And Bill's looking at me the whole time. He's eye contact, sizing me up. And I'm thinking, man, I hope I get this gig. But this is a little intimidating. So, you know, but it all worked out. Why do you think he picked you to do that?

Because obviously it ended up having great success. You know, I know he'd read something I'd written. So maybe there was something in the stuff that became the format for all the books. Again, that present tense thing. I was reading a book. It was like – it was a thriller. I can't remember the author but a british guy and he one of his characters opens the book like the man with 45 seconds to live is something and i thought

man that is cool i'm going to steal that and so i put that in killing lincoln and we use that in a few of the books so it just kind of set the format that ran throughout the whole series just quick taught historic stuff full of detail but not so much that it's going to bog you down did he tell you from the jump he wanted to create a series like this where they're all called you know like a similar name or how did that happen it was a one-off as a matter of fact bill bill's publisher didn't believe he could sell history books so he thought that um he didn't believe bill o sell history books. So he thought that – He didn't believe Bill O'Reilly, who at the time was the guy on Fox News, couldn't sell history books. They thought he was just a political guy.

So Lincoln was supposed to be just a one-off. And so I began writing it. And I got about halfway through before I even showed any pages to Bill. And later we got in the habit of every time we finished a chapter, we would go over it. So it was, but, so I sent him like, you know, 150 pages. And that's when Bill got involved in the process. But then it got, Killing Lincoln went right to number one, stayed there for a year. And so then Kennedy came up and Jesus, and then we just got in, we became just a year. And so then Kennedy came up and Jesus,

and then we just got in, we became just a machine. Yeah. You wrote about the wildest cases, like in modern history and in regular history, like these, these books obviously covered a wide gamut before, before I get into some of the specifics of them though, what,

what's, I mean, you mentioned the cadence of how you work, but like as a guy, what's Bill like to work with? I mean, it seems like you guys had some sort of very seamless relationship to write so many books in such a short period of time. He's very – you know, like I said, I live in California.

He lives in Long Island. So everything was done on the phone. For a while there – I want to say though, the whole time we've known each other, I think we were in the same place at the same time maybe a dozen times. Wow. Almost everything was done on the phone. But people don't understand that Bill is actually really creative and really has a great mind for story. And so he really added a lot to that. He's very particular, but we got into a routine of,

like I like to be, I'm not punctual, so I try to be punctual. Let's put it that way. So if he said, he said, you know, if let's talk tomorrow at seven, I got in the habit of calling right at seven. So it kind of said just a good, it felt very disciplined. So whenever we talked on the phone, it just felt like we started at a certain time. We knew what we're going to go over and then we knew what was next. And so it just – it became very, very easy to put pages out. When you wrote that first one, Killing Lincoln, and dived into that historical research, first of all, had you had any background on that before? Or was that the first time really looking at it?

No, I knew nothing. And that – most of my books are like that. Yeah. I like to come in like a blank – as a blank slate. Was there anything that shocked you? No, you know what? It's how much I cared by the time I had to kill Lincoln,

you know, because when you're the guy writing it, you know, it could be John Wilkes Booth pulling the, the, the trigger. But if you're shooting the guy and I was very sad, it was,

it's like, it's like reliving it. I, Oh, when I, when I killed, when I killed Jesus and killing jesus and killing jesus and that was that's tough well because the you know the the the whips and the and you know the

cross wasn't polished wood it was splinters and all that stuff and it was just like crucifixion was a terrible way to die and just again you start living these things with these people so it was uh yeah like you said it does emotion, there's a lot of emotion to it. How do you write a book, though, called, like, Killing Jesus? You were saying this right before we got on air, and I couldn't agree more. It's like you're going to piss everyone off. You know what's funny is, so first of all, Bill called me, and he goes, ready? We're going to kill Jesus.

That's what he said. Just like that. Just like that. Just like that. And I almost literally fell out of my chair. I go, they're going to kill us. They're going to destroy us. So I called a friend of mine who is a theologian at Yale. And I said, Don, I said, I need you to tell me the 20 best books about the historical Jesus.

And he goes, I'll give you 10. So he sent me a list of 10 books, and I read them, and I used some of that research in the story. And there was actually a guy who was critiquing the book once it first came out, and this is the reason I did it. He said, well, I was going to criticize this book, but then I realized I was one of the sources, so I can't have to refuse myself. So I was trying to take that. Oh, that's 3D chess. It worked out pretty well. Oh my God. So, and you'd think we would have been pillaged, but there are people who tell me they actually

read that every year at Easter, just to put them in the moment. Now, I haven't read that one. I think I read Killing Lincoln back in the day. But what, how did you from, so obviously these books end with you killing the character at hand, but what was the perspective from which you were writing that? Like, were you writing that from all different characters perspective or? You know, I grew up as a Catholic and one of the things that I didn't realize frustrated me because I was probably like a young historian even at the time, but if you read the Gospels as part of the Mass, there's no context. You have all this like, oh, the Romans did this and the Pharisees did this. No one comes out and says, okay, the Romans, you know.

So what happens in killing Jesus is it gives it context. You realize that the Romans were not nice people, and that the people they put like Herod to be in charge of a city like Jerusalem, also not a nice person. So when you start putting in these human emotions, like actual physical things, these aren't things made up. These are actual events that took place that also you realize that that would have been a terrible place in time to live. You'd really have to be very careful not to stick your neck out. And Jesus was that guy who, you know, stuck his neck

out. In writing something like that, though, does that have a, you know, like you said, you grow up Catholic or whatever, but does that have like an impact on your faith when you finish that? In a weird way that I can't even – so like I said, you know, when you write about a character, they become your best friend. You know everything about them. You know everything about them. And so literally with someone who starts to talk about them, you feel a very proprietary feeling like, hey, you can't talk about that person because that's my guy. And so literally, my wife and I went to church on Easter right after that book came out. And everybody is talking about Jesus and singing about Jesus.

And I was in church getting furious. It's like, you can't talk about Jesus. Jesus is my guy. I wrote about him. I wrote about Jesus. And I was in church getting furious. It's like, you can't talk about Jesus. Jesus is my guy. He's the one. I wrote about him. I wrote about him. It's like, how dare you guys presume you know who Jesus is? He was pretty fucked up. Yeah, I can imagine. Like you said, you get in so deep with them. It's gotta be nuts. But that's, you know, also it takes balls to do stuff like that too because it's like you're not just selling a story that you want to sell a lot of books to. But you're putting something in that's going to be a historical record for people to read hundreds of years from now. It's a part of how we interpret some of the most important alleged events that have ever happened. There's a pressure there on top of the personal nature of that because a lot of people ascribe their meaning of life to a guy like that.

Yeah, and I was – that was the one I was really aware of writing the book because usually when you write a regular history piece, there is already a niche audience that – like Midway, there are Navy people who know everything there is to know about Midway, but it's different when it's a belief system. And that's the only time I've encountered that. And like I said, no going in knowing that people, everybody's going to hate us. It's just, it's one of those things. No one is going to, you know, go, Oh, I got to read that book because it's going to tell me everything I need to know. I'm sure that people thought it was blasphemous that we tried to humanize it. I don't even know. But it's just one of those things where the heavy weight of criticism is there even before you write the first word. Oh, sure. No doubt. Now, another one you wrote was Killing Kennedy. And obviously that's in the news now because they released some documents. Obviously wrote this a while ago, but you know,

I ask everyone this who's covered that case or research that case. Like what, what do you think happened there? You know, I don't know. You know, it's funny cause I was thinking about that today for some reason. I'm not sure why,

but I kind of think, Oh yeah. Because we're in Hoboken. I kind of felt like the mob did it. I kind of think, oh, yeah, because we're in Hoboken. I kind of felt like the mob did it. I just feel like, I don't think it was the CIA. I don't think it was one man acting alone, but I think Oswald played a part. I think he was a patsy, but I think the mob did it.

It was just too perfect. It just seemed like, you know, all the seemed like all the pieces came together seamlessly. Do you think that there could be rogue people, though, within the bureaucracy, not just CIA, but Pentagon, places like that, who obviously weren't disappointed to see it happen and when it did were perfectly fine buttoning that one up to make sure no one looked further? A hundred percent. I just – I feel like that – to tell you the truth, I'm surprised that doesn't happen more because there are so many people with so much power in the means to make something like that happen. It's like the guy who tried to shoot Trump. I still want to know more about that one because – I think we all do. It's like – and who tried to shoot Trump. I still want to know more about that one. I think we all do. And that just went away.

It's like, oh, yeah, he missed and he's dead. It's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, hang on. Somewhere out, Trump's just like, black rock. But no one's listening. It's into an abyss. It is nuts how fast that went away. That went away. I don't know.

My bullshit meter is up on that one. I just, you know, again, as someone who is an historian, I'm not one to subscribe to conspiracy theories or even, you know, pretend to put them out there. But that got my radar up. It just made me think, it doesn't smell right well i think everyone makes every single goddamn thing a conspiracy theory today which then kind of takes away from the power of of ones that actually are real conspiracy there are some that are real and and there's no doubt about that and we've seen some play out in front of us but it's got to be hard being in your seat in today's times where there's such a – what's the word?

Like such a stigma around it because of the people who will throw around fucking everything as a conspiracy theorist. And then it's almost like your job to be like, well, no. And then you can fall in the trap of saying, well, no to everything. And then there's some that actually really did happen and you're like, oh, shit. Well, it's like I've got to be careful when I'm on social media because I want to – if you look at X, for instance, there are people who will try to put something in a historical context. Oh, yeah.

And you go, oh, you're trying to do something sane and I applaud that. But when I'm tempted to do the same thing, it's like I'm going to back away from it because then you're just one more person, one more voice out there. And I'd rather do something like write a book where I'm a singular voice instead of just one person. And you can't be taken out of context as much.

Right. Like when you write a tweet and you've got 280 characters or even now you can write a longer tweet, like it's a tweet. You're not writing a novel in there and there's mistakes you can make or pertinent details that got to be tied to pertinent details that aren't going to happen. And that's the unfortunate nature of how we get information these days. People want it in bite-sized form for everything. And I think it's really important that we have things in full form as well with our shitty attention spans to actually try to understand the full basis of what's going on.

Well, and I think that that's influenced my writing style a little bit. You know, Patterson likes really short chapters, like 1800 words. And I think that's, no, even 1200 words, which I think is too short. But that's the modern attention span. Yeah. And it makes me want to write chapters just a little bit shorter because people get a dopamine hit when they finish a chapter. And that makes them want to read another chapter. And it's why we doom scroll through. I lost like two hours yesterday doom scrolling. It's like-

Oh, even you lose time too? Yeah. Oh, that's not good. Well, I'm on a plane. I got nothing else to do. We're all fucked. If you're getting distracted, we are fucked. And, you know, if you go on X, there's the for you, and then there's the followers. You can do followers, and you can get off. But if you do for you, it locks in on you right away. And you go, I need more.

You need more. It's nuts. Not great. We'll figure it out, though. We'll figure out everything. I'm an optimist on that stuff you know you know what it's like on the way over here i was about to pull my phone out and i was getting on the train and i was about to pull my phone out and start just looking for stuff and i thought i'm gonna sit here and i'm gonna be quiet and i'm not gonna look at my phone

and about two minutes later without even knowing it i was reaching for i was reaching for it's like no do not touch the phone. But it's funny. They got us. It's wired, too. Yeah, I started. Like, I go for at least one walk a day. I try to work it around calls, right?

And then there's going to, we try to finish those fast. Then there's a time where I can just be myself. But I don't, I probably only bring AirPods one out of 10 times now. Most of the time I'm just walking quietly, which means then, you know, my phone's always on do not disturb. So I ain't feeling anything or anything like that. And man, is it a head clearer? I even started, I weaned myself off of listening to music while lifting last year.

And now, so when I work out every day, I lift for an hour and then I do like 25 minutes of cardio and abs. The only time I have music in is when I do out every day, I lift for an hour and then I do like 25 minutes of cardio and abs. The only time I have music in is when I do cardio. And it's amazing. Like I don't have time for this meditation stuff. It sounds awesome. But like I'm a busy guy, right? But the closest I come to the meditation is like when I'm lifting and I'm just really present with myself.

My phone sits on the ground face down. I don't touch it. I mean you can ask Alessi. I don't text him before 8.45 in the morning. Yeah. You know? And it is amazing, like, just how that compounds the clarity in your head over time, just having time away from that thing. That's good.

Yeah. It's tough, though. It's tough. It's really tough. People are calling you. World's out there. You're going to miss something. I'm going to miss a text.

You know, people push it along, too. Like, I texted you. You know, I tried texting you four times. You're going to miss something. I'm going to miss a text. People push it along too. Like I texted you. I tried texting you four times. You didn't respond. I have 87,404 unread emails and 1,415 unread texts. They can go fuck themselves. That's how it is, man.

I don't know what to tell you. I answer enough. But last question for you, Martin. This has been absolutely awesome today. You're really, really impressive and your writing is amazing. But, you know, it is like a weird historical time right now. There's a lot of things going on. You've already highlighted some of them today, like geopolitically, war, politically across different countries and movements that are happening like what do you see historical parallels right now to some other times you've studied in the past i do but they're

they're all kind of different you know for instance um like again it's gonna sound like conspiracy stuff but pay attention to china you know China is doing a lot of stuff, and they're patient. They take the very long view. They're doing exactly what Japan. Don't forget that Japan was brilliant at the end of World War I. They aligned themselves with the Allies, with the U.S. and Britain. So at the end of the war, they got the few German possessions in the Pacific Ocean. And those were places like Palo Alto. What they did was they immediately began fortifying

them. This is 1917, began fortifying them, building underground command posts and hospitals into lava, so stuff that couldn't easily be destroyed. So those were the places, those were the islands we had to capture that were so tough in World War II. Well, China's doing the same thing in the South China Sea right now. And if we turn a blind eye to places like Ukraine, well, you know, Taiwan is very vulnerable. So it's just, it's little things like that. And people need to be paying attention because, you know, who thought Japan would be a threat, you know, back in 1917? Nobody did. You know, they were in the process of building the biggest and best navy in the world, and nobody even really cared about it.

So it's little things like that. And like we said before, it's not one big thing. It's not a 9-11. It's little incidents along the way that you look back later and go, we should have seen. Yeah. A lot of history is like nothing, nothing, nothing. Oh, shit. Yeah, exactly. Nothing, nothing, nothing. Yeah, there was some stuff. There was some stuff happening. So good. Well, Martin, you got your new book coming out. So we're putting out this podcast shortly after that. We will have the link to that down below, Taking Midway. I'm also going to put a link to your website where you have links, I think, to every book

you've ever written so that people can check them out. There's a full bibliography, as you can tell from what we talked about today. Highly recommend Taking London, whatever I did. That is amazing. So thank you so much for doing this. It's been awesome. This has been super, super intense, but a blast. It was really, really fun. Super intense. What is... All right. I hope I didn't torture you. so much for doing this it's been awesome this has been super super intense but a blast it's really

really fun super intense what is all right i hope i didn't torture you my bad no no no and i mean that in a really good way it's just it's uh it's it's nice to be present for a very long time that's it's fun right that's what i'm saying i don't have to worry about these things oh great all right well thank you everyone go check out the books below give Give it a thought. Get back to me. Peace. Thank you guys for watching the episode. Before you leave, please be sure to hit that subscribe button and smash that like button on the video. It's a huge help. And also if you're over on Instagram, be sure to follow the show at Julian Dory podcast or also on my personal page at Julian D. Dory. Both links are in the description below. Finally, if you'd like to catch up on our latest episodes, use the Julian Dory podcast playlist link in the description below. Thank you.