Bannon's War Room - Episode 5328: Founder's Fire From 1776 Tp the Age Of Trump Cont.
Aired: 2026-04-25
Duration: 48:38


=== Patents and the Battleground (14:09) ===

[00:00:03]  This is the primal scream of a dying regime.
[00:00:07]  Pray for our enemies because we're going to medieval on these people.
[00:00:12]  You're not going to free shot all these networks lying about the people.
[00:00:17]  The people have had a belly full of it.
[00:00:19]  I know you don't like hearing that.
[00:00:20]  I know you try to do everything in the world to stop that, but you're not going to stop it.
[00:00:23]  It's going to happen.
[00:00:24]  And where do people like that go to share the big lie?
[00:00:27]  MAGA Media.
[00:00:29]  I wish in my soul, I wish that any of these people had a conscience.
[00:00:34]  Ask yourself, what is my task and what is my purpose.
[00:00:38]  If that answer is to save my country, this country will be saved.
[00:00:44]  War Room.
[00:00:45]  Here's your host, Stephen K. Bann.
[00:00:52]  Okay, welcome.
[00:00:53]  You're in the War Room in the run up to the celebration, the commemoration of the 250th founding of the nation with the Declaration of Independence.
[00:01:03]  A book is out that takes the optimistic, I think, a realistic assessment of the nation, both.
[00:01:10]  These individuals called founders have been so important to our nation, not the founding generation, some of that, but really founders of institutions, movements, and companies, and entice it directly to the evolution of American history.
[00:01:24]  Arthur Herman, thank you so much.
[00:01:26]  Glad to be here, Steve.
[00:01:28]  The book, you lay out some gifts.
[00:01:30]  You talked about the other day in the previous hour about the president itself, that office.
[00:01:36]  There's some others that you call the gifts.
[00:01:39]  They're gifts.
[00:01:40]  They're gifts from the founding fathers for the Both from the Declaration of Independence, but also from the Constitution, that allowed this extraordinary moment, the founding of the country, to be not just a one off, but something that is continuous and becomes a legacy that they leave for us.
[00:02:00]  And it allows founders like themselves, people with the vision, the drive, the willingness to take risks, and even risk it all in order to achieve great visions, to achieve great things.
[00:02:14]  And one of those.
[00:02:16]  One of those gifts is the role of the president.
[00:02:18]  The president as chief executive, as commander in chief, as the chief law enforcement officer.
[00:02:25]  We were talking about that last time.
[00:02:27]  But also as someone who can, when he feels it is necessary, even take a stand against the legislative majority to say, this is important we do this, and we're going to move the country and move our nation in this direction.
[00:02:42]  And American history is dotted with examples of presidents who, You took that power and used it effectively to move the nation forward.
[00:02:51]  The second gift I'll mention. Is one I don't think a lot of people think about as part of one of those gifts, and that is the creation of the U.S. Patent Office.
[00:03:00]  This was something that was fundamental to the way in which the Founding Fathers thought about what the future of the nation is.
[00:03:07]  It's in the Constitution.
[00:03:08]  It is Article I, Section 8.
[00:03:10]  Why did guys from the Enlightenment that are driven by the Enlightenment decide to put the Patent Office in the Constitution?
[00:03:16]  It's precisely because they were enlightened, gentlemen.
[00:03:19]  It's because they understood the degree to which human creativity needed to be something that would be protected.
[00:03:27]  And protected as a right of property.
[00:03:31]  You know, it's interesting that you have, on the one hand, in the Declaration of Independence, no mention of property there, but you do in Section 1 of Article 1, Section 8, when it comes to the patent.
[00:03:46]  It's a right.
[00:03:47]  In fact, it's the only place in the Constitution outside of the Bill of Rights that actually uses the word right the right of inventors, of creators to own what it is that they have created as an idea, as a technology.
[00:04:01]  As an invention.
[00:04:03]  And it is that right, the right of intellectual property, to take what I have done and created and to use it as I see fit, not as the government sees fit, not as a big corporation sees fit.
[00:04:17]  It is that which unleashes what Abraham Lincoln called the fire of genius, of being able to think of great ideas, great innovations, and to apply them into the world in terms confident.
[00:04:33]  That what you have done, you will retain ownership of.
[00:04:36]  What is so extraordinary about that is given the context of the time, it's not really big corporations, these other things are.
[00:04:43]  It is monarchies.
[00:04:45]  Everything was the king had, just because you're born in some geographical region, you don't even have land, you're not an indentured servant, but every idea you have is theirs, not just the elite, goes all the way up to a monarch.
[00:05:00]  How did they come up to a monarch?
[00:05:01]  Did they see that as a central part?
[00:05:03]  Of the revolution, or the central part of really making this experiment totally different than everything that had come before it?
[00:05:11]  They had to.
[00:05:12]  And I think it was partly because they understood that what the revolution had set in motion was more than just a political revolution, it was an intellectual revolution.
[00:05:22]  And that always, and this is part of that enlightened outlook, is an understanding that there is no division between the realm of the theoretical and the mechanical and practical.
[00:05:34]  All the great enlightened thinkers thought about.
[00:05:37]  The application of ideas in the world to make new devices, to create new inventions, to make advances in agriculture, in mechanical arts, in metallurgy.
[00:05:49]  This was part and parcel of what the Enlightenment outlook was involved.
[00:05:53]  I mean, look at the founders themselves Benjamin Franklin, a key inventor and key businessman at the same time.
[00:06:01]  Thomas Jefferson, right?
[00:06:03]  We all know about his role as an inventor.
[00:06:05]  This is not some little eccentricity.
[00:06:08]  On their part, it's central to their person, but it's also in the framing and founding of the country.
[00:06:18]  It's central to that.
[00:06:19]  That's right.
[00:06:19]  And also, how applied science is part of the advance of civilization.
[00:06:27]  And if you had a new nation, which was going to be liberated in all other kinds of ways, that to free up the life of the mind to achieve the things that it's possible to achieve.
[00:06:37]  Free up the life of the mind, but also set a framework that the manifestation of that.
[00:06:43]  Can be monetized for the benefit of the creator, or the creator would have control.
[00:06:48]  You couldn't steal it from him.
[00:06:50]  He could manifest, or he or she could manifest it, and you build wealth that way.
[00:06:54]  That's putting it really well.
[00:06:56]  That's an excellent way to look at it because with that right of ownership comes a decision when you're going to use it.
[00:07:03]  For example, you may decide hey, the market is waiting for my widget.
[00:07:09]  This is the right time to unleash it on the public.
[00:07:13]  And to create a market, make some money for myself, but also change the world as a result of it.
[00:07:17]  And this is why patents, the holding of patents, is so fundamental to the way in which founders are able to create businesses and institutions and so on.
[00:07:28]  You know, the last chapter of the book, I talk about the TV show Shark Tank, which I think is a great example of how that founder mindset is built into the culture.
[00:07:39]  Hugely popular program.
[00:07:41]  Hugely popular.
[00:07:42]  90% of these things are tiny little startups.
[00:07:46]  And they got the founders fired.
[00:07:49]  And so many want to do that.
[00:07:50]  That's right.
[00:07:51]  That's right.
[00:07:51]  And so many of them, every time they go up in front of the sharks, right, what's the question all the sharks always ask them?
[00:07:59]  It is, how many patents do you have?
[00:08:02]  Right.
[00:08:02]  And they'll say, well, I'm applying for a patent for this, or I already have patents for this, et cetera.
[00:08:07]  You look at the whole history of business founders in the country, and they all have fistful of patents because that's what's the anchor.
[00:08:16]  In terms of ownership of the business or even the industry and technology that they're creating.
[00:08:21]  But Founders Fire, you get all these stories.
[00:08:23]  It's amazing.
[00:08:24]  It's tied directly, it's intertwinedly linked into American history.
[00:08:27]  That's where I have to get the book.
[00:08:28]  I want to go back then.
[00:08:29]  You talk about patents and one of the controversies that's come up the last couple of years.
[00:08:32]  Edison is in the book.
[00:08:34]  Yep.
[00:08:35]  But compare Edison to Tesla because there's always been this concept that Edison stole these ideas or his Menlo Park crowd waited for Tesla to create them.
[00:08:44]  And Tesla just wasn't enough a businessman or didn't know the language well enough.
[00:08:49]  To be able to monetize it.
[00:08:50]  So Edison gets the credit where really Tesla was the genius in back of so much that hasn't even been manifested today.
[00:08:59]  Well, you know, in that particular case, what you see is, and I talk about this in the book, that at the same time that you're creating this sort of marketplace for ideas through intellectual property and patents, you're also creating, of course, a battleground at the same time of who can get the patent first and who's successful in doing so.
[00:09:21]  And whether you're talking about it's pretty cutthroat.
[00:09:22]  Oftentimes, there's a lot at stake.
[00:09:25]  There's a lot at stake.
[00:09:27]  In the case of Edison, with regard to Tesla, with regard to Alexander Graham Bell, for example, and his competitors in the creation of the telephone, that in many cases it's a question of who gets to the post first, it makes the application, who wins it.
[00:09:42]  But that's where the courts come in, because courts will come in and sort out these kinds of differences and recognize these patents are virtually identical.
[00:09:51]  And the very fact that this one, Had managed to, by a curled lip, secure the right of the patent first, does not necessarily freeze out the other from their rights to their technology.
[00:10:04]  I have the patent office.
[00:10:05]  And then the third one.
[00:10:07]  The third one is the creation of the Springfield Armory.
[00:10:11]  The Springfield armory.
[00:10:12]  These are three pretty disparate.
[00:10:14]  They are in some ways, but they're fundamental.
[00:10:17]  The Springfield armory is in the.
[00:10:18]  This is the first Silicon Valley.
[00:10:21]  It's what it becomes.
[00:10:22]  Right.
[00:10:22]  And the man who really made that possible was Thomas Jefferson.
[00:10:25]  Jefferson had gone to France and had seen an inventor there who was making muskets out of interchangeable parts.
[00:10:34]  Unheard of.
[00:10:35]  Usually a gunsmith would shape his parts the stock, the trigger, the lock.
[00:10:42]  All of those and so on to be crafted to each weapon.
[00:10:46]  This guy was using interchangeable parts.
[00:10:48]  In fact, Jefferson himself said, I got to try that and put together.
[00:10:52]  So he writes to the Secretary of War, Henry Knox, and says, We got to start doing this.
[00:10:57]  We need a place where we can begin to create and give contracts to people to start doing interchangeable parts.
[00:11:05]  Springfield Army is first.
[00:11:07]  The second one is the armory at Harper's Ferry, not very far from here, as a matter of fact, in 1798.
[00:11:13]  It comes up in American history several times.
[00:11:15]  Yes, indeed.
[00:11:16]  Yes, indeed.
[00:11:17]  Beckoning an interesting book, wouldn't it?
[00:11:19]  Harper's Ferry is sort of the hub of American history in so many respects.
[00:11:24]  Big time.
[00:11:26]  But what happens is.
[00:11:27]  And Jesse Knox, by the way, was Washington's artillery officer.
[00:11:30]  Artillery officer, part of that original team with the landing.
[00:11:33]  The Banner Brothers are on Washington.
[00:11:34]  That's right, who participated in the raid on Trenton.
[00:11:39]  What happens is these arsenals become much more than simply storehouses for weapons, they become laboratories.
[00:11:47]  Where a number of inventors and technologists.
[00:11:51]  That's Bell Labs, essentially.
[00:11:52]  In effect, yeah.
[00:11:54]  They're paid by the government, but the people working there are private contractors, the ones who are making changes in how this works.
[00:12:03]  One of them was Eli Whitney, for example, inventor of the cotton gin, but he's also somebody who got a contract to work building muskets with the same revolutionary technique, which is interchangeable parts.
[00:12:15]  Well, by the middle of the 19th century, what's happening at the Springfield Armory?
[00:12:19]  Has become so distinct, and European observers go and they're amazed at what's happened, being able to make these weapons so much faster than gunsmiths and makers in Europe, that it becomes known as the American system.
[00:12:34]  And the American system is really the grandfather of mass production.
[00:12:41]  The techniques of mass production that build America's industry into the greatest in the world, and then in my book, Freedom's Forge, is the secret to strategic advantage over Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan during World War II, all trace their roots back to that Thomas Jefferson letter to Henry Knox saying, We need a place.
[00:13:07]  Where inventors can go and experiment with new revolutionary techniques for making weapons, because what will happen then is we'll create a revolution in manufacturing and we'll gain not just strategic advantage with our enemies when it comes time for war, but also an economic advantage by the energies and, again, the founders' fire, which can be released to defend this country.
[00:13:34]  And that's why, look at the history of the American defense industry.
[00:13:40]  Unlike European countries, you don't see it dominated by a single great mega corporation like Vickers in England, like Cruiseau in France, like Krupp in Germany.
[00:13:53]  The World War II miracle was made possible by assembling a number of private companies, all of them working on specific projects, but which came together and could be coordinated together in a way which builds, as we were saying last time, the greatest military industrial complex.

=== Happiness in the Declaration (12:15) ===

[00:14:12]  Ever.
[00:14:12]  Let's take a short break.
[00:14:13]  I want to thank the team at Birchgold, obviously.
[00:14:17]  Now it's in the headlines every day, particularly when we talk about it.
[00:14:21]  Turns out it's not a bailout of UAE or the Saudis or Qatar.
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[00:14:27]  A credit swap so they can support the U.S. dollar.
[00:14:32]  Birchgold.com, promo code Bannon, end of the dollar empire.
[00:14:36]  Most importantly, get to talk to Philip Patrick and the team.
[00:14:38]  They're our Saturday sponsor and have been for many, many years.
[00:14:41]  Short commercial break.
[00:14:42]  Author Herman on the other side.
[00:14:45]  It's surely too hard to say.
[00:15:00]  War Room.
[00:15:01]  Here's your host, Stephen K. Bath.
[00:15:06]  Welcome back.
[00:15:06]  There's a fourth gift.
[00:15:07]  And what would that be?
[00:15:08]  The fourth gift, I think, is in some ways the most extraordinary of all.
[00:15:11]  And it's embedded in, of all places, the Declaration of Independence.
[00:15:15]  And that is the right of pursuit of happiness.
[00:15:21]  What other document offers this as part of the rights endowed by the creator of the world?
[00:15:27]  That's his document in the time of history because it's nasty, brutish, and short.
[00:15:32]  If you're not part of the aristocracy, You would think so.
[00:15:35]  That's true.
[00:15:36]  In Europe, your life is okay, but the monarchy and the aristocracy, like in pre revolutionary France, are not interested in the people in Paris pursuing the pursuit of happiness.
[00:15:51]  You would agree to that?
[00:15:51]  So, just in the whole context of the world history.
[00:15:53]  It was, but you know, and I've written about this elsewhere, it was an idea that was very much part of the Scottish Enlightenment.
[00:16:00]  And if you go to my How the Scots Invented the Modern World, the thinkers there like you wouldn't think the dour Scots would be interested.
[00:16:07]  In inventing golf, you would be interested in the pursuit of happiness, a game that breaks you down every time you go.
[00:16:14]  That's really true.
[00:16:15]  But of course, for every Scot, the greatest happiness of all was getting out of Scotland and living anywhere else.
[00:16:23]  So the pursuit of happiness was missing.
[00:16:25]  Happiness was missing.
[00:16:25]  A ticket to London, a ticket across the Atlantic, a ticket to anywhere else to go.
[00:16:31]  But seriously, the idea of it was that part of what it is that is to be human and part of the civilizing process.
[00:16:40]  It is to arrive at a state of moral well being that we, through our interaction with others, through our interaction with our things, through property, we come to have an understanding and a sense of emotional and moral satisfaction.
[00:16:55]  That's one reason why Adam Smith's first book is The Theory of Moral Sentiments.
[00:17:01]  It's about the ethical foundations of civilization and what it is to be someone who can share with others our sense of well being, our sense of happiness.
[00:17:11]  It just carries over to Carries over to the founding fathers, particularly Jefferson.
[00:17:16]  And it's why, to everybody's surprise, this gets embedded in the Declaration of Independence.
[00:17:22]  Steve, what should it have said?
[00:17:23]  What it should have said, and there were many who argued this, that it should have said, included are these the rights of life, liberty, and property, right?
[00:17:33]  Property should have been it.
[00:17:34]  It was very much part of the 18th century point of view with regard to the inviolable nature of private property.
[00:17:41]  By the way, it's one of the reasons why the issue of slavery had come up.
[00:17:45]  It's property.
[00:17:46]  You can't threaten that right.
[00:17:48]  It's inviolable.
[00:17:49]  But property does come in in the Constitution with the Patent Office, but not in the Declaration.
[00:17:57]  And what's striking about that notion of happiness is how subjective it is.
[00:18:03]  Property is not.
[00:18:04]  Property is I own this.
[00:18:06]  Here's my title deed, right?
[00:18:09]  Property is defined by law.
[00:18:12]  Happiness is not.
[00:18:14]  It really depends on an inner state, it depends on our own sense of.
[00:18:17]  I'm happy.
[00:18:19]  I've achieved a level, a way of life that works for me and that gives me that sense of satisfaction.
[00:18:26]  What that does, I think, I believe, in the case of America, is that it means that for people who live here, who are part of American society, that how you choose to live is your business.
[00:18:41]  And to pursue your own, to follow your own bliss, to follow your own path, including as a founder, as a creator of a startup, to appear on Shark Tank, that's your right.
[00:18:56]  That's part of why you're here in America to enjoy that.
[00:18:59]  In no other society in Europe or in Asia are people given that sense of having that kind of right.
[00:19:07]  No.
[00:19:08]  If anything, your business is to stay where you are in your.
[00:19:12]  In your class and society, it's stamped on you by your education, it's stamped on you by your accent, it's stamped on you by your ancestry.
[00:19:21]  Only in the United States are you able to throw off everything that has connected you to your past and to become an entirely new person because that's what's going to make you happy.
[00:19:34]  Extraordinary.
[00:19:35]  How, what was the reaction when the declaration came out in your mind?
[00:19:38]  What was the reaction to it?
[00:19:40]  Because I had this, this, um.
[00:19:44]  Philosophical and yet practical way it talked to people before you get into the list of kind of the war document.
[00:19:53]  What was the reaction to it?
[00:19:55]  I think when you get the reaction from people from John Adams and so on, it's a pleasant surprise.
[00:20:00]  This is a great idea.
[00:20:01]  We really need to put this in here.
[00:20:03]  It's hugely important in terms of the Enlightenment view of what this new nation should be and become.
[00:20:09]  I also think, although you don't get this in the debates themselves and the correspondence between Adams and Jefferson, is That precisely, by leaving the word property out of the document, it also meant that the issue about slavery is one that could be kicked down the country.
[00:20:29]  It could be kicked down the South Carolina and the South Carolina.
[00:20:31]  It would not be possible for them to say that because the right of property is the reason that we've created a new nation, therefore you can't violate that right.
[00:20:40]  One of the things that, look, the power of this book and his other writings, the power of this book, particularly tied to the commemoration of our 250th, is you get to spend some time.
[00:20:50]  With a brilliant man.
[00:20:51]  I mean, when you read the book, you really get into it and you understand that.
[00:20:55]  One of the things that you've been most extraordinary about, and you go back and look at all these, the various topics that you've taken on in the other books, you are, if nothing else, you have a genius for pattern recognition, right?
[00:21:12]  You can see things out there that I think others can't.
[00:21:16]  Like this, you come up with books like How the Scots Invented the Modern World, the whole thing of the Forge of Box.
[00:21:22]  In 1776, We have, I think, within a 90 day period, the publication of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, Gibbon's first volume of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and the Declaration of Independence.
[00:21:41]  That's like a role that the world's never been on since then.
[00:21:45]  What was it among not just educated people, but people that could read and understand these ideas that led within basically a 90 to 100 day period?
[00:21:57]  The publication of three things that have really has as much of the foundation of the modern world.
[00:22:03]  You talk about the idea of decline or how we think of history came from Gibbons, how we think of economics, so much of it in human nature and how it's tied to it comes from Smith, and everything you just said about the Declaration.
[00:22:15]  And it's not just a war document, it's not just a we're becoming independent from a monarchy.
[00:22:20]  It talks about the core of what it means to be human.
[00:22:25]  How did that all come about?
[00:22:27]  It's a really fascinating question.
[00:22:29]  In a 90 day period, it's a really interesting question to ask.
[00:22:33]  And the mallabout.
[00:22:34]  And I think that all, I'll answer the question this way.
[00:22:40]  All three works Gibbon's Decline and Fall, The Wealth of Nations, and The Declaration of Independence are all in their way reflections on history.
[00:22:52]  In Gibbon's case, it's more obvious.
[00:22:55]  Namely, he's looking at the history of not just the Roman Empire, because if you get through all six volumes, It's not just about the history of the Roman Empire.
[00:23:05]  No, it's about the United States and the interactions with the Muslims.
[00:23:08]  All the way up through the siege of Constantinople in 14 years.
[00:23:11]  Yes.
[00:23:11]  In fact, you can find out so much today about our conflict in Iran by reading those last couple of volumes.
[00:23:17]  Don't you think so?
[00:23:18]  Absolutely.
[00:23:19]  I think you really can.
[00:23:19]  Because people think it just goes like 435 of the barbarians in the West.
[00:23:24]  It goes for another thousand years.
[00:23:25]  Another thousand years.
[00:23:26]  It goes forward.
[00:23:27]  Because what he's also talking about is the great transition from the world of paganism, of classical culture, to the world of Christianity.
[00:23:38]  Of which Gibbon was not a great fan.
[00:23:40]  He's not a fan of it.
[00:23:41]  He's not a great fan of it.
[00:23:42]  He actually blames.
[00:23:44]  He hearkens back.
[00:23:45]  Well, the thing, and it gets me back to you in particular, your book on decline, is that Gibbon comes up with the idea when he's sitting on that church that's right near the Forum today.
[00:23:58]  He's on the steps when the monks come through and they're singing Vespers.
[00:24:01]  And he looks around.
[00:24:02]  He's there in the mid 18th century on a grand tour.
[00:24:08]  And he looks around at all the.
[00:24:10]  In Rome, like the Ark of Titus, everything.
[00:24:13]  He says, This was the greatest empire in the history of man.
[00:24:17]  These people achieved so much.
[00:24:18]  And I'm sitting here and it's a dump.
[00:24:20]  I mean, it's magnificent, but I'm looking around.
[00:24:23]  I got a handful of monks.
[00:24:24]  The place is in ashes.
[00:24:26]  What happened?
[00:24:27]  What happened to these people?
[00:24:29]  Who were they?
[00:24:30]  They were giants on the earth.
[00:24:32]  And but more importantly, their institutions were giants.
[00:24:35]  I mean, you've got a great part in here about the Roman Empire and about Justinian, et cetera.
[00:24:41]  But Gibbons, It hit him in the solar plexus that he spent the rest of his life investigating what had happened.
[00:24:49]  This magnificent edifice, and here I've got a handful of monks and people that are dirt poor.
[00:24:56]  And you're right.
[00:24:57]  And what he was also seeing was that moment of confrontation.
[00:25:03]  How did this great edifice of empire and glory, the most powerful military and economic force in the world, how did these.
[00:25:16]  Little monks.
[00:25:19]  How did they bring this down?
[00:25:21]  How did they bring this crashing to the ground?
[00:25:22]  Oh, you mean the whole thing of the Christian part?
[00:25:24]  The advance of Christianity, the triumph of Christianity.
[00:25:26]  The triumph of Christianity.
[00:25:27]  But also lurking in Gibbon.
[00:25:29]  Because he loved antiquity in the pagan religion.
[00:25:33]  But he also loved modernity.
[00:25:35]  And the subtext of Gibbon's history is that what happened to the Roman Empire happened because.
[00:25:48]  It lacked a world built, an economy built around trade and commerce.
[00:25:55]  It was a slow moving agricultural empire based on slavery.
[00:26:00]  Based on slavery.
[00:26:02]  Whatever, all the magnificent works in literature and philosophy and art, all of it rested ultimately on a very primitive and exploitative system of economics.
[00:26:14]  He learned this from his Scottish friends like Adam Smith.
[00:26:19]  Hang on, we're taking a short commercial break.
[00:26:21]  The power of Founder's Father is one, you have a totally new perspective on the history of our nation.
[00:26:27]  It's tied together.

=== Curiosity Keeps Us Young (02:40) ===

[00:26:28]  But you will get to spend many hours with one of the most brilliant minds we have in this country, Arthur Herman.
[00:26:34]  Short break, back to the mic.
[00:26:37]  No time to be blind.
[00:26:39]  Open your mind to sing.
[00:27:01]  Here's your host, Stephen K. Bann.
[00:27:06]  The power of your books, The Founders Fire is another one, from 1776 to the age of Trump, is that as you read your books, I underline a lot, but I'm also jotting notes down.
[00:27:17]  I noticed, I noticed.
[00:27:18]  I'm jotting notes in my notebook of other areas of inquiry I want to pursue or other books of yours that I want to read.
[00:27:26]  That's because you, if nothing else, folks, you're going to have many hours of good company.
[00:27:31]  Good intellectual company.
[00:27:33]  So that's, I think, the power of your writing.
[00:27:35]  My wife will tell you part of this is also, I am a relentlessly curious person.
[00:27:42]  I always have to find out what's going on.
[00:27:44]  I'm like, I'm one of the worst people to visit hospitals because every time I see a closed door, I have to push it open and see what's going on on the other side.
[00:27:52]  Hotels, the same way.
[00:27:54]  And my wife is like, don't go.
[00:27:56]  The door is closed, honey, but I think it's locked.
[00:27:58]  Don't try to do it.
[00:28:00]  I am relentlessly curious.
[00:28:01]  So every book that I've done, Inevitably leads to the next one or the next two, as a matter of fact, because I learned something about, let's say, the British Navy.
[00:28:12]  Our audience, and particularly the older part of the audience, is the same.
[00:28:16]  I notice that in people as they get older, the way you stay young and stay connected with people is it's curiosity.
[00:28:24]  How can people that maybe don't have that instill that?
[00:28:29]  I don't know.
[00:28:31]  Maybe it's something that's innate, maybe it's something that you Pick up from habits going back to when you were a kid and it just carries you forward.
[00:28:40]  But you know, over the last decade, I've spent a lot of time, for example, working on quantum technologies and artificial intelligence.
[00:28:49]  To understand that, to put it into the book.
[00:28:52]  Well, no, not to put it into the book, just because I'm curious.
[00:28:54]  I want to know what's going on, what's happening, what's the next big thing.
[00:28:57]  And in fact, you may be interested to credit this, but I, in fact, even organized in 2018, 2019, organized a consortium of labs.

=== Quantum Tech Meets History (10:24) ===

[00:29:09]  And companies to create global standards for quantum key distribution networks and for quantum random number generators.
[00:29:19]  And we took them, you know what we did?
[00:29:21]  We took them to the International Telecommunications Union in Geneva and presented them there to the security section, Section 17.
[00:29:31]  We got passed.
[00:29:33]  Even the Russians and the Chinese said, you know what, these are good standards, we should use them, et cetera.
[00:29:38]  That's the kind of trouble I can get myself into when I get on a jag like that.
[00:29:42]  All of my books come out of trying to answer a question I can't find another book that'll answer.
[00:29:49]  And when that happens, I said, someone's got to write a book out about this.
[00:29:52]  And it usually ends up being me.
[00:29:54]  Before I get to the Scottish comments, Gibbons, Smith, and the Declaration of Independence tie it together.
[00:30:01]  In the background of Gibbons' decline and fall is Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations.
[00:30:06]  And understanding that through trade and commerce, that through the free exchange of goods between free individuals, a new kind of society.
[00:30:17]  Was taking place that was not going to revert to barbarism as the Roman Empire had done when the great imperial edifice came crashing down, when the armies dispersed and would no longer fight to save that empire.
[00:30:33]  It descended into the Dark Ages.
[00:30:35]  In Gibbon's mind, there is no Dark Age coming because we live in a different world.
[00:30:40]  We live in a world of trade and commerce.
[00:30:43]  And the book and the view that he was reflected in that is the one that is encapsulated by Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations.
[00:30:51]  It's the realm of trade and commerce has created a new level.
[00:30:57]  Somewhat in the Declaration of Independence.
[00:30:59]  And is also about history, which is we're at a culminating moment in history in which the rights given to us by our Creator can now be fully realized.
[00:31:13]  In a new nation, in an independence from an empire, we can achieve what it is that would seem otherwise beyond capabilities of ordinary nations and ordinary people.
[00:31:27]  How was it?
[00:31:29]  That the Americans at that time were able to think that through, the founders were able to think that through and set up some sort of framework where the intellectually more evolved French and their revolution couldn't.
[00:31:48]  They actually, in fact, it ended in.
[00:31:50]  It ended badly.
[00:31:51]  It ended into it, not just the bloodshed and everything they tried to do in tearing down the institutions, which some of those institutions needed reforming dramatically.
[00:32:00]  Maybe even destruction.
[00:32:01]  But it ended in a military dictatorship that then had led the bloodiest wars that Europe's had since until World War II.
[00:32:08]  And also led to a view about the role of government and the role of individuals as being subordinate to the needs of the community.
[00:32:17]  Well, it's still, it's still, it's still, it lays the groundwork for communism.
[00:32:20]  Communism.
[00:32:21]  Marxism and communism springs out of the French Revolution model.
[00:32:24]  The famous story with Nixon there with Mao, and there's this thing of the conversation is not going in Choen Lai and Nixon and Kissinger are talking.
[00:32:32]  Kissinger made conversation, goes, Well, you come from a revolution.
[00:32:35]  What's your thoughts about the French Revolution?
[00:32:37]  He goes, too early to tell.
[00:32:39]  Too early to tell.
[00:32:42]  But for the, I think what, and this gets to the core of your question, that those American founding fathers, when you look through their writings, you look at the debates in the Continental Congress, and then later in the U.S. debate on the Constitution, there is always an awareness of their place in history.
[00:33:03]  And in order to have that sense of one's place in history, You need to know history.
[00:33:09]  You need to have an understanding of how the past worked and a framework by which to understand its relationship with who you are and what you're doing.
[00:33:21]  And that's true for the founding fathers.
[00:33:23]  And actually, Steve, that's one of the reasons why I wrote the book, because I wanted to give people a way to understand not just a new look about American business and the history of American business, but also a new way to think about American history and how their experience relates to it by giving a totally different framework.
[00:33:42]  Based on this constant struggle between the founders on the one hand with the drive and the vision and the willingness to take risks, and those for whom that vision is going a little too far.
[00:33:55]  You know, stay in your lane, stick to your knitting, look before you leap.
[00:34:01]  That mindset, which is also part of the American experience, part of the human experience, is constantly butting up against the one that wants to thrust forward, that wants to go off in a brand new direction.
[00:34:15]  It was true, wasn't it, during the Continental Congress?
[00:34:20]  Yes.
[00:34:20]  The people who said, whoa, wait a second, independence.
[00:34:23]  Too much.
[00:34:25]  Yeah, we never talked about too much.
[00:34:26]  To use that phrase, it's a bridge too far.
[00:34:29]  We don't want to go there.
[00:34:30]  It's a big mistake, et cetera.
[00:34:33]  Are your books so popular because we don't teach history correctly when people are getting the more formal education?
[00:34:44]  Like your book, How the Scots Invented the Modern World.
[00:34:47]  New York Times bestseller.
[00:34:48]  Not just that, it's a blockbuster book.
[00:34:50]  I remember when it came out, everybody was reading that book.
[00:34:55]  But you would think.
[00:34:57]  Including Bill Clinton.
[00:34:59]  Everybody read it.
[00:35:00]  It was a.
[00:35:01]  Gave it a blurb, as a matter of fact.
[00:35:03]  That book published in when?
[00:35:05]  That published in 2001.
[00:35:07]  2001.
[00:35:07]  It came out almost at the same time, almost a week after the attack on 9 11.
[00:35:14]  And I thought that was going to kill the book.
[00:35:16]  I thought, that's it.
[00:35:17]  This book is done because everything's going to be focused on Islamic terrorism, on the threat to America, et cetera, et cetera.
[00:35:25]  I actually think what people wanted in that moment was an awareness of why are we being attacked?
[00:35:33]  What are the values, the values that we in America and the West embody that, first of all, draws the hostility of barbarians like this, but also at the same time, that we want to hang on to and that we prize and value?
[00:35:49]  And the Scott's book, I think, in that sense, the timing turned out to be fortuitously right.
[00:35:55]  How did you come up with the idea?
[00:35:58]  There have been so many people that have looked at history.
[00:36:01]  I'm always fascinated with how writers come up with an idea and then manifest it that it's like a breath of fresh air.
[00:36:08]  And this book was so talked about when it first came out because you took something that people just kind of glossed over, you were able to see pattern recognition and then bring it out in vivid detail.
[00:36:19]  But how did you get the original idea?
[00:36:21]  Well, it really came out of the idea to climb because, in many ways, with that book, How the Scots Is. Book is about that group of Scottish thinkers in the 18th century who laid the foundations for the theory of progress.
[00:36:35]  And Scotland was, it had its back against the wall.
[00:36:38]  It wasn't like it was a paradise.
[00:36:39]  It was not the, by no means.
[00:36:41]  This is what's so shocking about the book.
[00:36:43]  When you lay it out at the beginning, it's like anywhere on earth should have come up with this except Scotland.
[00:36:48]  It was a pretty dismal, dismal situation at the beginning of the 18th century.
[00:36:54]  And then it experienced this enormous, gets this enormous gift through the act of union and that it links up with the trade networks that.
[00:37:02]  That England had built across the Atlantic and into Asia and into Europe.
[00:37:08]  And so Scottish merchants find themselves now suddenly being able to do business around the world, in Europe, in America, and so on.
[00:37:18]  And this sets in motion thinking by that core group, that coterie of enlightened thinkers who occupied the central chapters of how the Scots invented the modern world to think about how, again, commerce and trade changes society for the better.
[00:37:37]  And means not only more prosperity, but also more freedom to individuals to think and act in the world as they see fit instead of their superiors, social superiors, religious superiors, whatever.
[00:37:53]  And that sets in motion then the ideas about capitalism, the way in which capitalism is a liberating force in the world, sets in motion ideas about how commerce.
[00:38:08]  Creates bonds between bonds of trust and rests on those bonds of trust, bringing people together, not driving them apart in any kind of way, and how the profit motive.
[00:38:20]  Our pursuit of it in our own self interest, ironically and paradoxically, helps to bring benefits to others by the products and the goods that we provide for them.
[00:38:31]  So the book originally started, Steve, as a book about Adam Smith and his friends.
[00:38:37]  And then as I was putting it together, my agent at the time said to me, You really ought to bring this up to the present.
[00:38:45]  So I expanded it out into the 19th century, which meant bringing in the Scottish diaspora.
[00:38:51]  The spread of Scottish immigrants all across Europe and the world to Africa, to India, and of course also to North America.
[00:39:01]  And that's what really drew me into the nexus between the ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment, Adam Smith, David Hume, and others, and what the founding fathers were up to and what they were thinking about the role of liberty, the nature of liberty, and how you would create a country.
[00:39:22]  Create a nation in which individual liberty could be realized to its fullest extent more than any other place in the world at any other time in history.

=== Researching Freedom's Forge (08:37) ===

[00:39:34]  We have about a minute here we're going to hold you through for the last break.
[00:39:37]  Because of the advances in surveillance technology and the scale of technology today, have we lost the power of the idea of individual liberty?
[00:39:48]  I think we face a lot of challenges.
[00:39:49]  They did then too, after all.
[00:39:52]  At that time, the challenge was.
[00:39:54]  The very existence of large traditional social structures and religious structures.
[00:40:00]  We think about it in 18th century Europe, in every country, you have state religion, which dictates how you worship, dictates what schools you get into.
[00:40:12]  In England, getting to university required religious loyalty to the Church of England here.
[00:40:20]  And so the very notion of separation of church and state, embedded in the Bill of Rights, was itself.
[00:40:28]  A revolutionary break from where the rest of the world was and what was taking place there.
[00:40:34]  There are always challenges.
[00:40:35]  The technological challenges we face today seem to be on a different scale, and yet it's many of those same technologies which can also be the most liberating ones we face.
[00:40:45]  Let's take a short commercial break when we wrap up.
[00:40:48]  Arthur Herman, Founders Fire.
[00:40:51]  Get it and get it for a young person in your life today.
[00:40:55]  We rejoice with it all.
[00:40:57]  Let's take down the CCP.
[00:41:00]  War Room.
[00:41:01]  Here's your host, Stephen K. Bann.
[00:41:05]  Okay, I want to thank our sponsors of Birch Gold.
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[00:41:31]  I don't know, two, 3,000 years of mankind's turbulent financial history.
[00:41:39]  This has been extraordinary to give this kind of time for us.
[00:41:41]  Author Herman is his 11th book, and it's going to be a blockbuster, Founders Fire, that ties together not just the entrepreneurial spirit, but the founder spirit, very different.
[00:41:53]  The founder spirit and vision and what it takes ties it directly to American history.
[00:41:58]  Couldn't be a better way to kick off to kind of have another understanding of the United States and optimistic.
[00:42:04]  This book is very optimistic.
[00:42:06]  It is.
[00:42:06]  And it is one that I think has infuriated certain reviewers.
[00:42:12]  Who say we can't fault him on his facts or on his academic framework?
[00:42:17]  How could any reviewer?
[00:42:18]  But surely there must be, surely there has to be some doom waiting out for us out there in some kind of way, particularly in the age of Trump, that I haven't really addressed in the course of this discussion.
[00:42:31]  We've got to make sure they're perfect.
[00:42:32]  It is a book, it is an optimistic book.
[00:42:34]  I mean, I think that's true for all my books, actually.
[00:42:38]  Starting with the idea of decline, because the idea of decline was it's wrong.
[00:42:41]  Yes.
[00:42:42]  We're not in decline.
[00:42:43]  Yes.
[00:42:43]  No matter how many times, Self appointed prophets try to tell us that is so.
[00:42:48]  And they do it for self interested reasons.
[00:42:51]  One of the first, one of those chapters, as you remember, is on Al Gore and the ecological movement, which I think my predictions about how intellectually bankrupt it was.
[00:43:02]  I think you came out on the better side of that argument.
[00:43:04]  Way better, I think.
[00:43:05]  What I want to go back to that blank page when we first sat down because people are so fascinated like, could they be a writer?
[00:43:11]  Could they do this?
[00:43:13]  When you're sitting down that time to do that first book proposal and you just had the typewriter.
[00:43:19]  What is it that you have to do to make sure that you can actually come up with an idea and put it down succinctly on paper?
[00:43:25]  What works for me, and this has been the case with just about every book that I've written, is drawing upon my experience, as we were saying, at the teaching of the Smithsonian Institution, in which I was doing these eight week courses twice a day for eight weeks.
[00:43:40]  So for me, every issue, everything I talk about almost automatically falls into eight parts.
[00:43:49]  Right?
[00:43:49]  Gaul is divided into three parts for Julius Caesar.
[00:43:52]  Every one of my books starts divided into eight parts.
[00:43:56]  And that's my starting point.
[00:43:57]  That's just the concept.
[00:43:59]  I think about it as eight lectures.
[00:44:01]  And then, of course, it doesn't stay that way, but you add one or two.
[00:44:05]  But by and large, the construction of the book from an outline standpoint tends to follow in multiples of eight.
[00:44:13]  What can I say?
[00:44:14]  16 chapters, 12 chapters.
[00:44:17]  That's where I start.
[00:44:18]  And then you begin to assemble the material to support.
[00:44:22]  What it is you want to say in each chapter.
[00:44:27]  And then it's the process of sitting down and putting together in prose that you think a general reader, not your academic colleagues, are going to be able to follow and understand.
[00:44:41]  So the 11th book, first one was 1997.
[00:44:45]  Yeah, 1997.
[00:44:46]  So how many years of research?
[00:44:50]  Usually it's a two year process.
[00:44:52]  The whole thing.
[00:44:53]  You had a downward chance.
[00:44:53]  One year of research.
[00:44:54]  This one was a little faster.
[00:44:55]  One year of research and one year of writing.
[00:44:57]  Yeah, this one was a little faster in a way because I was able to draw on research that had been done elsewhere and to draw on themes from my other books, like Freedom's Forge, for example, like How the Scots Invented the Modern World.
[00:45:10]  I know this came out quicker because I just finished Viking's Heart.
[00:45:13]  Yeah, that was a really, that was a wonderful book to write, too.
[00:45:16]  Fabulous book to read.
[00:45:18]  You can do so much.
[00:45:19]  How do people go?
[00:45:21]  So Founders Fire is in bookstores right now.
[00:45:23]  It's in bookstores at this very moment.
[00:45:26]  You can go to Amazon.
[00:45:27]  You can go to Barnes and Noble and buy it online there, or go to your Barnes and Noble store.
[00:45:33]  I encourage that.
[00:45:35]  You can go to my website to place orders there as well, ArthurHerman.com, with a dash in between Arthur and Herman.com.
[00:45:44]  And you can also check out my other books and the articles on the various things I work on, from technology to defense industrial base.
[00:45:52]  It's all help yourself.
[00:45:57]  Hel That's always up on the website.
[00:45:59]  They can figure it out.
[00:46:00]  They can track you.
[00:46:01]  Do you also have social media or is it best just to go to the website?
[00:46:04]  X. I'm definitely an X guy.
[00:46:06]  You're an X guy.
[00:46:07]  Yep, very much so.
[00:46:08]  And what's it under?
[00:46:09]  What's your handle?
[00:46:10]  Handle is at Arthur L. Herman.
[00:46:13]  Pretty simple, pretty basic.
[00:46:14]  What founders fire?
[00:46:17]  And my strongest recommendation not simply get the book, obviously, to read the book and enjoy the book, savor the book, but also particularly.
[00:46:28]  If there's someone maybe down in the dumps and you want to get them jacked up for the founding of the country, get them this book.
[00:46:34]  If there's a young person that you are having a hand in their formative years, get them the book and make sure they read it.
[00:46:42]  And I wanted this to be a book which people would come to understand not only their own history, but maybe themselves and think about themselves in a new, in a different light based on how we got here and what we're doing here.
[00:46:56]  And who knows, you may find that you're your founder yourself, you didn't know it.
[00:47:00]  That you may have to take that side hustle and turn it into something really big.
[00:47:05]  We're waiting.
[00:47:06]  Your task and your purpose, as we say here.
[00:47:10]  I want to thank you for spending the time.
[00:47:12]  Oh, it's been great.
[00:47:13]  It's been extraordinary.
[00:47:13]  You're one of the great writers in America today, and you have the topics.
[00:47:20]  If you go to Arthur Herman's website, you'll see the topics.
[00:47:23]  So many of my favorite books are there.
[00:47:25]  And quite frankly, so many of the books that have helped have been intellectually formative for me.
[00:47:31]  The McCarthy book was really because in those days, he was so demonized.
[00:47:36]  I'm a huge.
[00:47:37]  Unbelievable.
[00:47:38]  And I come from Virginia, and you were taught to.
[00:47:44]  General Lee and General Marshall are the two top of the list.
[00:47:47]  And it's only when you get into McCarthy that General Marshall is looking a little different, although I still admire him.
[00:47:54]  I tried to buy his place down at Pinehurst.
[00:47:57]  Did you?
[00:47:58]  Yeah, he had a little cottage down there in Pinehurst.
[00:48:01]  Didn't actually cross the trade, as we say, but there's always hope.
[00:48:06]  Arthur, once again, it's just taking this amount of time is fantastic.
[00:48:10]  Thanks so much.

=== Reevaluating General Marshall (00:27) ===

[00:48:11]  We're going to leave you.
[00:48:12]  I'll be up on social media all weekend.
[00:48:14]  Of course, We have the pressing concerns of the day in front of us, including this war.
[00:48:22]  We're up 24 7 on that.
[00:48:24]  I don't think this weekend we're going to have a Sunday show.
[00:48:27]  I think we're just going to cut it at 6.
[00:48:30]  We'll kick back on the Sunday show if necessary.
[00:48:33]  See you back here Monday morning, 10 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time, and we'll be back in the world.