I'm going to go and there's nothing going on tonight. Good afternoon I'm Michael ballas and let that be your welcome for the next hour.

I am absolutely ecstatic that we have one of the very few return guests on your

welcome Arthur Hermann now Arthur you had written what I consider when people

asked me for book recommendations yeah your book your first book is one of the ten books I say that everyone should read which is the idea

decline in Western history. You're a very discerning intellectual if that's one of

your favorite books because it's a favorite of cycle generation whatever term you want to use

a new cycle generation whatever term you want to use there's a new calamity that is going to cause the

underworld and it's from the right wing and from the left wing and

and somehow these calamities never seem to come through and it's what I call the

disco stew fallacy which is there's a

Simpsons episode and Homer was talking disco stew and he's extrapolating disco

sales from 1977 1978 he goes if sales continue at this rate hey and of course the sales did not

continue and all these ideas that they had even some some that were based on

some reality you know people corrected and then there were the things like Gobano and, you know, race mixing and oh my God, you know, there's not going to be any race and that somehow it's going to have bad consequences. Where we're still here, life expects, these increased, diseases have been conquered. However, I was going to come

and talk to you about your other book, how the Scots invented the, I want to get the title exactly

right, invent the modern world. But you have written so many amazing books on so many important topics.

I don't know how we're going to cover most of them, so I'll have to have you on again.

So let me go through your bibliography which I think is

absolutely amazing because you hit the big figures you have a book on Gandhi and

Churchill that was the Pulitzer Prize finalist. Yeah, I was just gonna I got you

Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize which I want to talk to you about right Douglas MacArthur who is one of the perhaps great unsung heroes of the right wing.

That's right.

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