Folks, my new graphic novel, Unwanted, a tall tale of the Old Weston New Wave, is out

for pre-order now.

I've been working on this for 25 years.

It's a dark comedy with a shiny exterior.

Please check it out at UnwantedBook.com. Good afternoon Michael Malice here. Let that be your welcome for the next hour. We are going to have a very long introduction for our next guest because I have a new book and there's a whole big backstory. So sit back and relax. We have returning with us one of my two favorite historians. Sorry Arthur. There's two of you. Arthur Herman. Arthur wrote what I think is one of the 10 most important books I've ever read. It's called The Idea of Decline and I was forget the last word. The idea of decline in Western history, I could not have written the white pill right there without it because what Arthur did was go through generation generation and people like, look, things are terrible. It's all going to go to the hell. And yep, the things are terrible. They're not wrong, but somehow things

revert back to the mean.

And he just goes through generation,

generation of all these apocalyptic fears

and how they never came to fruition.

And as I joked with Arthur,

it's all downhill from here after his first book.

I also referenced you a couple weeks ago

because I had Count Dankula on the show.

And your other book, which I haven't been read yet, but I'm familiar with the thesis, which is how the Scots invented the modern world, which talks about how much impact the Scottish people who are not big a number had on Western civilization. It's enormously profound, totally punching above their weight. And I'm shooting at the episode but I was talking to Dankelerla who is a Scotsman, how angry it makes me as someone who's never even been to Scotland, how there is a more Scottish pride. And if there's one people who should be like throwing in your face, yeah, well, the Scots did that. They're them and to have them kind of be in any sense, backpedaling or downplaying their accomplishments to me is completely insane. So it's not enough that you're at one absolute masterpiece. You also, and this is the book that made me a bit intellectually intimidated by you, the cave in the light, Plato versus Aristotle and the struggle for the solo western civilization, and what Arthur does is he takes Plato's views, which is this world of ideas, and like, hey, if I can imagine it, we can make it happen. And an Aristotle who's very much grounded in reality and reality has certain laws that you cannot avoid, nor can you escape. There's nowhere else to go. And he traces the path as each of these ideas takes a sentence in civilization and its consequences up through the 20th century. Absolutely superb book. It's almost like a murder mystery.

It's exciting to read who's gonna win, even though you know the history and how it plays out. My favorite part of that book, I think, was your treatment of Santa Gustin through which I learned, it's pronounced a gustin in Augustine. But also the fact that even though his city of God is a darker book, and he's very much fixated on man as a fallen figure and you know this doom and gloom view of the world is fallen earth. He still has this sense of no no no no no no you have to have faith it's going to work on the end you know we're just going to have to get through this tough stuff but hold the fort which I thought was a very interesting take on his views and a little bit of how he's not perceived. So then I got this one and let me tell you my thought. So I get an email from your lovely Black life Beth, who I got to meet several years ago, who's a complete joy. And she's like, Arthur, she sends her best. Oh, okay. Awesome. She goes, she goes, you would have Arthur on your show. I say, of course, I sell the publicist, send me a copy, a signed copy. It's not signed, but that's okay.

I'll get a signed copy.

We have to do that.

When we come to Austin, we'll be doing that. With great pleasure. And I saw the title, I'm gonna walk you through my thought process. Just bear with me, founders fire from 1776 to the age of Trump. And I thought, oh God, this is gonna be some conservative, you know, read me about the founding fathers,

how great they were blah blah blah.

But then I read the first paragraph about the founding fathers, how great they were blah blah blah blah.

But then I read the first paragraph of the blurb, the jacket, and it goes whether it's 1776 or the era of Donald Trump, Elon Musk,

Arthur Herman argues that the United States has always been propelled forward by a special kind of leader, the founder.

...