Applied History Today

- It's 10 years near the Graham since you and I published our essay in the Atlantic on why the president needs a council of historians. Just bringing back that happy memory and it seemed like a good time to get together and compare notes on what we have achieved in the way of making applied history a reality in that decade. So the purpose of this joint venture, which was I think originally Nicholas NE's idea was to bring you, me and John together as an an opening triumvirate and then have a general discussion with some other key figures in the applied history movement. I think of it as this great movement of ours after which we'll open it up for general discussion. According to my run of show, you are up first Graham. Then I'll say a a few things. We each have 10 minutes and then it'll be John's turn as somebody who's been in the room where it happens more recently than you and altogether more than me, after which I think we have five people that we've tipped off to be called on and then the general discussion. So I think that's enough opening remarks for me. I'm gonna hand the microphone to you Graham.

- Thank you very much Neil. And I would say that and shout out to Nicos, one of the students for getting disorganized and noting that 10 years after the manifesto it probably appropriate to take a pause for few minutes and look at what's happened, where we now stand and what that and challenges and opportunities will like going forward. But I guess since I'm the elder, I, I get to go first, but since you're the most productive of the torian yo and since John is the example of the one man council Anova Cat Council of Applied Historians, having worked there for four British Prime ministers course, they changed very quickly including those recent one or maybe not now working but did previously. That felt a little bit more about the future. Now this is great application. I'm saying you could either add a volume introduction to any of the participants in the creative session, came to the wrong meeting, so wanted to just push forward and I, I think that as you think, look back, it was a little bit brash of you and me to call this manifesto and we even noted at the time that it was building on the foundations that had been laid here earlier by two of our great colleagues, Ernest May and introduced that. So I think that maybe attempt to revive that in part in the May fellows program, which I created at the director of the developer center and then our joint effort, Neil, and then the work that's come forward and when I look back at it, I think going, I'm gratified and grateful and I think in particular that I think this was your idea that this should be probably not as a organization but not as a hierarchy, but the kind you were exploring networks. So this should be more like a Google the network in which parties will with their own imagination and energy and funding and otherwise try to ask whether and how they can apply history to illuminate current analysis of choices. So I'm gonna say up two minutes about the what it is it isn't and about two or three minutes on looking back and then a couple of minutes on looking forward. But I'm really look forward to hearing what Neil and John and others say about looking forward. So what it is, Neil and I said in the manifesto, applied history is the explicit attempt to illuminate current challenges and choices by reasoning from history, examining analogs and prestige. So that's a pretty bold fake. So it's not simply, oh I can think of an historical analog and it's not simply history for its own sake. It starts with the current challenge and choice and asks can this be illuminated by recently permission? So asking what is this line have been? What silver indifferent and is there some clues there or ask, hey, what did somebody else do in this situation like this of what happened that we can and we find any clues from that. And as we said in the manifesto, we did not imagine that destroying would have a crystal ball that would proceed the future. So they're nonprofits or sayers the the competition is simply what others would do in trying to illuminate those same challenges and choices without re reserving for ion. And the analog we put, because we were proposing a council of applied distortions is that they should do a EZ will or maybe a little bit better than the Council of Economic Advisor stuffs when asked to eliminate a challenge or choice. And if you look at the track record of the Council of Week value advisors, it's not very good. It's eliminating the future. It's pretty hard are it's wrong that somebody else has a, has a as a crystal ball. So the competition is not for it probably a crystal ball. It's the competition is the competition that exists and in the white history manifest. We also noted in the view at the website, it's important to remember what this applied history initiative is not. So it is not claiming to be original. Cides would not be surprised by somebody trying to illuminate the future by analyzing the past nor would rum or layer who was a famous historian here in the 20th century or Crane Brent or Paul Kennedy or Michael Hour or blah blah blah blah blah. But not the original executive, not exclusive. This doesn't belong to ard. It didn't belong to our, when Neil and I were broke here, he carried and built a a Uber history initiative as an envelope. But long before we were doing this, people like Paul Kennedy and John Ga and Mike at Oxford and others were doing their versions. They were not trying to take anything away from what other entities do it. It's not orthodox there general monopoly of wisdom or methodology or practice. It's what I think John or church and applauds all initiatives of other universities and fintechs or practitioners. We can have some di discussion and debate about whether any particular effort eliminates and how to do that. But the fact that people might do it in the way slightly different than the way you know that King Charles slogan or at Harvard, it's not, oh no it's not applied. No it's not. The orthodox finally stop. So if you go back to Ernie Maye and Dick said thinking of time, they're very clear that they're trying to encourage a applied history but not in some fashion they're not trying to go off it any way that would surprise people. They're trying to do so in ways that historians who've tried to do this earlier would recognize. So there's no special character or Rick or the version with fun I regard or who otherwise there's just many, many, many efforts to probably find out ways to do it better. So I would say that's in short what it is, what you do. Looking back if we case by, well I was recently producing a report on what we've been doing and was surprised even very happily surprised by what has actually been a accomplished over this decade. So the high history network and newsletter, which I hope most of the people in the audience are parted, if you're not you can sign up now has more than 600 professionals across more than 70 institutions and this includes a dozen major loads of activity of which voters and martyr two but also Yale and the Yale GW strategy initiative that Mary Sak has now run and Kings College London in conjunction Cambridge brought about. So there are a dozen major nodes pursuing this more or less in a similar way on the same path but in slightly different mix. The working group of which this session is one has had 10 sessions this year and sessions that included no extremely interesting people including our college here, Sean Dova, in which we were trying to see whether illuminating what's happening in Israel and the Middle East probably by recent or history we might Feinstein student events that Nikos and others have organized included sessions by Carmen Reinhardt who's the co-author with Rogoff. This kind and Stiffer a great example of economic histories as as applied district was one. The books and articles that have come out in the past year I think suggested to movement is gaining momentum. The city which likes Gavin's new book that won the LER prize on historical sensity, the coming Storm, Myron Westad at Yale, the this Mitchell's great power diplomacy, which we had a a session of the working group which is gotten a lot of attention right and and deserves a lot of attention. He takes us vacuum into the ar Deus who if you don't know who that is, you cut some more interesting reading to do the list's work is a during good read Neil's piece with Richard Haas and Philip Ko on Ourto Man for winning the war is a good example on industry to try to clarify. And the piece that I write in front of yours with WinCo on the longest piece, the fact that the 80 years we've had without great Power war is the longest period without great Power war since the Roman Empire is a good reminder. Our historical arc, the dark minority Collus has been 61 flee postdoc May fellows and 17 now Uber early career fellows in their Uber lab. And I look at the growing nodes of the network, the Center for Statecraft and National Security at Kings, which John will say something more now, the Kissinger Center at John Hopkins with Gavin and Res, Sergey Chenko, Yale where Mary ate, who's been a professor at Hopkins, but also a major figure here in our applied history project is now done to become the director of the main strategy project.

- Wow. - The Hamilton School at the University of Florida that will go lay the foundations more, which is actually, it will rate work on at an more diverse set of views including a history as implies this I could go on more and more, but that's enough to kind of get you started. I would say looking back over a decade, well okay, and again thanks to energy from lots of people around the big idea, timely here. Looking forward just briefly again a dozen some questions, how much in three and then my main thing looking forward is to look forward to the next generations of people like John and many people here who are gonna do side saying first one is maybe for three questions then we need a a basic toolbox of teachable skills for applying history or, and Ali and John and a number of us here out in Wesley will at for the class two days trying to see whether we should be trying to create basic tools like you got OD s screwdriver I have in talk at a chisel. Second question is, should we embrace financial analysis as to recognize it as applied history? Now since Neil has been built a verb wing mentor that actually does this and does it brilliantly, the proposition that by looking at the past you might have some insights into questions like will current embargo impact will prices and if so for how long and will that impact the inflation? And if so for how long? Well there's an old industry, you could read about it, the Wall Street Journal every day that does charting and graphing and the connection of members, sometimes even statistical analysis to try to illuminate the future. So if applied history is challenges and choices illuminated by evidence of analysis from the past, I would say the answer is yes. And I think it'd be interesting for Neil and others to applying about why this has a doubt as normal as it should. I think in part it's because most mainstream historians are not very numerate. So they know why could I have numbers. In part it's, it's been a will we different, different sort of arena. I don't know the answer. The question is should we now recognize this as another major part of the applied history portfolio? Finally, well the question of the relationship that we applied history and what's happening in universities in mainstream history departments, it not quite fair to say that we're seeing the withering away of mainstream history in major university departments. But if you look at the shrinking in the number of of majors, you look at the shrinking in the number of PhDs, the withering away of history departments wouldn't be, it would be provocative. Actually Neil wrote a provocative piece about this earlier, maybe a decade ago, in fact I can remember. But it's continued and the question whether therefore in major universities one should now find an opportunity, we apply historians, we apply historians either as part of the current discussion and now kind of having a balance of more diverse views. Since most applied historians tend to focus on issues that now reason why they're applied history is because they're trying to illuminate some challenger choice. So the the decline of, for example, bushes on or stated or war and peace, maybe now it's to some extent why apply story or maybe apply story will find their way as one of the foundational skills in schools of problem cost. That certainly but French trying to build here as a foundational course. So I'm gonna say all of these are questions about the future though forward. But my bottom line is this in the pretty amazing 10 years that I'm working toward to the decade that follows over that I think I haven't called you before yet, Neil, the most productive applied Australian, but I would say I, I don't, I don't know how many Neil Furnaces there may be, but one of them is it puts out something called Neil Jo Neil furnace and journalism and every week you have some illumination of some current issue in, in at least one or two pieces and then your financial consulting firm wing mantel puts up a report every day for or every whatever. So any case over to you.

- Well thanks very much indeed Graham and and thanks for covering the kind of academic developments that have been in applied history over the last decade here at Stanford, at Harvard and elsewhere. I'm going to talk about Greenmantle because I don't think it's possible to go from the academy straight to government anymore. What we need to show is that applied history works in the marketplace because in the marketplace you are held to account if you are wrong, it becomes clear a great deal more rapidly and with more painful consequences that if you are wrong in the academy where tenure means there's almost no accountability. So one, when we talk about applied history, we we're actually in some ways unwittingly channeling Isaac Asimov, he called it psycho history in the foundation series. And psycho history is defined early on as that branch of mathematics which deals with the reactions of human conglomerates to fix social and economic stimuli. Now it's I think normal for historians to be very dismissive of science fiction, but we at Greenmantle in fact regard science fiction as an integral part of of what we do because what we try and do is is to combine historical knowledge at, with the the science fiction variable that is to say the thing that history doesn't tell you is what the next technological breakthrough will be. And you need to factor that in. The other interesting thing about Asimov's psycho history is that it's not actually naively deterministic in second foundation, the third quotation here, one of the characters says you must not say never actually psycho history predicts only probabilities. A particular event may be infinitesimally probable, but the probabilities always greater than zero. And I, I always remind my team at Greenmantle to avoid never and to attach probabilities to everything that we say we think is going to happen or might happen. I'm gonna give you eight cases of applied history in action. I'll do it quickly because time's short and the discussion's important. But just to give you an illustration of of how since Greenmantle was founded in 2011, we've evolved, we've built applied history, I want to emphasize that applied history exists and it works. So take lesson one that we learned. I think we were very quick to see that we had entered Cold War II and I checked it with Kissinger at a memorable interview we did in Beijing. That was the occasion when he said we were in the foothills of a cold war. Some people will be familiar with that, what you're not familiar with because greenmantle content is not in the public domain is how we arrived at that insight. Here are a couple of examples. We went from the road to do divorce for Chimerica in March, 2018 to the digital arm curtain in February, 2019. These slides were very important for Greenmantle and here I want to give a shout out to my colleagues Chris Miller and Alice Han. It was realizing that the world according to Huawei was a Cold war map and that China spent more on imported semiconductors than on oil. That led us to the realization that that Cold War II was underway and had like Cold War won a technological dimension. You can see from slide the second of the slides, the germ of what became Chris's book Chip war in 2020, in January that year we warned our clients that we were almost certainly on the beginning, in the beginning of the biggest pandemic since the influenza of 19 18 19. Almost none of our clients believed that, but I think our report plagues and people's nailed it and we understood the way in which a highly infectious virus would be spread by a global transportation networks extremely quickly to everywhere in the world. In 2021 before the pandemic was really over, we had to make a decision about whether there was going to be an inflation problem. We said there was, I remember checking with Larry Summers, I know we're not supposed to mention Larry, but he was one of the few economists who saw the inflation mistake of 2021. We arrived at the same conclusion in reports in February of 2021 and later in November we nailed the inflation mistake of the first Biden year. But you can never be right all the time and this is an important feature of applied history. The pro the process, the historical process is too complex to model in a deterministic way. And we slipped up in 2023 when like most commentators, we thought a recession was likely. And we base that on our characteristic method of looking at every recession looking for common variables. And the indicator we wrongly emphasized was inflation adjusted credit growth. It didn't deliver the recession. We assess every predictive statement that we make every year and we shoot for a batting success rate of 66 to 75%. You'll never get to a hundred if you get to 50% you should go outta business and just send your clients a coin that they can toss. Lesson four, in a cold war, you should expect multiple proxy wars. Hot wars happen in strategically peripheral locations. Ukraine was the first hot war of cold wari. We predicted that war, we said it was gonna happen. The escalation of the invasion, the full scale invasion in a report in December 19th, 2021, which was not a consensus view at that time in in applied history it's really important to be right but out of consensus, that's where the money is. Our analogies were that it could be at the winter war that Ukraine could be Finland or it could be the Korean War, in which case they were South Korea. I these analogies were very helpful. Those people who thought Ukraine would fold in a week were very wrong. If you told our clients back then that the war would still be going in April, 2026, I think most of them would've laughed. Were still going, we still haven't got to the Korean style Armes. Maybe Putin has to die as Stalin did for that to happen. Fifth example, Jay Menz did a fantastic job. He's now at state, but he was our Middle East guide when we would analyzing that the Iranian problem and we rightly saw that there were gonna be escalating tensions with Iran, we also saw that there would be no resuscitating the nuclear deal. And we rightly and consistently said that protests wouldn't topple the regime and very proud of the coverage we did then. But in 2023, Jay consistently predicted in report after report that something was going to blow up to derail the Saudi Israeli component of the Abraham Accords. He just couldn't tell whether it would be Hamas or Hezbollah that did it. So we warned our clients consistently of an event like October 7th. It must be said that the National Security Council did a less good job. The only thing we had to predict in 2024 was who would win the presidential election. We consistently said it would be Trump. This was not a consensus view certainly in early 2023, but of course it turned out to be very right. Couple more cases, I think we were quick to see that the most important race of Cold War two was the AI race. That was something we wrote about as early as 2018 and we've consistently and I think accurately covered the race as it's unfolded. I'll say a bit more about AI in a minute. Finally, it's not a very elegant slide, but it does I think make the point that you need a paper trail, a re research trail if you're doing this kind of thing because clients never remember when you're right and it's good to remind them occasionally. So we, we consistently from September of last year anticipated a resum resumption of hostilities between Israel and Iran. Marcus Hendricks who took over from Jay has done a brilliant job at every stage of this drama. We got the timing of the the American Israeli strikes pretty much right in January. By February 20th we had 84% cumulative probability of joint US Israeli strikes. What we've been wrong about and again you gotta own your mistakes, is that we didn't think that the straight would stay closed this long. And that of course required us to do some very rapid recalibration. We didn't use the sewers analogy till March 20th and then I began to make the argument that this risk being the American sewers. So I tell you all that to show you that applied history actually works. All of those calls in their different ways were outta consensus and they were mostly right. The mistakes we've made have been greatly outnumbered by the right cold. Last point I want to make, if you read Sebastian Libby's biography of Demis Hassabis, you'll understand that applied history is now technologically possible as well as intellectually possible. It's always been intellectually possible, but it's now technologically possible because really what applied history is, is just induction at scale. We don't attempt to model the world, we don't attempt to create equations, which was the project of social science. What we do is pattern recognition with large data sets and that's the essence of what demi hasib is pioneered deep mind. It's just that Demis thought it would be useful for biology, but if it's useful for protein folding, it's also useful for human affairs. I urge to read the the book and realize that Hassabis is one of the great pioneers, but he and I have been discussing recently the ways in which these tools of large scale data sets and inductive computing could be applied to to history. And I think the potential there is absolutely enormous and green mantle's already tapping it. I think I've learned six things by founding and running green mantle, which are highly relevant to this group. We've learned to cast the night net as widely as possible. You can never have too many analogies, but the ones that work better tend to be closer in space and time. Comparing Trump to Augustus Caesar I think is a mug's game. Secondly, you must formulate your hypothesis clearly so that it can be empirically tested. There's not enough of that in academic history. In fact, there's almost none of it. Thirdly, you've gotta simultaneously solve for macro markets, politics and geopolitics using the maximum amount of data. For example, if you want to know if the Iranian economy could be created by a blockade, you need to look at every example that you possibly can find of a country that's been subjected to blockade and look at what the economic outcomes were. You can do that. Fourthly, you've got to understand the protagonist's worldview and the only way you can find that out is, as it were from the horse's mouth. This is where human intelligence is crucial. AI can't know certain things, it can't know what the decision makers are thinking and we spend I think a lot of our time just trying to make sure we know that. But as you are doing that, you must avoid getting emotionally engaged with the protagonists. I think I made that mistake over Brexit. I got too close to David Cameron and George Osborne and it led me to mis misjudge the likely outcome of the 2016 referendum. Finally, and this is an an example of how to think historically, that's too often forgotten. You need to think counter factually all the time. And as Lewis Namia put it, you have to have an intuitive understanding of how things do not happen. Most history doesn't happen and when you are trying to think about what's going to happen, you have to think about all the things that might happen but probably won't and not enough people understand that that's the core of our discipline. So that's applied history, it works, we are building it, we're scaling it. And the only thing that's really missing is that governments don't yet use it unless they come and ask us. Very nicely. I'll leave it there.

- Fantastic. This is this stuff of seminar seminar that we're not gonna add today, but it's a a, you've given us the top of many icebergs and we did to come back and actually try to see how we could wrestle with this because every, every slide has at least five things that are worth discussing to try to better look for each understand. So our third of the three of us, IANS is John be, let me again remind you, John is currently the head of the King's College ger that's building a pie history in sacred craft, the Baby Earhart and several colleagues. He is a perfect fit for this group because he's also a visiting faculty member here at the history project at the Kennedy and he is a distinguished visiting fellow at Nstitute. So part their applied history undertaking and for our purposes a wonderful colleague who was a distinguished historian before he became the tangle of policy where he Canada I think unique experience of someone who is a historian trying to be helpful by providing clarification for policy makers and that's sitting as a professor, right? And appear Hager as a intermediary when he was working for decision makers at number 10, but not a decision maker. And so having to think about what questions to assign people and how to present this to this national security advisor or this foreign minister. And then finally as a decision maker that is the national security advisor is not the prime minister but is part of the group of people that make choices. So consuming whatever he had briefly been either intermediating or creating. So I, I think for what Neil and I had had in mind and try to use this analogy of a council of by ance is simply the notion that governments and the components of government which, and available to the people doing applied history when they're wrestling with a, with a challenge of choice. And John has had a chance to see that in it every one of the different incarnations as well as now thinking about what he's building going forward. So John, over you.

- Brilliant. Thank you. Thank you so much. What a privilege and pleasure to follow Graham and Neil. As Graham said in the last couple of days here, we've been sweating the methods and the toolbox for oh you might teach applied history and then Neil's intervention speaks to the actual application in a different domain. It's not primarily an edit bit of function, it's something that is designed by the clients who are making real decisions in the real world in real time. And I'll speak a little bit about the academic setting in Europe, in the UK and into this broader network. And then secondly, I'll spend most of my time at our Marx on some reflections on the application of history in government. I remember vividly 2016, the launch of the manifesto while we've been conversing the last few days is what a new manifesto would look like. And I think it would look slightly different and I don't hear put words in other people's mouth but it very striking when Neil was talking there that there is a lot of self-reflection testing an evolution of methods under pressure of clients, under pressure of the challenges in academia and under of real world events. And I think that evolution, that iteration is part of the health of bio history. So bio 3 26 20 26 looks significantly different than bio history 2016 and that is the way it should be alongside that. One thing that we've been discussing the last few days is also is that that what we're talking about here is one form of truth. It's not the only truth, it's one form of truth that's useful in policy maybe. And there are other forms of truth that are useful in policy making. It's a form of knowledge that has and an approach to knowledge and public policy and the world around us that has a heritage. One that stretches back many centuries if you like, it's a subject or an idea that undulates in its fortunes. I would suggest there are obvious external architectural reasons for or fire industry to be having a moment right now. I went to government in 2019, I remember the laws of my investor in 2016. I signed a book track contract yet to be completed as a government service I would say like overtures follow line in 2017 about the wise and so-called full of western world order international order. So there are moments at which the fundamental assumptions Hal brands describes as global brand strategy is the unexamined assumptions begin to be examined when the connection between different cocks or areas of policy which are set in motion or established parameters begin to get upset or shake their on. Tony Blair after nine 11 famously told that everybody nce a few days after the kaleida scope has been shake and that is reorder the world for the thesis land. We're nowhere near a moment of reordering, although some mines are really getting to focus on that because we are at the moment in which the fundamentals of our political economy are the inputs and outputs of our relationship, the assumptions about historical progress, other people's assumptions about historical progre progress, which which we are being confronted and we are passing them all of these things in flux. I will suggest to you that a modes of relative stability when there are shared assumptions, when are al economy appears more stable, when there's a more natural equilibrium and international affairs, then some of supply historians may take a short sabbatical for a period of time or get back into the archives and do some history for basically sake. But those moments of fluxs and transition that allows us to to elevate, elevate focus on the supply history. I think it was great you mentioned in the UK context some of the applied stories we have. My art previously at Oxford founded my own department, the war studies department at case under about 60 years ago. And that department is in itself a place where we have anything between a third or a half of historians depending on what's happening when we open up the window and a user of the story. We also have people in academia and this is very important, who should not be defined by their media policy relevance. So we are nested at kings in an era which conjure insurgency consumed much knowledge. Students wanted to study con terrorism or intelligence. We protected and kept in our academic settings experts on Russia, experts on caucuses, experts on deterrents as well. And I think that's an important part why universities play their played their outside and played their role for a longer period of time in the applied history. Granted said also I believe in this

- Broad

- Church approach, I think the applied history movement, I'm gonna call it Im mobilization in a moment, does capture that spirit. Broad church, a happy church, but what a church in which we are capable of willing of contesting each other's interpretations. That's part of the rich mix as I said, there's no fundamental truth but unless we are debating with each other the veracity or the effectiveness of our analogies, the nce of particular case studies that we're not doing our job. So again, this process of iteration contestation of ideas all based as they said, all the drawing and evidence empiric system where we possibly can. That's another part of our story. And I said mobilization because then where we've been talking about the heritage over the body history in the last couple of days, I give you the example of historians in Britain in different parts of history. So in the 19th century it'd be very common for people who were this, the senior leaving historians of the age, the Carlis isles, the the colie, et cetera, to be intimately involved in political life to set the tone and discourse of politic politics, to reflect on the analogies around the rise and fall of nations and other issues. And then in the 20th century, a period where you had more and more professionalization of the torical profession, you had these various voice, the mobilization of intellectual energy, including not only historians at critical moments of crisis or inflection to H because those historians were either an operating and fighting or perhaps over the fighting edge but mobilizing themselves to help crash craft national narratives to learn lessons from previous periods of diplomacy in the first and second world wars, to engage in constructive acts or post-war planning to rethink the fundamentals, to understand other nations. And this is the great Kissinger inside. I think it's hard to reduce Kissinger to one fundamental inside, but if there is one, or at least I tell my students, so this, this, it's it's, it's the understanding in international affairs and diplomacy, the vital importance, understanding the historical story received historical feature directions, sor identity of your interloper. So all those things are different. Sometimes historians have contributed to and been involved. And so I think where I say at one of those moments, it's reflected in the fact we have young talent, bright interested chat people where a challenge our assumptions involved in all of those conversations. And if think go into history in the policy world because we are a broad church or happy church without saying we're church and wish we can also bro Sherry's disagreement or challenge. And I have never been that content with the idea of a cons of applies. Historians, some of the people who have echoed the purpose and idea of art history like Anthony Selden in the UK have talked about the Prime Minister having an official historian in the building in various moments and time. We do have historians started around in the foreign office, other institutions who do play a valuable role of historical memory, although sometimes it's quite hard to find documents, the relevant documents. I remember when we were looking to ride a new national security strategy in 20 20 21, I said to those in Ministry of Defense, could they go and find copies of the 1997 review for me and it took about six weeks for the end of Dusty basement and acquire that review and produce it and and then come back. So sometimes those historians are asking be a bit more swifter in their mobilization. But we do have historical then we do have, so learning in in, in government and and, and those institutions and individuals play an effective role. But in government and in policy, I think you have challenges in the application of history. And Neil said something at the end of his remarks, which I want to all align on because you have to be prepared to get it wrong in applied history and you have to be prepared to get it wrong sometimes in a public way. You have to be prepared to put your credibility on the line when you're making calls in and around client history as an advisor or a politician or otherwise. And that sort of critical at that risk, frankly that risk factor which comes with reward where you get it right is very, is actually a fundamental part of applied history in a government setting. I, we had a fantastic meeting in Cambridge a few weeks ago, a kind of younger generation, the applied history network and some of those people were in the room and I in the context,

- These other Cambridge

- In the other Cambridge in the ca, Cambridge uk great great collection of people and I, I landed upon rather intentionally a bit of a crude analogy but I'm gonna test it on you again today, which is what I call the breaking bad policy. So the Breaking by Policy, most people I think you've seen Breaking Bad are aware of the story on Breaking Bad, which is that a frustrated in in ill ill health sort of slightly depressed science teacher in a secondary school or equivalent in whatever what it is the United States discovers through his excellent scientific capabilities a cure form of crystal meth, which he brings onto the market and transforms the drunk trade and brings it great where riches and knocks all the other competitors off the market. And in a way it's sometimes the academic policy that we in history departments or academia curate, preserve, develop a pure form of knowledge and our only job is to bring it somehow to the toothless symbol and and sky to form our political class and expose it to them. And actually the story of breaking back, I guess a little bit more complicated after that from that point because it suddenly realize when you enter this trade you're entering competitors, you're entering compromise, you're entering frankly quite a nasty and challenging environment in which the person you trust one day is not a person you trust the next day when there are others who share very different views as well. So I said in Breaking Bad policy reflects the fact that when you come to apply history and applying history, you are fundamentally compromising what you do. You are not producing the fullest form of knowledge with the longest footnotes and biography. You are often in a very snatched setting on a plane with a prime minister or whispering to that minister before they have debate with another minister. You're engaging with their assumptions. Ash Carter here at the Kennedy School Fantasy said a version of something that heavy also said, which is historical analogy and historical assumptions are kind of the first order part of certainly foreign policy discussions in government as well. So you are dealing with crude analogies, unique being the favorite author of any minister either work for you are dealing with certain assumptions, some that seem hopelessly optimistic in certain settings based on an understanding of how history develops understanding of their own lifetime to experience. You are dealing with individuals importantly whose blood sugar is high or low or loaded, who are tired and stressed or distracted and that they don't have the time for study. And Machiavelli says something very interesting in the Prince most overused and word duck, and I'm very guilty of doing this myself. He says something like solid the prince is very ous opening, which is I can't give you many gifts dear princes because you have the wealth and the money and I'm, but you're humble servants. But what I can give you is the fruits of my learning. But very importantly the fruits of my learning adapted to the circumstances in which you operate. And that is necessarily a ification sometimes of knowledge that is def necessary, a implication of knowledge and and it others not just a few more very tangible examples of which that by history is being is is being used. But I'd sort of stood into four parts and end, end all that hard. What is applied history can be the tool of assessment and a very useful tool of assessment. It strikes me the best subject matter or country matter experts or regional experts, the debt to start off at the desk officer or an embassy, it's a a, a set political counselor understand the place in which they operate effectively by application of history and historical knowledge. And you can see the quality of the analysis through that. Again, other tools are necessary sociological tools, economic tools, frankly their ability to get out about politically connect. But that sort of core analytical function history could be a very useful purpose, a very useful tool in that. The second is policy and there's a firewall I think actually true on elk for the firewall, but it's a firewall in many of our assistance between the assessment community and the policy community and the kind applied history you have when it comes to policy and decision making. Decision making, it's a slightly different form of history, which is more common the have analogies, it's more uncommon to have precedents, it's more common to have how it is where you're trying to establish the parameters in which you're trying to operate. And in there's two other forms of applied history as well as I think are important. There's a strategic level of wise history. So if the United States is confronted by a and China I, we celebrated, the first note I saw when I arrived in government in 2019 was a note official sensitive from the then national security advisor to the Prime Minister summarizing a very brief level sort of foreign policy challenges around the world and said we must avoid the IDE Trump. And I thought, forgive me, well it's more complicated than that and I responded to that. But are my ability to articulate why's more complicated, depended on circumstances owns a strategic level discussion And it is in tactical level of applied history, which is very interesting. So again, gray measure scenario around in Ukraine as Korea and at the end of last year started this year, there were some inclinations or hints that some of the peace negotiations were settling upon actually frankly in the European US side, accepting upon a proposition that could be lived with or could be built on. And then people began to explore questions, tactical implications as to what, what would mean for de ized areas, et cetera, et cetera. Bit of historical presence. So different, different variety are messy and deeply compromised process and it's just a final level of that as well in the government settings in all of them that I been involved with the app site for historical knowledge, the humility with which policy makers want more knowledge I think is very high. And I would characterize this if there is a problem with the buyer history and I'm an optimist about it, more of a supply side problem than demand side problem. I'll end on that though. Sorry brother.

- Thank you. So my goodness, this would be the top of another multi hour seminar too. We have several other people that I'm asked to maybe give us a minute or two just briefly about some related activity. Mary ti was teaching and she showed up yet. I like, hey, so Rona Mid is one of our colleagues here at Kennedy School who was bringing more of a perspective on this, including this world, China, Asia. Yes,

- Thanks very much Bre. Well first of all, this is an absolutely fantastic way to start, very important discussion. I had the benefit actually of a second bite, so to speak to John because he came to our China class this morning and gave an absolutely kind of virtuous performance in terms of how to formulate foreign policy towards China limits to very fast changing circumstances. So there's no doubt that you can talk, talk and walk and walk. I think since these should be short interventions, I just want to flag up something. And again, seat Joe, sorry, expert on China here. So m get the next generation to come in with thoughts on this about why trainer is both one of the most appropriate places to think about the use of applied history, but also why its own politics is actually one of the best if under examined examples of how applied history is everywhere. If you look at the founding or founding the kind of confirmatory document of recent years that the Chinese Communist party has put out about itself and bearing in mind that although there's an awful lot of oil plate, an awful lot of jargon, it's actually quite rare, at least in the public sphere, that China's political thinkers, whatever you may think of them, sit down and really put down a very long and detailed state about who we are and what we do and why we do it. And it's indicative that when they did that in 2021, the most recent time, they produced a resolution, all of the parties, politics, lot of the party's ideas, but on the party's history because for them it was, it remains very important that the policies that they implement in the present day, whether it's about climate change or about cracking down on incidents or whether it's about policies towards ai, are in their own minds very much shaped by the trajectory of history that they feel has driven them over the last hundred hundred, 304 years since Foundation in 21 to the present today. And the way that they apply history is something that I think outside observers you, you don't look at it in detail, tend to, to to underestimate, but they look at particular incidents, the ex Jesus, the brilliant kind of explanation we've had from Neil about how Greenman does this. We'll talk in the head from John. I think in many ways it's echoed by people in the party school in Beijing. I won't ask John and Neil if they spend much time over there getting tips. We probably shouldn't ask too many questions along those lines. But if you look at the historical examples, for instance, one that comes to my mind, pastor, well this story of China is that that party resolution in 9 21 spends quite a bit of time talking about the rectification movement of 1942. Now this is not a stop incident that I'll go into detail on, but let's just say it's a pretty hardcore set of ideological corrections to those who would deviate from the right path. It's not general without deep as China as the sort of happiest of periods in in recent history, but it was historically important enough that in a statement about where China was gonna go in the 20 and 2020s and 2030s and beyond, this example is one they picked up one other example, I won't give the the names in detail, but various figures from the 1920s and thirties. I think one it shouldn't have shown as one of the founders of the Chinese Communist Party are held up in this document and subjected to a sort of historical ex examination and excoriation their sins are kind of laid out again for people to understand as why they were kicked out the party they speak with me dead for the best part of the century. You know, they are not the stuff of conversation in Beijing coffee shops and yet the party considers that actually bringing up these historical examples is an important tool in terms of explaining who it is and how it justifies itself to the world in the present day. But the Chinese Communist Party think it's important. I think those of us who want to understand what they're up to should think it's important as well. So I give you the CCP as perhaps the other users of applied history, whether they get applied to Neil for a contract with Greenman, I do have for discount rates if they came in Neil, we will see.

- Okay, thank, thank you. So showing you what I saying again, you will Joseph, introduce yourself and May fellow.

- Hi, I am Joe, I'm a May fellow, Joe Passman. I didn't expect to be handed the mic, but I would just echo this idea of China as as or exemplars of applied history. It goes back even farther than the Chinese Communist Party civil examination system back in the Song Dynasty where any candidate to serve in the Imperial government would have to write essays, often be some historical examples, and there's new research about how they were supposed to think counter factually and imagine themselves in the situation of another historical actor and RIFing their voice spreading actual policy documents for a given historical situation. And a lot of this comes out and still in the modern era with, with a Chinese communist party using history applied as a way to sharp the future.

- But I think Mary has finished her class. So Mary Sub, as I mentioned before, is a professor, a STEM professor at Hawkins and but is now and been part of our, of listing faculty member here with the applied district project, but is now taken up the Mansfield at Vu, where she's directing the grand strategy project and she and our listed and several literature building applied district or rebuilding applied building five history. So Mary, give us a minute or two of just what you're thinking about in terms of the live history, you know, as we look back and especially as we look forward.

- Yeah, well I'm, I'm sorry that my travel to New Haven means I can't be with you in person, but certainly I can report from Yale that interest in applied history is very, very high. There were hundreds of applications to take. The grand strategy class students are hungry to learn about great power competition and how the, you know, history can help us to understand it. We've had many, many public events. I, you know, I I really can only say that the interest is really very, very high at Yale and I feel pleased to be part of the grand strategy community there.

- Oh, thank you. We seeing this film one, Phil is another of her colleagues who was here at the beginning and was part of the efforts that, and he talk here for years to the talking to the University of Virginia and we out at Hoover as part of the Uber part of the network. So Philip, you'd have some SW respected here. Hey, two minutes in, tell us whatever you would be willing to

- Well, I'm glad to come to the revival meeting of the broad church and stand up and testify and I wish to offer witness, my witness is to point out fir first that the main objective of policy is not to predict the future. The main objective of policy is to change the future. Now it can be argued that it's good in making policy to be able to predict the future, but in fact you never have certain predictions that best you have statements of possibilities or probabilities. And what you're doing in policy is you're actually trying to change the odds. You're trying to make things more probable, less probable. You're trying to minimize risks or mitigate risks, hedging or seize opportunities. That's actually a somewhat different perspective. You're therefore not trying to generalize about what will happen. You're trying to figure out what to do to change the future. So that the famous French medieval list, mark Bloch before World War II wrote a book called the Historian's Craft, in which he described what he called the paradox of provision. That the paradox of provision was that the most accurate and convincing predictions of the future that a historian could offer were those that did not come true. They did not come true because precisely because they were so accurate and convincing people reacted to the predictions in order to nullify them. So the second point that follows from that is that the main problem of policy is to figure out what to do and how to do it, what to do and how to do it. And that of those two questions, the what to do and the how to do it, the how to do it part is usually more difficult and often more consequential than one can reflect on the kind of historical knowledge that can help people decide what to do or or how to do it. And in speculating about the kinds of historical knowledge that are most useful. The last point I'd make is to say that there are really two kinds of historical knowledge and only two, there's direct history and indirect history that is, there is a history of the case at hand. Its people, its issues, its institutions, its circumstances, there's the direct history of the case at hand and there is indirect history, which is the history of some other cases that we think might allow us to make indirect inferences. And I'll say that in working on the value of historical knowledge to solve those problems of policy, usually the direct knowledge is more powerful and more important than the indirect knowledge and is often invaluable. For instance, I was at a, a day long discussion yesterday with a large delegation from Mexico working on Mexico security policy, which is very important right now. We are in the process now in our government and in Mexican government at our suggestion of repeating a kingpin strategy in dealing with Mexican cartels that exactly mirrors the strategy we adopted during the Mexican administration of Felipe Calderon between 2006 and two and 2012, which was profoundly ineffective and indeed even counterproductive. But I dare say that very few Americans or commentators and even me, Mexicans who are not directly involved, remember or even know about this direct history of the case at hand that offers innumerable insights for what we should be be doing now in the most important policy problem of what the administration said is the highest priority of American foreign policy. So it's just a way of offering my test testimony about the value of historical knowledge and perhaps to particularly emphasize the significance of just at least knowing the history of what it is you're working on.

- Good point and a great illustration. Yes. So we have, we have 16 minutes and we, I questions, there are questions. We have a,

- We have some questions online, Graham, which which we could turn to a couple of them are, are of interest to me. You can see them in the q and a slide or Dropbox, whatever the word is, dropdown menu. The

- Why don't you, you pick so my please.

- So I'm, I'm going to to take a couple Alexa and, and DVI asks me, there's a question for John as well. The, the one she asks me is I teach on a module called the Long View Understanding international relations through history. In your view, what classic applied history case studies could help with a module of this magnitude? And I that, that's a great question because my experience is that the, the case study method works quite well in the classroom. I, I ran a course at Harvard 10 years ago before I moved here called Strategy and Crisis. And the idea was that we would combine reading some kind of classic works of, of strategic thinking with some specific cases. Graham, of course, has done such en enormously important work and the Cuban Missile Crisis that it's all almost become the standard case for how to handle a crisis well. But I think any course that's worth its salt has to have a case of a crisis badly handled and in and crisis. We did the escalation in Vietnam, the decision making that the Johnson administration took in 65, that that led to the, the disaster that that was Vietnam. But I think this case method's important and Phillips also illustrated it because if we don't make an effort to, to have relatively succinct accounts of particular policy crises, then it's extraordinarily easy for amnesia to kick in. This was part of the point that Graham and I made in our original manifesto that the United States of amnesia just kept making the same old mistakes. This this brings to mind the, the reaction of a senior policymaker of the, the, the Bush administration w Bush who wrote to me after reading volume one of Kissinger saying, I find it quite amazing to read the accounts of Kissinger's visits to Vietnam in 19, in the mid 1960s. It was so like Iraq and, and it was the fact that he was surprised by the resemblance between Iraq and Vietnam or South Vietnam that really, that really staggered me. Another question which I like is Dan McAfee's question, is there a risk of being an astrologer on the hunt for the hottest take in hopes a policymaker or marketplace will look your way? Dan, this is the temptation of journalism where it's more important to be sexy than to be right. And there are no penalties for being wrong. As, as the track record of nearly any columnist illustrates, it is just a, a litany of wrong predictions with with no apparent consequences when you're dealing in the marketplace. You just have to be right. And one reason I wanted to to have green mantle was not just that Harvard was driving me crazy and it was clear that the institution was going to go insane, but it was also obvious to me in 2011 that journalism was going insane and the entire public sphere was like a toxic wasteland. And so it was important to create something that was off campus and off the grid so that we could just focus on being right even when it's boring. And often as Philip will confirm, complex policy questions are really quite dry when you get down to the detail. You are only tempted to go for sensation if you have an editor to please, but in the markets you just have to be right. And, and that leads me to comment on something Philip said, which is important that in government you, you can't know really that's the problem of conjecture that Kissinger identified even before he went into the White House. That, that any, any decision confronting a a future problem brings with it a dilemma. And the is that if you take action to avoid the disaster that has a certain cost and there's no gratitude if you avert the disaster because nobody's grateful for a disaster that was averted and didn't happen, the easiest thing in a democracy, John might want to comment on this, is not to do anything Europeans specialize in kicking the can down the road. The most important insight of the problem of conjecture is that that is also an action and the costs of that inaction can in fact be greater than the costs of taking, of taking action. This is a central problem in government and it's quite different from the problems in the marketplace where you, you put the trade on, if you are right, you make money. If you're wrong, you lose it. But, but you are essentially waiting to see if you are right in the market. You are watching the price of oil to see if it goes up or down. Once you enter the realm of policy, you enter the realm of the problem of conjecture where you are, as Philip rightly said, you are, you are shaping the future and you can never be sure that your action was a better option than inaction would've been because the counterfactual is purely conjectural. There's one last point I'd like to add as a footnote. Asimov says that psycho history can only work if nobody knows what the predictions are. And so the predictions of psycho history have to be kept strictly secret in the foundation series. And I think that's quite a nice, a nice little point to add. I'll hand the microphone back to Graham or John if they want to take the Cs up. There is a question from Vic, which we could also a ask address, but I'll leave it to Graham and, but John,

- Let's see. Jersey is, I think in particular is a good way of the proposition that as you pointed out, that for the policymaker she has the choice and she can either do something and it is the put osis and she cannot respond and it has consequences. And the consequences would it all, every be different, have no action taken, but there's no option to have no consequences. Absolutely. Right.

- I I think there's a, there's, there's a tension here. This is why the high history is not the same thing as pure historical research and as I said with the subject matter experts and historians of different pockets who were keeping un vegetable for 20 years and his advice was not solved and probably should have been. That's an example of our history of history. History's sake is fine, proper, we should support it and share it. I also think, and this goes a little bit, it goes on those both directed indirect history, certain ways in which history is used. I mean the job of this story actually is, and the job of this story is to say it's more complicated than you presume and therefore are you deploy that when sometimes politics is about making choices and sometimes politics is about simplifying those issues. Our colleague Frank Gavin in his book thinking, sorry, Cox lawyer, historical sensibility and I think certain skill sets that come from historical sensibility can be applied without actually the indirect or direct knowledge of, of active situation. That includes an ability to discern what is important and what is involved and what, what is the f what you can change, what you can't change. Now that thats just comes with the so training and historical mind, but it's not quite hard to apply in policy only the inaction point ledge. To give you a very good example, and it's not for me to litigate current UK foreign policy, but to say that the UK's response to what's happening in the Gulf has been flexed with very public appeals to the lessons of Iraq. This is what the prime minister says in every single stage when he explains what he's trying to do, it is very good reasons by the why, why he would refer to the lessons of Iraq. But sometimes because of that instinct complicated that instinct, others lessons, sometimes you're so focused on the lessons in a previous era you spent less time giving like the current scenario discerning the historical forces of utter and perhaps you are rather than sophisticated version of the letters. As I say, Frank Frankenberg moves from historical, what do you call the checklist that policy makers might u use and do give an example, there is one in the UK governments and some of the Bri audience will will know this. So at times of tense, tense, controversial and consequential decisions on protocols. Somewhere some, somewhere we we'll put before ministers or officials in our meetings in Coroll, the National security consult quite literally a laminated piece of paper which is called the chill court checklist. And the chill court report was UK states to attempt to learn the lessons of what happened in Iraq. And the only specific, we have the scenario before we, but I asked you quite sensible questions that weren't asked at critical moments. It about learning from a history for himself as of course crucial, bigger than I left in report as well. So that's an applied history checklist. That's that's that's the sensibility you put in front of you. My overview actuallys slightly odd bit and that's probably why you have a tendency towards an action in a number of areas where action might be better and the history perhaps sometimes becomes a bit of a dead work that there are very tangible examples of of of deploying that.

- Do you ever mean w here asked you during who's been at the the business school but is now moving to the Texas society where there's ambitions. So say a word about what that is and then SQ wanted make get the mic go.

- Yeah, so I'm moving to University of Texas in Austin where at school center of leaderships I'll be both the climate center and school center of leadership building brew from nursing Florida teaching Austin where he's our provost. So he's in charge of this whole thing and his goal at UT Austin is he thinks to build the best center for strategic studies in the United States of America. That is his goal. So we are creating the new strategy in the statecraft major and small sub leadership. They're currently in the process of hiring something like 12 to 15 new faculty. Oh Houston, I'm starting there as a full professor this fall. There'll be another round of hiring this coming year. The major year's gonna be launched in fall of 27th with, I'll be a hundred students initially I'm starting, I have a couple course studies already this year, history revolution history, the Cold War. This year I'll move my business into politics class to UT lawsuit and so is eventually to have probably PhD students in in strategy cigarette as well. The Clements Center also has a lot of money from the state of Texas, so they're expanding, they're hiring tenure family members at the Clement Center as well. I'll be in both, whether it'll be people since be in Clements, more pre-ops, war postdocs, war conferences. So watch the space. Usually office is gonna be, I just spoke to to Ari West side and he said, you know, after he retires at some point 12th grade into the future, he says a move to the UK and likely it the place to visit a come to the United States will be Austin. So not Cambridge, not Palo al, Austin, Texas. He says I'm the place he's gonna go after years I should

- Say competition is a great thing and I see

- So yeah, so, so watch Austin. So I just want a small point to including John said, you mentioned that the, the demand exceed supply, I understand about demand for what exceeds supply of what is it regional expertise, historical analysis, prognostication scenario planning. What is the demand for that's not being satisfied?

- Okay, brilliant question answer Jordan. We now have news of a mega church emerging in Texas and in addition to our bullet trips that's very configuring we're hit that very years so, so so the the while Zoe and government for a dedicated period time and over down for six years, the period preceding that I've been around policy, various part it resolve in all of that today there was a period, particularly the war on terror period through to really early 2010 in which the basic fundamental assumptions in the national security paradigm were quite set in stones. And that included things like ca ency and a few of us debated or challenged and adopted on ency included certain assumptions with the UK called the terrorism policy contest. It included certain assumptions about use of development spending, relative balance of development, spending, re spending, all the truth used while lines or there's a wide set INow and in my experience, and it's qualitative rather than qualitative, we basing there was more resistance to external voices expertise because the, there was the, the, the expertise was internal, it was, it was on the field in Afghanistan or elsewhere. My own lived experience thereafter is partly because a lot of our assumptions are shake and partly because we are presented with challenges and problems where we've lost expertise or that muscle memory or language expertise. The number of I in British foreign office man speakers has gone off a cliff. Therefore the appetite for quick fixes or broader knowledge and information in different parts of state, particularly for all history, the non exclusively legal historians, academic expertise and knowledge has increased exponentially. Also partnered as our foreign officer have been squeezed, budgets have been squeezed experts, research, research analysts, et cetera. There's less of them. So I've really seen an exponential increase that's that's, that's the demand side. So supply side is where you get that from. And I guess my border point is I think there's an increase in the number of colleagues from history and other departments who want to partake in that. But there is also a late in culture instinct, which is fine law and, and not media contest whereby engaging with the dilemmas of policy makers and the state and it really therefore having to sympathize or empathize with those dilemmas is an enough to a significant portion of the academic role as well. There's issues with bottlenecks and program programs, et cetera. So that's, that's support in ux supply demand. So therefore the circuit in which I'm afraid we use ran as Swiss army knife roll us every issue. If he has a certain temperament we can deal with policy makers as well. We, but we, we don't wrap that big carousel to draw on.

- Let me, let me ask to annual or to say just a word of what's happening at KLC and the and the partnership with the, with Cambridge and also this remind people that and Cambridge University of the other Cambridge, they're actually building all new college the call the NOCO system recently funded, which history is likely to be one of the foundational wellness. So tell us a little bit about just in one minute 'cause and then be will come to you for the, for the wrap up for the last good we're just at the end but I didn't know the end without having people here subordinates.

- Absolutely. I dunno if I can speak too much on Cambridge, I think it's Columbia, 80 million for new school in probably policy, sorry, at Cames Rehab, the BURG applied industry program, which has been running for I think six or seven years and that is in collaboration center geopolitics at at hamburger sims if you have wrong made others various things that that that we do. I think one is that collaboration with government has been important, something that we're trying to build. So historical case studies for policy makers and that's about a paying attention to what exactly are the policy issues and then drama industry where it's relevant. The second thing is, so that's kind of deployment of applied industry. The second thing is the training. So a huge thing for us is having an undergrad applied industry fellowship and we're now in the fifth year I think we've an, and I haven't brought 'em yet, but it's now I think 60 students that have come through the program and they're, they come from all different disciplines in, in, in departments at Kings, but it's really exposing them to historical insights and so for instance we had a, a student who was studying to an economic student and she came into the program and she was interested in speculation. It kind of bubbles, specula bubbles if you will. And she said I'm going to study the Dutch tulip mania, the 17th century and what that shows in terms of insights for present day. But she never would've come across this historical precedent I don't think if it wasn't for the fellowship. So that's just kind of things that we're, we're trying to develop at that case

- With Leah. Let's turn it here for the last word since we're just over over time then

- I'll keep it brief. First I think this has been a terrific discussion and I thank everybody who's participated. I have four technological points to make. One of the things that is, is vital is that the foundation for what we do must be scholarship. I would not be doing what I'm doing with Greenmantle if I were not writing the biography of Kissinger, which is of Magnum opus based on the classical archival method of historical writing. When volume two comes out, which I hope will be next year, it'll be clear that one of the distinguishing features of Kissinger's thought was his ability to think historically and in terms of technological change, which is why he got the significance of AI before everybody on this call, even though he was in his nineties when he first heard about DeepMind. Second technological point in answer to the question, you know, what's the demand supply problem? We are too slow. Speed of response is vital. Academic historians move at tor to speed or oil tanker speed but you actually need to be able to, to get an answer to the question fast, what do we do? Because the straight of MOUs is closed, what do we do is not a a question you can answer in July. You need to answer today and we've gotta speed up. One of the things that I love about Greenmantle is we can move market speed not at academic speed. Third penultimate points, historians with the notable exception of Matt Conley and a few others just aren't making sufficient use of frontier models. The problem is a clear one. We don't understand that until you tell the frontier model use only primary sources or use only scholarly publications. The frontier model can't discriminate between garbage on the internet and scholarship. If you use the frontier models intelligently and prompt them in an intelligent way, they're tremendously powerful tools. But I see very few historians to taking advantage of this. Luke Nter wasn't able to join, I think he's teaching, but he and I are working on this kind of approach. We have a new program at Hoover endowed by Ken Griffin, which allows me to bring up to five visiting fellows a year here to work on specific projects. Luke is going to be one of those fellows. Tyler Goodspeed, will it be another, I don't have time to go through the whole list but this is, this brings me to my final and most important point. Applied history is indeed a broad church and it has a mega church and Austin is important in more ways than have been mentioned. Joseph Ledford, who's been helping me run the applied history working group here at Hoover is moving to Austin to be part of the same initiative as Jeremy just described. And of course Austin is also where the University of Austin was established just a few years ago as a kind of flagship of where universities ought to be in the 21st century meritocratic and free, which is by and large not true. But what we can see here and and and I think it's very clear is that there is a network but it doesn't work well. We should be doing events like this much more frequently. There's no reason why our seminars shouldn't be plugged in to Harvard and Austin and anyone else who cares to participate. The very first question, Vic Haynes's question is where our end, he asked about how we can widen the network, be the beyond the English speaking world. We are working on that. There are Germans, for example in Zurich. There's an applied history group and we need to make a conscious effort to make this network function. The technology exists, we're using it now, but I still think that our instincts are somewhat 20th century. And if we could, if we can make applied history technologically up to speed, I think we'll start achieving much, much more. That's it from me, thanks to everybody. Sorry we overrun. But that's probably the nature of the thing. We started five minutes late, we're ending six minutes late

- 20 seconds more so in the broadening of the network. We, I forgot to mention in Sweden there's a very active group that LA and Burg group I've been part of in Germany is a very active part of Manone. So, and even even having some discretions with India about some possibility and a is hurling organizing an event that's gonna happen in Beijing in October, which we'll be looking at cases like what happened or, or maybe that might be illuminating in the US China rival week. So I think this already creeping out. I just wanna accept completely the opposition that we should do more of these jointly. Anything that we're doing, we're very open with respect to. So let's figure out a way to do that. Another round of this before too long, I would love to do a full scale session for several hours simply on what you've been learning from being medical. 'cause I think that would be, each one of the, each one of the slides is one which with building that alert and I think John is a good example. He's been here for two days, I think she's only worked about 17 hours of vacuum with Pringle trying to take advantage of what he's worth. So it just, I would say applies history. Sin alive, will, and prospering. Thanks so many people were part of it. And to the next generation of people, we're gonna be digging hours. Right? There's, thank you.