arbitrarily. this is true of all the countries in africa and in the middle east and central asia in the isis is not a very benevolent organization but an organic organization and its predictable. that's one possibility. what's going on in ukraine is a little on the side of the separatists. they are backed by the russians but they have every right to want to cut away from ukraine which it is like a political tidal zone. it's not a real country so it should break up into at least two or probably five or six different political entities so those are a couple places things might happen. saudi arabia, the gigantic accident waiting to happen and has been waiting for the last 30 years. so when saudi arabia blows up or breaks up, it will be interesting to see. but the problem is at this point the u.s. government is acting as a provocateur all around the world using its military power which is about the only part of the u.s. government that kind of works to make trouble and stick their noses and all in all kind of places where it doesn't belong. so this isn't all going to go well especially as the economy turns down the next time because it's been bad economically the governments always look for somebody to blame. it's the chinese that caused this problem, they are making things too cheaply. it's the saudi's that are causing this problem. they are manipulating the price of oil. so this is a good reason to come to the perpetual batch in the water. so i think that probably the most dangerous in the world today is actually the u.s. government. >> is it fair to say that libertarians have been saying the sky is falling? >> sure. it depends on how we want to look at the track and how far back we want to go. after the constitutionalists put together in 1789 like three years later that the congress passed the alien and sedition acts which if they hadn't been repealed would have already tried to turn the u.s. into a police state back then and then the war between the states which is incorrectly called the civil war or the two entities were competing for the same government and did a lot of things and the social point of view posting of. so, sure. it's the dynamic which is basically entropy and it's the states that everything over time involves impulse apart into some of the worst and nothing has a substantial input or outside energy. so, it happens to the human body cometh against a the government, it happens to countries. sure. it's all predictable. we just don't know how long it's going to last. but i think that 100 years from now the map on the wall showing the u.s. will have a different form than it currently does and i would question that the u.s. would even be one entity. >> this is from right on the money. ever since i was a teenager i thought christmas at least as practiced in the west is a bad idea. what do you have against christmas? >> it's really a comment on christianity. i grew up a roman catholic, which i like to joke being a member of a cannibalistic difficult. but at this point, i don't belief in an entity of the sky that we have to worship and i like the trappings of christmas. but if people take their religion seriously, which they shouldn't i don't think unless you want to define it as a quest for a possible spiritual assistance which i think is interesting and you should do because we might have a good it's got nothing to do with these commercial enterprises like all the churches are today. their corrupt, counterproductive and while, i guess i go on about religion in a series of novels i'm writing which we get together next year and i hope we are talking about the next one and it takes an occupation that you can be a very good guy and speculator and the sixth and final novel is when i can do my thing after having been a warlord comes back to the u.s. because they think that he's gone and if you are then you have to give religion. so comes back to the u.s. and comes up with a new religion to overthrow christianity and islam and supports soap i'm sure even more people will hate me then than they do now after that comes out. >> so what would be one step to take away from this book? >> take control of your own life, try to become rich because if you become rich honestly you will only be about to do so by providing the goods and services that other people want and making the world a better place. so that's among other things with the book is about. >> right on the money as the name of the book. book tv on c-span2 on location in las vegas at the annual freedom fest. >> up next on the tv a panel discussion on the biographies of world leaders from the 20th annual "los angeles times" festival of books. >> if you would find a seat we are about to get going here. before we start i'm supposed to make a couple of announcements. the most obvious is to turn off your cell phone. second, you know there is a book signing after this session. it's located in the signing area number one. since this area is noted in the center of the program if you have a program you should be able to find there and it there and then finally to let you know the personal recordings of the sessions are not allowed so please don't. with that, let us begin to get my name is jim newton and i've spent 25 years before moving over to the ucla. also written a few books approach would qualify for the title of world leaders of history and it's a polite for me to be a moderate panel today. before we get started with me introduce to you the panelists at target to imagine a better group of people to take on the topic. they are my to buy immediate left kristin's book is the warrior queen and represents the culmination of. she's among she is among other things but out of a sea captain. she grew up in the panel can also wear also know where she also know where she was interested as an influence of spanish history and cultural threats. as a child she liked to sit out overlooking the caribbean at a place first of a place first explored by christopher columbus in 1502. before embarking on a riveting biography she worked as a journalist is a san francisco journal from the san jose mercury and finally as an award-winning business and economic reporter for the "washington post" where she was for 20 years. in 2009 she wrote the woman behind the new deal a biography of francis perkins and her book is available as a finalist which will be announced later this evening. next on the left we have stephen who teaches history at international affairs at princeton university where he's been a member of the faculty since receiving his phd from berkeley in 1988. his time has been spent in the shadow of the cold war the very first month he was teaching our first semester teaching in the fall of the berlin wall and he studies and writes about power, especially power under authoritarian regimes as well as about state to state relations or geopolitics. stalin, volume one paradox of power is his fifth book. in addition it is also it finalist for the baca for this evening. in addition to music over the institution at stanford and served as the chairman of the editorial review board of the princeton university press. for a time the book review of "the new york times" sunday business section as he says he wrote a lot of business books and he continues to write reviews and essays for various publications including "the wall street journal" for four and a half years and finally at the center of the table a person familiar to many of you i'm sure my friend scott. he's the author of five best-selling biographies can teach a work of extraordinary grace and collectively stunningly varied body of work. max perkins added to their genius received a national book award for writing a biography he was awarded a guggenheim fellowship and his 1998 biography on the pulitzer prize for the "los angeles times" book award. for 20 years, he was a friend and confidant of katharine hepburn katherine hepburn and his biographer, mark kate remembered picking the best seller for most of the summer that it was released. his biography of woodrow wilson published in september 2013 and if you don't mind my saying it is a masterpiece. [inaudible] [laughter] >> scott has heard me say this before but we have been friends for many years and his writing has been a source of personal inspiration for me during the dark moments of writing my first book by salvation for getting stuck here again was to simply pull off the shelf and read a few pages. it's a wonderful thing to be reminded what writing can do. it's always my pleasure to introduce scott but today it's my special pleasure to introduce him along with stephen and kristin. [applause] so, we have agreed to dispense with any kind of opening statements today several sorts of questions and when we get to the end of the 40 or 45 minutes we will open up to you for questions so keep that in mind. to get going i would like to ask each of you we are going to talk about biographies of world leaders and also talked about the work of setting the context for the biography that your writing. we can start anywhere but do you want to start with that? spinet yes, actually it was interesting. i knew that it was great to be challenging to write a biography of queen isabella of most of that most of us really only know as the name. she was the sponsors of columbus oh i knew that i would have a lot of information to honor. i didn't realize i was great to have to learn a whole new version of european history that i never really been introduced to. i learned it pretty quickly when i noticed that when i read the history of the world that she commissioned in her lifetime, she had one page about herself and this is talking about the whole significance of the history of the world come of three pages of the fall of constant mobile and how terrifying it had been. this was really the deciding factor in her life was how to secure europe from the ottoman turkish invasion and much of what she did has to be understood in that context. >> i wrote about woodrow wilson when he became president of the united states in 1913. he was presiding over a country of about 120 million people. we were an isolationist country. we have oceans buffering us and protecting us and it was really becoming a society of the haves versus have-nots and be owned 50% of the wealth in the nation. woodrow wilson, a poor minister's son who had never run for office until he was in his mid-50s and who had the biggest rise in american history in 1910 he had been the president of a small men's college of new jersey and by that, i mean a small men's college. [laughter] [laughter] also james madison did go there. >> you may just just have to cut want to cut this off right there. [laughter] anyway, i digress. [laughter] and so, he had devised in 1910 he runs a small college and he was elected president of the united states and so he is now inheriting this rather quiet and content nation or so it seemed on the surface. the reason to write a biography is not just told a story of a the story of a fascinating life, but the bigger objective really should be to eliminate the times and i could think of no greater figure who could be that beacon or could it be that great searchlight then what roe wilson and try to show how this country went from the 19th century into the 21st century and we are now living with a legacy that house in almost every way still than woodrow wilson whether you talk about the foreign policy today, the economy today or our psychology so much of it comes from woodrow wilson said that as the world he came from. >> i teach the woodrow wilson school at princeton university. [laughter] i don't have much to add here. [laughter] as you saw on one of those small men. [laughter] >> my subject is a different pathway not a heard of terry monarch or former president of an ivy league university. in fact he didn't go to university. so my task was to figure out how someone born in the periphery of the russian empire way in the south of the region whose father was a shoemaker and whose mother was a seamstress how somebody like that could get anywhere near power and what has been the largest country in the world about one sixth of the land mass. so how do you get somebody like that from the periphery from a poor family from circumstances that normally wouldn't give it give power unto you the way that a hereditary monarch or successful presidents would? and so the trick was to sketch in the world in which he was born which was the world of the unification of germany and that that is in fact where the book began and it may seem odd that the book begins with this modification of germany that struck me but that struck me as the logical point and then somebody's got to destroy the world for stalin to get near power and that's what happens. world war i which was then known as the great war is so distracted especially in russia that someone like stalin gets near and with his talent and his ruthlessness and with the mistakes of others, he is able to create a personal dictatorship inside in spite of the dictatorial regime so my story really couldn't even be told. >> hell did you decide what to put around that? how did you decide to set up the parameters for that? >> that's an excellent question, thanks. geopolitics goes like this the british empire are the global dominant power. they win with the french culminating in the defeat in 1815 and by then there is no doubt that they are the dominant cover and in fact they will go on to create the first global economy and that all the cables undersea and provided 90% of the shipping and the transactions that two things happen when is the unification of germany in the 1870s and all of a sudden you have a new dynamic power and the other is the restoration of east asia were japan isn't a new nation but a consolidated nation and both of those embark on germany, japan, both becoming the largest and most important power in the region and they happen to be on either side of the russian empire so that is the world in which he is born. there are other things going on the road as you eluded to the people get into that world and reshape. before he gets to fight the war with japan he gets up the power. it's not the challenge is to try on the unifying thread between isabella and stalin. the only one i could think of as they is they were all children once. [laughter] how do you deal with the growing up here to. it's not interesting as children or that lesson. >> i think that it's important and in a way i don't begin writing a book until i know how it ends and the poems i know i'm going to be taking my subject and the reader then i go back and i follow all the trails and look for the seeds that will become these flowers of. and the stakes of woodrow wilson they have this strong streak of religion. they were the ministers and going to the family tree. everything that he did for the rest of his life woodrow wilson became the most religious presidents that we ever had. this is a president who preyed on his knees twice a day and who read scripture every day and say prayer before every meal of his life. so he was able to go back to his childhood homes and i could go to the churches in which he sat as an 8-year-old and i could sit with and see where his father the reverend woodrow wilson has this great looming voice i could imagine what it must have been like for a child to hear literally the voice of god. and certainly in augusta georgia or columbia south carolina. and so all these factors come into play. then of course i wanted to deal with the fact he was this 19th century child and was born before the civil war and grew up and became of age during reconstruction. woodrow wilson left with no thought expressed so anything that he ever fought, heard or remembered he broke down somewhere so we could see these strains that are a really good blog some of some 40 or 50 years later when he is really changing the face of the world. >> i would like to go back to what he said earlier and that is the fact all three of the people we are talking about earlier were unlikely rulers. certainly the example that you gave that the relative poverty of the child. and even though she was the daughter and had royal blood on both sides of the family we don't even know what day she was born because no one bothered to write it down. we don't know where she was baptized. no webpage attention to where she was educated or thought that she would be significant for anything except they would marry her off to a distant country at some point. the thing that made her really seize power which is how she became the cleanest that she was terrified and was a deeply religious woman and prayed constantly. she took her children into the battlefield with her marching with a cross in front of them and when she wanted to do something for her leisure time, she would avoid her prayer clubs for churches so this is a woman of lives and breathes catholicism and felt that it was deeply at risk but christianity was any danger and put herself, pushed herself into a job that no woman had ever hoped for. it had been 200 years since a woman had been a ruler in spain, and the previous women that have been ruled as a failure there were a lot of people that thought it should be illegal for a woman to rule in fact in much of europe it was so that she had to do was sort of create a way to even present an image of how a woman could rule so i think one of the things that's interesting about all three of the people we've written about is that you have to imagine how they would fashion images for themselves that would allow them to move into political and social elites that would allow them to cover and i think that is really fascinating to self invention that they all did. >> this is a big one. he studied to be a priest and instead he decided to become god. [laughter] and you can see his appetite has grown. [laughter] we have a lot of books about stalin obviously. this is coming in big literature a book i wrote. most of those books treat his childhood. he underwent some hardships. he was impoverished etc.. there are many stories about his childhood that portrays as unsuccessful and unhappy. the problem is those stories aren't true and so when you look at the facts of his childhood in terms of what that he was a very successful student because of the orthodox church there was church there was a parish school where he was growing up in the town so he went to that school and he was a star pupil, the teacher's pet in the choir and earned admission into the seminary which was one of the highest educational institutions of the region. once again he was successful in his grades were high, he was also the teacher's pet which means he was a snitch. [laughter] some of you may know that role. [laughter] it was offered to me when i was growing up. but then he gave it up. he gave up with was successful to be a priest or month because he believed in social justice. he believed that it was oppressive and it was and that he would fight it. now, politics were a legal in russia. they had no parliament. you couldn't associate and so the opposition for the regime was illegal in the underground and it was as extreme in its opposition as the regime and its existence. and he embarked. he never graduated so he couldn't go on to the university and he and barked on a life for the underground where it was a rest, prison, exile, long stretches in siberia, no job, no money. the only position he ever had he worked as a weatherman in the observatory took the temperature periodically and wrote it down. that was his one shot before job before he became a dictator. [laughter] a slight resume. [laughter] the other part of it was the revolutionary experience. it turned out he didn't bring about social justice in the country that he ruled he brought about the opposite and in many ways it was more evil than the regime he thought and so it is a tragic story but it's a story of ideals and idealism and a story of a successful childhood that he himself gives up in order to pursue these ideals in a misbegotten way but one other thing i will stay that could save childhood is you can't discover the stalin of later years in the childhood. you can find someone that has life and death power over 200 million people which is what he had by the time that he's a mature adult. there's no place to find anything like that. there are great stories in his childhood and important episodes and major mentors and teachers and things he learned and skills he acquired his. but really the stalin that we know is invisible. something else has to happen to one of the things i do in do in the book as i put the politics of the center of the story and it's the pursuit and it's the creation of the dictatorship and the day-to-day running of the dictatorship that produces the personality rather than the personality that unfolds in the dictatorship. because the role was so monstrous in many ways, the people who survived it looking back for trying to find the roots so they would look at the childhood episodes. they could be 70-years-old living in paris or new york in exile remembering i knew the day that he said keep the he put the cat in my career and blew it up and that he was going to kill us all. [laughter] but he never put the cat in the microwave. they didn't have my traits get kind of things. we have all these things where late in life they figured out what it was that produced the rule and who became those episodes are not documented so you need to go back and look at the childhood mop with a perspective of the leader role and i think i found in 1920s episodes after he's in power after the 1917 resolutions to be a more formative experience that's not to downplay that his childhood was significant in some ways. >> to follow-up on that i had a sort of uneasy feeling of reading particularly the first installment where he is anything going in this reprehensible regime i find myself rooting for him and been feeling weird about that. [laughter] and i guess this is a question for you what are the special challenges of writing about them? >> it happened for a reason. 1917 russia didn't happen because the regime was nice and functioning well and competent etc. so there was a lot to fight for and in some ways i don't necessarily side with the social democratic party that we want to understand what they were about. so he's not the kind of person you come to admire in a moral sense at least after spending all that time spent with them to pick up some documents and their confessions of the crimes people didn't commit and there is blood on the documents because they were being beaten in order to sign these confessions sometimes they had their eyes gouged out so you could encounter documents like that and i just don't know how you would come to admire a person whose regime was like that but this is the thing from the point of view of power it's the gold standard of dictatorships. no one has ever accumulated my father or exercise more power. the hitler regime is about 12 years, very horrific years of the stalin regime is most three times that length. mao comes into this but didn't have the modern military industry and so mao come as important as he is is also a different character so in the end, you have this really spectacular from defined to be the plaintiff view dictatorships or you don't necessarily come to admire him but to be fascinated by what it took to create such a dictatorship and then what he did with the power that he accumulated. >> obviously this is a different character but it is a happy moment and how do you deal with what is described as a favorable account and admire yet how do you crackle with the defects of that? >> there's no way that you can look at the position it as a favorable light on that. [laughter] it's grotesque. the idea of burning people at the stake is basically disgusting. the idea of burning people at the stake because of what they believe is repulsive. the only thing i can say, she allowed under her reign of 22,000 people to be burned at the stake and it's very disturbing. it doesn't compare to stalin. [laughter] and i guess that's the thing that makes her a challenge and a difficult person to look at as that happened under her watch. she is responsible for that happening. why do so many spaniards love and admire her yet? i read somebody wrote a review about your book and they sat on some level and in some ways people think that stalin was a tough man for tough times and i think that a lot of people believed that isabella was a tough woman for tough times. i would also like to make the point that this concept of religious tolerance is a new one in history. we've really invented here in the united states about 250 years ago and we pray that we can always maintain if not there was no culture previous to that in world history that ever have had religious tolerance from her perspective church and state were one that an assault on her religious faith was an assault on her political power, and it was at a time she felt she was at global war and a threat of invasion and so that can ever justify it in any way but it does explain it. >> and she also think that was purifying? she was doing a good thing. >> she was devoutly religious herself. ..which the rest of the roman catholic church in europe had been unable to do. e disagreed with the board ofs who were her spanish subject and how they were importing themselves at the vatican, she was trying to make everybody, you might say literally, sing from the same hymn book and if they not going to do it they had to leave and that is essentially what she did. everyone who was not a roman catholic was forced to leave. .. killed under this rubric. it expanded to muslims who are presenting themselves as christians but were not in and of course it went on for 300 years. it applied to protestants come all kinds of freethinkers and in some ways, and it's with the franco era. the thing that is challengingllñ is that this isng a woman that somehow combined being close minded and open-minded. religiously closed minded but open-minded intellectual thoughtde and to the possibilities of global exploration, and because of that she set nine separate expeditions to the new world , and from the minute columbus stepped foot back on the shores of europe she sent fast or to the vatican and claimed everything for herself. she ultimately gave a sliver of it to portugal, which would be brazil. she married one of her daughters to the king of brazil, the king of portugal, thus making her daughters and her the controllers of the americas it was an extraordinary thing. it raises questions for us. the inquisition that can retain power. a new notion on the planet. a language to defend.wi being a racist. how would you characterize wilson on race in his own time and with the benefit of hindsight? >> i would characterize him today is a racist. how to characterize woodrow wilson is a centrist. there is a grateful beneath the united states that is race and racism. woodrow wilson was a southerner, southern bornnd and bred. so he grew up where there were two americas, no question about it. it was fairly enlightened but is very southern and bigoted the members came to him and said there are movements to integrate the federal offices in washington and we just really cannot have this. and wilson agreed. he listens, followed impose segregation and federal offices. in so doing that allowed segregation throughout the country. the wilson thing blacks were inferior? i don't think so. what i believe, he believed this country mainly the united states was not ready and said time and again there is one part of this country, no one needs to explain anything about plan that is the south.es he realized the nation was not ready to have blacks andch whites using the same lunchrooms, washrooms, feeds on the bus. he simply knew enough that there would be massive rebellion. so i think largely to keep the piece he did that. there is one other factor, even before he took. office the southern democratic congress was from the south by 9596 percent. they came to wilson said if you have any intention of integrating washington are beyond you will get nothing of your domestic agenda will get nothing you will see that is why he is perceived as a racist. i assure you haven't read enough newspapers, speeches, lectures from what was going on, most of the nation did not question this at all. there were pockets, more enlightened uneducated areas to be sure, but there were problems also in boston. boston was not ready to integrating 1913 either.ei but at least the conversation was being had an woodrow wilson did not j wish to join the conversation. one more note. i think he really failed as a leader because he was this great nation's educator in chief. after world war i in which a few hundred thousand african-american soldiers fought they came home thinking we have already mattress of courage, a lot of african-american mothers lost their sons and it was a moment when there would be ald good reason to have integration. that would've been a's wonderful moment to set before this nation and say these men died just as much is why people did. woodrow wilson on the subject said nothing, and it is no coincidence the summer of 1919, we have theh greatest race riots in the history of the united states >> particularly you. world leaders in history. i assume you speak russian.s your dealing with documents a working through translators? >> that is another excellent question. maybe i can make a small comment. a research question. you know, so i started with the british dominated world bute if i had gone back father who have the spanish dominated world. thethe phrase the sun never sets on the empire would have been for spain. the british then inherited it. and so whatop we are really talking about her not just interesting people but big moments in history in which a gigantic personality could emerge. it is hard to imagine someone being like president lincoln, but it is not that hard to imagine although it took a lot. l you could have been a lincoln. it did not mean you are going to be. it is hard to do it outside of a certain context. it is about ideas. you have driving well. to overcome whatever obstacles that might be, this determination and drive hitched to an idea, whether s it is the glory of spain for the purification of the catholic faith or social justice, the elimination of exportation for the destruction of capitalismso and marcus to bring about socialism as a driving idea. the explication command there are other ideas about internationalism which is's well enunciated in scott's book. it is important to keep in mind. the documentation is expensive. 4,000 or so. the vast majority are in russian butthere's a lot of stuff in german polish. frenchre mother languages.r i use those documents. i've worked in most of thet important archives that have come down from soviet europe butth i am not alone. many other people are working in these materials, too. one of the things that has happened o, and avalanche of publications a primary source documents. they were secret, the declassified them finally publish them a big fat books. interested in niger of the soviet relations. the germans have their6z versions. the problem ismi too muches material to assimilate. i ami am sure the panelists can sympathize. when you embark on a projectin is big you're buried under mounds of documents but youre want to read the originals o is much as you can is very thin. how you freshen the history. it is the shoe leather work, make the extra phone call, dig through the records one more time.n we get the impression that russia is a civilization the deep, wide, generally clashes with the united states international affairs. russia is seen through a certain lands. i don't say it is unjustified. the final analyst of the kgb said the west is constantly blackening our image. but we are giving them so much material. politics we can't support and so you want to see what the japanese think what the germans think. you want to immerse yourself.d you do as much of that is you can enter limitedff in the amount of time and effort. the moreeffort. the more that you do the better you end up. ultimately there are questions you cannot answer.iz you can humanize evil and it becomes easier to grasp. one of the great things about shakespeare's that he does not explain. you watch the characterha unfold in that spectacularyo language you are not saying connect that to how he wasr humiliated in school, tell us why his mistress did this. t it is just something aboutñ evil that is beyond an easy explanation. racism stuff there is mr. mr. that is okay if you can show the human qualities. the reader can then decide in the end. as i think one would say about stalin. >> i found the language problems to be far more difficult than anticipated. i think you start a book the way that youk fall in love. you find outnd there are a lot of hurdles and itt is hard and 80 and a broken hearted. but the thing that was hard about my previous biography of frances perkins i did not realize how lucky i was it is in modern english. the thing that was very fortunate is the printing press was invented in the late 14 hundreds and in that period of time known to be extraordinarily important and many of the chronicles number written or published in printed volumes early which was invaluable because you cannot read the handwritten letters in the archaic print. we have lostec the ability.d only a handful of people in the world can decipher them. i was able to take them. them.them. the library of congress hasot a fabulous, incredible collection. i photocopied and translated on the margins and that was how i did it. because there has been so much propaganda about isabel in so many different ways i decided one of the things that was essential was to get everything back as closeoc as possible to theum original documentle, the people who were there, witnesses at the time and what they said happened. i used a lot of arabiccu documents but checking to make sure islamic scholars used the same sources as valuable and important, i use, i used translations of the people who had known isabella jews who were in spain in the 1480s and 1490s and remember everything that had happened. a lot of them, when they fled to cyprus records were kept about the recollections h which were invaluable. there was very muchen that haswh been lost for 400 years behind the iron curtain. when the ottoman turks invaded albania in the former yugoslavia it wasyu very brutal. none of us really had a memory of that. aa lid have been put on those accounts in a lot of ways.ai those things, a lot of albanian documents are being translated into english. i paid for translations from that that were invaluable the people inside the ottoman empire and you came back and said what they had seen. i went different places and traveled for the book. all over spain.im and so luckily i got to spend time in spain, bute there was some excellent material in england because they were keeping such a keen eye of a growing spanish empire and there was in france. m i went a great many places. i was extremely lucky. really alexandria library of our times and had a spectacular collection. i was -- i do not think that i could have written a book ifa book if i did not live near washington dc and have access. >> we promised you time to ask questions.ic what is our girl? >> thank you very much. this is a question for professor.? i am wondering if she were doing research were you at times just shaking your head, at this mystery of stalin, this person came, pockmarked, not the most attractive physically. where there are moments when you were just astonished by his rise, his ability -- was - a totally paranoid? i just want to see if you could give a quick description. >> you know, thereknow, theres were times. there still are times when i am surprised and shocked.d this is volume one. [laughter] and there is a lot moreli explaining and writing to do. one of the things that i thought i understood but now i understand much better is the skills he had. h the ability to outsmart, outmaneuver, the coming, you know, we think of strategy as something where you write up a big plan, hundreds of pages long and the execute the planss and more or less you execute according to plan. but if you read the prussian military something happens on the battlefield, completely unexpected. turn it to your advantage. want to fightus and you looked really good. commentator came up with the microphone. you were great out they'rere today. i had ath great plan and that i have punched in the mouth. he had some plans and ideas but his great skill was to seize moments that of this which he perceived as opportunities. the willpower was pretty spectacular.ove i try to lay this out in theth book, how he became the era when it. the skill set that he had. he did not understand fascism which was a pretty big mistake to make. there were moments he failed to seize. as you see him unfold you see all sides of them. inside the dictatorship he is probably your guy. d >> execution jokes. >> how does that inform you that have is yourch perspective change? >> i ended up at the end i very saddened by life. as a woman i was glad to see she had managed to succeedy$ and become a leader and i think that she had someav successes that really have had residence for all of us. a huge proponent of female education without her would there be as many women in the group? there were some things that were good. the things that are happening. it seems like they are exact recaps of things that i saw come across the desk 500 years ago. and that has troubled me and i hope we find people in positions of power can findnd ways to deal with this knew and terrible challenge in ways that are keeping with our core values of religious tolerance.