Arizona state university. It is really an honor and pleasure to have you with us today, your latest book, a saga of churchills family and defiance and as all of you probably know i am sure eric is the author fabulous books at dead weight in the garden of thieves, thunderstruck, double and white city. I have read most of your books but ive not read your first book, i was intrigued looking at your biography that you wrote a book called the naked consumer how companies spot on individual consumers, its a very future tense subject, maybe well have you come back and talk about that. I also love on your website, all of you should listen and check out, i think its air clarkson books. Com, i love on your website you have an alternative biography which is fantastic and you describe it as a book that you really like it nobody else did. I seriously doubt the foot im going to take a look at that. So welcome and thank you for having me on. Thank you for viewing with us. I think we should get right to it and because im having this conversation today of all days i feel like i should ask the question that im sure is on everyones mind and that is how did Winston Churchill celebrate cinco de mayo. Ron house arrest, choose your turn in the face of the Global Pandemic. I just want to read a paragraph from your book, you wrote churchills notion of what constituted an office is what expands us, generals, ministers in fact members would find themselves meeting with churchill while he was in his bathtub, one of his Favorite Places to work. He also liked working in bed despite hours there each morning going through dispatches in the court with a seated nearby, always present was the box, the black dispatch box with the correspondent in minutes from others acquiring his attention. Replenished they rebu daily by s private secretary. He was someone who had mastered the art of working from home and we are all struggling to do these days. Maybe not the place of these conversations usually start but im really curious if you think churchill mortals from working on him. When i was doing the zoom interview with you right now i would be in the bathtub. Churchill had no sense and very likely wouldve been completely naked doing it. He was an ace work at home her and he would get up late in the morning and he would work in bed and he had his personal secretary nearby and at all times with the typewriter taking notes and he would more than likely would have, this is very appropriate for today, a tumbler full of water in whiskey, nonetheless whiskey and water. It is interesting that you talk about we tend to think of this epic relationship, friendship, partnership, alliance whatever we want to call it between fdr and churchill in the communication going back and forth between washington and london and the summits. But it was interesting reading your book how the early conversations in d. C. When churchill first enters office is about the drinking and the overthetop nature of his personality and i guess people were wondering is if somebody we can take seriously. Drinking is something that people have noted about churchill but its a mistake to ever think he was a drunk or an alcoholic, he was certainly not. His private secretary wrote later on that he had never seen churchill drunk or even in any way be limited by alcohol. Churchill even said that he was criticized for drinking and he said its taken a lot more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me. So thats how he felt. Not exactly working from home aspect. Some that resonates today, churchill spent a lot of time at the Prime Minister every week and in dividing his time between two country homes. He wouldve been very likely quite at home with the whole situation. I did not know this, checkers was donated by somebody, the government, was not correct as a camp david, more of a traditional country home i suppose. In america, before the war, well before the war, i believe he donated in 1914, dont quote me on that one, the idea being the checkers was to be used, no work was to be done. It was a place Prime Ministers could enjoy the countryside and let their faculty restore, churchill of course took that very, very differently, he decided to make this country a command post and every weekend with guest and booze and fun. I have to confess, when i first heard this is the subject of your next book, i was intrigued, i feel like i had read quite a lot about this first year of churchills being in office in the finest hour in the blitz and so forth. And recently i read Andrew Roberts biography of churchill and i feel like a lot of us, even if were not specialist, weve been inundated with books about the great historical character and i might escape this book had it not been written by you but having read your other books, i felt like hes going to have a new angle, new insight, some new framing but was it daunting at all, did you write about churchill because you thought there were too many books written about Abraham Lincoln or what was it the dream. I was totally undaunted and let me be clear, it was not churchill that drew me too do this book, churchill became and entered the party a little bit late in the process because i happen i had decided for complicated reasons that it would be very interesting to look into how it was that people got through the day during the blitz in the German Campaign and that portion of the blitz, how did they actually do it, the reason was that my wife and i had move from seattle to new york city. No sooner that i moved to new york city i had an epiphany of what 9 11 had been like for new yorkers versus realtime had experience. Its a world of different, not just the sense of sight but the violation of having your home city attacked and thats what made me started thinking about how people got to the blitz, if you can imagine 57 consecutive nights of bombing, how did people get through, my original thought, maybe the typical moment, so i thought about that and i said wait a minute, why not about churchill, his family and his advisors to see how they got to the day, when nobody actually done that, nobody decided to take a close look of the daytoday experience and thats a really help me get through. Was i dante, 0 yes. How much material had written about churchill and how much good stuff also, Andrew Roberts, hes my favorite at the churchill scholars, hes a brilliant writer. So much had been done that i had to make a strategic decision of how i would search the idea of everything that had ever been written about churchill or bar churchill which would have been a task and i realized to be a fool it would take me a decade and even then the time haycock toothed at the would not be done because eight more books would come out about churchill, i made a strategic decision, i was simply going to read as much as i could and get a sense of churchill in the landscape in that. And then i would write into the archives to see what was there and thats the most comfortable with original materials and so forth. And thats how i. Things down and otherwise i wouldve been overwhelmed and every single day for the last four and half years that i did not ask myself, what am i doing. It was very interesting to see how, it did feel like a portrait of churchills orbit, you are looking and we were often seen churchill and the historical moment through the eyes of his personal secretary or his daughter or other advisors that sometimes we dont necessarily see things through their perspective in some of the other accounts. You mentioned his own writing, one thing that astonished me was his biography and i had never realized just how prolific, with a history he wrote after the work but throughout his life he would always get himself out of financial holes by his own writing you so prolific and commanded a lot of money for his journalistic. His writing that got him out of the financial hole. This is something about churchill that is a remarkable, he was extremely well read, an extremely talented writer, and often a quick container. In all this went into the machine, churchills brain and it really helped him in trying to lead the nation through this crisis at the german air campaign. It is interesting that you said you gravitated toward the moment by thinking about what it mustve been like in new york and 9 11 and multiply that by 57 nights of the blitz and so forth and then your book comes out in early 2020 and of course we are now the entire world is fighting off the Global Pandemic which is an exponential challenge to our society that is quite different from war although we see people reaching for the analogies, the analogy is unquestionable and the need for leadership to mobilize society to meet the crisis at hand that requires extraordinary efforts and sacrifices. I want to ask you about that and whether there is a secret sauce with the churchill leadership, before we get to that and you started alluding to this, set the scene of may 10, 1940, an amazing day in history its where your account starts, 80 years from this coming sunday, im thinking about that in preparation, set the scene in terms of describing what the uk and Winston Churchill were facing. In 1940 which is when the action starts in my book was the day that churchill became Prime Minister, the greatest day in his life, it wasnt the thing he wanted most of all, he became preminister, rebellion in the house of commons or the consensus was that the Prime Minister was not up to the challenge of dealing with hitler in germany. In the same day was the day the hitler, the phony work used to be a phony war became a hot shooting were when hitler invaded the countrys. So heres the situation where churchill, the greatest day of his life and also one of the darkest days in the history of the world. This did not daunt churchill, this is like added spice to the challenge, he was in charge of this great empire as such a dire time it thrilled him. He becomes the Prime Minister and this is a crucial element because we talk about the people in particular in the main character in this book and i think in other words have been relegated to the secondary and he could be a candidate but he immediately is confronting you talk about exponential threats, the presumption at the time was that once germany consolidated over france in the forces being expelled, it was developed about the chaos and dunker and so forth. Once france was going to fall, the entire strategic picture would change. Prior to france falling and the assumption was that france would always stand in this would be the planes that would not be fighter experts and would not have the endurance to fly all the way to britain. Suddenly with france falling, there were german airbases on the coast of the English Channel in just minutes away from england and minutes away from london something that planners had never even speculated on. Some you have that threat in very real fear that hitler in germany was going to invade in a cross channel attack, this seemed to most people at that time to be a certainty. And if they had superiority, it was going to be innovation. If you can imagine taking control of britain, at this time would not only has hitler began invading various countries in europe and succeeding in crushing them, now hes facing an exponential threat across the channel. What a prospect but not for churchill. He took this on with agusta who came through time and time aga again. We were listening to the speech and his oratory and weve all been exposed to and there had been hollywood renditions. And obviously he had a gift of language that when you think of his recipe for leadership, i think theres a tendency to focus on the oratory and the ability to communicate and inspire through the english language should not be underestimated but was it most simply that he was a good communicator or how much of the ratio of the elements in success was that . It was a mix of things, were all familiar with the great lines that we never had so much by so many by sophia, i would argue thats not the strong point of his speeches and at the time, that particular line did not necessarily have the same resignations of the does not for us and its basically just a speech. But the thing that made churchill in particular excellent as communicating not just news and communication but communicating a sense of reason for courage, how his speeches are. The opening speech about dunkirk. Its a great storyteller, he was telling as you heard in his opening moment, he was telling it as a story, this is what was happening, this is how it was unfolding, a thrilling story if you think about it. What he would do, he would give his audience an appraisal and not happy talk, just a downtoearth, sometimes too sober into detailed and he scared the heck out of them on occasion. Then he would follow with comments about real grounds to white people should be optimistic, how this problem of dunkirk and potential for german invasion, how this can be resolved in a positive reason for optimism. Not happy talk, real grounds for optimism. And then become a rhetorical flourish at the end and have people rising from their seats and say all be part of this, were going to take this guy on dammit and this is how were gonna be hitler. That was a very powerful thing but theres another element to churchill leadership. One is this becomes a play in terms of his ability to communicate. Him being a great leader of history, he had an ability to put people into the grand epic of history to make them feel as if they were part of a great island story as you would put it. Thats very important to make them feel part of the thing and a great tradition and also he had a real understanding of a symbolic act. This is something as simple as using to call hitler by his name. He would say that man or that wicked man. If you think about it, its a very powerful thing, if you dont identify and you dont demonize your end, makes you seem like a presence from a distance. But then the under and of this continuum, even though the power and the bond that areas insuring himself there and surveying the damage, talking to people, expressing emotion of weeping in public, and also showing his resolve and in people being there and engaging in a courageous act and showing defiance, it was a powerful thing. And just to give you a contemporary example. I had to laugh the other day when we sell Vice President mike pence at the clinic without a mask and everybody else around him is wearing a mask into think of the optics of that, possibly appealing with the american maybe, but churchill would be wearing the mask and charging around and saying this is what we do. In the symbolical acts. If you engage in symbolic acts that creates distance, you dont wear a mask when your audience knows damn well you should wear the mask, its a problem, that undercut your credibility as a leader. Churchill had this acute sense of power of symbolic acts. Another example by the way, he certainly seemed to be confused. Churchill was more than likely to go on the nearest roof and to bring people with him including staff. That is where he was. Ive actually been to the bunker that theyve expanded to a nice museum in london, i was there for him and of course he was not going to spend that much time there because he was under the rooftop. One of the things that fascinates me, we need to talk a little bit about this as a source, the sense of which we have some realtime information on how people responded to his speeches and so forth through the project of Mass Observation, something i first read by daniel todd lynn, the home front in describing the Mass Observation phenomenon. It was a sociological project, can you describe that little b bit, i dont know what todays equivalent would be, i dont know if it be social media or peoples google searches,. A social scientist organization and to create a social psychology of ourselves, the idea to recruit hundreds to write about daily life in britain, the continuing things, for your credibility to sharpen their skills in their mantelpiece, it is that daily the cut of whats going to be and the Mass Observation in the worst part, the virus to continue, what a tremendous result, one of my favorite virus of the Mass Observation group, a young woman, Olivia Crockett who is a clerk for scotland, she is dating a married man, shes in this love affair with an older man and her diary shows a metaphorically what the broader culture in britain was excreting and how they evolved. Here comes a blitz in 1940, she is terrified, again like everybody else in london, this is a shocking thing, up until in the belief was for out of her reason it is not going to be attacked by german bombers directly. She is terrified, overtime she becomes less terrified and its a Pivotal Moment for her when they land outside her house and the germans attack at night and they would first drop a lot of things in their bombs inc. Is in setting things on fire, the flames would serve as a beacon for bombers to follow because its an era when flying at night in the moonlight, if you did not have moonlight you need fires. So she was outside her house, she put out the bombs and snuff this out, she was so proud of herself, so we lighted that suddenly she was no longer afraid, she had stood to this assault from germany and she had the courage to do this and put this thing out. Meanwhile her lover, she was quite candid about her lover in their sex life. Her lover became more and more fearful in my favorite moment as the story proceeds in time passes, as an airway begins to occur in the hereto bombs falling, it has a distinct sound, the hereto bombs falling and her lover tells her to get down, get down and she says that is great. So as i mentioned future tense, were usually focused on our relationship to technology and the impact of technology in society, part of the reason i wanted to have this conversation with you, other than the fact that im a fan of your book and a history buff, there is a future tense connection which one of the other things i was struck by reading your book, however, familiar i may or may not of been with churchill is that you really portray him, i dont know if youd call him a technologist in todays words but a tech enthusiast and the character professor lindemann is an interesting one, his goal as churchill circle, if you can talk a little bit about that relationship in churchills relationship assigned to technology, clearly weather was radar or everything that were familiar with, technology was a huge part of turning the tide in the allies in particular english contributions. That w