University. It is an honor and pleasure to have you with us today, eric and what brings us here today is your latest book the splendid and the vile, as all of you probably know eric is the author of fabulous books in the garden of beats, thunderstruck, and white city, i have read most of your books but i have not read your first book, i was intrigued looking at your biography that you wrote a book called the naked consumer, how Companies Plan individual consumers which is a future tense subject, maybe we will have you come back and talk about that one, i also loved on your website which all of you listening should check out, its eric larson books. Com, and love on your website you have an alternative biography which is fantastic and you described the consumer that you really like nobody else did they fiercely doubt that but im going to take a look at that. So welcome and thank you for having me rethink you for being with us. I think we should get right to it, because were having this conversation today of all days i feel like i should ask a question that if you like is on everyones mind, how did Winston Churchill celebrates and go to my. I am kidding. [laughter] that is not one of the things we discussed, and all seriousness we are having this event on zoom as opposed to in person which i wouldve loved because were on lockdown, quarantine, house arrest, choose your term in the face of a Global Pandemic. So i want to read a paragraph from your book, you wrote churchills notion of what constituted the office was expansive, often generals, ministers and Staff 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 and despite hours are each morning going to dispatch and report with a type cedar nearby, always present was the box, black dispatch box and minutes from other officials required his attention, replenished daily by his private secretary. Clearly Winston Churchill was someone who had mastered the art of working from home and Something Real puzzling to do this day in this discussions with your book, im curious as to whether you think churchill would have. And from working from home. Im doing the zoom interview with you right now, i would be in the bathtub and churchill had no sense of that any very likely wouldve been completely naked doing it. But he was an ace work at home or, he would get up relatively late in the morning and get up and work in bed and he had his personal secretary nearby and at all times with the typewriter taking notes, he was more likely to have a panel and frankly more than likely which is very appropriate today would have a tumbler full of water and whiskey very little whiskey but nonetheless was whiskey and water. It is interesting you talk about, we tend to think about the epic relationship, friendship, partnership, alliance, whatever you want to call between fdr and churchill and the Communications Going back and forth between washington but it was interesting reading your book how the early conversations in d. C. When churchill enters office is about the drinking and his overthetop nature of his personality and i guess people were wondering is a summary we can take fiercely . People have noted about churchill but it is a mistake, that he was a drunk or an alcoholic, he certain he was not and in fact it was very close to the private secretary wrote later on that he had never seen churchill drunk or in any way limited by alcohol, churchill himself with his canteen and they said they were criticizing him and he said its taken a lot more out of an alcohol then alcohol is taken out of me. Thats how we felt, and weenies working at home, one thing that resonates today, they spend a lot of time at the Prime Minister every weekend and i actually had to Country Homes and he would be very likely quite at home with this whole situation. I was struck, i did not know this that checkers was donated by somebody, to the government, was that correct . Like at camp david, more of a traditional country home i suppose. In america before the war, i believe he donated it in 1914, dont quote me on that one, the idea of being the checkers was to be used, no work was to be done. It was a place of Prime Ministers then enjoy the countryside and let their faculty restore, churchill of course took that very, very differently and he decided to make this country impact every week and with guest and booze and fun. I have to confess when i first heard this was the subject of your next book, i was intrigued, i felt like i had read quite a lot about this first year churchill began an office in the finest hour and so forth, recently i read i think was Andrew Robertsons biography of churchill and i feel like even for not specialists weve been inundated with books about the great historical character, i mightve skipped this book added not been written by you but having read your other boo books, i felt like he is going to have a new angle and a new insight into framing but wasnt daunting at all, did you write about churchill because he felt like there were two new books written about Abraham Lincoln or what was it that drew you. I was totally in daunting but let me be clear, it was not actually churchill that drew me too this book, churchill became and entered the party a little bit late in the process but what happened, i had decided for a variety of roughly complicated reasons it would be very interesting to look into how it was that people got through the day during the blitz in the German Campaign including the portion as we know as the blitz. How did they actually do it, the reason was i moved from seattle to new york city and another thing i had an epiphany about what 9 11 has been for new yorkers versus perhaps washington in realtime had experienced, world of difference, not just the sense but the sense of violation having your home city attack, thats what made me start writing about how people actually got to the blitz, and then 57 consecutive nights, how do people get through, the original, this is about the typical framework, i thought about that and then i said wait a minute why not the quest essential churchill, his family and advisors, exactly how they got through the day and nobody had actually done that were decided to take a close look at that, at the daytoday experience and thats what really help me get through it, and 0 yes, how much material had been written about church on how much good stuff also and people like andrew roberts, my favorite of the churchill scholars either born writer, so much had been done early on i was happy to make a strategic decision of the search and the idea of reading everything that has ever been written about churchill wrote by churchill which itself was a task and i realized he was there and it would take me a decade and now and then even by the time i got to the tenth year, and would not be done because two more books were, about churchill and i made a decision, i was going to simply read as much as i could to get a sense of churchill and the landscape in the period and then dive right into the archive to see what was really there, thats what i felt most comfortable with original materials and so forth. So thats how i managed to pair things down otherwise it wouldve been overwhelmed, thats not to say every single day for the last four and half years i did not in fact ask myself what am i doing. It was very interesting to see, it did feel like a portrait of churchills orbit 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 are not quite, we dont necessarily see things through their perspective as much in some of the other accounts that i read, you mentioned churchills own writing, one thing that astonished me, roberts biography, i had never realized just how prolific the history he wrote after the war but the fact throughout his life he would always get himself out of the financial holes by his own writing and he was so prolific and commanded quite a lot of money for his journalistic writings earlier in a way that i had not fully appreciated. And it was his writing that got him ultimately out of the financial hole read this is where it comes back about churchill that is a remarkable, he was extremely wellrounded, he was an extremely talented writer and often a quite good painter. All of this went into the machine in churchills brain and it really helped him in the process of trying to lead the nation through this particular crisis of the campaign. It is interesting that you said you gravitated toward this moment by thinking about what it mustve been like to be in new york on 9 11 and multiply that by 57 nights of the blitz and so forth. And then your book comes out in early 2020 and then of course the entire world is fighting off this Global Pandemic which is the next potential challenge for society that is quite different from war although we see people reaching from the analogies, the analogy is unquestionable and the need for leadership to mobilize society to meet the crisis on hand that requires extraordinary efforts and sacrifices. So i want to ask you about that and whether theres a secret sauce for the churchill leadership, before we get to that and you started alluding, before we set the scene, mamay , 1940, amazing day where your account starts, 80 years from this coming sunday i was also thinking about that, to just set the scene of describing what it was that the uk and Winston Churchill were facing. In 1940 which is when the action started in my book was a day that churchill became Prime Minister, the greatest day in his life, i think he would agree this is the thing that he wanted most of all, he became Prime Minister in the rebellion in the house of commons or the consensus was Neville Chamberlain was a Prime Minister and was not up to the challenge of dealing with hitler in germany. But the same day in may 10, 1940 was the day that hitler seemed to be a foaming were and when hitler invaded the low countries, heres a situation where churchill, this is a greatest day of his life was one of the darkest days in the history of the world. This did not. Churchill, this is like added spice to the challenge, youre in charge of this great empire at such a dire time. So he becomes a Prime Minister and this is a crucial moment when you talk about people in particular in the main characters in this book and in other words are really needed to secondary last year, but he was confronting when you talk about next potential threat, the presumption of the time and once germany consolidated over france, the air force is being expelled in the chaos at dunkirk and so forth. Once france fell they would transform in the strategic picture would change prior to france falling in the assumption that france would always stand and this would keep it at bay because the planes would not be fighter escrows particularly and not have the endurance to fly all the way. Suddenly when france followed at the german airbases on the coast of the English Channel was minutes away from england and minutes away from london, something that planners and britain had never even speculated. Assuming you had that threat and very real fear that hitler in germany was going to invade in a cross channel attack, this seems that most people was a certainty, and they thought it was going to be an invasion. If you can imagine taking control of britain at this time when not only has hitler begun invading various countries in europe and succeeding in crushing them, but now suddenly he is facing the expos on till threat in terms of invasion across the channel, what a hellish prospect for any normal but not actually for churchill he took this on time and time again. We were listening to snippets of the speech and his oratory all overall exposed to it in the hollywood rendition, there is obviously the gift of the language but when you think of his recipe for leadership, there is a tendency to focus on the oratory in that ability to communicate and inspire through leveraging the english language, maybe it should not be underestimated, wasnt mostly the great communicator or how much of the ratio of elements its a mix of things, first of all were familiar with the great lines and it never has been moved by from anybody for so few, thats not the strong point of his future unto speeches and at the time that particular line it did not have the same resignations as they had for all of us it is basically a speech, but the thing that made churchill particularly excellent and communicating, not just news and information by communicating a sense of reason for courage is how destructive his speeches. We got a taste of that opening speech at dunkirk, first of all was a great story, he was telling as he was opening, 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 a sober, not happy talk, really down to earth, sometimes to sober into detailed and scared the heck out of them on occasion but then he would follow with comments about real grounds why people should be optimistic and how this problem of dunkirk and potential, how this could be resolved, topic of reason for optimism, not happy talk, real grounds for optimism and then, the route toward goal metaphorically and have people raising insane going to be part of this, were going to take this on and this is how this is going to be. Were going to beat hitler. But there is no other element to churchills leadership, one is this becomes a playoff in terms of its ability to communicate. During this great leader of history, he had an ability to put people in place them into the grand epic of greatest history to make them feel that they were part of a great island story as you would put it, that was very important to make them feel part of a thing and a tradition but also he had a real understanding of the power of symbolic and they want to continue, something as simple as refusing to call hitler by his name, he would say that man or that wicked man and when you think about it, thats a powerful thing, if you dont identify and you dont demonize to the end and makes it seem like its an unimportant presence often a distance. But then in the continuing he would go in the depths of power and found out areas and find himself there and showing himself surveying the damage, talking to people, expressing emotion, he was not afraid of public but also showing his resolve and being there and he was engaging in egregious act and showing the client, this was a very, very powerful thing. , this was a separate example, and then we saw the Vice President mike pence at the mayo clinic without a mask and everybody around him was wearing a mask into think about and the optics of that, possibly appealing to the size of america maybe with somebody like churchill would be wearing that mask and charging around in saying this is what we do. That is the power and the symbolic act. If you engage in symbolic acts that create with audience, you dont wear a mask when your audience knows damn well you should be wearing the mask, that is a problem, that is a problem and undercut your credibility as a leader. Churchill had this to keep the sense of power symbolic acts, another example of that, you certainly seem to be fearless and frankly fearless is infectious and as i like to argue with fearless. Churchill is more than likely to go to a nearest roof and people to win including stack, that is a kind of leader he was. Ive actually been to the bunker, theyve expanded to a nice museum in london, i was there for him and he wasnt going to spend that much time there because he was going to the rooftop. He only spent three nights. One things that fascinates me, i need to talk a little bit of the source, the sense in which we have some realtime information on how people responded to his speeches and so forth through this project of Mass Observation, its when we first read britains war by daniel, a book about the home front and describing the Mass Observation and i guess it was a sociological project, can you describe that a little bit, the equivalent of that would maybe be social media or peoples google searches but talk a little bit about that. So it was a social Science Organization that was founded before the work into create, as its founder said to create a social psychology of ourselves, the idea of being to recruit hundreds o to write about daily life in britain, one way to sharpen their skills and describe things on their mantelpiece, it is that kind of daily personal detail of whats going through these. Here are these viruses and keeping them for Mass Observation. And then the worst start and then it continues to keep diaries, what a tremendous resource. One of my favorite diarist out of the group, young woman who is a clerk for scotland, she is dating a married man ended a love affair with an older man and her diary shows metaphorically what the broader culture in britain was experiencing and how they evolved. Here comes a blitz, she is terrified. This is a shocking thing, up until then the belief was for whatever reason by the german director. She is terrified. Over time she becomes less terrified, Pivotal Moment is when a bomb leans outside of her house and the germans attacked at night there would be send bombs into set things on fire and so the flames with serve as a beacon to follow and an era when flying at night was best done with the moonlight, if you dont have moonlight you had to have these fires. , she was outside of her house and she put out these bombs, she struck this thing out and she was so proud of herself and so related that suddenly she is no longer afraid, she had stood up by this assault from germany and she had the courage to put this thing out, we went out and her lover became, shes quite candidate about her lover and their life. Meanwhile her lover became more and more fearful in my favorite moment is as the story proceeds and the time passes, and they hereto bombs falling and her mother tells for her to get down, get down. That is great. As a mentioned future tense, we are usually focused on our relationshi