The Art of Manliness - #447： On Grand Strategy

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00:01:34.020 Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.

00:01:37.940 The ancient Greek poet Archilochus said,

00:01:39.860 A fox knows many things, but a hedgehog one important thing.

00:01:43.480 The original meaning of the quote has been lost in the midst of time,

00:01:45.920 but my guest today argues that it's a great metaphor for classifying two types of leadership strategies.

00:01:50.640 His name is John Lewis Gattis, and he's a Pulitzer Prize winning author,

00:01:53.680 an expert on the Cold War, and a professor of military history at Yale University.

00:01:57.300 Today, Professor Gattis and I talk about his book on grand strategy,

00:02:00.440 in which he distills insights about strategy from political and military history,

00:02:03.780 going all the way back to antiquity.

00:02:05.480 We begin our conversation discussing what strategy is and what it means to have grand strategy.

00:02:09.280 John then shares the analogy of the fox and the hedgehog

00:02:11.620 and the benefits and downsides to each approach to thinking and acting.

00:02:14.500 We then discussed why the best strategists combine fox-like and hedgehog-like mindsets,

00:02:19.180 examples from history of great leaders who had both,

00:02:21.340 and how he helps the students see the relationship between principle and practice.

00:02:24.980 After the show's over, check out the show notes at aom.is slash grand strategy.

00:02:39.060 All right, Professor John Gattis, welcome to the show.

00:02:41.880 Thank you, Brad. Pleasure to be here.

00:02:44.860 Today, we're going to talk about your book on grand strategy.

00:02:47.620 But before we do, tell us about the seminar that you teach at Yale University called Studies in Grand Strategy.

00:02:53.420 Because I think it's interesting.

00:02:54.340 It's a class that's co-taught by a civilian historian, which I imagine is you,

00:02:59.560 also with a military instructor.

00:03:02.040 And you look at military and political strategy going back all the way to the ancient Greeks.

00:03:06.020 I can see this something that, you know, this could be a course at the Naval War College, where you taught at.

00:03:11.420 So how did a seminar like this end up at Yale University?

00:03:15.180 Yeah.

00:03:15.640 Well, in fact, it was a course at the Naval War College.

00:03:18.680 And this is where I first got interested in grand strategy, something like, gosh, in the 1970s, a long time ago.

00:03:27.460 And this was Admiral Stansfield Turner, who was then the president of the Naval War College,

00:03:33.040 who hired me as a very junior instructor, along with some others, to teach classical text to military officers just back from Vietnam.

00:03:42.240 And none of us had any experience with this.

00:03:44.840 We were just thrown into this.

00:03:46.620 I, alongside a Marine colonel, who was my teaching partner.

00:03:50.920 So I was pretty, pretty spooked by this at first, but became comfortable with it.

00:03:57.580 And I've been interested ever since in the idea of approaching grand strategy from classical text.

00:04:04.580 I've been interested in how to teach it.

00:04:06.920 And I've been interested in collaborative teaching, that is, teaching alongside professorial colleagues,

00:04:13.440 but also military colleagues, who I think can add quite a bit to the course.

00:04:17.800 And who are the type of students at Yale that take a course on grand strategy?

00:04:22.980 When we started the course, Brett, which was in the year 2000,

00:04:26.280 we thought that it would only appeal to graduate students because the reading load was daunting.

00:04:32.060 It was an assumption of considerable prior knowledge, that kind of thing.

00:04:36.540 We could not have been more wrong.

00:04:38.720 The graduate students were uncomfortable with the course because it was far too general

00:04:43.300 and not focused in the way that they are used to focusing at the graduate level.

00:04:48.740 But the undergraduates took to it immediately.

00:04:50.960 The undergraduates infiltrated the course, took it over,

00:04:54.440 and it's been primarily an undergraduate course for sophomores, juniors, and seniors ever since.

00:05:00.720 That's interesting.

00:05:01.360 I think that's really funny how that turned out that way.

00:05:03.940 So let's talk about grand strategy.

00:05:06.480 But let's be good Platonists or Socratics. 1.00

00:05:10.140 We've got to start with definitions because these words strategy gets thrown around a lot.

00:05:15.860 So what is strategy?

00:05:18.620 Well, I would say, and I say in the book, that strategy is the business of linking up aspirations,

00:05:25.080 which can be anything that you want them to be, anything that you can dream about.

00:05:30.580 Aspirations are potentially unlimited, but they always have to be linked up with capabilities

00:05:36.460 because capabilities are never unlimited.

00:05:40.120 And so that's the trick.

00:05:41.680 That is what we go through life doing, is linking up limited capabilities with unlimited aspirations.

00:05:49.780 And I tell the students that what makes a strategy grand is its level of importance to them.

00:05:56.440 So I tell them that going out to get a pizza and deciding where to go is not grand strategy.

00:06:01.440 That's probably a petite strategy. 1.00

00:06:04.360 But life choices, whether it's choosing a major or whether it's choosing someone to fall in love with

00:06:10.160 or whether it's choosing a profession or whether it's making great decisions within that profession,

00:06:16.040 these are all grand issues to the people who are doing it.

00:06:19.300 And that's my definition, which is admittedly broader than what most experts on this subject would consider appropriate.

00:06:26.520 One thing I've seen happen a lot is people confuse strategy for tactics.

00:06:32.140 Right.

00:06:32.440 So how does strategy differ from tactics?

00:06:35.500 I think there is no sharp line that divides them.

00:06:39.280 It seems to me that tactics obviously relate more to immediate efforts that you're making as opposed to long-term planning.

00:06:48.480 But I don't see any boundary really between these two things.

00:06:51.680 I think one shades into the other because what happens at the tactical level, what happens when you try taking the next hill or crossing the next river,

00:07:01.460 can certainly affect your larger objectives.

00:07:04.560 Something as small as that can be the difference between victory and defeat.

00:07:09.560 So in the end, I think it's a gradation between them rather than a sharp line.

00:07:14.500 Gotcha.

00:07:14.600 So you begin your book on grand strategy by introducing an aphorism that I think a lot of people may have heard.

00:07:21.720 Maybe not so much young people, because it doesn't get thrown around that much these days.

00:07:26.140 But it's this.

00:07:26.940 It's the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.

00:07:31.680 So where did that phrase originate from and how does it relate to strategy?

00:07:36.300 Well, it goes back actually to the ancient Greeks, to a somewhat obscure Greek poet, Archilochus of Paros, who left it only as a fragment.

00:07:45.620 So we have no idea what he meant by it.

00:07:47.580 It's just something that by accident survived.

00:07:50.460 But the modern inspiration for it comes from Sir Isaiah Berlin, a philosopher at Oxford, who loved to go to parties.

00:07:59.700 And at a party in Oxford in 1939, someone who was studying classics, quoted this aphorism to Berlin.

00:08:09.240 And Berlin thought it was really neat.

00:08:11.200 And he said, let's play a game.

00:08:13.080 Let's classify great writers and thinkers as to whether they are foxes or hedgehogs.

00:08:19.040 And so that's how it started out.

00:08:21.520 But Berlin revived it in the 1950s as just the framework and the title for an essay on Tolstoy.

00:08:28.280 And the framework, the foxes and the hedgehogs, the animals, quickly overshadowed the subject of the essay, which was poor Tolstoy, who got left behind.

00:08:38.440 And it was the equivalent of going viral back in the early 1950s before there was such a thing as the Internet.

00:08:46.140 And it's been with us ever since.

00:08:48.840 So how do you connect that to strategy?

00:08:52.620 So fox knows many things.

00:08:55.120 Hedgehog knows one big thing.

00:08:56.220 Well, I think, first of all, the best connection for it is just a trick of teaching, Brett.

00:09:03.580 If you want people to remember things, turn them into animals.

00:09:06.840 This always works.

00:09:07.960 So that's why Berlin's aphorism took off, I think, Archilochus' aphorism.

00:09:13.260 And it's a starting point for the book.

00:09:15.140 It's also too simple, of course, because it implies that people are one or the other.

00:09:21.340 In fact, I argue in the book people have to be both.

00:09:24.700 It's important to know where you're going, which could be the one big thing.

00:09:29.320 But it's important also to know what's around you and what you're likely to run into, which is knowing many things.

00:09:35.360 And so I try to have some case studies in the book of historical figures who were firmly one or the other but could not master whatever the opposite was.

00:09:46.540 And then I have other case studies of people who I think did, for one reason or another, manage to be both.

00:09:53.860 And more important, they knew when to be which.

00:09:56.660 And so if there was a simple one-liner as to what the book is about, it's this.

00:10:02.340 How can you be both a fox and a hedgehog and know when to be which?

00:10:08.140 Gotcha. So let's talk about some of these case studies that show someone who's clearly just a hedgehog and someone who's clearly a fox.

00:10:14.960 So the one that I liked, you start off with the book with, is Xerxes, the Persian king crossing the Hellespont.

00:10:21.400 So what can Xerxes teach us about foxes and hedgehogs?

00:10:24.900 Well, it's a great scene to open a book with because it's in Herodotus.

00:10:28.740 It's Xerxes standing on a mountain overlooking the Hellespont, having built pontoon bridges across the Hellespont.

00:10:35.280 This is in 480 BC and crossing a great army into Europe to invade Greece.

00:10:42.120 And he's looking down at this and his uncle, Artabanus, who is an advisor, according to Herodotus, tugs at the king's sleeves and says, looking down,

00:10:53.680 Sire, are you really sure you want to do this?

00:10:56.260 And it was a little bit late to be asking that question.

00:10:58.660 But they immediately launch into two very typical statements for foxes and hedgehogs.

00:11:05.700 Artabanus, who is a fox, says that there are all kinds of things that could go wrong along the way before you ever meet the enemy.

00:11:14.060 The armies are so big that they will drink rivers dry before they cross them.

00:11:17.840 There's not enough food along the way.

00:11:20.200 There are lions in the mountains who may eat your camels.

00:11:23.280 And they're not ports along the way, no ports for the ships and so on.

00:11:27.680 So you could be weakened.

00:11:29.160 You could be defeated before you ever begin to meet some patriotic Greeks who will fight back. 1.00

00:11:35.280 And Xerxes draws himself up and Artabanus says, you have to think of everything.

00:11:40.420 Xerxes draws himself up and says, Artabanus, if I had to think of everything, I would never do anything.

00:11:47.460 And so he orders the invasion to go forward.

00:11:51.560 Well, what happened was exactly what Artabanus foresaw.

00:11:54.860 All of these things came together so that by the time Xerxes actually got to Athens and was able to capture the city and burn the Acropolis and whatnot, he was in a severely weakened position.

00:12:06.660 And the Greeks finally were able to defeat his fleet just outside of Athens in a great battle, the Battle of Salamis.

00:12:13.520 But at the same time, if it had been left to Artabanus, nothing would have happened.

00:12:18.860 Everybody would have turned around and they would have dismantled the bridges and gone home.

00:12:22.440 So that was a little bit implausible too.

00:12:25.000 So I pose those as a polarity.

00:12:27.280 It's a beautiful case study in polarities.

00:12:29.740 But then I try to look at the people who managed for one reason or another or in some way or another to be both thinking of everything, but at the same time retaining one big thing as a focus.

00:12:42.580 And who would be a good example of combining the two?

00:12:46.140 Well, I think my best early example is Octavian, who later became the Emperor Augustus, the first emperor of Rome, who was designated by Julius Caesar as his heir at the age of 18.

00:12:59.500 And this was when Caesar was assassinated.

00:13:02.180 Octavian was 18.

00:13:04.180 He had nothing.

00:13:05.020 He navigated so skillfully among the politics and the rivals of Rome that by age 20, he was one of a triumvirate ruling the city.

00:13:15.480 And by age 30, he was ruling the world.

00:13:18.640 So it's a very rapid ascent.

00:13:20.700 It's a very skillful ascent.

00:13:21.940 And it's a very good example of starting from weakness and winding up with strength by playing adversaries off against each other.

00:13:30.380 What's interesting about Octavian is having conquered the world at age 30, he then decided that the empire that he ruled, the Roman Empire itself, was now big enough.

00:13:43.760 There was nothing else left to conquer.

00:13:46.760 And he could turn to consolidating and cultivating institutions that would embed the Roman Empire over the long term for the future.

00:13:56.040 And so he shifts from being a fox to a hedgehog.

00:14:00.080 But I think he was always both along the way.

00:14:02.760 He saw that sequence and balanced it magnificently.

00:14:06.720 So he's the first of my combined foxes and hedgehogs.

00:14:10.960 But I have others.

00:14:12.120 I put Queen Elizabeth I in that category for sure.

00:14:16.260 I put the Founding Fathers of the United States to some extent in that category.

00:14:21.080 Certainly Lincoln falls into this category and certainly Franklin Roosevelt falls into this category as well.

00:14:28.400 All confronting different situations, but all very skillful in their ability to hang on to a big long term destination while being extremely flexible as to how they got there and what they dealt with.

00:14:41.020 Yeah, the Lincoln example, you talk about this sort of antidote story of him talking about compasses and swamps that sort of encapsulate.

00:14:48.600 So tell us that.

00:14:49.300 Well, it's actually a fake story as far as I can tell, Brett.

00:14:52.820 I don't think it ever happened.

00:14:54.340 But it's in the Lincoln movie.

00:14:56.020 It's in Spielberg, Steven Spielberg's Lincoln movie.

00:14:58.800 Tony Kushner wrote the screenplay for this.

00:15:01.960 And it's a scene in the movie toward the end of the movie when Lincoln is trying to get the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery once and for all, through the House of Representatives.

00:15:12.240 It's early 1865.

00:15:14.140 And Lincoln is wheeling and dealing and bribing and intimidating and pontificating and everything you can think of short of murder to get twist enough arms to get that vote through the House of Representatives, which would abolish slavery once and for all.

00:15:30.860 And Thaddeus Stevens, in the movie, who's played by Tommy Lee Jones, asks Lincoln how he can possibly justify such malodorous methods in the pursuit of such a noble objective.

00:15:43.240 And Lincoln, played by Daniel Day-Lewis, just points out that as a youth, as a surveyor, he knew the value of having a compass.

00:15:53.140 A compass told him where True North was.

00:15:56.300 He could find the proper direction just by looking down at his compass.

00:16:00.360 But if all he did was to look at the compass and nothing else, he could easily fall off a cliff or stumble into a swamp or starve in a desert or something.

00:16:10.440 So he had to be both things.

00:16:12.320 He had to be looking at the compass, but he had to have situational awareness also of what was around him.

00:16:19.180 And I think that, in a nutshell, exemplifies what leadership is when it combines the attributes of the hedgehog and the fox.

00:16:28.460 And what's interesting about all these individuals, even going back to ancient Greece, there weren't a lot of text about strategy like we have today.

00:16:39.160 So what are some of the famous strategists who made explicit these implicit ideas that Octavian was using, that Xerxes knew or was using or not using?

00:16:52.460 When did that start happening?

00:16:53.600 Well, I think the starting point for writing about this, of course, is Thucydides and his great history of the Peloponnesian War.

00:17:02.460 This is the war between the Athenians and the Spartans, which breaks out in the late 430s BC.

00:17:08.840 And it's not that Thucydides is putting forward himself some particular grand strategy, but in his extremely detailed history, he is writing about the grand strategies of the belligerents in this war.

00:17:25.100 It's probably not the case that they actually thought of themselves as having grand strategies because this term was not yet widely known.

00:17:32.580 But the Spartans had traditionally followed a strategy simply of cultivating military power and being more powerful than anybody else in Greece and thereby intimidating all possible opponents.

00:17:47.140 And the Athenians concluded they could not possibly compete with these military skills, but they were a maritime power.

00:17:55.620 They were a naval power, something that Sparta was not.

00:17:59.880 And so they embraced a strategy for simply walling off their city, the city of Athens and the port of Piraeus, from the rest of Attica, so that when war came, they could just bring everybody in within the walls. 0.98

00:18:13.140 They could rely on their ships and their colonies elsewhere in the Aegean to supply them, and they could wear the Spartans down in this way.

00:18:22.140 So it's almost as if the Spartans decided on the grand strategy of a tiger and the Athenians decided on the grand strategy of a shark.

00:18:31.480 Two very, very different approaches in a common struggle.

00:18:35.820 So nobody articulated that.

00:18:37.700 We can just conclude it from what Thucydides tells us of what happened.

00:18:42.320 But it has become a model for people thinking about grand strategy ever since.

00:18:46.340 And in fact, it's exactly what I was teaching back at the Naval War College long ago in the 1970s that first got me interested in this subject.

00:18:56.060 We're going to take a quick break for you, Ward, from our sponsors.

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00:21:22.600 Yeah, and you had individuals in the East, like Sun Tzu, making explicit this idea of, you know, you have to be flexible in your military strategy.

00:21:34.120 And then I guess the big treatise on strategy that came out was Clausewitz.

00:21:38.940 That was probably the most – tell us about Clausewitz.

00:21:41.000 What was his idea about grand strategy?

00:21:43.580 Well, part of the problem – Clausewitz, first of all, was a Prussian officer who, when Napoleon defeated Prussia, became disgusted and actually joined the Russians instead.

00:21:57.700 And so he was on the Russian side in 1812 when Napoleon invaded Russia.

00:22:03.100 After that was all over, he wrote a great book, which is probably the greatest of all books on grand strategy, called On War.

00:22:10.340 And this was published in 1830, a year after Clausewitz died.

00:22:16.320 He never actually completed this text.

00:22:18.880 It's incomplete.

00:22:20.180 It's fragmentary.

00:22:21.700 It's sometimes repetitive.

00:22:23.800 It has the complication, of course, of having been written originally in German, so it depends on the quality of the translations if you're reading it in English.

00:22:31.660 It's been debated by strategists ever since it came out.

00:22:35.760 But if you read it in a certain way, if you read it, as I say in the book, from a high altitude, trying to look at the overall picture instead of trying to find consistency of detail in it, it is profoundly sophisticated in its view of grand strategy.

00:22:52.840 And what is, I think, so sophisticated about it, what is so rewarding about it, is that it's a work of theory, for sure.

00:23:01.420 So it's meant to guide the hand and the mind of future strategists.

00:23:06.800 But at the same time, it's a theory of when not to have a theory.

00:23:11.640 So it explains that theories cannot cope with all situations.

00:23:15.840 There are too many uncertainties in the application of theory.

00:23:19.680 Clausewitz himself called it friction and coined the use of the term friction to describe what he also calls the fog of war.

00:23:29.180 And his point is simply that no theory can predict everything that can possibly go wrong.

00:23:36.140 So you could ask the question, well, why have a theory in the first place?

00:23:40.360 And Clausewitz says, well, it's a little bit like military training.

00:23:44.060 Anybody who's venturing onto a battlefield will bring, any officer who's venturing onto a battlefield, will bring some training to that experience.

00:23:54.660 But the battle will never go in just the way that the training prepared that person for.

00:24:00.040 You have to be willing, you have to be able to respond instantly to situations as they're developing.

00:24:06.120 But nobody would say that somebody will fight more effectively on a battlefield for having had no training at all.

00:24:12.920 So training is important in that sense, but it does not predict the future.

00:24:17.200 And I think that's Clausewitz.

00:24:18.500 Right. So relying on theories is what a hedgehog would do.

00:24:22.060 Well, this is where it's complicated because you cannot quite easily fit Clausewitz into the fox-hedgehog dichotomy.

00:24:29.260 And I tried to use the fox-hedgehog dichotomy as a starting point.

00:24:33.960 That, in fact, is how Isaiah Berlin characterized it, only as a starting point for further investigation.

00:24:40.080 But I did not try to cram all the people subsequently who make appearances in the book into one or the other category.

00:24:47.060 I was really more interested in showing how you can be both.

00:24:51.300 And I think it's Clausewitz more than anyone else who gives us a theory on how you can be both, which is to be skeptical of theory.

00:24:58.700 I know that's a paradox, but that's Clausewitz.

00:25:01.680 It sounds a lot like we've had Robert Corum on the podcast talk about John Boyd and his OODA loop.

00:25:08.540 And Boyd basically just kind of built off of Clausewitz.

00:25:13.300 And the whole idea is the OODA loop is you have the idea of mental models that you take apart and put back together in different places.

00:25:20.600 And the first person, the competitor that can do that the fastest will win the competition.

00:25:25.100 Yes, of course.

00:25:25.620 But I would say mental models, John Boyd's concept, doesn't quite get at what Clausewitz is talking about because I think that makes it sound a little bit too formal.

00:25:35.480 Clausewitz was himself profoundly skeptical of models, and he saw them as great oversimplifications.

00:25:41.760 What he trusted, what he sought to incorporate into his thinking was simply experience.

00:25:49.780 And that's different from a model.

00:25:52.060 Experience is the strength that you need, the stamina that you need, the level-headedness that you need, the ability to remain calm when bullets are flying around you.

00:26:02.440 But I doubt very much that most people who are on battlefields are thinking about mental models right at that point.

00:26:09.900 They're thinking at a much more immediate and elemental level.

00:26:14.600 And Clausewitz knew this because he was a combat officer.

00:26:17.240 He had actually, he was drawing on the experience of being at the Battle of Bardino when he wrote his great book.

00:26:23.900 And so I think he knows what combat is like.

00:26:28.360 So did John Boyd, of course.

00:26:30.320 But the Uta model, it does seem to me, formalizes it a little bit more than Clausewitz would be comfortable with.

00:26:38.480 The metaphor I like, Brett, is simpler.

00:26:41.620 It's simply coaching in athletics.

00:26:43.860 If you think about what a coach does, the coach draws on the history and the lore of the game, how it has been well played and how it's been badly played in the past.

00:26:54.200 He makes sure that his young athletes know this stuff.

00:26:58.020 He puts them through strength building, exercises, discipline.

00:27:01.720 He teaches them how to fail and how to recover, all of these things.

00:27:05.600 But when they get out on the playing field, whatever the game is, there's not much left that the coach can do but just jump up and down on the sidelines.

00:27:13.440 And perhaps destroy a chair or something like that.

00:27:16.940 It's up to the guys that are playing the game to make the snap instant decisions.

00:27:21.260 I think that's consistent with Uta, but I think it's a little bit simpler and maybe even easier to grasp.

00:27:27.200 Because if you're teaching students and you put it in these terms, they immediately understand what you're talking about.

00:27:33.700 Yeah.

00:27:33.880 Wasn't it Clausewitz that talked about a good leader decision maker develops like a fingertip touch or is that Napoleon?

00:27:42.220 Something like that.

00:27:43.200 Yes.

00:27:43.620 The point that he was making, the point that others make, is that when you're in a crisis, you've got to have your training either at your fingertips or at whatever the intellectual equivalent of fingertips might be.

00:27:57.920 You've got to be able to draw on this instantly.

00:28:00.580 It's quick impressions in the sense of sizing up the situation, which is, I think, what Uta means by observation, but also quick impressions as to how you deal with that.

00:28:14.220 And Uta does refer to acting faster than the adversary does.

00:28:19.460 And that, I think, is consistent with Clausewitz.

00:28:24.120 But I just find that it's easier to explain coaching and athletics to students than it is to explain Uta.

00:28:30.980 Uta requires a PowerPoint slide.

00:28:33.940 Explaining coaching does not require that.

00:28:35.800 And that's an asset, in my view.

00:28:38.340 So one thing you talk about throughout the book is that some of these leaders who were able to encapsulate both hedgehog thinking, fox thinking, they were able to connect that grand vision to the day-to-day, the practice.

00:28:53.860 One of the issues is that once you've gained success, there's a tendency to become more of a hedgehog.

00:29:00.820 Like you mentioned Octavian.

00:29:02.500 Why does that happen?

00:29:04.420 What's going on there?

00:29:05.620 Well, for that one, we actually have social science evidence to confirm it.

00:29:10.060 And I'm referring to the political psychologist Phil Tetlock, who was, in the 1980s, began a very elaborate study of decision-making.

00:29:18.560 Why do some people seem able to predict the future accurately and others don't?

00:29:25.920 And so being a social scientist, what he did was to collect thousands of predictions on public issues from hundreds of public intellectuals and code them and arrange them and categorize them and whatnot.

00:29:41.060 And then revisit them some five years later, 10 years later, 15 years later, and rate them for accuracy.

00:29:48.780 And the problem he ran into as he did that, he was looking for variables.

00:29:52.480 He was looking for the possibility that liberals might predict the future better than conservatives, or maybe men would do it better than women or vice versa.

00:30:01.760 Or maybe the electorals would do it better than practitioners or whatever.

00:30:05.680 Nothing correlated, nothing made any sense, except that just for fun, he had stuck into his questionnaire that he passed out to everybody.

00:30:16.060 Also, the question, do you self-identify as a fox or a hedgehog?

00:30:20.500 And he explained Isaiah Berlin's use of those terms.

00:30:24.820 That's the only thing that made sense, because the record of those who identified as hedgehogs was terrible for prediction.

00:30:32.300 And Tetlock says it approximates that of a dart-throwing chimpanzee.

00:30:37.260 But those who identified as foxes actually had much more success.

00:30:42.860 Then Tetlock got interested in why it was that the hedgehogs nonetheless seemed to rise faster and higher in organizations.

00:30:51.460 And he decided that it has to do with sound bites in the modern world, being foxes, having one big idea.

00:30:59.620 Whether they were right or wrong in prediction, they were at least good in interviews, like this one.

00:31:06.040 They could do 30-second sound bites.

00:31:08.320 They were good at PowerPoint slides and all of that.

00:31:11.320 And so they tended to rise.

00:31:13.520 Whereas the foxes, who were accurate in prediction, could not quickly and easily and glibly summarize their views.

00:31:21.380 They would get into an interview and say, well, on the one hand, this, and on the other hand, that, and so on.

00:31:26.800 And people would tune out.

00:31:28.260 So ultimately, what rated as what caused success was simply the ability to do sound bites, whether you're right or wrong.

00:31:38.340 And that's profoundly disturbing if you think about it, because it helps to explain something about leadership in the modern world.

00:31:45.060 Why is it so often wrong?

00:31:46.960 Or why are bad predictions, lousy predictions, actually made?

00:31:51.080 Why do important people do dumb things?

00:31:53.740 All of that is, I think, nicely explained by Tetlock's research.

00:31:57.500 Yeah, people like confidence, even if it's wrong.

00:32:00.480 Right, yes.

00:32:01.780 For sure.

00:32:02.780 Confidence is the name of the game.

00:32:04.620 As long as you're confident and come across and don't complicate what you say with qualifications, you'll do very well.

00:32:13.260 But you'll be wrong.

00:32:14.120 Right.

00:32:14.600 Well, what about Octavian, though?

00:32:16.340 Because he was more fox-like in his...

00:32:19.200 But then he became a hedgehog.

00:32:20.560 Was it just because he was...

00:32:22.080 At that point, when you're in power, you're playing not to lose.

00:32:26.420 So you have to...

00:32:27.500 Well, first of all, Brett, Octavian did not have to do sound bites.

00:32:31.580 Right.

00:32:32.720 So it was a different age in that period.

00:32:35.980 And leadership had very different qualities in that period.

00:32:39.980 Everything happened more slowly then than it does today.

00:32:43.940 So I think it was a very different situation for him.

00:32:48.220 What Octavian did that I think is really quite fascinating is that he was trying to update the Roman Republic, turn it into an empire, because he thought that would be the way to make it run more efficiently.

00:33:02.500 But he knew that the Romans themselves profoundly distrusted kings.

00:33:07.480 They had a history of that.

00:33:09.680 And so he did it so gradually that the Romans did not even realize that their republic was being transformed into an empire.

00:33:18.860 And one of the very clever things that he did in this respect, he said that any great state, any great empire needs a national epic.

00:33:28.280 So he commissioned one of the great classical texts of all time.

00:33:33.560 And this is Virgil's Aeneid, which is unlike Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, in that it was a sponsored product.

00:33:41.080 And it was Octavian who was sponsoring it.

00:33:43.300 And it was for the purpose of making this transition from the republic to the empire.

00:33:49.120 So you might think of the Aeneid as being kind of the ancient equivalent of a modern sound bite.

00:33:54.180 But, of course, it's very different in length, it's very different in eloquence, and it's very different in the extent to which, of course, it has lasted and will last.

00:34:03.280 So as I'm listening to you, I can see why this course would be appealing to undergrads.

00:34:08.960 Because you have these young people who, they're probably, they're trying to figure out life.

00:34:13.620 They're trying to, they have these grand visions.

00:34:16.040 And I'm sure they're looking for that one big answer that will solve everything.

00:34:19.120 But this course teaches them, well, there's not one big answer.

00:34:21.720 Well, the big, the one big answer is there's not one big answer.

00:34:25.020 Exactly.

00:34:25.420 And we say that or try to say it in several different ways.

00:34:29.080 That's part of what I was trying to get across in the book.

00:34:32.560 The book has frustrated some readers who were looking for some kind of big answer at the end of it.

00:34:37.240 And I do say there is no one big answer.

00:34:40.900 But the other way that we went at this in teaching this course was to have three professors teaching and not just one.

00:34:48.020 And Paul Kennedy and Charlie Hill and I have always been good friends and still are.

00:34:54.600 But we have very, very different views, different political views, different teaching views.

00:34:58.680 And we actually can get into some pretty significant arguments, even about classical texts.

00:35:04.540 And we had a lot of fun in teaching this course, in doing this, in parading our disagreements in front of the students themselves.

00:35:12.100 And the students love that.

00:35:14.340 So for them, I think it was useful as a lesson in how people can disagree and still like each other, still be civil to each other.

00:35:23.120 I think it was a useful lesson in the number of things in life that don't have simple answers, where you have to be comfortable with contradictions and you will never completely reconcile the contradictions.

00:35:36.600 And I think in the end, it's a more accurate preparation for life if you don't try to tell them what they should know, but tell them how they can find out and how they can discover for themselves what will be most useful to them.

00:35:54.900 So the very manner in which the course was taught all this time, and still is, I think was meant to reinforce that message.

00:36:01.680 So I imagine the best way to learn how to connect principles to practices is through actually just living, right, making decisions, but also don't downplay the role of example.

00:36:14.500 So I think Clausewitz talked about that, right?

00:36:16.320 He calls them composites or sketches.

00:36:18.460 Yeah.

00:36:18.960 So what's an example of that?

00:36:20.560 We had another way of teaching that relationship between principle and practice in the course.

00:36:25.820 The course was and is a full-year course, which starts in the spring, which has a summer component to it, some kind of an individual project, and then a fall semester.

00:36:36.140 In the spring, it's spent on the classics.

00:36:38.260 The fall semester is spent on current policy issues.

00:36:41.920 But in the summer, what we do is to send our students out on what we call individual odysseys.

00:36:48.540 And for a lot of students, that would just be an internship somewhere.

00:36:52.880 But we don't like internships.

00:36:54.220 We want it to be epic trips.

00:36:56.840 We want it to be things that they can never do again in life because they'll be too busy or too many responsibilities or whatnot.

00:37:05.160 So, for example, if they are learning a new language, we will send them to the country that speaks that language, Russia, China, whatever, and just tell them, don't get a job. 0.99

00:37:15.120 Just travel around the country on our budget.

00:37:18.280 And talk to people, speak only Russian, speak only Chinese, go to exotic places, get off the tourist path, etc.

00:37:26.360 And if you are being trailed by the security police, as has actually happened to several of our students, and you're on the verge of being thrown into jail, just think of what Machiavelli would have done in a situation like that.

00:37:40.100 And they are equipped then for the relationship between principle and practice in a very immediate way.

00:37:48.200 And then they come back and write this all up and then apply it to current situations.

00:37:52.740 So, we find that that works well.

00:37:54.760 We find that it's a very effective teaching device.

00:37:57.820 And the exotic locale we have most recently chosen for our students or recommended to our students is America.

00:38:05.820 We're just saying, most of you don't know much about America.

00:38:09.180 Just, we will pay for you to take a road trip, get a jalopy or get a motorcycle or whatnot, and just cross the country and do it slowly and talk to people in small towns and actually see how they live.

00:38:22.300 Get out of the East Coast, the West Coast academic bubble and see the rest of the country.

00:38:28.200 And that has proven to be quite a popular project for our students as well.

00:38:32.400 I think it's very healthy to be able to do that.

00:38:35.180 Well, Professor Gattis, this has been a great conversation.

00:38:36.940 Is there some place people can go to learn more about your work?

00:38:39.960 Well, I guess, Brad, if I can, I would recommend the book, first of all, because I think that's a useful introduction.

00:38:48.060 What I really meant it to be was a book about teaching, just to kind of sum up at least my own perspective on what we were trying to do in this course.

00:38:56.340 I very deliberately did not try to co-author it with my teaching colleagues, Kennedy and Hill.

00:39:01.920 In fact, I didn't even show it to them until it came out because I knew they would disagree.

00:39:07.380 But they have written their own books in various ways on this subject.

00:39:12.080 So I think start with that as just a kind of a guide to what to do.

00:39:17.000 And then from that, selective reading, it never hurts to go back to the classical texts.

00:39:22.160 And if you know what you're trying to get out of them, if you're not trying to memorize every detail, but looking for the larger pictures for the what I call the TTPs, the timeless transferable principles, it can be immensely rewarding to that.

00:39:36.820 And it's very important to have people that you can talk with about these texts as well.

00:39:42.140 So several, quite a number of our alumni of this class who are now out in the world and they have jobs and they have families and whatnot.

00:39:50.740 But they also have secret cells or meetings where they just get together with each other late at night and they pull out their copies of Thucydides or Clausewitz or Machiavelli.

00:40:02.080 And they relive the glory days of the grand strategy class because they find it rewarding and refreshing just to come back to these texts periodically in life.

00:40:12.100 And I think that's very important as well.

00:40:13.920 There's no reason why you have to have had this course to be able to do that for sure.

00:40:18.320 Well, John Gattis, thank you so much for your time.

00:40:20.440 It's been a pleasure.

00:40:21.260 Thank you, Brad.

00:40:21.900 Enjoyed it.

00:40:22.820 My guest today was John Lewis Gattis.

00:40:24.420 He's the author of the book on Grand Strategy.

00:40:26.960 It's available on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere.

00:40:29.440 Also, check out our show notes at aom.is slash grandstrategy where you can find links to resources, including some suggested readings, some books you can read taken from Professor Gattis' book on Grand Strategy that you can check out to delve deeper into this topic.

00:40:43.340 Again, that's aom.is slash grandstrategy.

00:40:48.320 Well, that wraps up another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.

00:41:02.600 For more manly tips and advice, make sure to check out the Art of Manliness website at artofmanliness.com.

00:41:06.920 And if you enjoy the show, the podcast, you've gotten something out of it, I'd appreciate it if you take one minute to give us a review on iTunes or Stitcher.

00:41:12.900 Helps out a lot.

00:41:13.640 And if you've done that already, thank you.

00:41:15.160 Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think would get something out of it.

00:41:19.260 As always, thank you for your continued support.

00:41:21.480 Until next time, this is Brett McKay telling you to stay manly.

The Art of Manliness - October 08, 2018

#447： On Grand Strategy

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