10/12/26: OpenAI $20 Billion Short Of Promises, Historian On Collapse Of Weimar Germany

So this morning, we've got a new warning that the AI bubble may end up being a bust. Let's put this up on the screen. This is a write up from Bloomberg. The headline here is Jeffrey's Chris Wood sees massive capital destruction in AI. They write the most likely long term outcome of the AI boom will be massive capital destruction in the U.S. with market share going to cheaper open source Chinese models, according to Jeffrey's Financial Group, Inc. Initially, the focus was on the cheapness of China models and the related commoditization threat facing large language models. Chris Wood, global head of equity strategy, wrote in a report on Friday.

But now there is also a growing realization that China has become a technological peer to the U.S.

In AI.

So, Sagar, this has been, you know, in recent times, this has been one of the big financial fears about the AI development, which really has like eaten the entire U.S. economy alive. If you look at just construction build, what's getting built in America and what's not, it's all like data centers. If you look at the stock market and how much of it is built on the AI boom, we really have placed just a massive bet on these frontier AI model companies really paying off. And while they continue to lead development, they continue to sort of set the pace of technological change, there's been this question now of whether the Chinese models aren't good enough And much, much cheaper and open source and more flexible, by the way,

because you can, since they're open source, you can sort of adapt them to your own needs. They don't have the same sort of filters and safety mechanisms in place as the, as Anthropic and OpenAI's models do. whether they don't effectively undercut the business model of those leading frontier companies.

So that's what they're sounding the alarm about here. And then they also say, and by the way, the Chinese company's models are also really good. You may be pushing the bleeding edge of the frontier, but they also have products that are fairly comparable to what you're up to here as well.

Exactly.

And I think one of the things we've always tried to emphasize here on the show is technology does not equal business model.

They actually are uniquely separate.

And so while we cover day in, day out, the transformative effects of the technology in terms of its capabilities of alleged risk or all of that in the vision of those founders, that doesn't equal the immediate current business that things are, which could set us up for a crash. Let's put the next element up here on the screen, guys, which is D5. OpenAI, this was a pretty shocking report, has now signaled that their annualized revenue is actually $ 20 billion less than they had previously told investors. They said that the critical figure was nearing $ 50 billion in September.

far less than the $ 70 billion that was widely supported. The $ 70 billion figure had been reported by the Financial Times and other media outlets last month, quote, based on information that was provided directly to investors, the metric is the most important indicator of the overall actual demand for AI and underpins the infrastructure growth and the growth of the public equities markets. And here is what's interesting. All of the chip stocks declined dramatically as a result of this report.

Why?

Because their business models, the infrastructure that funds the AI developments, people supposedly paying for AI, is the backbone of the entire US equities market. Remember, NVIDIA is like the most valuable company already in human history. It's like some ridiculous percentage of the entire S & P 500. Their stock fell 2.9%. Oracle dropped 5.5%. Micron dropped by 5%. And all of this is because of their annualized revenue. Remember, OpenAI had already said, hey, by the way, we're not even going to go public this year because of alleged risk.

When in reality, it might just be that they don't have the goods whenever it comes to their annualized revenue. To be clear, what they're also pointing out, I want to return to the Bloomberg story, is something that he pointed out, which is so important. is that the majority of these deals they're striking for hyperscalers, for these data centers, is all debt financed, right? So he says that the credit risk is actually a huge problem behind these AI companies.

AI hyperscalers are not paying cash based upon what their customers are giving them. They are financing them with this high interest debt. Quote, with the emergence of these Chinese models, and falling token prices, it raises a concern over whether long-term profitability actually can be achieved. And so, you know, this actually is something that happens many times in history is a technology or company can be at the forefront of a technology, but somebody can come along either with the cheaper or a more refined or a more efficient way of doing that. And it will grow the industry, but it will crush that very specific first mover. You know, being first to market or being at the bleeding edge is super expensive. And it may just be that the

everyday costs that, and the everyday use of AI, at least as we currently know it, people are not using it to solve math problems. People are using it as a better Google. And that I would say is what 99.9% of the global population uses AI for. 0.1 are using it for agents to book things and.

Blah, blah, blah, and all the cool stuff.

We cover here but that's why the business concerns for them have always been you know really at the forefront and i think that's what we're beginning to see right now.

Yeah i mean to your point the models that are out now for the public are good enough to do what the public wants them to do like they're already really quite smart they can do quite a lot for the glorified google that most of us are using it for it's already more than sufficient and you wouldn't pay a lot more to have a you know somewhat smarter model or even a wildly smarter A lot of the thinking at OpenAI and Anthropic in particular has been effectively this sort of zero sum game where whoever achieves artificial super intelligence first, they just win and all of the market share goes to them. And they're the ones that, you know, automate us all out of existence and all of those sorts of things. And one thing that I'm

kind of grappling with, with the conversation around artificial general intelligence, which I think most people feel has now been achieved is at some level is that these terms are very squishy. It's not like there's a bright line. Okay, congratulations, you've achieved AGI, OpenAI, you did it, like you're the winner.

It doesn't quite work like that. Maybe ASI will be slightly different because there's a recursive self-improvement and there's this instantaneous intelligence explosion that or near instantaneous that really separates them from the pack. That is a possibility, but that's really the way that they've been thinking about it. And then I think there's also been an assumption that there would be a willingness, a mass willingness to pay for the very, very, very best technology. Whereas for many, not just ordinary consumers, but a lot of businesses too, the not quite as good technology may be good enough for them to use to replace human workers. Another possibility here, though, just to make the other argument on the other side

is We've seen recently these models solving all of these outstanding math problems by the hundreds, like the open AI models, internal models in particular, solving these math problems by the hundreds. We may also get to a place where the best models are not being put out to the public, where they're not really available for sale for you to get access to, or even for companies to get access to, that they keep them internally and you have to run your business processes through them. And that is the way that they earn revenue. So I, you know, I think it is very possible that this is a bubble, that there is some sort of major financial reckoning, not because the technology isn't powerful, but because it does become more

of a commodity with the much cheaper Chinese predominantly open source models.

That the people who end up making the.

Most money are the ones like, you know, meta pursuing muse, creating applications that people actually want to pay for and use and that businesses actually want to pay for and use. But I just want to put, you know, put a hedge there that I do think it's possible that there is a revenue model that works out for these bleeding edge frontier companies. And I also think that is a possibility of what happens here. Turning to another major market implications here. This is some wild stuff that's going on right now in the software space. Let's put D1 up on the screen. So you had some guy who's an engineer who's good with this stuff who got pissed off, as one does, at Adobe. And they're sort of notorious

for being quite exploitative of their customer base. And so he said, screw it. I am going to use AI to reverse engineer the entire Adobe software suite. And so this tweet here says, AI is now being used to recreate Adobe software. Developers released seven free open source apps as clean room alternatives to Adobe's main tools, Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, Lightroom, After Effects, InDesign, and Acrobat Pro. Built in Rust with help from Claude Opus 5.5, run on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS under MIT Apache licenses without using Adobe source code. Now, to be clear, the bugs are not all worked out here. He's sort of seeking collaboration to improve upon the products. But it just begs the question,

for any software company, how are you going to protect your product? How are you going to protect your business model when one guy pissed off one day can just go out there and create reasonable facsimiles of them using AI and put them out to the market? Similar thing is happening right now with video games as well, where they're able to go in and reverse engineer and mash up multiple video games together. This is going to have tremendous economic implications. And you can see here some of the Other people who know video games can tell you what these things we're looking at are. But apparently this is like video games, two different video games being mashed together so that you can play one game with a

character in the other landscape, etc. So this is all already going on and could have a major impact. And Sagar, there's previously been kind of a freak out around software and whether AI was just going to totally destroy the software industry. And I still think that that is a very open and likely result of what's happening here.

I'm loathe to play a Chamath clip in a positive way, but he actually summed it up pretty well.

So we'll kick it to Chamath to explain. Let's take a listen.

The more important point I want to make, though, is I sent this to Nick. There's been a couple of things that happened in the last couple of days, which I think are incredibly important. There have been people that decompiled the entire big five. What is the big five? Adobe has five very, very important products in their product suite.

Freeberg may know them all, but I just know Photoshop. There's like a bunch of others, okay?

Yeah.

And these folks decompiled it, distilled it, and published open source versions of these things. And I was so shocked because I was like, hold on a second. These are like profound products that have existed and have had moats for years. And now they're just open source versions. And then Nikita was, I think, trolling. And he was building on that idea and just talking about GTA because it's about to get released.

Yes.

I think GTA 6 is about to come out.

In November, yeah. we'll reconstruct this. Why is this important? I think that IP and software was effectively rendered worthless.

Two days ago.

Because if you think about it, when everything is headless, so when Elon makes his services headless, Benioff made Salesforce headless a few months earlier. When all of these things are headless and you can wrap them in agent tools and you can connect them via MCP to other experiences, The value of IP does no longer exist in software.

It doesn't exist.

And I think that that probably is the most profound implication. So like even in our business, we would argue with some of our customers all the time because we'll say, oh, we'll build this for you. We'll own the IP. They'll say, no, we want the IP. We don't know how to negotiate it. And two days ago, I walked into the 8090 guys.

I said, who cares? Who cares? And solve the problem.

But before it was always a negotiation and a set of trade offs. Now it's a who cares thing where like the IP is irrelevant. It still takes a while for the machinery of a business and frankly, the market to understand. But that is the most important thing that happened this week in my opinion.

So, you know, again, bombastic, as always, I think from the guys, but I'm not so sure that they're really wrong. I mean, to say useless is not completely correct because it's not going to happen overnight. Nobody knows how to run GitHub and go and set all this stuff up all that easily. There needs to be a consumer interface, a way to be able to easily do this. But that is generally how technology progresses. People will remember like downloading music. People were illegally downloading music for years before Napster and LimeWire. But the infrastructure or Pirate Bay or any of these things that was eventually created made it very easy for normal people to just go on and kind of figure it out. I could easily see something

like that where AI, I mean, I was thinking about the textbook industry as well, or even cheating, how, you know, Chegg, that entire software company, which was basically designed to sell textbooks and, you know, basically so-called not cheating, but kind of cheating services has been destroyed by AI. But IP itself now basically just seems illegitimate. I have noticed with Claude or any others, especially when there's a very rare book that I cannot find, I will ask it. And because of the stories that we've done here, you know, for summaries or for excerpts, it has it because we've pointed out AI companies buy all of these rare books, take the spines off, scan them, and then shred and destroy them. So it is the only thing that still

has a lot of the IP can use that to reconstruct and do various different things. I don't know.

I think it is fascinating.

I don't fully wrap my head around all of it, but software IP, as they point out, Adobe, even operating systems and others, these are multi-billion dollar 30-year businesses that have been around for decades.

Can they survive this? Maybe.

I didn't even know if they would be able to survive moving from the CD to Apparently, they figured it out. So it's certainly possible the legal system will give them their ability to sue and all of that. So I'm not sure that we're going to see total widespread adoption. But it's possible that AI just moves so quickly that we don't actually get to that point at all.

And I think that's pretty crazy.

Yeah, agreed.

All right. Let's get to Victor Sebastian standing by. Let's get to it. I'm very excited now to be joined by Victor Sebastian. He's the author of a new book, Weimar Germany. The Death of a Democracy. As I said in our introduction to the show, Victor wrote the book on Lenin, which I have recommended to countless people across the aisle. We are a bipartisan show here, and every single person is a fan of this author, which is a very difficult feat, I think, and it speaks to his deep credibility, research, and his storytelling abilities as a historian.

Victor, thank you so much for joining us. We appreciate it.

Well, thank you very much for asking me and for your very kind introduction.

Absolutely.

So, sir, one of the topics specifically with Weimar is it seems like something which people think they know about, they don't know a ton.

Everybody likes to draw a historical parallel.

Something that you draw upon in your book and that has been very popular in the discourse is this idea of Weimar America, or at the very least, Weimar of the West of what we're living in right now. Here is an excerpt I would love your specific reaction to of Rod Dreher, who recently wrote a book on the subjects interviewed in the New York Times. Let's take a listen, sir, and we'll get your reaction based upon the book.

When we hear Weimar, we think of the film Cabaret and corruption, and we think it all ended up in Nazism. But that is a superficial understanding of it. We have created in America today, perhaps throughout the West, the psychosocial conditions of Weimar without having suffered the traumas that Germany did, losing the First World War, hyperinflation, and the Great Depression. Well, what I mean by that, and this also goes back to Hannah Arendt and her famous 1951 book, The Origins of Totalitarianism. She tried to explain how it was that right-wing totalitarianism in Germany and left-wing version in Russia rose.

And she said, these are the factors. Social atomization is by far, said Arendt, the most important factor. We have done this with our young. And not only that, but the loss of trust in institutions, a feeling of wanting to tear it all down. There's nothing for me there. It's all here. And it made me think, it made me fear that we are one economic crash away from something very ugly. It may not be Hitler 2.0. It may not be Stalin 2.0. It might be something all American, but it's not going to be what we're used to.

And people of my generation and yours are really don't understand what's happening.

What do you think of that argument, sir? Do you agree?

I agree with some of it. I think history doesn't repeat itself either as tragedy or farce, as Marx would have put it, or as Mark Twain would have put it, it doesn't rhyme either. However, there are lots and lots of similarities, but I've written specifically about Weimar Germany readers now can make their own judgment after they've digested it about what it says about today. I've tried to draw an interesting, there are interesting parallels, but there are all kinds of things that actually were quite different. So just to think that we're in the Hannah Arendt, was in her great insight in that marvelous, marvelous book is that actually the far right and the far left are almost exactly identical. They're just two sides of the same coin anyway.

We are, as I draw, some of the parallels are kind of obvious, but there are significant differences. We are, I agree that we're in a time of revolutionary change. And these have nothing, not necessarily anything to do with the political turmoil we're in. One of the big ones that's probably going to have the biggest effect is who knows what the result of the AI revolution is going to bring to the world.

What happened in....

In Germany after the First World War was that they were defeated by the worst war in human history, where death was on an industrial scale, which we haven't had in the West. In fact, we've had nearly three generations of a.

Piece of.

Security, the like of which we haven't had maybe any time in history. So there are similarities, but there are a great number of differences.

I think what is.

It's brilliant just to say we're heading for the same thing.

Right. I totally agree with that. And there are a couple of takeaways from the book. To me, the key observation that you make, which is intuitive, but is not always the case whenever it's cast... historical fashion, is that Weimar was killed, it was not doomed. And I would be really interested to hear how you could maybe lay some of that out, especially, and by the way, I'm recommending everybody needs to read this book, regardless of what But that key insight is that humans have agency and that specifically leaders themselves matter dramatically. The way that Hindenburg is cast as a villain throughout your entire story is very important because a lot of people can look at history as a tide, as a wave which breaks and

it flows as if we can't stand in front of it. And the key point that you make is that is absolutely not the case. I'd love for you to be able to lay some of that out.

Yeah, I feel very strongly that almost nothing is inevitable in history. There's contingency in almost anything that happens except maybe death and taxes. Everything else, there are what-ifs, there's luck, there's happenstance. And this Weimar is a particular case. Often in the past, it has been written as though there is something inevitable, as an inevitable journey from Weimar Germany to the Nuremberg trials, for example. But there certainly is, there's all kinds of things might have happened. For example, Hitler, after his failed insurrection in 1923, there was a big demonstration and Hitler was at the front of it, and it got into a fight with the police, and the man right next to Hitler was shot dead. If that

bullet had gone a foot nearer, we might have been in a much happier situation.

In the world.

Hindenburg, who I do cast as one of the guiltiest men in history, because he paved the way and eventually allowed Hitler to take power, was he was elected president in 1925. He'd always been an ardent monarchist. He didn't believe in the republic. He did not believe in democracy. He hated the very idea of democracy and politicians. And he got himself elected in 1925. with the purpose of destroying them both. Now, he won an election. It was a close contest, and he only really won it because there was a spoiler candidate by the Communist Party that also didn't want democracy and the kind of republic that.

Weimar paid.

If the Communists had not decided to stand, all the opinion polls at the time and And all the more acute political observers thought that Hindenburg's opponent would win. So this is contingent. They're all a lot of the way through. One of the most able statesmen in the Weimar period in Germany, a man now almost forgotten, but was an extremely clever and able man called Gustav Stresemann, who who charted a path that got Germany out of its prior status into a respectable country again. After the incredible hyperinflation, he stabilized the currency.

He oversaw the golden.

Period in Germany between 1924 and 1929, where it was the fastest growing economy in Europe. receiving vast amounts of money and help from America, by the way. And he died in 1929, a few weeks before the Wall Street crash. He could have had the ability and the confidence of the people to have, I mean, he was very popular at the time, who might have weathered the worst of that storm without without Hitler. So there are all kinds of things that might have happened, what ifs, that it was not inevitable. And lots of history books, some very, very good history books of this period. There have been hundreds written about the Weimar period. But I think a lot of them look at it backwards. I've relied on

many of them, and I have mine. I owe a little bit of gratitude to many of those books, but if there is a fault in many of them written, certainly in the last 50 years, is that it looks at everything backwards as though we all know what happened and therefore that was inevitable.

100%.

My line has been, well, actually that isn't the case. People living in that time, very, very, very few, They didn't like Hitler, but very, very few saw what was going to happen. It didn't seem inevitable to people at the time. Almost nobody could have predicted it. Certainly in this country, the idea in a country that had such a civilization and a culture as Germany, that 10 years later there'd be slaughtering millions of people in concentration camps and death camps, would have been utterly inconceivable. Nobody would have thought that would be remotely a possibility. So nothing, sorry.

Well, I just want to pick up on this. Something that Rod Dreher had pointed out in that interview is he said we're one economic crash away. My biggest takeaway from your book is that the economics, I wouldn't say it was secondary. It was certainly a factor. But you extensively write about the culturally progressive change that happened within this society. It's almost difficult to describe to people, if you're not familiar with Prussian militarism, what German culture was like before the outbreak of the First World War. And to go from that to what happened in Weimar, which became one of the most progressive societies, I don't know, in human history, like really at the time, Was genuinely psychologically shocking. And so, you know, you point out, you know, maybe,

you know, you're not politics might differ a little bit here. I look at that as a very cautionary tale about how cultural elites specifically should try. you know, to embrace, you know, so-called progress or message or degeneracy, libertinism, to embrace these things, to popularize them or at the very least celebrate them, because it invited a mass reactionary social backlash, which is what you ascribe as one of the key tenets of Nazism and of its rise. So I would love to hear, you know, how you work through that.

Cause you know, correct me if I'm wrong, sir, you kind of cast these, you're like, look, these were all good things. You know, we had these, this cultural progressive and women's rights movement, a lot of it born out of a shitload of men were just killed, you know, on the Western front or on the Eastern front.

So it's kind of a female ruled society.

But you know, I wonder how much blame you put on the cultural elites of that time for trying to push the Vanguard so forward when, as you write very specifically, they are responsible in some part for the reactionary tide.

That follows with the rise of Hitler?

Well, yes.

I mean, modernism was being challenged by traditional cultural values and political values by forces that could not or would not accept the pace of change. That's a big part of it. And I write so much about the culture because it was so significant.

To what was going on.

It seems peculiar because Art, the edges of modernist art is not a thing that many Germans at the time would necessarily have been remotely interested in. Yet it became, because it challenged so much of the traditional values, everything became a culture war. Everything became political from the cuts of a woman's hair to the shape of a roof, um, um, you know, on a, on a building. What happened in, in Germany, the, uh, the Vilhelmina empire was, was, was, was very stayed at stayed. And, and, um, culturally very conformist, although they were great artists. It had a monumental high culture, of course, but it was very stuffy, very staid. Overnight, the big thing that happened was overnight after the revolution

in 1918, which brought the empire down, they removed censorship straight away. Having been a very stuffy atmosphere to anything goes happened with a remarkable suddenness. There were, there were the beginnings of kind of modernism in, in various art movements before, but really they, they were confined to tiny bits of, of, of the avant-garde in Berlin. It didn't get into the, into the mainstream. And what the far right did was, was, was, um, was pick up on this so much as yet another thing that the cultural elites in.

Berlin and the other big cities.

Were forcing down upon us and it was changing everything. And to some extent, yes, the artists were guilty, but they didn't consider themselves as a movement. They were not, I think this again gets back to my point point that I've just made earlier about the inevitability of it. They didn't see themselves as a movement. There were various different...

They saw themselves as individual working artists. They didn't think of themselves with that responsibility that if I carry on with this, drawing my line that way, or nude women or gay sex or whatever, it was automatically going to bring bring about a very far-right reaction. They didn't see themselves, or I don't see them, as a movement, a political movement in that way. It became one later when they were under threat, and it was fairly obvious by the early 30s that their days were going to be numbered.

Then they formed themselves into into movements.

But I don't think one can blame them.

They were individual artists that were allowed now for the first time to express whatever they wanted. And yeah, many of them were irresponsible. Many of them were doing really crazy things. But it wasn't as though they were a political party all about to change the world. So I don't... And many of them were.

Loathed by the far left just as much as the far right.

You know, that is an important point.

It's not, well, I guess, you know, if we were to care to our modern culture war, you know, it began, I don't think there are a lot of activists or these others are part of any broader political movement in the beginning.

They're just doing what they want to do.

But it does become, you know, something that starts to become part of the vanguard of the progressive or the democratic elite, right? And that becomes and invites a reactionary... Artists.

Like to shock. Artists like to shock.

Artists like to say something in order to get themselves heard and to get themselves, their art shown and to get their books read. They want to say something that people, you know, rather outrageous in many cases that people want to read. It's not, sorry, I interrupted your point.

No, no, it's fine.

I think you're making an important point because you're separating the art from the leaders. And I think that's kind of where I want to return to, which is ultimately, you know, it comes down to leadership. I mean, if I were to, I actually think this is one of the most important leadership books ever written because if you were to read this book, what you come away from is a small group of people can make a dramatic amount of difference. It's that discernibility for your– discernibility in leadership may itself be one of the most key important things that you should decide upon whenever you're voting or you're looking for. It's specifically around like the management of these titanic problems. And to that point, one of the

key elements that you identify in the book is that fear of communism, of the Red Scare, you know, Goebbels himself, I believe he coins the phrase like cultural Bolshevism, cultural Marxism, which is used often.

Throughout, you know, the way that he writes about Berlin.

It's still used all the time.

I know.

The way he writes about Berlin, I'm like, that's how I feel about San Francisco. I'm like, maybe I should check my own, you know, biases, maybe, you know, even by reading your book. But what I'm fascinated by is the actual state of communists in Germany. I got to be honest, sir, I really didn't know much about it.

I assumed that this was, at least these are people who are willing to street fight. I thought it was a legitimate movement. You point them out as some pretty pathetic characters, which people were very afraid of.

I'd love for you to be able to go into that.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, another thing you've got to remember, especially in America, is the geography. Communism wasn't just an idea or a thing out there. Communism and the chaos of the Russian Revolution in 1918 and 1919 was right on the doorstep. They were right next door. There were bits of Poland right on Germany's borders. was a foreign country wanting to basically take over Germany. And the Communist Party was relatively strong, but nowhere as strong as the right or the center actually believed. But it was very strong.

And they mounted one of the first things that happened after the empire. Again, just a bit to go back with some factual stuff that people may not, be aware of there was a communist uprising immediately after the um after the empire fell um and most of it was most of the communist party was subsidized by what you know by russia revolutionary russia which was still going through a civil war um bloodletting on a vast goal more than 20 million people died in the in the in the russian civil war at that time it was extraordinary And they were right next door.

And they were.

Financing an armed insurrection within Germany to take over the state. So a fear of Russia was not a theoretical thing. It was a very, very real threat. However, it wasn't as real a threat and as grave a threat as it looked. And it initiated a response that was far greater than it did. Also, what happened is that it fractured the left, which was the opposing for all the period of the Weimar Republic. The communists were fighting against the soft left socialist government. Most of the Weimar period has a soft left socialist government of the Social Democrats.

And they were as bitter enemies as the communists and the right. Most of the street fighting that we read about in the Weimar years, many of it was between the communists and the socialists who never joined up together, even when the threat of the Nazis and the far right was so great and it looked very much like they would run out. The far left and the more moderate left never, never united in any way to confront the Nazis.

Yeah.

One of the things you were mentioning there was about leadership also, you know, previously. And what I'm curious about in the West is I feel that we have a complete lack of leadership on the level of many of the great statesmen. that eventually builds the post-World War II order. Now, I think there's a lot of critiques of that. And many of the people who took on that legacy themselves were very foolhardy and have put us in a very bad situation some 80 years later. But when I read, and I'll be honest, even when I read of the 1914 outbreak of the war. I think all of these people are really criminal, many of the leaders and the reason why much of this happened. But the level of seriousness, which people even undertook the decision to go war, I

don't see that even when our country launches a full hearty war in Iran. I'm sitting here in the United States. Am I projecting here on leadership as it is today? I'm curious, because that seems to be, if I were to read your book and take one takeaway, it's that leadership, like I said, matters more than anything. At a time of precarious change, social change and economic change, you need people to think about these bigger questions. actually guides you in a good direction does our current leadership in the west give you any inspiration you don't just have to make it about america you can look at it you know broadly across different systems because that if it seems to me that this were to ever happen again it

would be specifically because of the leadership conditions like it did under weimar.

Um I think perhaps there were some great and significant leaders and there were some impressive.

People.

I picked Gustav Stresemann out particularly, but before that there were some. Many of them were assassinated, which was another factor that was a very, very significant factor in the history in Weimar. But the people that took over immediately after the revolution in 1918, after Germany had lost, they were well-intentioned. But I can't see Friedrich Ebert, who was the first president, was a fundamentally decent man who absolutely believed in democracy and believed in the Republic and the rule of law. But actually, he wasn't a great leader and he didn't, he put off decisions. The main one is that he made two very significant mistakes. The first was that he did nothing much to challenge this idea

that Germany was in a state of denial about having lost the war, the stab in the back. I didn't know many people. He never really challenged that. So he never put the blame of what happened in the war, the defeat in the war and where it belonged on the military leaders, Hindenburg and his other generals and the elite that got them into the war and the imperial court.

He kind of accepted that because Germany, none of the fighting and the wars were placed in Germany. So there was the infrastructure was great. The whole stab in the back idea is actually quite believable because there were no allied soldiers set foot in Germany. But it was still a defeated country and refused to accept that it was a.

Defeated country.

The other real strategic error that they made, the moderate social democrats and the moderate right centrists in a coalition made, and that formed most of the government for the first 10 years of the Weimar period. They continued to see the communist threat and all the middle classes continued to see that as the principal danger to their lives. The whole middle class saw that it was the fault of that.

But actually, as turned out, the right was great. Actually, the real threat was the right, the far right. So they never did anything much to challenge them. They never, until it was way, way, way too late. The strategic error of actually seeing where the danger came from was a fundamental.

So they were grave.

They may have been more serious people than we might have now. But there was certainly no better in judgment.

Right.

Yeah.

It's so, so interesting.

Sir, if you're a young person, we have a younger audience, and they read this book, what would you tell them to do differently than maybe that they are right now?

Well, to be aware that a civilization that you think of as having lasted a period, to be aware how easy it is to get way too fragmented and how fragile it can be.

Well, very poignant.

Do you have anything hopeful that you take away from the book?

I don't want to leave people depressed.

Actually, I kind of do. Not necessarily.

I mean, this is the problem with it. I'm not giving the game away. You know, it's not exactly a cheerful book in many places. However, a lot of the art and a lot of the amazing, this book has as much about Thomas Mann or Bertolt Brecht or Marlene Dietrich or Cabaret and all that than it does about the propaganda skills of Goebbels or Hitler. And there are lots about it, the joy of writing it, even though it was depressing to do in places. The joy of writing was seeing some of these amazing films. And it's how whatever's going on in the world, however we think it's all falling apart, creativity is always there, can always be there and can thrive in the most, appalling circumstances.

And that gave me such, such pleasure as I was writing this and looking at the doom that was about to happen. The process of creativity was going on just as the place was falling apart, which is always one of the reasons why I wanted to write it.

I think that's so great. I encourage everybody to read it. It will challenge you, and at the very least, it will inform you. And as I said, he's got some phenomenal books out there, and this just happens to be one of the latest. Sir, I really appreciate your time and engaging with some of my questions.

So thank you, sir. Appreciate your time.

Well, thank you very much indeed for having me.

Thank you guys so much for watching. We appreciate it. Crystal had a family thing just come up, so she had to step away. We'll do the AMA tomorrow for everybody. So we'll see you all then.

10/12/26: OpenAI $20 Billion Short Of Promises, Historian On Collapse Of Weimar Germany

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