What we’re going to work on next…
We’re proud to say that the following has been read (and praised) by figures close to President Trump.
Whether or not any of this thinking will actually be put into practice is outside our control.
All our ideas/plans for Ukraine are here:
https://artofthedeal.org/Ukraine/
Our output, published over the past 18 months, is more than a book. And yet, hopefully, it remains curated, organized and focused. Thank you to all who’ve contributed: I’m proud of it.
I’ve done my utmost to promote it, and – most importantly – to get it into the hands/minds of top-level people who can do something.
All has been left on the field. This one page captures my everything. It’s the best I could do. And I have sweat blood for nearly two years trying, personally funding the entirety of research.
Hope you’ll take a look around the website. There is a video version of our full plan now, too – if you prefer to watch/listen. You’ll see this was recorded late April. I spent a few weeks trying to get it picked up directly with decision-makers, per Jean Monnet, first. But General Kellogg’s terms last month were so far away, I thought better now to make public.
Which leads to what we’re working on next…
First, just a few recent tweets:
https://x.com/EdwardMDruce/status/1939788476624273823 – with thanks to the Budapest Global Dialogue (https://x.com/hiia_budapest/status/1934663509717000572)
https://x.com/EdwardMDruce/status/1938326713257038178 – I consider I saw the rise of Nigel Farage about as well as anyone in the UK. (And am the only person I’m aware of who stuck their neck out to thoroughly debunk all media BS about his comments with Nick Robinson in the run-up to the 2024 election.)
(I’ve had nothing to contribute on Iran/Israel the past few weeks – monumental though they’ve been. I was extremely low conviction on what would happen. When I have nothing to say, I shall remain quiet.)
Next project
Problem:
People engaged with diplomacy, trying to stop wars the world over, have very limited mental bandwidth.
There is a great fount of wisdom in old books that could help.
But figures in service do not have time to consume them. This is exacerbated by X/Twitter, but it’s an age-old problem.
Niall Ferguson in 2016 on Henry Kissinger’s rise to National Security Advisor:
“You live off your existing intellectual capital from the moment you enter government; you don’t have time to add to your intellectual capital, you don’t have time to read. It’s what you arrive knowing that helps you.”
Kissinger’s exact quotation, from White House Years: The First Volume of His Classic Memoirs:
“the convictions that leaders have formed before reaching high office are the intellectual capital they will consume as long as they continue in office. There is little time for leaders to reflect. They are locked in an endless battle in which the urgent constantly gains on the important. The public life of every political figure is a continual struggle to rescue an element of choice from the pressure of circumstance.”
In a humble way, I’ve experienced a personal taste of this:
Sir Niall more recently: “Books are now essentially decorations”:
“Talk to anyone in Washington... ‘We’re super busy. We can’t read a 500-page book. Just give us an abstract.’ And I think that’s healthy.”
There is demand from operators.
A tremendous Atlantic profile last month on Special Envoy for Peace Missions, Steve Witkoff:
“I asked Witkoff how he sized up his place in history—if he ever mused about the fact that diplomatic heavyweights including Henry Kissinger, James Baker, and Richard Holbrooke had tried their hands at some of what he’s attempting. He replied that he was unimpressed with Kissinger. ‘I watched a ton of stuff on Henry Kissinger,’ he told me. Among the details he learned is that the national security adviser persuaded Nixon not to end the Vietnam War before the 1972 election, because the conflict gave him leverage in the reelection campaign. ‘It was a sellout,’ Witkoff said with disgust.
(I concur – and clipped video of this episode on X in May 2023.)
Similarly: David Sacks, White House AI/Crypto Czar, who’s now regularly engaged in “AI diplomacy”:
“I waste way too much time using X. I just do it to stay up on current events so I can do this Pod[cast]. If I didn’t have this Pod, maybe I could just stop using it. That’d be great. I’d love to have that time back and just read more books.”
David goes on with Hugh Hewitt:
“[On biographies] I don’t read as many as I used to.”
No one wants David to stop the All-In Podcast.
But could something be put together that acts as a solution?
From another field – entrepreneurship – the best new-media model I’m aware of that has solved this for extremely busy operators is Founders podcast, by David Senra.
For those who don’t know it: each week Senra reads a biography of a seminal (though sometimes little-known) historic entrepreneur, and puts together a roughly hour-long monologue – extracting high-level story and very practical lessons. Senra’s been doing it for eight years. He’s nearly at 400 episodes. And he thinks of Founders as “church for entrepreneurs”.
Admirers include Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner.
And many – including company-owning friends of mine – really do rave about it:
Could we put together a diplomatic equivalent: “Founders podcast for great diplomats”? George Kennan/Dean Acheson/George Marshall…
A regular resource that’s deeply steeped in history, yet that’s just about digestible – even for those darting across the world at the velocity of a White House Envoy.
My colleague Sang-Hwa Lee:
…and I are underway with putting together a pilot episode. We’ve picked George Packer’s biography of Richard Holbrooke to lead the way: Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century.
Holbrooke was someone who, throughout his life, desperately hoped to become Secretary of State – but never quite made it. Though he did, admirably, broker peace in the Balkans with the 1995 Dayton Accords. Packer: “Here you really see him at his best. He’s in full gear. He brings all this energy and force, but also, persuasive power… It was his patience and persistence, and his ability to read these Balkan leaders and know what they wanted. And know their weak spots… [Speaking in 2019] Name me an American diplomatic achievement since, say, Camp David, that exceeds it.”
We intend to cover lessons both from climbing the pole of the State Department, and how Holbrooke pulled this off.
The larger question we’re asking, that’s directing our thinking here, is:
If you were going to become US Secretary of State in 3.5 years (the next administration) what are the top ~50 books you’d like to have been briefed on?
This is not going to be for a mass audience. It’s niche.
But David Senra/Founders is notable because of the extremely high percentage of successful founders, investors, and CEOs of major companies who listen. Making “arguably the highest quality entrepreneur’s podcast in the world, it started getting the attention of very influential and successful people”. Senra goes on to say, “You’re going to have opportunities and experiences you could never have dreamed of, because you’re making educational content for some of the most successful people in the world”.
Achieving an equivalent of this, in our domain of intrinsic interest, has great appeal.
We’re intending to call it:
Envoy’s Library
(Sang-Hwa came up with the name.)
The below is a provisional list of ~25 books we intend to begin tackling:
The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made, Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas
The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War, Nicholas Thompson
George F. Kennan: An American Life, John Lewis Gaddis
Jean Monnet: The First Statesman of Interdependance, Francois Duchene
Present at the Creation, Dean Acheson
Counsel to the President: A Memoir, Clark Clifford
Clark Clifford: The Wise Man of Washington, John Acacia
Diplomacy, Henry Kissinger
World Order, Henry Kissinger
Kissinger, Volume I, Niall Ferguson
Three Days at Camp David: How a Secret Meeting in 1971 Transformed the Global Economy, Jeffrey E. Garten
Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis, Graham Allison, Philip Zelikow
Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Robert F. Kennedy
America Against America, Wang Huning
Propaganda, Edward Bernays
Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History, Ted Sorensen
Statecraft: Strategies for a Changing World, Margaret Thatcher
The Guns of August, Barbara W. Tuchman
Marshall: Hero for Our Times, Leonard Mosley
Great American Gamble: Deterrence Theory and Practice from the Cold War to the Twenty-First Century, Keith B. Payne
The Pentagon Wars: Reformers Challenge the Old Guard, James G. Burton
Walter Lippmann and the American Century, Ronald Steel
Edwin O. Reischauer and the American Discovery of Japan, George R. Packard
On Grand Strategy, John Lewis Gaddis
Kissinger, Volume II [when published], Niall Ferguson
Envoy’s Library will be focused chiefly on 20th-century American diplomats. But we will look at others – Jean Monnet in Europe (“One of few people in modern politics who really deserve the label ‘genius’”, according to Dominic Cummings) – and look to tell their stories, too.
Why I think we could be onto a winner here…
Nearly two years ago, David Sacks (now White House AI/Crypto Czar) enjoyed a video I put together (https://x.com/EdwardMDruce/status/1681428639307505664) summarizing Ken Burns’s epic 18-hour documentary on the Vietnam War:
Getting someone of David’s calibre to watch a 26-minute video (when I had a brand-new X account, with close to zero following) is no small feat.
And on my July 2023 review of Jared Kushner’s Breaking History, I hope the author wouldn’t mind my revealing that he wrote back: “I had the chance to review what you wrote about my book. You did a better job summarizing it than I would have done!”
So, some demonstrated aptitude for this.
For any hardcore Founders podcast listeners…
Studying Steve Jobs led Senra to Edwin Land:
“Steve Jobs was constantly talking about this guy… And he calls him his hero. Wow – that’s fascinating. I need to find out what’s so special about this guy… All these ideas I thought were Steve Jobs’s are things he learned from Edwin Land.”
And studying Warren Buffett led Senra to Henry Singleton:
“Munger and Buffett keep bringing up this guy called Henry Singleton. Who is Henry Singleton? I’ve never even heard of him. And they say wild stuff. Charlie Munger says Henry Singleton is ‘the smartest person I’ve ever met’. That Singleton is smarter than Buffett. That it’s a crime business schools don’t study him… The ideas that I thought were Buffett and Munger are actually Singleton. And so I go and read everything about Singleton…”
Who are the almost-forgotten diplomatic equivalents we’ll uncover by studying Kennan/Acheson/Reischauer?
Our thinking here is not: “Ah, another podcast.”
It’s: “No one is reading these diplomatic biographies! We are unearthing rich history the world needs right now – and a podcast just happens to be the delivery mechanism by which figures in power, who could benefit, can best be made aware.”
Brass tacks:
- We’re not intending any hard schedule. It definitely won’t be weekly. (The majority of these books are 600+ pages.) Somewhere between fortnightly and monthly – however long it takes to read the book.
- We’ll do video and, I think, publish only on YouTube and X. (I might be wildly off, but does anyone use the Podcast app anymore? I now use the YouTube app and put my phone in my pocket to listen to almost everything. Wanting upfront to “delete” process as much as possible: is anyone violently attached to the Podcast app/Spotify?)
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If anyone is interested in bank-rolling early episodes, please write back and let me know. We’re seeking long-term sponsorship to do it.
We now have US 501(c)(3) non-profit status approved – so you’d get tax write-offs (in the US) for contributing.
Small seed money amounts for the pilot can be sent here – greatly assisting our journey to product-market fit.
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A wise person named Chiara said to me 18 months ago, when I was starting this in earnest: “In life there’s something only you can do. Success is: how close are you to that thing?” I think about this often.
In embarking on the above, I want to ensure: is there a keen customer? The Boron Letters – a classic in direct-response marketing:
Please write back and let me know your thoughts on our plan for Envoy’s Library.
If we’re missing a brilliant book from our list, please let us know.
And for the past 18 months on Ukraine: a big thank you to everyone for reading.
Sounds great! FWIW I still use a podcast app (RSS Podcasts)