Peter. Michael. Have you ever heard of a book called Clash of Civilizations?

I've heard of it. Clash of Civilizations. One of my favorite video games.

I'm excited to find out that they made a book.

Tell me about your relationship with this book. What do you know about it? I actually do know a little bit about it. If you were a professor of international affairs when the Cold War ended.

You were contractually obligated to write an entire book explaining why you think you should still be employed.

This is Samuel Huntington's attempts. You never had to read it in school.

There's a huge difference between me being told I should read something or have to read something and actually reading it.

So it's quite possible. The reason that I ask is that one of the first things that I learned when I was researching this is that Clash of Civilizations is one of the 10 most assigned books at US colleges.

Among top colleges, I'm like Ivy League colleges. It's number four. It's just below Plato, but it's above Aristotle and Democracy in America by Detokville.

I'm upset and disappointed to hear that international affairs and political science academics are not seriously pursuing truth.

And are instead championing the hack work of their colleagues, mentors and friends. This is shocking.

So what do you know about Huntington himself? Now this is all from memory. So give me a little rope here. But I believe that he was a big time international affairs academic.

Also a statesman. One of those guys who like went to Harvard or Yale back in like 1918.

And then that's enough to just sort of be in government or a near government for the rest of your life.

Yeah, he goes to the University of Chicago. He gets his PhD from Harvard in 1951. And then there's a little tiny interregnum period.

But then he becomes a Harvard professor and he stays there for 58 years.

He's sort of like a walking who's who of every single intellectual movement of the 20th century.

Like he's friends with Francis Fukuyama. He's friends with Chef Brzynski, Henry Kissinger.

He founded Foreign Policy Magazine. He worked for LBJ. Oh. According to one thing that I read, he is the most cited political scientist in America for like many, many years.

That makes sense to me. And again, I'm someone who didn't try very hard in school. And I still remember his name. So I think that says a lot.

The book itself comes out in 1996. And the background to the book is this period that we touched on briefly with Fukuyama in the end of history.

Basically from like the mid 1980s until the early 2000s, everybody was coming out with their like what happens after the Cold War book.

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