Accountant Debunks Christopher Columbus Myths After Reading 300 Pages of Primary Sources

Jeremy Lakosh [00:00:00] I would hint to a moment in history where centralization was torn down and it created great conflict, and that would be the French Revolution. The French Revolution was a tearing down of central authority, and that absence of Central authority created a great amount of violence that extended for a long period of time.

Vance Crowe [00:00:22] This is Jamal Seward, chief People Officer with St. Louis Bank in St. Louis, Missouri, and you are listening to the Vance Grow Podcast. Welcome back to the podcast. I'm glad you're here. Today is an interview with Jeremy Osh. He actually came on during the Coronavirus Pandemic, and that was actually when I had met him. Jeremy is an extraordinary guy. He's an accountant. He runs a retirement community, but he also is a historian and not just one of those people that reads books and then thinks about it on his own and kinda keeps it to himself. He has actually taken to putting these lessons that he's learned about history into a deep dive podcast, and it is a phenomenal podcast called The History in Context. And we're gonna talk about that and what he's going through, why he's doing it, and what the purpose of it is. And I can tell you that it is a history lesson that I have never had before, and I am so excited that he's putting this out there. It is very interesting. We're gonna get to that interview in just a second, but I wanna mention that during the conversation we talk about the Articulate Ventures network, and we talk about why Jeremy started the podcast and what got him going. And one of the things he mentions is that people in the network kind of pushed him forward. They helped him figure out how am I gonna do my audio better? How am I gonna make the, the video of me putting things out into the world look cleaner and crisper? And that's what you find in the Articulate Ventures Network. We have people that are podcasters, we have people that are audio files, we have people that love to give criticisms positive about the way you write things.

Vance Crowe [00:01:58] And so people are in this network trying to build things, trying to create things that they've always wanted to do, but never had any guidance. Because oftentimes when you share it with your friends and your family, they listen to what you're doing and they say, Hey, that's great, but people here give real feedback and they give as good as they're willing to get because people want that sort of criticism that allows you to get better and to have great conversations with people that you would never otherwise meet. So if you're interested in meeting people like Jeremy or many, many others from throughout North America, check out the Articulate Ventures Network. You can get there by going to Network dot Articulate Ventures. I hope to see you there and remember that we have a limited number of people that we're letting in before January 1st and we are filling up, so we hope that you'll do it soon. Thanks so much for joining us, and now onto the interview with Jeremy Osh. Jeremy Osh, welcome back to the podcast.

Jeremy Lakosh [00:02:56] Thanks for having me back. Vance. Happy to be here.

Vance Crowe [00:02:59] You know, it's always the accountant slash guy running the nursing home. That's one of those edge of your seat thrillers that everybody's always asking for more.

Jeremy Lakosh [00:03:09] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Skilled care in Illinois right now is, is a, is a hot topic. And with the state not paying Medicaid bills, the accounting side can be a little stressful too.

Vance Crowe [00:03:22] Are they really not paying paying their bills?

Jeremy Lakosh [00:03:25] So the state of Illinois in the last 12 years since the financial crisis has, has neglected its long-term care. Medicaid payments in approximately 10 of those 12 years, meaning that they've been more than three months behind on average in payments to nursing homes. This

Vance Crowe [00:03:47] Is insane what's going on. I, I mean, I think Coronavirus has only heightened this. I, I've tried to do some stuff with my taxes that are just really routine things and you, you literally cannot get someone to respond and you think, well, with taxes, you think they would be all over this, but they're just, there's literally not people in the office.

Jeremy Lakosh [00:04:06] Yeah, it, and in Illinois State government, it's, it's really bad. You can't get anyone to answer the phone. You can't get anybody to get back to you. On my side of things, we've had more fraudulent unemployment claims filed than we have employees. To give you an idea, I, I got hit in one week with five of them, and you can't contact anybody at IDES to say, Hey, this is not a legitimate claim. This person voluntarily walked out the door 18 months ago. So yeah, it's been a, it's been a very frustrating experience trying to navigate all of the ripples that this has created.

Vance Crowe [00:04:52] It's an odd thing going on right now with coronavirus because on the one hand you see that government is shut down and people are worried about, will I be able to go to my polling, blah, blah, blah. But just this weekend I drove out west of St. Louis to Fulton, Missouri, and there were more cars on the road than I have ever seen in western Missouri in my entire, in my entire time living here, that every single parking spot at restaurants were filled. The sports arenas that have outdoor soccer games, people were everywhere. So it's, it's hard to believe that we're in coronavirus times when you look around and say, well, it looks like the world is back to working order.

Jeremy Lakosh [00:05:35] Yeah, it, I think that some of that is a result of the social anxiety that was created when we did shut everything down. People were shut in for a lengthy period of time. You, you know, your more extroverted people were cooped up. And with the reopenings occurring gradually over the last couple of months, people are wanting to go out more and more and more. And sadly, you know, we have not found a way, in my opinion, at least, to stop the actual spread of this virus. So your observations of traffic and all of that match the nationwide spike in cases that we're seeing as well. You know, it's just a, it, it's a thing that's unfortunately occurring. And as colder weather sets in, you know, people are left to wonder, okay, what's gonna happen next? But, but from an economic standpoint, with the exception of hotels, airlines, and cruise cruise ships, I think that most of the consumption is back to normal.

Vance Crowe [00:06:40] Yeah, I was even at a hotel a couple of weekends ago, I had a brother getting married, and I, I think when I asked the head office, they said, well, we're 80% of our normal occupancy, so I don't think that they're a full, you know, sellout in Pontiac, Illinois. But it was interesting because even that place, they had PE kids playing in the pools and, and I have to wonder if it isn't that rural America has just decided, you know, we're, we're just gonna walk past whatever the dangers are and get back to our regular lives. Because when I go out into the rural areas or towns of of less than a hundred thousand people, they seem to be fully back to normal.

Jeremy Lakosh [00:07:17] Yeah. I think that, I think that the folks in rural America understand the dangers. They, they know what's going on. They've been briefed on, you know, how the disease spreads and, and what it does. And they've made a choice to balance the risk reward of that and have decided for the most part to go back to their ordinary lives. We're very blessed here in Woodford County to have such a strong agricultural community. A farmer that's out in a combine right now pulling corn is, you know, not very much affected by something like this. And so I think that there, I think that the rural America folks are really balancing these risk reward decisions and deciding, for the most part to just proceed.

Vance Crowe [00:08:07] So you're running a retirement community, which brings with it a whole different level, because it's one thing to be like, well, I'm in my thirties or my forties and and if I get sick, I'm probably gonna be fine. It might be a little uncomfortable, but that's not that big of a deal. But to have the virus running rampant around people that are 65 plus is a whole different gambit. So how do you view this differently than you think the average, you know, 30 something.

Jeremy Lakosh [00:08:32] So we've briefed our residents on the risks. They've been briefed on the risks as well. We have decided that we're not gonna be in a position where we could potentially facilitate an outbreak. Therefore, we've suspended all activities and anything that involves getting groups of residents together. We do have a transportation service that goes out during the senior shopping hour that will take our residents shopping for those that don't have transportation. But other than that, we've asked our residents to, to basically just use their judgment in how they, whether they shelter in place, or if they decide to form bubbles where they only interact with four or five other residents, we're not gonna police what they do. We're just not gonna be holding any group activities until the coronavirus threat is mitigated.

Vance Crowe [00:09:28] That to me, seems like the only reasonable approach. Like all of the other approaches where you're mandating or you're saying, we are gonna take the choice away from people, seems to be so antithetical to the, the core of a free society that I really struggle with it because I like, why is it that we did not start from the very beginning by saying, Hey, we're gonna make it a lot more difficult for employers to make you feel bad about going to work, but we're not going to start mandating how you have to behave in the workplace. That seems like a crazy change in our society.

Jeremy Lakosh [00:10:04] Yeah. And we tried, at the very beginning of Coronavirus, we were definitely more fearful of what was going on because we didn't know what we didn't know. So we tried to say to residents, Hey, you need to shelter in place. Don't do anything. Don't go out unless absolutely necessary. So we tried that approach and what ended up happening, Vance, is the amount of social anxiety that built up amongst our residents came out in the fact that they were just sitting around their houses essentially looking for problems to call us about. And so we would get, we would get the tiniest problem being called to us as almost like an emergency calls to our maintenance line quadrupled and our maintenance request system. The number of tickets in it tripled. So that's the, we, we got overwhelmed with volume and we didn't have the staffing structure in place to deal with that. And we're still working through that bubble. So as we, we did end up reopening and having events for a period of about four weeks, and then the second wave came and we decided in, I believe it was August, to shut back down the activities again. But this time we said to residents, you know, the risks, you know what's going on, feel free to communicate with family. If you have people over, we're not gonna police it. Communicate with each other, hang out in small groups, walk together. We have residents who will actually walk together and walk six feet apart and still be able to communicate with one another.

Jeremy Lakosh [00:11:38] Do things that continue to meet social needs just in a way that you feel comfortable from a public health perspective.

Vance Crowe [00:11:46] I mean, that makes total sense. And like I, when I was doing my Coronavirus podcast where I was doing two, sometimes three episodes a day, I, I go back every once in a while and listen to little snippets of it. And I can remember when we were watching footage from around the world of places like South America or in the Middle East, where the bodies were dead in the streets and people were so afraid that they were just, they were like drag them and then if they fell out of the sheet that they were carrying him, then they would just run away. And there's no way that people shouldn't have reacted with the same level of like, intensity. And I, I think that we still know that it's a deadly disease. It's, it's got all kinds of negative impacts, but we don't have that level of complete unknowing, like that was a dark cloud coming towards us, and we had no idea how violent the storm would be, but it would seem insane to me if we went back to that same level of authoritarian regime that, that, that people seem so quick to jump into.

Jeremy Lakosh [00:12:51] Yeah. And one thing I've learned from history is that when a government, especially in the United States, tries to do too much, you end up having this level of resistance that you end up getting a result that is completely contrary to what you're wanting. A great example in market economics is when you try to overly regulate an industry, a black market will pop up and thrive. So if you try to overly subdue a public health crisis and try to just shelter everybody in place, you're actually gonna have, in my opinion, a different effect where people are gonna ignore you, they're even gonna go so far as to potentially ignore relevant information and as a result, potentially put themselves at risk. Which is why throughout this whole thing I've been advocating a reasonable approach where it focuses on giving the people the information they need and then saying, here's the different things that you can do to help prevent, depending on what your level of fear is. I read a great article this weekend, Vance from Johns Hopkins University that talks about they've, they've finally figured out how the virus attacks the body and the way the proteins attach themselves to different parts of the body. And I found it extremely informative in terms of everything I've been hearing up to this point. And it's very promising to see that that information is eventually gonna be used to generate a vaccine, but it it's stuff like that that helps me make the decisions that I need to make to protect myself, not a government telling me this is what you have to do.

Vance Crowe [00:14:37] Yeah. And I think that the, that the authoritarian ideas about we aren't going to allow you to meet then prompts people to go into secret meetings or to do things under the cover of we don't want anybody to find out about us. And at the same time, there's been this impetus of like, there are things you're not allowed to say in public or around your work. And so to me, this is like a perfect storm coming together where you start having secret organizations. And secret organizations to me are a, a real danger because you start having groups of people that get together that believe that their getting together is that act of defiance, bonds them together. And if you have a fervent leader, if you have somebody that wants to propagate ideas because it's secret, you don't have that kind of sunlight that comes with having many people from different points of view come in and say, whoa, whoa, whoa. That idea sounds like a crazy idea. So the very thing that people have been saying, Hey, we need to stop all of this talk of like racial superiority or sexism or whatever, you will end up getting those things because you have these two storms that seem to me to be colliding together.

Jeremy Lakosh [00:15:49] Yeah. And, and the amount of civil discourse that is not occurring right now, the, the, the total lack of civil discourse is a major problem. I think about the miniseries that Milton Friedman created in 1980, free to choose. It was a 30 minute documentary and a 30 minute period of discussion. And the discussion revolved around people who had totally different viewpoints about economics, and they did 10 of these, so there were 10 hours worth. And the conversation in that discussion portion was of such great quality that it's hard to find anything in the, in the modern world that that matches that it, it's just, it's shocking to me how far we've gone down in terms of having the ability to intellectually civilly disagree on items. And I mean, the presidential debate obviously is an example of that, and those debates have been going down that road now for approximately eight years. But yeah, I mean, it, the the civil discourse is so absent in our society and so needed right now.

Vance Crowe [00:17:07] Well, and I think that social media gives people the impression that they are in a community. And by community I mean that you, you have a group of people that come from different points of view, different backgrounds, different financial stability, and they, they collide with one another and they, they have their own exchange of ideas and then they go apart and then they come back together and they go apart. But the benefit is because you know, you're gonna see these people again, whether it's at church or at your Elks Club or whatever the, you know, your kid's Boy Scout troop, whatever it is, it was not the zero sum game of if I disagree with this person, I'm going to annihilate them, which is what social media has done. It's made us feel like we're connected with a community, but we're not, we're only being shown those things that will drive our emotions high enough to get us to keep coming back and keep clicking that refresh button so you get more and more ads. And I think that it's a path that nobody saw coming, but now seems like something we should deeply fight against.

Jeremy Lakosh [00:18:12] Yeah. And I'll reflect a little further back to when I was in college, getting my bachelor's degree in the early two thousands, and how I went to a liberal arts school, and there were some professors there that had some pretty strict opinions of the world, let's just say, and civil discourse would occur, but that zero sum culture that you're talking about seemed to have been, been beginning to emerge within the universities where sometimes you could have polite disagreements, but other times it did turn into almost a, I have to annihilate you type thing. And then social media comes about, it starts up, it starts growing, and it becomes a bigger fuel for that fire to go. And so I've, I've kind of seen the last 20 years evolve into this, this zero sum culture where you do have to, or you feel compelled to destroy somebody because you disagree with them.

Vance Crowe [00:19:18] Yeah. And when we're talking about zero sum, for anybody that doesn't know that this means there can only be one winner there that, that everybody else loses. And there's one superior, you know, triumphant leader. And when I was in international relations, they often talk about how zero sum is a trap because there is no one country that ends up winning and dominating. Because even if you had one country, let's say Germany's marched to, you know, their hellscape that they wanted to inflict on everyone, eventually somebody would've come up and broken that regime up. Eventually somebody comes in and is will, will break it up. And then you have a whole bunch of different countries or a whole bunch of different ideas. And this idea that one idea in a classroom or one position on Facebook, it, it really has changed a fundamental part of our culture because we really are a culture of meritocracy where you have a hierarchy of ideas. And it's not like the one idea at the top is the ultimate winner, and they decide everything it's saying, well, like, I mostly like that idea, but then I see some value in these other ideas down here. But in the, in the social media, and I would say the, the direction the universities have gone in, it is not a meritocracy. It is an honor culture, and it is that somebody besmirches you or somebody attacks your point of view and there is no other choice If you are to survive, you have to fight all the way back and get other people to agree that they are bad and evil and wrong.

Vance Crowe [00:20:51] And it's, it's a terrible change for our culture.

Jeremy Lakosh [00:20:55] Yeah, I, I agree. And, and my, my exposure to zero sum, yours being an international relations through diplomacy and things like that, mine actually occurred through economics and studying international trade when I was in graduate school. And the professor came up to the class and said, you know, this was during the Bush administration, there's a tremendous narrative going around that if we're trading with China, there's a winner and a loser. And he said, that's not the case in international trade. You have to have winners on both sides in order for that trade to continue and for those economies to prosper. But right now there's this, there was this thought then in the latter half of the, the, the last decade where there was a winner and loser in international trade. And that just is not the case.

Vance Crowe [00:21:48] People really have, unless they've been taught economics, it almost seems like trade and prices and supply is either done by a group of mean people at the top or, or from some, you know, like the hand of God, but not that invisible hand that you, you know, you hear talked about in economics, and I always find it an interesting thing to ask children. So when a kid gets to be about a teenager, you can start to ask them, why do you think things cost what they do? And you know, like, why do you think that candy bar is a dollar 25? And to hear their answers, if you understand economics are shocking. But then to then extrapolate that out and realize if you've never had economics training, it's not just a teenager that thinks that it's a 40-year-old that believes that prices are set because the Snickers bars company really wants to just gouge as much money as they possibly can, and they do. But you have to have the other concepts of how much is demand, how much supply, what, where is the, the, the ratio of how big of a margin you can get before people start kicking back and what their alternatives are. And I think that there is a huge percentage of our culture that has literally no understanding of economics. And so therefore when you start talking about economic concepts, it you're not even, you're not, it, I don't even know how to describe what that conversation is. It's, it's, it's like talking to somebody about Monet painting where they're colorblind and you're not.

Jeremy Lakosh [00:23:22] Yeah. It, it really is. And, and it's a tough, it's a tough thing Vance, because if I went into that conversation with somebody who, I mean, for lack of a better term, will call them progressive and tried to explain economics or how capital markets work or how capital is allocated, I think I would probably be shouted at within 30 to 60 seconds of talking. So, I mean, you really have to give an elevator speech to try to captivate somebody's attention. And it's, it's really, I don't wanna call it necessarily a hopeless cause, but the people who have this misunderstanding of economics also have a bitter hatred towards a class of people that they don't understand. And that's the barrier you gotta try to get over. And corporate America is a great example. There are people out there that absolutely hate corporations, yet they fail to understand that without the existence of corporations, many of the products they get for very little price, especially food, would be extremely expensive for them because nobody else has been able to manufacture in mass, like corporations have. A great line that I heard in a documentary was that corporations are right up there with political freedom in terms of expanding the quality of life for human beings over the last two centuries.

Vance Crowe [00:24:54] Well, and I, I would push back a little bit on your, on your position on how the progressives feel about things, because I was definitely a person that felt like the, the table was tilted for a very long time. And I would say that was not from a lack of understanding about economics, but it was from a lack of a robust view of how complicated things were. And I think most people that are progressive, they are focused on one or two factors, and they're saying, Hey, I wanna make sure we don't forget about this. And I, and I think one of the things that Milton Friedman did in that freedom to choose was there were two things that were happening. One is people were in person, and when you're in person and it has to be one person speaking and then another person speaking, there is a dialogue or there's an exchange of common courtesy or respect or just humanization of that, that, that I think is really important. And that's gone, right? We do not have places where that happened. But also to Milton Friedman's credit, he was so, he loved the sparring so much that he never let it become personal. Right. You could see that smile on his face. I mean, it is fun to watch, not because he is just destroying the, the person that brings up an idea, but it's because he finds a way to lay that idea out to this person in a way that makes them get kind of caught up in their own argument. And, and it, it's, it's fun. And I think that people on the, the, whatever you wanna call it, the right or the economic minded, often forget that if you, you have to embrace this thing with some level of playfulness, otherwise you take the same level of strength of argument that the progress that you're upset about with the progressives.

Jeremy Lakosh [00:26:40] Yeah. I, I, I agree. And, you know, yeah. Going, I mean, going back to Milton Freeman, he actually had in one episode somebody who was openly socialist in America. That was, that was episode one. And he had several government bureaucrats also in his series as well. So he, and, and they were what I would consider experts in their area. He didn't take some ordinary person off the street and bring them in. He brought in people who were very established in their ideology and had built a career around their ideology and were experts in specific areas, whether it was in this, in the case of this government bureaucrat, it was somebody who oversaw the welfare program for the state of Pennsylvania. So yeah, he, he was very good at finding experts that he could have civil discourse with.

Vance Crowe [00:27:40] So you've done something that I think is really extraordinary. You've created a YouTube series where you are busting apart myths about historical situations. And I, I, I'll let you explain it, but I just wanna start off by saying, you have started with the series on Columbus, and within the first five minutes of your first episode, which is like 25 minutes long, I realized that I had a Walt Disney understanding of Christopher Columbus. And once I got over my shame, I realized like, oh my God, this is a treasure trove listening to Jeremy break down this historical figure, Christopher Columbus, why did you get started on this crazy long, deep endeavor?

Jeremy Lakosh [00:28:26] So long story short, I guess my bachelor's degree is in history of political science. I've had an interest in history most of my life. And for years, I had said to myself, when I retire, I am going to take a very deep dive into American history. And what I want to do is I wanna find as much information from the people who were there in the moment and read that not somebody else's interpretation of events. Well, I started, I started thinking about that, and I started thinking about what value that may bring to others. And I joined the Articulate Ventures Network, and in the Articulate Ventures network, I started noticing that people were helping, you know, give tips to me on communication, how to look better in front of the camera, how to sound better. These were all blind spots to me in terms of presenting to others. So then the idea started churning through my head, why not do it now? And why not share the information I find with others? And so I went back as far as I could, and it ended up being Christopher Columbus. And a lot of people probably don't know this, but he kept a pretty detailed diary of what happened on all four voyages and some other writings outside of that. Now those writings were lost, but the original translation from somebody who was alive during Columbus' era did survive.

Jeremy Lakosh [00:29:57] So it's as close to original as you can get. And I read through this and I said, none of this is being talked about today, none of this. So that's why I decided to share it with this, this podcast and YouTube channel.

Vance Crowe [00:30:12] Oh man. I mean, like, I think that there is a level of embarrassment that people will have to walk past in order to be able to watch this. Because for me, I had my experience of Christopher Columbus, 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean Blue, Nina Penta, Santa Maria, and he got his money from Spain, right? That was the sum total of what I knew. And then I had heard that there were a lot of people that felt like he committed genocide and he did these terrible things, but it didn't even really cross my mind that there must be really deep, complex things that went into this. Like how did he chart it? What did they know about the new world? What, what was the first thing that happened when he got there? How did he keep people going in the right direction? It didn't even cross my mind. And I was a sailor that he had to have captains of two other ships, and he had to keep them in line from running away and going and finding gold or running on their own. So to me, what you have built here is truly magnificent, and it's something that I would've never done on my own.

Jeremy Lakosh [00:31:16] Well, I, I, I appreciate that, and I think that what I'm attempting to build prior to presenting to people is thousands and thousands of pages of reference material to help get me started in telling these stories. I have to come at it just like the listener with a very vanilla understanding of what was going on. I had a very similar opinion of Christopher Columbus or thought about him as you had prior to reading all of these documents. And it's because when we take history class, you have to learn, you have to learn a textbook of history in, you know, a period of how many hours. And, you know, I started with a, I've got a textbook here from 1960 that I use as a reference to go through, and I'm just looking for footnotes to then go out and expand on, I have the luxury of time to help me dive deep and then share with people what I found. So I think part of our disconnect is, is there's limited time in teaching, and we have this romantic view of certain historical figures that are presented by the, the artistic audience. And an an example of that we're gonna find out much later is John Smith in Pocahontas. That story is completely different than what really happened.

Vance Crowe [00:32:43] So why a 1960s historic history book as opposed to like going to the high school and borrowing the one they're using today?

Jeremy Lakosh [00:32:52] Well, I got, I got this 1960 history book at, at a, at a garage sale for 75 cents. So for one, it's probably a a bit

Vance Crowe [00:32:59] Cheaper. They're the Economist in you. Yeah.

Jeremy Lakosh [00:33:01] But I like this book because it talks about World War II as a current event, therefore the information that's in front of it is probably a little more detailed than a modern day history book, because they had the same amount of time and the same amount of volume, you know, back 60 years ago as they do today. But in today's book, they have to talk about World War ii, Vietnam, Korea, Kennedy nine 11. So there's a lot more on the back end. I, this book here has three chapters in it before you get to the American Revolution. So there's a lot in here that I can pinpoint and talk about and go out and research and find additional information on. And right now I'm past Columbus in my data gathering, and I'm working on 16th century explorers of, of the lower 48 states. And without this book, I probably wouldn't have even known any existed.

Vance Crowe [00:34:01] So give us a preview of the Columbus one. Right now you're three episodes in, you just aired the third episode. What, what did you discover about Columbus that was, you know, unexpected for even you, the historian,

Jeremy Lakosh [00:34:17] Several things. The, the first thing that probably jumped out to me the most was that the Spanish crown named Columbus governor of essentially any land he was gonna find. So Columbus was not only gonna be an admiral in terms of leading his exploration, but he was gonna be a political leader as well. And I think that that spread him far too thin. And he seems to have had issues trusting people because he stayed in the political leadership longer than I thought he should have. So I think his, his decision to hold onto the political leadership ended up causing his detriment and is playing a role in today's perception of him, which is leading to the tearing down of statues and everything else. Because the bad things about Columbus, and I'll, I'll throw a ge generic term out there that's been around since he was alive. People have been trying to tear him down for 500 years. And so I think that has, I think those roots come in his political leadership. Another thing that I'll mention is that I read 300 pages of original research, and there was zero mention of the world being flat. Everybody thinks today that the reason Columbus was successful was that he proved the earth was round and that it wasn't flat. And I even remember being a kid and hearing that people thought, if you sailed too far west, you just fall off the end of the earth.

Jeremy Lakosh [00:35:52] There was definitely a sense amongst people in Italy, especially at the time that there was land west of the known world. This was, Columbus was not the only person to think this way. And something I'll say right now that is not in the podcast is that Columbus, at one point, I believe he was in Panama, actually figured out that he had traveled nine 20 fourths of the distance around the world based on the position of the stars and probably some type of time zone allocation. But he figured that out, looking up at the sky. And today we have so many people who talk about Columbus being essentially stupid. And when I read that portion of it, I thought, how many people today could go from Spain to Panama and figure out by looking up at the sky, how far around the world they came?

Vance Crowe [00:36:53] Well, I, I think one of the things that I was struck by is, as you start unraveling this, and you show the maps and you talk about how long they were at sea and what they were expecting, they would find, you start to realize that every single person that was on that ship with him was a free person. They chose to get on that ship and, and sail underneath him. And he had to have been a leader that could inspire people to do things. And that part of it had been completely stripped out of it for me. Like I just had him as Columbus' King. He tells people where to go and they're gonna go there. But now all of a sudden you realize like, not only did this guy have to have some faith enough that he could talk people into funding this voyage, that he could then also be trustworthy enough that they would make him governor and give him 10% or whatever it was of whatever he found. But then also to be able to connect with the natives, get him to them, to show him around and continue to lead people again and again, and again, it made me say like, man, to, to bring him down to a, a paper thin version, not only cuts down him, but it also cuts down us as individuals. Like what are we as individual human beings capable of? If you have enough confidence and enough ability to get other people to row in the same direction as you, it, to me, your videos are nothing short of profound. And I, I really hope people watch them and I, I can't wait to see where you go with other, other parts of history.

Jeremy Lakosh [00:38:27] So to continue with your thought, I spend seven episodes on Christopher Columbus, and right now, three have been published. I'm doing one Every Monday at episode seven, you will begin to see the chronology unfold, where not only you, at at the end of episode six, we actually conclude with Columbus's life. But episode seven talks about all the leadership that occurred after Columbus was gone. And what I'm gonna want the viewer or the listener to understand and look at, is to listen to all that leadership afterwards and compare it to the first six episodes of Columbus and ask yourself those questions. How profound was his leadership compared to others? What was his contribution? Because part of making that determination is to also look at time after somebody is gone, what has their absence created? And we're gonna find out in episode seven that Columbus's absence creates profound problems that change the Caribbean world forever. And many of the catastrophes that we associate Columbus with today actually occurred after he was dead. And they were done by people who were very anti Columbus. So episode seven is gonna be a very critical analysis of all of this.

Vance Crowe [00:40:03] So where do you go after Columbus? I mean, to be totally honest, when you were telling us, Hey, I'm gonna, I'm thinking about doing this one, I actually didn't believe that you could do the depth that you've done. It is profound. But then two, when you were like, I'm gonna start with, I want to show American history, and you started all the way back at Columbus, I was like, oh man, it's gonna be forever until we get to the American Revolution and then onto the Civil War. But then it dawned on me after listening to this, there's 200 years in between there, there's a whole lot that happened in between when Columbus happened and then when we start to really settle North America. So what's your next leap after Columbus?

Jeremy Lakosh [00:40:41] So right now I'm in a unit that I call 16th century explorers. And it talks about all the people who either touched or went into the lower 48 states. And this is mostly absent from American history courses today because a majority of the exploration occurred in Florida, Texas, and areas that did not become a part of America until after the American Revolution. So this is stuff that occurred before Jamestown, before Roanoke, before Plymouth. And there is, there's a lot of interesting things that occur specifically of Florida with the Spanish attempts of, of colonizing Florida that I'm gonna talk about in detail. And believe it or not, in one episode, and I can't remember which, there's actually lessons of Christopher Columbus that come up. There are things that had people listen to Columbus at the time, they could have avoided some serious problems in the state of Florida.

Vance Crowe [00:41:42] Man, I'm really looking forward to Florida because I one time took a trip to the center of the Everglades where there was this town that had been created. And you see the hellscape that the jungles of Florida was, for somebody to try and traverse that place in, when there were no roads, there were no cars, there was no electricity, nothing. I cannot imagine what it would've been like because that would've been a dark and terrible jungle. And the Everglades just seem to go on forever. It's no different than a desert, but it's just lots of water there.

Jeremy Lakosh [00:42:15] Yeah. And I'll, yeah, I'll take it a step further. Right now I'm reading about the NVAs Expedition and the NVAs Expedition started in Florida, and it ended up going to Galveston, Texas all the way across the, the, the Mexican Peninsula and south to Mexico City. Started with 600 men, and they ended with four people. Four people walked into Mexico City eight years after the expedition began. This thing is so broad. One of the four survivors wrote a 200 page story about it. And this thing is so broad and so intense that I've already done three podcasts. I've already recorded 'em, they're out there, they're gonna come out in December, and I'm only 40% through the journey so far. I mean, it, it reads like the modern day odyssey. It's like these guys face problem after problem after problem, and the hellish landscape was the least of their issues. They eventually got to the shore of Florida to try to go back. They had lost all their ships, they had nothing. They were starving to death. So they decided to build five ships and leave Florida, but they didn't have a navigator, 250 men, and they didn't have a navigator. So they end up building these ships and leaving, and instead of going south back to Cuba, they go west. And I mean, it just, it, it's one problem after another. And they have four people survive, a 600 man expedition. And for somebody to be able to tell the story directly I is, is amazing.

Jeremy Lakosh [00:43:47] And nobody, nobody has created anything to my knowledge, like a movie or a Broadway play or to a pre prior guest of yours, a board game. Nothing's been created about this expedition, which I find very fascinating.

Vance Crowe [00:44:04] Well, it is amazing. And it is history in context. That's correct.

Jeremy Lakosh [00:44:08] Historical context.

Vance Crowe [00:44:09] Historical context. I love your opening line. Welcome to Historical Context, and it's Monday mornings at 8:00 AM central. They open up. I hope people check them out. So Jeremy, as you're doing these deep dives into history, you're le they're learning about these leaders, you're learning about folly, you know, what is it changing about the way you view the world today?

Jeremy Lakosh [00:44:36] So right now, I'm actually attempting to set aside just about everything I've learned about history to hold off and do this chronology because I'm seeing things that are so interrelated to the past, things that are happening that are related to decisions of the past that I can't answer your question directly right now, but when I get done with this journey, I'll definitely have a very profound answer. I think one thing I think that is important that I've come across is this, this political landscape that exists in America today that is very bitter and very di divided has actually been around in some way or another, going all the way back to the founding of Jamestown. And I think the root cause of our political difference today, and it was some dialogue that occurred during the American Revolution shortly after that I think lays this foundation, is I think that one side has an overabundance of trust in the individual and the individual's ability to make their own decisions. And the other side has more trust and faith in a central government authority guiding the people in a certain direction.

Vance Crowe [00:46:02] And to that is a great point that, so for the first time yesterday, I had, it dawned on me why we name one party the Democratic Party, and one party the Republican Party. It had never dawned on me that the people on the right, the Republicans believe that you should have some amount of popular control, but that you actually wanna live in a republic. That, that the, that you don't wanna have the mob control or a group of people in popular vote, which can be driven by, you know, the, the, the quick change that happens around in the world, which would be the left and the, the democratic being believing that, hey, as much as we can, we should have democracy and, and that democracy should be, everybody gets a vote, everyone is equal. We should all participate in, in the building of this. I had never actually put those two ideas together. I knew what a republic was, and I knew that we are not, this country is not necessarily a democracy, we're a republic. But I'd never put those two ideas together and said like, oh, that is actually what their names are. And it's, it's shocking to me that I never put that together, but it's now seems obvious and apparent.

Jeremy Lakosh [00:47:14] Yeah. And to go all the way, I'll go all the way back to 1797 when John Adams became president, and it was clear that there was a political divide in the country. John Adams led the Federalist Party that believed in a strong federal government, and Thomas Jefferson led the Republican party, but they were more commonly called Jeffersonians. And he believed Jefferson had a very radical opinion of government that today, I think even the libertarians would shy away from Jefferson, actually believed that a generation of Americans should not inherit the rules and regulations of the prior generation. Now at some point, obviously Jefferson becomes president, and that opinion had to modify to some extent, and we're gonna learn, I think we're all gonna learn about that together. As I, as I take a deep dive into his writings. What

Vance Crowe [00:48:15] Do you mean he didn't think that you should inherit, like that they should rewrite the, the government structure?

Jeremy Lakosh [00:48:21] Yes. Every law that's passed by a congressional authority should have a, essentially an expiration on it. And it's up to the next generation to reestablish those rules and regulations. And, and in all honesty, Vance, there's some of what Jefferson says that I think we could take to heart today. If you look at all the outdated regulations that we have on the books, maybe there are things that we need to put an expiration on. But Jefferson believed that there was very little outside of the Constitution that should be inherited from generation to generation. In fact, he had some, he had some skepticism about a, a constitution prior to it being written.

Vance Crowe [00:49:05] You know, this concept of fractal localism that I've talked about on the podcast where it's like the closer you get to your house, the, the more that you are kind of a socialist, right? So like in my home, I'm a communist, everybody shares everything. You know, you get into my, my in-laws and my extended family, then you're more of a socialist. And then as you get further and further out, you want less shared and you want more of like, Hey, we're gonna decide that you have less control over me and I have less control over you. But it seems as though the, the pressure of society almost always moves towards a centralization. Is that right? Or is that just my opinion? Because it seems like over time you always move towards a stronger center of government where, where you can be further and further away from the home and have more and more control over what's going on inside of my home.

Jeremy Lakosh [00:50:00] I think so I just, based on my knowledge and observations, yes, I would hint to a moment in history where centralization was torn down and it created great conflict. And that would be the French Revolution. The French Revolution was a tearing down of central authority, and that absence of central authority created a great amount of violence that extended for a long period of time. Not a lot of people know this, and I will get into this in my podcast because it, it has to, it affects American history. But the French Revolution was not King Louis revolutionaries and then Napoleon, it was King Louis, and then all these other people switched hands, and then it was Napoleon and all those people switching hands was because there was a total lack of central government.

Vance Crowe [00:50:51] Ben Anderson, who's somebody that we both know, he is the executive producer on this podcast. He has thrown forward his Peter Teel paradox that he believes that Trump is going to be reelected and he will be the last American president in the current society that we're living in. That that the kickback from that will be so strong that the next presidential election won't, won't, won't look like the same United States that we're in. As you hear this idea, what's your reaction?

Jeremy Lakosh [00:51:22] I would react by saying it's very well possible. There is currently a movement underway to remove the electoral college. And if Donald Trump were to be reelected, I think that the electoral college would be threatened. That institution would definitely be threatened. Beyond that, though, I'm not sure what else I could see that necessarily changes. I do think we are at risk. I I do think that we are at risk Vance for criminally investigating every single president that comes up after Donald Trump because of the, the amount of effort and attention that went into this last impeachment. I think that if Joe Biden is elected, you may see that whole Ukraine thing come up with Republicans and them try to start the same thing. So we may get into this cycle of criminally investigating US presidents because of the fervor that came out of the 16 election.

Vance Crowe [00:52:25] Yeah. And there's this weird power, like I've always said, if you don't like the, the direction that the opposition is going in the, the, you know, the other side's presidential candidate or their winner or whatever, then the goal should not be get your guy in. It should be lower the amount of power that, that that office holds, so that way you don't have to fight to the death over it. But the thing that you're describing about then using the courts to fight over the presidential elections, this only further increases the centralization of power, but also then making everything a zero sum fight where, where you're litigating the last election as opposed to figuring out what do we need to do to have the proper governance so that human beings can flourish and however you think they should flourish, fine, let's argue with that over the laws that we create and how it gets enacted. But we're just putting way, way, way too much power into individual components of the government.

Jeremy Lakosh [00:53:26] Absolutely. And, and I'll take it a step further. After the first presidential debate, I went on social media, which I don't do often, and I I posed a question, very simple question to everybody after that debate, is anybody ready to have a conversation about limited government? And, and, and it was interesting. I didn't get as much of a response as I thought I would, but that was my takeaway from all this. If you're, if you're feeling, if you're watching these debates and you're watching our federal government do things and you have this sense of hopelessness, why do you feel that way? Is it because you've given too much authority to the central government to dictate your life and create that hopelessness? That's what I think. And when I was in college, I, I didn't say this often, but I said it a few times, I said to people, you know, one political party in this country has been mostly responsible for building up the institution of federal government. At some point, there's gonna be somebody that comes in and takes that huge federal government and weaponizes it against the ideology of the people who created it. And that's what I think we have right now in Donald Trump. When Donald Trump was elected, I looked at my wife and said, the opposition is gonna have a terrible time dealing with him. They're not gonna know what to do because he's gonna weaponize the federal government against their ideology. So now I think is a great time for everybody to have a conversation about limited government, because to your point, we may have the Supreme Court deciding the next three or four elections.

Jeremy Lakosh [00:55:05] Who knows?

Vance Crowe [00:55:07] Yeah. The, so in my neighborhood association, somebody sent an email out about signs. There was like some argument about whether or not you could put up political signs, and it doesn't really matter the details, but the email that was written that the entire neighborhood saw, you could strip out whether they were talking about the left or the right, and it would make no difference. Both sides feel like the other side is being a bully and that you're having a fight over. And this was a literal quote, the soul of the nation. And when you start thinking about that, it's like, wait a second. Really the only soul that I can control is mine. And then outside of that, my family, like, what can I contribute to my family? And the further that you get out into what is the soul of something, you start getting into some weird territory where people start being able to be weaponized their, their ideology, their fervor about the importance of this one election or this one judge or this one situation. It, it ultimately can be used to whip up a mob and to get people to do things that they never would have done. Ha had they just been focused on what can I control and what should I be doing for myself and my family?

Jeremy Lakosh [00:56:22] Yeah, I mean, I, I agree with you. I, I have taken a, I've taken a very, very passive approach to this election because I don't want to get caught up in all the emotion that's being generated. I'm seeing all the emotion that is being generated and seeing it as, I hate to say it, but a total, total waste of time. We are unable right now to talk about actual issues going on in this country. I, for the first time, I know very little about both candidates status or, or standing on foreign policy. What, what does either candidate plan to do about Iran, North Korea, different sectarian threats in the Middle East? I, I have no idea. And it hasn't been communicated because in the only debate we've had, everybody's been shouting at everyone. So it's, it's this, this whole fervor that's come up, as you've said, has, has caused me to kind of just back away from it because I know that if I jump into it, it's just gonna be a total waste of my time.

Vance Crowe [00:57:33] Yeah, I mean, I, for sober October, which our group is all participating in, the Articulate Ventures network said, Hey, one of our shared experiences that we're gonna do this year is sober October. And for me, giving up alcohol or THC not that hard, I've got a baby, I don't have that much time for, for fun anyway, but I decided that I was going to do two other things. I got off of Twitter for the month and then I decided I'm gonna take the hours from six to 9:00 PM and I'm just gonna have my phone away from me. I'm just gonna be focused on what's going on at home. And I could never have predicted how much more stable that would make me feel, how much better my relationship with my wi wife and my new child could be, because I didn't realize that I was using an electronic drug and it was no different. Now I, I see that, that Twitter was no different than me having a, a puff on a, on a cigarette or something because I had that withdrawal for the first couple of days. And then all of a sudden I realized there's nothing on Twitter that I need to see. And it was, it really has balanced me out, and I feel like I am healthier and more clear of mind than I have been in years. And I would never have thought that Twitter had that impact on me. And I, I'm not a hundred percent sure I'm gonna go back. And if I do, it's gonna be a totally different way that I engage with Twitter because I, I used to think there was a lot more value there than there really was.

Jeremy Lakosh [00:59:02] Yeah, I, I agree with you. I mean, I've, the benefit for me to have social media, and I'm speaking specifically to Facebook, I have family that live in a different state than I do. So using Facebook, I could show through images and different things what's going on in my life so I don't have to have 12 different conversations with people. But outside of that, I've definitely toned down on the arguing and the, the honor culture in terms of my, my use of social media and, you know, your, your presence of what, I guess I would call it an introduction of certain structure has, has helped you. I found the same benefit in my life, although I haven't done anything like that for the sober October, my pick was to reduce the amount of caffeine that I take in. I'm down to just two cups of coffee a day versus seven or eight. And to do that the month before an election, when you do have a little bit of irritation as a side effect is, is challenging, but it's, it's been great. But yeah, you know, Twitter, I've never been a big fan of it. I don't use it often. And like you, I, I don't know when, I'll go back.

Vance Crowe [01:00:18] What was it like giving up caffeine? Like what have you figured out that you didn't know you would, you would learn through doing this process?

Jeremy Lakosh [01:00:26] So I've done it several different times in my adult life. I did it when I was 27, so this would've been 10 years ago. I went from 12 or 13 cups a day to zero, and I turned into Oscar the Grouch. I mean, I was, I'd snap at people, I'd copped an attitude. People would ask me if there was something wrong with me. And then to make matters worse, I'd have these bouts of fatigue where I would just fall asleep, I'd fall asleep in the middle of just about anything. I was actually afraid I was gonna fall asleep driving. So it was a very, very abrupt change for me. This time around, this time around, I have been a little more, I've been wound a little tighter, but some of that may be coronavirus and not caffeine reduction, but I've been sleeping better. I've noticed that I can go to sleep easier, I can wake up a lot easier. I still hit the snooze button on occasion, but my sleep is very structured, very, very good. So I think that that part has helped me with caffeine and, and I drank caffeine to keep me focused, but now that I've substituted sleep for that, I'm still focused.

Vance Crowe [01:01:47] Yeah, the, the, I would say that biggest benefit for me not drinking alcohol. And it's not, I, I didn't drink that much, maybe one or two with my father-in-law while we're playing chess. So it wasn't a big part of my day-to-day life. However, my sleep is so much better because I don't do that, that you start to see that you can stack winds. I wake up in the morning and I don't have to be like, oh, do I feel like, do I feel a little shitty today? Like, do I have to deal with this? That's all gone. And so I wake up and bang, I'm ready to go, and then I get to do all of the things in my morning routine that I know make the rest of my day better. So for me, sober October is one of those things where I'm like, how much of this can I hold onto and, and keep building on without, without it being sober October without it being like, Hey, we're all going through this, you know, sacrifice. But what, what do you take away and put into your world? Do you think you will keep your caffeine intake low? Or is November 1st? Are you gonna be sucking back a pot of coffee

Jeremy Lakosh [01:02:46] November 1st? I will have two cups of coffee. In fact, I may, I may actually go down to one. I, I may actually taper back even further. I do like having a cup of coffee. I have substituted that desire for hot tea. So that, that kind of helps. But I don't see myself ramping it up anytime soon. And mentally the way I think about things is that I'm more productive as an individual. I can get more done, I can accomplish more, and I can support my family because of that. So those are motivators that are kind of keeping me in check right now with what's going on.

Vance Crowe [01:03:29] Okay. Jeremy, last question, and this kind of hearkens back to Coronavirus time when I was asking people what do you think the world will look like two weeks from today? But I'd like to change it up and say, what do you think the world looks like during the third week of November?

Jeremy Lakosh [01:03:46] The third week of November? It will greatly depend on the outcome of the election, which I just feel sad saying that. I think that if Donald Trump is reelected, I think that we will have enormous amounts of violence and arson and destruction in urban areas. I think that if Joe Biden wins, that violence and destruction will not come until sometime next summer. And the reason I say that is because the people that are creating the chaos will think for a short period of time that whatever it is they're gonna get their way is gonna come. And when next summer comes around and they realize that that's not gonna be the case, I think the same outcome occurs.

Vance Crowe [01:04:40] Wow. I have not heard that. Okay. That's a very interesting perspective. I

Jeremy Lakosh [01:04:45] I, I, I hate to say this because I, I like being an optimist. I'm mild mannered. I think next year's gonna be a really bad year. I just, there's there and now and I don't think that next year's gonna be a bad year in where there's a sense of hopelessness going beyond that. I think next year is gonna be a very challenging year for this country, but we will get over it. We will get past it. I actually think that next year could be so much more worse that a hundred years from now they're not gonna talk about COVID-19 as the dominant factor here. They're gonna talk about COVID-19 as the spark to events that occur in 2021.

Vance Crowe [01:05:31] Wow. That is a very interesting, that's almost a Peter Thiel paradox answer. Alright. You can't do 50 50, but who, who, what do you think the odds are that Donald Trump wins reelection?

Jeremy Lakosh [01:05:45] 65%.

Vance Crowe [01:05:46] Wow. Okay.

Jeremy Lakosh [01:05:47] And, and, and, and I'm honestly vance, I'm not gonna be surprised either way, but the reason I'm, I'm saying 65% is because I'm looking at the voter registration data in the Battleground states, and I'm seeing a lot more Republican push in those battleground states in terms of voter registration than the Democratic party. So the independents and some Republicans could vote for Joe Biden and he ends up winning. But just based on the voter registration data, it's a bit of a mountain to climb. And if you think about it, in our lifetime, we've seen an incumbent president lose an election once. It's a hard thing to do to beat an incumbent.

Vance Crowe [01:06:33] Alright, Jeremy Osh, this has been a great conversation. If people wanna see your podcast, where do they find it?

Jeremy Lakosh [01:06:41] So I'll send you a couple of links, YouTube, just search historical context. There's a couple of things that'll come back, but my logo is the open book with the light shining on it. So that's historical context on YouTube. And if you, if you search historical context, Christopher Columbus, you'll come right up to the videos. And then I distribute the audio podcast through Anchor fm. So Anchor FM will tell you all of the different podcast networks that I'm on.

Vance Crowe [01:07:12] Well, man, it has been great to talk with you and we'll be checking back in in late November, early December to see how your predictions fared. Jeremy la thanks for joining me on the podcast. Thanks

Jeremy Lakosh [01:07:23] Again, Vance. Have a good one. Ah.