Moses×Tesla

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Verashare moment

   From the studio at Reborn Radio — next on STUDY HALL, Moses and Nikola Tesla. They take up On a colleague who failed in a way they secretly knew they were a hair away from themselves.
2. 00:11
   Mosesshare moment

   There was a man. In my company during the wilderness years. Dathan, his name was. You would not know him from history, but I knew him well enough. He came to me often with complaints, with visions of how things might be otherwise arranged.
3. 00:31
   Nikola Teslashare moment

   Yes, yes, I understand this type immediately. The man who sees the flaw in every system. Was he right? About the flaws?
4. 00:41
   Mosesshare moment

   Often. That was the difficulty.
5. 00:44
   Nikola Teslashare moment

   Ah.
6. 00:45
   Mosesshare moment

   He saw what I saw. That our people were stiff-necked, that they grumbled without ceasing, that they had no memory longer than three days for miracles. He stood near enough to leadership to see its cost, but not near enough to pay it. And one day he decided he could do better.
7. 01:07
   Nikola Teslashare moment

   He challenged you?
8. 01:09
   Mosesshare moment

   He and Korah and others. They gathered two hundred and fifty men, leaders of the congregation, and came to me and Aaron saying, 'You take too much upon yourselves. All the congregation is holy, every one of them, and the Lord is among them. Why then do you exalt yourselves?' Those were the words.
9. 01:37
   Nikola Teslashare moment

   The words of democracy! Of course, I see why this would appeal. But you are troubled by it still, after so many centuries?
10. 01:45
    Mosesshare moment

    I am troubled because I had said those very words. In my heart. Many times.
11. 01:52
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    Ah. Now we arrive at it.
12. 01:54
    Mosesshare moment

    Every time they complained of water, every time they wept for the cucumbers of Egypt, every time I climbed the mountain and found them dancing before a golden calf. I thought: perhaps I am the problem. Perhaps another man, a man who had not killed the Egyptian, who had not fled to Midian, who did not stammer when he spoke. Perhaps such a man could lead them better.
13. 02:24
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    This is the torture of the visionary mind! I have lain awake in my laboratory, in my rooms at the Waldorf, thinking precisely this. That Edison with his methodical plodding, his thousand useless experiments, his mercantile instinct, that somehow he was right and I was wrong. That perhaps the world wants the inferior product, delivered with showmanship.
14. 02:52
    Mosesshare moment

    Did you ever say it aloud? Did you ever gather others and challenge him directly?
15. 02:58
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    No. I wrote articles. I gave interviews. I demonstrated my alternating current system to anyone who would watch. But I did not organize a consortium to overthrow him, no.
16. 03:10
    Mosesshare moment

    That was your wisdom. Or perhaps your fear. I am not certain the two can be separated.
17. 03:18
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    What happened to this Dathan?
18. 03:20
    Mosesshare moment

    The earth opened. It swallowed him and his household and all that belonged to them. They went down alive into Sheol, and the earth closed over them, and they perished from the midst of the assembly.
19. 03:39
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    A geological event? An earthquake at the precise moment of confrontation?
20. 03:44
    Mosesshare moment

    You may call it what you wish. I called upon the Lord to make a new thing, that the ground might open its mouth, and it did. The others, the two hundred and fifty who stood with censers of incense, fire came out from the Lord and consumed them.
21. 04:07
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    And you watched this.
22. 04:08
    Mosesshare moment

    I watched this.
23. 04:10
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    Did you feel vindicated?
24. 04:12
    Mosesshare moment

    I felt. Relief. And immediately after the relief, a shame that has not left me. Because Dathan was not wrong in his seeing. He was wrong in his reaching. And I knew, even as the earth closed, that the difference between us was so small. A hair, as you say. Perhaps less.
25. 04:36
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    Yes! This is exactly the feeling! I knew men, collaborators in my early years, who took my ideas and tried to commercialize them before the ideas were ready. Before the mathematics were complete. They failed, of course. They failed spectacularly.
26. 04:54
    Mosesshare moment

    And you thought, that could have been me.
27. 04:57
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    I thought, that should have been me! If I had been more practical, less concerned with perfection, more willing to compromise with investors. I would have been the one bankrupt in Colorado Springs, begging Westinghouse for advances on patents already sold.
28. 05:15
    Mosesshare moment

    But you were not.
29. 05:16
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    I was not. Some instinct, some stubbornness, perhaps some cowardice kept me from making the leap one year too soon. They made it, and the ground swallowed them, financially speaking. And I continued. But I carried their failure like a weight. Because I knew my own equations, I knew how close I was to making the same error.
30. 05:41
    Mosesshare moment

    There is a peculiar guilt in this. To survive where another, not so different, does not.
31. 05:49
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    It is more than guilt. It is a kind of knowledge. You see yourself in the failure. You see that the qualities which saved you—caution, perhaps, or fear of public humiliation, or simply better timing—these are not virtues. They are accidents.
32. 06:07
    Mosesshare moment

    Or they are gifts. I have wondered this for a very long time. Whether what kept me from Dathan's error was righteousness or simply. The favor of God, which I did not earn and cannot explain.
33. 06:26
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    You believe in such favor?
34. 06:28
    Mosesshare moment

    I have no choice but to believe in it. I killed a man in Egypt. I fled. I was a shepherd for forty years, married to the daughter of a priest of Midian, no longer even among my own people. And then a voice from a bush that burned but was not consumed. Why me? I asked this. I asked it many times. The only answer I received was, 'I will be with you.' Not, 'You are qualified.' Not, 'You have earned this.'
35. 07:08
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    I too have felt this presence, though I would not call it God. When the ideas come, when I see the rotating magnetic field complete in my mind, when I know with certainty that I am correct and the others are groping in darkness, there is something beyond my own intellect operating. I have always known this.
36. 07:30
    Mosesshare moment

    And yet men like Dathan, men like your colleagues who failed, they also felt this certainty.
37. 07:39
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    Yes. This is the terrible thing. They felt it too. How do you distinguish between true vision and delusion? In the moment?
38. 07:48
    Mosesshare moment

    You cannot. Or I could not. I know only that I brought them out of Egypt, and Dathan did not. I stood on the mountain, and he did not. But the seeing, the dissatisfaction, the conviction that things must be otherwise. That was identical.
39. 08:08
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    So we are left with results. With history's judgment. How unsatisfying.
40. 08:14
    Mosesshare moment

    More than unsatisfying. Terrifying. Because it means that in the moment of decision, we are blind. We choose, or we are chosen, and only afterward do we learn whether we were the visionary or the cautionary tale.
41. 08:35
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    And yet we must choose. We must act. To wait for certainty is to never move at all.
42. 08:41
    Mosesshare moment

    Yes. This is leadership. This is prophecy. To move forward when the ground beneath you may open at any moment. And to watch when it opens beneath another, knowing that you are not so different, not so much wiser. Only still standing.
43. 09:02
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    I have never been comfortable with the praise I received. The titles, 'The Man Who Invented the Twentieth Century,' these things. Because I remember the faces of the men who tried what I tried, one year earlier or with one variable miscalculated. Their notebooks were as full as mine.
44. 09:21
    Mosesshare moment

    I never entered the Promised Land.
45. 09:24
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    I'm sorry?
46. 09:25
    Mosesshare moment

    I brought them to it. Forty years through wilderness, through Sinai, through the testing and the giving of the Law. And at the end, I was permitted only to see it from a distance. I died on Mount Nebo, looking across to what I could not enter.
47. 09:48
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    Why? Why were you denied?
48. 09:50
    Mosesshare moment

    Because at Meribah, when they quarreled again over water, when they accused me again of bringing them out to die in the wilderness, I struck the rock twice in anger. The Lord had told me to speak to it. But I was tired. Forty years tired. And I struck it, and I said to them, 'Hear now, you rebels, shall we bring water out of this rock?' We. As if Aaron and I were the source.
49. 10:25
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    One mistake. After forty years.
50. 10:28
    Mosesshare moment

    One moment when I believed my own authority instead of remembering whose authority it was. The same error Dathan made. Different in degree, perhaps. Not different in kind.
51. 10:45
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    Then none of us can claim to be other than fortunate.
52. 10:49
    Mosesshare moment

    No. We cannot. And when I watched Dathan and the earth, I was not watching a different kind of man. I was watching the man I would have been, absent grace. Or absent timing. Or absent some quality I cannot even name.
53. 11:10
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    This is why the colleague's failure haunts us. It is a mirror.
54. 11:15
    Mosesshare moment

    Yes. A mirror that shows us not what we are, but what we could so easily have been. What we may yet be, if we forget ourselves.
55. 11:27
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    I will not forget. This conversation, I think, makes forgetting more difficult.
56. 11:33
    Mosesshare moment

    That is all we can do. Remember. Remember Dathan. Remember your colleagues. Remember that the ground beneath us is never as solid as we think. And walk anyway.