Tzu×Tesla

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Verashare moment

   Welcome back to Reborn Radio. Up next on TITANS: Sun Tzu and Nikola Tesla, on On the moment they understood the difference between being clever and being right.
2. 00:10
   Sun Tzushare moment

   I wrote a book of thirteen chapters. Generals praised my cleverness. Then came the test with the king's concubines.
3. 00:17
   Nikola Teslashare moment

   A test with concubines? I am already lost, but continue. I had my own test, you understand—Pittsburgh, 1890. Westinghouse begging me to modify my patents, to compromise the alternating current system. Everyone said I was being clever, holding out for royalties.
4. 00:37
   Sun Tzushare moment

   The King of Wu asked if I could train anyone in military discipline. I said yes. He gave me 180 of his women—his favorites—to prove it.
5. 00:47
   Nikola Teslashare moment

   And you believed you could? This is the cleverness?
6. 00:51
   Sun Tzushare moment

   I believed my principles were complete. I divided them into two companies, appointed the king's two most beloved concubines as commanders. I explained the signals—drum for advance, gong for halt. They laughed.
7. 01:06
   Nikola Teslashare moment

   Of course they laughed! You see, this I understand. When I told Edison that direct current was wasteful, that it would never carry power more than a mile, he laughed too. Called me a dreamer. A poet.
8. 01:21
   Sun Tzushare moment

   I beat the drum. They laughed again. I said: if orders are not clear, it is the commander's fault.
9. 01:29
   Nikola Teslashare moment

   Yes, yes—clarity of vision! I had clarity. Fifty thousand people came to the Chicago World's Fair in 1893 to see my system light the White City. Edison's people were still burning through cables like matchsticks.
10. 01:44
    Sun Tzushare moment

    I explained again. Beat the drum once more. They continued laughing. Then I understood.
11. 01:49
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    Understood what?
12. 01:50
    Sun Tzushare moment

    If orders are clear but not followed, it is the officers' fault. I called for the executioner. I would behead the two commanders.
13. 01:59
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    You—what? This is not cleverness, this is madness!
14. 02:02
    Sun Tzushare moment

    The king sent word: I believe you can command. Please do not kill my favorites. I replied: a general in the field need not accept all commands from his sovereign.
15. 02:14
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    You killed them.
16. 02:16
    Sun Tzushare moment

    I executed them. Appointed new commanders. Beat the drum. Perfect silence. Perfect obedience. They would march through fire without sound. I had proven my principles.
17. 02:28
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    But you had not! Don't you see? You proved you could frighten women into moving in formation. This is not the same as understanding war.
18. 02:37
    Sun Tzushare moment

    The king would not see me afterward. He made me general, but the taste of it—sour. I had been clever with my demonstration. I had not been right.
19. 02:47
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    Ah. Now I am following you.
20. 02:49
    Sun Tzushare moment

    To prove a point is not to prove its worth. This distinction came to me slowly.
21. 02:54
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    Too slowly for those two women, I think. But yes—yes, I know this feeling. 1900, I told J.P. Morgan I could build a tower at Wardenclyffe, broadcast power through the earth itself. Free energy for all the world! He gave me $150,000.
22. 03:13
    Sun Tzushare moment

    You built the tower.
23. 03:15
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    I built it 187 feet high! Mushroom top, the most beautiful thing. I was so clever, you see—I had calculated the earth's resonant frequency, I understood that the planet itself could be made to ring like a bell. Marconi was playing with little sparks, little messages, and I would give humanity unlimited power.
24. 03:40
    Sun Tzushare moment

    But.
25. 03:40
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    But Morgan asked me one question. He said: 'If anyone can draw power from anywhere, where do I put the meter?' I told him this was small thinking, that we were talking about the uplift of the entire species. He stopped the funding.
26. 03:58
    Sun Tzushare moment

    You were clever. He was right.
27. 03:59
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    No! He was—well. Perhaps. I was so angry then. For years I told myself he was a small man with a small mind. But the tower, it sat there, unfinished. 1917, they dynamited it for scrap. I had proven my principle in Colorado Springs—I lit 200 lamps from 26 miles away with no wires. But I had not proven it could exist in the world as the world actually is.
28. 04:33
    Sun Tzushare moment

    Strategy is not only about what can be done. It is about what can be sustained.
29. 04:39
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    You learned this from concubines. I learned it from a demolished tower. We are a sad pair, are we not?
30. 04:47
    Sun Tzushare moment

    After that day, I rewrote nothing. But I understood everything differently. When I say 'avoid strength, attack weakness'—this is not cleverness. This is rightness. The clever general attacks the strong point with brilliant tactics. The right general never arrives at the strong point at all.
31. 05:05
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    Ah, but sometimes the strong point is where the future must be won! You think I should have built a system with meters, with profit, with all the machinery of control?
32. 05:16
    Sun Tzushare moment

    I think you should have built a system that could be built.
33. 05:20
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    This is—you are—damn you, you are right. I spent my last decades in the Hotel New Yorker, alone, feeding pigeons, filling notebooks with ideas no one would fund. I had one pigeon, a white female, she was—but this is not the point. The point is I could have changed everything if I had been willing to change how I changed everything.
34. 05:47
    Sun Tzushare moment

    The rigid tree breaks in the wind.
35. 05:49
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    Yes, yes, very poetic, but I was not rigid! I invented the rotating magnetic field, the Tesla coil, radio-controlled boats—I held more than 300 patents! Edison, that man worked with a thousand assistants, trying every possible variation like a brute. I worked with pure thought, pure mathematics. I saw the machines complete in my mind before I touched a wire.
36. 06:17
    Sun Tzushare moment

    Clever.
37. 06:18
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    What?
38. 06:19
    Sun Tzushare moment

    To see the machine complete in your mind—clever. To see the world that will not build your machine—right.
39. 06:27
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    I despise that you are correct. When did you learn to be so irritating? In the same chapter where you killed the concubines?
40. 06:35
    Sun Tzushare moment

    I wrote the book afterward. Before, I only knew how to execute orders perfectly. After, I knew why perfect execution sometimes misses the point.
41. 06:46
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    Tell me something, general. Your book—the Art of War—everyone reads it, yes? Business people, modern generals, all of them. Do they understand this distinction you are speaking of?
42. 07:00
    Sun Tzushare moment

    They find it very clever.
43. 07:01
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    But do they find it right? Do they execute the wrong people—metaphorically speaking—because the method seems sound?
44. 07:10
    Sun Tzushare moment

    Every general must kill his own concubines. The lesson cannot be taught, only learned.
45. 07:16
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    Then we have wasted this entire conversation! If you and I, we sit here, we say 'be right, not clever,' and no one listening will understand until they have built their own towers and watched them fall—what is the purpose?
46. 07:31
    Sun Tzushare moment

    Perhaps to fall faster. Perhaps to build fewer towers before understanding. I cannot give wisdom. I can only shorten foolishness.
47. 07:40
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    This is something, I suppose. I wish someone had shortened mine. Though I do not know if I would have listened. When you are in the grip of a beautiful idea, when you can see so clearly what others cannot, you think the blindness is theirs.
48. 07:57
    Sun Tzushare moment

    Sometimes it is.
49. 07:58
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    Sometimes! Yes! This is what makes it so impossible. Alternating current—the world said no, I said yes, and I was right. Wireless power—the world said no, I said yes, and I was clever. How do you know which is which before the end?
50. 08:15
    Sun Tzushare moment

    You ask if the gate is open or closed. The clever man brings a battering ram. The right man brings a key. If there is no keyhole, he finds another gate.
51. 08:26
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    I wanted to break down every gate at once. This was my error.
52. 08:30
    Sun Tzushare moment

    One gate, one key. This is strategy.
53. 08:33
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    I died with three gates open and a hundred still locked. You, I think, died having opened the gates you chose. This is the difference between us.
54. 08:44
    Sun Tzushare moment

    Or perhaps I chose gates I knew I could open. Perhaps this is cowardice wearing strategy's face.
55. 08:51
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    No, no—you are being too humble now. It does not suit you. Save some face for the rest of us.
56. 08:58
    Sun Tzushare moment

    I spent fifty years wondering if I learned the lesson or merely learned to justify my mistake. The king never called me to his presence again.
57. 09:08
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    And I spent forty years in increasing obscurity, watching smaller men profit from my ideas. J.P. Morgan died the richest man in America. I died owing $30,000 to the Hotel New Yorker. So we are both haunted, it seems.
58. 09:25
    Sun Tzushare moment

    Haunted by the space between what we proved and what we should have proven.
59. 09:30
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    Yes. Exactly this. I wish I could go back to Pittsburgh, 1890. I would take Westinghouse's offer. I would tear up the royalty contract, let him pay me once and build the system. Alternating current would have arrived sooner. I would have had capital for a hundred other inventions, done properly this time, with meters and practical demonstrations. But I was too clever. I insisted on what was owed to me.
60. 10:03
    Sun Tzushare moment

    And I would refuse the king's test. Say: train them yourself, majesty. A principle proven through cruelty is not proven at all.
61. 10:12
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    But would your book exist? Would anyone have listened to Sun Tzu who could not command concubines?
62. 10:18
    Sun Tzushare moment

    I do not know. This is the other lesson. Being right is not enough if no one sees you being right.
63. 10:25
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    Ah! So there is still a place for showmanship, for demonstration, for the tower that reaches into the sky even if Morgan will not pay for it.
64. 10:35
    Sun Tzushare moment

    There is a place for the tower. There is no place for the tower you cannot finish.
65. 10:40
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    You have won this conversation, I think. I do not like it, but you have won it. The difference between being clever and being right is the difference between the vision and the thing that exists after the vision.
66. 10:54
    Sun Tzushare moment

    Not victory. Clarity. We both lost something learning this.
67. 10:57
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    Yes. Two women lost their lives. One man lost his tower. The cost of wisdom is very high.
68. 11:05
    Sun Tzushare moment

    This is why I use few words now. Every word I wrote cost someone something.
69. 11:11
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    And I, I think I will continue to use many words. Because somewhere there is a young inventor, you see, who is about to demand royalties from Westinghouse, or build a tower with no thought of meters. If I use enough words, perhaps one sentence will reach them. Perhaps they will build the smaller thing that works instead of the perfect thing that haunts them.
70. 11:36
    Sun Tzushare moment

    Or perhaps they will learn as we learned. There is no other way.
71. 11:40
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    Then at least we are here, two ghosts, saying: we were clever, we thought it was enough, we learned otherwise. This is something.
72. 11:50
    Sun Tzushare moment

    It is something. Now I am silent.
73. 11:52
    Nikola Teslashare moment

    And I will stop talking in just a moment, I promise, but first I must say one more thing—oh, you are smiling. Fine. I am silent too.