0:00 We often think of a single day as just that — one unit of time, twenty-four hours on a calendar.0:07 But looking back at October sixth, you realize a day isn't a single thing at all; it's a place where profoundly different worlds can exist, and collide, all at once.0:20 Just yesterday, in our journey through October fifth, we talked about the first televised presidential address, a moment that fused political power with the new magic of broadcast media.0:34 Well, today's date takes that same theme of media and image, and it absolutely explodes it.0:42 It gives us the birth of the talkies, and, decades later, the birth of the filtered, visual world we all now live in.0:51 It’s a day of spectacle.0:53 But it’s also a day of profound, world-altering conflict.0:57 Two stories, running in parallel, shaping the world we inherited.1:02 Let's start with the spectacle.1:05 Oh, it’s a wonderful place to start.1:07 Imagine it’s Paris, 1889.1:09 The Belle Époque.1:11 The city is just buzzing, electric with the energy of the Exposition Universelle, for which they’ve just built a certain iron tower you might have heard of.1:23 And on this night, October sixth, a new establishment opens its doors at the foot of Montmartre.1:30 It has a big, red, spinning windmill on its roof.1:34 The Moulin Rouge is born.1:36 And with it, a legend.1:38 This wasn't just a dance hall.1:40 It was a cultural earthquake.1:43 It was opulent, it was a little bit naughty, and it was for EVERYONE.1:48 The rich industrialists came to rub shoulders with artists, writers, and the working girls of the neighborhood.1:57 It was a social melting pot fueled by champagne and the high-kicking, breathless, gloriously scandalous dance that made it famous: the can-can.2:08 Painters like Toulouse-Lautrec practically lived there, capturing the frantic energy, the faces in the crowd, the dancers with names like La Goulue — "The Glutton" — who would kick the top hat right off a gentleman's head.2:25 It was the birth of a certain kind of modern entertainment.2:30 Live, immersive, a little dangerous, and utterly unforgettable.2:35 It was about being THERE.2:37 In the room where it happened.2:39 Now, let's jump forward thirty-eight years.2:42 To 1927.2:43 The spectacle is still the thing, but the technology has made a quantum leap.2:49 For years, you went to the pictures.2:52 Silent pictures.2:53 You watched actors emote on screen while a live organist or pianist tried to keep up in the theater.3:01 The idea of hearing them speak was… well, it was science fiction.3:06 Until October sixth, 1927.3:08 In New York City, Warner Brothers premieres a film called "The Jazz Singer." Most of it is still a silent picture.3:17 But then, the star, Al Jolson, sits at a piano.3:21 He plays.3:21 And then he looks out, not just at the other actor in the scene, but at the audience, at history itself, and he speaks.3:31 "Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain't heard nothin' yet!" Can you IMAGINE the shock in that theater?3:39 The collective gasp.3:40 It wasn't just a line.3:42 It was a prophecy.3:43 A gunshot marking the end of one entire art form and the birth of another.3:49 Within a year, the silent film industry was basically gone.3:54 Studios were scrambling to convert to sound.3:57 Stars whose voices didn't match their on-screen personas saw their careers evaporate overnight.4:05 It was a revolution.4:06 The spectacle was no longer just about being in the room; it was about the room being brought to you, with sound and fury.4:16 The whole paradigm had shifted.4:18 From the live, shared energy of the Moulin Rouge to the recorded, mass-distributed energy of the talkie.4:26 The experience became more personal, yet infinitely more scalable.4:32 And that brings us to the next great pivot.4:35 October sixth, 2010.4:37 No movie palace this time.4:39 No red windmill.4:40 Just a couple of guys, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, who release an app for the iPhone.4:47 They call it… Instagram.4:49 And that first-ever Instagram post?4:51 It was a picture of a golden retriever, taken by Systrom, next to a taco stand in Mexico.4:58 The caption was just "test".5:01 That’s it.5:01 That’s the whole thing.5:03 It seems so trivial, so disposable.5:06 It looks like nothing.5:08 But we, with our hindsight, know it was EVERYTHING.5:12 Just as "The Jazz Singer" made sound an essential part of story, Instagram was about to make a certain kind of polished, filtered image an essential part of identity.5:25 It took the logic of mass media and put the tools of production into everyone's pocket.5:31 It democratized spectacle.5:33 We all became our own directors, our own stars, broadcasting our lives not from a Hollywood studio, but from our breakfast table, our vacation, our walk in the park.5:46 From the can-can dancer becoming a Parisian celebrity, to Al Jolson becoming a national one, to literally anyone with a phone being able to build a global following based on pictures of their dog.6:02 You can draw a straight line through October sixth.6:06 It's the day we learned to perform for the crowd, then for the camera, and finally, for the entire world, all the time.6:15 Looking back, that first, simple photo of a dog wasn't a test of an app.6:21 It was a test of us.6:22 And the results… well, they’re still coming in.6:26 But while one part of the world was busy building new forms of entertainment, another part was bracing for a conflict that would reshape the global order.6:38 And it also happens on October sixth.6:41 The year is 1973.6:42 It is Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.6:45 The holiest day in the Jewish calendar.6:48 In Israel, the country comes to a standstill.6:52 People are fasting, praying.6:54 There are no radio or television broadcasts.6:57 The roads are empty.6:59 It is a day of absolute, profound quiet.7:02 And into that quiet comes the thunder of war.7:06 At precisely 2 PM, a coalition of Arab states, led by Egypt and Syria, launches a massive, coordinated surprise attack.7:15 Egyptian forces surge across the Suez Canal, overwhelming the supposedly impenetrable Israeli Bar-Lev Line.7:23 In the north, Syrian tanks pour into the Golan Heights.7:28 For Israel, and for much of the world, this was unthinkable.7:32 After its decisive victory in the Six-Day War in 1967, the Israeli military was seen as invincible.7:40 The intelligence community was confident.7:43 Complacent, even.7:45 They had received warnings, signs, but dismissed them as bluffs or exercises.7:51 They believed the Arab armies were incapable of such an audacious, complex operation.7:57 They were wrong.7:59 Utterly wrong.8:00 The first few days of the war were a catastrophe for Israel.8:04 The losses in tanks, in planes, and in lives were staggering.8:09 The mood in the country shifted from serene confidence to existential dread.8:15 For a moment, it truly felt like the state itself could be overrun.8:20 This wasn't just a regional conflict.8:23 This was a Cold War proxy battle at the highest possible stakes.8:28 The United States backed Israel.8:31 The Soviet Union backed Egypt and Syria.8:34 As the tide of the war began to turn, thanks to a massive American airlift of military supplies to Israel, the two superpowers came dangerously close to a direct confrontation.8:48 Nixon put U.S.8:49 nuclear forces on high alert.8:51 It was a moment of genuine, world-ending peril.8:55 The fighting was brutal, and it lasted for just under three weeks.9:00 But its consequences would last for decades.9:03 Here’s the pivot.9:05 The thing that no one saw coming.9:07 The war wasn't just won or lost on the battlefield.9:11 Its most enduring legacy was economic.9:14 In response to the U.S.9:16 support for Israel, the Arab members of OPEC, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, did something unprecedented.9:26 On October seventeenth, while the war was still raging, they declared an oil embargo against the United States and other western nations.9:37 They cut production.9:38 And the world economy… broke.9:41 The price of a barrel of oil quadrupled almost overnight.9:45 In the United States, you had gasoline rationing.9:49 Endless lines at the pump.9:51 A national speed limit of fifty-five miles per hour was imposed to save fuel.9:57 The powerful, gas-guzzling American muscle car suddenly looked like a dinosaur.10:03 The great post-war economic boom shuddered to a halt, replaced by something they called "stagflation" — high unemployment AND high inflation.10:14 This single decision, born from the conflict that began on October sixth, redrew the map of global power.10:22 It demonstrated that a handful of nations, by controlling a single resource, could bring the world's mightiest economies to their knees.10:33 Our entire relationship with energy, our dependence on foreign oil, the very design of our cities and our cars — all of it was thrown into question.10:45 We are still living in the world that crisis created.10:49 And the story has one more tragic, deeply personal turn.10:53 The man who planned the October sixth attack for Egypt was its president, Anwar Sadat.11:00 The war, while a military loss in the end, was a political victory for him.11:06 It restored Arab pride and shattered the myth of Israeli invincibility, which allowed him to do the unthinkable: negotiate for peace from a position of strength.11:18 He went to Jerusalem.11:20 He signed the Camp David Accords with Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and President Jimmy Carter.11:28 He won the Nobel Peace Prize.11:30 It was an act of incredible political courage.11:34 And it cost him his life.11:36 On October sixth, 1981 — exactly eight years to the day after he launched the Yom Kippur War — Anwar Sadat was assassinated by extremists who opposed the peace treaty he had signed.11:50 He was killed during a victory parade… commemorating the 1973 war.11:55 The beginning of his greatest triumph became the anniversary of his death.12:01 A more perfect, more tragic historical irony is hard to find.12:06 So you see, it’s a day of such contradictions.12:09 The birth of spectacle and the brutality of war.12:13 The launch of a fun photo app and the memory of a global crisis.12:18 And amid all this, people are born.12:21 People who will go on to shape the world in their own ways.12:26 On October sixth, 1887, the architect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret was born.12:31 We know him as Le Corbusier.12:33 A giant of modernism.12:35 He dreamed of razing the old centers of cities like Paris and replacing them with towering, cruciform skyscrapers in vast green parks.12:46 He called houses "machines for living in." His vision was bold, brilliant, and to many, terrifyingly inhuman.12:54 But whether you love him or hate him, you can’t deny his influence.12:59 You see his ideas reflected in cityscapes all over the globe.13:04 And on this day in 1908, Carole Lombard was born.13:08 The queen of the screwball comedy, a star of that Golden Age of Hollywood that "The Jazz Singer" helped create.13:17 She was luminous, funny, and fiercely intelligent.13:21 Her life, too, ended in tragedy, when her plane went down while she was on a tour selling war bonds for World War Two.13:30 A bright, brilliant life caught up in the great, grinding gears of history.13:36 So what do we do with a day like October sixth?13:39 A day that gives us the can-can, the talkies, and Instagram, but also a surprise war, an energy crisis, and an assassination.13:49 I think it teaches us that history doesn't move in one direction.13:54 It’s not just a story of progress, or a story of conflict.13:59 It’s all of it, all at once.14:01 While one group of people is inventing a new way to delight the world, another is planning to tear it apart.14:09 While one person is taking a picture of their dog, a decision is being made halfway around the world that will change the price they pay for gas.14:21 It all connects.14:22 The spectacle and the struggle are two sides of the same human coin.14:27 And looking back at October sixth reminds us that the things that seem trivial today might just be the seeds of a revolution tomorrow.14:38 And the conflicts that seem so distant can, and will, find their way to our doorstep.14:44 It makes you wonder, doesn't it?14:47 What seeds are we planting today?
