. >> serving 26 years for robbery, ernie johnson land up in ad seg for assaulting an officer. >> telle, have you taken a look at that book yet? i don't want it back unless you've finished it. >> i read it about halfway. the memory palace. >> is it okay? >> yeah, it tells about the life and times of mateo ricci. >> i been in a couple fights. i'm generally an insolent person. i don't get along well with others. they don't like my religion. they discriminate against me because of that. >> johnson practices an obscure religion called asatru. >> before we were christians, we were asatru, believe in oden, thor and others. basically a medieval religion. classical. >> prison officials maintain these religions like asatru are really covers for white supremacist gangs. >> it's a problem. because you can't violate their religious freedom. >> you take it easy, huh? >> all right. >> for father mcnally, the choice or legitimacy of an inmate's religion is a secondary concern. >> forget the priest bit. deal with them as a human being first, then the ministry comes along with that. you deal with them

ernie may who wrote a book on the uses of history. the purpose of that course was to help eliminate how policymakers misused history, largely through analogies. for example, lyndon johnson, when he was vice president, kennedy sent them out to south vietnam to assess the situation. he got really taken in and referred to the president as the churchill of southeast asia cousin that his mind that's who he was. he was fighting against all odds and all enemies and hanging in there in these democratic ideals that was the analogy for lyndon johnson. now what could go wrong with him getting that wrong? what we saw what went wrong. it was in his head and when he became president, he expanded the war. it was based on a lot of world war ii analogies that were not correct and not appropriate and policymakers do all the time. people talk about music and chamberland and kennedy during the cuban missile crisis where he said they were talking about the preemptive strike in cuba and he said i don't want my brother to be the clone joe of the 1960s, meaning a perl harbor like strike. the uses of history actually really do matter and there's been many times where the hearings or markups her