back to indexJeremi Suri: History of American Power | Lex Fridman Podcast #180
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The following is a conversation with Jeremy Suri,
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a historian at UT Austin,
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whose research interests and writing
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are on modern American history
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with an eye towards presidents
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and in general individuals who wielded power.
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Quick mention of our sponsors,
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Element, Monk Pack, Belcampo, Four Sigmatic, and Eight Sleep.
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Check them out in the description to support this podcast.
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As a side note, let me say that in these conversations,
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for better or worse, I seek understanding, not activism.
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I'm not left nor right.
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I love ideas, not labels.
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And most fascinating ideas are full of uncertainty,
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tension, and trade offs.
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Labels destroy that.
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I try ideas out, let them breathe for a time,
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try to challenge, explore, and analyze.
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But mostly, I trust the intelligence of you, the listener,
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to think and to make up your own mind, together with me.
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I will try to have economists and philosophers on
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from all points on the multidimensional political spectrum,
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including the extremes.
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I will try to both have an open mind
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and to ask difficult questions when needed.
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I'll make mistakes.
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Don't shoot this robot at the first sign of failure.
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I'm still under development.
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Pre release version 0.1.
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This is the Lex Friedman podcast,
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and here is my conversation with Jeremy Suri.
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You've studied many American presidents throughout history,
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so who do you think was the greatest president
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in American history?
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The greatest American president was Abraham Lincoln.
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And Tolstoy reflected on this himself, actually,
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saying that when he was in the caucuses,
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he asked these peasants in the caucuses
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who was the greatest man in the world that they had heard of,
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and they said Abraham Lincoln.
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Well, because he gave voice to people
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who had no voice before.
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He turned politics into an art.
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This is what Tolstoy recounted,
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the peasants in the caucuses telling him.
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Lincoln made politics more than about power.
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He made it an art.
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He made it a source of liberation.
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And those living even far from the United States
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could see that model, that inspiration from Lincoln.
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He was a man who had two years of education,
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yet he mastered the English language,
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and he used the language
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to help people imagine a different kind of world.
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You see, leaders and presidents are at their best
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when they're doing more
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than just manipulating institutions and power,
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when they're helping the people imagine a better world.
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And he did that as no other president has.
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And you say he gave voice to those who are voiceless.
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Who are you talking to about in general?
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Is this about African Americans,
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or is this about just the populace in general?
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Certainly part of it is about slaves, African Americans,
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and many immigrants,
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immigrants from all parts of Europe and other areas
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that have come to the United States.
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But part of it was just for ordinary American citizens.
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The Republican Party,
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for which Lincoln was the first president,
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was a party created to give voice to poor white men,
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as well as slaves and others.
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And Lincoln was a poor white man himself,
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grew up without slaves and without land,
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which meant you had almost nothing.
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What do you think about the trajectory of that man
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with only two years of education?
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Is there something to be said
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about how does one come from nothing
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and nurture the ideals that kind of make this country great
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into something where you can actually be a leader
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of this nation to espouse those ideas,
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to give the voice to the voiceless?
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Yes, I think you actually hit the nail on the head.
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I think what he represented was the opportunity,
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and that was the word that mattered for him,
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opportunity that came from the ability to raise yourself up,
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to work hard, and to be compensated for your hard work.
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And this is at the core of the Republican Party
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of the 19th century, which is the core of capitalism.
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It's not about getting rich.
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It's about getting compensated for your work.
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It's about being incentivized to do better work.
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And Lincoln was constantly striving.
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One of his closest associates, Herndon, said,
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he was the little engine of ambition that couldn't stop.
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He just kept going, taught himself to read,
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taught himself to be a lawyer.
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He went through many failed businesses
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before he even reached that point, many failed love affairs.
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But he kept trying, he kept working,
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and what American society offered him,
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and what he wanted American society to offer everyone else
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was the opportunity to keep trying to fail
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and then get up and try again.
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What do you think was the nature of that ambition?
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Was there a hunger for power?
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I think Lincoln had a hunger for success.
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I think he had a hunger to get out
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of the poor station he was in.
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He had a hunger to be someone
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who had control over his life.
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Freedom for him did not mean the right
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to do anything you wanna do,
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but it meant the right to be secure
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from being dependent upon someone else.
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So independence, he writes in his letters
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when he's very young that he hated
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being dependent on his father.
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He grew up without a mother.
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His father was a struggling farmer,
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and he would write in his letters
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that his father treated him like a slave on the farm.
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Some think his hatred of slavery came from that experience.
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He didn't ever wanna have to work for someone again.
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He wanted to be free and independent,
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and he wanted, again, every American,
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this is the kind of Jeffersonian dream,
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to be the owner of themself and the owner of their future.
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You know, that's a really nice definition of freedom.
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We often think kind of this very abstract notion
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of being able to do anything you want,
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but really, it's ultimately breaking yourself free
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from the constraints, like the very tight dependence
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on whether it's the institutions or on your family
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or the expectations or the community or whatever,
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being able to be, to realize yourself
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within the constraints of your own abilities.
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It's still not true freedom,
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because true freedom is probably sort of
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almost like designing a video game character,
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something like that.
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I agree, I think that's exactly right.
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I think freedom is not that I can have any outcome I want.
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I can't control outcomes.
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The most powerful, freest person in the world
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cannot control outcomes,
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but it means at least I get to make choices.
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Someone else doesn't make those choices for me.
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Is there something to be said about Lincoln
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on the political game front of it,
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which is he's accomplished some of them?
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I don't know, but it seems like
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there was some tricky politics going on.
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We tend to not think of it in those terms
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because of the dark aspects of slavery.
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We tend to think about it in sort of ethical and human terms,
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but in their time, it was probably
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as much a game of politics,
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not just these broad questions of human nature, right?
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So is there something to be said
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about being a skillful player in the game of politics
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that you take from Lincoln?
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Absolutely, and Lincoln never read Karl von Clausewitz,
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the great 19th century German thinker
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on strategy and politics,
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but he embodied the same wisdom,
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which is that everything is politics.
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If you want to get anything done,
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and this includes even relationships,
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there's a politics to it.
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What does that mean?
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It means that you have to persuade, coerce,
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encourage people to do things they wouldn't otherwise do.
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And Lincoln was a master at that.
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He was a master at that for two reasons.
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He had learned through his hard life to read people,
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to anticipate them, to spend a lot of time listening.
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One thing I often tell people
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is the best leaders are the listeners, not the talkers.
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And then second, Lincoln was very thoughtful
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and planned every move out.
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He was thinking three or four moves,
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maybe five moves down the chessboard,
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while others were move number one or two.
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That's fascinating to think about him just listening,
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They look at great fighters in this way,
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like the first few rounds of boxing and mixed martial arts,
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you're studying the movement of your opponent
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in order to sort of define the holes.
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That's a really interesting frame to think about it.
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Is there, in terms of relationships,
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where do you think as president or as a politician
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is the most impact to be had?
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I've been reading a lot about Hitler recently,
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and one of the things that I'm more and more starting
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to wonder, what the hell did he do alone in a room
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with one on one with people?
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Because it seems like that's where
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he was exceptionally effective.
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When I think about certain leaders,
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I'm not sure Stalin was this way, I apologize.
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Been very obsessed with this period of human history.
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It just seems like certain leaders
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are extremely effective one on one.
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A lot of people think of Hitler in Lincoln
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as a speech maker, as a great charismatic speech maker,
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but it seems like to me that some of these guys
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were really effective inside a room.
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What do you think?
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What's more important?
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Your effectiveness to make a hell of a good speech,
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sort of being in a room with many people,
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or is it all boiled down to one on one?
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Well, I think in a sense, it's both.
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One needs to do both, and most politicians,
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most leaders are better at one or the other.
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It's the rare leader who can do both.
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I will say that if you are going to be a figure
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who's a president or the leader of a complex organization,
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not a startup, but a complex organization
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where you have many different constituencies
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and many different interests,
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you have to do the one on one really well,
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because a lot of what's going to happen
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is you're going to be meeting with people
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who represent different groups, right?
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The leader of the labor unions,
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the leader of your investing board, et cetera,
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and you have to be able to persuade them,
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and it's the intangibles that often matter most.
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Lincoln's skill, and it's the same that FDR had,
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is the ability to tell a story.
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I think Hitler was a little different,
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but what I've read of Stalin is he was a storyteller too.
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One on one storyteller?
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Yeah, that's my understanding is that he,
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and what Lincoln did,
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I don't want to compare Lincoln to Stalin,
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but what Lincoln did is he was not confrontational.
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He was happy to have an argument
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if an argument were to be had,
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but actually what he would try to do
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is move you through telling a story
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that got you to think about your position in a different way,
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to basically disarm you.
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And Franklin Roosevelt did the same thing.
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Ronald Reagan did the same thing.
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Storytelling is a very important skill.
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It's almost heartbreaking that we don't get to have,
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or maybe you can correct me if I'm wrong on this,
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but it feels like we don't have a lot of information
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how all of these folks were in private,
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one on one conversations.
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Even if we get stories about it,
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it's like, again, sorry to bring up Hitler,
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but people have talked about his piercing gaze
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when they're one on one.
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There's a feeling like he's just looking through you.
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I wonder, it makes me wonder,
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was Lincoln somebody who was a little bit more passive,
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like who's more, the ego doesn't shine.
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It's not like an overwhelming thing,
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or is it more like, again,
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don't want to bring up controversial figures,
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but Donald Trump, where it's more menacing, right?
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There's a more like physically menacing thing,
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where it's almost like a bullying kind of dynamic.
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So I wonder, I wish we knew.
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Because from a psychological perspective,
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I wonder if there's a thread
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that connects most great leaders.
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That's a great question.
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So I think the best writer on this is Max Weber, right?
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And he talks about the power of charisma,
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that the term charisma comes from Weber, right?
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And Weber's use of it actually to talk about profits.
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And I think he has a point, right?
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Leaders who are effective in the way you describe
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are leaders who feel prophetic,
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or Weber says they have a kind of magic about them.
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And I think that can come from different sources.
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I think that can come from the way someone
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carries themselves.
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It can come from the way they use words.
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So maybe there are different kinds of magic
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that someone develops.
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But I think there are two things
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that seem to be absolutely necessary.
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First is you have to be someone who sizes up the person
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on the other side of the table.
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You cannot be the person who just comes in
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and reads your brief.
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And then second, I think it's interactive.
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And there is a quickness of thought.
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So you brought up Donald Trump.
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I don't think Donald Trump is a deep thinker at all,
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And I think that quickness is part of,
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it's different from delivering a lecture
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where it's the depth of your thought.
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Can you for 45 minutes analyze something?
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Many people can't do that,
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but they still might be very effective
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if they're able to quickly react,
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size up the person on the other side of the table
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and react in a way that moves that person
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in the way they wanna move them.
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Yeah, and there's also just coupled with the quickness
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as a kind of instinct about human nature.
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Sort of asking the question,
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what does this person worry about?
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What are the biggest problems?
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Somebody, what is this, Stephen Schwartzman, I think,
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said to me, he's this businessman.
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I think he said like, what I've always tried to do
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is try to figure out, like ask enough questions
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to figure out what is the biggest problem
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in this person's life.
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Try to get a sense of what is the biggest problem
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in their life, because that's actually
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what they care about most.
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And most people don't care enough to find out.
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And so he kind of wants to sneak up on that
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and find that, and then use that to then build closeness
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in order to then probably, he doesn't put it in those words,
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but to manipulate the person into whatever,
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to do whatever the heck they want.
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And I think part of it is that,
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and part of the effect that Donald Trump has
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is how quick he's able to figure that out.
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You've written a book about how the role
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and power of the presidency has changed.
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So how has it changed since Lincoln's time,
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the evolution of the presidency as a concept,
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which seems like a fascinating lens
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through which to look at American history.
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As a president, we seem to only be talking
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about the presidents, maybe a general here and there,
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but it's mostly the story of America is often told
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through presidents.
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That's right, that's right.
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And one of the points I've tried to make
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in my writing about this and various other activities
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is we use this word president as if it's something timeless,
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but the office has changed incredibly.
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Just from Lincoln's time to the present,
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which is 150 years, he wouldn't recognize the office today.
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And George Washington would not have recognized it
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in Lincoln, just as I think a CEO today
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would be unrecognizable to a Rockefeller
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or a Carnegie of 150 years ago.
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So what are some of the ways in which the office has changed?
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I'll just point to three, there are a lot.
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One, presidents now can communicate with the public directly.
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I mean, we've reached the point now
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where a president can have direct,
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almost one on one communication.
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President can use Twitter if he so chooses
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to circumvent all media.
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That was unthinkable.
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Lincoln, in order to get his message across,
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often wrote letters to newspapers.
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And waited for the newspaper for Horace Greeley
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in the New York Tribune to publish his letter.
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That's how he communicated with the public.
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There weren't even many speaking opportunities.
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So that's a big change, right?
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We feel the president in our life much more.
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That's why we talk about him much more.
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That also creates more of a burden.
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This is the second point.
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Presidents are under a microscope.
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Presidents are under a microscope.
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You have to be very careful what you do and what you say.
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And you're judged by a lot of the elements of your behavior
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that are not policy relevant.
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In fact, the things we judge most
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and make most of our decisions on about individuals
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And then third, the power the president has.
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It's inhuman, actually.
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And this is one of my critiques
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of how the office has changed.
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This one person has power on a scale
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that's I think dangerous in a democracy.
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And certainly something the founders 220 years ago
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would have had trouble conceiving.
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Presidents now have the ability to deliver force
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across the world to literally assassinate people
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with a remarkable accuracy.
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And that's an enormous power that presidents have.
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So your sense, this is not to get conspiratorial,
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but do you think a president currently has the power
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to initiate the assassination of somebody,
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of a political enemy or a terrorist leader
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or that kind of thing to frame that person in a way
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where assassination is something that he alone
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or she alone could decide to do?
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I think it happens all the time
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and it's not to be conspiratorial.
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This is how we fought terrorism by targeting individuals.
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Now you might say these were not elected leaders of state,
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but these were individuals with a large following.
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I mean, the killing of Osama Bin Laden
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was an assassination operation.
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And we've taken out very successfully
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many leaders of terrorist organizations
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and we do it every day.
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You're saying that back in Lincoln's time
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or George Washington's time,
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there was more of a balance of power?
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Like a president could not initiate
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this kind of assassination?
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Correct, I think presidents did not have
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the same kind of military or economic power.
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We could talk about how a president can influence a market
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by saying something about where money is gonna go
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or singling out a company or critiquing a company
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in one way or another.
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They didn't have that kind of power.
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Now, much of the power that a Lincoln or a Washington had
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was the power to mobilize people
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to then make their own decisions.
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At the start of the Civil War,
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Lincoln doesn't even have the power
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to bring people into the army.
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He has to go to the governors
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and ask the governors to provide soldiers.
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So the governor of Wisconsin,
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the governor of Massachusetts.
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Could you imagine that today?
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So, but yeah, so they use speeches and words
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to mobilize versus direct action in closed door environments,
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initiating wars, for example.
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It's difficult to think about,
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if we look at Barack Obama, for example,
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if you're listening to this
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and you're on the left or the right,
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please do not make this political.
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In fact, if you're a political person
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and you're getting angry at the mention of the word Obama
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or Donald Trump, please turn off this podcast
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that I've just described.
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We're not gonna get very far.
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I hope we maintain a political discussion
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about even the modern presidents
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that view through the lens of history.
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I think there's a lot to be learned
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about the office and about human nature.
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Some people criticize Barack Obama
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for sort of expanding the military industrial complex,
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engaging in more and more wars,
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as opposed to sort of the initial rhetoric
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was such that we would pull back
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from sort of be more skeptical
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in our decisions to wage wars.
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So from the lens of the power of the presidency,
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as the modern presidency,
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the fact that we continued the war in Afghanistan
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and different engagements in military conflicts,
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do you think Barack Obama could have stopped that?
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Do you put the responsibility on that expansion
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on him because of the implied power
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that the presidency has?
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Or is this power just sits there
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and if a president chooses to take it, they do,
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and if they don't, they don't?
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Almost like you don't want to take on the responsibility
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because of the burden of that responsibility.
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So a lot of my research is about this exact question,
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not just with Obama.
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And my conclusion, and I think the research
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is pretty clear on this, is that structure
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has a lot more effect on us than we like to admit,
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which is to say that the circumstances,
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the institutions around us drive our behavior
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more than we like to think.
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So Barack Obama, I'm quite certain,
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came into the office of the presidency committed
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to actually reducing the use of military force overseas
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and reducing presidential war making power.
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As a trained lawyer, he had a moral position
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on this actually, and he tried.
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And he did withdraw American forces from Iraq
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and was of course criticized by many people for doing that.
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But at the same time, he had some real problems
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in the world to deal with, terrorism being one of them.
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And the tools he has are very much biased
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towards the use of military force.
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It's much harder as president to go and get Vladimir Putin
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and Xi Jinping to agree with you.
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It's much easier to send these wonderful toys we have
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and these incredible soldiers we have over there.
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And when you have Congress, which is always against you,
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it's also easier to use the military
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because you send them there.
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And even if members of Congress from your own party
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or the other are angry at you,
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they'll still fund the soldiers.
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No member of Congress wants to vote
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to starve our soldiers overseas.
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So they'll stop your budget,
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they'll even threaten not to pay the debt,
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but they'll still fund your soldiers.
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And so you are pushed by the circumstances you're in
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to do this, and it's very hard to resist.
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So that's, I think the criticism of Obama,
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the fair one would be that he didn't resist the pressures
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that were there, but he did not make those pressures.
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So is there something about putting the responsibility
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on the president to form the structure around him locally
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such that he can make the policy that matches the rhetoric?
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So what I'm talking to is hiring.
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So basically just everybody you work with,
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you have power as a president to fire and hire
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or to basically schedule meetings in such a way
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that can control your decision making.
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So I imagine it's very difficult to get out of Afghanistan
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or Iraq when most of your scheduled meetings
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are with generals or something like that.
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But if you reorganize the schedule
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and you reorganize who you have like late night talks with,
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you potentially have a huge ripple effect on the policy.
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I think that's right.
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I think who has access to the president
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is absolutely crucial.
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And presidents have to be more strategic about that.
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They tend to be reacting to crises
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because every day has a crisis.
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And if you're reacting to a crisis,
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you're not controlling access
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because the crisis is driving you.
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So that's one element of it.
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But I also think, and this is the moment we're in right now,
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presidents have to invest in reforming the system,
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the system of decision making.
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Should we have a national security council
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that looks the way it does?
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Should our military be structured the way it is?
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The founding fathers wanted a military that was divided.
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They did not want a unified department of defense.
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That was only created after World War II.
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Should we have as large a military as we have?
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Should we be in as many places?
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There are some fundamental structural reforms
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we have to undertake.
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And part of that is who you appoint,
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but part of that is also how you change the institutions.
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The genius of the American system
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is that it's a dynamic system.
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It can be adjusted.
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It has been adjusted over time.
link |
That's the heroic story.
link |
The frustrating story is it often takes us a long time
link |
to make those adjustments until we go
link |
into such bad circumstances that we have no choice.
link |
So in the battle of power of the office of the president
link |
versus the United States military,
link |
the department of defense,
link |
do you have a sense that the president
link |
has more power ultimately?
link |
So to decrease the size of the department of defense,
link |
to withdraw from any wars,
link |
or increase the amount of wars,
link |
is the president, you're kind of implying
link |
the president has a lot of power here in this scale.
link |
Yes, the president has a lot of power
link |
and we are fortunate and it was just proven
link |
in the last few years that our military,
link |
uniquely among many countries with large militaries,
link |
is very deferential to the president
link |
and very restricted in its ability
link |
to challenge the president.
link |
So that's a strength of our system.
link |
But the way you reform the military
link |
is not with individual decisions.
link |
It's by having a strategic plan
link |
that reexamines what role it plays.
link |
So it's not just about whether we're in Afghanistan or not.
link |
The question we have to ask is,
link |
when we look at our toolbox
link |
of what we can do in our foreign policy,
link |
are there other tools we should build up
link |
and therefore some tools in the military we should reduce?
link |
That's the broader strategic question.
link |
Let me ask you the most absurd question of all
link |
that you did not sign up for,
link |
but I've been hanging out
link |
with a guy named Joe Rogan recently,
link |
so it's very important for me and him to figure this out.
link |
If a president, because you said,
link |
you implied the president's very powerful,
link |
if a president shows up and the US government is in fact
link |
in possession of aliens, alien spacecraft,
link |
do you think the president will be told?
link |
A more responsible adult historian question version of that
link |
is, is there some things that the machine of government
link |
keeps secret from the president?
link |
Or is the president ultimately at the very center?
link |
So if you map out the set of information and power,
link |
you have CIA, you have all these organizations
link |
that do the machinery of government,
link |
not just the passing of bills,
link |
but gaining information, homeland security,
link |
actually engaging in wars, all those kinds of things.
link |
How central is the president?
link |
Would the president know some of the shady things
link |
that are going on?
link |
Aliens or some kind of cybersecurity stuff
link |
against Russia and China, all those kinds of things,
link |
is the president really made aware?
link |
And if so, how nervous does that make you?
link |
So presidents like leaders of any complex organizations
link |
don't know everything that goes on.
link |
They have to ask the right questions.
link |
This is Machiavelli.
link |
Most important thing a leader has to do
link |
is ask the right questions.
link |
You don't have to know the answers.
link |
That's why you hire smart people,
link |
but you have to ask the right questions.
link |
So if the president asks the US government,
link |
those who are responsible for the aliens
link |
or responsible for the cyber warfare against Russia,
link |
they will answer honestly, they will have to,
link |
but they will not volunteer that information in all cases.
link |
So the best way a president can operate
link |
is to have people around him or her
link |
who are not the traditional policymakers,
link |
this is where I think academic experts are important,
link |
suggesting questions to ask
link |
to therefore try to get the information.
link |
It makes me nervous because I think human nature
link |
is such that the academics, the experts,
link |
everybody is almost afraid to ask the questions
link |
for which the answers might be burdensome.
link |
And so that's right.
link |
And you can get into a lot of trouble not asking,
link |
it's the old elephant in the room.
link |
This is exactly right.
link |
And too often mediocre leaders
link |
and those who try to protect them try to shield themselves.
link |
They don't want to know certain things.
link |
So this is part of what happened
link |
with the use of torture by the United States,
link |
which is a war crime during the war on terror.
link |
President Bush at times intentionally did not ask
link |
and people around him prevented him from asking
link |
or discouraged him from asking questions
link |
he should have asked to know about what was going on.
link |
And that's how we ended up where we did.
link |
You could say the same thing about Reagan and Iran Contra.
link |
I wonder what it takes to be the kind of leader
link |
that steps in and asks some difficult questions.
link |
So aliens is one, UFO spacecraft, right?
link |
Another one, yeah, torture is another one.
link |
The CIA, how much information
link |
is being collected about Americans?
link |
I can see as a president being very uncomfortable
link |
asking that question.
link |
Because if the answer is a lot of information
link |
is being collected by Americans,
link |
then you have to be the guy
link |
who lives with that information.
link |
For the rest of your life, you have to walk around.
link |
You're probably not going to reform that system.
link |
It's very difficult.
link |
You probably have to be very picky
link |
about which things you reform.
link |
You don't have much time.
link |
It takes a lot of sort of effort to restructure things.
link |
But you nevertheless would have to be basically lying
link |
to yourself, to others around you
link |
about the unethical things.
link |
Depends of course what your ethical system is.
link |
I wonder what it takes to ask those hard questions.
link |
I wonder if how few of us can be great leaders like that.
link |
And I wonder if our political system, the electoral system
link |
is such that makes it likely
link |
that such leaders will come to power.
link |
It's hard and you can't ask all the right questions
link |
and there is a legal hazard if you know things
link |
But I think you can, back to your point on hiring,
link |
you can hire people who will do that in their domains.
link |
And then you have to trust that when they think
link |
it's something that's a question you need to ask,
link |
they'll pass that on to you.
link |
This is why it's not a good idea to have loyalists
link |
because loyalists will shield you from things.
link |
It's a good idea to have people of integrity
link |
who you can rely on and who you think will ask
link |
those right questions and then pass that down
link |
through their organization.
link |
What's inspiring to you, what's insightful to you
link |
about several of the presidencies
link |
throughout the recent decades?
link |
Is there somebody that stands out to you
link |
that's interesting and sort of in your study
link |
of how the office has changed?
link |
Well, Bill Clinton is one of the most fascinating figures.
link |
Why can't I, I apologize.
link |
Bill Clinton just puts a smile on my face
link |
every time somebody mentions him at this point.
link |
I guess it's charisma, I suppose.
link |
Well, and he's a unique individual,
link |
but he fascinates me because he's a figure
link |
of such enormous talent and enormous appetite
link |
and such little self control and such extremes.
link |
And I think it's not just that he tells us
link |
something about the presidency,
link |
he tells us something about our society.
link |
American society, this is not new to our time,
link |
is filled with enormous reservoirs of talent and creativity.
link |
And those have a bright and a dark side.
link |
And you see both with Bill Clinton.
link |
In some ways, he's the mirror of the best and worst
link |
And maybe that's really what presidents are in the end.
link |
They're mirrors of our world
link |
that we get the government we deserve,
link |
we get the leaders we deserve.
link |
I wish we embraced that a little bit more.
link |
A lot of people criticize Donald Trump
link |
for certain human qualities that he has.
link |
A lot of people criticize Bill Clinton
link |
for certain human qualities.
link |
I wish we kind of embraced the chaos of that.
link |
Because he does, you're right, in some sense represent,
link |
I mean, he doesn't represent the greatest ideal of America,
link |
but the flawed aspect of human nature is what he represents.
link |
And that's the beautiful thing about America,
link |
the diversity of this land with the mix of it,
link |
the corruption within capitalism,
link |
the beauty of capitalism, the innovation,
link |
all those kinds of things,
link |
the people that start from nothing and create everything,
link |
the Elon Musk's of the world and the Bill Gates and so on.
link |
But also the people, Bernie Mados and all,
link |
as the Me Too movement has showed the multitude of creeps
link |
that apparently permeate the entirety of our system.
link |
So I don't know, there is something, there is some sense
link |
in which we put our president on a pedestal,
link |
which actually creates a fake human being.
link |
Like the standard we hold them to
link |
is forcing the fake politicians to come to power
link |
versus the authentic one, which is in some sense,
link |
the promise of Donald Trump is like,
link |
it's a definitive statement of authenticity.
link |
It's like, this is the opposite of the fake politician.
link |
It's whatever else you wanna say about him
link |
is there's the chaos that's unlike anything else
link |
One thing, and this is a particular maybe preference
link |
and quirk of mine, but I really admire,
link |
maybe I'm romanticizing the past again,
link |
but I romanticize the presidents
link |
that were students of history.
link |
They were almost like king philosophers,
link |
that made speeches that reverberated through decades after.
link |
Using the words of those presidents,
link |
whether written by them or not,
link |
we tell the story of America.
link |
And I don't know, even Obama has been an exceptionally good,
link |
as far as I know, I apologize if I'm incorrect on this,
link |
but from everything I've seen,
link |
he was a very deep scholar of history.
link |
And I really admire that.
link |
Is that through the history of the office of the presidency,
link |
is that just your own preference
link |
or is that supposed to come with the job?
link |
Are you supposed to be a student of history?
link |
I think, I mean, I'm obviously biased as a historian,
link |
but I do think it comes with the job.
link |
Every president I've studied had a serious interest
link |
Now, how they pursued that interest would vary.
link |
Obama was more bookish, more academic.
link |
So was George W. Bush in strange ways.
link |
George H. W. Bush was less so,
link |
but George H. W. Bush loved to talk to people.
link |
So he would talk to historians, right?
link |
Ronald Reagan loved movies
link |
and movies were an insight into history for him.
link |
He likes to watch movies about another time.
link |
It wasn't always the best of history,
link |
but he was interested
link |
in what is a fundamental historical question.
link |
How has our society developed?
link |
How has it grown and changed over time?
link |
And how has that change affected who we are today?
link |
That's the historical question.
link |
It's really interesting to me.
link |
I do a lot of work with business leaders and others too.
link |
You reach a certain point in any career
link |
and you become a historian
link |
because you realize that the formulas
link |
and the technical knowledge that you've gained
link |
got you to where you are.
link |
But now your decisions are about human nature.
link |
Your decisions are about social change
link |
and they can't be answered technically.
link |
They can only be answered by studying human beings.
link |
And what is history?
link |
It's studying the laboratory of human behavior.
link |
To sort of play devil's advocate,
link |
I kind of, especially in the engineering scientific domains,
link |
I often see history holding us back.
link |
Sort of the way things were done in the past
link |
are not necessarily going to hold the key
link |
to what will progress us into the future.
link |
Of course, with history in studying human nature,
link |
it does seem like humans are just the same.
link |
She has like the same problems over and over.
link |
So in that sense, it feels like history has all the lessons,
link |
whether we're talking about wars,
link |
whether we're talking about corruption,
link |
whether we're talking about economics.
link |
I think there's a difference between
link |
history and antiquarianism.
link |
So antiquarianism, which some people call history,
link |
is the desire to go back to the past
link |
or stay stuck in the past.
link |
So antiquarianism is the desire to have the desk
link |
that Abraham Lincoln sat at.
link |
Wouldn't it be cool to sit at his desk?
link |
I'd love to have that desk.
link |
If I had a few extra million dollars, I'd acquire it.
link |
So in a way, that's antiquarianism.
link |
That's trying to capture and hold on to the past.
link |
The past is a talisman for antiquarians.
link |
What history is, is the study of change over time.
link |
That's the real definition of historical study
link |
and historical thinking.
link |
And so what we're studying is change.
link |
And so a historian should never say,
link |
we have to do things the way we've done them in the past.
link |
The historian should say, we can't do them
link |
the way we did them in the past.
link |
We can't step in the same river twice.
link |
Every podcast of yours is different from the last one.
link |
You plan it out and then it goes in its own direction.
link |
And what are we studying then in history?
link |
We're studying the patterns of change
link |
and we're recognizing we're part of a pattern.
link |
So what I would say to the historian
link |
who's trying to hold the engineer back,
link |
I'd say, no, don't tell that engineer not to do this.
link |
Tell them to understand how this fits
link |
into the relationship with other engineering products
link |
and other activities from the past
link |
that still affect us today.
link |
For example, any product you produce
link |
is gonna be used by human beings who have prejudices.
link |
It's gonna go into an unequal society.
link |
Don't assume it's gonna go into an equal society.
link |
Don't assume that when you create a social media site
link |
that people are going to use it fairly
link |
and put only truthful things on it.
link |
We shouldn't be surprised.
link |
That's where human nature comes in.
link |
But it's not trying to hold onto the past.
link |
It's trying to use the knowledge from the past
link |
to better inform the changes today.
link |
I have to ask you about George Washington.
link |
Maybe you have some insights.
link |
It seems like he's such a fascinating figure
link |
in the context of the study of power.
link |
Because I kind of intuitively have come to internalize
link |
the belief that power corrupts
link |
and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
link |
And sort of like basically in thinking
link |
that we cannot trust any one individual.
link |
I can't trust myself with power.
link |
Nobody can trust anybody with power.
link |
We have to create institutions and structures
link |
that prevent us from ever being able
link |
to amass absolute power.
link |
And yet, here's a guy, George Washington,
link |
who seems to, you can correct me if I'm wrong,
link |
but he seems to give away, relinquish power.
link |
It feels like George Washington did it
link |
almost like the purest of ways,
link |
which is believes in this country,
link |
but he just believes he's not the person
link |
to carry it forward.
link |
What do you make of that?
link |
What kind of human does it take to give away that power?
link |
Is there some hopeful message we can carry through
link |
to the future to elect leaders like that
link |
or to find friends to hang out with who are like that?
link |
Like what is that?
link |
How do you explain that?
link |
So it's actually the most important thing
link |
about George Washington.
link |
It's the right thing to bring up.
link |
What the historian Gary Wills wrote years ago,
link |
I'm gonna quote him,
link |
was that Washington recognized
link |
that sometimes you get more power by giving it up
link |
than by trying to hold on to every last piece of it.
link |
Washington gives up power at the end of the revolution.
link |
He's successfully carried
link |
through the revolutionary war aims.
link |
He's commander of the revolutionary forces
link |
and he gives up his command.
link |
And then of course he's president
link |
and after two terms, he gives up his command.
link |
He's an ambitious person,
link |
but he's recognizing that the most important currency
link |
he has for power is his respected status
link |
as a disinterested statesman.
link |
That's really what his power is.
link |
And how does he further that power?
link |
By showing that he doesn't crave power.
link |
So he was self aware.
link |
Very self aware of this
link |
and very sophisticated in understanding this.
link |
And I think there are many other leaders who recognize that.
link |
You can look to, in some ways,
link |
the story of many of our presidents
link |
who even before there is a two term limit
link |
in the constitution, leave after two terms.
link |
They do that because they recognize
link |
that their power is the power of being a statesman,
link |
not of being a president.
link |
I still wonder what kind of man it takes,
link |
what kind of human being it takes to do that.
link |
Because I've been studying Vladimir Putin quite a bit.
link |
And he's still, I believe he still has popular support
link |
that that's not fully manipulated.
link |
Because I know a lot of people in Russia
link |
and actually almost the entirety of my family in Russia
link |
are big supporters of Putin.
link |
And everybody I talk to sort of,
link |
that's not just like on social media.
link |
Like the people that live in Russia
link |
seem to support him.
link |
It feels like this will be in a George Washington way.
link |
Now will be the time that Putin,
link |
just like Yeltsin, could relinquish power.
link |
And thereby, in the eyes of Russians,
link |
become, in like the long arc of history,
link |
be viewed as a great leader.
link |
You look at the economic growth of Russia,
link |
you look at the rescue from the collapse
link |
of the Soviet Union and Russia finding its footing,
link |
and then relinquishing power in a way that perhaps,
link |
if Russia succeeds, forms a truly democratic state.
link |
This would be how Putin can become
link |
one of the great leaders in Russian history,
link |
at least in the context of the 21st century.
link |
I think there are two reasons why this is really hard
link |
for Putin and for others.
link |
One is the trappings of power are very seductive,
link |
as you said before, they're corrupting.
link |
This is a real problem, right?
link |
If it's in the business context,
link |
you don't wanna give up that private jet.
link |
If it's in Putin's context,
link |
it's billions of dollars every year
link |
that he's able to take for himself or give to his friends.
link |
It's not that he'll be poor if he leaves,
link |
he'll still be rich,
link |
and he has billions of dollars stored away,
link |
but he won't be able to get the new billions.
link |
And so that's part of it,
link |
the trappings of power are a big deal.
link |
And then second, in Putin's case in particular,
link |
he has to be worried about what happens next.
link |
Will someone try to come and arrest him?
link |
Will someone try to come and assassinate him?
link |
Washington recognized that leaving early
link |
limited the corruption and limited the enemies that you made.
link |
And so it was a strategic choice.
link |
Putin is at this point bringing power too long.
link |
And this comes back to your core insight.
link |
It's a cliche, but it's true, power corrupts.
link |
No one should have power for too long.
link |
This was one of the best insights
link |
the founders of the United States had,
link |
that power was to be held for a short time
link |
as a fiduciary responsibility,
link |
not as something you owned, right?
link |
This is the problem with monarchy,
link |
with aristocracy, that you own power, right?
link |
We don't own power, we're holding it in trust.
link |
Yeah, there's some probably like very specific
link |
psychological study of how many years it takes
link |
for you to forget that you can't own power.
link |
That could be a much more rigorous discussion
link |
about the length of terms that are appropriate,
link |
but really there's an amount,
link |
like Stalin had power for 30 years,
link |
like Putin is pushing those that many years already.
link |
There's a certain point where you forget
link |
the person you were before you took the power.
link |
You forget to be humble in the face of this responsibility
link |
and then there's no going back.
link |
And that's how dictators are born.
link |
That's how the evil like authoritarians become evil
link |
or let's not use the word evil,
link |
but counterproductive, destructive
link |
to the ideal that they initially
link |
probably came to office with.
link |
One of the core historical insights
link |
is people should move jobs.
link |
And this applies for CEOs probably.
link |
They can go become CEO somewhere else,
link |
but don't stay CEO one place too long.
link |
It's a problem with startups, right?
link |
The founder, you can have a brilliant founder
link |
and that founder doesn't want to let go.
link |
Right, it's the same issue.
link |
At the same time, I mean, this is where Elon Musk
link |
and a few others like Larry Page and Sergey Brin
link |
that stayed for quite a long time
link |
and they actually were the beacon.
link |
They, on their shoulders, carried the dream of the company
link |
where everybody else doubted.
link |
But that seems to be the exception versus the rule.
link |
Well, and even Sergey, for example, has stepped back.
link |
He plays less of a day to day role
link |
and is not running Google in the way he did.
link |
But the interesting thing is he stepped back
link |
in a quite tragic way from what I've seen,
link |
which is, I think Google's mission, initial mission
link |
of making the world's information accessible to everybody
link |
is one of the most beautiful missions of any company
link |
in the history of the world.
link |
I think it's what Google has done with the search engine
link |
and other efforts that are similar,
link |
like scanning a lot of books, it's just incredible.
link |
It's similar to Wikipedia.
link |
But what he said was that it's not the same company anymore.
link |
And I know maybe I'm reading too much into it
link |
because it's more maybe practically saying
link |
just the size of the company is much larger,
link |
the kind of leadership that's required.
link |
But at the same time, they changed the model
link |
from don't be evil to it's becoming corporatized
link |
and all those kinds of things and it's sad.
link |
There also are cycles, right?
link |
History is about cycles, right?
link |
There are cycles to life, there are cycles to organizations.
link |
I mean, it's sad Steve Jobs leaving Apple
link |
by passing away, sad.
link |
You know, what the future of SpaceX and Tesla looks like
link |
without Elon Musk is quite sad.
link |
It's very possible that those companies
link |
become something very different.
link |
They become something much more like corporate
link |
So maybe most of the progress is made through cycles.
link |
Maybe a new Elon Musk comes along
link |
and all those kinds of things.
link |
But it does seem that the American system of government
link |
has built into it the cycling that makes it effective
link |
and it makes it last very long.
link |
It lasts a very long time, right?
link |
It continues to excel and lead the world.
link |
And let's hope it continues to.
link |
No, I mean, we're into a third century
link |
and democracies on this scale rarely last that long.
link |
So that's a point of pride, but it also means
link |
we need to be attentive to keep our house in order
link |
because it's not inevitable that this experiment continues.
link |
Now it's important to meditate on that actually.
link |
You've mentioned that FDR, Franklin D. Roosevelt
link |
is one of the great leaders in American history.
link |
Franklin Roosevelt had the power of empathy.
link |
No leader that I've ever studied or been around
link |
or spent any time reading about was able to connect
link |
with people who were so different from himself
link |
as Franklin Roosevelt.
link |
He came from the most elite family.
link |
He never had to work for a paycheck in his life.
link |
When he was president, he was still collecting
link |
an allowance from his mom.
link |
I mean, you couldn't be more elite than Franklin Roosevelt,
link |
but he authentically connected.
link |
This was not propaganda.
link |
He was able to feel the pain and understand the lives
link |
of some of the most destitute Americans
link |
in other parts of the country.
link |
So through one of the hardest economic periods
link |
of American history, he was able to feel the pain.
link |
He was able to, the number of immigrants
link |
I read oral histories from or who have written themselves,
link |
Saul Bellow is one example, the great novelist
link |
who talk about how as immigrants to the US,
link |
Saul Bellow was a Russian Jewish immigrant.
link |
He said, growing up in Chicago, politicians were all trying
link |
I didn't think any of them cared until I heard FDR.
link |
And I knew he spoke to me.
link |
And I think part of it was FDR really tried
link |
to understand people.
link |
That's the first thing, he was humble enough
link |
to try to do that.
link |
But second, he had a talent for that.
link |
And it's hard to know exactly what it was,
link |
but he had a talent for putting himself,
link |
imagining himself in someone else's shoes.
link |
What stands out to you as important?
link |
I mean, so he was, he went through the great depression.
link |
The, so the new deal, which some people criticize,
link |
some people see, I mean, it's funny to look at some
link |
of these policies and their long ripple effects.
link |
But at the time, it's some of the most innovative policies
link |
in the history of America.
link |
You could say they're ultimately not good for America,
link |
but they're nevertheless hold within them very rich
link |
and important lessons.
link |
But the new deal, obviously World War II,
link |
that entire process, is there something that stands out
link |
to you as a particularly great moment that made FDR?
link |
Yes, I think what FDR does from his first 100 days
link |
in office forward, and this begins with his fireside chats,
link |
is he helps Americans to see that they're all in it together.
link |
And that's by creating hope and creating a sense
link |
of common suffering and common mission.
link |
It's not offering simple solutions.
link |
One of the lessons from FDR is,
link |
if you wanna bring people together,
link |
don't offer a simple solution.
link |
Because as soon as I offer a simple solution,
link |
I have people for it and against it.
link |
Explain the problem, frame the problem,
link |
and then give people a mission.
link |
So Roosevelt's first radio address in March of 1933,
link |
the banking system is collapsing.
link |
And we can't imagine it, right?
link |
Banks were closing and you couldn't get your money out.
link |
Your life savings would be lost, right?
link |
We can't imagine that happening in our world today.
link |
He comes on the radio, he takes five minutes
link |
to explain how banking works.
link |
Most people didn't understand how banking worked, right?
link |
They don't actually hold your money in a vault.
link |
They lend it out to someone else.
link |
And then he explains why if you go and take your money
link |
out of the bank and put it in your mattress,
link |
you're making it worse for yourself.
link |
And then he says, I don't have a solution,
link |
but here's what I'm gonna do.
link |
I'm gonna send in government officers to examine the banks
link |
and show you the books on the banks.
link |
And I want you to help me by going
link |
and putting your money back in the bank.
link |
We're all gonna do this together.
link |
No simple solution, no ideological statement,
link |
but a sense of common mission.
link |
Let's go out and do this together.
link |
When you read as I have so many of these oral histories
link |
and memoirs for people who lived through that period,
link |
many of them disagreed with some of his policies.
link |
Many of them thought he was too close to Jews
link |
and they didn't like the fact he had a woman
link |
in his cabinet and all that, but they felt he cared.
link |
And they felt they were part of some common mission.
link |
And when they talk about their experience fighting
link |
in World War II, whether in Europe or Asia,
link |
it was that that prepared them.
link |
They knew what it meant to be an American
link |
when they were over there.
link |
So that to me is a model of leadership.
link |
And I think that's as possible today as it's ever been.
link |
So you think it's possible, like I was going to ask this,
link |
again, it may be a very shallow view,
link |
but it feels like this country is more divided
link |
than it has been in recent history.
link |
Perhaps the social media and all those kinds of things
link |
are merely revealing the division
link |
as opposed to creating the division.
link |
But is it possible to have a leader
link |
that unites in the same way that FDR did without,
link |
well, we're living through a pandemic.
link |
This is already, so like, I was going to say
link |
without suffering, but this is economic suffering.
link |
A huge number of people have lost their job.
link |
So is it possible to have, is there one a hunger?
link |
Is there a possibility to have an FDR style leader
link |
Yes, I think that is what President Biden is trying.
link |
I'm not saying he'll succeed,
link |
but I think that's what he's trying to do.
link |
The way you do this is you do not allow yourself
link |
to be captured by your opponents in Congress
link |
or somewhere else.
link |
FDR had a lot of opponents in Congress.
link |
He had a lot of opponents in politics,
link |
governors and others who didn't like him.
link |
Herbert Hoover was still around
link |
and still accusing FDR of being a conspiratist
link |
and all these other things.
link |
So you don't allow yourself to be captured
link |
by the leaders of the other side.
link |
You go over their heads to the people.
link |
And so today, the way to do this is to explain to people
link |
and empathize with the suffering and dislocation
link |
and difficulties they're dealing with
link |
and show that you're trying to help them.
link |
Not an easy solution, not a simple statement,
link |
but here are some things we can all do together.
link |
That's why I think infrastructure makes a lot of sense.
link |
It's what FDR invested into, right?
link |
FDR built Hoover Dam.
link |
Hoover Dam turned the lights on for young Lyndon Johnson
link |
who grew up outside of Austin, right?
link |
FDR was the one who invested in road construction
link |
that was then continued by Dwight Eisenhower,
link |
by a Republican with the interstate highway system, right?
link |
FDR invested through the WPA in building thousands
link |
of schools in our country, planting trees.
link |
That's the kind of work that can bring people together.
link |
You don't have to be a Democrat or a Republican to say,
link |
you know what, we'd be a lot better off in my community
link |
if we had better infrastructure today.
link |
I wanna be a part of that.
link |
Oh, well, maybe I can get a job doing that.
link |
Maybe my company can benefit from that.
link |
You bring people together and that way
link |
it becomes a common mission,
link |
even if we have different ideological positions.
link |
When I first heard Joe Biden,
link |
many years ago, I think he ran for president against Obama.
link |
Before I heard him speak, I really liked him.
link |
But once I heard him speak,
link |
I started liking him less and less.
link |
And it speaks to something interesting,
link |
where it's hard to put into words
link |
why you connect with people.
link |
The empathy that you mentioned in FDR,
link |
you have these bad, pardon the French, motherfuckers
link |
like Teddy Roosevelt that connect with you.
link |
There's something just powerful.
link |
And with Joe Biden, I wanna really like him.
link |
And there's something not quite there
link |
where it feels like he doesn't quite know my pain,
link |
even though he, on paper, is exactly,
link |
he knows the pain of the people
link |
and there's something not connecting.
link |
And it's hard to explain.
link |
It's hard to put into words.
link |
And it makes me not,
link |
as an engineer and scientist,
link |
it makes me not feel good about presidencies
link |
because it makes me feel like it's more art than science.
link |
And I think it's exactly an art
link |
for the reasons you laid out, it's aesthetic.
link |
It's about feeling, it's about emotion,
link |
all the things that we can't engineer.
link |
We've tried for centuries to engineer emotion.
link |
We're never gonna do it.
link |
I'm a parent of teenagers.
link |
Don't even try to explain emotion.
link |
But you hit on the key point
link |
and the key challenge for Biden.
link |
He's gotta find the right words.
link |
It's not finding the words to bullshit people.
link |
It's finding the words to help express.
link |
We've all felt empowered and felt good.
link |
When someone uses words
link |
that put into words what we're feeling,
link |
that's what he needs.
link |
That's the job of a leader.
link |
And there's certain words,
link |
I haven't heard many politicians use those words,
link |
but there's certain words that make you forget
link |
that you're for immigration or against immigration.
link |
Make you forget whether you're for wars and against wars.
link |
Make you forget about the bickering
link |
and somehow inspire you, elevate you
link |
to believe in the greatness that this country could be.
link |
In that same way, the reason I moved to Austin,
link |
it's funny to say, I just heard words
link |
from people, from friends,
link |
where they're excited by the possibility of the future here.
link |
I wasn't thinking like, what's the right thing to do?
link |
What's the strategic,
link |
cause I wanna launch a business.
link |
There's a lot of arguments for San Francisco
link |
or maybe staying in Boston in my case,
link |
but there's this excitement that was beyond reason.
link |
That was emotional.
link |
And that's what it seems like.
link |
That's what builds, that's what great leaders do,
link |
but that's what builds countries.
link |
That's what builds great businesses.
link |
And it's what people say about Austin,
link |
for example, all the time.
link |
A talented people who come here like yourself.
link |
And here's the interesting thing.
link |
No one person creates that.
link |
And part of what FDR understood,
link |
you've got to find the words out there and use them.
link |
You don't have to be the creator of them.
link |
Just as the great painter doesn't invent the painting,
link |
they're taking things from others.
link |
is there something you could say about FDR
link |
I constantly tried to think,
link |
can this person, can this moment in history
link |
have been circumvented, prevented?
link |
Can Hitler have been stopped?
link |
Can some of the atrocities from my own family
link |
that my grandparents had to live through
link |
the starvation in the Soviet Union,
link |
so the thing that people don't often talk about
link |
is the atrocities committed by Stalin and his own people.
link |
It feels like here's this great leader, FDR,
link |
that had the chance to have an impact on the world
link |
that he already probably had a great positive impact,
link |
but had a chance to stop maybe World War II
link |
or stop some of the evils.
link |
When you look at how weak Hitler was
link |
from much of the 30s relative to militarily,
link |
relative to everything else,
link |
how many people could have done a lot to stop him?
link |
And FDR in particular didn't.
link |
He tried to play, not pacify,
link |
but basically do diplomacy and let Germany do Germany,
link |
let Europe do Europe, and focus on America.
link |
Is there something you would,
link |
would you hold his feet to the fire on this?
link |
Or is it very difficult from the perspective of FDR
link |
to have known what was coming?
link |
I think FDR had a sense of what was coming,
link |
not quite the enormity of what Hitler was doing
link |
and not quite the enormity of what the Holocaust became.
link |
I also lost relatives in the Holocaust.
link |
And part of that was beyond the imagination of human beings.
link |
But it's clear in his papers that as early as 1934,
link |
people he respected, who he knew well,
link |
told him that Hitler was very dangerous.
link |
They also thought Hitler was crazy, that he was a lunatic.
link |
Hamilton Fish Armstrong, who was a friend of Roosevelt's,
link |
who was actually the Council on Foreign Relations
link |
in New York, had a meeting with Hitler in 1934.
link |
I remember reading the account of this.
link |
And he basically said to FDR,
link |
this man is gonna cause a war.
link |
He's gonna cause a lot of damage.
link |
Again, they didn't know quite the scale.
link |
So they saw this coming.
link |
They saw this coming.
link |
FDR had two problems.
link |
First, he had an American public that was deeply isolationist.
link |
The opposite of the problem in a sense
link |
that we were talking about before.
link |
If we're an over militarized society,
link |
now we were a deeply isolationist society in the 1930s.
link |
The depression reinforced that.
link |
FDR actually had to break the law in the late 30s
link |
to support the allies.
link |
So it was very hard to move the country in that direction,
link |
especially when he had this program at home,
link |
the New Deal, that he didn't wanna jeopardize
link |
by alienating an isolationist public.
link |
That was the reality.
link |
We talked about political manipulation.
link |
He had to be conscious of that.
link |
He had to know his audience.
link |
And second, there were no allies willing
link |
to invest in this either.
link |
The British were as committed to appeasement, as you know.
link |
You're obviously very knowledgeable about this.
link |
The French were as well.
link |
The Russian government, the Soviet government
link |
was cooperating to remilitarize Germany.
link |
So there weren't a lot of allies out there either.
link |
I think if there's a criticism to be made of FDR,
link |
it's that once we're in the war,
link |
he didn't do enough to stop,
link |
in particular, the killing of Jews.
link |
And there are a number of historians,
link |
myself included, who have written about this,
link |
and it's an endless debate.
link |
What should he have done?
link |
There's no doubt by 1944,
link |
the United States had air superiority
link |
and could have bombed the rail lines to Auschwitz
link |
and that would have saved as many as a million Jews.
link |
That's a lot of people who could have been saved.
link |
Why didn't FDR insist on that?
link |
In part, because he wanted to use every resource possible
link |
He did not want to be accused of fighting the war for Jews.
link |
But I think it's also fair to say
link |
that he probably cared less about Jews and East Europeans
link |
than he did about others,
link |
those of his own Dutch ancestry and from Western Europe.
link |
And so, even their race comes in,
link |
is also the explanation for the internment of Japanese
link |
in the United States,
link |
which is a horrible war crime
link |
committed by this heroic president.
link |
120,000 Japanese American citizens
link |
lost their freedom unnecessarily.
link |
So, he had his limitations.
link |
And I think he could have done more during the war
link |
to save many more lives.
link |
And I wish he had.
link |
And there's something to be said about empathy
link |
that you spoke that FDR had empathy.
link |
But us, for example,
link |
now there's many people who describe the atrocities
link |
happening in China.
link |
And there's a bunch of places across the world
link |
where there's atrocities happening now.
link |
We do not uniformly apply how much we care
link |
for the suffering of others.
link |
Depending on the group.
link |
And in some sense, the role of the president
link |
is to rise above that natural human inclination
link |
to protect, to do the us versus them,
link |
to protect the inner circle
link |
and empathize with the suffering of those
link |
that are not like you.
link |
I agree with that.
link |
Speaking of war, you wrote a book on Henry Kissinger.
link |
It's not a great transition,
link |
but it made sense in my head.
link |
Who was Henry Kissinger as a man
link |
and as a historical figure?
link |
So Henry Kissinger to me is one of the most fascinating
link |
figures in history,
link |
because he comes to the United States
link |
as a German Jewish immigrant at age 15,
link |
speaking no English.
link |
And within a few years, he's a major figure
link |
influencing US foreign policy at the height of US power.
link |
But while he's doing that,
link |
he's never elected to office
link |
and he's constantly reviled by people,
link |
including people who are anti Semitic because he's Jewish,
link |
but at the same time also his exoticism
link |
makes him more attractive to people.
link |
So someone like Nelson Rockefeller wants Kissinger around.
link |
He's one of Kissinger's first patrons
link |
because he wants a really smart Jew.
link |
And Kissinger is gonna be that smart Jew
link |
I call Kissinger a policy Jew.
link |
There were these court Jews in the 16th and 17th
link |
and 18th centuries in Europe.
link |
Every king wanted the Jew to manage his banking.
link |
And in a sense in the United States
link |
in the second half of the 20th century,
link |
many presidents want a Jew
link |
to manage their international affairs.
link |
And what does that really mean?
link |
It's not just about being Jewish,
link |
it's the internationalism, it's the cosmopolitanism.
link |
And that's one of the things
link |
I was fascinated with with Kissinger.
link |
Someone like Kissinger is unthinkable
link |
as a powerful figure in the United States
link |
30 or 40 years earlier,
link |
because the United States is run by WASD.
link |
It's run by white elites
link |
who come from a certain background.
link |
Kissinger represents a moment when American society
link |
opens up not to everyone,
link |
but opens up to these cosmopolitan figures
link |
who have language skills, historical knowledge,
link |
networks that can be used for the US government
link |
when after World War II, we have to rebuild Europe,
link |
when we have to negotiate with the Soviet Union,
link |
when we need the kinds of knowledge we didn't have before.
link |
And Harvard where he gets his education late,
link |
he started at City College actually,
link |
but Harvard where he gets his education late
link |
is at the center of what's happening
link |
at all these major universities,
link |
at Harvard, at Yale, at Stanford,
link |
at the University of Texas, everywhere,
link |
where they're growing in their international affairs,
link |
bringing in the kinds of people
link |
who never would be at the university before,
link |
training them and then enlisting them in Cold War activities.
link |
And so Kissinger is a representative of that phenomenon.
link |
I became interested in him
link |
because I think he's a bellwether.
link |
He shows how power has changed in the United States.
link |
So he enters this whole world of politics,
link |
what, post World War II in the 50s?
link |
Yes, so he actually, in the 40s even,
link |
it's an extraordinary story.
link |
He comes to the United States in 1938,
link |
just before Kristallnacht, his family leaves.
link |
He actually grew up right outside of Nuremberg.
link |
They leave right before Kristallnacht in fall of 38,
link |
He originally works in a brush factory, cleaning brushes,
link |
goes to a public high school.
link |
And in 1942, just after Pearl Harbor, he joins the military.
link |
And he's very quickly in the military,
link |
first of all, given citizenship, which he didn't have before.
link |
He's sent for the first time outside of a kosher home.
link |
He had been in a kosher home his entire life.
link |
He's sent to South Carolina to eat ham for Uncle Sam.
link |
And then he is, and this is extraordinary,
link |
at the age of 20, barely speaking English,
link |
he is sent back to Germany with the US Army
link |
in an elite counterintelligence role, why?
link |
Because they need German speakers.
link |
He came when he was 15,
link |
so he actually understands the society.
link |
They need people who have that cultural knowledge.
link |
And because he's Jewish,
link |
they can trust that he'll be anti Nazi.
link |
And there's a whole group of these figures.
link |
And so he's in an elite circle.
link |
He's discriminated against in New York.
link |
When he goes to Harvard after that,
link |
he can only live in a Jewish only dorm.
link |
But at the same time,
link |
he's in an elite policy role in counterintelligence.
link |
He forms a network there that stays with him
link |
the rest of his career.
link |
There's a gentleman named Fritz Kramer,
link |
who becomes a sponsor of his
link |
in the emerging Pentagon Defense Department world.
link |
And as early as the early 1950s,
link |
he sent them to Korea to comment on affairs in Korea.
link |
He becomes both an intellectual recognized
link |
for his connections,
link |
but also someone who policymakers wanna talk about.
link |
His book on nuclear weapons, when it's written,
link |
is given to President Eisenhower to read
link |
because they say this is someone writing interesting things.
link |
You should read what he says.
link |
There's a certain aspect to him
link |
that's kind of like Forrest Gump.
link |
He seems to continuously be the right person
link |
at the right time in the right place.
link |
Somehow finding him in this.
link |
I don't wanna, you know,
link |
you can only get lucky so many times
link |
because he continues to get lucky
link |
in terms of being at the right place in history
link |
for many decades, until today.
link |
Yeah, well, he has a knack for that.
link |
I spent a lot of time talking with him.
link |
And what comes through very quickly
link |
is that he has an eye for power.
link |
It's, I think, unhealthy.
link |
He's obsessed with power.
link |
Can you explain like an observer of power
link |
or does he want power himself?
link |
Yes, both of those things.
link |
And I think I explained this in the book.
link |
He doesn't agree with what I'm gonna say now,
link |
but I think I'm right and I think he's right.
link |
It's very hard to analyze yourself, right?
link |
I think he develops an obsession with gaining power
link |
because he sees what happens when you have no power.
link |
He experiences the trauma.
link |
His father is a very respected Gymnasium Lehrer in Germany.
link |
Even though he's Jewish,
link |
he's actually the teacher of German classics
link |
to the German kids.
link |
And he's forced to flee and he becomes nothing.
link |
His father never really makes a way
link |
for himself in the United States.
link |
He becomes a postal delivery person,
link |
which is nothing wrong with that,
link |
but for someone who's a respected teacher in Germany,
link |
and Gymnasium Lehrer are like professors there, right?
link |
To then be in this position.
link |
His mother has to open a catering business
link |
when they come to New York.
link |
It's a typical immigrant story, but he sees the trauma.
link |
His grandparents are killed by the Nazis.
link |
So he sees the trauma and he realizes how perilous it is
link |
to be without power.
link |
And you're saying he does not want to acknowledge
link |
the effect of that?
link |
I mean, most of us, if we've had trauma,
link |
it's believable that it's traumatic
link |
because you don't talk about it.
link |
I have a friend who interviews combat veterans and he says,
link |
as soon as someone freely wants to tell me
link |
about their combat trauma,
link |
I suspect that they're not telling me the truth.
link |
If it's traumatic, it's hard to talk about.
link |
Yeah, sometimes I wonder how much from my own life,
link |
everything that I've ever done is just the result
link |
of the complicated relationship with my father.
link |
I tend to, I had a really difficult time.
link |
I did a podcast conversation with him.
link |
I saw it actually.
link |
It was, I was thinking I could never do that with my father.
link |
But I remember as I was doing it,
link |
and for months after I regretted doing it,
link |
I just kept regretting it.
link |
And the fact that I was regretting it spoke to the fact
link |
that I'm running away from some truths
link |
that are back there somewhere.
link |
And that's perhaps what Kissinger is as well.
link |
But is there, I mean, he's done,
link |
he's been a part of so many interesting moments
link |
of American history, of world history,
link |
from the Cold War, Vietnam War, until today.
link |
What stands out to you as a particularly important moment
link |
in his career that made who he is?
link |
Well, I think what made his career in many ways
link |
was his experience in the 1950s, building a network,
link |
a network of people across the world
link |
who were rising leaders from unique positions.
link |
He ran what he called the International Seminar at Harvard,
link |
which was actually a summer school class
link |
that no one at Harvard cared about.
link |
But he invited all of these rising intellectuals
link |
and thinkers from around the world.
link |
And he built a network there that he used forevermore.
link |
So that's what really, I think, boosts him.
link |
The most important moments in terms of making his reputation
link |
and making his career are two sets of activities.
link |
One is the opening to China.
link |
And his ability to, first of all,
link |
take control of US policy without the authority to do that
link |
and direct US policy, and then build a relationship
link |
with Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai that was unthinkable
link |
just four or five years earlier.
link |
Of course, President Nixon is a big part of that as well,
link |
but Kissinger is the mover and shaker on that.
link |
And it's a lot of manipulation, but it's also a vision.
link |
Now, this is in the moment of American history
link |
where there's a very powerful anti communism.
link |
So communism is seen as much more even though
link |
than today as the enemy.
link |
And China in particular,
link |
they were one of our key enemies in Vietnam.
link |
And in Korea, American forces
link |
were fighting Chinese forces directly.
link |
Chinese forces come over the border.
link |
Thousands of Americans die at the hand of Chinese forces.
link |
So for the long time, the United States
link |
had no relationship with communist China.
link |
He opens that relationship.
link |
And at the same time, he also creates a whole new dynamic
link |
in the Middle East.
link |
After the 1973 war, the so called Yom Kippur War,
link |
he steps in and becomes the leading negotiator
link |
between the Israelis, the Egyptians,
link |
and other major actors in the region.
link |
And it makes the United States the most powerful actor
link |
in the Middle East, the Soviet Union far less powerful,
link |
which is great for the United States in the 70s and 80s.
link |
It gets us though into the problems
link |
we of course have thereafter.
link |
So that speaks to the very pragmatic approach
link |
that he's taken the realistic approach
link |
versus the idealistic approach termed realpolitik.
link |
What is this thing?
link |
What is this approach to world politics?
link |
So realpolitik for Kissinger is really focusing
link |
on the power centers in the world
link |
and trying as best you can to manipulate
link |
those power centers to serve the interests
link |
of your own country.
link |
And so that's why he's a multilateralist.
link |
He's not a unilateralist.
link |
He believes the United States should put itself
link |
at the center of negotiations
link |
between other powerful countries.
link |
But that's also why he pays very little attention
link |
to countries that are less powerful.
link |
And this is why he's often criticized
link |
by human rights activists.
link |
For him, parts of Africa and Latin America,
link |
which you and I would consider important places
link |
are unimportant because they don't have power.
link |
They can't project their power.
link |
They don't produce a lot of economic wealth.
link |
And so they matter less.
link |
Realpolitik views the world in a hierarchy of power.
link |
How does realpolitik realize itself in the world?
link |
What does that really mean?
link |
Like how do you push forward the interest
link |
of your own country?
link |
You said there's power centers,
link |
but it is a big bold move to negotiate
link |
to work with a communist nation,
link |
with your enemies that are powerful.
link |
What is the sort of, if you can further elaborate
link |
the philosophy behind it.
link |
Sure, so there are two key elements
link |
that then end up producing all kinds of tactics.
link |
But the two strategic elements of Kissinger's way
link |
of thinking about realpolitik,
link |
which are classical ways,
link |
going back to Thucydides and the Greeks,
link |
are to say, first of all,
link |
you figure out who your allies are
link |
and you build webs of connection
link |
so that your allies help you to acquire
link |
what you want to acquire.
link |
This is why, according to Herodotus,
link |
the Greeks beat the Persians.
link |
The Persians are bigger,
link |
but the Greeks, the Spartans, the Athenians,
link |
others are able to work together
link |
and leverage their resources.
link |
So it's about leveraging your resources.
link |
For Kissinger, this makes Western Europe
link |
crucially important.
link |
It makes Japan crucially important.
link |
It makes Israel and Egypt crucially important
link |
in building these webs.
link |
You build your surrogates,
link |
you build your brother states.
link |
In other parts of the world,
link |
you build tight connections and you work together
link |
to control the resources that you want.
link |
The second element of the strategy
link |
is not to go to war with your adversary,
link |
but to do all you can to limit the power
link |
of your adversary.
link |
Some of that is containment,
link |
preventing the Soviet Union from expanding.
link |
That was the key element of American Cold War policy.
link |
But sometimes it's actually negotiation.
link |
That's what detente was about for Kissinger.
link |
He spends a lot of time,
link |
more time than any other American foreign policymaker,
link |
negotiating with Soviet leaders
link |
as well as Chinese leaders.
link |
What does he want to do?
link |
He wants to limit the nuclear arms race.
link |
The United States is ahead.
link |
We don't want the Soviet Union to get ahead of us.
link |
We negotiate to limit their abilities, right?
link |
We play to our strengths.
link |
So it's a combination of keeping your adversary down
link |
and building tight webs.
link |
Within that context, military force is used,
link |
but you're not using war for the sake of war.
link |
You're using warfare to further your access to the resources,
link |
economic, political, geographic that you want.
link |
To build relationships and then the second thing,
link |
to limit the powers of those you're against.
link |
So is there any sort of insights
link |
into how he preferred to build relationships?
link |
Are we talking about like, again, it's the one on one.
link |
Is it through policy or is it through like,
link |
phone conversations?
link |
Is there any cool kind of insights that you could speak to?
link |
Yeah, Kissinger is the ultimate kiss up.
link |
He is, some used to make fun of him.
link |
In fact, even the filmmaker from Dr. Strangelove,
link |
whose name I'm forgetting, Stanley Kubrick,
link |
called him kiss up at that time, right?
link |
He had a wonderful way of figuring out
link |
what it is you wanted, back to that discussion we had before
link |
and trying to show how he could give you more
link |
of what you wanted as a leader.
link |
It was very personalistic, very personalistic.
link |
And he spends a lot of time, for example,
link |
kissing up to Leonid Brezhnev, kissing up to Mao.
link |
He tells Mao, you're the greatest leader
link |
in the history of the 20th century.
link |
People will look back on you as the great leader.
link |
Some of this sounds like BS, but it's serious, right?
link |
He's feeding the egos of those around him.
link |
Second, he is willing to get things done for you.
link |
You want him around you because of his efficacy.
link |
So Richard Nixon is always suspicious
link |
that Henry Kissinger is getting more of the limelight.
link |
He hates that Kissinger gets the Nobel Peace Prize
link |
and he doesn't, but he needs him.
link |
Because Kissinger's the guy who gets things done.
link |
He builds a relationship in almost,
link |
I say this in the book, in almost a gangster way.
link |
He didn't like that he criticized that part of the book.
link |
But again, I still think the evidence is there.
link |
You need something to be done, boss, I'll do it.
link |
And don't forget that I'm doing this for you.
link |
And you get mutual dependency in a Hegelian way, right?
link |
And so he builds this personal dependency
link |
through ego and through performance.
link |
And then he's so skillful at making decisions
link |
for people who are more powerful
link |
because he's never elected to office.
link |
He always needs powerful people to let him do things.
link |
But he convinces you it's your decision when it's really his.
link |
To read his memos are beautiful.
link |
He's actually very skilled at writing things
link |
in a way that looks like he's giving you options
link |
as president, but in fact, there's only one option there.
link |
Is he, speaking to the gangster, to the loyalty,
link |
is he ever, like the sense I got from Nixon
link |
is he would, Nixon would backstab you if he needed to.
link |
One of the things that I admire about gangsters
link |
is they don't backstab those in their circle,
link |
like loyalty above all else.
link |
I mean, at least that's the sense I've gotten
link |
from the stories of the past, at least.
link |
Is, where would you put Kissinger on that?
link |
Is he loyalty above all else?
link |
Or is it, or a human, it's like the Steve Jobs thing,
link |
is like, as long as you're useful, you're useful,
link |
but then once, the moment you're no longer useful
link |
is when you're knocked off the chessboard.
link |
It's the latter with him.
link |
He's backstabbing quite a lot.
link |
And he's self serving.
link |
But he also makes himself so useful
link |
that even though Nixon knows he's doing that,
link |
Nixon still needs him.
link |
By the way, on that point, so having spoken with Kissinger,
link |
what's your relationship like with him
link |
as somebody who is in an objective way writing his story?
link |
It was very difficult
link |
because he's very good at manipulating people.
link |
And we had about 12 or 13 interviews,
link |
usually informal over lunch.
link |
And this was many years ago.
link |
This is probably now more than 10 years ago.
link |
Did you find yourself being like sweet talked,
link |
like to where you like go back home later
link |
and look in the mirror and it's like,
link |
wait, what just happened?
link |
He can be enormously charming
link |
and enormously obnoxious at the same time.
link |
So I would have these very mixed emotions
link |
because he gives no ground.
link |
He's unwilling to, and I think this is a weakness,
link |
he's unwilling to admit mistake.
link |
Others make mistakes, but he doesn't.
link |
And he certainly won't take on any of the big criticisms
link |
I mean, when you've worked as hard for what he has
link |
as he has, you're defensive about it.
link |
But he is very defensive and he's very fragile about it.
link |
He does not like criticisms at all.
link |
He used to, he hasn't done this in a while,
link |
but he used to call me up and yell at me on the phone,
link |
quite literally, when I would be quoted
link |
in the New York Times or somewhere saying something
link |
that sounded critical of him.
link |
So for instance, there was one instance
link |
a number of years ago,
link |
where a reporter came across some documents
link |
where Kissinger said negative things about Jews in Russia.
link |
Typical things that a German Jew would say
link |
about East European Jews.
link |
And the New York Times asked me, is this accurate?
link |
And I said, yeah, the documents are accurate.
link |
I've seen them, they're accurate.
link |
He was so angry about that.
link |
So there's the fragility,
link |
but there's also the enormous charm
link |
and the enormous intelligence.
link |
The real challenge with him though,
link |
is he's very good at making his case.
link |
He'll convince you.
link |
And as a scholar, as an observer,
link |
you don't wanna hear a lawyer's case.
link |
You wanna actually interrogate the evidence
link |
and get to the truth.
link |
And so that was a real challenge with him.
link |
So speaking of his approach of realpolitik,
link |
if we just zoom out and look at a human history,
link |
human civilization, what do you think works best
link |
in the way we progress forward?
link |
A realistic approach, do whatever it takes,
link |
control the centers of power,
link |
to play a game for the greater interests
link |
of the good guys, quote unquote.
link |
Or lead by sort of idealism,
link |
which is like truly act in the best version
link |
of the ideas you represent,
link |
as opposed to kind of present one view
link |
and then do whatever it takes behind the scenes.
link |
Obviously you need some of both,
link |
but I lean more to the idealistic side
link |
and more so actually, believe it or not,
link |
as I get into my 40s, as I do more historical work.
link |
Why do I say that?
link |
Because I think, and this is one of my criticisms
link |
of Kissinger, who I also have a lot of respect for,
link |
the realpolitik becomes self defeating
link |
because you're constantly running to keep power,
link |
but you forget why.
link |
And you often then use power,
link |
and I think Kissinger falls into this
link |
in some of his worst moments, not all of his moments,
link |
where the power is actually being used
link |
to undermine the things you care about.
link |
It's sort of the example of being a parent
link |
and you're doing all these things
link |
to take your kid to violin, basketball, all these things,
link |
and you realize you're actually killing your kid
link |
and making your kid very unhappy.
link |
And the whole reason you were doing it
link |
was to improve the person's life.
link |
And so you have to remember why it is,
link |
what Hans Morgenthau calls this is your purpose.
link |
Your purpose has to drive you.
link |
Now your purpose doesn't have to be airy, fiery idealism.
link |
So I believe deeply in democracy is an ideal.
link |
I don't think it's gonna ever look like Athenian democracy,
link |
but that should drive our policy.
link |
But we still have to be realistic
link |
and recognize we're not gonna build that democracy
link |
in Afghanistan tomorrow.
link |
I mean, does it ultimately just boil down again
link |
to the corrupting nature of power
link |
that nobody can hold power for very long
link |
before you start acting in the interest of power
link |
as opposed to in the interest of your ideals?
link |
It's impossible to be like somebody like Kissinger
link |
who is essentially in power for many, many decades
link |
and still remember what are the initial ideals
link |
that you strove to achieve.
link |
Yes, I think that's exactly right.
link |
There's a moment in the book I quote about him,
link |
comes from one of our interviews.
link |
I asked him, what were the guiding ideals for your policies?
link |
And he said, I'm not prepared to share that.
link |
And I don't think it's because he doesn't know
link |
what he thinks he was trying to do.
link |
He realizes his use of power departed quite a lot from.
link |
So it would sound, if he made them explicit,
link |
it would sound hypocritical.
link |
Well, on that, let me ask about war.
link |
America often presents itself to its own people,
link |
but just the leaders, when they look in the mirror,
link |
I get a sense that we think of ourselves as the good guys.
link |
And especially this begins sometimes to look hypocritical
link |
when you're waging war.
link |
Is there a good way to know when you've lost all sense
link |
of what it is to be good?
link |
Another way to ask that, is there in military policy
link |
in conducting war, is there a good way to know
link |
what is a just war and what is a war crime?
link |
I mean, in some circles, Kissinger is accused
link |
of contributing, being a war criminal.
link |
Yes, and I argue in the book, he's not a war criminal,
link |
but that doesn't mean that he didn't misuse military power.
link |
I think a just war, a just war,
link |
as Michael Walzer and others write about it,
link |
a just war is a war where both the purpose is just,
link |
and you are using the means to get to that purpose
link |
that kill as few people as necessary.
link |
That doesn't mean they won't be killing,
link |
but as few as necessary.
link |
Proportionality, right?
link |
Your means should be proportional to your ends.
link |
And that's often lost sight of,
link |
because the drive to get to the end often self justifies
link |
means that go well beyond that.
link |
And so that's how we get into torture in the war on terror.
link |
Is there some kind of lesson for the future
link |
that you can take away from that?
link |
Yes, I think the first set of lessons that I've shared
link |
as a historian with military decision makers is,
link |
first of all, always remember why you're there,
link |
what your purpose is, and always ask yourself
link |
if the means you're using are actually proportional.
link |
Ask that question.
link |
Just because you have these means that you can use,
link |
just because you have these tools,
link |
doesn't mean they're the right tools to use.
link |
And here's the question that follows from that.
link |
And it's a hard question to ask,
link |
because the answer is one we often don't like to hear.
link |
Are the things I'm doing in war actually doing more harm
link |
or more good to the reason I went into war?
link |
We came to a point in the war on terror
link |
where what we were doing was actually
link |
creating more terrorists.
link |
And that's when you have to stop.
link |
Well, some of that is in the data,
link |
but some of it, there's a leap of faith.
link |
So from a parenting perspective,
link |
let me speak as a person with no kids and a single guy,
link |
let me be the expert in the room on parenting.
link |
Now, it does seem that it's a very difficult thing to do,
link |
even though you know that your kid was making a mistake,
link |
to let them make a mistake,
link |
to give them the freedom to make the mistake.
link |
I don't know what to do,
link |
but I mean, that's a very kind of lighthearted way
link |
of phrasing the following,
link |
which is when you look at some of the places in the world,
link |
like Afghanistan, which is not doing well.
link |
To move out knowing that there's going to be
link |
a lot of suffering, economic suffering, injustices,
link |
terrorist organizations growing,
link |
that's committing crimes on its own people
link |
and potentially committing crimes against allies,
link |
violence against allies, violence against the United States.
link |
So how do you know what to do in that case?
link |
Well, again, it's an art, not a science,
link |
which is what makes it hard for an engineer to think about.
link |
This is what makes it endlessly fascinating for me.
link |
And I think the real intellectual work
link |
is at the level of the art, right?
link |
And I think probably engineering at its highest level
link |
becomes an art as well, right?
link |
So policymaking, you never know.
link |
But I will say this,
link |
I'll say you have to ask yourself and look in the mirror
link |
and say, is all the effort I'm putting in
link |
actually making this better?
link |
And in Afghanistan, you look at the 20 years
link |
and two plus trillion dollars that the US has put in.
link |
And the fact that, as you said correctly,
link |
it's not doing well right now
link |
after 20 years of that investment.
link |
I might like a company that I invest in,
link |
but after 20 years of my throwing money in that company,
link |
it's time to get out.
link |
Well, in some sense, getting out now, that's kind of obvious.
link |
I'm more interested in how we figure out in the future
link |
how to get out earlier than, I mean, at this point,
link |
we stayed too long and it's obvious,
link |
the data, the investment, nothing is working.
link |
The very little data points to us staying there.
link |
I'm more interested in being in a relation,
link |
let me take it back to a safer place again,
link |
being in a relationship
link |
and getting out of that relationship
link |
while things are still good,
link |
but you have a sense that it's not going to end up
link |
That's the difficult thing.
link |
You have to ask yourself, whether it's a relationship
link |
or you're talking about policymaking
link |
in a place like Afghanistan,
link |
are the things I'm doing showing me evidence,
link |
real evidence that they're making things better
link |
or making things worse?
link |
That's a hard question to answer.
link |
You have to be very honest.
link |
And in a policymaking context,
link |
we have to actually do the same thing
link |
we do in a relationship context.
link |
What do we do in a relationship context?
link |
We ask other friends who are observing.
link |
We ask for other observers.
link |
This is actually just a scientific method element actually
link |
that we can't, the Heisenberg principle,
link |
I can't see it because I'm too close to it.
link |
I'm changing it by my looking at it.
link |
I need others to tell me in a policymaking context,
link |
this is why you need to hear from other people,
link |
not just the generals,
link |
because here's the thing about the generals.
link |
They generally are patriotic, hardworking people,
link |
but they're too close.
link |
They're not lying.
link |
They're too close.
link |
I just think they can do better.
link |
How do you think about the Cold War now
link |
from the beginning to end,
link |
and maybe also with an eye towards
link |
the current potential cyber conflict,
link |
cyber war with China and with Russia,
link |
if we look sort of other kind of Cold Wars
link |
potentially emerging in the 21st century,
link |
when you look back at the Cold War of the 20th century,
link |
how do you see it and what lessons do we draw from it?
link |
It's a wonderful question
link |
because I teach this to undergraduates
link |
and it's really interesting to see how undergraduates now,
link |
almost all of whom were born after 9 11.
link |
So the Cold War is ancient history to them.
link |
In fact, the Cold War to them is as far removed
link |
as the 1950s were to me.
link |
I mean, it's unbelievable.
link |
It's almost like World War II for my generation
link |
and Cold War for them.
link |
It's so far removed.
link |
The collapse of the Soviet Union
link |
doesn't mean anything to them.
link |
So how do you describe the Cold War to them?
link |
How do you describe the Soviet Union to them?
link |
First of all, I have to explain to them
link |
why people were so fearful of communism.
link |
Anti communism is very hard for them to understand.
link |
The fact that in the 1950s,
link |
Americans believed that communists
link |
were going to infiltrate our society
link |
and many other societies.
link |
And that after Fidel Castro comes to power in 1959,
link |
that we're going to see communist regimes
link |
all across Latin America,
link |
that fear of communism married to nuclear power.
link |
And then even the fear that maybe economically
link |
they would outpace us because they would create
link |
this sort of army of Khrushchevian builders of things
link |
and what does Khrushchev said, right?
link |
Say we're gonna catch Britain in five years
link |
and then the United States after that, right?
link |
So to explain that sense of fear to them
link |
that they don't have of those others,
link |
that's really important.
link |
The Cold War was fundamentally about the United States
link |
defending a capitalist world order
link |
against a serious challenger from communism.
link |
An alternative way of organizing everything,
link |
private property, economic activity,
link |
enterprise, life, everything,
link |
organized in a totally different way.
link |
It was a struggle between two systems.
link |
So your sense is, and sorry to interrupt,
link |
but your sense is that the conflict of the Cold War
link |
was between two ideologies
link |
and not just two big countries with nuclear weapons.
link |
I think it was about two different ways of life
link |
or two different promoted ways of life.
link |
The Soviet Union never actually lived communism.
link |
But I think my reading of Stalin
link |
is he really tried to go there.
link |
Khrushchev really believed Gorbachev
link |
thought he was going to reform the Soviet Union
link |
so you would go back to a kind of Bukhar and Lenin
link |
So I do think that mattered.
link |
I do think that mattered enormously.
link |
And for the United States point of view,
link |
the view was that communism and fascism
link |
were these totalitarian threats
link |
to liberal democracy and capitalism,
link |
which went hand in hand.
link |
So I do think that's what the struggle was about.
link |
And in a certain way, liberal capitalism
link |
proved to be the more enduring system
link |
and the United States played a key role in that.
link |
That's the reality of the Cold War.
link |
But I think it means different things now
link |
to my students and others.
link |
They focus very much on the expansion of American power
link |
and the challenges of managing.
link |
They're looking at it from the perspective
link |
of not will we survive,
link |
but did we waste our resources on some elements of it?
link |
It doesn't mean they were against what America did,
link |
but there is a question of the resources
link |
that went into the Cold War and the opportunity costs.
link |
And you see this when you look at the sort of
link |
healthcare systems that other countries build
link |
and you compare them to the United States, race issues also.
link |
So they look at the costs,
link |
which I think often happens after a project is done,
link |
you look back at that.
link |
Second, I think they're also more inclined
link |
to see the world as less bipolar,
link |
to see the role of China as more complicated.
link |
Post colonial or anti colonial movements,
link |
independent states in Africa and Latin America,
link |
that gets more attention.
link |
So one of the criticisms now is because you forget
link |
the lessons of 20th century history
link |
and the atrocities committed under communism,
link |
that you may be a little bit more willing
link |
to accept some of those ideologies
link |
into our United States society.
link |
That this kind of, that forgetting that capitalistic forces
link |
are part of the reason why we have what we have today.
link |
There's a fear amongst some now that we would have,
link |
what would allow basically communism
link |
to take hold in America.
link |
I mean, Jordan and others speak to this kind of idea.
link |
I tend to not be so fearful of it.
link |
I think it's on the surface, it's not deep within.
link |
I do see the world as very complicated
link |
as there needing to be a role of having support
link |
for each other on certain political levels,
link |
economic levels, and then also supporting entrepreneurs.
link |
It's like that the kind of enforcing of outcomes
link |
that is fundamental to the communist system
link |
is not something we're actually close to.
link |
And some of that is just fear mongering
link |
for likes on Twitter kind of thing.
link |
If I could come in on that,
link |
because I agree with you 100%.
link |
I've spent a lot of time writing and looking at this
link |
and talking to people about this.
link |
There's no communism in the United States.
link |
There never has been, and there certainly isn't now.
link |
And I'll say this both from an academic point of view,
link |
but also from just spending a lot of time
link |
observing young people in the United States.
link |
Even those on the farthest left,
link |
take whoever you think is the farthest left,
link |
they don't even understand what communism is.
link |
They're not communist in any sense.
link |
Americans are raised in a vernacular
link |
and environment of private property ownership.
link |
And as you know better than anyone,
link |
if you believe in private property,
link |
you don't believe in communism.
link |
So the sort of Bernie Sanders kind of socialist elements,
link |
that's very different, right?
link |
And I would say some of that, not all of that,
link |
some of that does hearken back
link |
to actually what won in the Cold War.
link |
There were many social democratic elements
link |
of what the United States did
link |
that led to our winning the Cold War.
link |
For example, the New Deal was investing government money
link |
in propping up business, in propping up labor unions.
link |
And during the Cold War, we spent more money
link |
than we had ever spent in our history on infrastructure,
link |
on schools, on providing social support, social security,
link |
our national pension system being one of them.
link |
So you could argue actually that social democracy
link |
is very compatible with capitalism.
link |
And I think that's the debate we're having today,
link |
how much social democracy.
link |
I'll also say that the capitalism we've experienced
link |
the last 20 years is different
link |
from the capitalism of the Cold War.
link |
During the Cold War, there was the presumption
link |
in the United States that you had to pay taxes
link |
to support our Cold War activities,
link |
that it was okay to make money,
link |
but the more money you made, the more taxes you had to pay.
link |
We had the highest marginal tax rates
link |
in our history during the Cold War.
link |
Now, the aversion to taxes,
link |
and of course, no one ever likes paying taxes,
link |
but the notion that we can do things on deficit spending,
link |
that's a post Cold War phenomenon.
link |
That's not a Cold War phenomenon.
link |
So, so much of the capitalism that we're talking about today
link |
is not the capitalism of the Cold War.
link |
And maybe, again, we can learn that
link |
and see how we can reform capitalism today
link |
and get rid of this false worry
link |
about communism in the United States.
link |
Yeah, you know what?
link |
You make me actually realize something important.
link |
What we have to remember is the words we use
link |
on the surface about different policies,
link |
what you think is right and wrong,
link |
is actually different than the core thing
link |
that is in your blood, the core ideas that are there.
link |
I do see the United States as this,
link |
there's this fire that burns of individual freedoms,
link |
of property rights, these basic foundational ideas
link |
that everybody just kind of takes for granted.
link |
And I think if you hold on to them,
link |
if you're like raised in them,
link |
talking about ideas of social security,
link |
of universal basic income, of reallocation of resources
link |
is a fundamentally different kind of discussion
link |
than you had in the Soviet Union.
link |
I think the value of the individual
link |
is so core to the American system
link |
that you basically cannot possibly do the kind of atrocities
link |
that you saw in the Soviet Union.
link |
But, of course, you never know,
link |
the slippery slope has a way of changing things.
link |
But I do believe the things you're born with
link |
is just so core to this country.
link |
It's part of the, I don't know what your thoughts are.
link |
We are in Texas, I'm not necessarily,
link |
I don't necessarily wanna have
link |
a gun control type of conversation,
link |
but the reason I really like guns,
link |
it doesn't make any sense, but philosophically,
link |
it's such a declaration of individual rights
link |
that's so different than the conversations I hear
link |
with my Russian family and my Russian friends,
link |
that the gun, it's very possible
link |
that having guns is bad for society
link |
in the sense that it will lead to more violence.
link |
But there's something about this discussion
link |
that proclaims the value of my freedom as an individual.
link |
I'm not being eloquent in it,
link |
but there's very few debates
link |
where whenever people are saying,
link |
should you have what level of gun control,
link |
all those kinds of things,
link |
what I hear is it's a fight for how much freedom,
link |
even if it's stupid freedom, should the individual have.
link |
I think that's what's articulated quite often.
link |
I think combining your two points, which are great points,
link |
I think there is something about American individualism
link |
which is deeply ingrained in our culture and our society.
link |
And it means that the kinds of bad things
link |
that happen are different, usually not as bad.
link |
But our individualism often covers up
link |
for vigilante activity and individual violence
link |
toward people that you wouldn't have
link |
in a more collective culture.
link |
So in the Soviet Union, it was at a much worse scale
link |
and it was done by government organizations.
link |
In the United States, it's individuals,
link |
the history of lynching in our country, for example.
link |
Sometimes it's individual police officers,
link |
sometimes it's others.
link |
Again, the vast majority of police officers are good people
link |
and don't do harm to people, but there are these examples
link |
and they are able to fester in our society
link |
because of our individualism.
link |
Now, gun ownership is about personal freedom,
link |
I think, for a lot of people.
link |
And there's no doubt that in our history,
link |
included in the Second Amendment,
link |
which can be interpreted in different ways,
link |
is the presumption that people should have the right
link |
to defend themselves,
link |
which is what I think you're getting at here.
link |
That you should not be completely dependent
link |
for your defense on an entity
link |
that might not be there for you.
link |
You should be able to defend yourself.
link |
And guns symbolize that.
link |
I think that's a fair point.
link |
But I think it's also a fair point to say
link |
that as with everything,
link |
defining what self defense is, is really important.
link |
So does self defense mean I can have a bazooka?
link |
Does it mean I can have weapons that are designed
link |
for a military battlefield to mass kill people?
link |
That seems to me to be very different
link |
from saying I should have a handgun
link |
or some small arm to defend myself.
link |
That distinction alone would make a huge difference.
link |
Most of the mass shootings, at least,
link |
which are a smaller proportion of the larger gun deaths
link |
in the United States, which are larger
link |
than any other society, but at least the mass shootings
link |
are usually perpetrated by people
link |
who have not self defense weapons,
link |
but mass killing, mass killing weapons.
link |
And I think there's an important distinction there.
link |
The Constitution talks about a right to bear arms
link |
for a well regulated militia.
link |
When the framers talked about arms,
link |
that did not mean the ability to kill
link |
as many people as you wanna kill.
link |
It meant the ability to defend yourself.
link |
So let's have that conversation.
link |
I think it would be useful as a society.
link |
Stop talking about guns or no guns.
link |
What is it that we as citizens need
link |
to feel we can defend ourselves?
link |
Yeah, I mean, guns have this complicated issue
link |
that it can cause harm to others.
link |
I tend to see sort of maybe like legalization of drugs.
link |
I tend to believe that we should have the freedom
link |
to do stupid things.
link |
Yeah, so long as we're not harming lots of other people.
link |
Yes, and then guns, of course, have the property
link |
that they can be used.
link |
It's not just a bazooka I would argue is pretty stupid
link |
to own for your own self defense,
link |
but it has the very negative side effect
link |
of being potentially used to harm other people.
link |
And you have to consider that kind of stuff.
link |
By the way, as a side note to the listeners,
link |
there's been a bunch of people saying
link |
that Lex is way too libertarian for my taste.
link |
No, I actually am just struggling with ideas
link |
and sometimes put on different hats in these conversations.
link |
I think through different ideas,
link |
whether they're left, right or libertarian.
link |
That's true for gun control.
link |
That's true for immigration.
link |
That's true for all of that.
link |
I think we should have discussions in the space of ideas
link |
versus in the space of bins we put each other in labels
link |
and we put each other in.
link |
And also change our minds all the time.
link |
Try out, say stupid stuff with the best of intention,
link |
trying our best to think through it.
link |
And then after saying it, think about it for a few days
link |
and then change your mind and grow in this way.
link |
Let me ask a ridiculous question.
link |
When you zoom out, when human civilization
link |
has destroyed itself and alien graduate students
link |
are studying it like three, four, five centuries from now,
link |
what do you think we'll remember
link |
about this period in history?
link |
The 20th century, the 21st century, this time.
link |
We had a couple of wars.
link |
We had a charismatic black president in the United States.
link |
We had a couple of pandemics.
link |
What do you think will actually stand out in history?
link |
No doubt the rapid technological innovation
link |
of the last 20 to 30 years.
link |
How we created a whole virtual universe
link |
we didn't have before.
link |
And of course that's gonna go in directions
link |
you and I can't imagine 50 years from now.
link |
But this will be seen as that origin moment
link |
that when we went from playing below the rim
link |
to playing above the rim, right?
link |
To be all in person to having a whole virtual world.
link |
And in a strange way, the pandemic was a provocation
link |
to move even further in that direction.
link |
And we're never going back, right?
link |
We're gonna restore some of the things we were doing
link |
before the pandemic, but we're never gonna go back
link |
to that world we were in before where every meeting
link |
you had to fly to that place to be in the room
link |
So this whole virtual world and the virtual personas
link |
and the avatars and all of that,
link |
I think that's going to be a big part
link |
of how people remember our time.
link |
Also the sort of biotechnology element of it,
link |
which the vaccines are part of.
link |
It's amazing how quickly, this is the great triumph,
link |
how quickly we've produced and distributed these vaccines.
link |
And of course there are problems with who's taking them,
link |
but the reality is, I mean, this is light speed
link |
compared to what it would have been like,
link |
not just in 1918, in 1980.
link |
Yeah, one of the, I'm sorry if I'm interrupting,
link |
but one of the disappointing things
link |
about this particular time is because vaccines,
link |
like a lot of things got politicized,
link |
used as little pawns in the game of politics,
link |
that we don't get the chance to step back fully at least
link |
and celebrate the brilliance of the human species.
link |
Yes, there are scientists who use their authority
link |
improperly, that have an ego,
link |
that when they're within institutions,
link |
are dishonest with the public
link |
because they don't trust the intelligence of the public,
link |
they are not authentic and transparent,
link |
all the same things you could say about humans
link |
in any positions of power, anywhere.
link |
Okay, that doesn't mean science isn't incredible
link |
and the vaccines, I mean, I don't often talk about it
link |
because it's so political and it's heartbreaking to,
link |
it's heartbreaking how all the good stuff
link |
is getting politicized.
link |
Yeah, that's right, and it shouldn't be,
link |
and it'll seem less political.
link |
Eating the long arc of history.
link |
Yep, it'll be seen as an outstanding accomplishment.
link |
And as a step toward whatever,
link |
maybe they're doing vaccines
link |
or something that replaces the vaccine in 10 seconds,
link |
at that point, right?
link |
It'll be seen as a step.
link |
Those will be some of the positives.
link |
I think one of the negatives they will point to
link |
will be our inability, at least at this moment,
link |
to manage our environment better,
link |
how we're destroying our living space
link |
and not doing enough even though we have the capabilities
link |
to do more to preserve
link |
or at least allow a sustainable living space.
link |
I'm confident because I'm an optimist
link |
that we will get through this
link |
and we will be better at sustaining our environment
link |
in future decades.
link |
And so in terms of environmental policy,
link |
they'll see this moment as a dark age
link |
or the beginnings of a better age, maybe as a renaissance.
link |
Or maybe as the last time most people lived on Earth
link |
when a couple of centuries afterwards
link |
we were all dissipated throughout the solar system
link |
If the local resident, hometown resident,
link |
Mr. Elon Musk has anything to do with it.
link |
I do tend to think you're absolutely right.
link |
With all this political bickering,
link |
we shouldn't forget that what this age will be remembered by
link |
is the incredible levels of innovation.
link |
I do think the biotech stuff worries me more than anything
link |
because it feels like there's a lot of weapons
link |
that could be yet to be developed in that space.
link |
But I tend to believe that,
link |
I'm excited by two avenues.
link |
One is artificial intelligence.
link |
The kind of systems we'll create in this digital space
link |
that you mentioned we're moving to.
link |
And then the other, of course,
link |
this could be the product of the Cold War,
link |
but I'm super excited by space exploration.
link |
There's a magic to humans being.
link |
And we're getting back to it.
link |
I mean, we were enthralled with it in the 50s and 60s
link |
when it was a Cold War competition.
link |
And then after the 70s, we sort of gave up on it.
link |
And thanks to Elon Musk and others,
link |
we're coming back to this issue.
link |
And I think there's so much to be gained
link |
from the power of exploration.
link |
Is there books or movies in your life,
link |
long ago or recently, that had a big impact on you?
link |
Is there something you would?
link |
My favorite novel, I always tell people this,
link |
I love reading novels.
link |
And I think the historian and the novelist are actually,
link |
and the technology innovator are all actually
link |
They're all storytellers.
link |
And we're all in the imagination space.
link |
And I'm trying to imagine the world of the past
link |
to inform us in the present for the future.
link |
So one of my favorite novels that I read,
link |
actually when I was in graduate school,
link |
is Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks.
link |
And it's the story of a family in Lübeck
link |
in Northern Germany, living through the 19th century
link |
and the rise and fall of family, cycles of life.
link |
Many things we've talked about in the last couple of hours.
link |
Cycles of life, challenges of adjusting
link |
to the world around you.
link |
And it's just a very moving reflection
link |
on the limits of human agency
link |
and how we all have to understand the circumstances
link |
we're in and adjust to them.
link |
And there's triumph and tragedy in that.
link |
It's a wonderful novel.
link |
It used to be a kind of canonical work.
link |
It's sort of fallen out now.
link |
It's a big, big novel, but I'm very moved by that.
link |
I'm very moved by Tall Stories, War and Peace.
link |
I assign that every year to my students.
link |
That's a big, big book.
link |
But what Tall Story challenges
link |
is he challenges the notion
link |
that a Napoleon can rule the world.
link |
And we're all little Napoleons, right?
link |
We're all sort of thinking that we're gonna do that.
link |
And he reminds us how much is contingency, circumstance.
link |
It doesn't mean we don't have some control.
link |
You've spoke to me a little bit of Russian.
link |
Where does that come from?
link |
So your appreciation of Tall Story,
link |
but also your ability to speak a bit of Russian.
link |
Where's that from?
link |
So I speak, in addition to English,
link |
I speak reasonably well,
link |
depending on how much vodka I've had.
link |
Russian, I speak French and German.
link |
I learned those for research purposes.
link |
I learned French actually when I was in high school,
link |
Russian when I was in college,
link |
German when I was in graduate school.
link |
Now I do have family on my mother's side
link |
that's of Russian Jewish extraction,
link |
but they were Yiddish speakers by the time I met them.
link |
By the time they had gone through Germany
link |
and come to the United States,
link |
or really gone through Poland and come to the United States,
link |
they were Yiddish speakers.
link |
So there's no one really in my family who speaks Russian,
link |
but I do feel a connection there,
link |
at least a long range personal connection.
link |
Is there something to be said about the language
link |
and your ability to imagine history?
link |
Sort of when you study these different countries,
link |
your ability to imagine what it was like
link |
to be a part of that culture, part of that time?
link |
Yes, language is crucial to understanding a culture.
link |
And even if you learn the languages I have,
link |
learning Russian and German and French,
link |
it's still not the same
link |
as also being a native speaker either, as you know.
link |
But I think language tells you a lot about mannerism,
link |
about assumptions.
link |
The very fact that English doesn't have a formal U,
link |
but Russian has a formal U, right?
link |
V versus T, right?
link |
German has a formal U, Z versus D, right?
link |
So the fact that English doesn't have a formal U
link |
tells you something about Americans, right?
link |
And that's just one example.
link |
The fact that Germans have such a wider vocabulary
link |
for certain scientific concepts than we have in English
link |
tells you something about the culture, right?
link |
Language is an artifact of the culture.
link |
The culture makes the language.
link |
It's fascinating to explore.
link |
I mean, even just exactly what you just said,
link |
V, T, which is, there's a fascinating transition.
link |
So I guess in English we just have U.
link |
There's a fascinating transition that persists to this day
link |
is of formalism and politeness,
link |
where it's an initial kind of dance of interaction
link |
that's different methods of signaling respect, I guess.
link |
We don't, and language provides that,
link |
and then in the English language,
link |
there's fewer tools to show that kind of respect,
link |
which has potentially positive or negative effects
link |
on, it flattens the society where like a teenager
link |
could talk to an older person and show like a deference.
link |
I mean, but at the same time,
link |
I mean, it creates a certain kind of dynamic,
link |
a certain kind of society.
link |
And it's funny to think of just like those few words
link |
can have like a ripple effect through the whole culture.
link |
And we don't have a history in the United States
link |
These elements of language reflect aristocracy.
link |
The serf would never refer to the master,
link |
even if the master is younger,
link |
it's always Voi, right?
link |
In Turgenev, it's always Voi, right?
link |
I mean, and so it's, yeah,
link |
so it tells you something about the history.
link |
That's why to your question, which was a great question,
link |
it's so crucial to try to penetrate the language.
link |
I'll also say something else,
link |
and this is a problem for many Americans
link |
who haven't learned a foreign language.
link |
We're very bad at teaching foreign languages.
link |
If you've never taught yourself a foreign language,
link |
you have closed yourself off to certain kinds of empathy
link |
because you have basically trained your brain
link |
to only look at the world one way.
link |
The very act of learning another language,
link |
I think tells your brain that words and concepts
link |
don't translate one to one.
link |
This is the first thing you realize, right?
link |
We can say, you know, these two words mean this thing,
link |
you know, these two words mean the same thing
link |
from two languages, they never mean exactly the same thing.
link |
Dosvidanya is really not goodbye, right?
link |
And there's something, you know,
link |
right now there's people talking about
link |
idea of lived experience.
link |
One of the ways to force yourself into this idea
link |
of lived experience is by learning another language,
link |
to understand that you can perceive the world
link |
in a totally different way,
link |
even though you're perceiving the same thing.
link |
And of course, the way to first learn Russian
link |
for those looking for tutorial lessons for me
link |
is just like as you said, we start by drinking lots of vodka.
link |
It's very difficult to do otherwise.
link |
Is there advice you have for young people about career,
link |
about life, in making their way in the world?
link |
Yes, two things I believe that I say
link |
to a lot of talented young people.
link |
First, I don't think you can predict
link |
what is gonna be well renumerated 20 years from now.
link |
Don't pick a profession because you think,
link |
even though your parents might tell you or something,
link |
do this and you'll make money.
link |
You know, this is the scene in The Graduate
link |
where a guy tells Dustin Hoffman,
link |
go into plastics, money in plastics.
link |
So many of my students now have parents
link |
who are telling them, bright students, you know,
link |
go to the business school.
link |
That's what's gonna set you up to make money.
link |
If you're passionate about business, yes.
link |
But don't begin by thinking you know
link |
what's gonna be hot 20 years from now.
link |
You don't know what's gonna be hot from 20 years ago,
link |
20 years from now.
link |
What should you do?
link |
This is advice number one.
link |
Find what you're passionate about.
link |
Because if you're passionate about it,
link |
you will do good work in that area if you're talented
link |
and usually passion and talent overlap.
link |
And you'll find a way to get people to pay you for it.
link |
I mean, you do it really well, people will wanna pay.
link |
That's where capitalism works.
link |
People will find it valuable, right?
link |
Whether it's violin playing, right?
link |
Or engineering or poetry, you will find,
link |
you might not become a billionaire.
link |
That involves other things.
link |
But you'll find a way to get people to pay you for it.
link |
And then the second thing is it's really important
link |
at the very beginning of your career,
link |
even before you're in your job, right?
link |
To start building your networks.
link |
But networks are not just people you're on Facebook with
link |
or Twitter with, I mean, that's fine.
link |
It's actually forming relationships.
link |
And some of that can be mediated in the digital world,
link |
but I mean real relationships.
link |
I like podcasts because I think
link |
they actually open up that space.
link |
I know a lot of people can listen to a podcast
link |
and find someone else who's listened to that podcast
link |
and have a conversation about a topic.
link |
It opens up that space.
link |
Build those relationships,
link |
not with people who you think will be powerful,
link |
but people you think are interesting
link |
because they'll do interesting things.
link |
And every successful person I know at some level
link |
had a key moment where they got where they are
link |
because of someone they knew for some other reason
link |
who had that connection.
link |
So use and spread your networks
link |
and make them as diverse as possible.
link |
Find people who are of a different party,
link |
have different interests, but are interesting to you.
link |
That's brilliant advice.
link |
And some of that on the passion side,
link |
I do find that as somebody who has a lot of passions,
link |
I find the second part to that is committing.
link |
Yes, that's true too.
link |
Which sucks because life is finite.
link |
And when you commit, you say,
link |
well, I'm never going to be good.
link |
Like when you choose one of the two passions,
link |
one of the two things you're interested in,
link |
you're basically saying, I'm letting go.
link |
I'm saying goodbye to.
link |
Which is actually what does goodbye means,
link |
not goodbye, but letting go.
link |
That's exactly right.
link |
I think that's exactly right.
link |
I think you do have to make choices.
link |
You do have to set priorities.
link |
I often laugh at students who tell me
link |
they want to have like three majors.
link |
If you have three majors, you have no major, right?
link |
I mean, so I do think you have to make choices.
link |
I also think it's important that whatever you do,
link |
even if it's a small thing,
link |
you always do the best you can.
link |
You always do excellent work.
link |
My kids are tired of hearing me say this at home,
link |
but I believe everything you do should be about excellence.
link |
The best you can do.
link |
If I'm going to wash the dishes,
link |
I'm going to be the best person washing the dishes.
link |
If I'm going to write a book review,
link |
I'm going to write the best possible book review I can.
link |
Because you develop a culture about yourself,
link |
which is about excellence.
link |
Yeah, I was telling you offline about all the kind of stuff,
link |
Google Fiber and cable installation, all that stuff.
link |
I've been always a believer, washing dishes.
link |
People don't often believe me when I say this.
link |
I don't care what I do.
link |
I am with David Foster Wallace.
link |
There's so much joy for me.
link |
I think for everyone, but okay, let me just speak for me,
link |
to be discovered in getting really good at anything.
link |
In fact, getting good at stuff
link |
that most people believe is boring or menial labor
link |
or impossible to be interesting,
link |
that's even more joyful to find the joy within that
link |
and the excellence.
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It's the Jiro dreams of sushi,
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making the same fricking sushi over and over
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and becoming a master that can be truly joyful.
link |
There's a sense of pride and on the pragmatic level,
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you never know when someone will spot that.
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And intelligent people who perform
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at the level of high excellence look for others.
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And it radiates some kind of signal.
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It's weird what you attract to yourself
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when you just focus on mastery
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and pursuing excellence in something.
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Like this is the cool thing about it.
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That's the joy I've really truly experienced.
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I didn't have to do much work.
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It's just cool people kind of,
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I find myself in groups of cool people,
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like really people who are excited about life,
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who are passionate about life.
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There's a fire in their eyes.
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That's at the end of the day just makes life fun.
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And then also money wise,
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at least in this society,
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we're fortunate to where if you do that kind of thing,
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money will find a way.
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Like I have the great,
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I say this that I don't care about money.
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I have to think about what that means
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because some people criticize that idea.
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It's like, yeah, it must be nice to say that.
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Cause I have for much,
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many periods of my life had very little money,
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but I think we live in a society
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where not caring about money,
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but just focusing on your passions.
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If you're truly pursuing excellence, whatever that is,
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money will find you.
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That's I guess the ideal of the capitalist system.
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And I think that the entrepreneurs I've studied
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and had the chance to get to know,
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and I'm sure you'd agree with this,
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they do what they do
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cause they're passionate about the product.
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They're not just in it to make money.
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In fact, that's when they get into trouble
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when they're just trying to make money.
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You said your grandmother, Emily,
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had a big impact on your life.
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What are some lessons she taught you?
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Emily, who was the child of immigrants
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from Russia and Poland,
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who never went to college,
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her proudest day I think was when I went to college.
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She treated everyone with respect
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and tried to get to know everyone.
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She knew every bus driver in the town.
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She'd remember their birthdays.
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And one of the things she taught me is
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no matter how high you fly,
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the lowest person close to the ground matters to you.
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And you treat them the same way
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you treat the billionaire at the top of the podium.
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She didn't just say that.
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Some people say that and don't do it.
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She really did that.
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And I always remember that it comes up in my mind
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at least once a week
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because we're all busy doing a lot of things
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and you either see or you even feel in yourself
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the desire to just, for the reasons of speed,
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to be short or not polite with someone
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who can't do anything to harm you right now.
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And I remember her saying to me,
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no, you don't, you treat everyone with respect.
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You treat the person you're on the phone with,
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You treat that person if you're talking to Jeff Bezos
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or you're talking to Elon Musk.
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And I think making that a culture
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of who you are is so important.
link |
And people notice that.
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That's the other thing.
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And they notice when it's authentic.
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Everyone's nice to the person at the bottom
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of the totem pole when you want to get ahead in the line
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for your driver's license.
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But are you nice to them when you don't need that?
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And even when nobody's watching,
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that has a weird effect on you
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that's going to have a ripple effect and people know.
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That's the cool thing about the internet.
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I've come to believe that people see authenticity.
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They see when you're full of shit, when you're not.
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The other thing that Emily taught me,
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and I think we've all had relatives who have taught us this,
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that you could be very uneducated.
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She was very uneducated.
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She had a high school diploma,
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but I think she was working in a delicatessen in New York
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while she was in high school,
link |
or maybe it was at Gimbels or somebody.
link |
So she probably didn't take high school very seriously.
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She wasn't very well educated.
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She was very smart.
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And we can fall into a world
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where I'm a big believer in higher education
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and getting a PhD and things of that sort,
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but where we think those are the only smart people.
link |
Sometimes those are the people,
link |
because of their accomplishments,
link |
because their egos are the ones
link |
who are least educated in the way of the world.
link |
Least curious, and ultimately wisdom comes from curiosity.
link |
And sometimes getting a PhD can get in the way of curiosity
link |
as opposed to empower curiosity.
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Let me ask, from a historical perspective,
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you've studied some of human history.
link |
So maybe you have an insight
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about what's the meaning of life.
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Do you ever ask when you look at history, the why?
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Yeah, I do all the time, and I don't have an answer.
link |
It's the mystery that we can't answer.
link |
I do think what it means is what we make of it.
link |
There's no universal, every period I've studied,
link |
and I've studied a little bit of a lot of periods
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and a lot of a few periods,
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every period people struggle with this,
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and they don't come to,
link |
wiser people than us don't come to a firm answer,
link |
except it's what you make of it.
link |
Meaning is what you make of it.
link |
So think about what you want to care about
link |
and make that the meaning in your life.
link |
I wonder how that changes throughout human history,
link |
whether there's a constant.
link |
Like I often think,
link |
especially when you study evolutionary biology
link |
and you just see our origins from life and as it evolves,
link |
it's like, it makes you wonder,
link |
it feels like there's a thread that connects all of it,
link |
that we're headed somewhere.
link |
We're trying to actualize some greater purpose.
link |
Like there seems to be a direction to this thing,
link |
and we're all kind of stumbling in the dark
link |
trying to figure it out,
link |
but it feels like we eventually will find an answer.
link |
I hope so, yeah, maybe.
link |
I mean, I do think we all want our families to do better.
link |
and family doesn't just mean biological family.
link |
You can have all kinds of ways
link |
you define family and community,
link |
and I think we are moving slowly
link |
and in a very messy way toward a larger world community.
link |
To include all of biological life
link |
and eventually artificial life as well.
link |
Yeah, so to expand the lesson to the advice
link |
that your grandmother taught you,
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is I think we should treat robots and AI systems
link |
good as well, even if they're currently not very intelligent
link |
because one day they might be.
link |
Right, right, I think that's exactly right,
link |
and we should think through,
link |
exactly as a humanist how I would approach that issue.
link |
We need to think through the kinds of behavior patterns
link |
we want to establish with these new forms of life,
link |
artificial life for ourselves also, to your point,
link |
so we behave the right way, so we don't misuse this.
link |
We started talking about Abraham Lincoln,
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ended talking about robots.
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I think this is the perfect conversation, Jeremy.
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This was a huge honor.
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I love Austin, I love UT Austin,
link |
and I love the fact that you would agree
link |
to waste all your valuable time with me today.
link |
Thank you so much for talking to me.
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I can't imagine a better way to spend a Friday afternoon.
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This was so much fun, and I'm such a fan of your podcast
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and delighted to be a part of it.
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Thanks for listening to this conversation
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with Jeremy Suri, and thank you to Element, Monkpac,
link |
Belcampo, Four Sigmatic, and Asleep.
link |
Check them out in the description to support this podcast.
link |
And now, let me leave you with some words
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from Franklin D. Roosevelt, FDR.
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Democracy cannot succeed unless those
link |
who express their choice are prepared to choose wisely.
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The real safeguard of democracy, therefore, is education.
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Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.