Kind: captions
Language: en
the following is a conversation with
jeremy sury a historian
at ut austin whose research interests
and writing
are on modern american history with an
eye towards presidents
and in general individuals who wielded
power
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this is the lex friedman podcast and
here is my conversation with jeremy
sorry you've studied many american
presidents throughout history
so who do you think was the greatest
president
in american history the greatest
american president was abraham lincoln
uh tolstoy reflected on this himself
actually
uh saying that when he was in the
caucasus he asked these
um peasants in the caucuses who was the
greatest man in the world that they
had heard of and they said abraham
lincoln and why
well because he gave voice to people who
had no voice before
he turned politics into an art this is
what tolstoy recounted the peasants and
the caucuses telling him
uh lincoln made politics more than about
power he made it an
art he made it a source of liberation
and those living even far from the
united states
could see that model that inspiration
from lincoln he was a man who had two
years of education yet he mastered the
english language
and he used the language to
help people imagine a different kind of
world you see leaders and presidents are
at their best
when they're doing more than just
manipulating institutions in power
when they're helping the people imagine
a better world and he did that
as no other president has and you say he
gave
he gave voice to those who are voiceless
uh who are you talking to
about in general is this about
african-americans or is this about
just the populist in general certainly
part of it is about
uh slaves uh african-americans and many
immigrants immigrants from all parts of
europe and other areas that have come to
the united states
but part of it was just for ordinary
american citizens the republican party
for which lincoln was the first
president was a party created to give
voice to
poor white men as well as slaves and
others
and lincoln was a poor white man himself
grew up without slaves and without land
which meant you had almost nothing
what do you think about the trajectory
of that man with only two years of
education
is there something to be said about how
does one come from
nothing and
nurture the ideals that kind of make
this country great
into something where you can actually be
a leader of this nation
to espouse those ideas to give the voice
to the voiceless
yes i think i think you actually hit the
nail on the head i think
what he represented was the opportunity
and that was the word that mattered for
him
opportunity that came from the ability
to
raise yourself up to work hard and to be
compensated for your hard work and this
is at the core of the republican party
of the 19th century which is
the core of capitalism it's not about
getting rich it's about getting
compensated for your work
it's about being incentivized to do
better work and lincoln was constantly
striving one of his
closest associates uh herndon said
he was the little engine of ambition
that couldn't stop he just just kept
going
taught himself to read taught himself to
be a lawyer he went through many failed
businesses before he even reached that
point
many failed love affairs but he kept
trying he kept working
and what american society offered him
and what he wanted american society to
offer everyone else
was the opportunity to keep trying to
fail and then get up
and try again what do you think was the
nature of that ambition was there a
hunger for power
i think lincoln had a hunger for success
i think he had a hunger
to um get out of the poor station he was
in
he had a hunger to be someone who had
control over his life
freedom for him did not mean the right
to do anything you want to do
but it meant the right to be secure from
being dependent upon someone else
so independence uh he writes in his
letters when he's very young that he
hated being dependent on his father he
grew up without a mother
his father was a struggling farmer and
he would write in his letters that his
father treated him like a slave on the
farm
some think his hatred of slavery came
from that experience
he didn't ever want to have to work for
someone again he wanted to be free and
independent and he wanted again every
american this is the kind of
jeffersonian dream
to be the owner of themself and the
owner of their future
you know that's a really nice definition
of freedom we often think
kind of this very abstract notion of
being able to do anything you want
but really it's ultimately breaking
yourself free from the the constraints
like the very tight dependence on
whether it's
the institutions or on your family
or the expectations or the community or
whatever
be able to be to realize yourself
within the constraints of your own
abilities it's still not
true freedom because true freedom is
probably sort of
uh almost like designing a video game
character or something like that
i agree i think uh i think it's exactly
right i think freedom is not
uh that i can have any outcome i want i
can't control outcomes the most powerful
freeze person in the world cannot
control outcomes
but it means at least i get to make
choices someone else doesn't make those
choices for me
is there something to be said about
lincoln and
on the political game front of it
which is he's accomplished some of them
i i don't know
but it seems like there was some tricky
politics going on
we tend to not think of it in those
terms because of
the dark aspects of slavery we tend to
think about it in sort of ethical and
human terms
but in in their time it was probably
as much a game of politics not just
these broad
questions of human nature right it was
it was a game
so is there something to be said about
being a skillful player in the game of
politics that
you'd take from lincoln absolutely and
um lincoln never read carl von
clausewitz the great
19th century german thinker on strategy
and politics but but he
embodied the same wisdom which is that
everything is politics if you want to
get anything done
uh and this includes even relationships
uh
there's a politics to it what does that
mean it means that you you have to
persuade
coerce encourage people to do things
they wouldn't otherwise do
and lincoln lincoln was a master at that
he was a master that for two reasons he
had learned through his hard life to
read people
to anticipate them to spend a lot of
time listening one thing i often tell
people is the best leaders are the
listeners not the talkers
and then second um lincoln was very
thoughtful and planned
every move out he was thinking three or
four moves maybe five moves down the
chess board
while others were move number one or two
that's fascinating to think
about him just listening to studying
that's uh you know
they they look at great fighters in this
way like the first few rounds of boxing
and
mixed martial arts you're studying the
movement of your opponent
and in order to sort of uh to find the
holes
that's that's a really interesting frame
to think about it is there
in terms of relationships
where do you think as president or
as a politician is the most impact to be
had
i've been reading a lot about hitler
recently
and one of the things that i'm more and
more i'm starting to wonder
what the hell did he do alone in a room
with a
one-on-one with people because it seems
like that's where he was exceptionally
effective
when i when i think about certain
leaders
i'm not sure stalin was this way i
apologize been very obsessed with these
with this period of human history uh
it just seems like certain leaders are
extremely effective one-on-one
a lot of people think of hitler even in
lincoln
as a speech maker as a great charismatic
speech maker
but it seems like to me that some of
these guys were
really effective inside a room and what
do you think
what's more important your effectiveness
to uh
to make a hell of a good speech sort of
being
in a room with many people or is it all
boiled down to one-on-one
well i think in a sense it's both one
needs to do both and most
politicians most leaders are better at
one or the other it's the rare leader
who can do
both i will say that if you are going to
be
a figure who's a president or the leader
of a complex organization not a startup
but a complex organization where you
have many different constituencies and
many different
interests uh you have to do the
one-on-one really well
because a lot of what's going to happen
is you're going to be meeting with
people who represent different groups
right the
leader of the labor union the leader of
your investing board etc
and you have to be able to persuade them
and it's the intangibles that often
matter most
lincoln's skill and it's the same that
fdr had um
uh is the ability to tell a story i
think hitler was a little different uh
but
i'm what i've read of stalin is he was a
storyteller too one-on-one storytelling
yeah that's my understanding is that he
he and and what lincoln did i don't want
to compare lincoln to style what lincoln
did
uh is he he was not confrontational
uh he was happy to have an argument if
an argument were to be had but
actually what he would try to do is move
you
through telling a story that got you to
think about your position in a different
way to basically disarm you
and frankly roosevelt did the same thing
ronald reagan did the same thing
storytelling
is a very important skill it's almost
heartbreaking that
we don't get to have or maybe you can
correct me
if i'm wrong on this but it feels like
we don't have a lot of information how
all of these folks were
in private one-on-one conversations
even if we get like stories about it
it's like again sorry to bring up hitler
but
like uh people have talked about his uh
piercing gays when they're one-on-one
like there's a feeling like he's just
looking through you
i wonder like it makes me wonder it was
lincoln somebody who's a little bit more
passive
like who's more the ego doesn't shine
it's not like an overwhelming thing or
is it more like um
again don't want to bring up
controversial figures but uh donald
trump where it's more uh menacing
right there's a more like physically
menacing thing where it's almost like a
almost like a bullying kind of uh
dynamic so i wonder
you know i wish i wish we knew i wish
because
from a psychological perspective i
wonder if there's a thread that connects
most great leaders great question um so
i think the best
writer on this is max weber right and he
talks about the
the power of charisma that the term
charisma comes from weber right and
weber's use of it actually to talk about
prophets and i think he has a point
right uh leaders who are effective in
the way you describe
are leaders who feel prophetic or weber
says they have a kind of magic about
them
and i think that can come from different
sources i think that can come
that can come from the way someone
carries themselves it can come from the
way they use words
um so maybe there are different kinds of
magic that that that someone develops
but i think there
are two things that that seem to be
absolutely necessary first is you have
to be someone who sizes up the person on
the other side of the table
you cannot be the person who just comes
in and reads your brief
and then second i think it's interactive
and there is a quickness of thought so
you brought up donald trump i don't
think donald trump is a deep thinker at
all
but he's quick and i think that
quickness
is part of it's different from from
delivering a lecture where it's the
depth of your thought can you for 45
minutes analyze something
many people can't do that but they still
might be very effective
if they're able to quickly react size up
the person on the other side of the
table and react in a way that moves that
person in the way they want to move them
yeah and there's also just a coupled
with the quickness as a kind of
instinct about human nature yes
sort of asking the question what does
this person worry about
what is it what are the biggest problems
somebody uh
what is this steven schwartzman i think
said to me he's this businessman
i think he said like what i've always
tried to do
is try to figure out like ask enough
questions to figure out what is the
biggest
problem in this person's life try to get
a sense of what is the biggest problem
in their life
because that's actually what they care
about most and most people don't care
enough to
find out and so he kind of wants to
sneak up on that right and and find that
and then
use that to then build closeness in
order to then probably he doesn't put in
those words but to manipulate the person
into whatever to do whatever the heck
they want and i think
i i think part of it uh part of it is
that and part of
the effectiveness donald trump has is
how quick he's able to figure that out
you've uh written a book about how the
role
and power of the presidency has changed
so
has how has it changed since lincoln's
time
the evolution of the presidency as a
concept which seems like a fascinating
lens through which to look at american
history sure
as a president you know we seem to only
be talking about the presidents
maybe a general here and there but it's
mostly the
the story of america is often told
through
presidents that's right that's right and
one of the points i've tried to make
in my writing about this and and various
other activities is
we use this word president as if it's
something timeless but the office has
changed
incredibly just in link from lincoln's
time to the present which is you know
150 years
he wouldn't recognize the office uh
today and george washington would not
have recognized it in lincoln
just as i think a ceo today would be
unrecognizable
to a rockefeller or a carnegie of 150
years ago
so what are some of the ways in which
the office has changed i'll just point
to three there are
a lot uh one uh presidents now can
communicate
with the public directly i mean we've
reached the point now where president
can have direct almost one-on-one
communication president can use twitter
if he so chooses to circumvent
all media that was unthinkable lincoln
in order to get his message across
often wrote letters to newspapers and
waited for the newspaper for horus
greeley in the new york tribune to
publish
uh his letter that's how he communicated
with the public there weren't even many
speaking opportunities so that's a big
change right
we feel the president in our life much
more that's why we talk about him much
more
that also creates more of a burden
that's the second point presidents are
under a microscope
presidents are under a microscope you
have to be very careful what you do and
what you say and you're judged by a lot
of the
elements of your behavior that are not
policy relevant in fact the things we
judge most and make most of our
decisions on about individuals are often
that uh and then
third um the power the president has
um it's it's inhuman actually and this
is one of my critiques of how the office
has changed this one person
has power on a scale that's that's i
think dangerous in a democracy
and certainly something the founders 220
years ago would have had trouble
conceiving um
presidents now have the ability to
deliver force across the world to
to literally assassinate people with a
remarkable accuracy
uh and that's an enormous power that
presidents have so your sense
this is not to get conspiratorial but do
you think
a president currently has the power to
you know initiate the assassination of
somebody
of a political um enemy
or like a terrorist leader or that kind
of thing to
to frame that person in a way where
assassination is something that he alone
or she alone could decide to do i think
it happens all the time and it's not to
be conspiratorial this is how we fought
terrorism
by uh targeting individuals now you
might say these were not elected leaders
of state but these were individuals with
a large following i mean the killing of
osama bin laden
was was an assassination uh operation um
and we've we've taken out very
successfully many leaders of terrorist
organizations and
and we do it every day you're saying
that back in lincoln's time or george
washington's time there was more of a
balance of power like
a president could not initiate this kind
of assassination correct i think
presidents did not have the same kind of
military
or economic power we could talk about
how a president can influence a market
right by saying something pretty about
uh
where uh money is going to go or uh
singling out a company or critiquing a
company in one way or another
they didn't have that kind of power now
much of the power that a lincoln or
a washington had was the power to
mobilize people to then make their own
decisions
at the start of the civil war lincoln
doesn't even have the power to bring
people into the army he has to go to the
governors
and ask the governors to provide
soldiers so the governor of wisconsin
the governor of massachusetts could you
imagine that today
so but yeah so they used speeches and
words to mobilize
versus direct action in closed-door
environments
initiating wars for example correct
it's difficult to think about if we look
at barack obama for example
this if you're listening to this and
you're on the left or the right
please do not make this political in
fact if you're a political person
and you're getting angry at the mention
of the word obama or donald trump
please turn off this podcast we're not
going to get very far
i hope we maintain a political
discussion about
even the modern presidents that uh
view through the lens of history i think
there's a lot to be learned through
about
about the office and about human nature
some people criticize
barack obama for for sort of uh
expanding the
the military-industrial complex engaging
in more
and more wars as opposed to sort of the
initial
rhetoric was such that we would pull
back
uh from sort of be more skeptical in our
decisions to
wage wars so from the lens of the power
of the presidency
as the modern presidency the fact that
we continued the war in afghanistan and
different engagements
in military conflicts do you think
barack obama could have stopped that
do you put the responsibility on that
expansion on
him because of the implied power that
the presidency has
or is this power just sits there and if
a president chooses to take it they do
and if they don't they don't almost like
you don't want to
get take on the responsibility because
of the the burden of that responsibility
so a lot of my research is about this
exact question not just with obama
and my conclusion and i think the
research is pretty clear on this is that
structure has a lot more effect on us
than we like to admit
which is to say that the circumstances
the institutions around us drive our
behavior
more than we like to think so barack
obama i'm quite certain
came into the office of the presidency
committed to actually reducing the use
of military force overseas and reducing
presidential war-making power
uh as a trained lawyer he had a moral
position on this actually
and he tried and and he did withdraw
american forces from iraq and was of
course criticized by many people for
doing that
but at the same time he had some real
problems in the world to deal with
terrorism being one of them and the
tools he has
are very much biased towards the use of
military force
it's much harder as president to go and
get vladimir putin and xi jinping to
agree with you
it's much easier to send these wonderful
toys we have and these incredible
soldiers
we have over there and when you have
congress which is always against you
it's also easier to use the military
because you send them there and even if
members of congress from your own party
or the other
are angry at you they'll still fund the
soldiers no member of congress wants to
vote
to starve our soldiers overseas so
they'll stop your budget they'll even
threaten not to pay the debt
but they'll still fund your soldiers and
so you are pushed by the circumstances
you're in
to do this and it's very hard to resist
so that's
i think the criticism of obama the fair
one would be that he didn't resist the
pressures
that were there but he did not make
those pressures so
is there something about the putting the
responsibility on the president to
to form the structure around him locally
such that he can
make the policy that the that matches
the rhetoric so
what i'm talking to is hiring
so basically just everybody you work
with
you have power as a president to to fire
and hire or to
to basically schedule meetings in such a
way that
can control your decision making so
i imagine it's very difficult to to uh
get out of afghanistan or iraq
when most of your scheduled meetings are
with generals
or something like that but if you
reorganize the schedule
yes and you reorganize who you have like
late night talks with
you potentially have a huge ripple
effect on the
on the policy i think that's right i
think uh who has access to the president
is absolutely crucial
and presidents have to be more strategic
about that they tend to be reacting to
crises
because every day has a crisis yeah and
if you're reacting to a crisis you're
not controlling access because the
crisis is driving you
so that's one element of it but i also
think and this is the moment we're in
right now
presidents have to invest in reforming
the system
the system of decision making should we
have a national security council that
looks the way
it does should our military be
structured the way it is the the
founding fathers wanted a military that
was divided they did not want a unified
department of defense that was only
created after world war ii
should we have as large a military as we
have should we be in as many places
there are some fundamental structural
reforms we have to undertake
and part of that is who you appoint but
part of that is also how you change the
institutions
the genius of the american system is
that it's a dynamic system
it can be adjusted it has been adjusted
over time that's the
heroic story the the frustrating story
is it often takes us a long time to make
those adjustments until we go
into such bad circumstances that we have
no choice
so in the battle of power of the
office of the president versus the
united states military
the department of defense do you have a
sense that the president has more power
ultimately so to decrease the size of
the department of defense to withdraw
from any wars
or increase the amount of wars is the
president
you're kind of implying the president
has a lot of power here in this scale
yes the president has a lot of power and
we are fortunate and it was just proven
in the last few years
that our military uniquely among many
countries with large militaries
is very deferential to the president and
very restricted in its ability to
challenge the president
so that's a strength of our system but
the way you reform the military is not
with individual decisions it's by
by having a strategic plan that
re-examines what role it plays so it's
not just about whether we're in
afghanistan or not the question we have
to ask is
when we look at our toolbox of what we
can do in our foreign policy
are there other tools we should build up
and therefore some tools in the military
we should reduce
that's the broader strategic question
let me ask you the most
absurd question of all that you did not
sign up for
but it's especially i've been hanging
out with a guy named joe rogan recently
sure so it's very important um
for from for me and him to figure this
out if a president
because you said you implied the
president is very powerful if a
president shows up
and and the u.s government is in fact in
possession of aliens
alien spacecraft do you think
the president will be told a more
responsible adult
historian question version of that is uh
is there some things that the machine of
government keeps
secret from the president or is the
president ultimately at the very center
so if you like map out
the set of information and power you
have like cia you have all these
organizations that like
that do the the machinery of government
not just like the passing of bills but
like
uh gaining information homeland security
uh actually like engaging in wars
you know all those kinds of things uh
how
central is the president would the
president know some of the shady things
that are going on
aliens or some kind of
cyber security stuff against russia and
china all those kinds of things
is the president really made aware and
how if so
how nervous does that make you so um
presidents like leaders of any complex
organizations
uh don't know everything that goes on uh
they have to ask the right questions
this is machiavelli
most important thing a leader has to do
is ask the right questions you don't
have to know the answers
that's why you hire smart people but you
have to ask the right questions
so if the president asks the u.s
government those who are responsible for
the aliens are responsible for the cyber
warfare against russia
they will answer honestly they will have
to but they will not volunteer that
information
in all cases so the best way a president
can operate is to have people
around him or her who are not the
traditional policy makers this is where
i think
academic experts are important
suggesting questions
to ask to therefore try to get the
information
it makes me nervous because i think
human nature is such that
the the academics the experts
everybody is almost afraid to ask the
questions
for which the answers might
be burdensome and so that's right
and you can get into a lot of trouble
not asking it's the old
elephant in the room correct correct
this is exactly right and too often
mediocre leaders
and those who try to protect them try to
shield themselves they don't want to
know certain things
so this is part of what happened with
the use of torture by the united states
which is a war crime
during the war on terror president bush
at times
intentionally did not ask and people
around him prevented him from asking or
discouraged him from asking questions he
should have asked
to know about what was going on and
that's how we ended up
where we did you could say the same
thing about reagan and iran contra
i wonder what it takes to be the kind of
leader
that steps in and asks some difficult
questions so
aliens is one ufo spacecraft right
another one yeah torture is another one
the cia
how much information is being collected
about americans
i can see as a president being very
uncomfortable asking that question
because if the answer is a lot of
information is being collected by
of americans then you have to be the guy
who's lives with that information for
the rest of your life
you have to walk around you're probably
not going to
reform that system it's very difficult
you have to you probably have to be very
picky about which things you reform
you don't have much time it takes a lot
of sort of effort to restructure things
but you nevertheless would have to be
basically lying
to uh to the you know to to
to yourself to others around you about
the unethical things
depends of course what your ethical
system is
i wonder what it takes to ask those hard
questions
i wonder if how few of us
are can be great leaders like that and i
wonder if our political system
the electoral system such that
makes it likely that such leaders will
come to power
it's hard and you can't ask all the
right questions and there is a legal
hazard if you know things
at certain times but i think you can
back to your point on hiring you can
hire people who will do that in their
domains
and then you have to trust that when
they think it's something that's a
question you need to ask they'll pass
that on to you
this is why it's not a good idea to have
loyalists because loyalists will shield
you from things it's a good idea to have
people of integrity
uh who you can rely on and who you think
will ask those right questions and then
pass that down through their
organization
what's inspiring to you what's
insightful to you about
several of the presidencies throughout
the recent decades
is there somebody that stands out to you
that's interesting
in in sort of in your study of how the
office has changed
well bill clinton is one of the most
fascinating figures why can't i
i apologize bill clinton just puts a
smile on my face every time somebody
mentions him at this point i don't know
why
he's it's charisma i suppose well and
he's uh he's
he's a unique individual but but uh he
um
he fascinates me uh because he's a
figure of such
enormous talent and enormous appetite
and such little self-control uh and such
er extremes uh and and i think it's not
just that he tells us something about
the presidency he tells us something
about our society uh you know american
society this is not new to our time
is filled with enormous enormous
reservoirs of talent and creativity
and those have a bright and a dark side
and you see both with bill clinton in
some ways he's the mirror
of the best and worst of our society and
maybe that's really what presidents are
in the end right they're mirrors of our
world
that we get the government we deserve we
get the leaders we deserve i wish we
embraced that a little bit more
you know a lot of people criticize you
know donald trump for certain
human qualities that he has a lot of
people criticize
bill clinton for certain human qualities
i wish we kind of embraced the chaos of
that
you know because he he does you're right
in some sense represent
i mean he doesn't represent the greatest
ideal of america but
the flawed aspect of human nature is
what he represents and that's the
beautiful thing about america the
diversity
of this land with the the the mix of it
the the
the corruption of of within capitalism
the the beauty of capitalism the
innovation all those kinds of things the
people that
start from nothing and create everything
the elon musks of the world and the bill
gates and so on
but also the people bernie madoff's and
and
and all is the me too movie that showed
the the multitude of creeps that
apparently
permeate the entirety of our system so i
don't know there's something um
there is some sense in which we put our
president on a pedestal
which actually creates
a fake human being like we
the the standard we hold them to is
forcing the fake politicians to come to
power
versus the authentic one which is in
some sense the promise of donald trump
is uh a like it's a it's a definitive
statement of authenticity
it's like this the opposite of the fake
politician
it's whatever else you want to say about
him is there's
the the chaos that's unlike anything
else that's uh came before
one thing and this in particular may be
preference and quirk of mine
but i really admire maybe i'm
romanticizing the past again
but i romanticized the presidents that
were students of history yeah
they were almost like king philosophers
you know great gr you know that made
speeches
that um you know reverberated through
decades after
right then we we kind of using the words
of those presidents whether written by
them or not
we tell the story of america and
i don't know even obama has been an
exceptionally good as far
as i know i apologize if i'm incorrect
on this but
from everything i've seen he was a very
deep scholar of history
and i really admire that is that
through the through the history of the
office of the presidency
is that just your own preference or is
that supposed to come with a job
are you supposed to be a student of
history i think i mean i'm obviously
biased as a historian but i do think it
comes with a job
every president i've studied uh
had a serious interest in history now
how they
pursued that interest would vary uh
obama was
more bookish more academic so was george
w bush in strange ways
george h.w bush was less so but george
h.w bush loved to talk to people so he
would talk to historians right
ronald reagan uh loved movies and movies
were
uh an insight into history for him he
likes to watch movies about another time
it wasn't always the best of history but
he was interested
in what is a fundamental historical
question how has
how has our society developed how has it
grown and changed over time
and how has that change affected who we
are today that's the historical question
it's really interesting to me i do a lot
of work with business leaders and others
too
you reach a certain point in any career
and you become a historian
because you realize that the formulas
and the technical knowledge that you've
gained
got you to where you are but now your
decisions are about human nature
your decisions are about social change
and they can't be answered
technically they can only be answered by
studying human beings
and what is history it's studying the
laboratory of human behavior
to sort of play devil's advocate i kind
of
especially in the engineering scientific
domains
i often see history holding us back
instead of the way things were done in
the past are not necessarily going to
hold the key
to what
will progress us into the future
of course with history in studying human
nature it does seem like humans are just
the same
it's just like the same problems over
and over so
in that sense it feels like history has
all the lessons
whether we're talking about wars whether
we're talking about corruption
whether we're talking about economics
i think there's a difference between um
history and antiquarianism
so antiquarianism which some people call
history
is the desire to go back to the past or
stay stuck in the past so antiquarianism
is the desire to have
the desk that abraham lincoln sat at
wouldn't it be cool to sit at his desk
i'd love to have that desk if i had a
few extra million dollars i'd acquire it
right
so in a way uh that's antiquarianism
that's trying to capture and hold on
hold on to the past the past is a
talisman for antiquarians
um what history is is the study of
change over time that's the real
definition of historical
study and historical thinking and so
what we're studying is
change and so a historian should never
say
um we have to do things the way we've
done them in the past the historians
should say we can't
do them the way we did them in the past
we can't step in the same river twice
every podcast of yours is different from
the last one
right you plan it out and then it goes
in its own direction right
yeah um and um what are we studying then
in history we're studying
the patterns of change and we're
recognizing we're part of a pattern so
what i would say to
the historian who's trying to hold the
engineer back i'd say no
don't tell that engineer not to do this
tell them to understand how this fits
into the relationship with other
engineering products and other
activities from the past that still
affect us today for example
any product you produce is going to be
used by human beings who have prejudices
it's going to go into an unequal society
don't assume it's going to go into an
equal society don't assume that when you
create a social media site
that people are going to use it fairly
and put only truthful things on it
we shouldn't be surprised that's where
human nature comes in
but it's not trying to hold on to the
past it's trying to use the knowledge in
the past to better inform the changes
today
i have to ask you about george
washington it may be maybe you have some
insights
it seems like he's such a fascinating
figure
in the context of the study of power
because i kind of intuitively have come
to
internalize the belief that power
corrupts and absolute power crops
absolutely yes
and then and and sort of like
basically in thinking that we have to we
cannot trust any one individual i can't
trust myself with power i can't
nobody can trust anybody with power we
have to create institutions and
structures that prevent us from
ever being able to amass absolute power
and yet
here's a guy george washington who seems
to
you can correct me if i'm wrong but he
seems to give away relinquished power
uh it feels like george washington did
it
like almost like the purest of ways
which is uh believes in this country
but he just believes he's not the person
to to uh
to uh to carry it forward
i wha what do you make of that what kind
of human does it take to really
to give away that power is there some
hopeful message we can
carry through to the future to to to
elect leaders like that
or to or to uh find friends to hang out
with who are like that
like what is that how do you explain
that so it's uh it's actually the most
important thing about george washington
it's the right thing to to bring up
um what uh the historian gary wills
wrote years ago i'm going to quote him
was that washington recognized that
sometimes you get more power by giving
it up
than by trying to hold on to every last
piece of it
uh washington gives up power at the end
of the revolution he's successfully
carried through the revolutionary war
aims he's commander of the
revolutionary forces and he gives up his
command and then of course he's
president and after two terms he gives
up his command
what is he doing he's an ambitious
person but he's recognizing that
the most important currency he has for
power
is his respected status as a
disinterested statesman
that's really what his power is and how
does he further that power
by showing that he doesn't crave power
so he was self-aware very self-aware of
this and very sophisticated in
understanding
understanding this and and i think there
are many other leaders who
who recognize that um you can look to
uh in some ways um the story of many of
our presidents who
even before there is a two-term limit in
the constitution leave after two terms
um they do that because they recognize
that their power is the power of being a
statesman
not of being a president i still wonder
what kind of man it takes
what kind of human being it takes to do
that because i've been
studying vladimir putin quite a bit
right
and he's still i believe
he still has popular support that that's
not
fully manipulated because i know a lot
of people in russia and actually
almost the entirety of my family in
russia are big supporters of putin
and everybody i talk to sort of that's
not just like on social media
right like the people that live in
russia seems to
seem to support him it feels like
this would be in a george washington way
now would be the time that what putin
just like yatsen could relinquish power
and thereby in the eyes of russians
become in in like the long arc of
history
be viewed as a great leader you look at
the economic growth of russia
you look at the rescue from the collapse
of the soviet union and russia
finding its footing and then
relinquishing power
in a way that that perhaps if russia
succeeds
forms a truly democratic state this
would be
how putin can become one of the great
leaders in russian history
at least in the in the context of the
21st century
i think there are two reasons why this
is really hard
for putin and for others one is
the trappings of power are very
seductive as you said before they're
corrupting
this is a real problem right if it's in
the business context you don't want to
give up that private jet
if it's in putin's context it's billions
of dollars every year that he's able to
take for himself or give to his friends
it's not that he'll be poor if he leaves
he'll still be rich
and he has billions of dollars stored
away but he won't be able to get the new
billions
and so that's part of the trappings of
power are a big deal
and then second in putin's case in
particular he has to be worried about
what happens next
will he be tried will someone you know
try to come and arrest him will someone
try to come and assassinate him
um washington recognized that leaving
early
limited the corruption and limited the
enemies that you made
and so it was a strategic choice putin
has at this point been in power too long
and this comes back to your
core insight it's a cliche but it's true
power corrupts
no one should have power for too long
this was one of the best insights the
founders of the united states had
that power was to be held for a short
time as a fiduciary responsibility
not as something you owned right this is
the problem with monarchy with
aristocracy that you own power
right we don't own power we we're in
holding it in trust
yeah there's uh there's some probably
like
very specific psychological study of uh
how many years it takes for you to
forget
that you can't own power that's right
there's you know
that's could be a much more rigorous
discussion about the length of terms
that are appropriate
but really there's an amount like stalin
had power for 30 years like putin is
pushing
those that many years already
there's a certain point where you forget
the person you were before you took the
power that's right
you forget to be humble in the face of
this responsibility
and then there's no going back that's
right that's how dictators are born
that's how the evil like authoritarians
become
evil or let's not use the word evil but
uh counterproductive destructive to the
to the ideal that they initially
probably came to office with that's
right that's right one of the
core historical insights is people
should move jobs
and it supplies for ceos probably
absolutely apps they can go become ceo
somewhere else but
don't stay ceo one place too long it's a
problem with startups right the founder
you can have a brilliant founder
and that founder doesn't want to let go
yeah right it's the same issue
at the same time i mean this is where
elon musk and
a few others like uh larry page and
sergey brin
that stayed for quite a long time and
they actually were the beacon
they on their shoulders carried the
dream the company
yeah where everybody else doubted so but
that seems to be the exception
right versus the rule well and even
sergey for example right
has stepped back right he plays less of
a day-to-day role and
is not running google and the way he did
the interesting thing is he stepped back
in a quite tragic way from what i've
seen which is
i i think google's mission an initial
mission
of making the world's information
accessible to everybody
is one of the most beautiful missions of
any company in the history of the world
i think it's
what google has done with a search
engine and
um and other efforts that are similar
like scanning
a lot of books it's just incredible it's
similar to
wikipedia but
what he said was that it's not the same
company
anymore and i i know maybe i'm reading
too much into it
because it's more maybe practically
saying just the size of the company's
much larger the kind of leadership
that's required
but at the same time sure they change
the model from
you know don't be evil to it's becoming
corporatized and all those kinds of
things and
it's sad it um there also are cycles
right history is about cycles right
there there are cycles to life
there's cycles to organizations it's sad
i mean it's sad steve jobs leaving apple
by
passing away sad you know what the
future of spacex and tesla looks like
without elon musk
is quite sad it's very possible that
those companies become something very
different
they become something much more you know
like corporate
and uh stale
yeah so maybe maybe most of progress is
made through cycles maybe a new elon
musk comes along
all those kinds of things but it does
seem that the american
system of government has has uh
built into it the cycling yes
that makes it effective and it makes it
last very long it lasts a very long time
right it continues to excel and lead the
world
sure sure and let's hope it continues to
no it's
i mean we we're into you know a third
century
and democracies on this scale uh rarely
last that long
so that that's that's a point of pride
but it also means we need to be
attentive to keep our house in order
because
it's not inevitable that this experiment
continues
now it's important to meditate on that
actually uh you've mentioned that fdr
franklin d roosevelt is one of the great
leaders
in american history why is that franklin
roosevelt
had the power of empathy no
leader that i have ever studied or been
around or spent any time reading about
was able to connect with people who were
so different from himself
as franklin roosevelt he came from the
most elite family he
never had to work for a paycheck in his
life when he was president he was still
collecting an allowance from his mom
i mean you couldn't be more elite than
franklin roosevelt
but he authentically connected this was
not
you know propaganda he was able to feel
the pain and understand the lives of
some of the most destitute
americans in other parts of the country
it's interesting so through the
one of the hardest economic periods of
american history he was able to feel the
pain he was able to
the number of immigrants i read oral
histories from or who have written
themselves saul bella was one example
the great novelist who talked about how
as immigrants to the u.s although i was
a russian jewish immigrant
he said growing up in chicago
politicians were all trying to steal
from us
i didn't think any of them cared until i
heard fdr and i knew he spoke to me
uh and and i think part of it was fdr
really tried to understand people that's
the first he was humble enough to try to
do that
but second he had a talent for that and
it's hard to know exactly what it was
but he had a talent for putting himself
imagining himself
in someone else's shoes
what stands out to you as uh important i
mean he said he was uh he went through
the great depression
the so the new deal which some people
criticized some people see i mean it's
it's funny to look at some of these
policies and they're long
ripple effects but at the time
it's some of the most uh innovative
policies yes in the in the history of
america you could say
they're ultimately not good for america
but they're nevertheless
hold within them very rich and important
lessons
but then you deal obviously world war ii
of that entire process is there
something that stands out to you as a
particularly great moment
that made fdr yes i think
uh what fdr does from his first 100 days
in office forward
and this begins with his fireside chats
is he helps
americans to see that they're all in it
together
and that's by creating hope and creating
a sense of
common suffering and common mission it's
not offering simple solutions one of the
lessons from fdr
is if you want to bring people together
don't offer a simple solution
because as soon as i offer a simple
solution i have people for it and
against it
don't do that explain the problem frame
the problem
and then give people a mission so
roosevelt's first
uh radio address uh in march of 1933 the
banking system is collapsing
and we can't imagine it right banks were
closing and you couldn't get your money
out your life savings would be lost
right we can't imagine that happening in
our world today
he comes on the radio he takes five
minutes to explain how banking works
most people didn't understand how
banking worked right they don't actually
hold your money in a vault
they lend it out to someone else and
then he explains why if you go
and take your money out of the bank and
put it in your mattress you're making it
worse for yourself
he explains this uh and then he says i
don't he does
i don't have a solution but here's what
i'm gonna do i'm gonna send in
government
uh officers to examine the banks and
show you the books on the banks
and i want you to help me by going and
putting your money back in the banks
we're all gonna do this together no
simple solution no ideological statement
but a sense of common mission let's go
out and do this together
when you read as i have so many of these
oral histories and memoirs for people
who lived through that period
many of them disagreed with some of his
policies many of them thought he was too
close to jews and they didn't like the
fact he had a woman in his cabinet and
all that
but they felt he cared and they felt
they were part of some common mission
and when they talk about their
experience fighting in world war ii
whether in europe or asia
it was that that prepared them they knew
what it meant to be an american
when they were over there so that to me
is a model of leadership
and i think that's as possible today as
it's ever been so you think it's
possible like
i was going to ask this again it may be
a very shallow
view but it feels like this country is
is more divided than it has been in uh
recent history
perhaps the social media and all those
kinds of things are
merely revealing the division as opposed
to creating the division
but is it possible to have a leader
that unites in the same way that fdr did
without well
we're living through a pandemic this is
already yes
so like i was gonna say without
suffering but there's this is economic
suffering
right huge number of people have lost
their job so is it possible to have
uh is there one a hunger is is there a
possibility to have an fdr
style leader who unites yes i think that
is what president biden is trying i'm
not saying he i'm not saying he'll he'll
succeed but i think