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 that's what he's
trying to do
the way you do this is you do not allow
yourself to be captured by your
opponents
in congress or somewhere else fdr had a
lot of opponents in congress he had a
lot of opponents in politics
governors and others who didn't like him
uh herbert hoover was still around
and still accusing fdr of being you know
a conspiratorist and all these other
things so
um you don't allow yourself to be
captured by the leaders of the other
side you go over their heads to the
people
and so today the way to do this is to
explain to people and empathize with the
suffering and dislocation and
difficulties they're dealing with
and show that you're trying to help them
not an easy solution
not a simple statement but here are some
things we can all do
together that's why i think
infrastructure makes a lot of sense it's
what fdr invested into
right fdr built hoover dam hoover dam
turned the lights on
for young lyndon johnson who grew up
outside of austin right
fdr was the one who invested in road
construction that was then continued by
dwight eisenhower by a republican with
the interstate highway system
right fdr invested through the wpa in
building thousands of schools in our
country planting trees
that's the kind of work that can bring
people together
you don't have to be a democrat or
republican to say you know what we'd be
a lot better off in my community if we
had better infrastructure today
i want to be a part of that or well
maybe i can get a job doing that maybe
my company
can benefit from that you bring people
together and that way it becomes a
common mission
even if we have different ideological
positions yeah it's funny i
i've uh when i first heard joe biden i
think many
i mean many years ago i think he went
for president against
obama and i
before i heard him speak i really liked
him but once i heard him speak i stopped
i
started like him less and less and it
speaks to something
interesting where it's hard to put into
words
what why you connect with people the
empathy that you mentioned in fdr
you have like these bad pardon the
french motherfuckers like teddy
roosevelt
that connect with you there's something
just powerful
and with joe biden i can't i i want to
really like him and like
there's something not quite there where
it feels like he doesn't
quite know my pain even though he
on paper is exactly you know he knows
the pain of the people and there's
something not connecting and it's
it's hard to explain it's hard to put
into words and uh
it makes me not uh
as a engineer and scientist it makes me
not feel good about
like presidencies because it makes me
feel like it's more
art than science it is an art and and i
think it's exactly an art for the
reasons you laid out it's aesthetic
it's about feeling it's about emotion
all the things that we can't engineer
we've tried for
centuries to engineer emotion we're
never gonna do it don't try it i'm a
parent of teenagers
don't even try to explain emotion um
but you hit on the key point of the key
challenge for biden he's got to find the
right words
yeah it's not finding the words to
bullshit people
yeah it's finding the words to help
express we've all felt
empowered and felt good when someone
uses words that put into words what
we're feeling
yeah that's what he needs that's the job
of a leader and there's certain words
i haven't heard many politicians use
those words but there's certain words
that
like make you forget
that uh that you're for immigration or
uh against immigration make you forget
whether you're four wars and against
wars
but you forget about like the bickering
and
somehow like uh inspire you like elevate
you
to believe in the greatness that this
country could be yes
um in that same way like the reason i
moved to austin
is funny to say is like i just heard
words from people from friends
where they're excited by the possibility
of the future here
i wasn't thinking like what's the right
thing to do what's like
strategic because i want to launch a
business there's a lot of arguments with
san francisco or maybe staying in boston
in my case
but there's this excitement that
that was beyond reason that was
emotional yes yes
and that that's that's what it seems
like that's what builds
that's what great leaders do but that's
what builds countries that's what build
grades
great businesses that's right and it's
what people say about austin for example
all the time yeah a talented people who
come here like yourself
and here's the interesting thing no one
person creates that the words emerge
and part of what fdr understood is
you've got to find the words out there
and use them
yeah you don't have to be the creator of
them right just as the great painter
doesn't invent the painting they're
taking things from others
as a small aside is there something you
could say about
fdr and hitler
i constantly tried to think can can this
person can this moment in history have
been
um circumvented prevented
can hitler have been stopped can some of
the atrocities from my own family
that like my grandparents had to live
through the
the starvation in the soviet union so
the thing that people don't often talk
about
is the atrocities committed by stalin
and his own people
it feels like here's this great leader
fdr that had the chance to
um to have an impact on the world
that um he already probably had a great
positive
impact but had a had a chance to stop
maybe world war ii
or st stop some of the evils when you
look at what
how weak hitler was from much of the 30s
relative to militarily
relative to everything else how many
people could have done a lot to stop him
and fdr in particular didn't
he tried to play
not pacify but basically do diplomacy
and
let let germany do germany let europe do
europe
and focus on america is there is there
something you would uh would you hold
his feet to the fire on this
or is it very difficult from the
perspective of fdr to have known
what was coming i think fdr had a sense
of what was coming not
quite the enormity of what hitler was
doing and not quite the enormity of what
the holocaust became i also lost
relatives in the holocaust um
and part of that was beyond the
imagination of human beings yes but it's
clear in his papers
um that as early as 1934 people he
respected who he knew well told him that
hitler was
very dangerous they also thought it was
crazy that he was a lunatic
hamilton fish armstrong who is a friend
of of roosevelt
uh who was actually the council on
foreign relations in new york had a
meeting with hitler in 1934 i remember
reading the account of this
uh and he basically said definitely this
man is going to cause a war he's going
to cause a lot of damage again they
didn't know quite the scale
so they saw this coming they saw this
coming fdr had two problems
first he had an american public that was
deeply isolationist
the opposite of the problem in a sense
that we were talking about before if
we're an over militarized society
now we were a deeply isolationist
society in the 1930s the the depression
reinforced that
fdr actually had to break the law in the
late 30s to support the allies
so it was very hard to move the country
in that direction especially when he had
this program at home
the new deal that he didn't want to
jeopardize by alienating an isolationist
public that was the reality we talked
about political manipulation he had to
be
conscious of that he had to know his
audience and second
there were no allies willing to invest
in this either
the british were as uh as committed to
appeasement as you know you're obviously
very knowledgeable about this the the
french were as well
it was very hard the russian government
the soviet government was cooperating to
re-militarize
germany so there weren't a lot of allies
out there either
um i think if there's a criticism to be
made of fdr
it's that once we're in the war
he didn't do enough to stop in
particular the killing of jews
and there are a number of historians
myself included who have written about
this and it's an endless debate what
should he have done
there's no doubt by 1944 the united
states had
air superiority and could have bombed
the rail lines to auschwitz
and other camps that would have saved as
many as a million jews that's a lot of
people
who could have been saved why didn't fdr
insist on that
um in part because he wanted to use
every resource possible to win the war
he did not want to be accused of
fighting the war for jews but i think
it's also fair to say that he probably
cared less about jews
and east europeans than he did about
others um
those of his own dutch ancestry and and
from western europe and so
you know even there race comes in is
also the explanation for the internment
of japanese in the united states which
is a horrible
war crime committed by this heroic
president 120 000 japanese-american
citizens
lost their freedom unnecessarily so he
had his limitations
and and i think he could have done more
during the war
to save many more lives and i wish he
had and there's something
to be said about empathy that you spoke
that fdr had
empathy but us for example now there's
many people who describe the atrocities
happening in china
and there's a bunch of places across the
world where there's atrocities happening
now and
we care
we do not uniformly apply how much we
care for the suffering of others
that's correct depending on the group
that's correct and in some sense
the role of the president is to uh
to uh rise above that natural human
inclination to protect
to do the us versus them to protect
protect the inner circle
and empathize with the suffering of
those that are not like you
that's correct i agree with that yeah
speaking of war you wrote a book on
henry kissinger
it's not a great transition but it made
sense in my head
who was henry kissinger as a man and as
a historical figure
so henry kissinger to me is one of the
most fascinating figures in history
because he comes to the united states as
a german jewish immigrant at age 15
speaking no english and within a few
years
he's a major figure influencing u.s
foreign policy at the height of u.s
power but while he's doing that he he's
never elected to office
and he's constantly reviled by people
including people who are anti-semitic
because he's
jewish but at the same time also his
exoticism makes him more attractive to
people
so someone like nelson rockefeller wants
kissinger around he's one of kissinger's
first patrons because he wants a really
smart jew
and kissinger is going to be that smart
jewel i called kissinger a policy jew
there were these court jews in the 16th
and 17th and 18th centuries in europe
every king wanted the jew to manage his
banking
and in a sense in the united states in
the second half of the 20th century many
presidents want a
jew to manage their international
affairs and what does that really mean
it's not just about being jewish
it's the internationalism it's the
cosmopolitanism
that's one of the things i was
fascinated with with kissinger someone
like kissinger is unthinkable as a
powerful figure in the united states
30 or 40 years earlier because the
united states is run by wasps it's run
by
white elites who come from a certain
background
kissinger represents a moment when
american society opens up not to
everyone
but opens up to these cosmopolitan
figures who have language skills
historical knowledge networks that can
be used for the us government
when after world war ii we have to
rebuild europe when we have to negotiate
with the soviet union when we need the
kinds of knowledge we didn't have before
and harvard where he gets his education
late he started at city college actually
but harvard where he gets his education
late
is at the center of what's happening at
all these major universities at harvard
and yale at stanford at the university
of texas
everywhere where they're growing in
their international affairs bringing in
the kinds of people who never would be
at the university before
training them and then enlisting them in
cold war
activities and so kissinger is a
representative of that phenomenon i
became interested in him
because i think he's a bellwether he
shows how power has
changed in the united states so he
enters this whole world of
uh politics what post-world war ii
in the 50s yes so he he actually
in the 40s even it's an extraordinary
story he comes to the united states in
just before crystal knocked his family
leaves they he actually grew up right
outside of nuremberg
they leave right before kristallnacht in
in fall of 38.
come to come to new york he originally
works in a brush factory cleaning
brushes
goes to a public high school and in 1942
just after pearl harbor he joins the
military
and he's very quickly in the military
first of all given citizenship which he
didn't have before
uh he sent from the first time outside
of a kosher home he had been in a kosher
home his entire life he sent to
south carolina to eat ham for uncle sam
and then he is and this is extraordinary
at the age of 20
uh barely speaking english he is sent
back
to germany with the u.s army in an elite
counter-intelligence role
why because they need german speakers he
came when he was 15 so he actually
understands the society many people have
that cultural knowledge
and because he's jewish they can trust
that he'll be anti-nazi
and there's a whole group of these
figures he's one of many
and so he's in an elite circle he's
discriminated against in new york
when he goes to harvard after that he
can only live in a jewish-only dorm
but at the same time he's in an elite
policy role in counter-intelligence he
forms a network there
that stays with him the rest of his uh
career
there's a gentleman named fritz cramer
who becomes a sponsor of his
in the emerging pentagon defense
department world
and as early as the early 1950s he sent
them to korea
to comment on affairs in korea he
becomes both an intellectual recognized
for his connections
but also someone who policymakers want
to talk about his book on nuclear
weapons when it's written
is given to president eisenhower to read
because they say this is someone writing
interesting things you should read
what he says there's a certain aspect to
him that's
kind of like forrest gump he seems to
continuously be the right person at the
right time in the right place
that's right somehow finding him in this
i don't i don't unders you know
you can only get lucky so many times
because he continues to get lucky
in terms of being at the right place in
in history
for many decades until today yeah well
he has a knack for that he i spend a lot
of time
talking with him um and what comes
through very
quickly is that he has an eye for power
uh it's i think unhealthy he's obsessed
with power can you explain
like an observer of power or this or
being uh
does he want power himself yes both of
those things both of them
and i think i explained this in the book
uh he doesn't agree with what i'm going
to say now
um but i think i'm right and i think
he's right it's very hard to analyze
yourself right yeah
um i think he develops an obsession with
gaining power because he sees what
happens when you have no power
he experiences the trauma his
uh father is a very respected gymnasium
lair
in germany even though he's jewish he's
actually the teacher of german classics
to the german kids this is great and
he's forced
to flee and he becomes nothing his
father never really
makes a way for himself in the united
states he becomes a postal delivery
person which is nothing wrong with that
but for someone who's a respected
teacher in germany and game losing there
are like professors there right
to then be in this position his mother
has to open and catering business when
they come to new york
it's a it's a typical immigrant story
but he sees the trauma
his grandparents are killed by the nazis
um so he sees the trauma
and he realizes how perilous it is to be
without power
and you're saying he does not want to
acknowledge
the the effect of that it's hard
it's hard i mean most of us if we've had
drama
it's believable that it's traumatic
because you don't talk about it i have a
friend who interviews
uh combat veterans and he says as soon
as someone freely wants to tell me about
their combat trauma
i suspect that they're not telling me
the truth if it's traumatic it's hard to
talk about
yeah sometimes i wonder how much from my
own life
everything that i've ever done is just
the result of my the complicated
relationship with my father
i i tend to
i had a really difficult time did a
podcast conversation with him
i saw it actually perfect it's great
it was i i regret it i never do that
with my voice
but i i remember as i was doing it and
for months after i regretted doing it
i just kept regretting it and the fact
that i was regretting it
spoke to the to the fact that i'm
running away from some
truths that are back there somewhere
and that's perhaps what kissinger is as
well but
is there i mean he's done he's been a
part of so many interesting
moments of american history of world
history
from the cold war vietnam war until
today
what stands out to you as a particularly
important moment
um in his career that that made
who he is well i think
uh what made his career in in many ways
uh was uh his experience in the 1950s
building a network
a network of people across the world who
were rising
leaders from unique positions he ran
what he called the international seminar
at harvard um which was actually a
summer school class that no one at
harvard cared about
but he invited all of these
rising intellectuals and thinkers from
around the world
and he built a network there that he
used uh forevermore so that's what
really i think
boosts him um the most important moments
in terms of making his reputation
making his career or two sets of
activities one is the opening to china
and his ability to first of all take
control of u.s policy without the
authority to do that and direct u.s
policy
and then build a relationship with mao
tsudung and joe and lai
that was unthinkable just four or five
years earlier uh
of course president nixon is a big part
of that as well but kissinger is the
mover and shaker on that and it's a lot
of manipulation but it's also a vision
now this is put in the moment of
american history where there's a very
powerful anti-communism
correct so communism is seen as
much more even though than today as the
enemy correct
and china in particular they were one of
our key enemies in uh vietnam
and in korea american forces were
fighting chinese forces directly chinese
forces come over the border
thousands of americans die at the hand
of chinese forces right so for the long
time the united states had no
relationship with communist china he
opens that relationship
and at the same time he also creates a
whole new dynamic in the middle east
after the 1973 war the so-called yom
kippur war he steps in and becomes the
leading negotiator between the israelis
the egyptians
and other major actors in the region and
it makes the united states the most
powerful actor in the middle east the
soviet union far less powerful
which is great for the united states in
the 70s and 80s it gets us though into
the problems we of course have
thereafter so that that speaks to the
very pragmatic
approach that he's taken um the
realistic approach
versus the idealistic approach uh
the termed uh real politic what is this
thing
what is it what is this approach to
world politics
so realpolitik for kissinger is um
really focusing on the power centers in
the world
and trying as best you can to manipulate
those power centers to serve the
interests of your own country
and so that's why he's a multilateralist
he's not a unilateralist
he believes the united states should put
itself at the center of negotiations
between other powerful countries
but that's also why he pays very little
attention to countries that are less
powerful and this is why he's often
criticized by human rights activists
for him parts of africa and latin
america
which you and i would consider important
places are unimportant
because they don't have power they can't
project their power they don't produce a
lot of economic wealth
and so they matter less realpolitik
views the world in a hierarchy of power
how does real politic
realize itself in the world what what is
it what does that
really mean like how do you uh push
forward the interest of your own country
you said there's power centers
but it uh is a big bold move
to negotiate to work with a communist
nation
with your enemies that are powerful
how what is the sort of if you can
further elaborate sure
philosophy behind it sure so there there
are two key elements that then
end up producing all kinds of tactics
but the two strategic elements of
kissinger's way of thinking about
realpolitik which are classical ways
going back to thucydides and the greeks
are to say first of all
you figure out who your allies are and
you build webs of connection
so that your allies help you to acquire
what you want to acquire
right this is why according to herodotus
the greeks beat the persians the
persians are bigger but the greeks the
spartans the athenians others are able
to work together and leverage their
resources right
so it's about leveraging your resources
for kissinger this makes western europe
crucially important
it makes japan crucially important it
makes israel
and egypt crucially important right in
building these webs you
build your surrogates you build your
brother states
in other parts of the world you build
tight connections and you work together
to control
the resources that you want the second
element of the strategy
is not to go to war with your adversary
but to do all you can to limit the power
of your adversary
some of that is containment uh
preventing the soviet union from
expanding that was the key element of
american cold war policy
but sometimes it's actually negotiation
that's what de tant was about for
kissinger he spends a lot of time more
time than any other
american foreign policymaker negotiating
with soviet leaders
as well as chinese leaders what does he
want to do he wants to limit the nuclear
arms race
the united states is ahead we don't want
the soviet union to get ahead of us we
negotiate um
to limit their abilities right we play
to our strengths
so it's a combination of keeping your
adversary down and building tight webs
within that context military force is
used but you're not using war for the
sake of war
you're using warfare to further your
access to the resources
economic political geographic that you
want
to build relationships and then the
second thing to limit the powers of
those you're against
exactly so is there any uh sort of um
insights into how he preferred to build
relationships
are we talking about like again it's the
one-on-one
is it through policy or is it through
like phone conversations
is there any cool kind of insights that
you can speak to yeah kissinger
is the uh ultimate kiss-up
he is some used to make fun of him in
fact even
the film the the filmmaker uh from dr
strangelove who's name i'm forgetting uh
right stanley kubrick
called him kiss up at that time he was
right um
he had a wonderful way of figuring out
what it is you wanted
back to that discussion we had before
and trying to show how he could give you
more of what you wanted as a leader it
was very personalistic
uh very personalistic and uh he spends a
lot of time for example kissing up to
leonid brezhnev
kissing up to mao he tells mao you're
the greatest leader in the history of
the 20th century people will look back
on you as the great leader
some of this sounds like bs but it's
serious right he's feeding the egos of
those around him
second he is willing to get things done
for you he's effective
you want him around you because of his
efficacy so richard nixon is always
suspicious that henry kissinger is
getting more of the limelight he hates
that kissinger gets the nobel peace
prize and he doesn't
but he needs him because kissinger is
the guy who gets things done so he
performs
he builds a relationship in almost i say
this in the book in almost a gangster
way he didn't like that he criticized
that part of the book but
again i still think the evidence is
there
you need something to be done boss i'll
do it
and don't forget that i'm doing this for
you and you get mutual dependency in a
hegelian way right
yeah and and and so he builds this
uh personal dependency through ego and
through performance
and then he's so skillful at making
decisions
for people who are more powerful because
he's never elected to office he always
needs powerful people to
let him do things but he convinces you
it's your decision when it's really his
to read his memos are beautiful he's
actually very skilled at writing things
in a way that
look looks like he's giving you options
as president
but in fact there's only one option
there
is he speaking to the gangster to the
loyalty
is he ever like the sense i got from
nixon
is he would nixon would backstab you if
he needed to
uh one of the things that
i admire about gangsters
is they don't backstab those in the
inner circle like loyalty above it all
else i mean at least that's uh the sense
i've gotten from
the stories of the past at least is uh
where would you put kissinger on that
is he loyalty above all all else
or is it our human it's like the steve
jobs thing is like as long as you're
useful you're useful but then
once long the moment you're no longer
useful is uh
when you're knocked off the chessboard
it's the latter with him
he he's backstabbing quite a lot
and he's self-serving um but he also
makes himself so useful that even though
nixon knows he's doing that
nixon still needs him yeah
by the way on that a point so having
spoken with kissinger
what's your relationship like with him
as somebody who is
in an objective way writing
his story it was very difficult because
uh he's very good at manipulating people
and uh
we had about 12 or 13 interviews usually
informal over lunch um and um
and this was many years ago but this is
probably not more than 10 years ago
um did you find yourself being like
sweet talked
like to where you like go back home
later and look in the mirror it's like
wait what just happened
he can be enormously charming and
enormously obnoxious at the same time so
i would have these very mixed emotions
because he gives no ground he he's
unwilling to
and i think this is a weakness he's
unwilling to
um admit mistake
others make mistakes but he doesn't and
he certainly won't take on any of the
big criticisms that are
that are pushed i understand why i mean
when you've worked as hard for what he
has as he has you're defensive about it
but he is very defensive he's very
fragile about he does not like
criticisms at all
he he used to he hasn't done this in a
while but he used to call me up and
yell at me on the phone quite literally
when i would be quoted in the new york
times or somewhere
saying something that sounded critical
of him so for instance there was one
instance a number of years ago where
a reporter came across some documents
where kissinger said negative things
about
jews in russia typical things that a
german jew would say about
east european jews and the new york
times asked me
is this accurate and i said yeah the
documents are accurate i've seen them
they're accurate he was so angry
about that so so there's the fragility
but there's also the enormous charm and
enormous intelligence um the real
challenge with him though is
he's very good at making his case he'll
convince you
and as a scholar as an observer
you don't want to hear a lawyer's case
you want to actually interrogate the
evidence and get to the truth
and so that was a real challenge with
him so speaking of his
approach of real politics
if we just zoom out and look at human
history human civilization
what do you think works best in um
in the way we progress forward a
realistic approach
do whatever it takes control the centers
of power
to play a game for the for the greater
interests
of the good guys quote unquote or
lead by a sort of idealism which is um
like truly act in the wa
in the best version of the ideas you
represent as opposed to kind of
uh present one view and then do whatever
it takes
behind the scenes obviously you need
some of both but i lean more to the
idealistic side and more so actually
believe it or not
the as as i get into my 40s uh as i do
more historical work
why do i say that because i think and
this is one of my criticisms of
kissinger who i also have a lot of
respect for the realpolitik becomes
self-defeating
because you're constantly running to
keep power but you forget why
and you often then use power and i think
kissinger falls into this
in some of his worst moments not all of
his moments where the power is actually
being used to undermine the things you
care about
it's sort of the example of being a
parent and you're doing all these things
to you know take your kid to violin
basketball all these things
and you realize you're actually killing
your kid and making your kid very
unhappy
and the whole reason you were doing it
was to improve the person's life yeah
and so you have to remember why it is
what what hans morgan thou calls this is
your purpose your purpose has to drive
you
now your purpose doesn't have to be airy
fairy idealism
so i believe deeply and democracy isn't
ideal
i don't think it's going to ever look
like athenian democracy
but that should drive our policy
but we still have to be realistic and
recognize we're not going to build that
democracy in afghanistan tomorrow i mean
does it ultimately just boil down again
to the corrupting nature of power
that um nobody can
hold power for very long before you
start
acting in the in the interest of power
as opposed to
in the interest of your ideals it's
impossible
to be like somebody like kissinger who
is
essentially in power for many many
decades
and and still remember what are the
initial ideals that you strove to um
to achieve yes i think that's exactly
right there there's a moment in the book
i quote
about him comes from one of our
interviews i asked him
what were the guiding ideals for your
policies
and he said uh i can't i'm not prepared
to share that
and i don't think it's because he
doesn't know what he thinks he was
trying to do
he realizes his use of power departed
quite a lot
from so he it would sound if he
made them explicit he would sound
hypocritical correct
well on that let me ask about war
america often presents itself to its own
people
but just the leaders when they look in
the mirror is i get a sense
that we think of ourselves as the good
guys
in especially this begins sometimes
to look hypocritical when you're waging
war
is what's a good um is there a good way
to know
when you've lost all sense of what it is
to be good um
another way to ask that is there in
military policy in conducting war
is there a good way to know what is a
just war
and uh what is a war crime i mean
in some circles kissinger is accused of
contributing
you know being a war criminal yes i i
and and i argue in the book he's not a
war criminal but that doesn't mean that
um he didn't misuse military power
um i i think um
a just war war just war as michael walls
and others write about it a just war
is a war where both the purpose is just
and you are using the means to get to
that purpose
that uh kill as few people as
necessary that doesn't mean they won't
be killing but as few as necessary
proportionality
right your your means should be
proportional to your ends
and um that's often lost sight of
because the drive to get to the end
often self-justifies means that go well
beyond that and so that's that's that's
how we get into torture in the war on
terror
right is there some kind of lesson for
the future
yes you can take away from that yes i
think the the the first set of lessons
that i've shared as a historian with
with military decision makers is first
of all always remember why
you're there what your purpose is and
always ask yourself if the means you're
using
are actually proportional ask that
question just because you have these
means that you can use just because you
have these tools
doesn't mean they're the right tools to
use and here's the
question that follows from that and it's
a it's a hard question to ask because
the answer is one we often don't like to
hear
are the things i'm doing in war actually
doing more harm or more good
to the reason i went into war we came to
a point in the war on terror
where what we were doing was actually
creating more terrorists
and that's when you have to stop
well some of that is in the data but
some of it there's a leap of faith
so from a parenting perspective let me
let me speak as a person with no kids in
the
single guy let me be the expert in the
room i'm parenting
no uh it does seem
that it's a very difficult thing to do
to um
even though you know that your
kid was making a mistake to let them
make a mistake to give them the freedom
to make the mistakes sure
i don't know what to do but i mean
that's a very kind of
light-hearted way of phrasing the
following which is
when you look at some of the places in
the world like afghanistan which is
not doing well right to move out
knowing that there's going to be a lot
of suffering
economic suffering injustices
terrorist organizations growing that
committing crimes on its own people and
potentially committing crimes
against allies violence against allies
violence against the united states
um how do you know what to do in that
case well
again it's an art not a science which is
what makes it hard for you know an
engineer to
to think about this is what what makes
it endlessly fascinating for me yeah
and i think the real intellectual work
is at the level of the art
right and i think probably engineering
at its highest level becomes an art as
well
right so policy making you never you
never know
um but i will say this i'll say you have
to ask yourself and look in the mirror
and say
is all the effort i'm putting in
actually making this better
and in afghanistan you look at the 20
years and
two plus trillion dollars that the u.s
has put in
and the fact that as you said correctly
it's not doing well right now after 20
years of that investment
you know i might like a company that i
invest in
but after 20 years of my throwing money
in that company
you know it's time to get out well in
some sense getting out now
is um that's kind of obvious i'm more
interested in how we figure out in the
future
how to get out earlier then i mean at
this point
we've stayed too long and it's obvious
the data the the investment
nothing is working you know it's very
the very little data points to us
is staying there i'm more interested in
uh
you know being in a relation let me take
it back to a safer place again being in
a relationship and getting out of that
relationship while things are still good
but you have a sense that it's not going
to end up in a good place
that's that's the difficult thing you
have to ask yourself
whether it's a relationship or you're
talking about policy making in a place
like afghanistan
are the things i'm doing showing me
evidence real evidence that they're
making things better
or making things worse that's a hard
question to be honest with you you have
to be very honest and in a policy making
context
we have to actually do the same thing we
do in a relationship context what do we
do in relationship context we ask other
friends who are observing
right we ask for other observers this is
actually just a scientific method
element actually right
that we can't the heisenberg principle i
i can't see it because i'm too close to
it i'm changing it
by my looking at it right i need others
to tell me in a policy making context
this is why you need to hear from other
people not just the generals because
here's the thing about the generals
they're they generally are patriotic
hard-working people but they're too
close
they're not lying they're too close they
always think they can do better
yeah how do you think about the cold war
now from the beginning to end and maybe
also with an eye towards the current
potential cyber conflict cyber war with
china and with russia
if we look sort of other kind of cold
wars potentially emerging in the 21st
century
when you look back at the cold war of
the 20th century
how do you see it and what lessons do we
draw from it
it's a wonderful question because i
teach this to undergraduates and it's
really
interesting to see how undergraduates
now
almost all of whom were born after 9 11.
yeah
uh so the cold war is ancient history to
them in fact
yeah the cold war to them is as far
removed
as you know the 1950s were to me i mean
that's
the you know that's it's it's
unbelievable it's almost like
world war ii for my generation and cold
war and cold war for them it's so far
removed the collapse of the soviet union
doesn't mean anything to them
um so uh so how do you how do you
describe the cold war to them how do you
describe the soviet union to them
first of all i have to explain to them
why people were so fearful of communism
anti-communism is very hard for them to
understand
um the fact that in the 1950s americans
believed
that communists were going to infiltrate
our society and many other societies and
that after
fidel castro comes to power in 1959 that
we're going to see communist regimes all
across latin america
that fear of communism married to
nuclear power
and then even the fear that maybe
economically they would outpace us
because they would create this sort of
army of khrushchevian you know creep
builders of things and you know what as
khrushchev said right say we're going to
catch britain in five years and then the
united states after that
right so to to explain that sense of
fear to them that they don't
have of those others that's really
uh important the cold war was
fundamentally uh
about the united states defending a
capitalist world order against a
serious challenger from communism an
alternative way
of organizing everything private
property economic
activity enterprise life everything
organized in a totally different way it
was a struggle between two systems
so your senses and started to interrupt
but your sense is
the the conflict of the cold war was
between two ideologies
and not just two big countries with
nuclear weapons
i think it was about two different ways
of life or two different um
promoted ways of life the soviet union
never actually
lived communism yes but i i think my
reading of stalin is he really tried to
go there that and khrushchev
really believed gorbachev thought he was
going to reform the soviet union so you
would go back to a kind of bukhar and
lenin
communism right so um i do think that
mattered i do think that mattered
enormously and from the united states
point of view
um the view was that communism and
fascism
were these totalitarian threats to
liberal democracy and capitalism which
went hand in hand
so i do think that's what the struggle
was about and in a certain way liberal
capitalism
proved to be the more enduring system in
the united states played a key role
in that that that's the reality of the
cold war
but i think it means different things
now to my students
and others they focus uh
very much on the expansion of american
power
and the challenges of managing
they're looking at it from the
perspective of not
will we survive but did we waste our
resources
on some elements of it it doesn't mean
they were against what america
did but there is a question of the
resources that went into the cold war
and the opportunity costs
and you see this when you look at the
sort of health care systems that other
countries build and you compare them to
the united states
race issues also um so they they look at
the costs which i think
often happens after a project is done
you look back at that
second i think um they're also more
inclined
to see the world as less bipolar
to see uh the role of china as more
complicated
post colonial or anti-colonial movements
uh
independent states in africa and latin
america that gets more attention
so one of the criticisms now
is because you forget the the lessons of
20th century history
and the atrocities committed under
communism
that you may be a little bit more
willing to
accept some of those ideologies into our
the united states society
that this kind of um that forgetting
that capitalistic forces
are part of the reason why
we have what we have today there's a
fear
amongst some now that we would
have we would allow basically communism
to take hold in america i mean
jordan and others speak to this kind of
idea i tend to
not be so fearful of it i think it's on
the surface
it's not deep within i do see the world
as
very complicated as a as there needing
to be a role of
having support for each other on certain
political levels economic levels and
then
also supporting entrepreneurs it's like
um that the kind of enforcing of
outcomes that is fundamental to the
communist system
is not something we're actually close to
and some of that is just fear-mongering
for
for uh for likes on twitter kind of
thing
if i could come in on that because i
agree with you 100 i've spent a lot of
time
writing and looking at this and talking
to people about this um
there's no communism in the united
states there never has been and there
certainly isn't now and
and i'll say this both from an academic
point of view but also from just
spending a lot of time observing young
people in the united states
even those on the farthest left take
whoever you think is the farthest left
they don't even understand what
communism is they're not communist in
any sense
americans are raised in a vernacular and
environment of private property
ownership
and as you know better than anyone if
you believe in private property you
don't believe in communism so
the what what the sort of bernie sanders
kind of
socialist elements that's very different
right
and i would say some of that not all of
that some of that does harken back
to actually what won in the cold war
there were many social democratic
elements of what the united states did
that led to our winning the cold war
for example the new deal uh
was investing government money in
propping up business
in propping up labor unions and
during the cold war we spent more money
than we had ever spent in our history
on infrastructure on schools uh on
providing social support
social security our national pension
system being one of them
so you could argue actually that social
democracy
is very compatible with capitalism and i
think that's the debate we're having
today how much social democracy i'd also
say that the capitalism we've
experienced the last
20 years is different from the
capitalism of the cold war uh
during the cold war there was the
presumption in the united states
that you had to
pay taxes to support our cold war
activities
that it was okay to make money but the
more money you made the more taxes you
had to pay
um we had the highest marginal tax rates
in our history during the cold war
now the aversion to taxes and of course
no one ever likes paying taxes but the
notion that we can do things on deficit
spending that's
a post-cold war phenomenon that's not a
cold war phenomenon so
so much of the capitalism that we're
talking about today is not the
capitalism of the cold war and maybe
again we can learn that and see that see
how we can
reform capitalism today and and and get
rid of this
false worry about communism in the
united states yeah you know
you make me actually realize something
important what we have to remember
is the words we use on the surface about
different policies what you think is
right and wrong
is actually different than the core
thing
that like is in your blood the core
ideas that
are there of i i do see
the united states as this there there's
this fire that burns
of individual freedoms of
uh of of of property rights
these these basic foundational ideas
that everybody just kind of takes for
granted
and i think if you hold on to them
if you're like raised in them talking
about
ideas of social security of universal
basic income of of of reallocation of
resources
is a fundamentally different kind of
discussion than you had in the soviet
union
i think the value of the individual is
so core to the american system
that you basically cannot possibly do
the kind of
atrocities that you saw in the in the
in the soviet union but of course you
never know the slippery slope
has a way of changing uh changing things
but i do believe the things you're born
with
it's just so core to this country it's
it's part of the
i don't know what your thoughts are
where we are in texas i'm
not necessarily i don't necessarily want
to have a gun control type of
conversation but
the reason i really like guns
it doesn't make any sense but
philosophically it's
it's such a declaration of individual
rights
that's so different than the
conversations i hear with my russian
family my russian friends
that the gun is is very possible that
having guns is bad for society in the
sense that like it'll lead to more
violence
but there's something about this
discussion
um it that
like that proclaims the value
of my freedom as an individual i'm not
being eloquent in it but there's very
few
debates where whenever people are saying
should
you have what level of gun control all
those kinds of things
what i hear is it's a fight for
how much freedom even if it's stupid
freedom
should the individual have i think
that's i think that's what that's what's
articulated quite often i i think uh
combining your two points which are
great points i think
there is something about american
individualism which is deeply ingrained
uh in our culture in our society and it
means that
the kinds of bad things that happen are
different usually not as bad but
but our individualism often covers up
for
um vigilante activity and individual
violence toward people that you wouldn't
have in a more collective culture
um so in the soviet union it was at a
much worse scale and it was done by
by government organizations in the
united states it's
you know individuals the history of
lynching in our country for example
sometimes it's individual police
officers sometimes it's others
again the vast majority police officers
are good people don't do harm to people
but there are
these examples and they they're able to
fester
in our society because of our
individualism now gun ownership
uh is about personal freedom i think for
a lot of people
and um there's no doubt that in our
history
included in the second amendment which
can be interpreted in different ways
is the presumption that people should
have the right to defend themselves
which is what i think you're getting at
here
that you should not be completely
dependent for your defense
on an entity that might not be there for
you you should be able to defend
yourself and guns symbolize that um
i think that's a fair point but i think
it's also a fair point to say
that as with everything uh defining what
self-defense is is really important
so does self-defense mean i can have a
bazooka does it mean i can have weapons
that are designed
for a military battlefield to mass kill
people that seems to me to be very
different
from saying i should have a handgun or
some small arm
to defend myself that distinction alone
would make a huge difference most of the
uh mass shootings at least which are a
proportion a smaller proportion of the
larger gun deaths in the united states
which are larger than any other society
but at least the mass shootings
are usually perpetrated by people who
have not self-defense weapons
but mass killing mass killing weapons
and i think i think there's an important
distinction there the constitution talks
about a right to bear arms for a
well-regulated militia when the framers
talked about arms
that did not mean the ability to kill as
many people as you want to kill
it meant the ability to defend yourself
so let's have that conversation i think
it would be useful as a society
stop talking about guns or no guns what
is it that we as citizens need
to feel we can defend ourselves yes yeah
i mean guns
have this complicated issue that it can
cause harm to others
i tend to see sort of maybe indra like
legalization of drugs
i tend to believe that we should have
the freedom to do stupid things
yeah as long as we're not harming lots
of other people yes
and then guns of course have the
property that they can be used
it's not just you know a bazooka i would
argue is pretty stupid
to own for your own self-defense but it
has the very
negative side effect of being
potentially used to harm other people
and you have to you have to consider
that kind of stuff by the way as a side
note to the listeners
uh there's been a bunch of people saying
that uh
lex is way too libertarian for my taste
no i actually am just struggling with
ideas and sometimes put on different
hats in these conversations i
i um think through different ideas
whether they're left right or
libertarian
that's true for gun control that's true
for immigration it's true for all of
that i think we should
we should have discussions in the space
of ideas
versus in the space of bins we put each
other in labels and we'll put each other
and also change our minds all the time
try out say say stupid stuff with the
best of intention
trying our best to think through it and
then
after saying it think about it for a few
days and then change your mind
and grow in this way let me ask a
ridiculous question
when you zoom out when uh human
civilization has destroyed itself and
alien graduate students are studying it
uh like three four five centuries from
now what do you think will remember
about
this period period in history the 20th
century the 21st century
this this time we had a couple wars
we had a charismatic black president in
the united states
with um a couple pandemics
what do you think will actually stand
the the
stand out in history no doubt the
uh rapid technological innovation
of the last 20 to 30 years uh how we
created a whole
virtual universe we didn't have before
and of course that's going to go in
directions you and i can't imagine 50
years from now
that this will be seen as that origin
moment that when we went from
playing below the rim to playing above
the rim right to being
all in person to having a whole virtual
world and in a strange way the pandemic
was a provocation to move even further
in that direction and we're never going
back
right we're we're going to restore some
of the things we were doing before the
pandemic but we're never going to go
back to that world we were in before
where every meeting you had to fly
to that place to be in the room with the
people um so this whole virtual world
and the virtual personas
and avatars and all of that um i think
that's that's going to be
a big part of how people remember our
time also the sort of biotechnology
element of it which
which the vaccines are part of um it's
amazing how quickly this is the great
triumph how quickly
we've produced and distributed these
vaccines and of course their problems
with who's taking them but
but the reality is i mean this is light
speed
compared to what it would have been like
not just in 1918 in 1980
yeah one of the and sorry if i'm
interrupting but one of the
disappointing things about this
particular time
is because vaccines like a lot of things
got
politicized used as little pawns in the
game of politics
that we don't get the chance to step
back fully at least
and celebrate the the brilliance of the
human species that's right
this is yes there are scientists who use
their authority
improperly that have an ego
that when they're
within institutions are dishonest with
the public
because they don't trust the
intelligence of the public they are not
authentic and transparent
all the same things you could say about
humans in any positions of power
anywhere okay that doesn't mean science
isn't incredible
and um the vaccines i mean i don't i
don't often talk about it
because it's so political and it it it's
heartbreaking
to it's heartbreaking how all the good
stuff is getting politicized yeah that's
right and it shouldn't be
it'll seem less political um in the long
arc of history
it'll see it'll it'll be seen as an
outstanding
accomplishment and as a you know a step
toward whatever maybe they're doing
vaccines or something that replaces the
vaccine in 10 seconds you know at that
point right yeah it'll be seen as a step
those will be some of the positives
i think one of the negatives they will
point to will be um
our inability at least at this moment to
manage our environment better how we're
destroying our living space
and not doing enough even though we have
the capabilities to do more to preserve
or at least
allow a sustainable living space i'm
confident because i'm an optimist
that we will get through this and we
will be better at sustaining our
environment in future decades
and so in terms of environmental policy
they'll see this
moment as a dark age or the beginnings
of a better age maybe as a renaissance
or maybe uh as a as the last time
most people lived on earth when a couple
centuries afterwards were all dissipated
throughout the
the solar system in the galaxy very
possible if the local resident
hometown resident mr elon musk has
anything to do with it
i i do i do tend to think you're
absolutely right with all this political
bickering
we shouldn't forget that what this age
will be remembered by is
the is the incredible levels of
innovation yes i do
i do think the biotech stuff worries me
more than anything
because it feels like there's a lot of
weapons that could be yet to be
developed
in that space but i tend to believe that
i'm excited about by two avenues one is
artificial intelligence
the kind of um the kind of systems we'll
create in this digital space that you
mentioned we're moving to
and then the other of course this could
be the product of the cold war but i'm
super excited by space exploration sure
there's a magic tour to humans being sp
and we're getting back to it i mean we
we were
enthralled with it in the 50s and 60s
when it was a cold war competition and
then after the 70s we sort of gave up on
it
and thanks to elon musk and others we're
coming back to this issue and and
i think there's so much to be gained
from the power of exploration
is there books or movies in your life
long ago or recently that had a big
impact on you
yes something you were yes um
you know my favorite novel i always tell
people this i love reading novels i'm a
historian
uh and i think the historian and the
novelist are actually
and the technology innovator are all
actually one and the same we're all
storytellers storytellers and we're all
in the imagination space
and um i'm trying to imagine the world
of the past to inform us in the present
for the future
so one of my favorite novels that i read
actually when i was in graduate school
is thomas mons button brooks and
it's the story of a family in lubeck in
northern germany
living through the 19th century and the
rise and fall of families cycles of life
many things we've talked about in the
last couple hours
cycles of life um challenges of uh
adjusting to the world around you and
it's just a very moving reflection
on the limits of human agency and how we
we all have to
understand the circumstances we're in
and adjust to them
and there's triumph and tragedy in that
it's a wonderful novel it used to be a
kind of canonical work it's sort of
fallen out now
it's a big big novel but uh i'm very
moved by that
i'm very moved by tolstoy's war and
peace i assign that every year to my
students that's a big big book
but what tolstoy challenges is he
challenges the notion that a napoleon
can rule the world
and we're all little napoleons right
we're all sort of thinking that we're
going to do that
and he reminds us how much is
contingency circumstance that doesn't
mean we don't have
some control you've uh spoke to me a
little bit of russian
where does that come from so your your
appreciation of tolstoy but also your
ability to speak a bit of russian where
is that
where is that from so uh i speak in
addition to english i speak
reasonably well depending on how much
vodka i've had
russian nice french and german um i
learned those
uh for uh research purposes i learned
french actually when i was in high
school
russian when i was in college german
when i was in graduate school
now i do have family on my mother's side
that's of russian jewish extraction
um but they were yiddish speakers by the
time you know i met them by the time
they had gone through germany and come
to the united states or really gone
through poland and come the united
states they were yiddish speakers so
there's no one really in my family who
speaks russian
but i do feel a connection there at
least a long range
personal connection is there something
to be said about the language
and your ability to imagine history
sort of when you study these different
countries
your ability to imagine what it was like
to be
um a part of that culture part of that
time
yes language is crucial to understanding
a culture and
even if you learn the language as i have
learning russian and german and french
it's still not the same as also being a
native speaker either as you know
um but i think language tells you a lot
about mannerism
about assumptions uh the very fact that
english doesn't have a formal you
but russian has a formally right versus
right
german has a formal you z versus d right
so the fact that english doesn't have a
formal you
tells you something uh about americans
right that's just one example
uh the fact that um you know that
germans have such a wider vocabulary
for certain scientific concepts than we
have in english tells you something
about the culture right language
is an artifact of the culture the
culture makes the language
it's fascinating to explore i mean even
just exactly what you just said
which is there's a fascinating
transition
so i guess in english we just have you
yeah
there's a there's a fascinating
transition that persists to this day
is is of formalism and politeness
where it's an initial kind of dance of
interaction that's
uh different methods
of signaling respect i guess we don't
then language provides that and in the
united in the english language
there's fewer tools to show that kind of
respect which has
potentially positive or negative effects
and it flattens the society where like a
teenager could talk to an older person
and show like uh like a difference
i mean but at the same time i mean it
creates a certain kind of dynamic a
certain kind of society
and it's funny to think of just like
those few words can have any
like a ripple effect through the whole
culture and we don't have a history in
the united states of
of aristocracy yeah the these uh
elements of language reflect aristocracy
the the the surf
would never refer to the master even if
the master is younger
it's always void right of it's always
right i mean and so
it's um yeah so it tells you something
about the history that's why to your
question which was a great question it's
so crucial
to try to penetrate the language i'll
also say something else
and this is a problem for many americans
who haven't learned a foreign language
we're very bad at teaching foreign
languages
if you've never taught yourself a
foreign language
you have closed yourself off to certain
kinds of empathy
because you have basically trained your
brain to only look at the world one way
the very act of learning another
language i think tells your brain
that words and concepts don't translate
one to one
this is the first thing you realize
right we can say you know these two
words mean the same thing from two
languages they never mean exactly
yeah it's the same thing right dos
fedonia is really not goodbye
yes right and there's something you know
right now there's people talking about
idea of lived experience
one of the ways to force yourself into
this idea
of liv's experience is by learning
another language is to understand that
you can perceive the world in a totally
different way even even though you're
perceiving the same thing
and of course the way to first learn
russian for those
looking for tutorial lessons for me is
just like as you said
you start by drinking lots of vodka yes
of course it's very difficult
to do otherwise is there advice you have
for young people
about career about life uh
in making their way in the world yes
the two things i i believe that i say to
a lot of talented young people first
um i i don't think you can predict
what is going to be well renumerated 20
years from now
don't pick a profession because you
think even though your parents might
tell you or
do this and you'll make money you know
this is the scene in the graduate uh
where
a guy tells dustin hoffman going to
plastics money and plastics
we don't know so many of my students now
have parents who are telling them
uh bright students you know go to the
business school that's
that's what's going to set you up to
make money if you're passionate about
business yes
but don't begin by thinking you know
what's going to be hot 20 years from now
you don't know what's going to be hot
from 20 years ago about 20 years from
now
what should you do this is advice number
one find what you're passionate about
because if you're passionate about it
you will do good work in that area or if
you're talented
and usually passion and talent overlap
and you'll find a way to get people to
pay you for it
i mean you do it really well people will
want to pay that that's where capitalism
works
people will find it valuable right
whether it's violin playing
right or engineering or poetry you will
find you might not become a
billionaire that involves other things
but you'll find a way to get people to
pay you for it
and then the second thing is um it's
really important
uh at the very beginning of your career
even before you're in
your job right to start building your
networks
but networks are not just people you're
on
facebook with or twitter with i mean
that's fine uh
it's actually forming relationships and
some of that can be mediated in the
digital world but i mean real
relationships
i like podcasts because i think they
actually open up that space i know a lot
of people can listen to a podcast
and find someone else who's listened to
that podcast and have a conversation
about a topic it opens up that space
build those relationships not with
people who you think will be powerful
but people you think
are interesting because they'll do
interesting things
and every successful person i know
at some level had a key moment where
they got where they are
because of someone they knew for some
other reason yeah who had that
connection
so use and spread your networks and make
them as diverse as possible find people
who
are of a different party have different
interests but are interesting to you
that's brilliant advice and some of the
on the on the passion side
i do find that um as somebody who has a
lot of passions
i i find the the second part to that
is commit committing yes that's true
which sucks
because life is finite and when you
commit
you say well i'm never going to be good
like when you choose one of your two
passions one of the two things you're
interested in
you're basically saying i'm i'm letting
go i'm saying
this to that's true that's true which is
actually what does it down your means
nice five letting go that's exactly
right yeah i think that's exactly right
i think that's i think you do have to
make choices you have to set priorities
i often laugh at students who tell me
they want to have like three majors
if you have three majors you have no
major right i mean so i do think you
have to make choices i also think
um it's important that whatever you do
even if it's a small thing you do you
always do the best you can you always do
excellent work
my kids are tired of hearing me say this
at home but i believe everything you do
should be about excellence the best you
can do
if i'm going to wash the dishes i'm
going to be the best person washing the
dishes yeah
right if i'm going to write a book
review i'm going to make the best
possible
book review i can why because you
develop a culture
among about yourself which is about
excellence yeah i was
i was telling you offline about all the
kind of stuff google fiber and cable
installation all that stuff
i've been always a believer washing
dishes
people don't often believe me when i say
this i don't care what i do
i i'm i am with david foster wallace i'm
unbearable
there's so much joy for me i think for
everyone but okay let me just speak for
me
to be discovered in getting really good
at anything in fact getting good at
stuff that most people believe
is boring or menial labor or
uh you know impossible to be interesting
that's even more joyful to find the joy
within that in the excellent
it's the giro dreams of sushi making the
same freaking
sushi over and over and becoming a
master that that's that can be truly
joyful there's a sense of pride
and on the pragmatic level you never
know when
someone will spot that and uh
intelligent
people who perform at the level of high
excellence look for others
yeah and it radiates some kind of signal
it's weird it wears what you're
it's weird what you're attracting
yourself when you just focus on mastery
and pursuing excellence in something
like
this is the cool thing uh about it
that's the joy i've
really truly experienced i didn't have
to do much work it's just cool people
kind of
i find myself in groups of cool people
like really people who are excited about
life who are passionate about life
there's a fire in their eyes that's uh
you know at the end of the day just
makes
life fun you know something and then
also money-wise
at least in this society we're fortunate
to where if you do that kind of thing
money will find a way like i have the
great i say this that don't care about
money
you know i have to think about what that
means because some people criticize that
idea as like yeah
that must be nice to say that uh because
i
have for much many periods of my life
had very little money
but i think we live in a society where
not caring about money but just focusing
on your passions
if you're truly pursuing excellence
whatever that is money will find you
that's i guess the ideal of the
capitalist system
and i think that the entrepreneurs i've
studied and had the chance to get to
know
and i'm sure you'd agree with this they
they do what they do because they're
passionate about the product
yeah they're not just in it to make
money in fact that's when they get into
trouble
yeah just trying to make money exactly
you said your grandmother emily had a
big impact on your life
she lived to 102
what are some lessons she taught you
emily who was the the child of
immigrants from from
russia and poland who never went to
college
her proudest day i think was when when i
went to college
um she
she treated everyone with respect and
tried to get to know everyone she knew
every bus driver
in the town she'd remember their
birthdays
and one of the things she taught me is
no matter how high you fly
the lowest person close to the ground
matters to you
and uh you treat them the same way you
treat the
billionaire at the top of the podium and
she she did that she didn't just say
that
some people say then don't do it she she
really did that and i always
remember that it comes up in my mind at
least once a week because
we're all busy doing a lot of things and
you either see or you even feel in
yourself
the desire to just for the reasons of
speed
to be short or not polite with someone
who can't do anything to harm you right
now
and i remember uh her saying to me no
you you don't
you you you treat everyone with respect
you treat you know the person you're on
the phone with right customer service
you treat that person if you're talking
to jeff bezos so you're talking to
elon musk right uh and and i think
making that a culture of who you are is
so important and people notice that
that's the other thing
and they notice when it's authentic
everyone's nice to the person at the
bottom of the
totem pole when you want to get a head
in the line for your driver's license
yeah but are you nice to them when you
don't need that they notice that
and even when nobody's watching that has
a weird effect on you
that's going to uh have a ripple effect
and people know that's the cool thing
about the internet
i've come to believe that people see
authenticity they see
when you're full of shit when you're not
that's right the other thing that that
emily taught me and i think we've all
had relatives who have taught us this
right that you could
be very uneducated she was very
uneducated she you know she had a high
school diploma
but i think she was working in you know
in a delicatessen in new york you know
while she was in high school or maybe it
was
gimbals or something so she didn't take
high school very seriously she wasn't
very well educated
she was very smart and we can fall into
a world
where i'm a big believer in higher
education and getting a phd and things
of that sort
but where we think those are the only
smart people
sometimes those are the people because
of their accomplishments because their
egos are the ones
who are least educated
in the way of the world yeah least
curious
and now ultimately wisdom comes from
curiosity
and sometimes getting a phd can get away
uh it can get
in the way of curiosity as opposed to
empower curiosity
let me ask uh from a historical
perspective
you've studied some of human history so
maybe you have an insight about what's
the meaning of life
why do you ever ask when you look at
history the why
yeah i do all the time and i don't have
i don't have a i don't have an answer
it's it's the mystery that we can't uh
answer i i do think um what it means is
what we make of
it there's no universal
every every period i've studied and i've
studied a little bit of a lot of periods
and a lot of a few periods
every period people struggle with this
and there's no they don't come to
wiser people than us don't come to a
firm answer
except it's what you make of it meaning
is what you make of it so
think about what what you want to care
about and make that
the meaning in your life um i wonder how
that changes throughout human history
whether there's a constant like that's i
often
think especially when you study
evolutionary biology and you just
see our origins from life and as it
evolves
it's like it makes you wonder if
it feels like there's a thread that
connects all of it
that we're headed somewhere
we're trying to actualize some greater
purpose you know like there there seems
to be a direction to this thing
and we're all kind of stumbling in the
dark trying to figure it out
but it feels like we eventually will
find an answer
i hope so yeah maybe i mean i do think
we all
um we all want
our families to do better we are we we
are
familiar and family doesn't just mean
biological family you can have all kinds
of ways you define family and community
and i think i think we are moving slowly
and
in a very messy way toward a larger
world community to include all of
biological life
and eventually uh artificial life
as well and so that this
to uh to expand the lesson to the advice
that uh your grandmother taught you is i
think we should treat
robots and ai systems uh good
as well even if they're currently not
very intelligent because
one day they might be right right i
think that's exactly right and and we
should think through
exactly exactly as a humanist how i
would approach that issue
we need to think through the kinds of
behavior patterns we want to establish
with these new forms of life artificial
life
um for ourselves also to your point so
we behave the right way so we don't
misuse this
started talking about abraham lincoln
ended talking about robots
i think this is the perfect conversation
jeremy this was a huge honor
i love austin i love ut austin
and i love the fact that you would agree
to waste all your valuable time with me
today thank you so much for talking
today
i can't imagine a better way to spend a
friday afternoon this was so much fun
and i'm such a fan of your podcast and
delighted to be a part of it
thank you thanks for listening to this
conversation with jeremy suri
and thank you to element monk pack
belcampo
four sigmatic and asleep check them out
in the description to support this
podcast
and now let me leave you with some words
from franklin d
roosevelt fdr democracy cannot succeed
unless those who express their choice
are prepared
to choose wisely the real safeguard of
democracy therefore
is education thank you for listening and
hope to see you
next time