Jeremi Suri: History of American Power | Lex Fridman Podcast #180
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 quick mention of our sponsors element monk pack belcampo four sigmatic and eight sleep check them out in the description to support this podcast as a side note let me say that in these conversations for better or worse i seek understanding not activism i'm not left nor right i love ideas not labels and most fascinating ideas are full of uncertainty tension and trade-offs labels destroy that i try ideas out let them breathe for time try to challenge explore and analyze but mostly i trust the intelligence of you the listener to think and to make up your own mind together with me i will try to have economists and philosophers on from all points on the multi-dimensional political spectrum including the extremes i will try to both have an open mind and to ask difficult questions when needed i'll make mistakes don't shoot this robot at the first sign of failure i'm still under development pre-release version 0.1 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 1938 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 300 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