The following is a conversation with Jeremy Surrey, a historian at UT Austin, whose research
interests and writing are on modern American history with an eye towards presidents and
in general individuals who wielded power.
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This is the Lex Friedman podcast, and here is my conversation with Jeremy Surrey.
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.
And Tolstoy reflected on this himself, actually, saying that when he was in the Caucasus, he
asked these peasants in the Caucasus, 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 in the Caucasus telling him.
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 and 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 voice to those who are voiceless.
Who are you talking to about in general?
Is this about African Americans?
Or is this about just the populace in general?
Certainly part of it is about slaves, 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.
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 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.
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, Herndon, said he was the little engine of ambition that
couldn't stop.
He 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 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.
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.
That's a really nice definition of freedom.
We often think this very abstract notion of being able to do anything you want, but really,
it's ultimately breaking yourself free from 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, being able to realize yourself within the constraints of your own abilities.
It's still not true freedom.
It's true freedom is probably almost like designing a video game character or something
like that.
I agree.
I think that's exactly right.
I think freedom is not that I can have any outcome I want.
I can't control outcomes.
The most powerful, freest person in the world cannot control outcomes, but it means that
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 the political game front of it, which
is he's accomplished some of them?
I don't know, but it seems like there were 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 ethical and human terms, but in their time, it was probably
as much a game of politics, not just these broad questions of human nature.
It was a game.
Is there something to be said about being a skillful player in the game of politics
that you take from Lincoln?
Absolutely.
Lincoln never read Carl von Klauswitz, the great 19th century German thinker on strategy
and politics, but he embodied the same wisdom, which is that everything is politics.
If you want to get anything done, and this includes even relationships, there's a politics
to it.
It means that you have to persuade, coerce, encourage people to do things they wouldn't
otherwise do.
Lincoln was a master at that.
He was a master at 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.
Then second, Lincoln was very thoughtful and planned every move out.
He was thinking three or four moves, maybe five moves down the chessboard, while others
were move number one or two.
That's fascinating to think about him just listening to studying.
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 in order to define the holes.
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.
One of the things that I'm more and more starting to wonder, what the hell did he do alone in
a room with one-on-one with people because it seems like that's where he was exceptionally
effective.
When I think about certain leaders, I'm not sure Stalin was this way.
I apologize.
I've been very obsessed with this period of human history.
It just seems like certain leaders are extremely effective one-on-one.
A lot of people think of Hitler in Lincoln as a speechmaker, as a great charismatic speechmaker,
but it seems like to me that some of these guys were really effective inside a room.
What do you think?
I think it's more important.
Your effectiveness to make a hell of a good speech, sort of be 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, 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, is the ability to tell a story.
I think Hitler was a little different, but what I've read of Stalin is he was a storyteller
too.
One-on-one storyteller?
Yeah, that's my understanding is that he, and what Lincoln did, I don't want to compare
Lincoln to Stalin, but Lincoln did, is he was not confrontational.
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 Franklin 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 stories about it, it's like, again, sorry to bring up Hitler, but people
have talked about his peers and gays when they're one-on-one.
There's a feeling like he's just looking through you.
I wonder, it makes me wonder, was Lincoln somebody who's a little bit more passive, who's more,
the ego doesn't shine, it's not like an overwhelming thing, or is it more like, again, don't want
to bring up controversial figures, but Donald Trump, it's more menacing.
There's a more physically menacing thing where it's almost like a bullying kind of dynamic.
So I wonder, I wish we knew, because from a psychological perspective, I wonder if there's
a thread that connects most great leaders.
That's a great question.
So I think the best writer on this is Max Weber, and he talks about the power of charisma,
the term charisma comes from Weber, and Weber's use of it, actually, to talk about profits,
and I think he has a point.
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 from the way someone carries themselves, it can come from the way
they use words.
So maybe there are different kinds of magic that someone develops, but I think there are
two things 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 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 couple do the quickness as a kind of instinct about human
nature.
Yes.
Sort of asking the question, what does this person worry about?
What are the biggest problems?
Maybe, what is this Stephen Schwartz man I think said to me, this businessman, I think
he said, what I've always tried to do is try to figure out, 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, and find that, and then use that to then build
closeness in order to then probably he doesn't put it in those words, but to manipulate the
person into whatever, to do whatever the heck they want.
And I think part of it is that, and part of the effect that Donald Trump has is how quick
he's able to figure that out.
You've written a book about how the role and power of the presidency has changed.
So 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, as a president.
We seem to only be talking about the presidents, maybe a general here and there, but it's mostly
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 various other activities
is we use this word president as if it's something timeless, but the office has changed incredibly.
Just from Lincoln's time to the present, which is 150 years, he wouldn't recognize the office
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 a lot.
One, presidents now can communicate with the public directly.
I mean, we've reached the point now where a president can have direct almost one-on-one
communication.
A 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 Horace Greeley in the New York Tribune
to publish 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.
This is 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.
And then third, the power the president has.
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, I think, dangerous in a democracy.
And certainly something the founders 220 years ago would have had trouble conceiving.
Presidents now have the ability to deliver force across the world to literally assassinate
people with a remarkable accuracy.
And that's an enormous power that presidents have.
To your sense, this is not to get conspiratorial, but do you think a president currently has
the power to initiate the assassination of somebody, of a political enemy, or a terrorist
leader or that kind of thing, 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 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 an assassination operation, and we've taken
out very successfully many leaders of terrorist organizations, 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 by saying something about where money
is going to go or 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?
But yes, they use 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, 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 and I'm subscribed.
We're not going to get very far.
I hope we maintain a political discussion about even the modern presidents that viewed
through the lens of history.
I think there's a lot to be learned about the office and about human nature.
Some people criticize Barack Obama for expanding the military industrial complex, engaging
in more and more wars, as opposed to the initial rhetoric, was such that we would pull back
from being more skeptical in our decisions to wage wars.
From the lens of the power of the presidency as the modern presidency, the fact that we
continue the war in Afghanistan at 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 take on the responsibility
because of 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.
As a trained lawyer, he had a moral position on this, actually, and he tried.
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 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 putting the responsibility and the president to form the structure around
him locally such that he can make the policy 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 fire and
hire or to basically schedule meetings in such a way that can control your decision making.
So I imagine it's very difficult to 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 and you reorganize who you have late night talks
with, you potentially have a huge ripple effect on the policy.
I think that's right.
I think 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.
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 founding fathers wanted a military that was divided.
They did not want to unify the 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 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 having a strategic plan that reexamines 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 especially
I've been hanging out with a guy named Joe Rogan recently.
Sure.
So it's very important 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 US 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 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 map out the set of information and power, you have CIA, you have all these organizations
that do the machinery of government, not just the passing of bills, but gaining information,
homeland security, actually engaging in wars, all those kinds of things.
How central is the president?
Would the president know some of the shady things that are going on?
Or some kind of cybersecurity stuff against Russia and China, all those kinds of things.
Is the president really made aware?
And if so, how nervous does that make you?
So presidents, like leaders of any complex organizations, don't know everything that
goes on.
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 or
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.
Makes me nervous because I think human nature is such that the academics, the experts, everybody
is almost afraid to ask the questions for which the answers might be burdensome.
Yes.
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 Americans, then you have to be the guy
who 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 probably have to be very picky about which things you reform, you don't have much time.
It takes a lot of effort to restructure things, but you nevertheless would have to be basically
lying to yourself, to all those 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 can be great leaders like that.
And I wonder if our political system, the electoral system, is 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 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 and 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 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, I guess, charisma, I suppose.
Well and he's a unique individual, but he fascinates me because he's a figure of such
enormous talent and enormous appetite and such little self-control and such extremes.
I think it's not just that he tells us something about the presidency, he tells us something
about our society.
American society, this is not new to our time, is filled with 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.
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.
A lot of people criticize 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 because 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 what he represents and that's the beautiful thing about America, the diversity
of this land with the mix of it, the corruption of within capitalism, the beauty of capitalism,
the innovation, all those kinds of things, the people that start from nothing and create
everything, the Elon Musk's of the world and the Bill Gates and so on but also the
people Bernie Mados and all as the Me Too movement has showed the multitude of creeps
that apparently permeate the entirety of our system so I don't know, there is something,
there is some sense in which we put our president on a pedestal which actually creates a fake
human being, like 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 a definitive statement of authenticity, it's like this the opposite of the fake politician
is whatever else you want to say about them is there's the chaos that's unlike anything
else that came before, one thing and this is a particular maybe 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, they were almost like king philosophers that made speeches
that reverberated through decades after, 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 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 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 had a serious interest in history, now how they pursued
that interest would vary, 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 loved movies and movies were an insight into history for him, he liked
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 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, especially in the engineering scientific domains, I often
see history holding us back, sort 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 and 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 history and antiquarianism, so antiquarianism, what
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, that's antiquarianism, that's trying to capture and hold on, hold on to
the past, the past is a talisman for antiquarians.
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, we have to do things the way we've done them in the past, the historian
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?
And 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 crops and absolute power
crops, absolutely, and sort of like basically in thinking that we have to, we cannot trust
any one individual.
I can't trust myself with power, 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,
because he seems to give away relinquish power.
It feels like George Washington did it almost like the purest of ways, which is believes
in this country, but he just believes he's not the person to carry it forward.
What do you make of that?
What kind of human does it take to give away that power?
Is there some hopeful message we can carry through to the future, to elect leaders like
that, or to find friends to hang out with or like that?
What is that?
How do you explain that?
So it's actually the most important thing about George Washington.
It's the right thing to bring up.
What 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.
Washington gives up power at the end of the revolution.
He's successfully carried through the Revolutionary War Ames.
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 this.
And I think there are many other leaders who recognize that.
You can look to, in some ways, the story of many of our presidents who even before there
is a two-term limit in the Constitution, leave after two terms, 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, and I believe he still has popular
support that that's not fully manipulated.
Because I know a lot of people in Russia, and almost the entirety of my family in Russia,
are big supporters of Putin, and everybody I talk to, that's not just on social media.
But the people that live in Russia seem to support him.
It feels like this will be in a George Washington way.
Now will be the time that Putin, just like Yeltsin, could relinquish power.
And thereby, in the eyes of Russians, become, in 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 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 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.
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 it.
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 try to come and arrest him?
Will someone try to come and assassinate him?
Washington recognized that leaving early limited the corruption and limited the enemies that
you made.
And so it was a strategic choice.
Putin is at this point bringing 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.
This is the problem with monarchy, with aristocracy that you own power.
We don't own power, we're in holding it in trust.
Yeah, there's some probably very specific psychological study of how many years it takes
for you to forget that you can't own power.
That's right.
That could be a much more rigorous discussion about the length of terms that are appropriate.
But really, there's a 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.
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 authoritarians become evil.
Or let's not use the word evil, but counterproductive, destructive 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's the plaza for CEOs probably.
Absolutely.
They can become CEOs somewhere else, but don't stay CEO one place too long.
It's a problem with startups.
The founder, you can have a brilliant founder and that founder doesn't want to let go.
It's the same issue.
At the same time, this is where Elon Musk and a few others like 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 of the company where everybody else doubted.
But that seems to be the exception versus the rule.
And Sergey, for example, has stepped back.
He plays less of a day-to-day role and is not running Google in the way he did.
But the interesting thing is he stepped back in a quite tragic way from what I've seen,
which is 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.
It's what Google has done with a search engine and other efforts that are similar like scanning
a lot of books.
Sure.
It's just incredible.
Yeah.
It's similar to Wikipedia, but what he said was that it's not the same company anymore.
And I know maybe I'm reading too much into it because it's more maybe practically saying
just the size of the company is much larger, the kind of leadership that's great.
But at the same time, they changed the motto from don't be evil to it's becoming corporatized
and all those kinds of things.
It's sad.
There also are cycles, right?
History is about cycles, right?
They're cycles to life.
They're cycles to organizations.
It's sad.
I mean, it's sad.
Steve Jobs leaving Apple by passing away said, 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 like corporate and stale.
So maybe most of progress is made through cycles.
Maybe new Elon Musk comes along, all those kinds of things.
But it does seem that the American system of government has 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, I mean, we're into a third century and democracies on this scale rarely last that
long.
So 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.
It's important to meditate on that actually.
You mentioned that FDR, Franklin 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.
You couldn't be more elite than Franklin Roosevelt, but he authentically connected.
This was not 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 one of the hardest economic periods of American history, he was able to feel the
pain.
The number of immigrants I read oral histories from or who have written themselves, Saul
Bello was one example, the great novice who talked about how as immigrants to the US,
Saul Bello 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.
I think part of it was FDR really tried to understand people.
That's the first thing.
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 important, so he went through the Great Depression, so the
New Deal, which some people criticize, some people see, I mean, it's funny to look at
some of these policies and their long ripple effects, but at the time, it's some of the
most innovative policies 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 the New Deal, obviously World War II, that entire process, is there something that
stands out to you as a particularly great moment that made FDR?
Yes, I think 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.
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 radio address in March of 1933, the banking system is collapsing.
We can't imagine it.
Banks were closing, and you couldn't get your money out.
Your life savings would be lost.
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 works.
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, and then he says, I don't have a solution, but here's what I want to
do.
I'm going to send in government 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 going to 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.
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.
That to me is a model of leadership, and I think that's as possible today as it's ever
been.
Do you think it's possible?
I was going to ask this, again, it may be a very shallow view, but it feels like this
country is more divided than it has been in recent history.
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.
I was going to say without suffering, but this is economic suffering, and a huge number
of people have lost their job, so is it possible to have, is there one, a hunger?
Is there possibly to have an FDR-style leader who unites?
Yes.
I think that is what President Biden is trying.
I'm not saying 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.
Herbert Hoover was still around and still accusing FDR of being a conspiratist and all
these other things.
So 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.
FDR built Hoover Dam.
Hoover Dam turned the lights on for young Lyndon Johnson, who grew up outside of Austin.
FDR was the one who invested in road construction that was then continued by Dwight Eisenhower,
by a Republican with the Interstate Highway System.
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 a 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.
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.
When I first heard Joe Biden, many years ago, I think he ran for president against Obama.
Before I heard him speak, I really liked him.
But once I heard him speak, I started to like him less and less.
It speaks to something interesting, where it's hard to put into words why you connect
with people.
The empathy that you mentioned in FDR, you have these bad part in the French motherfuckers
like Teddy Roosevelt that connect with you.
There's something just powerful and with Joe Biden, I want to really like him and there's
something not quite there where it feels like he doesn't quite know my pain.
Even though he on paper, he knows the pain of the people and there's something not connecting.
It's hard to explain.
It's hard to put into words.
It makes me not, as an engineer and scientist, it makes me not feel good about presidencies
because it makes me feel like it's more art than science.
It is an art.
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 going to do it.
Don't try it.
I'm a parent of teenagers.
Don't even try to explain emotion.
But you hit on the key point and the key challenge for Biden, he's got to find the right words.
It's not finding the words to bullshit people.
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.
That's what he needs.
That's the job of a leader.
There's certain words, I haven't heard many politicians use those words, but there's certain
words that make you forget that you're for immigration or against immigration.
Make you forget whether you're for wars and against wars.
Make you forget about the bickering and somehow inspire you, elevate you to believe in the
greatness that this country could be.
Yes.
In that same way, the reason I moved to Austin, it's funny to say, is I just heard words from
people, from friends, where they're excited by the possibility of the future here.
I wasn't thinking, what's the right thing to do?
That's strategic because I want to launch a business.
There's a lot of arguments for San Francisco or maybe staying in Boston in my case, but
there's this excitement that was beyond reason, that was emotional.
It seems like that's what great leaders do, but that's what builds countries.
That's what builds great businesses.
That's right.
It's what people say about Austin, for example, all the time, talented people who come here
like yourself, and here's the interesting thing, no one person creates that.
The words emerge.
Part of what FDR understood, you should've got to find the words out there and use them.
You don't have to be the creator of them.
Just as the great painter doesn't invent the painting, they're taking things from others.
As a smaller side, is there something you could say about FDR and Hitler?
I constantly tried to think, can this person, can this moment in history have been circumvented,
prevented?
Can Hitler have been stopped?
Can some of the atrocities from my own family that my grandparents had to live through,
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 have an impact on the
world that he already probably had a great positive impact, but had a chance to stop
maybe World War II or stop some of the evils.
When you look at how weak Hitler was from much of the 30s relative to militarily, relative
to everything else, how many people could've done a lot to stop him?
And FDR in particular didn't.
He tried to play, not pacify, but basically do diplomacy and let Germany do Germany, let
Europe do Europe, and focus on America.
Is there something you would, 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.
And part of that was beyond the imagination of human beings.
But it's clear in his papers that as early as 1934, people he respected, who he knew
well told him that Hitler was very dangerous, they also thought Hitler was crazy, that he
was a lunatic.
Hamilton Fish Armstrong, who was a friend of Roosevelt's, who was actually at the Council
on Foreign Relations in New York, had a meeting with Hitler in 1934.
I remember reading the account of this, and he basically said to FDR, this man is gonna
cause a war, he's gonna 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 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 committed to appeasement.
As you know, you're obviously very knowledgeable about this.
The French were as well.
It was very hard.
The Russian government, the Soviet government, was cooperating to remilitarize Germany.
So there weren't a lot of Allies out there either.
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, and it 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?
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, those of his own Dutch ancestry and from Western Europe.
And so 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 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 rise above that natural human inclination
to protect, to do the us versus them, to protect the inner circle, and to 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.
Within a few years, he's a major figure influencing US foreign policy at the height of US power.
But while he's doing that, 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's
going to be that smart Jew I call 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, and 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 U.S. 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, at 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 politics, what post-World War II, in the 50s?
Yes.
So he actually, in the 40s even, it's an extraordinary story.
He comes to the United States in 1938, just before Kristallnacht.
His family leaves.
He actually grew up right outside of Nuremberg.
They leave right before Kristallnacht in fall of 1938.
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.
He's sent from the first time outside of a kosher home.
He had been in a kosher home his entire life.
He's sent to South Carolina to eat ham for Uncle Sam.
And then he is, and this is extraordinary, at the age of 20, barely speaking English,
he is sent back to Germany with the U.S. Army in an elite counterintelligence role.
Why?
Because they need German speakers.
He came when he was 15, so he actually understands the society.
I mean, 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 counterintelligence.
He forms a network there that stays with him the rest of his career.
There's a gentleman named Fritz Kramer, 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.
I'm finding him in this, I don't want to, you can only get lucky so many times because
he continues to get lucky in terms of being at the right place in history for many decades
until today.
Yeah.
Well, he has a knack for that.
I spent a lot of time talking with him.
And what comes through very quickly is that he has an eye for power.
It's I think unhealthy.
He's obsessed with power.
Can you explain like an observer of power or does he want power himself?
Yes.
Both of those things.
Both of those.
And I think, I explained this in the book.
He doesn't agree with what I'm going to say now, but I think I'm right and I think he's
right.
It's very hard to analyze yourself, right?
I think he develops an obsession with gaining power because he sees what happens when you
have no power.
He experiences the trauma.
His father is a very respected Gymnasium Lehrer in Germany.
Even though he's Jewish, he's actually the teacher of German classics to the German kids.
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, in Gymnasium Lehrer, like professors
here, right, to then be in this position, his mother has to open and catering business
when they come to New York.
It's a typical immigrant story, but he sees the trauma.
His grandparents are killed by the Nazis.
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 effect of that?
It's hard.
I mean, most of us, if we've had trauma, it's believable that it's traumatic because you
don't talk about it.
We have a friend who interviews 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 for my own life everything that I've ever done is just the
result of the complicated relationship with my father.
I tend to...
I had a really difficult time, I did a podcast conversation with him.
I saw it actually.
It's great.
I regret everything.
I could never do that with my father.
But 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 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 been a part of so many interesting moments of American history, of world history
from the Cold War of Vietnam War until today.
What stands out to you as a particularly important moment in his career that made who he is?
Well, I think what made his career in many ways was 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, 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 forevermore.
So that's what really, I think, boosts him.
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 US policy without the authority to do that
and direct US policy, and then build a relationship with Mao Zedong and Joe Enlai that was unthinkable
just four or five years earlier.
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 in the moment of American history where there's a very powerful anti-communism.
Correct.
So communism is seen as much more even than today as the enemy.
Correct.
China in particular, they were one of our key enemies in Vietnam.
And in Korea, American forces were fighting Chinese forces directly.
Chinese forces come over the border.
Thousands of Americans died at the hand of Chinese forces.
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 speaks to the very pragmatic approach that he's taken, the realistic approach versus
the idealistic approach, the termed real politic.
What is this thing?
What is this approach to world politics?
So real politic for Kissinger is 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.
And 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.
Real politic views the world in a hierarchy of power.
How does real politic realize itself in the world?
What does that really mean?
How do you push forward the interest of your own country?
You said there's power centers, but it is a big, bold move to negotiate, to work with
a communist nature, with your enemies that are powerful.
What is the sort of, if you can further elaborate the philosophy behind it?
So 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 real politic, 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.
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.
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 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, 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 Detente 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 to limit their abilities.
We play to our strengths.
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.
There are many insights into how he preferred to build relationships.
We're talking about, again, it's the one-on-one.
Is it through policy or is it through phone conversations?
Is there any cool insights that you could speak to?
Kissinger is the ultimate kiss-up.
He is.
Some used to make fun of him, in fact, even the filmmaker from Doctor Strange Love whose
name I'm forgetting.
Stanley Kubrick called him kiss-up at that time.
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, very personalistic.
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.
We'll look back on you as the great leader.
Some of this sounds like BS, but it's serious.
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.
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.
He performs.
He builds a relationship.
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.
Don't forget that I'm doing this for you.
You get mutual dependency in a Hegelian way.
He builds this personal dependency through ego and through performance.
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 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.
One of the things that I admire about gangsters is they don't backstab those in the inner
circle, like loyalty above all else.
I mean, at least that's the sense I've gotten from the stories of the past, at least, is
where would you put Kissinger on that?
Is he loyalty above 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 when you're knocked off the chessboard.
It's the latter with him.
He's backstabbing quite a lot and he's self-serving, but he also makes himself so useful that even
though Nixon knows he's doing that, Nixon still needs him.
By the way, on that 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 he's very good at manipulating people and we had about 12
or 13 interviews, usually informal over lunch and this was many years ago, but this is probably
not more than 10 years ago.
Did you find yourself being like sweet talked, like to where you like go back home later
and look in the mirror and 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's unwilling to, and I think this is a weakness, he's unwilling to admit mistake.
Others make mistakes, but he doesn't and he certainly won't take on any of the big criticisms
that are pushed.
I understand why.
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 it.
He does not like criticisms at all.
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 there's the fragility, but there's also the enormous charm and the enormous intelligence.
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 a human history,
human civilization, what do you think works best in the way we progress forward?
A realistic approach, do whatever it takes, control the centers of power to play a game
for the greater interests of the good guys, quote unquote.
Or lead by idealism, which is truly act in the best version of the ideas you represent
as opposed to 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, as I get into my 40s, 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 real politic 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 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.
And so you have to remember why it is, what Hans Morgenthau 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 in democracy is an 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 blow down again to the corrupting nature of power that
nobody can hold power for very long before you start acting in the interest of power
as opposed to the interest of your ideals that's impossible to be like somebody like
Kissinger who is essentially in power for many, many decades.
And still remember what are the initial ideals that you strove to achieve?
Yes, I think that's exactly right.
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, 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 would sound, if he made them explicit, he would sound hypocritical.
Correct.
Well, on that, let me ask you about war.
America often presents itself to its own people, but just the leaders.
When they look in the mirror, I get the sense that we think of ourselves as the good guys.
And especially this begins sometimes to look hypocritical when you're waging war.
What's a good, is there a good way to know when you've lost all sense of what it is to
be good?
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 what is a war crime?
In some circles, Kissinger is accused of contributing, being a war criminal.
Yes.
And I argue in the book, he's not a war criminal, but that doesn't mean that he didn't misuse
military power.
I think a just war is 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 kill
as few people as necessary.
That doesn't mean they won't be killing, but as few as necessary, proportionality.
Your means should be proportional to your ends.
And 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 how we get into torture in the war on terror.
Is there some kind of lesson for the future that you can take away from that?
Yes.
I think the first set of lessons that I've shared as a historian 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 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 from a parenting
perspective.
Let me speak as a person with no kids and a single guy as an, let me be the expert in
the room on parenting.
No, it does seem that it's a very difficult thing to do to, even though you know that
your kid was making a mistake, to let them make a mistake, to give them the freedom to
make them a mistake, 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 to move out knowing that there's
going to be a lot of suffering, economic suffering, injustices, terrorist organizations
growing, committing crimes on its own people and potentially committing crimes against
allies, violence against allies, violence against the United States.
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 an engineer
to think about this is what makes it endlessly fascinating for me.
And I think the real intellectual work is at the level of the art, and I think probably
engineering at its highest level becomes an art as well.
So policymaking you never know, 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 US
has put in.
And the fact that, as you said correctly, it's not doing well right now after 20 years
of that investment, I might like a company that I invest in, but after 20 years of my
throwing money in that company, it's time to get out.
Well, in some sense, getting out now is that's kind of obvious.
I'm more interested in how we figure out in the future how to get out earlier.
I mean, at this point, it's stayed too long and it's obvious, the data, the investment,
nothing is working.
So, the very little data points to us staying there, I'm more interested in, you know, being
in a relationship, 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 the difficult thing.
You have to ask yourself, whether it's a relationship or you're talking about policymaking
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 ask.
To be honest with you.
You have to be very honest.
And in a policymaking context, we have to actually do the same thing we do in a relationship
context.
What do we do in a relationship context?
We ask other friends who are observing.
We ask for other observers.
This is actually just a scientific method element actually, right?
That we can't, the Heisenberg principle, I can't see it because I'm too close to it.
I'm changing it by looking at it, right?
I need others to tell me in a policymaking context, this is why you need to hear from
other people, not just the generals, because here's the thing about the generals.
They generally are patriotic, hardworking people, but they're too close.
They're not lying.
They're too close.
They always think they can do better.
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, so the Cold War
is ancient history to them.
In fact, the Cold War to them is as far removed as the 1950s were to me.
It's unbelievable.
It's almost like World War II for my generation and Cold War for them.
It's so far removed.
The collapse of the Soviet Union doesn't mean anything to them.
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.
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 builders of things.
What is Khrushchev said?
Say, we're going to catch Britain in five years and then the United States after that.
To explain that sense of fear to them that they don't have of those others, that's really
important.
I mean, the Cold War was fundamentally 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.
Your senses and start to interrupt, but your senses, 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 promoted ways of life.
The Soviet Union never actually lived communism, but I think my reading of Stalin is he really
tried to go there.
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 I do think that mattered.
I do think that mattered enormously.
And for the United States point of view, 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 and the United States played a key role in that.
That's the reality of the Cold War, but I think it means different things now to my
students and others.
They focus 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 healthcare systems that other countries
build and you compare them to the United States, race issues also.
So they look at the costs, which I think often happens after a project is done.
You look back at that.
Second, I think they're also more inclined to see the world as less bipolar, to see
the role of China as more complicated.
Post-colonial or anti-colonial movements, independent states in Africa and Latin America,
that gets more attention.
So one of the criticisms now is because you forget 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 the United States society, 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 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 they're needing to be a role of having support
for each other on certain political levels, economic levels, and then also supporting
entrepreneurs.
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 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.
There's no communism in the United States.
There never has been, and there certainly isn't now.
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 what the sort of Bernie Sanders kind of socialist elements, that's very different.
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 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, 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.
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.
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 how we can reform capitalism today and get
rid of this false worry about communism in the United States.
Yeah.
You know what?
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 do see the United States as this, there's
this fire that burns of individual freedoms, of property rights, 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 reallocation of resources is a fundamentally
different kind of discussion that 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 Soviet Union.
But of course, you never know, the slippery slope has a way of changing things, but I
do believe the things you're born with is just so core to this country.
It's part of the, I don't know what your thoughts are, we are in Texas.
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 such a declaration of individual rights that's so different than
the conversations I hear with my Russian family and my Russian friends, that the gun, it's
very possible that having guns is bad for society in the sense that it will lead to
more violence.
But there's something about this discussion 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 we 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 what's articulated quite often.
I think combining your two points, which are great points, I think there is something
about American individualism, which is deeply ingrained in our culture and our society.
It means that the kinds of bad things that happen are different, usually not as bad,
but our individualism often covers up for vigilante activity and individual violence
toward people that you wouldn't have in a more collective culture.
In the Soviet Union, it was at a much worse scale and it was done by government organizations.
In the United States, it's individuals, the history of lynching in our country, for example.
Sometimes it's individual police officers, sometimes it's others.
Again, the vast majority of police officers are good people and don't do harm to people,
but there are these examples and they are able to fester in our society because of our
individualism.
Now, gun ownership is about personal freedom, I think, for a lot of people.
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.
I think that's a fair point, but I think it's also a fair point to say that as with everything,
defining what self-defense is is really important.
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 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.
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.
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?
Guns have this complicated issue that it can cause harm to others.
I tend to see maybe legalization of drugs.
I tend to believe that we should have the freedom to do stupid things.
Yeah.
So long as we're not harming lots of other people.
Yes.
Because of course, have the property that they can be used.
It's not just 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 consider that kind of stuff.
By the way, as a side note to the listeners, there's been a bunch of people saying that
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 think through different ideas, whether they're left, right, or libertarian, that's true for
gun control.
That's true for immigration.
That's true for all of that.
I think we should have discussions in the space of ideas versus in the space of bins.
We put each other in labels and we put each other in.
300%.
And also change our minds all the time.
Try out, say stupid stuff with the best of intention, try 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 human civilization is destroyed itself and alien graduate students
are studying it like three, four, five centuries from now, what do you think we'll remember
about this period in history?
The 20th century, the 21st century, this time, we had a couple of wars, we had a charismatic
black president in the United States, we had a couple of pandemics, what do you think we'll
actually stand out in history?
No doubt the rapid technological innovation of the last 20 to 30 years, 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.
But this will be seen as that origin moment that when we went from playing below the rim
to playing above the rim, right, to be 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 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.
So this whole virtual world and the virtual personas and the avatars and all of that,
I think that's going to be a big part of how people remember our time.
Also the sort of biotechnology element of it, which the vaccines are part of.
It's amazing how quickly, this is the great triumph, how quickly we've produced and distributed
these vaccines.
And of course, there are problems with who's taking them, but the reality is, I mean, this
is light speed compared to what it would have been like, not just in 1918, in 1980.
One of the, 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 brilliance of the human species.
That's right.
That's right.
This is, yes, there are scientists who use their authority improperly that have an ego
that 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.
That doesn't mean science isn't incredible and the vaccines, I mean, I don't often talk
about it because it's so political and 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.
It's in the long arc of history.
Yeah.
It'll be seen as an outstanding accomplishment and as a step toward whatever, maybe they're
doing vaccines or something that replaces a vaccine in 10 seconds at that point, right?
Yeah.
It'll be seen as a step.
It'll be seen as positive.
I think one of the negatives they will point to will be 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 as the last time most people lived on earth when a couple of centuries afterwards
we were all dissipated throughout the solar system and the galaxy.
Very possible.
If the local resident, hometown resident, Mr. Elon Musk has anything to do with it.
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 incredible levels
of innovation.
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 by two avenues.
One is artificial intelligence, 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 the magic to humans being...
And we're getting back to it.
I mean, 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 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.
And did you do something you were...
Yes.
You know, my favorite novel, I always tell people this.
I love reading novels.
I'm a historian and I think the historian and the novelist are actually...
And the technology innovator are all actually one in the same.
We're all...
Storytellers.
Storytellers.
And we're all in the imagination space.
And 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 Mann's
Budenbrooks.
And it's the story of a family in Lübeck 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 of hours.
cycles of life, challenges of adjusting to the world around you.
And it's just a very moving reflection on the limits of human agency and how 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 I'm very moved by that.
I'm very moved by Tolstoy's War and Peace.
I assign that every year to my students.
It'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.
It doesn't mean we don't have some control.
You've 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's that from?
So I speak, in addition to English, I speak reasonably well, depending on how much vodka
I've had.
I guess.
Russian.
I speak French and German.
I learned those for 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, 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.
We've really gone through Poland and come to the United States.
We 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 a part of that culture, a part of that time?
Yes.
Language is crucial to understanding a culture.
And even if you learn the language as I have, you're learning Russian and German and French,
it's still not the same as also being a native speaker either, as you know.
But I think language tells you a lot about mannerism, about assumptions, the very fact
that English doesn't have a formal U, but Russian has a formal U, right, V, versus T,
right?
German has a formal U, Z, versus D, right?
So the fact that English doesn't have a formal U tells you something about Americans, right?
And that's just one example.
The fact 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, we, the, which is there's a fascinating transition.
So I guess in English, we just have you.
There's a fascinating transition that persists to this day is of a formalism and politeness
where it's an initial kind of dance of interaction that's different methods of signaling respect.
I guess we don't, the language provides that in the United States, in the English language,
there's fewer tools to show that kind of respect, which has potentially positive or negative
effects on it flattens the society where like a teenager could talk to an older person
and show like a, like a difference that 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 aristocracy.
Yeah.
These elements of language reflect aristocracy.
The surf would never refer to the master, even if the master is younger, it's always
for you.
Right.
And again, it's always for you.
Right.
I mean, and so it's, 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 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, these two words mean the same thing from two languages.
They never mean exactly the same thing.
Dosvedanya is really not goodbye, right?
And there's something, right now there's people talking about idea of lived experience.
One of the ways to force yourself into this idea of lived experiences by learning another
language is to understand that you can perceive the world in a totally different way, 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 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, in making their
way in the world?
Yes.
Two things I believe that I say to a lot of talented young people.
First, 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.
There's the scene in the graduate where the guy tells Dustin Hoffman, go into plastics,
money in plastics.
We don't know.
So many of my students now have parents who are telling them, bright students, go to the
business school.
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 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 if you're talented
and usually passionate 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 you.
That's where capitalism works.
People will find it valuable.
Whether it's violin playing or engineering or poetry, 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 it's really important at the very beginning of your career, even
before you're in your job, to start building your networks.
But networks are not just people you're on Facebook with or Twitter with.
That's fine.
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 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.
On the passion side, I do find that as somebody who has a lot of passions, I find the second
part to that is committing, which sucks because life is finite.
And when you commit, you say, well, I'm never going to be good.
When you choose one of the two passions, one of the two things you're interested in, you're
basically saying, I'm letting go.
I'm saying, that's you done you.
That's true.
That's true.
Which is actually what does with done your means.
Not to buy, but letting go.
That's exactly right.
I think that's exactly right.
I think you do have to make choices.
You do 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 it's important that whatever you do, even if it's a small thing, 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 write the best possible book review
I can.
Why?
Because you develop a culture about yourself, which is about excellence.
Yeah.
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 am with David Foster Wallace.
I'm unboreable.
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 impossible
to be interesting, that's even more joyful to find the joy within that and the excellence.
Just the Girodreams of sushi making the same freaking sushi over and over and becoming
a master of that, that can be truly joyful.
There's a sense of pride on the pragmatic level.
You never know when someone will spot that.
Intelligent people who perform at the level of high excellence look for others, who do
you say?
Yeah.
And it radiates some kind of signal.
It's weird.
It's weird what you attract to yourself when you just focus on mastery and pursuing excellence
in something.
This is the cool thing about it.
That's the joy I've really truly experienced.
I didn't have to do much work.
It's just cool people, I find myself in groups of cool people.
Really people who are excited about life, who are passionate about life, there's a fire
in their eyes that at the end of the day just makes life fun.
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.
I have the great... I say this that I don't care about money.
I have to think about what that means because some people criticize that idea as like, yeah,
that must be nice to say that because for many periods of my life I had very little
money, but I think we're living 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 that had the chance to get to know, and I'm
sure you'd agree with this, they do what they do because they're passionate about the product.
They're not just in it to make money.
In fact, that's when they get into trouble when they're 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 child of immigrants from Russia and Poland, who never went to college,
her proudest day I think was when I went to college, 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 you treat them the same way you treat the billionaire at the top of the podium.
And she did that.
She didn't just say that.
Some people say that and don't do it.
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 her saying to me, no, you treat everyone with respect.
You treat 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.
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.
It's nice to the person at the bottom or the totem pole when you want to get ahead in the
line for your driver's license.
But are you nice to them when you don't need that?
They notice that.
And even when nobody's watching, there has a weird effect on you that's going to 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 Emily taught me, and I think we've all had relatives who have taught
us this, that you could be very uneducated, she was very uneducated, she had a high school
diploma, but I think she was working in a delicatessen in New York while she was in
high school, or maybe it was at Gimbal's or somebody.
So she probably 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 of their egos
are the ones who are least educated in the way of the world, least curious, and ultimately
wisdom comes from curiosity.
And sometimes getting a PhD can get in the way of curiosity as opposed to in power curiosity.
Let me ask, from a historical perspective, you've studied some of human history.
So maybe you have an insight about what's the meaning of life?
Do you ever ask when you look at history, the why?
Yeah, I do all the time, and I don't have an answer.
It's the mystery that we can't answer.
I do think what it means is what we make of it.
There's no universal.
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 you want to care about and make that the meaning in your life.
I wonder how that changes throughout human history, whether there's a constant.
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, 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, there seems to be a direction to this thing.
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 want our families to do better.
We are familial, and family doesn't just mean biological family.
You can have all kinds of ways you define family and community, and 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 artificial life as well.
So to expand the lesson to the advice that your grandmother taught you is I think we
should treat robots and AI systems good as well, even if they're currently not very intelligent,
as one day they might be.
I think that's exactly right, and we should think through 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, for ourselves also to your point.
So we behave the right way, so we don't misuse this.
We 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 Surrey, and thank you to Element,
MonkPak, Bell Campo, FourSigmatic, and EightSleep.
Check them out in the description to support this podcast.
And now, let me leave you 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.