YouSaid · the spoken record

Dan Carlin

lines on the record: 181
first: 2020-11-03
most recent: 2020-11-03
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And morality in a way that favors the state that you can turn people who today we look at as unbelievably brave and moral and crusading for righteousness and turn them into enemies of the people. So, I mean, in my mind, it would be people like that.”
2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's another thing to say, oh no, I'm going to display them in a way that with this regime, that's a death sentence. And not just for me, for my family, right? And these regimes, there was not a lot of distinction made between father and son and wives. That's a remarkable sacrifice to make and far beyond what I think I would even be capable of. And so the admiration comes from seeing people who appear to be more morally profound than you are yourself. So when I look at this, I look at that kind of thing and I just say, wow. And the funny thing is if you'd have gone to most average Germans on the street in 1942 and said, what do you think of these people? They're going to think of them as traitors who probably got what they deserved. So that's the eye of the beholder thing. It's the power of the state to sow propagandize value.”
2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are people in the German military who opposed and worked against Hitler, for example. But to me, that's almost cowardly compared to what these young people did in the white rose movement because those people in the Wehrmacht, for example, who were secretly trying to undermine Hitler, they're not really putting their lives on the line to the same degree. And so I think when I look at heroes, and listen, I remember once saying there were no conscientious objectors in Germany as a way to point out to people that you didn't have a choice. You know, you were going to serve in there. And I got letters from Jehovah's Witnesses who said, yes, there were. And we got sent to the concentration camps. Those are remarkably brave things. It's one thing to...”
2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because they were so open about it, it's almost a certainty, right? That's incredibly moving to me. So when we talk, and we had talked earlier about sort of the human spirit and all that kind of thing.”
2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That doesn't sound patriotic, it wouldn't sound patriotic here in this country if you made a similar argument. I will go away from the 1930s and go to the 1940s to answer your question. So there is movements like the White Rose movement in Germany, which involved young people, really, and from various backgrounds, religious backgrounds often who worked openly against the Nazi government at a time when power was already consolidated, the Gestapo was in full force, and they execute people who are against the government. And these young people would go out and distribute pamphlets. And many of them got their heads cut off with guillotines for their trouble. And they knew that that was going to be the penalty. That is a remarkable amount of bravery and sacrifice and willingness to die and almost not even willing.”
2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So earlier we had talked about Putin and we had talked about patriotism and love of country and those sorts of things. In order to be a hero in Nazi Germany by our views here, you would have had to have been anti-patriotic to the average German's viewpoint in the 1930s, right? You would have to have opposed your own government and your own country. And that's a very It would be a very weird thing to go to people in Germany and say, listen, the only way you're going to be seen as a good German and a hero to the country that will be your enemies is we think you should oppose your own government. It's a strange position to put the people in a government in saying you need to be against your leader. You need to oppose your government's policies. You need to oppose your government. You need to hope and work for its downfall.”
2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Nomadic, we're Native American peoples or tribal peoples anywhere generally do not get the advantage of being able to write the history of their heroes.”
2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. And I feel that way about a lot of those nomadic Confederacy builders that they really seem to be these figures that stand out as extraordinary in one way or another. Remembering, by the way, that almost all the history of them were written by the enemies that they so mistreated that they were probably never going to get any good press. They didn't write themselves.”
2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think I can label great leaders. And I'm always fascinated by that idea that, and I'm trying to remember who the quote was by, that great men, oh, Lord Acton, so great men are often not good men. And that in order to be great, you would have to jettison many of the moral qualities that we normally would consider a Jesus or a Gandhi. These qualities that one looks at as the good upstanding moral qualities that we should all aspire to as examples, right? The Buddha, whatever it might be, those people wouldn't make good leaders because what you need to be a good leader often requires the kind of choices that a true philosophical Diogenes moral man wouldn't make. So I don't have an answer to your question. How about that? That's a very long way of saying, I don't know.”
2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Script person who didn't really impress anybody with his skills. And then in the 1920s, it's all of a sudden As you said, sort of the man of the hour, right? Feeling that Jengis Khan, and we don't really know, was an impressive human being from the get-go. And then he was raised in this environment with pressure on all sides. So you start with this diamond and then you polish it and you harden it his whole life. Hitler seems to be a very unimpressive gemstone most of his life. And then all of a sudden, so, I mean,”
2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But Hitler's, I mean, if you said who was Hitler today, one of the top things you're going to say is he was an anti Semite. Well, then you have to draw a distinction between general, regular anti-Semite Semitism that was pretty common in the era and something that was a rabid level of anti-Semitism. But Hitler didn't seem to show a rabid level of antisemitism until after or at the very end of the First World War. So if this is a defining part of this person's character and much of what we consider to be his evil stems from that, what happened to this guy when he's an adult, right? He's already fought in the war to change him so. I mean, it's almost like the old, there was always a movie theme. Somebody gets hit by something on the head and their whole personality changes, right? I mean, it almost seems something like that. So I don't think I call that necessarily a great leader. To me, the interesting thing about Hitler is what the hell happened to a non-discriminatory.”
2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is a wicked amount of things to have achieved. He's very impressive as a figure. Attila is very impressive as a figure. Hitler's an interesting figure. He's one of those people because, you know, the more you study about Hitler, the more you wonder where the defining moment was. Because if you look at his life, I mean, Hitler was a relatively common soldier in the First World War. I mean, he was brave. He got some decorations. In fact, the highest decoration he got in the First World War was given to him by a Jewish officer. And he often didn't talk about that decoration, even though it was the more prestigious one because it would open up a whole can of worms. You didn't want to get into.”
2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At home plate, and he had to hit Alexander started on third base. And so I try to draw a distinction between them. Genghis Khan is tough because there's two traditions. The tradition that we grew up with here in the United States and that I grew up learning was that he was a self-made man. But there is a tradition, and it may be one of those things that's put after the fact because a long time ago, whether or not you had blue blood in your veins was an important distinction. And so the distinction that you'll often hear from Mongolian history is that this was a nobleman who had been deprived of his inheritance. So he was a blue blood anyway. I don't know which is true. There's certainly, I mean, when you look at a Genghis Khan though, you have to go.”
2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know who assassinated Philip, but then handed the greatest army the world had ever seen to his son, who then did great things with it. You see this pattern many times. So in my mind I'm not sure Alexander really can be that great when you compare him to people who arose from nothing. So the difference between what we would call in the United States, the self-made man or the one who inherits a fortune. There's an old line that it's a slur, but it's about rich people and it's like he was born on third base and thought he hit a triple, right? Philip was born.”
2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Get that job. In fact, he reminds me of a lot of other leaders, Frederick the Great, for example, in Prussia. These are people who inherited the greatest army of their day. Alexander, unless he was an imbecile, was going to be great no matter what. Because, I mean, if you inherit the Wehrmacht, you're going to be able to do something with it, right? Alexander's father may have been greater. Philip, Philip II was the guy who literally did create a strong kingdom from a disjointed group of people that were continually beset by their neighbors. He's the one that reformed that army, took things that he had learned from other Greek leaders like the Theban leader at Pemenundez, and then laboriously over his lifetime stabilized the frontiers, built this system. He lost an eye doing it. His leg was made lame. This was a man who looked like he built the empire and led from the front ranks. I mean, so, and then who may have been killed by his son.”
2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's an interesting question, and one I've thought a lot about because let's take Alexander the Great as an example, because Alexander fascinated the world of his time, fascinated ever since people have been fascinated with the guy. But Alexander was a hereditary monarch, right? He was handed the kingdom, which is fascinating. Right, but he did not need to rise from nothing.”
2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Chinese diplomatic history was all about keeping these tribes separated. Don't let them form confederations of large numbers of them because then they're unstoppable. Attila was a perfect example. The Huns were the Turks, another large Confederacy of these people, and they were devastating when they could unite. So the diplomatic policy was don't let them. That's what made the Mongols different is Genghis Khan united them. And then unlike most of the tribal Confederacies, he was able, they were able to hold it together for a few generations.”
2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I guess a fan of the Mongols would say that the difference and what made the Mongols different wasn't the weapon system or the fighting or the warriors or the armor or anything, it was Genghis Khan. And if you go look at the other really dangerous from the outside world's perspective, dangerous step, nomadic confederacies from past history was always when some great leader emerged that could unite the tribes. And you see the same thing in Native American history to a degree too. You had people like Attila, right? Or there was one called Tumen. You go back in history and these people make the history books because they caused an enormous amount of trouble for their settled neighbors that normally, I mean, Chinese, Byzantine, and Persian approaches to the steppe people were always the same. They would pick out tribes to be friendly with. They would give them money, gifts, hire them, and they would use them against the other tribes. And generally, Byzantine, especially...”
2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everything in the saddle that creates something that is difficult to copy. And it gave them a military advantage. You know, I enjoy reading actually about when that military advantage ended. So 17th and 18th century, when the Chinese on one flank and the Russians on the other are beginning to use firearms and stuff to break this military power of these various khans. The Mongols were simply the most dominating and most successful of the Confederacies, but if you break it down, they really formed the nucleus at the top of the pyramid of the apex of the food chain. And a lot of the people that were known as Mongols were really lots of other tribes, non-Mongolian tribes, that when the Mongols conquer you after they killed a lot of you, they incorporated you into their Confederacy and often made you go first. You know, you're going to fight somebody. We're going to make these.”
2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Illustrated it, but the Mongols and the Scythians and Scythians and the Avars and all these people did it too, where they would shoot from underneath the horses' neck, hiding behind the horse the whole way. You look at a picture of somebody doing that and it's insane. This is what the Byzantines couldn't do and the Chinese couldn't do. It was a different level of harnessing a human animal relationship that gave them a military advantage that could not be copied, right? It could be emulated, but they were never as good, right? That's why they always hired these people. They hired mercenaries from these areas because they were incomparable, right? So the combination of people who were shooting bows and arrows from the time they were toddlers, who were riding from the time they were, who rode all the time. I mean, the Huns were bow-legged, the Romans said, because they were never, they ate, slept.”
2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What the nomads had of the Eurasian steppe was this relationship between human beings and animals that change the equation. It was how they rode horses. And societies like the Byzantines, which would form one flank of the steppe and then all the way on the other side you had China and below that you had Persia These societies would all attempt to create mounted horsemen who used archery and they did a good job but they were never the equals of the nomads because those people were literally raised in the saddle. They compared them to centaurs the Comanches, great example, considered to be the best horse riding warriors in North America. Comanches, I always loved watching there's paintings George Catlin, the famous painter who painted the Comanches”
2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, these are all the nomadic, you know, the nomads of the Eurasian steppe were huge, huge players in the history of the world until gunpowder nullified their traditional weapon system, which I've been fascinated with because their traditional weapon system is not one you could copy because you were talking about being the greatest warriors you could be. Every warrior society I've ever seen values that.”
2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When you have Kubla Khan, as the Emperor of China, it's beginning to be a different thing, right? And the Mongols, when their empire broke up, the ones that were in settled the so-called settled societies, right? Iran, places like that, they will become more like over time the rulers of those places were traditionally. And the Mongols in, say, like the cognate of the Golden Horde, which is still in their traditional nomadic territories, will remain traditionally more Mongol. But when you start talking about who the Mongols were, I try to make a distinction. They're not some really super special people. They're just the latest Confederacy in an area that saw nomadic Confederacies going back to the beginning of recorded history, the Scythians, the Sarmatians, the Avars, the Huns, the”
2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm going to back up a second. I'm reminded of the line set about the Romans that they create a wasteland and call it peace. Wow. But there's a lot of conquerors like that, right? You will sit there. And listen, historians forever have, it's the trade, it's the famous trade-offs of empire. And they'll say, well, look at the trade that they facilitated. And look at, you know, the religion, all those kinds of things, but they come at the cost of all those peoples that they conquered forcibly and by force integrated into their empire. The one thing we need to remember about the Mongols that makes them different than, say, the Romans, and this is complex stuff and way above my pay grade, but I'm fascinated with it. And it's more like the Comanches that you just brought up, is that the Mongols are not a settled society. They come from a nomadic tradition. Now, several generations later,”
2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Been portrayed as something like a liberal empire. And the idea of Mongol universality is more about conquering the world. And it's like saying, you know, we're going to bring stability to the world by conquering it. Well, what if that's Hitler? He could make the same case, or Hitler wasn't really the world conqueror like that because he wouldn't have been trying to make it equal for all peoples. But my point being that it kind of takes the positive moral slant out of it if their motivation wasn't a positive moral slant to the motivation. And the Mongols didn't see it that way. And I think the way that it's portrayed is like... But it sure doesn't look like this was an attempt to create some wonderful place where everybody was living a better life than they were before. I think that's later people putting a nice rosy spin on it.”
2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I always like to point out is yes, but the con could still come in with his representatives to your town decide your daughter was a beautiful woman that they wanted in the Khan's concubine and they would take them. So how liberal an empire is this, right? So many of the things that they get credit for is though there's some kind of nice guys may in another way of looking at it just be a simple mechanism of control, right? A way to keep the empire stable. They're not doing it out of the goodness of their heart. They have decided that this is the best. And I love because the Mongols were what we would call a pagan people now. I love the fact that they, and I think we call it, I forgot the term we used, it had to do with like they were hedging their bets religiously, right? They didn't know which God was the right one. So as long as you're all praying for the health of the Khan, we're maximizing the chances that whoever the gods are, they get the message, right? So I think it's...”
2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you want to say, oh, yes, he cleared out the deadwood and made for, well, then it's a positive thing. If you say my family was in the forest fire that he set, you're not going to see it that way. Much of what Genghis Khan is credited with on the upside, right? So things like religious toleration. And you'll say, well, religiously, the Mongols were religiously tolerant. And so this makes them almost like a liberal reformer kind of thing. But this needs to be seen within the context of their empire, which was very much like the Roman viewpoint, which is the Romans didn't care at a lot of time what your local people worshipped. They wanted stability. And if that kept stability and kept you paying taxes and didn't require the legionaries to come in, then they didn't care, right? And the cons were the same way. Like they don't care what you're practicing as long as it doesn't disrupt their empire and cause them trouble.”
2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the idea was that sometimes the world has become sowhelmed with bureaucracy or corruption or just stagnation that somebody has to come in or some group of people or some force has to come in and do the equivalent of a forest fire to clear out all the dead wood so that the forest itself can be rejuvenated and society can then move forward. And there's a lot of these periods where the historians of the past will portray these figures who come in and do horrific things as creating an almost service for mankind, right? Creating the foundations for a new world that will be better than the old one. And it's a recurring theme. And so this was the sub-theme of the cons podcast because otherwise you don't need me to tell you the story of the Mongols, but I'm going to bring up the historical arsonist element. But this gets to how the Khan has been portrayed.”
2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As I often say, I'm not a historian, which is why what I try to bring to the hardcore history podcasts are these sub-themes. So each show has a, and they're not, I try to kind of soft pedal them. So they're not always like really right in front of your face. In that episode, the soft pedaling sub-theme had to do with what we referred to as a historical arsonist. And it's because some historians have taken the position that sometimes and most of this is earlier. So if historians don't do this very much anymore, but these were the wonderful questions I grew up with that blend, it's almost the intersection between history and philosophy”
2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let's look at it more like a stock market and that you have fluctuations in the truthfulness or believability of the press and there are periods where it was higher than other periods. The funny thing about the so-called clickbait era, and I do think it's terrible, but I mean it resembles earlier eras to me. So I always compare it to when I was a kid growing up when I thought journalism was as good as it's ever gotten. It was never perfect. It's also something that you see very rarely in other governments around the world. And there's a reason that journalists are often killed regularly in a lot of countries. And it's because they report on things that the authorities do not want reported on. And I've always thought that that was what journalism should do. But it's got to be truthful. Otherwise, it's just a different kind of propaganda, right?”
2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Carried. The newspapers were the water, and the newspapers were the big thing up until certainly the late 60s, early 70s. The newspapers were still the water carrier of the government, right? And they were the water carriers of the owners of the newspaper. So let's not pretend there was some angelic, wonderful time. And I'm saying to me because I was the one who brought it up, let's not pretend there was any super age of truthful journalism and all that. And I mean, you go to the revolutionary period in American history and it looks every bit as bad as today, right?”
2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, and let me de romanticize the American history of this too, because the American press was often just as biased, just as, I mean, I always looked to the 1970s as the high watermark of the American journalistic, the post-watergate era, where it was actively going after the abuses of the government and all these things. But there was a famous speech, very quiet, though, very quiet, given by Catherine Graham, who was a Washington Post editor, I believe. And I actually, somebody sent it to me. We had to get it off of a journalism like a JSTOR kind of thing. And she at a luncheon assured that to the government people at the luncheon, don't worry, this is not going to be something that we make a trend. Because the position of the government is still something that was”
2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Be to go through before the internet all the newspapers and find the, I used to know all the journalists by name and I could pick out who they were. And I have a hard time picking out the truth from the falsehood. So I think constantly, how are people who don't have all this background, who have lives or who are trained in other specialties? How do they do it? But if the government is the only approved outlet for truth, A traditional American and a lot of other traditional societies based on these ideas of the Enlightenment that I talked about earlier would see that as a disaster waiting to happen or a tyranny in progress. Does that make sense?”
2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And okay, so herein lies, and this again, the traditional American perspective, because we've had yellow, so-called yellow journalism since the founding of the republic. That's nothing new. But the problem then comes into play when you remove journalists, even, you know, it's a broad brush thing, but you remove both the crappy ones who are lying and the ones who are telling the truth too, you're left with simply the approved government journalists, right? The ones who are towing the government's line, in which case the truth as you see it, is a different kind of fake news, right? It's the fake news from the government instead of the clickbait news and, oh, yeah, maybe truth mixed into all that too in some of the outlets. The problem I always have with our system here in the United States right now is trying to tease the truth out from all the falsehoods. And look, I've got 30 years in journalism. My job used to be...”
2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No one's really worked on, and again, you would tell me if Putin is putting into place, I know he's talked about it over the years, putting into place a system that can outlive him and that will create the stability that the people in Russia like him for when he's gone. Because if the oligarchs just take over afterwards, then one might argue, well, we had 20 good years of stability. But, I mean, I would say that if we're talking about a ship of state here, the guy steering the ship maybe, if you want to look at it from the Russian point of view, has done a great job, maybe. Just saying. But the rocks are still out there and he's not going to be at the helm forever. So one would think that his job is to make sure that there's going to be someone who can continue to steer the ship for the people of Russia after he's gone. Now, let me ask, because I'm curious, and ignorant. So is he doing that, do you think? Is he setting it up so that when there is no...”
2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Stability here because it's the same problem you have in a monarchy, right? Where you have this one king and he's particularly good or you think he's particularly good, but he's going to turn that job over to somebody else down the road. And the system doesn't guarantee because”
2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, what you're talking about are some of the people who would form an oligarchic class in Russia and that Putin is the guy who can harness the power of the state to keep those people in check. The problem, of course, in a system like that, a strong man system, right, where you have somebody who can hold the reins and steer the ship when the ship is violently in a storm is the succession. So if you're not creating a system that can operate without you, then that terrible instability and that terrible future that you justify the strong man for is just awaiting your future, right? I mean, unless he's actively building the system that will outlive him and allow successors to do what he's doing, then what you've done here is create a temporary, I would think, a temporary”
2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so there's a couple of things that come to mind on that. The first one has to do with the idea of oligarchs. There's a belief in political science. You know, it's not the overall belief, but that every society is sort of an oligarchy, really, if you break it down, right?”
2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do they miss elections? They want the choice to prove it at the ballot box, or are they so in love with him that they wouldn't want to take a chance that someone might vote him out?”
2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What was indoctrinated into your bones in your formative years? It's like your bones are growing, right? And you can't go back. So to me, this is so much a part of who I am that I have a hard time jettisoning that and saying, oh no, Vladimir Putin not being elected anymore is just fine. I'm too much of a product of my upbringing to go there. Does that make sense? Yeah.”
2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, if that's what they want. And look, it would be silly to broad brush the Russians like it would be silly to broad brush anyone, right? Millions and millions of people with different opinions amongst them all. But they seem to like a strong person at the helm. And listen, there's a giant chunk of Americans who do too. In their own country, but an American would say, as long as the freedom of choice is given to the Russians to decide this and not taken away from them, right? It's one thing to say he was freely elected, but a long time ago, and we've done away with elections since then is a different story too. So my attitude on Vladimir Putin is if that's who the Russian people want and you give them the choice, right? If he's only there because they keep electing him, that's a very different story. When he stops offering them the option of choosing him or not choosing him, that's when it begins to look nefarious to someone born and raised with the mindset.”
2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. Studied is a loaded word. And again, I find it hard sometimes to not filter things through an American lens. So as an American, I would say that the Russians should be allowed to have any leader that they want to have. But what an American would say is, but there should be elections, right? So if the Russians choose Vladimir Putin and they keep choosing him, that's their business. Whereas an American, I would have a problem is when that leader stops letting the Russians make that decision. And we would say, well, now you're no longer ruling by the consent of the governed. You've become the equivalent of a person who may be oppressing your people. You might as well be a dictator, right? Now, there's a difference between a freely elected and re-elected and re-elected and re-elected dictator.”
2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, but I mean, I think the idea that this is universal is in and of itself a bias. Now, do I want freedom for everybody else? I sure do. But the people in the Soviet Union who really bought into that wanted the workers of the world to unite and not be exploited by the greedy, blood-sucking people who worked them to death and pocketed all of the fruits of their labor. If you frame it that way, that sounds like justice as well, you know. So it is an eye of the beholder sort of thing.”
2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so I think we have to try to be more understanding. See, the traditional American viewpoint is that if a place like China does not allow their people individual human rights, then they're being denied something. They're being denied, and 100 years ago they would have said they're God-given, rights. Man is born free. And if he's not free, it's because of something done to him. The government has taken away his God-given rights.”
2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Interwoven, this modern military industrial complex with the traditional benefits of the American system and ideology so that they've become intertwined in our thinking, whereas 150 years ago, they were actually considered to be at opposite polarities and a threat to one another. When you talk about the love of the nation, I tend to be suspicious of those things. I tend to be suspicious of government. I tend to try very hard to not be manipulated. And I feel like a large part of what they do is manipulation and propaganda. And so I think a healthy skepticism of the nation state is actually 100% Americanism in the traditional sense of the word. But I also have to recognize, as you so eloquently stated, Americanism is not necessarily universal at all.”
2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Things with suspicion in the first hundred years of the Republic because they saw it as an enemy to the very things that Americans celebrated. How could you have freedom and liberty and individualistic expression if you had an overriding military that was always fighting wars and the founders of this country looked to other examples like Europe, for example, and saw that standing militaries, for example, standing armies were the enemy of liberty? Well, we have a standing army now and one that is totally interwoven in our entire society. If you could go back in time and talk to John Quincy Adams, right, early president of the United States and show him what we have now, he would think it was awful and horrible and that somewhere along the line, the Americans had lost their way and forgotten what they were all about. But we have so successfully”
2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Individual needs of any single person, especially if those things are in conflict with each other, right? If you cannot provide for the greater good because everyone's so individualistic, well, then really what is the better thing to do, right? To suppress individualism so everybody's better off. I think trying to recognize how someone else might see that is important if we want to, you know, you had talked about eliminating war. We talk about eliminating conflict. The first need to do that is to try to understand how someone else might view something differently than yourself. I am famously one of those people who buys in to the ideas of traditional Americanism, right? And look, what a lot of people who live today, I mean, they would seem to think that things like patriotism requires a belief in the strong military and all these things we have today, but that is a corruption of traditional Americanism, which viewed all the...”
2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not just that. Let me add to what you're saying, and I'm very, I spend a lot of time trying to get out of my own biases. It is a fruit. That China, and I always, you know, as an American, I tend to think about this as their government, right? This is a rationale that their government puts forward. But what you just said, you know, is actually, if you can make that viewpoint beautiful is kind of a beautiful way of approaching it, the Chinese would say that what we call human rights in the United States and what we consider to be everybody's birthright around the world is instead Western rights. That's the words they use, Western rights. It's a fundamentally Western-oriented, and I'll go back to the Enlightenment-based ideas on what constitutes the rights of man. And they would suggest that that's not internationally and always applicable, right? That you can make a case, and again, I don't believe this runs against my own personal views, but that you could make a case that the collective well-being of a very large group of people outweighs the”
2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because they're both ideologically based systems involving peoples of many different backgrounds who are united under the umbrella of the ideology.”
2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who's just good, you know? So I think it's very hard to throw away our own biases and preconceptions. And, you know, it's an all eye of the beholder kind of thing. But when you're talking about ideological societies, it is very difficult to throw off all the years of indoctrination into the superiority of your system. I mean, listen, in the Soviet Union, Marxism one way or another was part of every classrooms. You could be studying geometry and they'll throw Marxism in there somehow because that's what united the society and that's what gave it a higher purpose. And that's what made it in the minds of the people who were its defenders a superior, morally superior system. And we do the same thing here. In fact, most people do. But see, you're still French no matter what the ideology or the government might be. So in that sense, it's funny that there would be a Cold War with these two systems.”
2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source