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

“It's hard for me to wipe my own bias away from there, right? Because if I were in Iraq, for example, I would want freedom, right? But if you then leave and let the Iraqis vote for whomever they want, are they going to vote for somebody that will, I mean, you know, you look at Russia now. And I hear from Russians quite a bit because so much of my views on Russia and the Soviet Union were formed in my formative years. And, you know, we were not hearing from many people in the Soviet Union back then, but now you do. You hear from Russians today who will say your views on Stalin are archaic and cold. So you try to reorient your beliefs a little bit, but it goes to this idea of if you gave the people in Russia a free and fair vote, will they vote for somebody who promises them a free and open society based on enlightenment democratic principles? Or will they vote for somebody we in the US would go, what are they doing? They're voting for something strong man.”
2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Banner someday, right? It was a global revolution. So ideological societies are different. And to be a fan of the ideological framework and goal, I mean, I'm a liberty person, right? I would like to see everybody in the world have my system of government, which is part of a bias, right? Because they might not want that. But I think it's better for everyone because I think it's better for me. At the same time, when the ideology, if you consider, and this stems from ideas of the enlightenment and there's a bias there. So my bias are toward the, but you feel, and this is why you say we're going to bring freedom to Iraq. We're going to bring freedom to hear. We're going to bring freedom because we think we're spreading to you something that is just undeniably positive. We're going to free you and give you this.”
2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So let me draw the comparison then, and I often say this that the United States, like the Soviet Union, is an ideological-based society, right? So you take a country like France, it doesn't matter which French government you're in now. The French have been the French for a long time, right? It's not based on an ideology, right? Whereas what unites the United States is an ideology, freedom, liberty, the Constitution. This is what draws the e pluribizunum kind of the idea, right? That out of many one, well, what binds all these unique different people, these shared beliefs, this ideology. The Soviet Union was the same way, because as you know, the Soviet Union, Russia was merely one part of this Soviet Union. And if you believe the rhetoric until Stalin's time, everybody was going to be united under this ideological”
2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With right people manipulate us through love of country and all this because they understand that this is something we feel very strongly, but they use it against us sometimes in order to whip up a war fever or to get people, I mean, there's a great line and I wish I could remember it in its entirety, that Hermann Guring had said about how easy it was to get the people into a war. He says, you know, you just appeal to their patriotism. I mean, there's buttons that you can push and they take advantage of things like love of country and the way we have loyalty and admiration to the warriors who put their lives on the line. These are manipulatable things in the human species that reliably can be counted on to move us in directions that in a more sober, reflective state of mind, we would consider differently. I mean, you get this war fever up and people wave flags and they start denouncing the enemy and they start signing, you know, we've seen it.”
2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Saying, oh, it was this awful group of people that took over your country. He said the Germans did this. And there's that bitterness where he says, let's not forget what they did to us and what we had to do back, right? So for me, when we talk about these combat situations, the reason I call these people heroic is because of they're fighting to defend things we could all understand. I mean, if you come after my brother and I take a machine gun and shoot you and you're going to overrun me, I mean, you're going to, that becomes a situation where we talked about counterforce earlier, much easier to call yourself a hero when you're saving people, or you're saving this town right behind you and you know if they get through your machine gun they're gonna burn these villages they're gonna throw these people out in the middle of winter these families that to me is a very different sort of heroism than this amorphous idea of patriotism you know patriotism is a thing that we often get used”
2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He's concerned about his position and his comrades and the people who he owe the responsibility to. And those, it's a very small world at that point. And to me, that's where the heroism is, right? He's not fighting for some giant world civilizational thing. He's fighting to save the people next to him. And his own life at the same time, because they're saving him too. And there is a huge amount of heroism to that. And that gets to our question about Force earlier. Why would you use force? Well, how about to protect these people on either side of me, right? Their lives. Now, is there hatred? Yeah, I hated the Germans for what they were doing. As a matter of fact, I got a note from a poll not that long ago, and I have this tendency to refer to the Nazis, right? The regime that was, and he said, why do you keep calling them Nazis? He says, say what they were. They were Germans. And this guy wanted me to not absolve Germany by saying,”
2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Red Army soldiers, and they're very patriotic, right? But a lot of that patriotism comes through years later as part of the nostalgia and the remembering. When you're down at that front 100 yards, it is often boiled down to a very small world. So your grandfather, was it your grandfather? Grandfather at the machine gun.”
2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Jones had said that the evolution of a soldier in frontline action requires an almost surrendering to the idea that you're going to live, that you become accustomed to the idea that you're going to die. And he said you're a different person simply for considering that thought seriously because most of us don't. But what that allows you to do is to do that job at the front line, right? If you're too concerned about your own life, you become less of a good guy at your job, right? The other thing that the people in the 100 yards of the front line do that the people in the rear medical unit really don't is you kill and you kill a lot, right? You don't just, oh, there's a sniper back here, so I shot him. It's we go from one position to another and we kill lots of people. Those things will change you. And what that tends to do, not universally, because I've read accounts from”
2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let me suggest something. There's a line that a Marine named Eugene Sledge had said once, and I keep it on my phone because it makes a real distinction. And he said, the front line is really where the war is. And anybody even a hundred yards behind the front line doesn't know what it's really like. Now, the difference is, is there are lots of people miles behind the front line that are in danger, right? You can be in a medical unit in the rear and artillery could strike you, planes could strike you. You could be in danger. But at the front line, there are two different things. One is that, and at least, and I'm doing a lot of reading on this right now and reading a lot of veterans accounts, James Jones, who wrote books like from here to eternity fictional accounts of the Second World War, but he based them on his own service. He was at Guadalcanal, for example, in 1942.”
2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Cog and a machine, and the machine doesn't really care as much about them as the rhetoric and the propaganda would insinuate.”
2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Heroes. And so I feel like we do a lot of talk about art troops and our soldiers and stuff, but we don't treat them as valuable as the rhetoric makes them sound. Otherwise, we would be more careful about where we put them. If you're going to send my son, and I don't have a son, I have daughters, but if you're going to send my son into harm's way, I'm going to demand that you really need to be sending him into harm's way and I'm going to be angry at you if you put him into harm's way, if he doesn't warrant it. And so I have much more suspicion about the system that sends these people into these situations where they're required to be heroic than I do the people on the ground that I look at as either the people that are defending us in situations like this, the Second World War of War, for example, or the people that turn out to be the individual victims of a system where they're just”
2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then I feel bad for the fireman. I feel like you've abused the trust that you give those people, right? So when people talk about war, I always think that the people that we have to make sure that a war is really necessary in order to protect are the people that you're going to send over there to fight that. The greatest victims in our society of war are often the warriors. So in my mind, when we see these people coming home from places like Iraq, a place where I would have made the argument and did at the time that we didn't belong to me, those people are victims, and I know they don't like to think about themselves that way because it runs totally counter to the ethos. But if you're sending people to protect this country shores, those are heroes. If you're sending people to go do something that they otherwise probably don't need to do, but they're there for political reasons or anything else you want to put in that's not defense related, well, then you've made victims of our...”
2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Either in the system that they're part of the military or the people that control the military at the highest political levels, I feel a lot less moral attachment to them. And I have a much harsher about how I feel about them. I do not consider the military itself to be heroic, and I do not consider the military-industrial complex to be heroic. I do think that is a tale wagging the dog situation. I do think that draws us into looking at military endeavors as a solution to the problem much more quickly than we otherwise might. And to be honest, to tie it all together, I actually look at the victims of this as the soldiers we were talking about. If you set a fire to send firemen into to fight,”
2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Saving sort of task, right? Or if nothing else, a self sacrifice for what they see as the greater good. Now, I draw a distinction between the individuals and the entity that they're a part of, a military, and I certainly draw a distinction between the military and then the entire, for lack of a better word, military industrial complex that that service is a part of. I feel a lot less moral attachment to those upper echelons than I do the people on the ground. The people on the ground could be any of us and have been in a lot of, you know, we have very professional sort of military now where it's a very subset of the population, but in other periods of time we've had conscription and drafts and it hasn't been a subset of the population. It's been the population, right? And so it is the society oftentimes going to war. And I make a distinction between those warriors and the entities.”
2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've always had a problem with this because as a person interested in military history. The distinction is important. And I try to make it at different levels. So at base level, the people who are out there on the front lines doing the fighting, to me, those people can be compared with police officers and firemen and people, fire persons. But I mean, people that are involved in An ethical attempt to perform a task which ultimately one can see in many situations as being”
2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Other elements that come into play too. You and I are discussing this at the very high intellectual level of things, but there's also a tail wagging the dog element to this. So think of a society of warriors, a tribal society from a long time ago. How much do the fact that you have warriors in your society and that their reason for existing, what they take pride in, what they train for, what their status in their own civilization, how much does that itself drive the responses of that society, right? How much do you need war to legitimize warriors? You know, that's the old argument that you get to, and we've had this in the 20th century too, that the creation of arms and armies creates an incentive to use them, right?”
2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But how is one nation state supposed to prevent another nation state from acting in ways that it would see as either detrimental to the global community or detrimental to the interest of their own nation state? And I think we've had this question going back to ancient times, but certainly in the 20th century, this has come up quite a bit. I mean, the whole Second World War argument sometimes revolves around the idea of what the proper counterforce should be. Can you create an entity, a league of nations, a united nations, a one world entity maybe even, that alleviates the need for counterforce involving mass violence and armies and navies and those things? I think that's an open discussion we're still having.”
2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think it goes to the fourth question, too. So, for example, what do you do? I mean, let's play with nation states now, although I don't know that nation states are something we should think of as a permanent construct forever.”
2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think especially when one is not achieving the goals that they want to achieve through peaceful discussion or argumentation or trying to convince the other side that sometimes the next level of operations is something a little bit more physically imposing, if that makes sense. We go from the intellectual to the physical.”
2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the two bleed together. So take. Because it's always my go-to example. I'm afraid, and I'm sure the listeners all hate it, but take Germany during the 1920s, early 1930s, before the Nazis came to power. And they were always involved in some level of force, you know, beating up in the streets or whatever it might be. But think about it more like an intellectual discussion until a certain point. It would be difficult, I imagine, to keep the intellectual counterforce of ideas from at some point degenerating into something that's more coercion, counterforced, if we want to use the phrases we were just talking about. So I think the two are intimately connected. I mean, actions follow thought, right? And at a certain point,”
2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or simply for random reasons. I mean, we humans lack control sometimes. We can be violent for no apparent reason or goal. And that's it. I mean, you look at the criminal justice system alone and the way we interact with people who are acting out in ways that we as a society have decided is intolerable. Can you deal with that without force and at some level violence? I don't know. Can you maintain peacefulness without force? I don't know.”
2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Simple almost law of physics in human interaction, especially at the civilizational level. I think civilization requires a certain amount of, if not violence, than force. And again, they've talked, I mean, it goes back into St. Augustine, all kinds of Christian beliefs about the proper use of force. And people have philosophically tried to decide between can you have sort of an ahinsa Buddhist sort of we would be nonviolent toward everything and exert no force or there's a reason to have force in order to create the space for good. I think force is inevitable. Now we can talk, and I've not come up to the conclusion myself, if there is a distinction to be made between force and violence, I mean, is a non-violent force enough or is violence when done for the cause of good a different thing than violence done either for the cause of evil, as you would say?”
2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And there's going to be some ground where if those two things are not the same, and I don't know that maybe they are, where there's certainly some crossover. And I think force, you're an engineer, you'll understand this better than I, but think about it as a physical law. If you can't stop something from moving in a certain direction without pushing back in that same direction, I'm not sure that you can have a society or a civilization without the ability to use a counterforce when things are going wrong, whether it's on an individual level, right? A person attacks another person, so you step in to save that person, or on even at the highest levels of politics or anything else, a counter force to stop the inertia or the impetus of another movement. So I think that force is a”
2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I'm going to respond to your question with a question What do you see the difference being between violence and force? Let me go farther. I'm not sure that violence is something that we have to put up with as human beings forever, that we must resign ourselves to violence forever. But I have a much harder time seeing us”
2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know, these are the kinds of things where you start to delve into the psychological makeup of these people. In other words, is anybody born evil? And I actually believe that some people are. I think the DNA can get scrambled up in ways. I think the question of evil is important too, because I think it's an eye of the beholder thing. I mean, if Hitler, for example, had been successful, and we were today on the sixth or seventh leader of the Third Reich, since I think his entire history would be viewed through a different lens because that's the way we do things, right? Denguis Khan looks different to the Mongolians than he does to the residents of Baghdad, right? And I think so an eye of the beholder question, I think, comes into all these sorts of things. As you said, it's a very slippery question.”
2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Suffering intentional suffering. Yeah. Yes, I think that, and I think that there's historical figures that one could point to, but that gets to the deeper question of, are these people sane? Do they have something wrong with them? Are they twisted from something in their youth?”
2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Might have changed what they were doing. So, were they evil or misguided or wrong or made the wrong? And I hate to do that because there's certain people like Hitler that I don't feel deserve the benefit of the doubt. At the same time, if you're fascinated by the concept of evil and you delve into it deeply enough, you're going to want to understand why these evil people did what they did. And sometimes it can confuse the hell out of you, you know, who wants to sit there and try to see things from Hitler's point of view to get a better understanding and sort of commiserate with. So, but I'm fat, obviously, first history show. I'm fascinated with the concept.”
2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To do were designed for the betterment of the German people, right? Whereas Alexander the Great, once again, this is somebody from more than 2,000 years ago with lots of propaganda in the intervening years. But one of the views of Alexander the Great is that the reason he did what he did was, for lack of a better word, write his name in a more permanent graffiti on the pages of history, right? In other words, to glorify himself. And if that's the case, Does that make Alexander a worse person than Hitler because Hitler thought he was doing good? Whereas Alexander, if you believe the interpretation, was simply trying to exalt Alexander. So the motivations of the people doing these things, it seems to me, matter. I don't think you can just sit there and go, the only thing that matters is the end result because that might have been an unintentional byproduct, in which case that person, had you been able to show them the future.”
2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I'm fascinated with the concept, so fascinated by it that the very first hardcore history show we ever did, which was a full 15 or 16 minutes, was called Alexander vs. Hitler. And the entire question about it was the motivations, right? So if you go to a court of law because you killed somebody, one of the things they're going to consider is why did you kill them, right? And if you killed somebody, for example, in self-defense, you're going to be treated differently than if you malicious killed somebody maliciously to take their wallet, right? And in the show, we wondered, because, you know, I don't really make pronouncements, but we wondered about if you believe Hitler's writings, for example, Mein Kampf, which is written by a guy who's a political figure who wants to get off. So, I mean, it's about as believable as any other political tract would be. But in his mind, the things that he said that he had”
2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Here's the problem, I think, with it because I fully see where you're going with that, and I understand it. The problem is the question of the reason for inflicting suffering. So sometimes one might inflict suffering upon one group of individuals in order to maximize a lack of suffering with another group of individuals, or one who might not be considered evil at all might make the rational, seemingly rational choice of inflicting pain and suffering on a smaller group of people in order to maximize the opposite of that for a larger group of people.”
2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How do we define evil? Evil seems to be a situational eye of the beholder kind of question, so if we define evil, maybe I can get a better idea of... And that could be a whole show, couldn't defining evil. But when we say evil, what do we mean?”
2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source