YouSaid · the spoken record

Jeremi Suri

lines on the record: 124
first: 2021-04-30
most recent: 2021-04-30
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

“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.”
2021-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #180 – Jeremi Suri: History of American Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2021-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #180 – Jeremi Suri: History of American Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I hope so. Yeah, maybe. I mean, I do think we all We all want our families to do better. We are familiar. And family doesn't just mean biological family. You can have all kinds of ways you define family and community. And I think we are moving slowly and in a very messy way toward a larger world community.”
2021-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #180 – Jeremi Suri: History of American Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. It means what we make of it. 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 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.”
2021-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #180 – Jeremi Suri: History of American Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. The other thing that Emily taught me, and I think we've all had relatives who have taught us this, right? That you could be very uneducated. She was very uneducated. She 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 gimbals or something. 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, and 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.”
2021-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #180 – Jeremi Suri: History of American Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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, right? And I think making that a culture of who you are is so important. And people notice that. That's the other thing. And they notice when it's authentic. Everyone's nice to the person at the bottom of the totem pole when you want to get ahead in the line for your driver's license. But are you nice to them when you don't need that? Notice”
2021-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #180 – Jeremi Suri: History of American Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2021-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #180 – Jeremi Suri: History of American Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2021-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #180 – Jeremi Suri: History of American Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think the entrepreneurs I've studied and had the chance to get to know, and I'm sure you'd agree with this, they, They're not just in it to make money. In fact, that's when they get into trouble. They're just trying to make money.”
2021-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #180 – Jeremi Suri: History of American Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A sense of pride and on the pragmatic level, you never know when someone will spot that. And intelligent people who perform at the level of high excellence look for others.”
2021-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #180 – Jeremi Suri: History of American Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you have three majors, you have no major, right? 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. If I'm going to write a book review, the best possible book review I can, why? Because you develop a culture about yourself, which is about excellence.”
2021-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #180 – Jeremi Suri: History of American Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“True. That's true. Which is actually what does with Daniel Means. Not good vibe, but let him 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 three majors.”
2021-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #180 – Jeremi Suri: History of American Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2021-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #180 – Jeremi Suri: History of American Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, you do it really well. People will want to pay. 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, right, to start building your networks. But networks are not just people you're on Facebook with or Twitter with. I mean, that's fine. 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”
2021-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #180 – Jeremi Suri: History of American Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 remunerated 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, this is the scene in the graduate where a 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 ago, 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 passion and talent overlap. You'll find a way to get people to pay you for it.”
2021-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #180 – Jeremi Suri: History of American Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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'll also say something else, and this is a problem for many Americans who haven't learned a foreign language. We're very bad at teaching foreign languages. If you've never taught yourself a foreign language, you have closed yourself off to certain kinds of empathy because you have basically trained your brain to only look at the world one way. The very act of learning another language, I think tells your brain that words and concepts don't translate one-to-one. This is the first thing you realize, right? We can say, you know, these two words mean the same thing from two languages. They never mean exactly. Same thing. Dos Vidania is really not goodbye.”
2021-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #180 – Jeremi Suri: History of American Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We don't have a history in the United States of aristocracy. These elements of language reflect aristocracy. The serf would never refer to the master, even if the master is younger as tui. It's always, right? And Tergenev, it's always vi, right? I mean, and so”
2021-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #180 – Jeremi Suri: History of American Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, language is crucial to understanding a culture. And even if you learn the languages I have, 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? German has a formal UZ 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. We have in English tells you something about the culture, right? Language is an artifact of the culture. The culture makes the language.”
2021-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #180 – Jeremi Suri: History of American Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But they were Yiddish speakers by the time I met them, by the time they had gone through Germany and come to the United States or really gone through Poland and come to the United States. They were Yiddish speakers. So there's no one really in my family who speaks Russian. But I do feel a connection there, at least a long-range personal connection.”
2021-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #180 – Jeremi Suri: History of American Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I speak in addition to English, I speak reasonably well depending on how much vodka I've had 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.”
2021-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #180 – Jeremi Suri: History of American Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The last couple 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. That's a big, big book. But what Tolstoy challenges is he challenges the notion that a Napoleon can rule the world. And we're all little Napoleons, right? We're all sort of thinking that we're going to do that. And he reminds us how much is contingency circumstance. That doesn't mean we don't have some control.”
2021-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #180 – Jeremi Suri: History of American Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. 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 and the same. 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 Mons Buddenbrooks. And it's the story of a family in Lubeck in northern Germany living through the 19th century and the rise and fall of family cycles of life. Many things we've talked about.”
2021-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #180 – Jeremi Suri: History of American Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2021-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #180 – Jeremi Suri: History of American Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2021-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #180 – Jeremi Suri: History of American Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. And it shouldn't be. It'll seem less political. It's no longer history. It'll be seen as an outstanding accomplishment and as a step toward whatever. Maybe they're doing vaccines or something that replaces the vaccine in 10 seconds at that point, right? It'll be seen as a step. Those will be some of the positives. I think one of the negatives they will point to will be”
2021-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #180 – Jeremi Suri: History of American Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who's taking them? But the reality is this is light speed compared to what it would have been like not just in 1918. In 1980.”
2021-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #180 – Jeremi Suri: History of American Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No doubt the rapid technological innovation of the last 20 to 30 years, how we created a whole virtual universe. 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.”
2021-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #180 – Jeremi Suri: History of American Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Smaller proportion of the larger gun deaths in the United States, which are larger than any other society, but at least the mass shootings are usually perpetrated by people who have not self-defense weapons, but mass killing, mass-killing weapons. And I think there's an important distinction there. The Constitution talks about a right to bear arms for well-regulated militia. When the framers talked about arms that did not mean the ability to kill as many people as you want to kill. It meant the ability to defend yourself. So let's have that conversation. I think it would be useful as a society. Stop talking about guns or no guns. What is it that we as citizens need to feel we can defend ourselves?”
2021-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #180 – Jeremi Suri: History of American Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thing for a lot of people. And 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 really important. So does self-defense mean I can have a bazooka? Does it mean I can have weapons that are designed for a military battlefield to mass kill people? That seems to me to be very different from saying I should have a handgun or some small arm to defend myself. That distinction alone would make a huge difference. Most of the mass shootings, at least, which are a proportious.”
2021-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #180 – Jeremi Suri: History of American Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. And it means that the kinds of bad things that happen are different and 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. So in the Soviet Union, it was at a much worse scale and it was done by government organizations. In the United States, it's, you know, individuals, the history of lynching in our country, for example. Sometimes it's individual police officers, sometimes it's others. Again, the vast majority police officers are good people 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.”
2021-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #180 – Jeremi Suri: History of American Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 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.”
2021-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #180 – Jeremi Suri: History of American Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was invest in 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'll 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”
2021-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #180 – Jeremi Suri: History of American Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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, right? And I would say some of that, not all of that, some of that does harken back to actually what won in the Cold War. There were many social democratic elements of what the United States did that led to our winning the Cold War. For example, the New Deal.”
2021-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #180 – Jeremi Suri: History of American Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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're 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.”
2021-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #180 – Jeremi Suri: History of American Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. And Khrushchev really believed. Gorbachev thought he was going to reform the Soviet Union so you would go back to a kind of Bukhar and Lenin communism, right? So 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 in the United States played a key role in that. That's the reality of the Cold War.”
2021-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #180 – Jeremi Suri: History of American Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's really important. 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.”
2021-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #180 – Jeremi Suri: History of American Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. 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 and what does Khrushchev said where we're going to catch Britain in five years and then the United States after that. So to explain that sense of fear to them that they don't have of those others.”
2021-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #180 – Jeremi Suri: History of American Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. I mean, 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.”
2021-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #180 – Jeremi Suri: History of American Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You have to be very honest, and in a policy making context, we have to actually do the same thing we do in a relationship context. What do we do in 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 my looking at it, right? I need others to tell me in a policy making context, this is why you need to hear from other people, not just the generals, because here's the thing about the generals. They generally are patriotic, hard-working people, but they're too close. They're not lying. They're too close. They always think they can do better.”
2021-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #180 – Jeremi Suri: History of American Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have to ask yourself whether it's a relationship or you're talking about policy making in a place like Afghanistan, are the things I'm doing showing me evidence, real evidence that they're making things better or making things worse? That's a hard question to ask.”
2021-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #180 – Jeremi Suri: History of American Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, again, it's an art, not a science, which is what makes it hard for an engineer to think about this, what makes it endlessly fascinating for me. And I think the real intellectual work is at the level of the art, right? And I think probably engineering at its highest level becomes an art as well, right? So 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 $2 plus trillion dollars that the U.S. has put in. And the fact that, as you said, correctly, it's not doing well right now. After 20 years of that investment, 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.”
2021-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #180 – Jeremi Suri: History of American Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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”
2021-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #180 – Jeremi Suri: History of American Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 Just war, as Michael Walls or another's 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, right? 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.”
2021-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #180 – Jeremi Suri: History of American Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 him.”
2021-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #180 – Jeremi Suri: History of American Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 fury idealism. So I believe deeply in democracy as 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.”
2021-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #180 – Jeremi Suri: History of American Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 realpolitik becomes self defeating because you're constantly running to keep power, but you forget why. And you often then use power, and I think Kissinger falls into this in some of his worst moments, not all of his moments, where the power is actually being used to undermine the things you care about.”
2021-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #180 – Jeremi Suri: History of American Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2021-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #180 – Jeremi Suri: History of American Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. I mean, when you've worked as hard for what he has as he has, you're defensive about it. But he is very defensive. He's very fragile about it. He does not like criticisms at all. 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 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.”
2021-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #180 – Jeremi Suri: History of American Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 is unwilling to, and I think this is a weakness He's unwilling to admit mistake.”
2021-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #180 – Jeremi Suri: History of American Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was very difficult because he's very good at manipulating people and we had about twelve or thirteen interviews, usually informal over lunch. And this was many years ago. This is probably not more than 10 years ago.”
2021-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #180 – Jeremi Suri: History of American Power · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source