Jeremi Suri is a historian at UT Austin. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: - Eight Sleep: https://www.eightsleep.com/lex to get special savings - BetterHelp: https://betterhelp.com/lex to get 10% off - InsideTracker: https://insidetracker.com/lex to get 20% off - Athletic Greens: https://athleticgreens.com/lex to get 1 month of fish oil EPISODE LINKS: Jeremi's Twitter: https://twitter.com/jeremisuri This is Democracy podcast: https://podcasts.la.utexas.edu/this-is-democracy Jeremi's Website: https://jeremisuri.net Jeremi's Books: 1. Civil War by Other Means: https://amzn.to/3hRa3cT 2. The Impossible Presidency: https://amzn.to/3hTn5X8 3. Henry Kissinger: https://amzn.to/3WqkBOY PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ YouTube Full Episodes: https://youtube.com/lexfridman YouTube Clips: https://youtube.com/lexclips SUPPORT & CONNECT: - Check out the sponsors above, it's the best way to support this podcast - Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman - Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman - Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman - Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman OUTLINE: Here's the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. (00:00) - Introduction (06:45) - Revolutions and governments (24:23) - American Civil War (33:35) - Lincoln and election of 1860 (37:25) - Slavery (50:35) - Freedom of speech (1:02:17) - Death toll of the Civil War (1:05:36) - Ulysses S. Grant (1:07:45) - Ku Klux Klan (1:19:27) - Robert E. Lee (1:27:11) - Abraham Lincoln (1:42:18) - If the south won (1:50:54) - Hypocrisy of the Founders (1:56:56) - John Wilkes Booth (2:00:11) - White supremacy (2:05:34) - Disputed elections (2:15:56) - Politics (2:24:20) - Donald Trump and Joe Biden (2:37:06) - January 6th (3:02:04) - Hope for the future
Chapter 1: What is discussed at the start of this section?
The following is a conversation with Jeremy Suri, a historian at UT Austin. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We've got Eight Sleep for naps, BetterHelp for mental health, Insight Tracker for biomonitoring, and Athletic Greens for multivitamins. Choose wisely, my friends.
And now onto the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make this interesting, but if you must skip them, friends, please still check out the sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This episode is sponsored by Eight Sleep and its new Pod 3 mattress. I saw a meme recently, maybe I should look it up.
It was a meme that was highlighting different ways you can do self-care, which is, you know, depending on how you feel, what's the best solution? I think it was, if everybody hates you, go to sleep. If you hate everybody, eat some food. And if you hate yourself, Take a shower.
I think those advice, obviously it's just a meme, but there's some truth to that, at least the first and the third for me. A shower is a refreshing way to take sort of control of your life, and it feels like a fresh start. And sleep, it's just magic to me. And not even a full night's sleep, but a little bit of sleep, like a nap, can completely transform my worldview.
Just having a bit of a melancholy outlook, or maybe being a little bit cynical about the world. For me, I take a nap and everything feels new. It's just, I could see the beauty in the world again. Some of that is, of course, a gift. It's built on a foundation of regular exercise, a good diet, and some of that is genetics. biochemistry in the brain, but really sleep for everybody.
It can give a positive delta to your mood. So I take sort of the bed I sleep on extremely seriously. Some of that is temperature control. I think for me, temperature is so essential to a great sleeping experience. And Eight Sleep does a good job of that. They control the temperature, obviously in a technological way. So you could do it with an app. It's a wonderful thing.
Check it out and get special savings when you go to eightsleep.com slash Lex. This episode is also brought to you by BetterHelp, spelled H-E-L-P, help. I actually have a conversation with an amazing scientist and a psychiatrist coming up. And it's going to be a very wide-ranging conversation, I think, about different aspects of human behavior. The good, the bad, and the ugly.
So I think much of his specialization is in trauma, but he really knows so much about narcissism, sociopathy, psychopathy, just the nature of evil. the nature of hate, all of those things. And the human mind is just really fascinating. And I do think that talk therapy is a really, really good way to explore some of the darker corners of that mind, of that human mind.
I've been a big fan of that from a historical perspective, Freud and Jung. Psychoanalysis has been really interesting to me.
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Chapter 2: What self-care tips are shared in the podcast?
Obviously, as a big fan of podcasts, I see a huge value in the power of conversation. to achieve a kind of intellectual, spiritual, emotional intimacy in the realm of ideas. Sometimes it feels one way, but as a fan of a lot of podcasts, it doesn't feel one way. It feels like a real conversation, even though I know I'm just a listener.
Anyway, I'm a big believer in talk therapy, and BetterHelp allows you to do that really easily. So the barrier to access is nil. It's super easy. That's essential. The first step is really the hardest. It truly is. So you can check them out at betterhelp.com and save on your first month. This show is also brought to you by InsideTracker, a service I use to track biological data.
I love tracking stuff about my life. Now I do want to be extremely careful not to over optimize everything. I think in some way optimization is the death of romance because I think romance or just the appreciation of the beauty of the human experience in part grounded in the chaos, the unpredictability, the uncertainty, the mystery, all of that.
And I think getting perfect data and coming up with a perfect plan and optimizing every single little thing is, I think, suffocates the possibility of magic that is the human condition. That said, you do, I believe, have to build a foundation of health. health broadly defined. And so for that, you have to collect as much data from your own body as possible and take actions based on that data.
That's what InsideTracker helps you with. You can get special savings for a limited time when you go to InsideTracker.com slash Lex. This show is brought to you by Athletic Greens and its AG1 drink. This set of ad reads I'm doing today is just the all-stars of what brings joy and happiness and health to my life. Sleep, mental health, collecting good long-term data about your body.
And now with Athletic Greens, I mean, that's really my favorite source of happiness in the health space, in my personal life. I drink the AG1 drink twice a day. I break my fast with it, I do it after a long run, put it in the fridge, get a little bit cold. While I take a quick shower, jump out, drink the drink, I feel refreshed and ready to continue the day.
Now that all the dark, deep exploration of my own mind, the process of running, whether I'm listening to audio books and brown noise, all of that is done. And now that's kind of the trigger that says I'm going to start. anew, and I'm going to take on the rest of the day. That's what AG1 symbolizes for me.
Anyway, they'll give you one month's supply of fish oil when you sign up at athleticgreens.com slash Lex. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Jeremy Suri.
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Chapter 3: How does sleep influence our worldview?
What is the main idea, the main case that you make in your new book, Civil War by Other Means, America's Long and Unfinished Fight for Democracy?
So our democratic institutions in the United States, they are filled with many virtues and many elements in their design that improve our society and allow for innovation. But they also have many flaws in them, as any institutions created by human beings have. And the flaws in our institutions go back to a number of judgments and perspectives.
that people in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries had. And those flaws have been built into our institutions, and they continue to hinder innovation and growth in our society. Three of the flaws that I emphasize in this book are flaws of exclusion, the ways our institutions exclude people, not just African Americans, many different groups.
The ways our institutions also give power to certain people who have position rather than skill or intelligence or quality. And third, and most of all, the ways our institutions embed certain myths in our society, myths that prevent us from gaining the knowledge we need to improve our world. In all of these ways, our democracy is hindered by the false reverence
for institutions that actually need to be reformed, just as we need to highlight the good elements of them. That's really what my book is about.
And the myth, the false reverence, what are we talking about there?
So there's a way in which we believe that if we love our country, It's somehow wrong to criticize our institutions. I believe if you love your country, you want to encourage your institutions to get better and better. I love my university where I work, but I want it to be better. We have many flaws. I love my family, but I'm constantly telling family members how they can be better.
That's what true knowledge leadership is about, not just cheerleading.
What's the counterpoint to that? Because the other extreme is a deep, all-encompassing cynicism towards institutions. So for me, I like the idea of loving America, which seems to be sometimes a politicized statement these days, that you believe in the ideals of this country. That seems to be either a naive or a political statement, the way it's interpreted.
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Chapter 4: What role does mental health play in personal development?
even those who you think are open-minded, once they've committed themselves and put their money and their reputation on the line, they don't want to hear otherwise. So in a sense, what you say is bigger than even being an iconoclast, it's being able to persuade and work with people who are afraid of your ideas.
Yeah, I think the key is, like in conversations, is to get people out of a defensive position, like make them realize we're on the same side, we're brothers and sisters, and from that place, I think you just raise the question. It's like a little thought that just lands, and then I've noticed this time and time again.
Just a little subtle thing, and then months later, it percolates somewhere in the mind. It's like, all right, that little doubt. Because I also realize in these battles, especially political battles, People often don't have folks on their side that they can really trust as a fellow human being to challenge them. That's a very difficult role to be in.
Because in these battles, you kind of have a tribe and you have a set of ideas and there's another tribe and you have a set of ideas. And when somebody says something counter to your viewpoint, you almost always want to put them in the other tribe as opposed to having... Truly listening to another person, that takes skill.
But ultimately, I think that's the way to bridge these divides is having these kinds of conversations. That's why I'm actually, again, optimistically believe in the power of social media to do that if you design it well. But currently, the battle rages on on Twitter.
Well, I think what you're getting at, which is so important, is storytelling. And all the great leaders that I've studied, some of whom are in this book, some of whom are not, right, whether they're politicians, social activists, technologists, it's the story that gets people in. People don't respond to an argument. We're trained. At least in the United States, we're often trained to argue.
You're told in a class, okay, this part of the room, take this position. This part of the room, take this position. And that's helpful because it forces you to see different sides of the argument. But in fact, those on one side never convince those on the other side through argument. It's through a story that people can identify with. It's when you bring your argument to life in human terms.
And someone again like Abraham Lincoln was a master at that. He told stories. He found ways to disarm people and to move them without their even realizing they were being moved.
Yeah, not make it a debate. Make it, tell a story. That's fascinating. Because yes, some of the most convincing politicians, I don't feel like they're arguing a point. They're just telling a story. And it gets in there, right?
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Chapter 5: What challenges did Andrew Johnson face when he inherited power?
Andrew Johnson inherited power with very few limitations on how he used that power. Congress wasn't even in session. And so this became very directly a problem because Andrew Johnson started pardoning Southerners, allowing them to come back into power. So he had like a few months where he just went wild. Yeah.
It's giving the car keys to someone who's not prepared to drive but decided that they're going to do what they want with the car for a while. All right.
Is there any level to which power corrupted Lincoln, a war president?
Yes, I do think there were some areas. And I think that even though he was a great president, if not our greatest president, maybe one of the greatest figures of our history, he was flawed. One is his problem of succession. But also... I think Lincoln over-invested in the power of the presidency.
He came to believe too much in the role of one man and not in creating a more balanced approach to governance. And that's a function of war. That's where war is dangerous. War has an inherent centralizing power in a democracy. And that is dangerous because even when you have the best of people running a war, that gives them a lot of power to make decisions.
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Chapter 6: How did Lincoln's presidency impact his views on power?
Yeah. How do you come down from that? I see that with Zelensky and Putin currently. Yep. It's a war. How do you come down? Because Ukraine and everybody, anybody in a war kind of, especially if you're fighting for the ideal of democracy, it seems like war is anti-democratic. It is. So how do you come down from that? What's the interesting mechanism that, I mean, some of it is leadership.
You have to be like a George Washington type figure, be able to walk away from power.
I think you gave the answer right there. You need to walk away from power or you need to be forced to walk away from power. Historically, one of the things that democracies have tended to do when they have a chance is to vote out of office the victor in the war. Think about Winston Churchill. Roosevelt is elected to his fourth term when he's still in the war.
It's not clear that he would have been elected again, let's say he lived on, because there is a sensibility that the person has become too powerful in this role and that someone else should now step in, someone else who's also not a war president but has other interests. So let's hope Ukraine wins this war. Zelensky should then step down. or someone else should be voted in.
It will be dangerous if he remains president. Let's say he wins somehow, and a true victory, just as a hypothetical. He should not be, he should be praised, maybe given a nice villa, but someone else should take over, because the problem is that he's going to have too much power, and honestly, he's going to be too out of touch with what the country needs after the war.
What do you think would have happened if Lincoln had lived? That's the sort of counterfactual view of history. It's an interesting question that probably you think about a lot. What would have happened if he didn't get assassinated?
It's a reasonable question because it was not inevitable he'd be assassinated. He could have had more protection that night. He'd invited Ulysses Grant to go to the theater with him, and Grant and his wife didn't go. If they had been there, there would have been more protection for Grant. So he would have had at least double the security there.
So there are many ways in which he might not have died. I think it still would have been a difficult, transition. But I think there were a few things that would have been better. First of all, Lincoln would not have pardoned all of these Confederate leaders and allowed them to come back into power. Lincoln also would have been a better politician at holding his Republican coalition together.
And I think Lincoln was more committed to empowering former slaves and others. So we still would have had a lot of conflicts, but I think what would have been a degree of difficulty was doubled or tripled because Lincoln was removed and the opposite came into power with Andrew Johnson.
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Chapter 7: What are the implications of the January 6th Capitol riot?
Most people are not responsible for the bad activities, but most don't do something to stop it. And when I say do something, I mean really do something.
Yeah, really. And that's also, to push back on the pushback, silence on Twitter is not what Eli Wiesel was talking about. So sometimes silence on Twitter is the courageous action because you wait and think and learn and have patience to truly understand the situation before you take actual action. Not participate in the outrage crowds on Twitter, the hysteria of cancellation.
What's hard to do is to speak up when everybody else is silent. That's what's hard to do. And to speak up against those who you thought were on your side. Yes, exactly. Good luck to those on the left who speak up against the left. And the same, good luck to those on the right who speak up against the right. It's a lonely place. It's a painful place. That's why walking in the center is tough.
You get attacked by both sides. It's a wonderful, wonderful journey.
And you know, what's interesting to me, and what I learned writing this book, every book is a journey. What I learned in the laboratory of this book, right, Was a lot of those figures who do stand up, even in their own lifetime, they don't get the accolades they deserve, but they make a difference. And that's maybe not enough comfort because you want to see benefits in your own lifetime.
But I think it really matters. And many of the figures I talk about were not even well known in their time. So you can make a difference. You do impart something small in the universe that can grow into something better, and we shouldn't forget that.
Yeah, that's why I admire Boxer, the horse. I will work harder even if he gets sent to the slaughter by the evil pigs.
You're on Orwell today.
I love it. I'm on... Recently, I mean, Animal Farm is one of my favorite books. I've been recently... I just am rereading 1984 now. It's been politicized, that book in general. Yeah. But to me, it's a love story. It is a love story. That there's a... Like, love is the...
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Chapter 8: How can we heal the political divide in America?
And so in essence, you have a deal made that one side will get all it wants while allowing the other side to have the figurehead. And so in a certain way, this marks a moment when the Confederacy wins. For example, Hayes has to agree to pull out all federal force from the South, which means there's no protection for fair elections going forward.
And you'll see in states like Mississippi, the number of African-American voters will decline and not recover again until the late 20th century. So that's what that election does. And from 1876 until 1896, we have a series of elections that are very close. It happens also... in 1888 that the person with the most popular vote loses. That's Grover Cleveland, who loses to Benjamin Harrison.
And again, we'll have the same issue. where there's a dispute. And so what that election shows us, 1876, 1888, is that our election system and the problem of having an electoral college really complicates things and makes it harder for us to come to any kind of consensus, any kind of agreement on who's won an election.
Super important for today, because most of the 20th century, we don't have close elections, so it doesn't matter. When we come to a world today where our elections are very close, our system is not well designed to deal with those issues.
Do you draw any parallels with our time, and what are some key differences? There's been contested elections, Florida, Florida, Florida, with Al Gore, and there's been just contested election after contested election, and of course, most famously recently, with the contested election that led to January 6th.
So I think a couple of parallels and a couple of differences. One parallel is that when you have close elections, the losing side's never happy. It's a myth that when you have a close election, the other side just accepts it and it's not, that doesn't happen. And we need to be attentive to that and ready for that.
January 6th actually should surprise us, not because it happened, but because it hadn't happened before. Um, People who lose a close election are never happy and they always think that something has been done. That's one parallel. Second parallel is elections are violent. We have this myth that our elections are peaceful.
No, there's always violence involved in one way or another, violence in either trying to prevent people from voting or violence in preventing people from preventing.
people from voting right elections are not peaceful walks in the park and that's why most countries have a centralized system to manage elections and provide protection for people we need to think about that a lot of people don't vote because they're afraid
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