#354 – Jeremi Suri: American Civil War
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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.
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.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is discussed at the start of this section?
0:00–3:23
2
What self-care tips are shared in the podcast?
3:23–6:45
3
How does sleep influence our worldview?
6:45–15:21
4
What role does mental health play in personal development?
15:21–1:36:31
5
What challenges did Andrew Johnson face when he inherited power?
1:36:31–1:37:46
6
How did Lincoln's presidency impact his views on power?
1:37:46–1:54:00
7
What are the implications of the January 6th Capitol riot?
1:54:00–2:07:00
8
How can we heal the political divide in America?
2:07:00–3:06:01
Speakers
3 identifiedMore from Lex Fridman Podcast
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