Lex Fridman: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Yeah, that’s right. Yeah. As you know this, America has this incredible streak of individualism. Individualism in America probably peaked, I think between roughly call it the end of the Civil War, 1865 through to probably call it 1931 or something. And there was this incredible rush. I mean that period, we now know that period as the second Industrial Revolution, and it’s when the United States basically assumed global leadership and basically took over technological and economic leadership from England. And then that led to ultimately then therefore being able to not only industrialize the world, but also win World War II and then win the Cold War. And yeah, there’s a massive individualistic streak. By the way, Milton Friedman’s old videos are all on YouTube. They are every bit as compelling and inspiring as they were then. He’s a singular figure. And many of us, I never knew him, but he was actually at Stanford for many years at the Hoover Institution, but I never met him, but I know a lot of people who worked with him and he was a singular figure. But all of his lessons live on or are fully available. But I would also say it’s not just individualism, and this is one of the big things. It’s playing out in a lot of our culture and kind of political fights right now, which is basically this feeling, certainly that I have and I share with a lot of people, which is it’s not enough for America to just be an economic zone, and it’s not enough for us to just be individuals, and it’s not enough to just have line go up, and it’s not enough to just have economic success. There are deeper questions at play, and also there’s more to a country than just that. And quite frankly, a lot of it is intangible. A lot of it involves spirit and passion. And like I said, we have more of it than anybody else, but we have to choose to want it. The way I look at, it’s like all of our problems are self-inflicted. Decline is a choice. All of our problems are basically demoralization campaigns, basically people telling us, people in positions of authority telling us that, “We shouldn’t stand out, we shouldn’t be adventurous, we shouldn’t be exciting, we shouldn’t be exploratory, we shouldn’t this, that, and the other thing. And we should feel bad about everything that we do.” And I think we’ve lived through a decade where that’s been the prevailing theme. And I think quite honestly, as of November, I think people are done with it. If we could go on a tangent of a tangent, since we’re talking about individualism, and that’s not all that it takes. You’ve mentioned in the past the book The Ancient City by, if I could only pronounce the name, French historian Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges. I don’t know. That was amazing.…

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