Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…Well, I think in a lot of ways it’s much of what it was in the mid-19th century. I still think it’s a magnet for… I mean, we’re in an unbelie- we’re far more diverse now as a people than we were during the Civil War because we continue to act in the same way as it did in the Civil War, only they’re not Germans and Ir- people come from everywhere here now. I mean, they literally come from everywhere here now. And everybody doesn’t find a nice easy road here by any means, and there are lots of things wrong with the United States. But I still think the United States acts… Has a, has a role in the world that’s unlike, I won’t say any other place, but I can’t think of a place that’s quite like it, that has so many people coming from so many places, who somehow manage to fit into this mosaic. And then I think most people do have a way to fit into the mosaic, and then they become part of the old mosaic when the next group of people who are not like them come in, and those are the ones who are the new ones fitting in. Yeah, sometimes I think about, I’m sorry to romanticize it, but because I do think that Barack Obama was one of the great speech makers of my lifetime. And I, I sometimes imagine what Lincoln would have thought if he could attend an Obama speech. If he saw that Obama became president, that an African American became President of the United States of America. It’s, it seems like such a trivial thing to say, but I think it’s not trivial at all. It’s one of the great accomplishments of our country. I think one of Lincoln’s great attributes was his humanity comes through so many things that he wrote. His real appreciation for people who faced long odds, worked against the odds, didn’t begin with advantages in their favor, and so forth. I think he and his ability to grow, I think he would have handled that actually pretty well. Much better than many other people I can think of from the mid-19th century. I think he had genuine humanity. I think, I don’t think you can read all the things he wrote and not come to that conclusion. He also… But, so does, does he check all our boxes now? Of course he doesn’t. Was he prejudiced by our standards in some ways? Of course he was. But I think that he, I think he would have handled that pretty well, and he would have been, still been really tall. Even in our time- … he’d be way taller than most people.…

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