Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, so what he said to me was no different than what he ultimately said on 60 Minutes, which was, ” As somebody helping lead this country, I bear responsibility and I’m going to make sure that those who are involved are brought to justice and I’m going to make sure that we put in place reforms to make sure things like this don’t happen again.” It was a horrible situation that occurred. What I saw from him after that was just a doubling and a tripling down on the positive things he was doing, figuring out ways to kind of continue to modernize this society, build opportunity in the kingdom, and to continue to be a better ally to all the different countries that wanted to be aligned with them. One thing I learned from this case is how one particular situation, a tragedy, can destroy so much progress and the possibility of progress and the possibility of connection between the bridges that are built between different nations and how narratives around that can take off and take such a long time to repair. You’ve worked with this in the Middle East with Israel and so on, how the history, the narratives, the stories, they kind of have this momentum that’s so hard to break even when you have new leaders, new blood, new ideas that come in. It’s just sad to see that yes, this tragedy happens, but it doesn’t mean that you can’t make progress. I don’t know if you have lessons from that, just how much of a dramatic impact it had on creating tension between the United States and Saudi and in general and the Middle East that somehow Saudi’s not a friend, but is against the ideals and the values of the United States. So it definitely created massive tension and it became a very high profile action that actually overshadowed a lot of the good work that was being done in the region and a lot of the progress we were making. But when you think about this or you think about the other issues that we’ve gone through today, I think the general framework that I always try to approach things with is you can’t change what happened yesterday. You can only learn from it and then you can change how you deal with tomorrow. When I think about the people in power, what do I hope that they’re spending their time focused on? Two basic things. Number one is how do I create safety and security for my people and for the world? And then how do I give people the opportunity to live a better life? And so when things like this happen, obviously there are certain reactions that are appropriate, but ultimately you have to think through how do you not allow the paradigm that you’re creating in the world to lead to worse outcomes than would happen otherwise? And so when I would think about foreign policy in general, one of the differences between foreign policy and business is that in business the conclusion of a problem set, you finish a deal. You either have a company or a property, or if you sell it, you have less to do and more capital hopefully if it’s successful. In a political deal, it’s always about paradigms. So the end of a problem set is always the beginning of a new paradigm, and you’re always thinking through how do you create an environment that leads to hopefully the best amount of positive outcomes that could occur versus creating a paradigm that will lead to negative outcomes. So bad things happen, a lot in the world, and you have to make sure that when those happen, people are held accountable for it. But you also don’t want to make sure that in the process of making sure that there’s accountability for these actions, you don’t set a lot of progress that the world is making back. That will lead to worse off situation for many more people.…

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