Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…You’re absolutely right. Of arrogance. And I think you’ve also articulated that a lot of presidents throughout American history have suffered from a bad case of arrogance and narcissism. Absolutely. But sometimes for a benefit. You have to be a pretty crazy person to want to be president. I had put out a tweet that got some controversy, and I think it was Joe Rogan, who I love, but he was like, “I want to find out who Kamala Harris is as a human being.” And I was like, “I’m actually not interested in who politicians are as human beings at all.” I was like, “I’ve read too much about them to know, I know who you are.” If you spend your life and because I live in Washington and I spend a lot of time around would-be politicians, I know what it takes to actually become the president. It’s crazy. You have to give up everything, everything. Every night, you’re not spending it with your wife. You’re spending it at dinner with potential donors, with friends, with people who can connect you. Even after you get elected, that’s even moreso now you got to raise money and now you’re onto the next thing. Now you want to get your political thing through. You’re going to spend all your time on your phone. You and your staff are going to be more like this. Your entire life revolves around your career. It’s honestly, you need an insane level of narcissism to do it because you have to believe that you are better than everybody else, which is already pretty crazy. And not only that, your own personal characteristics and foibles lead you to the pursuit of this office and to the pursuit of the idolatry of the self and everything around you. There’s a famous story of Lady Bird Johnson after Johnson becomes the president and he’s talking to the White House Butler. She was like, “Everything in this house revolves around my husband. Whatever’s left goes to the girls,” her two children, “And I’ll take the scraps.” Everything revolved around Johnson’s political career and his daughters, when they’re honest, because they like to paper over some of the things that happened under him, but they didn’t spend any time with him. Saturday morning was for breakfast with Richard Russell, I forget. These are all in the Robert A. Caro books. Sunday was for Rayburn. There was no time for his kids. That’s what it was. And by the way, he’s one of the greatest politicians to ever live. But he also died from a massive heart attack and he was a deeply sad and depressed individual.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.