The Daily Stoic - Journalist Kati Marton on Angela Merkel’s Remarkable Stoicism

Episode Date: March 26, 2022

Ryan talks to journalist and author Kati Marton about her new book “The Chancellor: The Remarkable Odyssey of Angela Merkel,” the unshakable calm that she exuded as the chancellor of Germany, the stoic qualities that she embodies, and more.  Kati Marton has combined a career as an acclaimed reporter and writer with human rights advocacy. Since 1980, Kati has published nine books and is an award-winning former NPR correspondent and ABC news bureau chief in Germany. She also contributes to The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and Vanity Fair, to name a few. Her latest book, “The Chancellor: The Remarkable Odyssey of Angela Merkel” is not only a political biography, but also an intimate human portrait and revelatory look at successful leadership in action, unveiling the unique political genius and moral chacter of one of the world’s most successful female leaders.  Blinkist takes top nonfiction titles, pulls out the key takeaways and puts them into text and audio explainers called Blinks that give you the most important information in just 15 minutes. Go to Blinkist.com/STOIC to start your free 7 day trial and get 25% off of a Blinkist Premium membership.The Jordan Harbinger Show is one of the most interesting podcasts on the web, with guests like Kobe Bryant, Mark Manson, Eric Schmidt, and more. Listen to one of Ryan's episodes right now (1, 2), and subscribe to the Jordan Harbinger Show today.Shopify has the tools and resources that make it easy for any business to succeed from down the street to around the globe. Go to shopify.com/stoic for a FREE fourteen-day trial and get full access to Shopify’s entire suite of features.New Relic combines 16 different monitoring products that you’d normally buy separately, so engineering teams can see across their entire software stack in one place. Get access to the whole New Relic platform and 100GB of data free, forever – no credit card required! Sign up at NewRelic.com/stoic.As a member of Daily Stoic Life, you get all our current and future courses, 100+ additional Daily Stoic email meditations, 4 live Q&As with bestselling author Ryan Holiday (and guests), and 10% off your next purchase from the Daily Stoic Store. Sign up at https://dailystoic.com/life/ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemailCheck out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookFollow Kati Marton: TwitterSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoke podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoke. Each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stokes. you live up to those four stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview stoic philosophers, we explore at length how these stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend when you have a little bit more space when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal and most importantly to prepare for what the week ahead may bring.

Raising kids can be one of the greatest rewards of a parent's life. But come on, someday, parenting is unbearable. I love my kid, but is a new parenting podcast from Wondry that shares a refreshingly honest and insightful take on parenting. Hosted by myself, Megan Galey, Chris Garcia, and Kurt Brown-Oller, we will be your resident not-so- so expert experts. Each week we'll share a parenting story that'll have you laughing, nodding, and thinking. Oh yeah, I have absolutely been there. We'll talk about what went right and wrong.

What would we do differently? And the next time you step on yet another stray Lego in the middle of the night, you'll feel less alone. So if you like to laugh with us as we talk about the hardest job in the world, listen to, I love my kid, but wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on the Amazon music or Wondery app. Do it. Hey, it's Ryan Welcome to another episode

of the Daily Stoic Podcast. This is the time of year in Austin, where it gets like amazing. It's my wife and I were just talking about this. It's, you know, like, night is darkest right before the dawn. Austin has this sort of weird cycle where it's like, you think it's spring and then no, it gets cold again and then you think it's spring

and then we call it three fake springs and then we call it three fake springs and then winter returns. But now it's actually spring, like after South by spring starts and just like we just looked at our farm yesterday and just like boom, everything had gotten green, like immediately.

And it was so amazing. And we have now of very deep rooted memory of how beautiful and awe inspiring is because in those sort of quiet days in the Early days of the pandemic we just had so much more time and life had become so much quieter And so much more still that we we really soaked it in and appreciated it. And now I have this feeling of like the blackberries are going to start soon. And we're going to be picking those.

And now it's it's it gets dark later. So we can go on walks after dinner for a longer. I don't know. I'm feeling good about how things are. And I know I was just talking about this earlier this week. But I don't know. I'm I'm feeling some enthusiasm and excitement and and

some natural beauty is soaking my into my system after a dark cold winter at least by Texas standards. I'm excited for what is to come. I can already feel the energy as people are coming into the bookstore. Anyways, today's episode is about someone that I've wanted to read a great book about for a long time, but I have not found one. I wrote about Anne Holmerkall in Ego is the enemy. She's one of the characters because she's one of the few statesmen or stateswomen of history who no one would say has a huge ego. And I've read a really

great New Yorker piece about her that formed the basis of a lot of what I wrote. But there wasn't the perfect book. And I picked up a bunch, I didn't like them. Until I read earlier this year, the remarkable Odyssey of Anhella Merkel by Katty Martin, who is a delightful biographer of Anhella Merkel. And more than just a writer, she's had a long career as an acclaimed reporter and as well as being a human rights advocate. And she's published nine books.

She's worked at NPR. She was the ABC News Bureau Chief in Germany. And what I loved about this book just a little taste from Katty is is You know she also grew up behind the Iron Curtain and so she's able to I think really bring us inside those early formative years of this totally fascinating world leader a different like a leader cut from different cloth a different mold and It just made for a fantastic book. I can't recommend

the Chancellor, the remarkable Odyssey of Anne-Holimmerkel enough. I was really looking forward to this interview. I think it went great. And there was some selfish reasons for me wanting to do it. Not only did I read the book, so I was interested in it, but my newest book, which will be the second book in my Stuart Virtue series, The Sequel to Courage is Calling, is about temperance, moderation, self-control, temperament. And I really wanted to write about Anne Holmerkel. And I did, she's a main character in the book, as is Queen Elizabeth the second. And I had a bunch of questions,

so you'll notice I'm talking to Katty about this. And hopefully that's a little peek behind what's to come from me. But I'll just get into the interview because it was great. I think you'll enjoy it. Do you check out the chancellor? You can pick it up in the Payner-Porture Bookshop. I believe it weren't anywhere. Books are sold. And you can follow the wonderful author at Kati Martin, that's K-A-T-I-M-A-R-T-O-N. Here's an insight into one of the most politically successful and morally unique leaders in the world, Anhala Merkel. I absolutely love the book. Oh, thanks, Ryan.

It was the Everest of writing projects. I've looked at a couple of the other books about Merkel, and I was very much waiting for this book because... Oh, thanks. The blurb that said, you're closer than anyone to unlocking the mystery. I thought that was quite correct. Well, that was what I was aiming for. What are the library America books you have behind you?

What are those? That's Stephen Crane that I see. Yes, yes. So we've got, well, we've got a modest collection of Katis. Yes. And we have, we have Richards to end a war, which I think should be required reading right about now. Yes. And yeah, eight of my, eight of my tent. That's kind of gross, isn't it?

No, no, you got to have them somewhere. And I wrote my thesis on this guy, Alexander Solzhenitsin, so he's up there. And then what are the library of America books? Oh, so the library of America books, you can't these. So we've got Henry James, we've got Dreisser, we've got Stephen Cranier, quite right? We've got O'Neill and the complete place of Eugene O'Neill. Ah, so just fiction. So just fiction. Yeah, yeah.

And you know, one of the things I love about this otherwise unlovable Zoom world is that we do get to see each other's collections, except for one person. Can you guess the person who doesn't have a single personal item behind her? Just take a wild guess. Yeah, I would guess she would use some sort of a screen and not bother to show anything.

None of our business is so typical. No art, no nothing. And no one's ever been in her home. I mean, no one, I mean, no one from her stuff. I assume her husband's been there. Well, I wanted to ask you, Asher, that's sort of where I was thinking about starting, because you do mention one thing, I think you said it was on her desk. What's the little, like, you can wait with the, with the slogan on it. And we'll bring that to it. Yeah, yeah. So I did sneak into our office, full disclosure.

Also not a simple operation. And it's a plexiglass cube that says, in Dehu, I leak the cuffed. And that means in calm, there is strength, which is truly her mantra. That is a mongrel superpowers, Ryan, is that she does not lose her cool. And God knows autocrats from Trump to Putin have tried to shake that surreal calm of hers. But she ain't going there.

She just doesn't meet them where they wanna be met, which is on their playing field of, of bloviation and insults. She just doesn't take the bait and that drives them bonkers. Do you know the origins of that quote where she got it from how it came to be on her desk? I've never heard of that word. No, me neither. You know what? I'm going to take a guess. Gupta, I assume it's Gupta because she swears by Gupta, you know, one of the gods of

German high kutur. And it seems like having been to Good Deshausen in Weimar, it had that vibe, it had that hyper-com feeling. So let me just try Good Des for that. Yeah, it's your point about not being provoked. That seems like an underrated skill in a leader. I think we want, it's sort of, we want passionate leaders, right? We want leaders to, and then of course, leadership obviously selects for the driven, for the ambitious, for someone with something to prove. So you end up not getting very often leaders who can't be provoked, but that's almost like at least at that level

at the height of power is probably the ultimate skill or the ultimate tool in the toolkit because people are trying to provoke you all the time. Yeah, it seems so obvious. And yet, as you say, because she projects negative charisma, which is born of the fact that she doesn't emote in public. It's hard to imagine her going too far in our political culture because we really

want to be entertained. And the Germans have been there. They paid a very high price for their entertainer and cheese. And so I'm not sure that she would, in fact, sad to say I'm sure that she wouldn't thrive in our environment of, you know, we want low-viators, it seems. And, you know, it just seems like we don't learn. We don't learn from choosing repeatedly

the theatrical over the entertainer over the guy who's gonna be interested in us. The executive. Yes, yes, but she's more than that. She's more than an executive. She she's more than that. She's but she's more than I'm executive. She's she's waiting She's way more than that. Do you do you think it's partly it's counter programming? I mean we have the stereotype that women are more emotional than men How much of that is just naturally who she is and how much of it is she understands that the expectation or the criticism might be this

And she's trying to very much go in the opposite direction might be this and she's trying to very much go in the opposite direction. Definitely, partly that she had so much to overcome. I mean, here's this woman coming from East Germany. She was 35, as you know, and she first crossed from East to West Berlin, so a fully formed person. And she was a physicist, so a scientist, and above all, a woman in a country that never even had a queen, I think, uniquely in Europe. So she had so much to overcome. So yes, she was, because she's quite brilliant, she observed what works and what doesn't work. She, I mean, she's always learning.

Even now, she processes new information like nobody's business, you know, voracious reader. I mean, it kind of breaks my heart to even be talking about this because there's no one like her on the, on the world stage. No one, no one who comes close to having her personal story, the prime feature of which is that this is a woman who lived for 35 years in a police state. And for whom the word freedom is not a, you know, a big abstraction. It means not being able to read the books you want to read, not being able to travel to the Western sector of the country to visit your relatives.

It means daily seeing that that hideous monument to man's in humanity, to man which was the wall, because on her way to her lab every morning she, her subway rattled past that. So you know, these experiences really were foundational for her and I maintain that they really served the entire world for the last 60 years because we had such a person, such a calm and extraordinarily centered, centered as an oak treeola Miracle, which doesn't mean she's boring. I was one of the pleasant surprises of my five years search for who is Angola Miracle, is that she's not really who we think she is. I'm writing about Miracle and Queen Elizabeth in the book that I'm doing now, which is about sort of temperance and self-discipline. And it's taught me that they both came to very similar places

from very similar, dissimilar paths. I'll say. But there does seem to me to be a sort of a personality overlap. There one, ironically one is much more powerful than the other, right? Queen Elizabeth's power is all symbolic, and Merkel's power was literal and real, and yet they both seem to be very circumscribed in how they act, how they treat that role. And yeah, I was curious what you thought of the similarities and differences there. Well, I don't think Merkel would like the comparison. Yeah, because she, I remember one's asking, or she has a tiny circle of trusted confidants,

like three or four. I mean, so small that when Obama went to say goodbye to Merkel in 2016, and he looked around her office that her team had gathered there, he looked at her and he said, wow, you guys still all here? Because it was exactly the same team as eight years before. So, remarkable loyalty to the boss, which is telling about who she is. Anyway, once I asked one of those three people who was extremely helpful to me, I was observing the chancellor at a refugee event and I, you know, being an American, I whispered to her, why doesn't she announce something that, you know, and the age said, well, you know, she's not the queen of England.

She doesn't make these appearances and say flowery words. She's here because she wants to learn. And that was, so she kind of put me down with that line that she's not the queen of England, which because she is running a country. She is in the throes of a, a delicious humanitarian crisis. This was 2015 when, you know, 1 million Middle Eastern refugees

were allowed to enter Germany. You know, her miracles I maintain, miracles, probably most emotional and longest lasting move. And for once, she didn't factor in, she didn't weigh all the advantages versus the disadvantages, which is how she normally operates. Sure. So yeah, it's an interesting concept.

And I'll be looking for your arguments, but, yeah, Miracle also benefits from the fact that she can leave. She, she, in fact, just left. And, you know, as much as she must be absolutely shattered observing what's going on, the very, in Ukraine, the very thing she worked 16 years to prevent. This is precisely the scenario that she devoted all those hundreds of hours to trying to

talk sense to Vladimir Putin, now coming to pass just weeks after her departure. By the way, not a coincidence in my view. This is gonna ask what you thought, yes. Not a coincidence at all. Now I think no Putin is testing the will of the West, of the EU and of Washington. He saw a great deal of vulnerability in both Washington and Berlin with a brand new chancellor.

And I think he absolutely miscalculated and the really tragic piece of this among many is that there is no one there like Merkel who might have talked sense to him because Merkel was the one head of state that he truly respects. And literally they speak the same language being both of the products of the same Soviet foundation. Obviously, they came out with different conclusions about that system. She considered the end of the Soviet Empire her liberation and the beginning of her of her restarting her life as a politician, because as I said, she'd been a lab for most of her adult life.

And the night the wall fell, she literally took off her white coat and went looking for a political party for that same night for Putin, who was in those days, KGB agent in Dresden was catastrophic. And he has many times said that the demise of the Soviet Empire was the great tragedy of the 20th century. By the way, he spent that night

shoveling documents and files into his furnace. So that's such a speed that it exploded. So how much do you think he's sort of begrudging respect for her comes to what we're just talking about, which is that she seemed to be of the world leaders, the one that he couldn't provoke, the one that whose goat he couldn't get. You tell the story in the book about his little incident

with his hunting dogs. Oh my God, yes. Her staff was just furious because he knew, of course, being a KGB agent, he did his due diligence and knew that she was afraid of dogs having been bitten. So he unleashed this big black lab, Kony, who immediately went for Merkel and was sniffing around her.

And Merkel typically just kind of froze. Her staff was going bananas, just a ball. And afterwards, she said to them, you know, this is all he's got. He's got to do this. So she so totally saw through his macho exterior as she did Trump's, you know, the need to always be the top dog and the need to dominate. And she managed to make them both look kind of pathetic, kind of ridiculous. She, one of her strategies in negotiating with Putin or any other super-macho guy, Super, Super macho guy, you know, be Erdogan or Trump or Putin, is that when they're, you know, erupting and in verbiage about all the injustices that they have suffered, their people have suffered and all, you know, how it's time to correct history and blah, blah, blah. She then, she lets them go and she never interrupts. She lets

these volcanic eruptions pass and then she said, and then she repeats what they just said, but in very plain almost childlike phrases, which make them sound pretty damn ridiculous. So this is what you... And so she replays what they just played. Instead of meeting bombast with bombast, She meets it with calm reason. And that does take the supreme self-control of someone who learned very early not to call attention to herself. And because there was no value in that in the Stasi State. And she was always the most brilliant kid in the class, whatever the class was. And you see in the photographs in my book that she's always sitting near the back of the class

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Hey, prime members, you can listen to episodes Add Free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. Yeah, I can imagine her waiting for one of those eruptions to wrap up and then go, are you finished? Just sort of self-control to not be evoked in it, but also not to take it. She's taking it for granted, she's taking it at face value, but also not. She understands that it's a performance. It's not actually, and it to take it seriously is to get sucked into it. Yes, yes. On the other hand, it's unlike the queen to return to your analogy, she has to deliver. It's not enough for her to show up as the symbol of the state beautifully turned out,

which she rather rarely is beautifully turned out. That's not among her skill set. But she has to actually execute, she has to deliver fuel, she has to make sure that the extreme right stays power is never going to jeopardize German, the health of the nation as she observed in Japan with Fukushima after which she took Germany off the nuclear grid, a controversial. In other words, she's always managing a crisis. There was never a month that was crisis-free from 2005 to just a few weeks ago. I mean, it was just one rolling crisis. Yeah, I was going back to that dog incident. The other one, what I think is so impressive about it too,

is like if you've ever been around someone who's afraid of dogs or if you're afraid of dogs, the tricky thing is the dog also senses it, right? The dog senses your unstable, potentially dangerous energy, and it's a feedback loop, right? Right, right. And the dog's uncertain and then you're like this, and that's a, and so what I find so impressive about that

is not just she understands that there's this sort of global exchange happening between her and Putin, but also she legitimately is afraid of dogs and she somehow manages to keep that under wraps in that moment too. It's pretty impressive. It is, but again, because I was born and raised into a similar system,

and so we had occupied Hungary, the child of jailed Jordan Lists. And so I know what fear does, and how it infects your DNA. And certainly I was raised by two, I mean, I was a little kid when we escaped from Hungary and did observe tanks in my hometown. So Soviet tanks rolling into Budapest.

So observing Ukraine has a personal resonance for me in all its horror. But the idea that she learned to master fear and knew that she had to assume that people were informing on her from the beginning. And in fact, her lab partner, whom she was close friends with, was pretty much a full-time informer. And he totally betrayed her trust. And that was just a reminder of something that her parents had prepared her for, which is that eventually they will try to recruit you.

As they did, I mean, the Stasi had deeper penetration of East Germany than the Gestapo had of Hitler's Germany. I cite statistics in my book as to, of East Germany, then the Gestapo had Hitler's Germany. I cite statistics in my book as to one agent for every, I don't know, 20 people. I mean, it was crazy. So it was that level of suspicion and almost paranoia. In fact, has been an advantage for her in her political life because one of her great assets is that people are endlessly underestimating her, including all her mentors

who saw this brilliant woman who can't possibly be a threat to them. Well, guess what? Because she knew how to contain whatever it was she was planning, whatever ambition and she had vast ambitions for herself. One of the reasons that she left science was that she was a good scientist, but she didn't think she was no bell-priced material. So in other words, whatever she was going to do, she was going to do at the highest level. The top. Yep, yep. She was going to be chancellor or nothing.

And that's what I see the similarity between her and the queen is the ability to wear the mask, right? And to also be, to have the self-control to be okay being underestimated. Like I think of the queen and her sort of weekly meetings with the Prime Minister. She knows more than every one of the Prime Ministers. I mean, she's dealt with 12 of that person, right? Like, she's been in that chair for longer than that person has been alive in many cases. Yes.

Yes. And so there's a certain amount of egolessness required to be in comfortable being under estimate. She understood that Merkel did that her male mentors were using her or seeing her as a tool or not a threat. And she was strong enough not to correct them of that helpful assumption. Absolutely.

As I say, some kind of book that she may never have torched her, her rivals, but she certainly never ran for the firehows when they were self-imulating. That was her. But if I can just underscore the obvious contrast between her majesty, the queen, I have nothing against her. Happy I don't live in a monarchy. But I like why. Yeah, OK. I mean, Queen Elizabeth was born into this role. Angela Merkel. Angela Merkel,

how we went up the brutalizer name. She had to fight for every inch of territory. As I've pointed out, the triple outside or the scientist, the woman, and from these. So, you know, as I pointed out, the triple, the triple outside or the scientist, the woman, and from these. So, you know, and yet never breaks a sweat, never reveal that, you know, just pretend that you don't notice when the guys are plotting who's going to be the one to take her down as they were. Just soldier on and learn from the best and observe what pulls down the week and the corrupt and hold your cards extremely close to the best. These are extraordinary skills. And sometimes I felt like I was writing

Machiavelli volume 2 called the princess because there are so many lessons in this tale for not only for people with political ambitions, but I think for all of us, I know that in the process of trying to decode this extraordinarily opaque personality, I learned so much. I mean, I approach situations now with kind of one eye cocked, you know, to I don't want to say I ask myself every morning, what would Merkel do? But, but it does, but I do think that in, in a bunch of ways, it's changed me. It's, it's made me more less impulsive, more, I weigh whatever mantras, the advantages out with the disadvantages,

because it's very rare that things are that clear. And above all, I try not to react to, you know, when I'm pissed off, which we are daily, you know, especially, you know, during COVID, how often, you know, where we were ready to scream and frustration at whatever. And I, I, I've tried, she's, she's, she's made me a calmer person. So my children are grateful. Where do you think there's a sort of a certain stoicism to her, right? And where does that come from? Is that the religious training? Is that the scientific sort of focus on the rational mind? Did she have a philosophical or political

hero that she was modeling herself against? Where does the sort of tone of come from? Yeah, you've just listed a bunch of them. So, so first of all, she is a woman of deep, but extremely private faith. She is the pastor's daughter. Her father had an enormous influence on her.

He was a rather austere, rather forbidding not, but not a cuddly guy. She, she never fully got his got his affirmation, his approval. I never voted for, which is remarkable, neither of her parents did. So the Lutheran faith, which for her, is about a sense of responsibility for those less fortunate. And also, she scorns, you know, flash and wealth. And, you know, here, I mean, the idea that she left the chancellery a few weeks ago,

and returned to her rent-controlled apartment in Central Berlin. No palaces, no yachts, no nada. No $20 million Netflix deal after. That's so fun. Anything like that. No, I mean, that would run completely against the grain for her. And she considers, you know, acquisitions, property, so on,

really burdensome. They slow you down. She loves nature. Her staff calls her rambles in the woods near her very modest little, you can't even call it a country house. It's a typical East German style da tcha, where she and her husband go and she loves to go for rambles there. They call her staff calls that, her think tank, because that's where she goes to be quiet and to think. And I'm guessing she's spending a lot of time there now. But for her to maintain the kind of Putin-like palace, would be a colossal waste of time. And you can only imagine what she thinks of the wealth

that this man who has paid $140,000 a year that this man who was paid $140,000 a year has accumulated, he's supposedly the wealthiest man in the world. So you can only imagine what she thinks of that. Or of Trump, she was never invited to Mar-a-Lago. She lived in fear of being invited to Mar-a-Lago because she might have had to accept. So yes, so just to fully answer your question about where this comes from.

So it's the faith, it's the love of nature. It's the fact that she spent her youth in a very remote corner of Germany, Brandon Bird. And that was partly where she learned to rely on herself and to draw on her own resources. She was a country girl. She was not a city girl. By the time she got to Berlin,

which was after she got her PhD, to begin work in the East German Academy of Sciences, she was a fully formed person. So she was never an urbanite, though she loves culture and loves, you know, I don't think that she's going to be, you know, people are endlessly asking me, so what is she going to do now? And the things she isn't going to do is take another job. I mean, what job is there after 16 years as Chancellor of Germany. But Nor is she ever going to be bored because she is so turned on by culture, music and opera and plays and books. She's a voracious reader.

That was one way that she escaped the kind of confinement of living in the Stasi State was that her parents who were originally from the West. I mean, this is another really bizarre thing, is that when all the traffic was from East to West escaping the red army, her family, Merkel's family chose the opposite route and went from west to east because her father took up the challenge to minister in the atheist communist state. And of course that's why that's why Merkel grew up in that atheist communist state, but they did take with them a rather rich They did take with them a rather rich library of books. And she, that's how she discovered, for example, you asked earlier about her heroes and role models.

And one of them is Catherine the Great, kind of ironic. The German princess who became the Sari no Afrussia. And she has a portrait of her in her office. Yeah, yeah. And Ukraine comes into this story too bizarrely, because Catherine the Great conquered Ukraine. So when you were saying earlier, you said you didn't think she could be successful in the American

political system. It does feel like as sort of naturally reserved and sort of indifferent as she is to fashion or makeup or appearances. As you said, anti-carrismatic. You do talk quite a bit in the book about how she figured out how to play the game and got, like, you can't serve 16 years as a politician without being a pretty decent politician, and you can't do it in the information age without being pretty good at managing your image and mastering these sort of new media tools. So she does figure

these things out. She does. But on the other hand, I think quite a survival mechanism. I mean, how do you survive 60 years of one crisis after the next? And maintain your balance. And one way is that she doesn't do social media. She's not out there. She is, I have Germans asking me, as her biography does this chancellor have any grandkids? They don't know that she doesn't have children. They don't.

No, no. I mean, that is available information. Sure. But she doesn't sit down and give interviews about her wonderful marriage or her potato soup recipe or whatever. There's none of that. She just doesn't think it's anybody's business. And that fact, and here's another lesson from Michael Valley volume two, is if you don't give it all away to the public,

you know, that liberates a large part of you that frees a large part of you to actually maintain life as a normal human. life as a normal human. She's about as normal a human as any supremely powerful player on the world stage has ever been because she didn't reveal everything. I say in the book that Germans aren't tired of her looming over them because she doesn't loom. Sure. It was a clever thing, but it also, in that, you know, they didn't really get tired of her in an age when, you know, our attention span is shrinking by the minute.

They weren't tired of her because she kept, because she kept, she wasn't in their face at all. And that helped her tremendously as well. But, and do you think a little bit that some of it is expertly done political theater, like decide into, it's not that she doesn't focus, let's say, on clothes, but she makes it clear that she's not focusing on clothes

because she's focusing on doing her job, right? Or even, is the, hey, I'm gonna go get my groceries at the grocery store like a normal person, but is part of that also being seen around the people and sort of is part of expertly managed theater also. Look, she is a complex human being unlike the rest of us. And of course, she knows that some of this really plays well. And the fact that she lives like most Germans

is pretty appealing. And that in 16 years, there hasn't been a breath of scandal. And nor any tell all books. I mean, imagine an American- There's barely any regular books. Let alone tell all books. Yes, yes.

And I think my book is far more revealing than any other because not that I uncovered all sorts of scandals, not at all, but that I do attempt to get beneath the surface of her. But she did figure out that she had to make a non-story out of the fact that she had no fashion sense. And so, you know, she was very strategic in that. She engaged a humbord designer who filled her closet with the Miracle Uniform, her equivalent of a man's pinstripe suit, which is jewel-tone jackets in endless shades and black trousers. I once I once caught her shopping for for shoes and in a department store in Berlin and while that even happened is such such an absurdly emblematic

and while that even happened is such an absurdly emblematic illustration of who she is. Yeah, while her, she hates to have her security anywhere in her line of sight, so they kind of pretend to be shoppers and she bought the same identical pair of black flats, I think six pairs of them. So, you know, it was not like, like most women, I really enjoy buying shoes, but not six of the same, you know. And the same with grocery shopping, she really enjoys that. And one of the iconic photographs of one of the iconic photographs to have come out of the COVID era over which she very competently ruled was showed her the day after she gave probably the most emotional speech

of her career. And because she doesn't give speeches, everybody paid attention with the iconic backdrop of the Reichstag behind her. And she told the nation in the most human terms that this is serious and that we're going to have to make sacrifices, but that we have to look after each other. And the next and please do not hoard. She promised people that there would be that the markets would have sufficient content. And the next day she was seen, and I have this photograph in my book, pushing a shopping cart with the same number of bottles of wine as rolls of toilet paper, four of each.

So, you know, she's very clever. She's also, by the way, extraordinarily witty. She's got a killer sense of humor, which unfortunately she doesn't display in public. Do you think that perhaps, I imagine this is connected to her humor, but you just said that when you gave the speech, people listened, do you think one of the sort of ancillary benefits of not always seeking the spotlight, always bloviating is that when you speak, people listen. There's a famous line from Cato, he said, I only speak when I'm confident that what I have to say is better not left unsaid, right? And that seems to be...

Well, that's a great line. That seems to encapsulate how she approaches communication. Yes, yes, absolutely. And by the way, because she has a lot of self-awareness, she also knows that public speaking is not her friend. She was suspicious of Obama at the outset, because she thought he was just that. Just a young man in a hurry who had a silver tongue. It took her a while to figure out

that he was actually a serious substantial guy, but there's was a not always smooth relationship. Yeah, David Halberstjam in his book about Bill Belichek, he said, Bill Belichek was not only in the stake business, he had contempt for sizzle, right? And that seems to be her approach as well. She's skeptical of, she's not only sort of, isn't charismatic, but it seems that she might be skeptical of charisma in other people because it might mean

that there's more style and substance. Yes, and also that charisma can lead to very dangerous developments. I mean, you know, she's of all the modern German leaders is the one who has most assimilated the lessons of the Holocaust and has made, you know, really historic speech to the Knesset in Jerusalem. She identified Israel's security as a foundational reason for the German state to exist. So she tied Germany's destiny to that of another country, Israel.

And, and the, you know, why? Because even though she was raised in the East, where they invented this mythology that all the Nazis were from the West, and that all the good Germans were from the East. And therefore, the East never went through the confrontation with the West did. And by the way, that has been a real problem for Merkel because, well, two reasons. One, she didn't pay sufficient attention to the fact that most East Germans, her fellow East Germans,

couldn't restart their engines as fast as she did. And she was impatient with them. And therefore, she didn't acknowledge them to the extent that they felt they needed to be acknowledged for their suffering. And so a lot of the so-called IFD, the far right party, which is in the Bundestag for the first time since the Second World War, is from her region of East Germany.

And they're disgruntled. And it's not the economy stupid. It's about, and this is also a blind spot of hers is that because she's such a hyper rational person, she underestimates the role that the irrational plays for most of us. Is that, that's Tracksmith's maybe something that she and Obama share when you're a very rational. Yeah. You have control of your temperament,

you're very brilliant. It makes it hard for you to understand, slash accommodate people who are not just not that, but maybe the opposite of that. Yes, yes. Actually, she and Obama are much alike in that regard. They're dissimilar in other fundamental ways, which I relate.

But Obama so trusted her more than any other. I mean, Ben Rhodes who my interviewed for this book said that the word, he can't avoid the word love to describe how Obama felt about Merkel. And she was the only one for whom he felt that. But however, when Putin started acting up in 2014, moving in on Ukraine, Obama just didn't have the patience to engage with Putin.

Yeah. And said to Marathon, you know, that man just lies to me morning, noon, and night. And well, of course, he lied to her too. But, you know, you look at the map and you realize that Russia is not going away and Germany's right there. And in fact, I quote Bismarck, the first German chancellor as saying that the key to a sound German foreign policy

is to make a good treaty with Russia. That was in the 19th century, and it's true today. So she was the one who carried the baton for the West in those endless hours, Sure. In those endless hours hunched over a table in Minsk where she said that the only way she knew the time of day was whether they were serving bread and jam or roast. So that level of focus and concentration and stamina, you know, the ability to just stay

at the table until you find common ground is really what diplomacy is about. And very few heads of state have the patience, the stamina, the strategic thinking, and the other thing that she brings to the table is, and this is, again, goes back to her brilliance, her photographic memory, is that no one, including Putin, can match her for mastery of detail and fact. She said at one point during the Ukraine crisis that she knew every tree in the dumbass because she was following, you know, even the Putin kept denying

that these were not his guys. They were called little green men because they didn't have any insignia. His men were, you know, overnight moving, and she knew every inch of territory that they were taking. And man, do we miss that, that kind of adult supervision of Putin now, because you don't see him hunched over a map with anybody now.

Sure. And that's a tragedy for all of us. I was struck by the chapter in the book on her relationship with her husband, you tell the story, which I had heard before, about him not attending her inauguration and such. I can't tell if that's cute or sad. Yeah, well look, it might be sad for you and me,

but it works for them. They've been together for many decades, and part of their deal is that he gets to do what he likes to do and she gets to do what she likes to do. He's a very distinguished quantum chemist well known in his field and the only person who ever called him Mr. Marcle was Nicholas Sarcosi and it didn't go over too well because Marical is the name that she kept from her first right right. Married. A very brief starter marriage. You know based partly on I mean they were she married Ulrich Marical who was a fellow student and likes to get married and because you got better apartments if you were a married couple.

I mean, they also love each other, I think. But she had grew him pretty quickly. But the marriage is very close and she, but absolutely private. Absolute. He's never given a single interview about her. Can you imagine? It's incredible. I mean, I think that's the worry or the suspicion that people have, you know, when you see these

people who are very calm and cool and collected that maybe they're just not capable of emotional intimacy, not that they're keeping it out of the workplace, but that they're somehow robotic and not capable of that closeness or connection. But do you think that that's not the case with her? Not at all. I've seen her tear up a couple of times. She tear it up at a memorial for World War One that's very done. It's just I don't know if you've ever been there. I mean, it's just one of those battle fields with just endless crosses across rolling green fields, kind of like the landing beaches in Normandy. I mean, just boggles the mind to think of that many fallen and you look at the graves

and they're you know very young soldiers German and French and and part of this the commemoration was was that young Germans and French kids just just bounded with with white streamers among the among the graves and she teared up at the you know at the notion that their grandparents had died in those beautiful fields for an inch of territory and she so hates war. So that was one time she, she emoted and the other time was, which really had historic consequences when she, when she met this refugee girl in the summer of 2015, I call that chapter the summer of Reem

because Reem was this little girl who was picked for a town hall as a sort of model refugee girl and she started moving into the microphone saying that all my friends are making their plans but I can't because I don't have the security of being able to stay in this country. I wanna stay in this country. And Merkel was, she whispered into her own,

my God, God. I mean, she was completely blown away by that and then subsequently had the girl to the chancellery a couple of times. The girl and her family, of course, have now been given permanent asylum in Germany, along with one million other Middle Eastern refugees. And her Republican friends, like Henry Kissinger, a mentor, said to her Angela to to allow one refugee in

is a humanitarian act, but to allow one million is to destroy German culture and civilization. Well, guess what? That Henry was wrong. That did not happen. And for the most part, those, that one million population of refugees have been, have been integrated into German society.

It's not even a big subject anymore. I mean, it certainly isn't today because today of population of refugees have been integrated into German society. It's not even a big subject anymore. I mean, it certainly isn't today because today, it's all poop. Isn't that the irony though that after 16 years or not quite? But after a decade and a half of rational, almost wonkish sort of policy decisions and sort of fact-based solution, you know, focused decisions

devoid of emotion or or grandstanding or any of that, that her her greatest decision and her most inspiring and perhaps most permanent part of her legacy was the opposite of all of that. Yes, yes. Yeah. Where are you going with that? Just that it's, you know, she has this playbook, this rulebook that she follows her whole career. And then she has the ability to throw it out at the last second to do her greatest, her greatest bit of work.

Well see, I don't quite see it that way because I think that her moral code has always been operational. It was just the first time that it was really tested. Because until then, she was dealing with things like the nuclear crisis, the euro crash, having to figure out how to deal with populace. Those were not emotional issues. This was the equivalent of if there had been a wave of anti-Semitism. To me, it was all of a piece because as much as she doesn't talk about her faith, it's so obvious that that is her core

and that is the secret of what has sustained her and what drives her, her know, her ambition is real, but it's not sort of empty ambition. She really does believe that she can deliver for not only her people, but for the world. I think her big disappointment is that she was just about to focus on climate. Her 2020 January, a New Year's speech was, that's the one speech a year that she can be counted on to deliver.

And she said that now I'm going to focus on climate because I haven't been able to. And then six weeks later, it came COVID. So if I were to hazard a guess as to where we will be hearing from Miracle after, let's give her a little break now. Although I sincerely hope that she's on the phone to her successor about how to deal with Putin. I'm sure she is. I'm sure she is. And probably even to Biden. I think the issues of climate and the urgency of climate, that'll be one. And the other I would would be women who are still far from empowered,

and particularly in Africa. I think she'll be stepping up to those issues, but no formal positions. Nor does she care about a Nobel Peace Prize. There's a, there's a Marcus Aurelis Quodis says, just that you do the right thing, the rest doesn't matter. And, and that to be her, her, her one million refugee policy, I think she probably, I don't know, the advice from Kissinger, there's probably a political truth in that.

But it's also morally important to have taken that into consideration. Do you know what I mean? And so it just struck me as this, I don't want to say emotional because that, but you're right, it's a profoundly moral choice that she made as opposed to a political choice. It was a moral decision, which we see so rarely from leaders. Leaders make political decisions and partisan decisions, but very rarely do they make moral decisions. Yeah, I think this is what makes her quite frankly the greatest, the most important politician

of the 21st century is that she was able, she's no Gandhi, but she's no mother Teresa, she's a cunning, when necessary ruthless, brilliant, but deeply moral politician. You know, it's hard for me to even put those two words in the same sentence moral politician. You know, when you, it's hard for me to even put those two words in the same sentence moral politician because it's so rare. But she is that. And the fact that she doesn't rub our noses in that, you know, we conclude that if we study, as I have studied her, that is the inevitable conclusion. But she hasn't said, I'm a moral,

principled person. And, you know, she doesn't ask for our approval, which also makes her very appealing. No, and that's why I thought the book was so important. I read a few book, a book a few years ago, called Lincoln's Virtues by William Lee Miller. And he was saying that, we forget, because we look at Lincoln 150 odd years ago, we see him as just a moral figure as opposed to a politician. He had the same job as every other president and just as Merkel does,

but to be able to be a politician and a moral figure, to use the imperfect art of persuasion and governance and coalitions to enact moral acts is profoundly important. Even if you disagree with all the specific moral acts that that person took because that combination is so rare, we see the pragmatic or the calculating politician all the time where the charismatic cult of personality politician, but Merkel combines the elements that we should want to see in politicians far more often.

Yeah. Oh, that's so well put, Ryan. And I would give a shout out here to the German people who vanishes. And seemingly unexciting, you know, uncharismatic leader who isn't out to seduce them. Yes. You know, that they would have the good sense to four times elect such a person, really speaks

of a mature democracy. And even in her leave-taking, you know, snow, I mean, it's hard to avoid the comparison with our recent leave leaftaker. Yeah. You know, no attempt to argue with the outcome. In fact, she chose, she's the most popular politician in Germany by far. She could have stayed, but she chose to leave at her own speed and then really cleared out and let the next guy get his bearings. I mean, that is what that is how democracy is meant to work and sad

to say it doesn't work that way in our our democracy, we, who were the midwives of this Germany, really taught them well. And I don't know, something happened. No, you're right. They've outpaced us. There are more mature democratic base in some ways than we are. And that is an indictment for sure.

And devastating for Merkel Merkel who loves America, of all the German chancellors, she was the one who most revered this culture, she said that among her fantasies is to drive around the West Coast in a convertible with spring steam on the radio, which is, again, not how we think of Angela Merkel. Well, that's so the opposite of growing up in East Germany,

right? That's the most American free Levi's jeans convertible Pacific Coast Highway. That was probably the dream that propels her in any ways. Absolutely. Yeah, it was her first trip. It was to the Pacific. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, I absolutely loved the book. Thank you so much for writing it and for coming on. And I can't recommend it highly enough. Thank you, Ryan. It was such a pleasure. I feel like we could go on and on. I'm sure we could.

And now I hope you write this. I think you should write a sequel to the Prince called The Princess. And it should be lessons on power and cunning from women throughout history. Wow. You know, I may come back to you. I think you should write it.

I'll read it in two seconds. Okay. All right. If I could write it in two seconds. Yes, that would be the issue. Yeah, okay, Ryan. Thank you so much. You know, the Stoics in real life

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