Design Matters with Debbie Millman
Mar 30, 2026 · 50 min · 28 segments
Timothy Snyder is a leading historian of Eastern Europe, the Holocaust, and political conflict, and the author of more than a dozen books, including *Bloodlands*, *Black Earth*, *On Tyranny*, and…
Timothy SnyderGuest
Debbie MillmanHostspeaker_12
You've said that if you don't know the languages, you don't really know the history.
Well, capability in language means that you can talk to other people in their own language.
So as, as Americans, we're used to people speaking our language, but what we're not used to thinking about is how the other side might be getting more out of the exchange than we are because they're looking at how we behave natively, whereas we're looking at how they behave in a second or a third or a fourth language.
If you can speak the language of the other person, you're more likely to learn more about them.
And if you can, if you can read in the original, each book that you read is taking you a step further into a whole culture, into a whole way of embracing the world.
And then you can bring that back to yourself when you're, when you're in your own language.
And then of course, I'm a historian, and the vast majority of archival materials are not in fact translated.
And you can translate them yourself if you want, but it's not the same thing as proceeding document to document, context to context and trying to figure out what was going on.
Your parents served in the Peace Corps in the Dominican Republic and El Salvador before settling in Centerville, Ohio.
And I read that growing up, your weekends were often spent writing letters to prisoners for Amnesty International.
Uh, so the, the, the Quaker part is certainly relevant in the sense of the insistence that there is a moral component to everything, and I believe that's actually correct.
I, I think all of the forms of politics which attempt to sayThat morality doesn't matter.
That, for example, it's all about efficiency or it's all about technocracy, it's all about just finding a solution.
Those tend to end up serving certain people and not everyone else, right? So if you say efficiency is the thing, what you're saying is we have to have what we have now, just more of it and faster.
But why do we have to have more of what we have now? Why, exactly, right? There's always the why, whether the why is explicit or not, and the Quakerism helps with that because the Quaker-- in Quakerism, there's, there's a moral aura around everything.
You've said that if you don't know the languages, you don't really know the history.
Well, capability in language means that you can talk to other people in their own language.
So as, as Americans, we're used to people speaking our language, but what we're not used to thinking about is how the other side might be getting more out of the exchange than we are because they're looking at how we behave natively, whereas we're looking at how they behave in a second or a third or a fourth language.
If you can speak the language of the other person, you're more likely to learn more about them.
And if you can, if you can read in the original, each book that you read is taking you a step further into a whole culture, into a whole way of embracing the world.
And then you can bring that back to yourself when you're, when you're in your own language.
And then of course, I'm a historian, and the vast majority of archival materials are not in fact translated.
And you can translate them yourself if you want, but it's not the same thing as proceeding document to document, context to context and trying to figure out what was going on.
Your parents served in the Peace Corps in the Dominican Republic and El Salvador before settling in Centerville, Ohio.
And I read that growing up, your weekends were often spent writing letters to prisoners for Amnesty International.
Uh, so the, the, the Quaker part is certainly relevant in the sense of the insistence that there is a moral component to everything, and I believe that's actually correct.
I, I think all of the forms of politics which attempt to sayThat morality doesn't matter.
That, for example, it's all about efficiency or it's all about technocracy, it's all about just finding a solution.
Those tend to end up serving certain people and not everyone else, right? So if you say efficiency is the thing, what you're saying is we have to have what we have now, just more of it and faster.
But why do we have to have more of what we have now? Why, exactly, right? There's always the why, whether the why is explicit or not, and the Quakerism helps with that because the Quaker-- in Quakerism, there's, there's a moral aura around everything.
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