freedom can't be understood as something which just happens or which is morally neutral.

Freedom is the value of values. It's a thing you have to care about it or to care about other things.

And so like all values, it demands a certain amount of courage.

From the TED Audio Collective, this is Design Matters with Debbie Milman.

On Design Matters, Debbie talks with some of the most creative people in the world about what they do,

how they got to be who they are, and what they're thinking about and working on.

On this episode, a conversation with historian Timothy Snyder about our current political moment

and what the idea of freedom has to do with it.

The ideological thing that is deeply wrong with the U.S. is that we misunderstand freedom.

Timothy Snyder is one of the most important and urgent intellectual voices of our time.

A historian of Eastern Europe, the Holocaust and political conflict, he has spent his career using the past to help us see and understand the present with clarity.

He is the author of more than a dozen books, including Bloodlands, Black Earth, on tyranny, and most recently, on freedom.

Timothy Snyder, welcome to Design Matters.

I'm very glad to be with you.

Timothy, you speak six languages and can read ten.

How many languages can you think in?

I think the real question is how many do you dream in? And I do dream

sometimes in Polish, and I do dream sometimes in French. And there are bits sometimes of my dreams

that are in German and snatches occasionally in Ukrainian. I don't really think in languages at all.

You've said that if you don't know the languages, you don't really know the history.

What does native language make available to you that translation doesn't?

Well, capability in language means that you can talk to other people in their own language.

...