Scott requested the following corrections to be added on-screen. They were. They are provided here for reference.
YouTube Timestamps:
54:10 – Correction: Note from Scott: I meant Baker not Carter.
1:23:38 – Correction: Note from Scott: Please add on screen “and bombing and blockading Iraq from them” after I say “They occupy the two holy places”.
1:50:48 – Correction: Around the United Nations
3:36:08 – Correction: M1 money supply grew ~30% (not two-thirds) from May 2020 to its March 2022 peak. Source: https://mises.org/power-market/how-much-did-they-print
4:28:10 – Correction: Note from Scott: I meant “Lebanese Shi’ites along with the Palestinians”
4:46:37 – Correction: Note from Scott: Saddam’s romance novel overstated. That was in 2000. “Begone, Demons” was in 2003. Still, it was a novel, not a plan to attack us.
5:17:23 – Correction: Western Slavonia
5:36:48 – Correction: Tulsi Gabbard was promoted to Lieutenant Colonel.
8:33:24 – Correction: Note from Scott: I meant “Ramzy Yousef” not “Ramzi Binalshibh”
10:13:23 – Correction: The River Tysa into Romania
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1:02:24 – Correction: Note from Scott: I meant Baker not Carter.
1:31:51 – Correction: Note from Scott: Please add on screen “and bombing and blockading Iraq from them” after I say “They occupy the two holy places”.
1:59:02 – Correction: Around the United Nations
3:44:21 – Correction: M1 money supply grew ~30% (not two-thirds) from May 2020 to ts March 2022 peak. Source: https://mises.org/power-market/how-much-did-they-print
4:36:24 – Correction: Note from Scott: I meant “Lebanese Shi’ites along with the Palestinians”
4:54:51 – Correction: Note from Scott: Saddam’s romance novel overstated. That was in 2000. “Begone, Demons” was in 2003. Still, it was a novel, not a plan to attack us.
5:25:36 – Correction: Western Slavonia
5:45:02 – Correction: Tulsi Gabbard was promoted to Lieutenant Colonel.
8:41:38 – Correction: Note from Scott: I meant “Ramzy Yousef” not “Ramzi Binalshibh”
10:21:37 – Correction: The River Tysa into Romania
This is a transcript of Lex Fridman Podcast #477 with Keyu Jin.
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Lex Fridman (00:00:00) The following is a conversation with Keyu Jin, an economist at the London School of Economics, specializing in China’s economy, international macroeconomics, global trade imbalances, and financial policy. She wrote the highly lauded book on China titled The New China Playbook: Beyond Socialism and Capitalism that details China’s economic transformation since 1978 to today. And it dispels a lot of misconceptions about China’s economy that people in the West have. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description and consider subscribing to this channel. And now, dear friends, here’s Keyu Jin.
Misconceptions about China
Lex Fridman (00:00:47) What is the single biggest misconception the West has about China’s economy today?
Keyu Jin (00:00:52) The biggest misunderstanding is somehow that a group of people or even just one person runs the entire Chinese economy. It is far from the reality. It is a very complex, large economy, and even if there is an extreme form of political centralization, the economy is totally decentralized. The role that the local mayors, I call this the mayor economy, plays in reforms, but also driving the technological innovation that we’re seeing right now. It is actually not run by just a handful of people. It’s more decentralized than the US’s. And I think more broadly, a big misunderstanding is really the relationship between Chinese people and authority.
Keyu Jin (00:01:37) Well, people think that somehow there’s almost blind submission to authority in China. We have a very nuanced relationship with authority, whether it is between kids and parents or students and their teachers or with your bosses and the Chinese government, it’s kind of the same thing. There’s paternalism, they think that they’re responsible for you. But a certain amount of deference to authority is not blind submission. It’s been written implicitly in our contract for thousands of years that in exchange for some deference, we are given stability, security, and peace and hopefully prosperity.
Lex Fridman (00:02:20) So there is some element that we have in the West of freedom of the individual so that a little bit of the rebel is allowed in balance with the deference to authority.
Keyu Jin (00:02:30) Yeah, absolutely. Without that, how can you have this radical, dynamic entrepreneurialism you see in China? If you don’t have a sense of self, a sense of the fact that you can find opportunities, you look for opportunities, you drive opportunities, it’s all self-motivated.
Lex Fridman (00:02:50) Is there still a young kid in China that’s able to dream to be the stereotypical Steve Jobs in the garage, start a business and change the world by doing so?
Keyu Jin (00:03:02) There are millions of young kids like that in China. They might not be thinking about changing the world. And this is where the Chinese approach to innovation is very different from the Silicon Valley one, I’d say. But they see opportunity. They see a country with a billion consumers. They see scale, they see speed, they see that with their dreams and the team that you have in China with engineers and the digital transformation, you can do so many things. And this generation of young people think about transforming their local economy. I think we’re going to get into this, but it’s no longer going to just be manufacturing. The young kids are entrepreneurs.
Lex Fridman (00:03:41) Well, let’s stay on the big picture a bit, there’s a perception that China is a communist country. So to what degree is China a capitalist country and to what degree is it a communist country?
Keyu Jin (00:03:54) I’ve rarely seen a more capitalist society than China, from the pure economic side. I’ve rarely seen companies that are as competitive as Chinese companies. People as ambitious and obsessed with making money as Chinese people. Kind of ruthless actually. And look, consumers shop, firms invest. If you invest well financially, you’ll get great returns. What is not capitalistic about the Chinese economy? At the same time, the social fabric is highly socialist. First of all, the state or enterprises dominate many of the sectors. The state banks control the financial system. We often talk about common prosperity, about equal opportunity, just and fair society. But even daily stories, a walk in the park behind my parents’ apartment, you’re going to find at least 50 organized social groups on a daily level, singing, dancing, exercising, doing whatever these fantastic idiosyncratic hobbies they have, getting together every single day. And free courses for the elderly in retard. That sense of communalism, that sense of belonging, that strive for harmony at the societal level is there.
Education in China
Lex Fridman (00:05:17) So just to go back to something you said, there is a value for competition culturally. So on the business side, on the economic side, there is a cultural value of people competing in a meritocratic way?
Keyu Jin (00:05:33) Competition is ferocious in China, especially when it comes to Chinese companies, but also in education. I should be thankful that I’m not born later that I am because I thought China was pretty competitive already going to the schools and studying for the exams. It is a different level today. Competition is not necessarily in the culture, I’d say, it’s driven really by the changing economic and social circumstances of the day. The Chinese companies are all hardworking. They’re all going after the market share. They all kind of want to do the same thing. It’s not quite like in the US where you open a coffee shop while next door I’m going to open a bagel shop. In China, if the coffee shop does well, everybody wants to open the same coffee shop.
(00:06:17) And I think, again, I’m sure we’re going to get to this, but there’s a lot of that kind of competition, which really drives the world sometimes crazy of replication. But it’s because it’s not easy. It’s not easy to make money. In the education system, there are not enough jobs for the young people. So how do you get ahead? Let’s say if you’re part of a lower stratum society, how are you going to make sure that your children are going to have a better life than you? You invest in education. So everything is about competition. In a country with 1.3 billion people, that’s somewhat to be expected.
Lex Fridman (00:06:53) Let’s go back to the roots of that. So you described the China’s economy model is rooted in its history. So can we talk about Confucianism? Can you explain to what degree those roots run back to Confucianism and in general to other parts of Chinese history?
Keyu Jin (00:07:10) Yeah. Confucianism is more of a moral philosophy than let’s say a religion or a belief system. It prioritizes social harmony above anything else. It’s not about metaphysics, but more about ethics. And at the individual level, the responsibility, the duties are all meant to preserve that social order. So it’s filial piety, it is loyalty, it is how to be a Chinese gentleman. But things like saving, frugality is part of the moral discipline. Education is part of the moral cultivation. So there’s a very strong emphasis that you as a citizen have a responsibility to contribute to society as a whole.
Lex Fridman (00:08:02) On the education side, a part of Confucianism is a value for meritocracy. So how does that permeate the education system in China? You’ve already spoken to it a little bit, the value of competition in that it’s already getting more and more intense. But it would be very interesting to get your understanding of the education system, its history and as it stands today.
Keyu Jin (00:08:23) If China were relatively successful economically, a huge part of the reason is by and large, it’s been meritocratic. That is changing somewhat now, but the only way that you have still that many poor people, especially a couple of decades back, still be in harmony with society, seeing all these rich people make tons of money and you’re still belonging to that lower stratum. The only reason is that you believe that your children have a future through meritocracy. And even though it’s highly imperfect, standardized testing, all this competition, all of the hours and the tutorials to studying for standardized exams. Well, that is a very realistic scenario in China because there’s that many people. When I was growing up in school, we had 60 people per class and there were 10 classes in one grade. Now imagine that many people applying for colleges in the American way, how many essays would have been written and need to be scrutinized? But also that gives room for total corruption, if you know what I mean. Just connection based.
(00:09:36) And actually the standardized exams, as imperfect as it is, to select talent is still by and large fair. And that’s how that whole generation of entrepreneurs, bureaucrats, government officials were selected. If you look at the Chinese premiers, the presidents of the past, they all went to great schools, a lot of them were engineers. And same thing for civil servants. It has changed somewhat. The meritocracy I think is eroding in China. I’m worried about that. Because it is fine that you get into a good university based on your own merit, but finding a job now becomes much less meritocratic. People with connections get jobs more easily than others.
(00:10:22) Of course, this is not just a unique Chinese phenomenon, it’s actually everywhere. But I guess what I’m saying is that that meritocracy, which was so fundamental to the ancient Chinese education system, by the way, civil servants were selected based on standardized exams in the past. That’s always been throughout Chinese history and that relates to Confucianism. Now, the opportunities, and coming back to the competition point, is that the opportunity is getting slimmer and slimmer. And again, this is not a unique Chinese phenomenon, jobs, where are the jobs going to be? So meritocracy has become more of a problem.
Lex Fridman (00:10:58) Do you have any memories of your own experience in terms of competition, the good and the bad of it? Maybe from that, can you pull out the thread of the value of that kind of competition? Basically, I grew up in the Soviet Union, so there’s a kind of brutality to the competition, but I think it ultimately molds really interesting people.
Keyu Jin (00:11:22) There is a good and bad part of competition. I remember when I was going into middle school, every single midterm exam, final exam, you are ranked from number one to number 800 in your entire grade and publicly displayed.
Keyu Jin (00:11:40) Imagine the majority of people and how they feel. But it does drive ambition in part and you don’t take anything for granted and you work hard, you keep the spirit up. But going to the US, I finally realized that Americans are totally competitive, it’s just that they don’t display it. It’s not as apparent. I remember I went to a very competitive high school, but everyone’s so chill, “Oh, I’m not studying.” They’re studying. They are secretly studying. When I was doing my PhD at Harvard, people would say, “Oh, my parents say don’t work so hard.” People say, “Don’t say you worked.” They’re working hard, just you don’t show it. In China, it’s kind of a noble thing to show that you’re working hard and that you’re number one or that you’re top of the class and you want to display it and you want to let everybody know. But in the US, everybody’s secretly doing it.
Lex Fridman (00:12:42) Yeah, some of it is the signaling. The culture emphasizes the signaling of is it better for everything to come easily, thereby showing that you’re a genius, it comes naturally? Or is it better to show that you worked extremely hard for the thing? But the ultimate result is there’s still competition. But I don’t know, when you’re visually displaying and explicitly stating that it’s good to be number one and it’s bad to be number 800. I think that permeates throughout the culture to where, first of all, you understand that hard work is the only way to improve, to succeed in life. And second of all, you just create this framework of early on understanding what it means to live a good life. And a part of that is to find the thing you’re damn good at and get even better at it, master it, become hopefully the best person in the world at that thing. I don’t know, that’s an extremely important lesson for society to teach.
Keyu Jin (00:13:51) Yeah. That’s, I would say, the right kind of competition or the efficient kind of competition. I feel that in the Chinese education system, it was not necessarily efficient because it frames you and molds you to be thinking in a certain way what’s been taught to you. You don’t have the bandwidth or the time or freedom to be more creative and to think outside the box. There, it’s just the box. You maximize the box and that’s it. You don’t actually know what’s outside of the box and you never actually go there. That’s the bad part of Chinese competition. And when I got to the US, the high school teachers were asking us to question authority, to question text. I’m like, “Wow, really? You can do that?” So I started asking why.
Economic reforms of Deng Xiaoping
Lex Fridman (00:14:34) All right. So there has been this miracle in the Chinese economy from after Mao, under Deng Xiaoping, where the Chinese economy got transformed and grew incredibly. So can you explain what happened? The different transformations that happened, the different reforms that happened under Deng Xiaoping?
Keyu Jin (00:14:56) Deng Xiaoping was by far our most pragmatic leader and I think everybody’s grateful to Deng Xiaoping. My father’s generation would not have seen that amount of prosperity and peace and opportunity without Deng Xiaoping. It started in the late 1970s when Deng Xiaoping came out with this open up and reform mandate. And it was very tough. Again, coming back to the big misunderstanding of China, it’s not as if one leader decides that that’s what we’re going to do and then everybody follows order and does that. No. There are tons of political barriers, tons of incentive compatibility problems at the local level. In the end, you need the local provincial governors, the mayors to do the job. And how many prefectures are there in China? A lot. And they have their own interests. We know this around the world, politically it’s the most difficult thing to do. But somehow Deng Xiaoping was able to break tradition, break convention, come out with this completely new way of thinking about society, life and economy. And it was so transformative.
(00:16:08) I remember people of that generation told me one time that society was going to focus on the economy. Really? Why would they do that? Wasn’t it politics? Wasn’t it everything about politics and struggle and ideology? So for them that the whole country and the government is going to focus on the economy was just so shocking. Even though we take it for granted now. That shows you that breaking that mold was incredibly difficult. But I think opening up was a really momentous thing that China did. And it wasn’t just joining the WTO, they were doing a decade of work in preparation leading up to that. What’s called Special Economic Zone is really to turn Shenzhen from a fishing village to an export platform, now to a Chinese-style Silicon Valley. And there was the agricultural reforms in the 1980s that meant that farmers could decide what they were going to grow and keep the surplus. Whereas it was a collective system before. You know that very well.
(00:17:17) And then of course, the ultimate transformation was when China actually joined the WTO in 2001. And the rest of it is history. We’re still talking about the aftermath. But reforms was the single biggest impetus to Chinese growth. And every time there was a major reform, it was followed by a good decade-long growth. Every time growth went down, there was a new series of major reforms rolled out and then, oops, that led to another wave of good growth. But I’d say that reform pace has slowed in the last 15 years, but are there reforms to be done? Yeah, absolutely. Has China reached even close to its potential? Not at all. But again, it comes back to politics. Now it’s less about economics, it’s more about national security, it’s more about politics. And I think that is probably the single biggest barrier to continued good economic growth.
Lex Fridman (00:18:20) Maybe can you speak to what it takes in such a large system, in many ways such a successful economy, to do reform? So you mentioned pragmatism. Deng Xiaoping famously said that, “It doesn’t matter whether the cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice.” So there’s that pragmatism that I think underlies a lot of great reforms
Keyu Jin (00:18:40) As a contrast to Soviet Union, the Chinese economy, as I mentioned, was extremely decentralized. In Soviet Union, the ministries were in charge of essential bureaucracy. But a lot of the power were given to these provincial governors, party secretaries, mayors of different sorts, and they were incentivized. That’s the key is that these mayors were incentivized to do a good job. If I were successful on a radical reform, if I were successful, I’d be a national hero and then that reform will be rolled out in every single city in the country over time. And I’ll be promoted to the higher run of the central government. And who knows, I might even become vice premier, premier president one day. That was how the individual was motivated to carry out these really tough reforms. Now China has changed a bit. It’s not about being radical and radically successful. It’s about being safe. So when you shift from basically an entrepreneurial state to a safe state, then the objective function changes and you see it in different economic outcomes.
Mayor economy and GDP growth race
Lex Fridman (00:19:54) So maybe can you speak to that? What are some important things to understand about the structure of the Chinese state?
Keyu Jin (00:20:00) Well, the central leadership politically is extremely powerful and it’s very consolidated. But they hold a very crucial key to the local governments, which is that they decide their fate. Am I going to promote them? Am I going to put them in jail? Am I going to fire them? Am I going to reward them? Am I going to punish them? They hold that crucial key. And I think what was very surprising for most of the Western audience is that when I mentioned about the mayor economy, they say, “Why don’t our American mayors in each city do these very radical things and then push for GDP growth and technology innovation?” It’s quite different. I think this is where China’s very unique in the world, is that political centralization, economic decentralization, and the yardstick to measure local mayors’ competence through, in the first stage, it was GDP growth.
(00:20:53) So I am a mayor of the city of Nanjing in Jiangsu province. I’m going to peak at my neighbor mayor’s city’s GDP growth and I’m going to be very, very competitive. By the way, I forgot about that. Competition is extremely competitive among the local government officials because you are competing with other mayor for a top job. So you need to do better than them. And whether that was an efficient structure or not, I cannot comment. But it certainly just fueled this massive and rapid economic expansion. First it was industrialization. Everybody wanted to do exports. Then they discovered, oh my gosh, we can have so much fiscal revenues coming from land, selling land and real estate. Let’s build real estate and let’s urbanize. And then the money kept coming into these local governments and that they can spend it on nurturing more companies or supporting real estate or supporting investment and they can do a better job.
(00:21:54) So then it was geared towards real estate. And that’s how the property cycle became the big thing. Everything was at double speed because of what the local government’s incentives were designed to do. I say now that China’s biggest challenge is consumption, it’s not production. We know that China’s very, very competitive in production and supply. China needs to be a consuming country to be a rich country. Why don’t you put consumption as part of the yardstick for measuring local governments? For a while it was environmental protection. Guess what? Very few of them really want to do it seriously because it goes against the incentives of driving growth. They would suffer on GDP growth if they were very serious about environmental protection. So for a couple of years, nothing happened in China on that front. And then the central government got really concerned and even angry and frustrated, so they decided to put that as a penalizing factor. And then guess what happened? Well, actually environmental protection sped up and in a matter of a short few years, I see blue skies every day in Beijing. That’s how it works.
Lex Fridman (00:23:03) So GDP is a measure of success in production. What’s the measure or what does it mean to be successful on the consumer side? You said it’s important to improve that. What does it mean to be a successful consumer nation?
Keyu Jin (00:23:17) The metrics shouldn’t be geared just towards GDP growth alone. It was just singular GDP growth and you can borrow heavily and just spend on infrastructure. That’s not a productive way to drive the economy. That’s what the local governments were doing for a long period of time. In the last few years, innovation, unicorns have been an implicit yardstick for local governments. That’s how we’ve seen these great EV companies. 80 cities doing EVs. I mean, do we really need 80 cities to do their own Evs?Solar panels. Now DeepSeek has become a star. Semiconductor companies. Each local government wants to have their own national champion.
(00:24:01) So implicitly technology was part of the yardstick competition as well. But if you can more accurately have a metric for consumption measures, really focus on making sure that it’s coming from consumption this GDP growth rather than from investment or infrastructure, then I think that it might focus the government’s objective a bit more on thinking about how to make people feel more secure so that they want to save more. For instance, creating more jobs, for instance, more on Social Security spending, on healthcare, on elderly care. Because for the longest period of time, this political economy model was brilliant as scaling up supply, but it was extremely weak at raising personal consumption. Because the incentive does not lie in consumption, it lies in production. So you shift the objectives a little bit and maybe the local government will do more to stimulate consumption.
Lex Fridman (00:24:56) Okay. You mentioned the mayor economy. That seems like an incredibly powerful idea. And you also mentioned that perhaps you’re not sure exactly how perfectly efficient it is and what efficiency there means, how good are you at quickly figuring out the best ideas? That’s what an efficient market does. There’s a component to what you’re saying where you’re a little bit critical of do you really need 80 EV companies? But maybe you do. That seems like an incredible thing to do. So what are the pros and cons of this? Maybe you can speak to it a little bit more.
Keyu Jin (00:25:29) I think it depends on the timing. If you’re starting something, starting a new emerging strategic sector like EVs or batteries or solar panels, you need the local governments to be involved to mobilize. The big push to coordinate the supply chains. If you wait for the markets to develop over time, it’s going to take a long time. Maybe they don’t even want to do it. Look at the US. The US is very, very behind on some of the new strategic sectors. But once you’ve reached a certain level of market competition, I think the state needs to withdraw or to retreat.
(00:26:07) Because ultimately the state is not the best at allocating resources, picking winners. You want the private actors, whether it’s the venture funds or through market competition, to ultimately decide who gets the most resources. But in the beginning, that big push is not really in any of the canonical models that I’ve studied in economics in the Western school of thought, state push, state mobilization, state initiation. That’s not there. But I think if you look at EVs, solar panels, even just thinking about the idea of reforms in the first place, that initial state push was vitally important.
(00:26:47) The other negative, although I think by and large positive aspect, is I don’t think that we need 80 cities to do their own EV brands, but to get started, maybe that’s what it would’ve taken to drive that incentive. And then ultimately, it’s up to the market to decide who are the last five remaining EV companies through market mechanisms. That’s Chinese-style industrial policy. Industrial policy was heavily criticized and again, if I talk to my Harvard professors, they’ll be very, very, very skeptical about the role of the state, especially in such a major way. But if you look at the Chinese experience, the evidence for success is all there. The cities that have pushed the most on supporting that particular sector ultimately did the best in terms of production, but also in terms of innovation, measured by patents. It’s all in the data. But the downside is that a lot of the capital is wasted. And this is what I also discussed in my book is that it is inefficient, although maybe it’s necessary. The amount of waste of investment plowed into these companies that will ultimately just go under, but also the misallocation-
Keyu Jin (00:28:00) … Ultimately, just go under, but also the misallocation of resources, because it’s led by the state, are some of the downsides, but I guess on balance, it’s been positive, because look at China’s internal combustion engine effort. Nothing, right? Semiconductors. Thanks to Biden, thanks to Trump, it’s improved dramatically, but all these things that they tried to do before, they couldn’t do, but when it’s a new thing, like something that there’s no incumbent, no particular advantage in any country. Actually, China’s really spearheading these sectors.
Lex Fridman (00:28:34) Can we linger a little bit more on this mayor economy? It just seems like such a powerful thing, where one mayor looks over to the next and looks, even just a trivially simple number like the GDP. Why don’t we do that in the United States or in the West more, just compete on GDP?
Keyu Jin (00:28:52) Well, you need to be elected and reelected, right? Is that what your electoral base cares about? In China, it’s what the central government, your boss, cares about. If you ask the consumers, they’d rather you spend on social spending, right? The things we talked about that stimulates consumption, on education, on healthcare, things that stimulate demand, it’s te difference of political system.
Lex Fridman (00:29:19) Maybe, can you speak to the difference? Another difference is the long-term, multi-generational thinking that permeates Chinese culture, so how does that differ from the western-style capitalism of quarterly-focused thinking?
Keyu Jin (00:29:35) The Chinese are both the most patient and the most short-termist economic actors I met. The patience, I don’t need to explain, because I think the political continuity means that they can make plans for two decades ahead, right? Even longer. The investment of Chinese parents in their children is a multi-decade long project, and they save. Chinese people love to save, because they think that they’ll have even more money if they save that money, rather than spend it on a ski vacation. That, I think it’s patently obvious to most people around the world, but I think that most of them would not have known that there’s a very popular motto in China, which is called, “Short, flat, fast.” That’s the impatient part of the Chinese culture, especially with respect to the economy. Short, flat, fast was used to describe a winning volleyball strategy that eventually became adapted to describing the society, as a whole, and economic decision making.
Keyu Jin (00:30:46) If you’re an investor, you only want to invest in things that you can quickly turn around, make a lot of money, and don’t need to do much work. It also applies to marriages, so a short courtship, a very flat, emotional relationship, and a fast divorce, that is how you see these companies rise within a very short period of time. Of course, investors are only interested in those companies that can turn around and exit in a very short period of time, making many, many multiples. And so, in that sense, people are very, very impatient, right? I sit on some boards of these long-standing companies, and the values are just so different. Even though a lot of these public companies are constrained by the quarterly results and so forth, but the values are about sustaining something, a company, for a long time, thinking about organic growth, thinking about investments for the future, sustainability. Maybe it’s that competition. Maybe it’s the speed that we’re used to in China. People think about short, so this dichotomy is very, very interesting.
Lex Fridman (00:32:00) It’s a surprising idea, right? So, that there is a kind of, in the west conception of Chinese culture, Chinese economy, that everything is usually 50, 100, 200 years out. You have this long vision, but you’re basically saying that there’s a deep, in the business sector, impatience about everything.
Keyu Jin (00:32:21) That’s a transitory phenomenon, I’d say, but if you look at the cheaper stuff, poor quality, that’s a reflection of that, the copying, it’s the same kind of mentality. Just get ahead quickly, but again, that is all shifting. That is all shifting, because China’s now in a different stage of development. If you ask the younger generation, they really care about quality. They care about values, and these companies, these very successful companies, successful in five years, ten years, found themselves in a very difficult position after a longer period of time.
(00:32:53) That short, flat, fast attitude, which was so popular, especially before the pandemic, that’s actually somewhat disappearing, so in some sense, this economic downturn is not that bad for China, because it made the Chinese realize that it’s not always going to go up, and it made them really look down deeper into what they really should be focused on, that there will be cycles, there will be up and downs, and so these very short-termist thinking and opportunistic way of driving business will ultimately fail. It’s bad for China that we’re having a sustained economic softness, but I think it’s also a very, very important lesson for the Chinese people to go through.
Growing up in China
Lex Fridman (00:33:41) Let’s go, if we can, a bit to the personal. So, you grew up in China. What are some moments from childhood that were maybe defining to your understanding of Chinese culture and Chinese economy?
Keyu Jin (00:33:55) We look back at those moments when everybody in China was very poor with a bit of nostalgia. I remember no doors were locked. I was in Beijing, and I remember every day in the summer, everybody just went downstairs and chatted with everybody else. It was very social. It was very community-based. The neighbors help each other. We had very, very little, small apartments, very limited access to certain goods. When I was born, even in Beijing, there were these vouchers for how many eggs you can buy, and even Beijing, there were three or four blackouts per week, typically. There was a sense of community. There was a very strong bond between people and within the family, because they were going after a common goal, making your life better, right? Struggling, striving to make your life better, and I remember being on the back of my father’s bike, getting up 6:00 AM every day and going to nursery. That’s the typical day. Not a lot of material goods, but people had a sense of purpose, and that’s radically different. It’s completely different now in China.
Lex Fridman (00:35:13) Do you think that, if you go to the human condition, do you think that nostalgia has some truth to it, or is it just nostalgia like any other? Is there some aspect of a intense, competitive, vibrant economy that loses some element?
Lex Fridman (00:35:29) Of everybody being poor together?
Keyu Jin (00:35:33) Well, everybody having a common goal and a sense of community, right? That is what’s missing in these extremely individual-based, capitalist societies, and I think what the Chinese government is striving to do with Chinese, socialistic characteristics is to somehow try to preserve a bit of that socialist character, while still relying on market-based incentives, but if you’re an extremely individual-based society, I think you do lose a lot of that, and I think some of the backlash that we’re seeing from society is a reflection of that, right? People being alone more and more, the death of despair in the US, addiction, that they’re lonely. Competition means that you kind of have to be somewhat badass, and you sometimes put down values and you forsake harmony in order to get ahead. That’s certainly the Chinese society now. That was not the case before.
Lex Fridman (00:36:34) Do you think that’s a natural consequence of capitalism almost always, that you become more individualized, you become lonelier, you feel lesser if you are not winning, and thereby, somehow that breaks down society community more and more?
Keyu Jin (00:36:54) I think it’s a spectrum, right? And Europe is somewhere in between, I’d say, but Europe also is not as technologically and innovative as the US, but on a social level, there is more social protection for the people. There is a stronger sense of community, I’d argue. It’s not perfect. Ultimately, it is a choice, and this is what I think that China has to decide right? Do you want technological supremacy and radical breakthroughs? Well, yes. If you do, then you have to tolerate that there are going to be some people who are just going to be uncomfortably rich, like in the United States. You can’t say that you detest the financial system for its greed, but then not accept the fact that it is what fuels innovation, right?
(00:37:45) Risky capital fuels uncertain investments, which allows for countries like the United States to be making these breakthroughs. That’s what China wants, but at the same time, China can’t tolerate these extremely rich people around and the power that is accrued to them. They want to be a leader in technology, but then the financial system is not liberalized. It’s highly regulated, but there’s also intervention. Even if we look back at the French civil law, versus the English common law, the former protects creditors, and the latter is more friendly towards debtors, which gives them more breathing space to innovate, but also to fail and to innovate again. That makes a big difference, so it’s all about a spectrum, right? But you can’t have it both ways.
Lex Fridman (00:38:41) We don’t, often enough, have that nationwide conversation about what we want to be as a country. There’s just a group of people yelling, “We don’t want billionaires,” and another group saying, “We don’t want communists or whatever.” It’s a very trivialized kind of chanting, but there is a balance. There is a spectrum, and you get to decide, “Do you like the nice things, the nice toys?”
Keyu Jin (00:39:07) And the power that the US has.
First time in the US
Lex Fridman (00:39:09) And the power, the geopolitical power, the military power, cultural power, influence on the rest of the world? Yeah, you get to choose which do you want. So, the first time you went to US, what was that like? You mentioned Harvard. How did that change your understanding of the world?
Keyu Jin (00:39:28) Well, it’s funny that we’re talking about this now, because I was able to go to the US on a scholarship to an American high school, because the US, at that time, was open arms, all open arms towards international students. They kind of wanted to be the country that was going to educate the future leaders of the world and their elitist institutions, like Harvard, was really going to be, they’re the center of the world. So, they welcomed students like me and many, many others to be exchange students to study in the US, and we thought, “Wow. We’ve never seen a more generous country.” I was able to go to an American high school and live with an American family, which was, wow, can I say a big change from China, not only because I was plucked from the Communist Youth League party and then straight to supporting their democratic campaign, because the host family was running for State Attorney general in New York.
Keyu Jin (00:40:31) So, I was kind of going to these conventions, handing out flyers, and trying to get votes and, I don’t know, in Chinatown or something, but it was so interesting to see that’s how the system worked. But in the course of doing that, I realized that people had a very simplistic understanding about China. Even when I was 14, I decided that one thing I wanted to do was to dispel some of these deep myths about China, because the China that they knew, and again, it was all the three T’s back in the late 1990s: Taiwan, Tibet, and Tiananmen Square. They thought about China, they thought about these three things.
(00:41:18) I was like, “Well, that’s strange, because that’s not how I’m feeling in China, with all this bidding for the Olympics before 2000 and all these buildings going up and down, all this excitement about joining the WTO, all these radical reforms that are taking place, and then all this effervescence that you feel in the air.” It’s not GDP growth as numbers. You actually see it, and they’re describing China as if it was a place shredded with white terror, and so I thought, “Hm. That’s interesting. There’s a big gap, big gap of understanding,” and even today, that many years later, people know China a little bit more, but the sentiment hasn’t profoundly changed.
Lex Fridman (00:42:06) It’s still the three Ts, I feel like.
Lex Fridman (00:42:11) So, what about the level of misunderstanding of Chinese people of the West? Is there a similar level of misunderstanding the other direction as well?
Keyu Jin (00:42:20) I don’t think to the same extent, because there’s Hollywood. You can see daily American life, although it might not be totally realistic. There was a huge amount of admiration of US technology innovation, but also the American dream. I think our newspapers, even though there’s bias everywhere, is not focused only on reporting the really bad stuff and portraying a negative side. I think these few years have been a little bit different, but so many students went to the US, right? So many people travel to the US, and this is an interesting thing. I’ve rarely met an American who has been to China and who still goes on about how bad China is. I think that going to China makes all the difference.
Lex Fridman (00:43:16) I feel that’s one of the big gaps of my life that I need to alleviate, is to travel in a real way for a long time to really experience the people and the cultures, and China’s a big place.
Keyu Jin (00:43:28) Mm-hmm. Go dig deep, and don’t just go to Beijing and Shanghai.
China’s government vs business sector
Lex Fridman (00:43:33) Let’s go back to the economics, so can you just dig a little deeper on the relationship in China, between the government and the companies and the private sector? So, how much freedom do companies have?
Keyu Jin (00:43:48) Another big misunderstanding, and a fundamental one, is that people somehow think that the state suppresses the private sector. It’s not at all as simple as that. For the most part, if we look at the local government’s incentive system, they want to help the best, private companies, which are the most promising, because it makes them look good. It adds to their GDP. It adds to the jobs, investment. They are so helpful to these private companies. Actually, I know many of these local government officials working tirelessly, day and night, especially in bad times, to coordinate between debtors and creditors, and to smooth out and define relationships with banks. They want to help these private companies, because again, their incentives are aligned. Deepseek is a private company, by the way, so it has done the country proud, and why would the state want to go and suppress these private companies, which ultimately is kind of a beacon, represents a beacon success for China.
(00:44:52) Now, on how much freedom they have, it’s really ranged from too much freedom. That’s part of the problem, where you have defense companies buying art auction houses, real estate companies, like Evergrande, buying soccer clubs, doing EVs, companies investing in real estate that has nothing to do with their core business. That’s how much latitude were given to private companies, and there were consequences. They were not reined in, and then you go to the other extremes, where they’re scolded, they’re reprimanded, they’re reined in, and they’re kind of folded into submission so that is the whole spectrum. You have the whole range, but I guess what we’re really getting at is it is a country that is moving from a no-rule of law or very little rule of law, very immature markets, to something that is being gradually established: bankruptcy laws, corruption laws, rules and regulations on what’s possible.
(00:45:59) One interesting point is that, in China, you ask the companies to innovate first, and then you regulate after, right? So, that has led to things like P2P platforms. It’s led to lots of kind of financial innovations, some of which has actually been very helpful and good, some of which had been disastrous, but the intention to regulate after the fact is to really not slow down or hinder the innovation. This is a very different approach from Europe. You regulate first, and then companies have to work around that. So, this is why the Chinese economy is so complex. You cannot reduce it to simply a statement saying, “The state is unhelpful for the private,” or something like that. There are certain sectors where these SOEs dominate, when it comes to national security in terms of energy, but let’s not focus on these few sectors. By and large, most of the economy, if you actually admit to the fact that China’s highly innovative and highly entrepreneurial, means that it must be the private sector that is driving the show.
Communism and capitalism
Lex Fridman (00:47:06) Innovate first, regulate after, really interesting. I also, in my mind, am contrasting it with the way the Soviet Union and Russia, since operated. That doesn’t sound at all like this model, and it’s interesting that countries that, at least on the surface, had a similar cultural communist problems, the bureaucracies that form inside the communist state. It just seems that China broke away from that somehow. I don’t understand exactly what happened.
Keyu Jin (00:47:39) In the West, they group these economies together, as if they’re the same thing. No, it’s not the same at all. There’s so many differences, so much more flexibility. You can have dynamic entrepreneurialism, at the same time have socialist characteristics, and I think this is what China has been able to shape and mold, a unique model that balances between government industry, between state coordination and market mechanisms, and between individualism and communalism. It’s not necessarily black and white. You can have all these things at the same time.
Lex Fridman (00:48:12) So, what are the pros and cons of being an entrepreneur in China versus the west? If you get a choice, you have a dream, you want to build epic things, and you get to choose where to start that business, what are the pros and cons of each path?
Keyu Jin (00:48:26) In China, the speed is just awe-inspiring. You have a good idea, you implement it. You realize your dream very fast, because there’s also the support system, right? The infrastructure there, the digital infrastructure there, the engineers are there, the talent is there, and they’re cheap. The market competition is there to keep you going. The consumers give you a very, very fast feedback. Look at Xiaomi. It was making phones, and now it makes one of the world’s best EVs, 270,000 cars sold in one day a few days ago with a new model.
Keyu Jin (00:48:59) They were phone makers, so there’s an advantage to that, okay? But I would not feel safe, not because of danger of expropriation or nothing like that, but the bankruptcy laws are not there, right? It’s not necessarily always fair competition. Things don’t happen necessarily in an orderly manner. If you have a competitor, you can have a very evil competitor, and evil competitors are there everywhere in China. They would call the police on you, put you in jail, spread false rumors about you. Maybe that happens also in the US, but there’s a different level in China. Also, the mold that you can have to protect yourself, the IP protection, that’s much weaker in China, because the legal system is not very effective. If you have a good idea, you’ll be copied, and there’s a lot of work. You have to dine and wine with the local governments. I mean, that’s not allowed anymore, by the way, but you dine and wine, figuratively speaking. You have to have a very good relationship with them. That’s a different kind of work.
Lex Fridman (00:50:03) The wine and dine and the evil competitors is an interesting challenge. That, in some maybe distant ways, akin to the problems of the Soviet Union, I think, I guess in the United States there’s less of that, and I don’t even know if that’s based on laws, because there’s a lot of lawyers in the US that could do the same kind of evil competitor stuff, technically.
Keyu Jin (00:50:26) That’s true. The potential negative ramifications are there, but I think personal protection is a big difference. If you make a mistake, if your company’s not run well, you go to jail. I think that the US is much, much more tolerant on entrepreneurship, entrepreneurs on failure.
Jack Ma
Lex Fridman (00:50:45) Since we’re talking about it, there was a lot of controversy around Jack Ma “disappearing” reappearing a bit later, and there’s been sort of rumors of some tense relationships that he has with the Chinese government. What is important to understand about the whole situation? To what degree is it reflective of the issues entrepreneurs face in China?
Keyu Jin (00:51:11) In the US, capital controls politics, one could argue. In China, it has to be the other way around. Capital must be reigned in by politics. As part of the capitalist class, do not have the ambition to exceed the powers of the political class, is really at the core of it, I’d say, is the biggest difference between US and China. There are important details that I think the West has not fully provided to the public. For instance, and financial, as innovative as it was, was doing banking jobs without being regulated like a bank, right? So that, obviously, poses a host of financial stability questions and rules and regulations and so forth, so the fact that IPO was halted, you could say that there were strong, economic, regulatory grounds for that.
(00:52:17) But I think, more broadly speaking, if you’re an entrepreneur, part of the capitalist class, keep your head down, make money, and that’s fine, right? Do some philanthropy. There are also many, many other billionaires that are just fine, that are actually very much in favor of the political leadership, and they do their thing. Now, I’m not saying what’s right, what’s wrong. It’s just a very, very different culture and different country. In the US, it’s great to be colorful. You have a very, very colorful president. He would never have been able to make it in China. You have the likes of Elon Musk. It’s great to be different. It’s great to stand out. You do not want to stand out in China.
(00:53:06) The moral of the story is that the top leadership understands that it needs these top entrepreneurs, the likes of Jack Ma. They have done so many great things for the country, even for the world, but in China, garnering too much influence and power, even through social media, doesn’t make you look that great. It’s not a good thing for you, personally. There’s a saying in China that you just don’t want to be the tallest tree. The tallest tree gets the most wind. I don’t agree at all with the Western conclusion that this anecdote, this story, has meant that entrepreneurs don’t want to be entrepreneurs anymore, the young kids don’t aspire to be people like Jack Ma. That’s not true at all. The incentives are still there. It’s a different kind of rich, elite class in China.
Lex Fridman (00:53:59) So, on what dimensions do you think that the height of the tree is measured? Is it more about just mouthing off in public? So, can you still be the richest person in China and actually not clash with the state?
Keyu Jin (00:54:19) Absolutely. Don’t be too outspoken. Don’t try to get too much attention and too much influence and just, again, it’s a cultural thing, but just keep your head down, be humble, contribute to society, do philanthropy, work, collaborate with the government, and you’re kind of okay.
Lex Fridman (00:54:38) So, the signal the Jack Ma situation sends to the entrepreneurs in China is not, “Don’t be an entrepreneur.” It’s more like, “Don’t…”
Lex Fridman (00:54:50) Don’t be too colorful, and colorful means you can be colorful about the technical details of your technology, but don’t be colorful about Xi Jinping and politics, and just stay out.
Keyu Jin (00:55:04) Yeah. Stay out of politics, but I just want to say, that said, Jack Ma was really an emblem of extreme success for China, and the Chinese entrepreneurs look up to him. That’s really important. It was a signal that, unfortunately, was misconstrued by the side and by also outside world, but it’s laid a different path for what these entrepreneurs should be doing.
Lex Fridman (00:55:32) What do you think happened to him? So, he’s now, I think, living in Japan.
Keyu Jin (00:55:38) No. He’s an extremely fascinating character, and if he were in the US, he’d thrive. Funny, witty, smart, wise, creative, loves a good life, and I think it’s by choice that he’s roaming around the world, given that he has more free time.
Keyu Jin (00:56:01) All of them do. All of them do, because-
Keyu Jin (00:56:01) All of them do. All of them do because their lives, their destinies were totally changed because of China, because of the government, because of Deng Xiaoping, because of everything.
Lex Fridman (00:56:16) So I know a lot of people from the former Soviet Union, and there’s a deep resentment of broken promises, broken dreams. So that is not something you see.
Keyu Jin (00:56:25) That’s not how I would describe that generation and their feelings towards China. Of course, you always get exceptions, the ones who have moved to the US and who wants a democracy, but by and large, people are deeply grateful to China, the Chinese government, the Communist party, if you want to label it as that, because they’ve seen their lives be totally transformed. I mean, Jack Ma went from being a school teacher to becoming one of the most powerful people in the world. I mean, if you didn’t have China, how could that have happened? Right?
China’s view on innovation and copying ideas
Lex Fridman (00:56:58) Can you speak to the thing you mentioned a few times, which is the difference in American versus Chinese or maybe Western versus Chinese approach to entrepreneurship, zero to one versus one to N? Maybe can you explain that and what will it take for China to become a consistent zero to one innovator for the individual entrepreneurs to create totally new things versus doing the things you mentioned about speed and scale?
Keyu Jin (00:57:28) The US will lead for some time on breakthroughs on disruptive technologies, the zero to one technologies that ultimately change the world. But innovation is a process. It goes from invention to production and commercialization and diffusion, diffusing technology throughout all parts of the economy. And on those two stages, I think that China has a unique advantage, even if it still can’t do the zero to one breakthroughs, because in the end, how much this technology is adopted by the countries and by the various parts of the economy is fundamentally crucial to how much productivity will be unleashed. And China’s innovation currently, the DeepSeek is really one example, and I think it’s really the beginning of the scale-based leading edge technology, cost-cutting driven kind of innovation model, could be just as powerful, maybe even more effective and powerful than the breakthroughs. And it’s a very different approach to innovation.
(00:58:36) The Chinese companies focus on solutions, problem-solving. Again, that comes back to the education system, right? You’re giving a problem. I’m going to find the answer. The Chinese students can do it. You want them to write their own question, they can’t do it, right? I’m exaggerating a little bit, but it’s a little like that, right? They see a problem. They’re going to go after it. They’re going to find the best solution. And that’s really, really useful, right? Because we don’t need, or developing countries especially don’t need these frontier technologies that they can’t use. And China currently has this AI Plus program, which is about pushing AI into every single plausible sector with the help of the state. So adoption diffusion is very important. Why China can’t do breakthroughs or can’t do zero to one technologies? I think at the root of it, and there are some deeper, we talked about the proximate reasons, the short, flat, fast, for instance, right? You don’t want to spend too much time on investigating something that you don’t even know if it’s commercially viable.
(00:59:43) So basic research is still weaker than in the US universities, but also this kind of intrinsic motivation. It’s very different, right? In China, it’s driven by extrinsic motivation. You are rewarded by compensation, financial compensation, all these kind of extrinsic motivation is what drives you. But intrinsic motivation, pursuit of knowledge for knowledge’s sake, that was deep in the Confucius philosophies. But of course poverty has changed all that. The profound commitment to scholarship, to research, which we know is very much true in the US universities, it’s starting. It’s starting, but it’s not there. So I think these two approaches are actually quite compatible with each other. I don’t know what all this fuss is about, right? China uses technology very well. It can scale up and reduce costs, and then it can spread it around. And the US makes the highest value added by inventing these technologies. But again, diffusion matters.
Lex Fridman (01:00:48) Well, yeah. The things you mentioned, the scale, the manufacturing, the diffusion, from a economics perspective, you wonder which is the more important skill to have. And it seems like the cost-cutting, the efficient, large scale, fast manufacture, the diffusion is much more important for the success and the growth of the economy.
Keyu Jin (01:01:11) I think where it ultimately leads to an impact on the economy, that’s more important. It’s this persistent question we have. Why don’t we see the productivity in the numbers, right? You’re in AI. AI, we had long periods of investment. You hadn’t seen it in the numbers until maybe even recently, and it’s still very slow. But China’s pushing that in the sectors, robotics, AI, cloud, industrial, Internet of Things, and even companies like Huawei, I think it’s gotten a little bit of too bad of a rep in the US, but American engineers working for Huawei said that they’re so happy working for Huawei. The intent focus on innovation, but also on solution driven innovations in Africa, in rural areas really changes people’s lives. It doesn’t change the world, but it changes individual’s lives.
Lex Fridman (01:02:04) What’s the feeling that Chinese entrepreneurs have about copying technology? Because I think one of the cultural things in the US, it’s just really not respected if you copy, so that’s seen as a big problem. And is there some degree to where in China it’s not?
Keyu Jin (01:02:25) No, unfortunately this is a big cultural difference. Our sense of property rights is actually quite different from the US. I think that will change over time. But absolutely, you’re right. They have no qualms about copying as long as it leads to success, right? That’s the difference in values. As we mentioned in the beginning, you asked why the level of competition is so fierce. Well, they all do the same thing. Once they’ve seen one successful thing, everybody does the same thing. You’d have no respect for doing that in the us. But in China, it’s all fine. But I think that over time it will change. Just give it a little bit of time.
Lex Fridman (01:03:04) So fundamentally, it’s a bad thing.
Keyu Jin (01:03:07) In the end, if China’s all about innovation technology, you cannot not have very strict IP protection.
Keyu Jin (01:03:16) And ultimately, again, we’re still in the short, flat, fast stage. When we graduate from that stage, you’re going to have very different views about these things and you’re going to try to diversify and do different things. But again, it’s a stage. Chinese people were hungry. They’re still a little bit hungry. They’re not going to be as hungry in the future.
DeepSeek moment
Lex Fridman (01:03:36) So can you describe the DeepSeek moment and DeepSeek as it represents what China’s thinking about in the space of AI? And does China have a chance at outrunning US in the AI race?
Keyu Jin (01:03:50) DeepSeek was a surprise to the world, but I don’t think it was that much of a surprise to the same degree to the Chinese. And remember that DeepSeek happened in times of crisis, urgency, not in times of comfort. A lot of these technological breakthroughs and leapfrogging happens in times of crisis. This is called crisis innovation. And you got to thank the US for that. When the Chinese were comfortably importing chips from the US, the whole industry stalled for 20 years. I mean, why would you plow in billions, tens and billions and even more when you can just import the best? You don’t want to do your own innovation. It’s because of these export controls, these sanctions on these companies, that Chinese companies in the Chinese state felt an existential crisis a few years ago by being cut off from these critical components. And guess what happened? In a short amount of time, a degree of domestic capacity ramping up and catch up has been nothing short of remarkable. Again, thanks to US truculence on technology.
(01:05:04) Now, I’m sure there are many aspects of hyperbole related to DeepSeek, but it just shows you that the gap is much smaller between the China and the US on leading edge technologies than what was expected that these export controls were not effective. They may have even backfired. And it shows you that China has this relentless focus on taking some of the existing technologies and using scale and the advantages to cost and to diffuse. And this is just the beginning. I think it will happen in many other industries as well, including in semiconductors, and that’s a Chinese approach. Now, there’s an interesting dilemma here, which is that this is happening in a time of extreme economic softness, slowdown and missed uncertainty, trade wars, a lack of confidence, slowdown in private investment and consumption, a withdrawal of foreign investment from China, especially the US venture funding.
(01:06:19) Imagine what China would’ve been like, let’s say if the economy was doing better. But you could also argue that it’s because people feel threatened that they make more leaves. Now, I wish the world is not… We don’t have to drive each other to the corners to do something great, but that is the reality. And I don’t think that there’s an easy say between who wins because I think the winning idea is part of the old playbook. You’re all kind of part of a network. Different countries, different players have different choke points on each other. I don’t think it’s just about the US and China.
(01:06:55) And what’s more, you use your leverage once, and that leverage has a half-life. It becomes a lot less effective the second time around because other countries, other companies are going to try to substitute away. If China uses the rare earth leverage, which I think it is now a little bit, there will be alternatives and substitutes. Got to be very, very careful of what coercion leverage means. Same thing with the US, right? So I think this is all the old thinking of who wins, who dominates. I think we need a new playbook.
CHIPS Act
Lex Fridman (01:07:29) So to you, maybe when you refer to Biden and Trump, if you go back to Biden, it would be the CHIPS Act. So the export controls created unintended, unexpected effect where it had the reverse geopolitical effect.
Keyu Jin (01:07:44) I hope it was unintentional. Otherwise, you’d be questioning the level of intelligence of the US administration. But I think that the things they laid out did the opposite of what was intended. It sped up domestic capacity. It motivated the whole country to do this whole of a nation program to go after technologies, kind of like the way they go after Olympics, Olympic gold medals. They wanted to maximize Olympic gold medals, and they put the whole nation at work and all the resources, and that’s what China did. Huawei, another example, they were sanctioned. Guess what? They have come back to life stronger than ever before. And this is not unique to this episode. If we look throughout history, these blockades don’t work. The continental system actually indirectly led to Industrial Revolution in the UK. When the Spanish blockade, the Portuguese, they came up with a very ferocious, forceful naval power. And you’re talking about China here. They just don’t lie down and lie flat and say, “Oh, we give up.” Right? They’re more motivated than ever before.
Lex Fridman (01:08:59) So the lesson is don’t force people or nations into a corner.
Keyu Jin (01:09:06) Yeah. You make them have a very comfortable situation and they tend to become complacent and they stagnate.
Tariffs and Trade
Lex Fridman (01:09:18) All right. So can you talk through the whole saga of the Trump’s tariffs that’s still going on, especially tariffs on China? From your perspective as an economist, to what degree was it justified? To what degree was it effective? To what degree is it bad policy for US, for the west, for the world, also for China?
Keyu Jin (01:09:39) China has been preparing for this for the last five years, and for the return of Trump and for Trump’s maniac trade policies. You’d think that Trump also had five years to prepare for this battle with China. It didn’t show. You can say that the Chinese, at least this time around, have played their hand pretty well when dealing with Trump’s tariff threats and the trade war with a level of calibrated assertiveness. They have really thought through everything very elaborately. And look, this is not good for either country. Let’s just be clear. It’s bad for US and China and it’s bad for the world. And every country has a stake in the US-China trade war because whether you trade directly or indirectly with China, you’re going to be affected. They are one of the largest intermediate exporters in the world. And Chinese manufacturing goods anchor global manufacturing prices.
(01:10:47) The cumulative tariff burdens, when you get to Canada, when you get to Mexico, when you get to any other final destination, these tariffs will affect you. So it’s clearly very, very bad for the world. China’s core principles, and I think that this is not well understood from the rest of the world towards the US, and something that they have kept up is equivalence, reciprocity and realism. China’s not going to lower tariffs unless the US does. You kind of stand up to Trump like a man. That’s the only way to deal with Trump. That’s its view. The deal has to be realistic. The phase one deal of the last time wasn’t realistic, and China thinks, look, the US is going to use this as a leverage, right? That’s not possible. This can’t be seen as political concession. The deal has to be seen as mutual commerce.
(01:11:46) So where China can have room to negotiate is opening up things like services. American banks, American financial institutions have a lot of business to do in China. They can buy a limited number of more goods. They can discuss about transparency around rules and regulations on e-commerce, on data. All of that is fine. But don’t confound economic issues with political issues. Hong Kong, Taiwan is not part of the deal, by the way, in case anyone was wondering. Trying to change China’s state hybrid private sector model, don’t go there. Anything that challenges China’s technology, security, that’s not really part of the discussion. I think that people have to be clear about also what China thinks and wants, and also the Chinese to be clear about what Trump wants, although I don’t know anybody, even Trump himself knows exactly what he wants, in order for these very complex negotiations to actually succeed.
Lex Fridman (01:12:48) Okay, so China has a few red lines, so don’t mention Hong Kong or Taiwan.
Keyu Jin (01:12:54) Don’t mix the political issues with the trade deal.
Lex Fridman (01:12:57) Right. And then is there some degree maybe you can speak to culturally where stylistically there’s red lines, meaning don’t bully China language-wise, or does that not matter? Because there’s a kind of way of speaking in the United States that I feel like in diplomacy in general, neither side wants to be humiliated and in great deals, even when one side on paper wins, you want to make the other side, especially the side that gets the shorter end of the stick, feel like they’ve won and show the rest of the world that they’re the winner.
Keyu Jin (01:13:44) We have an absence of diplomacy. But you’re absolutely right, there needs to be respect. The Chinese at least really care about respect. And I wish there was just a bit more cultural fluency, and I think a lot of things would be so much easier between the two countries, just understanding that because you can actually push China to do a lot of things, all within reason that would work in favor of the US, but understand that respect is vitally important. Face-saving is very, very, very important.
Lex Fridman (01:14:16) To what degree, what Xi Jinping says and what they’re putting out there in the world represents the truth? So he has a whole way of being of like, “Let’s de-escalate. Let’s all make good deals together. Almost like, let’s be friends.” Modi a little bit has a similar way of being like, “Let’s just…” And the implied thing is, forgive the French, but if you fuck with us, we won’t be nice, but let’s just all be nice together. Is he speaking the truth?
Keyu Jin (01:14:48) Xi Jinping is not Putin, right?
Keyu Jin (01:14:53) And there is a genuine desire on China’s part to de-escalate. Again, coming back to the level of pragmatism. Under economic strain in China, you don’t really want to be picking fights. They don’t agree at all with Trump’s economic views and world vision, let’s just put it simply. So understanding that a lot of this is also driven by American internal politics, which they are aware of, helps a bit, but there’s a genuine desire to take the temperature down with the US even if the weather doesn’t fundamentally change.
Lex Fridman (01:15:34) What does a good diplomacy look like here for both sides? On just strictly on the economics, on the trade, the tariffs, what’s the best possible outcome for the world?
Keyu Jin (01:15:48) I think that Trump can show to the American consumers that he has gotten some sort of a deal, right? That the Chinese have bought more American goods or promised to buy American goods, and then the American companies can come into China. And then a lot of the previously restricted investment opportunities are now not restricted and the American banks can make money in China. He can say that. And I think that could be part of a really realistic deal that somehow American companies will be better protected through IP protection. And again, that’s in China’s interest as well. So I don’t see a fundamental conflict here. And at the same time, they lower the tariffs not to the rates where they were before but lower and you don’t prohibit trade. And then for China, that would also be a success. So you can actually have success for both places, but being realistic is part of the game.
Lex Fridman (01:16:45) Question to you as an economist, is tariffs a useful, effective tool for global trade?
Keyu Jin (01:16:55) No. I think that there is a real problem in global trading system and globalization in general that is not going to be resolved by tariffs. We do need to think about more harmony between countries where let’s say not one country dominates. And here I’d push back on China and say, “Yes, you have amazing companies and competitive companies, but you just can’t dominate everything. That would not be good for global harmony. You need to give other countries an opportunity. You need to develop your own internal economy, rely on your consumers as part of the deal.” Tariffs, this kind of highly protectionist method is very distortionary and it’s going to be bad for the US. I’d actually argue that both China and the US have totally taken advantage and also enjoyed the global economic realm under the US liberal order. I think that China quite likes it actually.
(01:18:03) US kept at peace and during this peaceful times, things were working very well economically, technologically. They kept the sea lanes open. They did their part to preserve peace to the extent they can, I guess. But China wants peace. Only with peace can they do what they can and actually US, despite saying they’ve been victimized, look, they’ve had a very, very good time. Never have quality of life, standards of living, technology risen as much as the US did under its own liberal order than it has ever before, and the amount of influence and power. Yes, of course, you can blame the US for lots of things that happened, but it actually had a really good time and China as well. So now they’re going to take this apart. They think that they’re going to be somehow better off that American people and Chinese people are going to be better off under more disorderly, fragmented rule of a jungle kind of world. That’s an illusion. That’s what politicians tell their people, but that’s not the truth.
Lex Fridman (01:19:05) So what are, if not tariffs, ways to incentivize countries like the United States to build internally? So to build semiconductor chips internally, for example?
Keyu Jin (01:19:17) Well, exactly. Tariffs is a way to punish foreigners. But what you really want to do is to strengthen your own domestic competitiveness. And I want to draw an analogy to the US-Japan competition. In the 1980s, Japan actually took over in many parts of the semiconductors industry even though the microchip was invented in the US. But guess what happened? Well, it actually drove more competition and more mobilization in the US actually creating this innovation system, changed a few really critical laws that helped with US innovation and the consumers benefited. The US took over again as the leader of the semiconductors industry. There’s no better way than to strengthen yourself to be competitive because ultimately, tariffs have not done anything to help the US.
(01:20:07) The trade deficits have widened since Trump, right? They haven’t closed the imbalance with China and with the rest of the world because ultimately the US saves less than it invests. And that’s a macrophenomenon. It’s not a trade phenomenon, but I fear that the US, by dropping off of this global trading network and system, it will lose more and more of its power. You have power when you’re deeply engaged and embedded with a country. Once you’ve left it, you actually lose any sort of leverage.
Lex Fridman (01:20:47) So there’s got to be ways to incentivize industrial policy, building more stuff internally without tariffs, right? You just invest from a federal perspective, you invest in companies, maybe like more than carrot towards the domestic versus stick versus the foreigner.
Keyu Jin (01:21:05) All kinds of subsidies that are justified for the green transition for innovation, R&D, support for the university system, the US is the world leader in terms of attracting talent, it has everything going for it. But it was a little bit complacent. And by dropping off of that global network, it’s going to do itself more disservice.
Lex Fridman (01:21:30) Yeah. Tariffs don’t quite make sense to me, but maybe I’m dumb. It just doesn’t make-
Keyu Jin (01:21:34) It doesn’t make sense to economists either. And economists are not all dumb.
Immigration
Lex Fridman (01:21:40) All right. You did mention immigration a little bit. I think that’s a component of it also. You said your own experience was that US was much more open to immigration in the past. What do you think about this on the human side, the protectionism, the closing of the borders that the US is doing? What are the pros and cons of that from an economics perspective?
Keyu Jin (01:22:07) On US immigration, I understand both sides of the story to be very honest. And I also understand a bit of the protectionist streak, not only coming from the US but also from Europe and various parts of the world, which is going to be a trend. I understand that before you care about people in the rural villages in Indonesia, you really care about the Northern Brits in this country and they have not fared well. I understand that your jobs may be under threat because of this uncontrolled influx of illegal immigrants.
(01:22:46) From a purely economic and rational level, you’d say immigration is very important because it keeps the prices down, keeps inflation down, it keeps up the supply, which is very important when you have that much demand. And look, the standards of living have also improved for many people who can afford it. The low-cost workers being able to sustain the service economy. So I understand both sides of the story. I think that in the end, it is a balance. And I do believe even as an economist, that social harmony, and I come back to this word harmony repeatedly, even though as an economist, this thing doesn’t even exist, is becoming ever more important.
(01:23:32) And as a nation, some kinds of skilled immigration is actually what makes the US the most technologically advanced country in the world. At the same time, you do have to think about your own citizens, the ones that have had generations and been around, and you have to think about their livelihoods.
Lex Fridman (01:23:52) Yeah. The puzzle of social harmony is a fascinating one. You spoke to the long history of China, how they-
Lex Fridman (01:23:59) Yeah. That’s Confucius. And then there is a kind of social harmony, a very different set of-
Lex Fridman (01:24:00) … and then there is a kind of social harmony, a very different set of ideologies in the United States and in the West broadly. And it’s all a puzzle. And you do want to have some cohesion. But in the United States, one of its beautiful aspects is the diversity of humans. And so the continued influx of diversity feeds the machine that makes America great also. But too much breaks the fabric of that society. So it such an interesting puzzle. And some of it is like we humans can’t balance. So you go one extreme, the other. And you just oscillate back and forth.
(01:24:44) And then also politics, especially in the United States, there’s a red team and a blue team. And when the red team is at the top, the blue team just pulls all the way to the other direction, and vice versa. And we just kind of oscillate back and forth in this way, and hopefully make progress over time.
Keyu Jin (01:25:03) But I want to come back to the point of choice. What makes America so great is that it tolerates instability. It tolerates clashes, it tolerates volatility. Think about the financial crisis, right? The financial volatility of… Again, the US dollar is where it is because of this deep liquid financial system in the US that no other country has managed to build. There are clashes everywhere in society, but it is a very diverse country with all the benefits to that. It is a highly, highly unequal country, economically speaking. The CEO pays, the businessmen being able to be in top political positions. You balk at that level of cronyism, if you will.
(01:25:59) But the US is the technological leadership and it is able to stomach that volatility and clash without breaking apart. And other countries don’t have the capacity of the institutions, the culture to be able to tolerate and still maintain to keep the society together. So I think it is very interesting. But yeah, it’s a puzzle.
Taiwan
Lex Fridman (01:26:29) So we talked about the economic side of tariffs, and you mentioned the other red line and the three T’s. Can we talk about Taiwan? So how important is Taiwan to the Chinese economy and the global economy?
Keyu Jin (01:26:44) Taiwan has among other things, TSMC, which is vitally important for the global economy. It’s also very important for the Chinese leadership and the Chinese people. You don’t want to ask what I think, ask the Chinese young generation. They would one day like to see unification. It’s part of the patriotic, the dream, if you will. And it’s a chip between the US and China. So everybody is watching Taiwan. But I’d say that this attention is not necessarily good for Taiwan, because all this uncertainty on the political risk has meant that investment there has dramatically been curtailed.
(01:27:28) And mainland China is a very, very important economic partner to the Taiwanese economy. I think that I don’t have a lot of views around this, but I just say this, I think there’s more political wisdom of the Chinese government side than we assume outside of China. And that strategic ambiguity, but also strategic patience, especially given China’s economic situation currently means that more likely or not, I think that if China does really well economically. And Taiwan is not doing as well economically as we’ve seen that over time, this is still the best strategy from China’s point of view to resolve these differences. I think any military use and action would be actually quite detrimental to China.
Lex Fridman (01:28:31) So what’s a way to avoid military conflict here? It seems like a red line unification is the red line for the United States and it just feels like a very tense situation. So is there a path forward here that avoids any military conflict where everybody’s happy from an economics perspective, from a semiconductor manufacturer perspective also?
Keyu Jin (01:28:58) Well, first of all, you have to keep the communication channel open, right? There was a risk of that being shut off during the Biden administration. That’s highly, highly dangerous.
Lex Fridman (01:29:06) Meaning US-China communication.
Keyu Jin (01:29:08) Yeah. There’s also something that I think people miss, which is that the soldiers in mainland China, that’s part of the one-child policy generation, right? There’s only one son. Families have only one son. And I think to assume that the Chinese people desire and would be able to forsake that generation for unification purposes, or be able to tolerate lost lives for this, I think is also a bit of an exaggeration in stress. And I think Chinese people also really… They really care about peace and stability. Chaos is just not part of what they think is good for them.
(01:29:58) The role that TSMC plays is so critical given the choke point they have on the rest of the world in the semiconductors industry, which we know is one of the most important industries sustaining the economy. Not to mention things like AI and technologies. Look, the US has been trying to build another TSMC outside of Taiwan. It’s very, very, very slow. There are a lot of cumulative knowledge, experience, and skills that are involved. It’s not that easy.
(01:30:39) The Chinese don’t want to see an eruption of TSMC either, because again, it’s vitally important for everybody. Whilst I don’t think that this is really necessarily a bargaining chip, because if you really see what the Chinese thinks about Taiwan, it goes beyond economics. It goes beyond the logical. It is about realizing a dream, which even I tended to not place enough importance. But when I talk to the young people in China, I realized that it’s still their dream.
Lex Fridman (01:31:19) It’s just unfortunate that this dream is mixed up in the fact that Taiwan with TSMC has been incredibly good at manufacturing. It’s just an interesting puzzle of why it’s so difficult, a low cost at scale to manufacture chips. And it’s just incredible that they were able to do it. And it’s an interesting puzzle for how China can do it domestically and how US can do it domestically. And it seems like there’s increasing urgency on that. And I think if we look out in the next a hundred years, the urgency is good because it’s probably good for each individual country to be manufacturing majority of their chips. It’s less likely to lead to conflict.
Keyu Jin (01:32:03) Well, this is the trend that you need to manufacturing things that are important for national security. It’s not efficient, but it’s so-called strategically safer.
One-child policy
Lex Fridman (01:32:15) You mentioned one-child policy, so can we speak a little bit more to that? What broadly, what impact has it had on the Chinese society? On culture, you already mentioned some of it, some of the impact on the economics, on the culture, on the demographics of China.
Keyu Jin (01:32:33) It’s probably one of the most radical policies that China has enacted in its history. And the enforcement was very strict. In my class, nobody had a sibling except my friend who was a Uyghur. 98% of urban households had only one. The other 2% are twins, which you’re allowed to keep. Thank goodness. If you had the good fortune of giving birth to twins, it had lots of unintended consequences on the economy and society as well.
(01:33:11) Maybe on the good side, it’s actually a golden age for Chinese women because the Chinese girls never had as much education investment apportioned to them as they’ve had after being the only child in the family. And you raised a daughter like a son. And if we look at all the skill gaps and the education gaps and the returns to education, actually girls fared better. Apart from the top, top, top leadership in the Chinese political class, you look at the CEOs and major companies, in the ministry, civil servants, there are a lot of Chinese women.
(01:33:52) And actually, recently, if you look at the surveys, the Chinese families would prefer to have a daughter than a son. Because they’ve seen how much bargaining power you as a Chinese woman and as a rare bride, or a scarce supply of brides goes, you have raised your bargaining power and you can command high amounts of dowry. That was an unintended good thing about the one-child policy. And to the opposite, the recent relaxation of the one-child policy, actually women are now encouraged to have as many kids as they possibly can.
(01:34:31) The flip side of the one-child policy has not necessarily been good to women in the job market because they think, “Ph, well, you’ve only had one child. Oh, guess what? You can have another child.” So that’s not necessarily good for long-term employability. But on the economic side, I’ve written about this in my academic papers, it’s been one of the very important causes of high saving rate. I always tell people, “You want to stimulate consumption? Well, have more kids.” You know how much one of those costs, right?
Keyu Jin (01:35:05) Especially in China, the tutorial ships, the education. You have to buy a house. You have to buy a house for them so that they can get married eventually.
Keyu Jin (01:35:13) So it’s very, very expensive to have a child. If I have more children, you spend more. But maybe people don’t want to have more children because the cost of having a child is so high. And this is driven by the competition. And why is there so much competition? Because there’s a one-child policy generation, right? You want your child to be the dragon or the phoenix, and you put everything into that one child. That makes the child more anxious, makes the whole environment more competitive.
(01:35:44) And in the end, these one-child policy children don’t want to have a lot of kids, because they don’t want them to see them suffer what they have suffered. So there are all these kind of unexpected consequences, but also changing the social fabric. I’d like to say that it broke the hierarchy of the family where the parents had the dominant role. Now the kids are the boss. They boss everybody around, they boss the grandparents around.
(01:36:09) It relates to the puzzle, the housing puzzle. How is it possible that the Chinese youth can afford these really expensive real estate with their meager income? Well, one common thing is that they have six wallets, you and your spouse, together with the parents, and maybe even the grandparents would chip in. So there’s this kind of intergenerational family dynamics that makes our models focused on the individual consumption, just completely inappropriate to describe these dynamics.
(01:36:46) But the demographic side is the other challenge, which is they were so strict about the one-tile policy and they kept it in for too long, so that once they decide to loosen it and decided that fertility rates were way too low to sustain the Chinese economy in its future, it was already too late. And now, they’re finding all kinds of creative ways to make people have more kids. This is not something that they can demand and command in ways that they can demand and command emerging strategic sectors.
(01:37:27) So all these really interesting social anecdotes where they’re encouraging even single women in a highly conservative society, encouraging single women to raise children, nothing to be afraid about that, lots of support system going there. I mean, they’re radically changing the whole thinking around these kind of issues.
Lex Fridman (01:37:47) Well, it seems like even the West, a lot of the developed countries have a demographics problem. It seems like a lot of countries are not having enough babies.
Keyu Jin (01:37:59) Very, very, very low fertility rate. It’s just that for China’s stage of development, it should be having more babies than it is currently having. So the one-tile policy accelerated that demographic transition. It really squeezed in many, many decades into two. But my view about the demographic aspects for the economy is not as pessimistic as most people because, meanwhile we’re talking about aging, there are also high rates of unemployment, right? When we’re talking about is there enough people to do the jobs? We have things like AI and not enough jobs, and these kind of questions that are first order.
(01:38:53) We haven’t even figured out the relationship between labor force, productivity, what are the factors of production that will be most important for future economy? And so we shouldn’t be terrified that there’s a looming aging problem. Because I think the more important question is that skill gap. What kind of skills do we actually need in the economy? What kind of education system should we design in the economy to better suit the country to an ever evolving and transformative technological society?
Lex Fridman (01:39:27) Because if that’s successful, then we’d be able to respond to whatever puzzle the demographic situation creates.
Keyu Jin (01:39:33) Yeah. If you look at the most recent evidence on this issue, they found that post-1990, aging economies became richer. Not the other way around, which was true for the pre-1990 sample. And the reason is that these aging societies much more rapidly adopted new technologies, automation that actually helped the entire economy. So should we be panicking about this now when we’re actually also panicking about the fact there’re not enough jobs around? There are other issues that are more relevant for the Chinese economy today.
China’s economy collapse predictions
Lex Fridman (01:40:11) There are constant predictions of China’s economy collapsing. You have pushed against that narrative. But you’ve also spoken to some of the challenges it’s going through. What’s the GDP going to look like? Is the Chinese economy going to collapse? Is it going to flourish? What do you think?
Keyu Jin (01:40:31) Collapse is such a strong word, and the West has been using this word repeatedly. If I remember correctly, maybe four to five times, maybe even six times since 1980s during the period of China’s fastest growth. I tend to not think that Chinese economy will collapse. But will a slowdown continue? Will it be able to lift up again? Will it be able to come out of this cycle soon? I think that’s more relevant. And the Chinese economy has a lot of potential because the fundamentals are still there.
(01:41:11) When we talk about the fundamentals, it’s the skills, it’s the human capital, it’s the physical capital, it’s the macroeconomic stability and political stability. That’s a lot going for a country if you look around the world right now. And this is why the entrepreneurialism is still there, because the fundamentals are there, even though the economy is weak, consumers are not confident and private investment is insufficient. The fundamentals are there.
(01:41:37) Is China where it should be far, far, far from it. Because China’s potential, based on the fundamentals, is a much higher level of per capita income than where it is currently. It’s kind of currently in a $10,000 bracket. And this is also a puzzle because you’re a $10,000 per capita income country that can actually do leading-edge technology and can be neck to neck with US companies on these high-tech. That’s the first time in history.
(01:42:06) Even the Soviet Union, which was very technologically advanced, did not have the extent of commercializable civilian technology and the technologies that were pervasive throughout the economy. But fundamentally, we have to understand how much of this real estate crisis has impinged on the economy and explains the persistent slowdown.
Lex Fridman (01:42:29) Can you explain the real estate crisis?
Keyu Jin (01:42:32) A few years ago, there was a crackdown on the real estate sector. And again, it comes back to a lot of the social issues we were discussing. Why aren’t people having kids? Well, maybe it’s because housing is too expensive. Maybe it’s because education system is too competitive. The speculative bubbles in the real estate is making housing unaffordable, and that’s not part of the Chinese social characteristics. And so when they decided that the property investors were going to be reined in that housing was to be lived in, not speculated. It really brought down the whole sector in terms of investment, in terms of the financing of the sector. But ultimately, it made such a massive impact or such a massive dent on the economy, because it really embodied the two fundamental pillars of the economy. One is the fiscal system and one is the financial system.
(01:43:35) So coming back to our local mayor economy, where did you think the local mayors got their funds? Through real estate, they sold land. Real estate property developers came in, they can develop the entire local economy because the services will come in, the jobs will come in. And by the way, you are an equity owner of the entire city. So you want these property developers around. Many countries throughout history all have this property transition, right? You need to wean the economy off of property. In a good situation, it takes three to five years. In a bad situation, it can take 10 years.
(01:44:21) I don’t know where China belongs currently. But the real estate collapse also meant the local finances, local government finances also shrunk dramatically. Real estate was a really important part of the financial industry, it brought that down. Together, it really had a major impact on the economy. But also from the consumer side, their wealth was primarily tied into real estate. Not the stock market, not other kind of investment opportunities, it was real estate. So they felt poor, they consumed less.
Advice for visiting China
Lex Fridman (01:44:54) So in the spirit of understanding China better, maybe to get a bit of your advice, if I were to visit China, what’s the right way to visit to experience it, to see the people, to talk to the people maybe outside of the big cities? Is there any advice you can give to somebody going to China?
Keyu Jin (01:45:13) Checkout Speed, his travels into China. I think they represent a more dynamic reality than just visiting Beijing and Shanghai and Shenzhen, the big cities. I actually think a lot of the opportunities, especially economic opportunities, are in the second, third tier cities now in China. And there’s a return of talent. These companies, Pop Mart, they’re coming from these second-tier cities that care about the local economy, about fun, entertainment. That’s what the new generation is about, they don’t want to be lining up some factory doing manufacturing jobs.
(01:46:02) If you think that the Chinese new generation is still all about that, you should really study them a little bit more. They’re all about making their lives more fun and more interesting, right? That’s the cycle, right? In the beginning, Chinese people are hungry. They want to look for jobs, and they find these jobs and manufacturing. Now they want a work-life balance. They are a spearheading fashion. They spend so much more on entertainment, travel, clothing, restaurants. They have come out with these amazing coffee chains that have beaten completely Starbucks within a very short amount of time. This is all the new generation.
(01:46:44) Where are the opportunities? It’s in the local areas. It’s all about localism. Not globalism, localism. Being rooted in your local economy, you’ll actually find so many more opportunities. You go to Chongqing. I actually was watching a video about Chongqing. I thought we were in Shanghai. I was so surprised. And you go to Chengdu, it’s fun. People work a little bit less, but it’s really exciting. It’s very fun. People are really nice. Go to Xinjiang, take a look for yourself. There’s ski resorts being open there. You have a very interesting, colorful, dynamic complex country, and it’s not defined by Beijing and Shanghai.
Lex Fridman (01:47:28) So the small cities are flourishing and are developing a personality of their own.
Keyu Jin (01:47:33) They are flourishing more than the first major-tier cities.
Lex Fridman (01:47:37) Interesting. What’s the most beautiful thing to you about China and its people that you wish more knew?
Keyu Jin (01:47:47) Behind all this competition and the ambition, you have a very genuine group of people. They are funny, they are community-based, they are authentic. Actually, it’s not contradictory, right? You have a society which is heavily controlled, but they find ways to be truly, truly authentic. And ultimately, they’re just a very social group, right? Again, I keep on coming to this being lonely aspect of the western society and increasingly living alone. That is not China. It’s still a very, very warm country, and they’re warm to foreigners, and they are friendly.
Lex Fridman (01:48:39) Well, very grateful for you being a voice of balance, a voice of reason in this world, and for the book you’ve written on China that a lot of people deeply respect, and for talking today. Keyu, thank you so much. This was an honor.
Keyu Jin (01:48:53) Great to be with you. It’s a pleasure.
Lex Fridman (01:48:56) Thanks for listening to this conversation with Keyu Jin. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description and consider subscribing to the channel. And now, let me leave you with some words from Confucius, “It does not matter how slowly you go, as long as you do not stop.” Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
This is a transcript of Lex Fridman Podcast #476 with Jack Weatherford.
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Lex Fridman (00:00:00) The following is a conversation with Jack Weatherford, anthropologist and historian specializing in Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire. He has written a legendary book on his topic titled Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, and he has written many other books, including Emperor of the Seas: Kublai Khan and the Making of China, Genghis Khan and the Quest for God, The Secret History of the Mongol Queens and other excellent books. I’ve gotten to know Jack more after this conversation and I cannot speak highly enough about him. He’s a truly brilliant, thoughtful, and kind soul. This was a huge honor and pleasure for me. This is the Lex Fridman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description and consider subscribing to this channel. And now, dear friends, here’s Jack Weatherford.
Origin story of Genghis Khan
Lex Fridman (00:00:56) Genghis Khan, born in approximately 1162, became the conqueror of the largest contiguous empire in history. But before that, he was a boy named Temüjin, who at nine years old, lost everything. His father, his tribe, living in poverty, abandoned to the harshness of the Mongolian steppe. From a boy with nothing to the conqueror of the world. So tell me about this boy, his childhood and the Mongolian steppe from which he came from.
Jack Weatherford (00:01:27) The story of Genghis Khan, like the story I think of all of us, it doesn’t begin at birth, it begins… That’s the beginning of life. The story begins long before birth, and sometimes it can be many generations before and sometimes only shortly before. But I think with Genghis Khan, a crucial thing is to understand how his parents met and then how he was conceived. And that is that one day a cart was coming across the Mongol territory and only women drove carts. Men rode horses, women also rode horses, but women owned the houses which were called gers, the tents. They owned all the household equipment, and so they had to have carts for moving back and forth. And the fact that a cart was moving meant that some woman was moving from one place to another. And in fact, her husband was with her. She was a new bride and her husband was on a horse close to her.
(00:02:29) So what happened was a man named Yesügei… Yesügei, the future father of Genghis Khan. Yesügei was up on a hill. He was hunting with his falcon. The words of the Secret History of the Mongols were very clear, and he looked down and he saw her and he could barely glimpse her, but he knew she was young and she was a new bride. And he rode back to camp. He got his two brothers and they came racing down and they came… And first the husband of the woman looked around and he decided to flee, not because he was a coward, but he figured he would probably pull the men after him. They would chase him. And they did. They chased him. He went far away. He circled around. He came back. He arrived back at the cart where his wife was. Her name was Hö’elün. And Hö’elün had time to think while he was riding around being chased by the Mongols.
(00:03:28) And she decided that it’s more important for him to live. And she told him when he came back, “You must flee. If you stay here, they will kill you and they will take me. But if you flee, they will take me, but you will have the chance to find another wife. There are many women in the world. You find one and you call her Hö’elün after my name, and you remember me when you’re with her.” It’s a very dramatic moment. And he rode away and he looked back and forth, and it said that the pigtails or the braids that were hanging down were whipping back and forth from his chest to his back. He was divided, obviously, whether he should go or stay. But the three men were approaching again and they were headed straight for the cart this time. And they came in and they took Hö’elün.
(00:04:22) She didn’t say a word until her husband was over the ridge. And when he was over the ridge and she could no longer see him, she began to scream and wail. And one of the brothers said to her, “It doesn’t matter if you shake the waters out of the river and if you shake the mountains with your screaming, you will never see this man again.” And he was right. That was the moment that Genghis Khan’s mother and father met. That’s the beginning of his story in this kidnapping. And it’s going to reverberate every detail of it. We’ll come back again and again, not only throughout the story of the life of Genghis Khan, but it’s going to continue on with the feuds and the issues caused by it all the way into the future. And to some extent in certain parts of the world, you could say it still exists.
Lex Fridman (00:05:17) So the meeting is fundamentally sort of a mixture of heartbreak and dark criminal type of kidnapping?
Lex Fridman (00:05:28) And from that is conceived this conqueror of the biggest contiguous empire in history.
Jack Weatherford (00:05:35) What I was really interested in was how did this happen? Who was this person? As Wordsworth wrote in his poem, “The child is father of the man, and it’s the childhood that created him.” And it’s that episode that was before he was born, but all the things that happened throughout his childhood made him into the man that he became. And so he was now, suddenly this unusual situation was created where a child is going to be born to a kidnapped woman who’s being held by strange people, the Mongols. They were not her people. And he already had another wife, her husband, he had a wife named Sochigel. He had at that time already one son, later he had another son with her. It was a very odd situation. And in fact, the father, Yesügei wasn’t even there when Temüjin was born. He was off fighting the Tatars.
(00:06:38) And during this campaign against the Tatars, he killed two Tatars. One of them was named Temujin-üge, which is sort of person of iron is what it means from the Turkic. But today a part of also Mongolian language. So he came back, he had a baby, and he decided to name him Temüjin, the person of iron or iron-man, we might call him.
Jack Weatherford (00:07:05) After the man he killed. So he has a kidnapped mother, she’s a second wife now, not a legal wife, but just a second kidnapped wife. And he’s named for someone his father just killed. It was not an auspicious beginning. And in fact, just episode after episode in his childhood was inauspicious. The father and mother moved camp one time when he was quite young and somehow they overlooked him and forgot him. He was left behind. So here’s this young child, we don’t know what age, but it could have been around four or five, I think. He was left behind. And as it turned out, some other people, the Taichiud found him and then they kept him for a while, and eventually he was reunited with his father and mother.
(00:07:58) And it’s very odd to me that I never have any inkling of a spark of relationship much between the father and the son because then when Temüjin is eight years old, his father decides to take him off to find a wife, which finding a wife in the Mongolian terms means you give the child to that family or you give the boy to that family and he will live with them and they will raise him up and they will train him the way they want before he can marry their daughter. And so he’s taking him off at age eight, but he didn’t take the other son from the other wife, Behter. He was keeping him. There was something about Temüjin having been lost once and found by the Taichiud and reunited with the family.
(00:08:46) And now his father takes him off at age eight and he was going to take him to Hö’elün’s family, but he never made it. He stopped with another family. It’s like the first family he came across. And in the words of the Secret History, it sort of like instant love that there was fire in his eyes and fire in her eyes. And he saw this girl Börte, who was about nine years old, a little older, and he wanted to stay there with that family according to the story. And so the father left him there with that family. But on the way home, the father, he saw a drinking party and he decided to join them. They were Tatars. He hid his identity. On the steppe, everybody kind of figures out who everybody is. They figured out who he was. And supposedly they poisoned him. He got on his horse and was able to ride back home. But within a few days he died.
(00:09:53) So now Temüjin is off living with another family, and somebody comes from his family, a family, not a relative, but a close person named Münglig comes to get him, take him back, and they make it through the winter. They make it through the winter. Mother Hö’elün, by now she has four sons and one daughter. I think the daughter had already been born or the daughter was going to be born not too long after that, but they make it through the winter. The spring comes and of course the clan is going to move to a new camp. They go to spring camp from winter camp. And they have a ceremony for the ancestors. And they started the ceremony, but they did not tell Hö’elün. And so she came and she was angry that she had been left out. And the old women said, “You’re the one for whom we do not have to call. We will feed you if you come, but we do not have to take care of you.”
(00:10:57) Letting her know that as a captive woman, she was not a real wife in their view. And that was really the signal that when they moved camp, they were not taking her with them. And they packed up and they took her animals. They took the animals. But at that moment, she still had one horse for a moment, and she jumped on the horse and she took the banner of her husband and she raced around the people. And the banner after death contains the soul of the person, [foreign language 00:11:29] it’s called. And so she raced around and they were a little bit nervous. And so they camped for one night and they waited until it was dark, then they took off. And this time one of the friends of the family came running out to try to stop them and they killed him.
(00:11:46) And Temüjin cried. He was a little boy, eight years old. There was nothing he could do. He’s just a little boy. And now that family is left there on the steppe, four children, possibly five already. Sochigel, the other woman with two children. They’re all left there to die on the steppe. When the winter comes, they will surely all die.
Lex Fridman (00:12:14) How do they make it through the winter?
Jack Weatherford (00:12:16) Mother Hö’elün, in the words of the Secret History, she pulled her hat down over her head. She took her black stick and she ran up and down the banks of the river digging out roots to feed the gullet of her brood. She fed them through the winter. She found foods digging up whatever she could, finding whatever she could, everything she could. And even at this young age, Temüjin was already beginning to go out to collect things. He could get fish, he could do a few tasks to help feed the family. It was an extremely awful struggle at this point, but she saved every one of the children.
Lex Fridman (00:13:03) So Temüjin’s early years were marked by loneliness, abandonment and struggle?
Jack Weatherford (00:13:12) Yes. Even after this, he was kidnapped at one point by Taichiud people. He was kidnapped and we would say, I think the correct word, enslaved. They put him into a cangue, a yoke like a ox would wear. And so his two arms are in it and his head is in it, and he’s trapped in this thing. And every night he would be taken to a different ger to be guarded by that family. And one night there was a little celebration. So most of the people are drinking and he’s left with a boy who’s not very smart. Temüjin managed to take the cangue, the wooden yoke that he’s trapped in and use it as a weapon by turning it around very quickly and hitting the boy in the head, knocking him out. That was one of the first lessons for the Mongols, that anything that moves is a weapon.
(00:14:10) This is going to go on for generations. Very important for the Mongols. If it moves, it’s a weapon. He did that. He raced off in the night and he jumped into the river to hide. He still got a cangue on him. He’s still trapped under there. The people are looking for him. They come out and they’re up and down the river and he’s hiding underneath the water for the most part, trying to breathe as best he can, but it’s dark and it protects him a little bit. They give up and they say, “Okay, we’ll come back tomorrow. He can’t possibly escape.” But the next day, he knew one family that he thought he could go to, and he was right. He went to that family and a great risk to themselves. They in fact were a captive family of the Taichiud and at great risk to themselves, they managed to saw off the cangue and then burn it in their fire, and they gave him food to escape, and then he had to go find his family again. So this is the kind of life that this boy Temüjin had.
Lex Fridman (00:15:18) So he, just to be clear, the neck is trapped and the hands are trapped?
Jack Weatherford (00:15:23) We think that’s how it is. We just have the word. They don’t say the head and the hands. We know that his body is trapped in it, but from all evidence we have, it’s the hands and the head.
Lex Fridman (00:15:36) And he is running around deeply alone with this thing?
Jack Weatherford (00:15:41) Yes. And then he has to go out and find wherever his family is.
Lex Fridman (00:15:46) So this in part was the foundation of his breaking with Mongol tradition, that kinship is the most important thing above all else. Because here’s his life story where he’s abandoned over and over and over.
Jack Weatherford (00:16:00) Yes, by his father’s own brothers. See, the men who kidnapped her, they had an obligation under the Mongol law and custom to marry her when her husband died. They did not. They should take care of her and her children because her children or the children of their brother, they count as the sons of the clan, or they should. But no, they had all deserted him, all betrayed him. He learned very early on that you cannot trust family.
Lex Fridman (00:16:31) You mentioned that Genghis Khan’s childhood, Temüjin was marked by extreme tribal violence. Can you describe sort of the state of affairs in the steppe? How much violence is there? How much kidnapping is there?
Jack Weatherford (00:16:48) The story of Temüjin is not a unique story for that time. Now, as an isolated family of outcasts, of course he’s not participating in the various feuds and the raids of the people around them, but they are constantly raiding in the winter and for women and for horses and for any kind of valuables that they can find. It’s almost like their way of getting trade goods from China. That one group raids the other in order to find out whatever they have for textiles or for metal.
(00:17:23) Mongols produced nothing. They could produce felt to make their tents, but they were not craftsmen. And so they had to get these items from somewhere, and it was through raiding. Even in the genealogy of Temüjin, you see going back generation after generation of women having been kidnapped, children born who are not necessarily the father’s child, and it’s unclear who the father was, and all of these issues go back for a long time. Later, Genghis Khan will realize once he becomes Chinggis Khan, he will realize that the true source of most of the feuding on the steppe is over women. And later he will outlaw the kidnapping of women and the sale of women, in part not only because of what had happened to his mother, but what happened to him next in his life.
Lex Fridman (00:18:16) And this is one of the things you talk about, this in some ways, the love story with his wife was her kidnapping, was the defining… If you could point to one place where Genghis Khan the conqueror was created, it’s that point, his wife being kidnapped. Can you describe, first of all, his love for this woman and what that means and what the kidnapping of her meant?
Jack Weatherford (00:18:45) At age 16, Börte, the girl he had met when he was eight years old as she was nine, she’s now 17, and she and her mother come. It’s hard to even imagine what it was like for this 16-year-old boy who has suffered these indignities of life in every way that you can imagine. And suddenly, here is the love of his life, who’s going to be living with him, making him happy. He has somebody who loves him. It’s not just his mother running around getting food and trying to feed the five children and plus the other wife and her two children. No, he has somebody who loves him.
(00:19:32) It’s all the excitement that you can imagine with the fire in the eyes and the excitement. And then it only lasts a few months. So there they are… And there’s a lady visiting them. We don’t know exactly who she is, but just they called her grandmother, [foreign language 00:19:50]. Granny [foreign language 00:19:51] is there. Granny [foreign language 00:19:52] is sleeping, of course, on the floor of the ger, the tent. And early in the morning, she feels the vibrations in the earth, and she knows that horsemen are coming. She rouses the family. And mother Hö’elün is in charge. Mother Hö’elün is still in charge even though Temüjin is now married. She puts all of her children on a horse. She takes the baby girl Temülün in her own lap. She has one extra horse, but she won’t take Börte because she knows…
(00:20:31) She doesn’t know who the men are. She has no idea. But they’re coming. They’re coming in the dark. They’re coming for a woman. They know there’s a girl there. This family of outcasts has acquired a wife, and they know that they’re coming for that. And so she leaves Sochigel, the other wife, she leaves this old lady, granny [foreign language 00:20:51], who actually has her own cart, and she leaves Börte. They pile into granny’s cart, and it’s only an ox to pull it so they don’t get too far before the attackers get there. But mother Hö’elün is right. She’s able to get her children off to the mountain, into [foreign language 00:21:09], to the mountain side away from them because the men are so focused on this cart and finding out how many women are in there and who they are and all. So mother Hö’elün saved her family, but at a cost.
(00:21:26) Suddenly Temüjin realizes he has obeyed his mother, but he’s lost the most important thing in his life. And I do think this is the defining moment of his life. The story began back when his mother was kidnapped, but now the kidnapping of his wife and [inaudible 00:21:46] what will he do? What should he do? What can he do? Is he going to just resign himself to it? Is he going to go out and look for another wife? And he decides that life is not worth living without Börte. He has found something good in this life. And if he has to die trying to get her back, he will die trying to get her back.
Lex Fridman (00:22:14) And this is the early steps of the military genius born, because in order to get her back requires an actual organization of troops.
Jack Weatherford (00:22:28) He goes to a man who ruled the Khiyad people in Central Mongolia, the Tuul River, about where the capital Ulaanbaatar is today. He goes there because that Wang Khan is his name or Toghrul khan. He goes there because Wang khan had been the Lord over his father at one point, and his father had gone on raids for him. And so he went there and actually he took a gift, that’s because Börte’s mother had brought a sable coat as a gift for mother Hö’elün at that time of the marriage. So he took the coat and he took it and he gave it as a gift to Wang Khan and asked for his help. And Wang Khan said, “Yes.” He said, “I’ll send some troops, but we need more. And you need to ask Jamukha. You need to ask him to come also.” He said, “I will send a message to him to get troops.”
Lex Fridman (00:23:28) You have to tell the story of Jamukha. Because the story of Genghis Khan is one of people abandoning him, being disloyal. And here is a person who’s not of his kin, but becomes his, in a way, brother, in a way, loyal. And as you’ve described, he’s both the best thing to have happened to Genghis Khan and one of the biggest challenges in the later years to Genghis Khan. So who was Jamukha?
Jack Weatherford (00:24:01) Jamukha was a boy about the same age as Temüjin. And his family had winter camp close to where mother Hö’elün was living with her children. And so the two boys met during the winter time. In fact, they both claimed descent from the same woman about four generations earlier, or five. It’s a little unclear. She was a Uriankhai woman who herself was kidnapped, and actually Jamukha was the descendant of her from the fact that she was pregnant at the moment of kidnapping. And then Temüjin is descended from her through the new kidnapper, [foreign language 00:24:38], his ancestor. So they’re both through, as the Mongols would say, from the same womb. They come from the same historic origin. However, their lives were similar and they both lost their fathers very early. But Jamukha also lost a mother. So he grew up in the household of his grandfather. He had no siblings, unlike Temüjin with a whole house full of siblings. He grew up with his grandfather and his grandfather had several wives.
(00:25:06) So he grew up with a bunch of old women, which later he said he thought was an influence on his life. But the two boys meet. So they come from different backgrounds. And Jamukha is not as deprived by any means as the life of Temüjin, but he has a certain emotional deprivation I think, having not had mother, father, siblings, and he lives with these old people. The two boys meet, they become good friends playing on the ice. And so they’re playing on the ice. And then very early on, I think when they’re about 10 or 11 years old, they decide to make a pact. It’s called becoming anda. Anda is more than a friend. A friend is like [foreign language 00:25:49] in the language. And there are several different types of friendship, but anda is a friendship that’s beyond a friendship. It’s something for life. And they swore that they would be there forever to protect each other, to help each other in every moment.
(00:26:05) And they exchanged knucklebones. So each one of them had the knuckle bone of a roebuck, a deer, a knuckle bones are used in these games that they play, but it’s also used to forecast the future. You can roll them around and all. And it’s very strange, on the ice, I will say in the wintertime in Mongolia, it can be up to 50 degrees below zero. And it doesn’t really matter at that point, whether it’s even Celsius or Fahrenheit or what it is. But you slide something across the ice and it’s just absolutely smooth like silk, and it goes on for a long way. And if you put your ear down to the ice, you hear this celestial sound that is unlike any sound on the earth. It’s just like the angels are singing under the ice. So once they’ve sworn this relationship of anda, then a couple years later they swear it again, but this time they’re slightly older boys and they have bows and arrows, and so they exchange arrows with each other.
(00:27:05) In fact, the text is very specific that Jamukha took the horn, cut it off of a 2-year-old calf, and he whittled it down. And then he drilled a hole into it in order to make a whistling arrow, which is used for several purposes among the Mongols. It’s used for signals for one thing, from one person to another. But also when you’re hunting, if you want to move the animal in a certain direction, you send a whistling arrow in the opposite direction to make the animal move. So it had a lot of uses. So the boys had exchanged roebuck knuckles, this time they exchanged… And so they had been close friends. And Wang Khan said, “Okay, Jamukha should raise some troops and go with you.” And he did.
(00:27:53) So the three set out. Some troops from Wang Khan. He himself did not go. He was too old, but he sent some troops and then Jamukha and his troops, and then basically just Temüjin and his family, he just had his brothers. That’s all. They set off to find the Merkit people up the Selenga River, which flows into Siberia and on into Lake Baikal. They had to go through some extremely rough territory. And you see in this episode though, Jamukha is already a little bit fierce without necessarily thinking it through carefully. He gives this long speech about all the things they’re going to do to the Merkit people. “We’re going to jump to the [inaudible 00:28:40], the smoke hole in the top of the ger. We’re going to jump in there and we’re going to kill them all. We’re going to kill the men and the women and the children. We will destroy these people forever.”
(00:28:50) He has an extremely militant rhetoric at least. And he’s also rather critical of the other people. Wang Khan’s people came late and he gave them this long lecture about, “We are Mongols, and if we give our word, our word is our promise, forever. And rain or sleet or snow, it doesn’t matter. We be there on time.” So he’s dressing down his superiors. He is very aggressive, but he’s very helpful. So these troops, they move in on the Merkit camp. They also come in at night. And so there’s a small amount of warning because some men are out hunting sables, the Merkit men, and they race back to the camp and they tell the people, and the people are getting ready to get out as fast as possible. So Börte has no idea who’s coming. She doesn’t want to be kidnapped again, it’s just somebody.
(00:29:48) So she and the grandmother [foreign language 00:29:52], and Sochigel, they’re loaded into a cart to go away. So Temüjin comes in. And there’s a full moon that night, so they could see what they’re doing, and he’s really searching for her. He’s not paying too much attention to the battle. And he’s calling for her, and she hears his voice. She knows who it is. She jumps off the cart and she runs to him and they reunited and he grabs her, embraces her, and then he said, “This is the goal. This is why we are here. We don’t need anything else.” He was very clear about that.
Lex Fridman (00:30:31) And that was his first full on military engagement?
Jack Weatherford (00:30:38) Yes, aside from the things… Yes, his first full on military engagement. Now, along the way, in addition to escaping all these horrors, he had killed his older half brother, Behter.
Lex Fridman (00:30:51) And that too was a deeply formative experience. So what was that about? Can you explain in Mongol society, the role of the older brother and the power struggle there, and not to moralize, but there’s also the ethical foundation behind the murder?
Jack Weatherford (00:31:12) The killing of Behter, that’s one of the things that’s totally unknown outside of the Secret History of the Mongols, none of the Persian Chronicles, none of the Chinese Chronicles, none of them knew about this until the Secret History was deciphered and translated. But Behter was the older child of Sochigel. The older brother has complete authority over the younger siblings in Mongolian society, they have to refer to him with a special pronoun all the time, ta. And he refers to them as chi. It’s like a formality. And his word goes. He’s the father in the absence of the father. But also it’s quite common that if a man dies and he has no brothers, or his brothers do not marry his widow, then if he has a son by another wife, she will become his wife.
(00:32:10) So it would’ve been common that Behter eventually, when he passed through puberty, would then perhaps marry mother Hö’elün. Now, I don’t know that that happened, but I think either it did or Temüjin was trying to prevent it, because it was bad enough that he was the older brother, but he comes the older brother and the stepfather. I think Temüjin just couldn’t handle that. And he was already, Behter was ordering around. So he would take things like a fish or bird that Temüjin had caught, and that’s perfectly acceptable in the Mongol hierarchy.
Lex Fridman (00:32:51) So Temüjin would catch a fish and Behter would take the fish?
Jack Weatherford (00:32:56) Yes, it’s only recorded once, but perhaps it happened several times.
Lex Fridman (00:32:59) So that’s an okay thing to do for an older brother, just take stuff?
Jack Weatherford (00:33:04) Yes, he can do anything he wants just about with his younger siblings. But Temüjin is not going to stand for it. Mostly in the record, they kind of put the blame on this fish, which I’m not so sure that’s really the blame. And the boys had actually taken the sewing needles from their mother. They were using them for fishing… I think it was more complicated than that. But for whatever reason, he and his next brother Qasar decided to kill him, and they did.
Lex Fridman (00:33:38) Why to you, is it more complicated than that? It feels to me like stealing of a fish is like the final straw. Here he’s being abused over and over and over, and the fish is a symbol of that. And so here he takes matters into his own hands.
Jack Weatherford (00:33:56) I think it is the symbol of that, and it can be the thing that pushes him over the edge, but it’s all these other tensions of what’s going on…
Jack Weatherford (00:34:00) … over the edge, but it’s all these other tensions of what’s going on with the family. Because they shoot him with arrows, they kill him, but what happens afterwards is also interesting for the dynamics of what was going on before. Because we hear nothing from Sochigel. She and her younger son Belgutei, they stay with the family. They don’t go away.
(00:34:23) But the one who is outraged is mother Hö’elün, his mother. She screams and hollers at him in the longest kind of tirade you can imagine. About, “You’ll never have anybody in your life except your own shadow, and you are worse than”… Everything that she could name that could be worse than. She was outraged and went on, and on, and on about it.
(00:34:47) So, she was obviously extremely distressed about it. Whereas Sochigel, the mother of the boy, she may have been distressed, I don’t know, but nothing has shown up in the record. So, he does have this episode of having killed off his brother. But I don’t think it was a deeply meaningful, I think it was important, but I don’t think it was a mostly deeply meaningful for Temüjin. The brother was gone, the problem was solved, mother is extremely ticked off at him but…
Lex Fridman (00:35:20) But it does show… In fact, it’s interesting if it’s not a big deal for him. It does show that he’s willing to resort to murder to take care of a bad situation.
Jack Weatherford (00:35:34) Yes, he is capable of doing anything that needs to be done to resolve what he sees as a problem. Bekhter was a problem, he resolved it at a very young age. So, he’d had that experience behind him. But now Bekhter’s younger brother Belgutei is on the raid with him and with Jamukha when they go to capture Börte back. So, he has both loyalty, and Belgutei stays loyal to him his entire life, his entire life. It was very interesting.
Lex Fridman (00:36:11) So, actually if we return to Börte, is it normal to have such a love story across many years when you’re separated, and sort of having that kind of loyalty? Because it was two-way loyalty from Börte to Temüjin and Temüjin to Börte, and this is like before he was Chinggis Khan.
Jack Weatherford (00:36:31) I think as children, he was too preoccupied with staying alive and trying to find fish and roots to eat and things like that, to really be pining for her all the time. But for whatever reason, she came. And it could be that her family liked him in some way, or that she remembered him, or that she had no other suitors because at 17 she should have been married actually.
(00:36:59) So, I can’t explain why, but it was certainly a strong love story after the fact, if not before. I mean those two were loyal to each other throughout their lives. Or she was, I would say, the most important person to him after that.
Lex Fridman (00:37:16) He went to literal war to get her back.
Jack Weatherford (00:37:20) He risked everything, he was willing to die. He was willing to kill, he was willing to die in order to get her back. And he got her back, and now he’s reestablished his relationship with Jamukha. And so they decide to stay together and they all go off to the Olkhonud Valley. And she is pregnant, this becomes a huge issue forever.
(00:37:54) It’s one of those things that to this day almost, it’s an issue and what happens. But as he says much later in life, when his own sons rebel against him, and they call that first child a Merkit bastard, he defends his wife viciously to his own sons. He says, “You were not there. You do not know who loved who and who did not. You did not see the sky turning around. You did not see the stars falling. You did not see the earth turn over. You don’t know what was happening. And if I say he is my son, he is my son. Who are you to say otherwise, you were not there. You come from the same warm womb, and if your mother could hear your words, her warm womb would turn to cold stone.”
(00:38:45) So, he defended her forever. But he’s off now… We go back to the beginning. She’s pregnant, they are in the Olkhonud Valley, and he Jamukha decide to renew their vows of being anda to each other. So, this time it’s more serious and it’s a ceremony in front of the whole… We can’t say tribe, it’s not big enough yet for a tribe, but a whole clan that’s there.
(00:39:18) And then Jamukha takes off a gold belt, which actually he had stolen from the Merkit at some point. And where on earth they got a gold belt? I don’t know where. He took off a gold belt and he put it on Temüjin. And then Temüjin gave him a mare who had never had a foal that had never given birth. And it was an unusual mare who had a little growth on the front of her head, which they called a horn.
(00:39:44) So, it was an unusual gift and don’t… It has meaning, but I don’t know all the meanings behind it. It’s sort of odd to me. But the golden belt I didn’t think about it in different ways. But the belt for the Mongol man is really the sign of manhood. And in fact, just a belt, büse, a woman was often then and even now called a person without a belt because that’s how they were at that time.
(00:40:12) Today, women wear belts, of course. But they still use the word busgui, busgui with no belt. So, it’s a very important symbol of manhood. So, he gave that to Temüjin and they celebrated. And then the word told a secret history. They slept apart under the same blanket, apart from the other group, and they were happy together. And then when the baby was born to Temüjin named the baby Jochi, which means visitor.
(00:40:44) And some people say, “Well, it’s because the child was really the Merkit child.” Other people say, “No, it’s because he was a visitor on the territory of Jamukha at that time.” And other people can say, well, Jamukha’s ancestor who had been born from the kidnapped woman who was pregnant, that they had named that Jarigadi which meant foreigner. So, it’s kind of like a parallel, the visitor, the foreigner. And so Jamukha’s clan took the name from him. They were called Jadaran, Jadaran. So, there are all these things that sometimes we can’t quite understand because we don’t have the total mentality of that time, and we were not there.
Lex Fridman (00:41:27) But we should say that… I mean, it’s a pretty powerful part of this love story is that the child is likely not his. And he accepted that child as his own. And defended it as it becomes much more important later as his first child.
Jack Weatherford (00:41:47) Yes, he defends this child through his entire life. But not long after the birth, he and Jamukha break apart. Or really it’s Temüjin breaks apart at the urging of Börte. She said, “He lords it over you too much. He orders you around too much. You need to be free. We need to break away.” And she urged him, and he loved his wife more than anything.
(00:42:19) I think that in a certain way the most important other character in his life, adult life, would be the anda relationship. Which gets up being severely tested in the future years. But they run away through the night. They go all night long to escape from him. But he obviously loved Börte the most and took the baby of course with them as well.
Early battles & conquests
Lex Fridman (00:42:43) So, here’s this breaking point of the anda. How did that relationship evolve?
Jack Weatherford (00:42:48) The two of them never claimed to break it. They had just separated. Now, we have Wang Khan, the most powerful ruler on the Steppe who’s ruling out of Central Mongolia of the Kerait people. And so Jamakha remains loyal to him, but at first, so does Temüjin. They are both loyal to him, but they’re fighting in different kinds of campaigns, and all.
(00:43:16) So, for a while they’re not fighting each other. But eventually some things happened that separate Temüjin. Temüjin was making all of these great victories for Wang Khan. And he even got the title Wang, which means… from Chinese, meaning a prince or king. Wang Khan received that from the Jin Dynasty because of all of these conquests against the Tatar people.
(00:43:45) So, Temüjin was rising up, and then he wanted his son to marry the daughter of Wang Khan, and Wang Khan said, “No.” His own son Senggum told the father, “No, no, no, no, we don’t marry those low people. They’re Mongols. They’re not like us. We are Kerait people. We’re not going to marry them.”
(00:44:07) And so then now war, you could say, breaks out. Or feud really, it’s more of a feud. And Temüjin has to flee far away into the east to a place called Baljuna. And he goes to Baljuna, and at this time then Jamukha is going to fight on behalf of his Lord, Wang Khan. The two of them do not meet in combat, but now their forces are fighting each other.
Lex Fridman (00:44:37) And they didn’t see that. I mean, there’s an obvious tension there. There’s an obvious, if slight, breaking of loyalty, right?
Jack Weatherford (00:44:46) Yes. It’s hard to know what’s going through their minds at that point. We only have it later on when their relationship is being resolved in unfortunate ways. They claim that neither one of them ever truly broke it, because they never harmed each other directly.
(00:45:06) And in fact, then Temüjin eventually defeats Wang Khan. So, he takes over Central Mongolia, he’s starting to really rise up now. And he has the title from his own people of Chinggis Khan. They give him that at Black Heart Mountain by the Blue Lake. It’s a very beautiful special place.
(00:45:26) But he takes that title. That’s not a title that anyone had ever held that we know of. Chinggis Khan, it was a new title that he just thought up, or somebody thought up, or somebody thought it had auspicious meaning behind it. It’s very close to the word tengiz, which means the sea. It could have had something to do with that.
(00:45:49) Mongolians really like, we might say puns of… they like words with meanings. And that’s very important to them. The more meanings a word has, the more power that word has, so if it has different meaning and different languages. So, in the Mongolian, it sounds like strong Chin, Chinggis. But in the Turkic, and there are many Turkic people, including the Merkit themselves are mostly Turkic people. It sounds like the sea, tengiz, tengiz.
Lex Fridman (00:46:17) So, it’s exciting to them when there’s this double meaning and the double meaning plays with each other, and that excites them.
Jack Weatherford (00:46:25) Especially, with names. I’m like today in Mongolia… Well, I’ve been there so long, I think the fad has passed now. But about 20 years ago, it was popular to name children Misheel, girls. Because it’s a French name, an American name, and it means smile in Mongolian. So, it’s the power of three great languages and three great civilizations.
(00:46:46) And so many names are like that. And so I think Chinggis it doesn’t have one meaning. I think it means powerful, it means the sea, I think it means many different things. So, he had become a Khan, and he was ruling over him. And so Jamukha now switched loyalties to the next kingdom over called the Naiman people who are farther west.
(00:47:06) And he becomes the protege, you could say, of the Naiman people. But when Chinggis Khan attacks the Naiman, Jamukha deserts the Naiman. He tells them, “These people have snouts of steel and they eat humans alive.” And he was telling him all these horrible things about the Mongols.
(00:47:35) And Tayang Khan, the leader of the Naimans he was rightfully scared about them. And he was left there, and he, in fact, was very quickly also defeated. So, Jamukha has not fought against Temüjin in this campaign. And he’s off with some of his people, Jadaran clan people.
(00:47:58) He’s off with them and they see the turning of the tide. But he now wants to become the Great Khan of the Steppe. He has very few followers, but he takes the title Gurkhan, which is a very old ancient important title. But because Wang Khan is gone, Toghrul Khan gone, he could take this title and pretend to be the great Khan of the Steppe, and all.
(00:48:30) But his own people turn against him and they capture him, and they think they will take him to Chinggis Khan. It’s now Chinggis Khan. They’ll take him and they’ll be rewarded perhaps for turning him in. And Chinggis Khan does reward them immediately. He kills them all because they have betrayed their leader who is his anda. It’s a very strange encounter. And so supposedly Chinggis Khan says to him, “Come back to me, save me, be beside me, protect me, be my shadow, be my safety guard in life.” And supposedly Jamukha says, “But I did betray you when my people fought against you, and you will always know that, and you will never completely trust me. I’ll be like a louse underneath the collar of your tunic. I’ll be like a thorn in the lapel of your dell.”
(00:49:43) He said, “Kill me without shedding my blood, let me die. And if you do, take my remains up to a high place and bury me, and I will be the guard, I’ll be the protector for you and your people forever.” So, they obviously, Tamujan did not participate in the killing, but he ordered the killing. And he was either… It’s not specified how he was killed without shedding the blood, but the Mongols had several ways.
(00:50:21) Because the most honorable way to die was without shedding blood. The blood contains part of the soul, and if you lose it, you’re losing your soul before you die. So, they usually wrap them up in felt carpets and then beat them to death or trample them to death with horses, something like that. There are a couple other methods, but I think that’s probably the method by which Jamukha was killed.
(00:50:43) And so he was killed, and then Temüjin or Chinggis Khan had his remains taken up and buried in a high place. This is over near Tuva, which is today part of Russia. But until the 20th century it was a part of Mongolia. The Tuvan people very, very close culturally to the Mongols.
Lex Fridman (00:51:04) It seems that both of them under the anda relationship had a deep value for loyalty. And so it’s not worth living after you’ve been disloyal, which is the Jamukha perspective, right?
Jack Weatherford (00:51:21) He had become very practical at this point, and he understood that you needed complete total loyalty and trust with everybody around you. And I think for this reason, he was willing either say, to accept the plea of Jamukha, and when Chinggis Khan was asking him to come back, and to be his shadow, and to be his safety guard. Again, maybe that was just a formality that he knew would be rejected. Or maybe when Jamakha offered to be killed without shedding blood, that was a formality that he thought would not be followed through.
Lex Fridman (00:52:05) Nevertheless, to me, just reading your work and understanding this history, this relationship seems like a really, really important relationship that defines the nature of loyalty for Chinggis.
Jack Weatherford (00:52:19) I would say in both negative and positive ways, it was the most important relationship of his adulthood aside from Börte. But that relationship really did not seem to have many negative aspects. They sometimes disagreed on things, but small things. So, she was by him and she was positive in every regard so far as we know forever.
(00:52:41) Although she was not submissive but she was always on his side. And Jamakha, he was just a little too hot-headed for me. I mean, in my evaluation of him. That these things like, “Oh, we’re going to drop down on the Merkit and we’re going to come through the smoke hole, kill everybody,” and all. And he had a flair for the dramatic, even in a way of giving the gold belt to Temüjin.
(00:53:08) But Jamakha also explained himself at the end of life, and he said, “We both lost our father, but I also lost my mother. And you had a strong mother to raise you, I did not.” And he said, “You had Börte, you have a very strong wife to help you. And my wife, just used a word like prattler, like she just sort of complains and prattles along, and we did not have a relationship.”
(00:53:40) So, I think something about that rings true, that there were some elements of that that were true. But Jamakha certainly didn’t have the intelligence and the real genius for dealing with people, dealing with soldiers, especially in warfare that Temüjin had.
Lex Fridman (00:54:02) Yeah, in that relationship, there’s a contrast because Chinggis Khan did not accumulate riches or accumulate power in a way that was for the sake of the riches or for the sake of the power. He was always very practical in what is the way to maximize the success of this operation.
Jack Weatherford (00:54:24) Yes, yes. I often wonder, what happened to the gold belt? It disappeared from the story. And a gold belt doesn’t just disappear. What happened to that? It’s so interesting because Temüjin was never interested in material goods. And when as Chinggis Khan, as the ruler, in some ways you could say, became the richest man in the world, because he controlled the most wealth flowing through him.
(00:54:50) But he always dressed simply. He always lived in the tent and he said, “I eat what my soldiers eat. I dressed the way my soldiers dressed. I lived the way my soldiers live. We are the same.” So, he had no interest in the wealth. And Jamakha, he had sided before with Wang Khan, which was very advantageous because they had more trade goods and wealthier people, and all. But he just didn’t have the temperament, I think, that was going to be helpful for Chinggis Khan’s continued rise.
Power
Lex Fridman (00:55:23) That is one of the powerful things about the Chinggis Khan stories. He came from nothing.
Jack Weatherford (00:55:27) From absolute nothing.
Lex Fridman (00:55:29) And he didn’t, from what I see and understand, become sort of corrupted by the riches or changed. He fundamentally remained the same person who does not have value for material things.
Jack Weatherford (00:55:42) He changed and matured in various ways over life as we all do, or we hope we do. But he never became avaricious in any way. He was never greedy. He was never acquisitive. He kept a simple life. And part of the simple life for him meant that no one was allowed to write about him. No one was allowed to make his likeness. They couldn’t paint a picture of him. They couldn’t make a statue of him. No building could be built dedicated to him. No palace, no tomb, no temple of any sort. Not even, at the point of death, the simplest gravestone. Nothing, nothing.
Lex Fridman (00:56:19) It’s fascinating that a kid, like a boy that doesn’t know the world would have the intelligence to understand how corrupting that is. The moment somebody builds a statue of you, it’s like a slippery slope. Doors becoming… Not seeing the world clearly. Not seeing surrounding yourself with sycophants that don’t tell you the information. Not being able to select the right people to lead the armies or to lead the territories that you conquer. So, it’s interesting that he had that foresight of don’t record, don’t worship. That’s because that’s a dangerous road to go down for a leader.
Jack Weatherford (00:57:00) And it’s very hard to explain how he stuck to that, how he got it. You’re so easily corrupted by power, and yet he maintained this very fierce attitude towards his relationship with the people around him, his guard mostly, or his private part of the army that went with him, the central part of the army. That was his relationship, his family. He had four wives. This was what was important to him. And in fact, no portrait was painted until 1278. Well, by then he’d already been dead for 51 years. And then no statue until the 21st century.
Secret History
Lex Fridman (00:57:46) Just incredible. But let’s go to the document that you referenced several times, the Secret History.
Jack Weatherford (00:57:53) The Secret History is a very unusual document, and I happen to love it very much. But I said, Chinggis Khan allowed nothing to be written about him in his lifetime. The people couldn’t take notes. Even the army was not… He, Chinggis Khan ordered the invention of the alphabet for the Mongol people. And it was adapted from the Uyghur people.
(00:58:14) And so to this day, it’s often called the Uyghur alphabet, the Uyghur alphabet. So, he had ordered that, and he’d ordered his children to learn to read and write. And some did, I think most did not, but some did. But one of the things he did with every campaign, even the one with the Merkit when he rescued Börte was he always adopted one orphan.
(00:58:41) And that child became a full member of the Mongol nation and his household. His mother Hö’elün would raise the child. So, she eventually had a whole household full of boys of different tribes, but they all became very high-ranking members of the government. And one was the Tatar boy who turned out not to be so great as a soldier, but he could read and write, he was the best. And later eventually, he became the supreme judge appointed by Chinggis Khan, of course. And so when Chinggis Khan died, he recognized it was important not just to write down the law, that’s all Chinggis Khan allowed to be written in blue books, only the law. Nothing about him or campaigns or military, anything,
(00:59:27) But Shigi Qutuqu, was his name. Shigi Qutuqu realized that this was going to be lost, that this is a great historic thing that has happened. So, he compiled the work. A part of it he… I don’t know other people contributed, helped him, just a little bit unclear. The Mongols, they don’t specify that. So, they always tell you exactly where something happens so we know exactly where it happened. In Mongolia, you can still go to that spot where he wrote it. That’s very important to the Mongols.
(00:59:55) And we also know it as the year of the Mao, so it was 1228, Chinggis Khan had died at 1227. So, he wrote down, it begins with what we would say are the myths, although I’m not sure they’re myths, but the origins of the myths. It begins with the marriage of a Gray-Blue Wolf with a Tawny Deer.
(01:00:14) Then some people say, “Well, that’s some kind of myth. It’s totemic.” And Mongols mostly, they look at me, I asked them about this. They said, “What? He was named Blue-Gray Wolf, she was named Tawny Deer. They married.” They are very practical about it, and they think they’re real people. Maybe they were or not, I don’t know.
(01:00:36) So, this earlier history is just the Genealogy as it should be, who knows? But it’s also in there because like Bodonchar, they call it Bodonchar the Fool, the ancestor of Temüjin. He’s cast out because he’s just so dumb. The rest of the family doesn’t want him. And his father is undetermined who he was. He kidnapped the Ö’elün Üjin woman. She has the child who becomes the ancestor, Temüjin.
(01:01:00) So, it’s a confusing mess. But I tend to think it’s probably accurate. It has a lot of good information. And by the time you get to the life of Temüjin, the reason we know these intimate things is because that person Shigi Qutuqu, he was there. Sleeping in the same gear with the people. So we even see in there, he will record instances where Börte sits up in bed and tells her husband, “Okay, you got to do this. You got to do that. You can’t do this anymore. We can’t think of”… It’s all recorded, right?
(01:01:30) So, it’s a very intimate document. And this is one reason that it was secret, it was only for the family. They were trying to uphold Chinggis Khan’s prohibition against putting out information about the family. So, it was a secret for a very long time. So, much so that scholars began to think it didn’t exist.
(01:01:50) And then in the 19th century, a Russian academic who was working in China at the time, in Beijing. He discovered a manuscript which was very, very odd that people didn’t think was anything because it’s all Chinese characters, but it makes no sense in Chinese. But he recognized, but if you read it, pronounce it, it makes sense to a Mongolian. And so it was in this code that had been used to record the information in Chinese.
Lex Fridman (01:02:23) So, they were recording the sounds.
Jack Weatherford (01:02:26) The sounds, correct. They used Chinese characters to record sounds. Which is always problematic in some little areas here, not exactly sure what the name is or something like… But it was a very unusual document. And then once they found it, they realized that some of the Persian documents had incorporated part of that already.
(01:02:47) So, that was very helpful to me because some of the Persians I trust very much, and I liked their work very much. And so it was helpful that it already existed. And some of it existed in other Mongolian sources that were written later. Some of it was just incorporated.
(01:03:06) So, it seemed to be fairly genuine, but it wasn’t a hundred percent pure. It had… Little things had happened to it along the way. Some things have been stepped here and there, and a few words changed. Sometimes for Temüjin, they call him Chinggis Khan. Well, he wasn’t the Khan then. And sometimes they call him Khan, which is like chief, and other times Khan, which is Emperor. Well, in Mongolian, it’s a big difference.
(01:03:31) So, there are little things like this that move around that you’re not sure why. But it’s a document that I have great faith in. It was not published in English until 1982, but Francis Woodman Cleaves at Harvard University translated it in the 50s. It was ready for publication, and he was having trouble with the publisher. And so it didn’t appear for nearly 30 years.
(01:03:55) And it was supposed to be two volumes. The first volume is the translation, the second volume was going to be the notes, and the second volume was lost. To this day, it hasn’t been found. I would love to see that. But anyway, now it’s in all languages, just about in the world.
Lex Fridman (01:04:14) Can you clarify? So there’s two volumes, the 19th century Chinese manuscript covers the first volume.
Jack Weatherford (01:04:23) Yes, that was translated and then published by Harvard University. But the notes were just the notes from the scholar, Francis Woodman Cleaves. Those were his notes, not Mongolian notes.
Jack Weatherford (01:04:34) There are Chinese notes that went with it because the Chinese had trouble understanding a lot of things in it. And they also, they disapproved of some things, so they would try to put their own notes in the margins to kind of correct the story and explain in a way why the Mongols women would be often marrying their stepson. It just did not match with Confucian ethics. So, there’s several things like that that they try to skip around. But so it’s interesting just to read the Ming Dynasty notes that are attached to it. But the document itself, Mongolian Nuuts Tovchoo, it’s just so important. And for me it was the guiding document. I didn’t want to be guided by anything else, first.
(01:05:21) Everything else I would check to correlate and fill in blanks and give more information. But I went to Mongolia to travel around to those places because they are so exact in there, and to feel it. And it’s so important, I think, because your history does not live in books. History does not live in archives or even libraries, as much as I need them for my work.
(01:05:45) But history lives in the people. History lives in the memory of the people and the culture. And for example, the episode with the kidnapping of Börte. So, I went to that place and I didn’t know when it happened, what season it happened. It was very important for figuring out the bursts that came afterwards and other events that were being correlated.
(01:06:06) Very important to me. And so I’m just talking to the people who live in that valley, the nomads there. They said, “Oh, it’s clear, it was the winter.” I said, “Oh, where did you read that?” He said, “No, granny Kuoqchin was on the ground, and she could feel the vibrations.” She said, “Look, this is summertime now. You’re not going to feel any vibrations the ground here is so soft.” Suddenly a whole important piece that I’ve been searching for just came together from some nomad sitting there next to his horse.
(01:06:44) And he was absolutely right. It could only happen in the winter. And that also correlates with the time that reading was done. So, it correlates with other historic factors. But then that gave me the time basis for figuring out a lot of other things. History lives in the people.
Lex Fridman (01:06:59) Just to link on that point, you visited different places that were important to the story of Chinggis Khan. What did it feel like? What are some memorable things about just the experience of standing there?
Jack Weatherford (01:07:16) Yes. I really set out mostly to visit the cities he had conquered across Central Asia and all. And there was so little to learn. I mean, everything was kind of known of whatever the Chroniclers had recorded, the archeologists had found whatever they had found. And I get there, and he hadn’t spent much time there, he didn’t identify with it, I wasn’t feeling anything.
(01:07:37) But in Mongolia, I would go to these places and I would know… If Chinggis Khan came back today, he would know exactly where he is. There’s no road, there’s no sign, there’s no building, there’s no power line going to… nothing. And just to smell the air, to feel it, to see the animals, and to see what kind of animals live here, what kind of plants are growing here, you begin to get a-
Jack Weatherford (01:08:00) … here. What kind of plants are growing here? You begin to get a feeling for how he was thinking and then you begin to see, ah, I know which direction they came from, the only direction they could come from was that way. You begin to see it and his life starts to unfold in a very dramatic way that I have the text or the text is it has no scenery, no props, nothing like that. The Mongols all understand their way of life, they don’t need to explain anything. They know which way the ger faces with the sun, they know all these things but, for me, that’s how I learned it, it was from being with the people, it was the most important thing and this was starting in the 1990s and the people, at this time, they were amazed that I would come.
(01:08:51) The Soviet era had just ended, socialism was just ending, democracy was starting and Genghis Khan had been forbidden to them for almost the entire century and every known descendant of Genghis Khan was killed in Mongolia following the secret history, that became the key to writing what I wrote. Take the history, which is difficult to understand, you have to go over and I often never understand different parts or I change my mind and think it was yes now it’s no but the secret history is a valuable document. And to me, also, it’s the opening document of Mongolian written language and I think it’s very important how do people begin their written language and they begin it with the words [foreign language 01:09:45], from highest heaven came the destiny of the blue wolf who is married to the tawny deer and their descendants who came from the Great Sea to live at the base of Mount Burkhan-Khaldun.
Lex Fridman (01:10:03) And then integrating the spiritual elements of nature, the mountains and the Great Sea and this deep connection to nature that they have.
Jack Weatherford (01:10:15) Mongolia is a world that, for the most part, is the same as when Genghis Khan was there, we cannot say that far to any other place in the world. Certainly not for America but, just a few hundred years ago, it was entirely different, people, languages, everything. But you can’t say it for London or Moscow or Istanbul, Constantinople, all of these things have changed so much but Mongolia is still Mongolia. It’s one of the largest countries in the world and space with the fewest number of people about, today, 3.3 million and they’re spread out and they live in their environment in such an intimate way. This was important for learning about Genghis Khan, how he thought, how he hunted, how he strategized for war, you learn that from the people today because they’re still there, they’re still living.
Mongolian steppe
Lex Fridman (01:11:10) What’s the open Mongolian steppe like? As we return to the feeling of Temujin and Genghis Khan, what’s it like looking at this place that has not changed since this time?
Jack Weatherford (01:11:22) The first thing I think about this steppe is that you can see forever in every direction. There’s no building, nothing to stop your line of view and it’s like being in the ocean in many ways. So, you have this extremely open space and the wind is usually blowing through it but it’s extremely fresh, it’s coming out of Siberia, it’s coming out of the Arctic, it sweeps down across Mongolia, cold as a dickens sometimes but it’s always fresh, always fresh. So, you have the wind coming in, you have the smell of the wind but also then there’s grass, the smell of grass becomes very important. Now, because of the particular location, from one year to another, one area may have grass one year and then drought the next year, another area has grass so you don’t always know. If it’s not grass, it’s dust. You have dust flowing in, the dust doesn’t smell so good, it doesn’t feel so good but that’s just one more part of the country.
(01:12:28) The waters are mostly pure. Now, unfortunately, there has been pollution in this century from mining in several areas but, even when I was there or even today when we go to some place like the Selenga River where we talk about the market lived, so it’s a place of pure waters and that’s how Mongolians define their world is by the water. Genghis Khan does not give lands to his sons to rule, he gives waters and people to rule. They do not refer to the earth as land, they refer to the earth as dalai, ocean, the sea. And so, water is very important and, to learn the rules about water, you don’t camp by water. If you can’t by water, your animals and you are going to be polluting it, messing it up so they’re back, maybe in our modern terms, about a kilometer back. You take the animals to the river to drink and then you take them away. You do not bathe in that river, you take the water away from the river and you bathe away from the river so you do not pollute the river.
(01:13:41) The rules are very strict and very clear and they’re from the time of Genghis Khan about how to deal with … But also, it’s dangerous to live close to the river because there are flash floods in the summertime, you could suddenly have it and it could wipe away if your camp is right there by the water. So, the people, they live with nature in a way that I don’t see anywhere else in the world. And even today with the changes with the cell phone and with solar panels and they could get TV out in the middle of the steppe, still they’re living a similar life. The young people, of course, want to drive a motorbike but they’re still herding cows and yaks and camels. If it’s on a motorbike, okay, they’re still doing it the Mongol way.
Mounted archery and horse-riding
Lex Fridman (01:14:28) But then, if we go to the time of Temujin, of Genghis Khan, another component is the horses. Can we talk about their relationship with the horse? Thinking about this open steppe, from a young age, all Mongols are trained to master riding horses. As you write, while standing on the horse, so they learn how to ride while standing on the horse from a young age. While standing on the horse, they often jostled with one another to see who could knock the other off. When their legs grew long enough to reach the stirrups, they were also taught to shoot arrows and to lasso on horseback making targets out of leather pouches that they would dangle from poles so they would blow in the wind. The youngsters practice hitting the targets from horseback at varying distances and speeds, the skills of such play proved invaluable to horsemanship later in life. Can you speak to the relationship of Genghis Khan and the Mongols to horses?
Jack Weatherford (01:15:36) The Mongol and the horse are inseparable. I wrote one line in the book that the editor removed because that was insulting. I said, the Mongol and the horse, they live together, they know each other with every twitch of the muscle and they smell the same. Well, I was saying it just not to be insulting about anything but they have that deep intimacy and the horses do know their owner from the smell. This is very important. It’s also important for Genghis Khan because they made the flags, what they call [foreign language 01:16:05], out of the horse hair from their own horses. And so, in battle, they used it for a very practical purpose and that is the horses would return to their source because they knew the smell of their flag, it was other members of their own herd.
(01:16:23) So, the language itself, I have never ever mastered all the words just for the colors of horses, much less for all the other things about it. I can remember, Mongolians, being out there in the countryside, they say, “Oh, I want to learn English.” I say, “Okay. Yeah, that’s nice, you teach me some words in Mongolian, I teach you some words.” “Okay.” They say, “What color is that horse?” I say, “Brown,” they would say, “Brown.” I’d say, “Yes, okay. What color is that horse?” “Brown.” Then they said, “But you said this color was brown, what color is this?”
(01:16:56) I said, “Well” … It’s just amazing. They have words based on how smooth the coloring is and the variation in the texture and all the different … Today in English, sometimes you can put them together, we say yellow brown or brown brown or black. But the words for horses, of course, by sex and then they have three because they have geldings and so they’re very important too and by age and by whether or not they’ve reproduced in the case of the females, all these things are important parts of the horse and the horse. And the horse …
(01:17:34) A few years ago, a presidential candidate ran under the slogan raised in the dust of many fast horses. It just resonates with the Mongolian spirit and the dust itself is important. The Mongolians, they will wipe the sweat and the dust off the horse and wipe it onto their own forehead which is the most sacred part of the body where the soul resides. This is how intimate a relationship is with the horses and they’re hard on them in some ways, they train them very well, they ride them very hard but the horses are also trained for that. They use a very small crop, it’s a little bit like a stick with a slight whip at the end, that they hit the rump of the horse, never anything else. They’re horrified at Western people who use metal spurs and metal to harm the horse in the stomach. And to harm the head of a horse, they say it’s a capital crime. I don’t know anyone who’s ever executed for it but you never ever harm a horse’s head.
(01:18:43) So, the horses are important in every way, even religiously important with the making of the fermented horse’s milk that the mother goes out every morning and she throws some to each of the four directions to start the day and they use it for every kind of thing. But some things puzzled me that, in my watching, I remember one day being with a very nice family, it happened to be on a gelding day when they were out there gelding the would-be stallions who don’t get to be stallions. But this family, they had a bunch of boys and only one or two girls, there were four or five boys and one boy was maybe 11 years old, he fell from the horse. You could see it not so far away, he fell from the horse and he didn’t get up. No one moved. In fact, they all turned attention away and I thought, what am I supposed to say? “This boy fell down, somebody go get him.” No.
(01:19:44) And then the boy was trying to hobble back, he still had the reins to his horse, but he couldn’t remount and he was trying to hobble back so his little brother went out to help him come in and they came into the ger and they sat down, the mother just turned her back. And I’m thinking, how on earth can you do this? This is a child, this is your child. But two weeks later, by chance, another boy who is practicing for Naadam, the annual races this boy had been doing, he was often in an area right close to the mountain area and the horse bolted, took off through the woods, he was knocked off by a tree and then the horse went deeper into the woods, the boy followed him, the boy became lost. The boy was 12 years old, he was lost for two weeks and he lived. I would’ve died in 48 hours, he lived.
(01:20:37) He said, well, he slept in the daytime when it was warm, he walked at night when it was cold, even though this was the summertime, the nights can be quite cold especially on a mountain, and he sang loudly all night long to keep the wolves away. And he knew what to eat and then he walked until he found water moving and then he would follow that water down to the … He lived and I realized, the boy falls from the horse, his mother’s not going to be there, she knows that. And it’s probably hard for her too to see her boys suffer but she knows.
Lex Fridman (01:21:13) Just a small tangent. There’s a wrestler named Cary Kolat and he tells the story about mental toughness, that the first time he saw truly mentally tough people was when he visited Mongolia for a wrestling tournament. And he remembered that they were taking showers in ice-cold water and, all the other wrestlers, they would take the shower and then, when the water hits them, you could see a little grimace. With the Mongols, it was emotionless. So, ice-cold water or any other kind of hardship, you build a hardness to that.
Lex Fridman (01:22:00) There’s a mental hardness and a mental toughness.
Jack Weatherford (01:22:03) You have to be able to take care of yourself. And with the weather, for example, often in that time, and still today, some people, if they can have the privacy to do it, the men will strip naked in the first heavy snow and roll around in the snow in order to prepare for the coming winter. And the valley where I lived, a lot of wrestlers come there to train in the summertime for the competition and the water is very cold coming down from the mountain and, every day when there’s a break, they go down, they take … Again, they do not get in the water, never but they take the water and they pour the cold water over themselves and, yes, it’s refreshing to them, refreshing.
Genghis Khan’s army
Lex Fridman (01:22:49) Well, then, getting back to the horses, the value they had for the horses and the horse riding skill they developed throughout their life created one of the most unstoppable military forces in history. So, if we just talk about the mounted archery that they’ve employed in war. The Mongols were able to do targeted shooting accurately at 200 meters or more while riding fast, up to speeds of 60 kilometers an hour, I read. So, there’s a lot to say. You have to time, and just watching some of the videos, it’s just incredible how stable you could be on top of a horse and I guess you’re supposed to be shooting at a moment of the gallop when all four of the feet of the horse are off the ground. And so, you have to time all of that, you have to position your body to maintain balance and then there’s the skill of the actual holding and shooting the bow accurately and there’s, obviously, the technology of the bow, the composite bow, the recurve bow.
(01:23:52) They’ve also, I read, used crossbows later, they’ve adapted the technology and there’s a particular kind of a thumb draw that you use for shooting with the composite bow that works for a horse. The thing is bouncing up and down, so you have to not drop the arrow. It’s just incredible to be able to shoot while the horse is going 60 kilometers an hour. Anyway. Can you speak to this exceptional excellence that Genghis Khan and the Mongols had for riding horses and engaging in war off of the horse?
Jack Weatherford (01:24:31) The Mongol, the horse and the bow were a perfect combination and it was the most lethal weapon known to the world before the modern era. It was incredible the synchronization and the timing of the movements and also the years of skill. The fact that, from absolute birth, the Mongols would be on a horse and, by three years old, they would probably be riding alone on the horse. Now, when I first went to Mongolia in the 1990s, at that time, all jockeys on horses for races had to be under six years old. That was the age limit, the cut-off was six years old at that time and so you had some as three years old racing out there. It’s absolutely incredible. And of course, at that age, they can’t even have a saddle because it can’t even be used so all they’re doing is staying on the horse, the horse has been trained to do what it has to do and they just stay on it.
(01:25:29) But by staying on it, they learn the horse, they become one and, not just one horse with one rider, but one rider with several horses. Usually, five is the number that you should have for you when you go off to battle and this ability to shoot. You have to defend your animals, there are wolves around, foxes, other things, in some areas, there were even tigers and other animals that would come in and you had to be able to shoot to defend it against other people who might be raiding you. So, they became excellent archers that had composite bows that were very powerful, much more powerful than those of most sedentary people. Now, I say all that because it’s very important but those are all nomadic traits of the great steppe anyway. In an earlier version, you had the huns who came out of Mongolia and hun is just the Mongolian word for human. Hun, to this day, that’s what they say for a human being. So, they came out of Mongolia and all the early Turkic groups came out of Mongolia and they had similar skills.
(01:26:40) So, you have this perfect weapon but also you have to have perfect strategy and how to coordinate it and organize it and use it and this is where the genius that I cannot explain at all but the genius of Genghis Khan came in. Other people, I think, had been very good in earlier times, a number of Turkic leaders or even Attila the Hun who, of course, was actually born in the West but they were charismatic leaders and very dramatic leaders and it wasn’t that they were so excellent in their strategy, they were very good in warfare and that’s what carried them through.
(01:27:20) Genghis Khan’s army was extremely good in warfare but small. He never got probably above 100,000, at the most 110,000. That is small. When you’re going against China that has millions just in the army, not to count in the country, and you’re going against Russia and you’re going against the Middle East and Persia and Afghanistan and these areas, your whole army has to be as finely tuned as each rider, each bow and each horse. That’s the weapon but the army becomes the super weapon of Genghis Han, how he organized it, on how he used it and the strategies that he put together.
Lex Fridman (01:28:04) Yeah. When you have a small army … Just think about that. A small army that conquered the world.
Jack Weatherford (01:28:13) It would fit in a stadium today in America.
Lex Fridman (01:28:18) So, there’s extreme efficient coordination of units, mostly cavalry, right?
Jack Weatherford (01:28:26) He had no infantry and he had no baggage train, he had no backup commissary, early on, no engineer corps, later one was added, much later. But no, all cavalry.
Lex Fridman (01:28:40) And so, there’s light cavalry and heavy cavalry and breaking down units using the decimal system, 10, 100, 1,000 so there’s a hierarchy where you delegate authority but, to the degree there’s commands, they must be followed strictly.
Lex Fridman (01:29:03) So, for extremely efficient, accurate, precise deployment of these troops in the battlefield and the dynamic movement of the troops, including all the interesting tactics that were utilized, you have to have really good communication and coordination and, for that, orders must be followed.
Lex Fridman (01:29:25) Is there something to speak to that? How do you tune this kind of system to where everybody is working together so well?
Jack Weatherford (01:29:31) I think the first point is the extreme loyalty of the people whom Genghis Khan chose. His kinsmen, as we said, had deserted him, his anda was a questionable relationship but all the others that he found were just common people, herders or hunters, very common, and they were loyal to him and never, ever revolted against him, never betrayed him. So, he had extreme loyalty. And then, as you mentioned, he organized as decimal system so the smallest unit of the army was the [foreign language 01:30:04], the squad of 10 men. They were put together and then, the head of that squad, he had total control over it but the men knew that they were going to protect each other and they had to come back with every member or every body, you don’t leave anybody behind. So, this was extremely important.
(01:30:25) So, if you submit to the orders of the man in charge, you know that he’s risking his own life for you also and you know that your brother on the left and on the right is risking his life for you. The army, they were organized with five horses each man, they had their bow and they had a lot of arrows, as many as they could have, but they also retrieved arrows at the end of their battle and they also would retrieve the enemy arrows. This was a great advantage, by the way, when they hit Russia because the Russians could not use Mongolian arrows, they could knock them in their bow but the Mongols could use Russian arrows.
(01:31:05) So, all these little things but it’s not even just the arrow, also they had to carry needle and thread. Every soldier had to be able to sew and sometimes that could be a torn garment, it could be a piece of skin or a wound that somebody has. It was a very odd thing when you think about the army of Genghis Khan and they’re carrying everything themselves, they don’t have any pack train behind them and that one of the things they have to carry is needle and thread in order to sew up things.
Lex Fridman (01:31:36) So, complete self-reliance in that regard.
Jack Weatherford (01:31:38) Yes. They also carried dried dairy products, aaruul it’s called, dry curd and they can keep it for a couple of years even. But you dry it and then, when you need it, you can put it in a flask of water, you ride all day, it joggles up and down, boom, boom, boom and turns into thick protein. It’s said that the Mongols could easily go three to five days without ever building a fire, they had enough food. They would …
(01:32:04) So, all these little things at the lowest level were important as well at the highest level of his loyalty of his men to him and it went all the way down. Loyalty was extremely important and he organized the army into left wing, right wing or east and west. Mongols, the word for left is east, the word for right is west so those two wings and then in the middle was the [foreign language 01:32:30], the center, this moving center that was his bodyguard and his unit in the middle.
(01:32:39) Then usually they would have a vanguard and a rearguard and sometimes the vanguard would go out as much as two years in advance to clear the land, run the people away, scare them, make them go away so that the grass is left there for the army when it moves through. And they never marched the way other armies do it in a line of one following the other, they would always go in long lines spread out in wings so that each horse is on its own path, you can say, but all parallel together. So, they had very precise ways of doing things and this, I think, was the secret with him and he used the best people but he was willing to train them as much as possible, he never punished them for what happened. So, Shigi Qutuqu, for example, the supreme judge, he was command one time of a group in a battle in Afghanistan and he lost the battle which is very, very unusual for Mongols.
(01:33:43) So, Genghis Khan went out with him, said, “Okay, let’s go to the battlefield together and look it over and you explain to me what you did and then we will talk about it.” So, he was very thoughtful in the way that he was training the people around him and they knew they weren’t going to be punished, it’s not like these countries where the general comes back and gets executed because he lost. No, Genghis Khan knows every general is going to try 100% and, if they retreat fine, they’re saving Mongol lives, they know what to do, he respects that. So, all these things like that fit together but I think a part of it that was important for him … So, he had this base from steppe warfare already, the horse, the archery and how that all fit together but he was very quick to embrace any kind of other technology that he saw.
(01:34:38) I think that sedentary armies, sedentary civilizations, they get stuck in ways, this is how we do it. And we’re going to make it a little faster, we’re going to make it a little bigger, a little stronger but this is how we think. Genghis Khan had no set way to think and, when he encountered the first walled cities around 1209 after founding his nation in 1206, he went out on these raids and I really think there were raids not wars at first. So, he went into Tangut territory of what’s now northwestern China in the upper reaches of the Yellow River. So, he went there and, of course, the cities have walls around him, this is a man who’s never encountered a wall in his life. Well, he did but they were made out of felt, the walls around his tent or felt walls.
Lex Fridman (01:35:23) Yeah. Just imagine what it’s like for the first time in your life seeing a wall.
Lex Fridman (01:35:30) When you come from the Mongolian steppe where there’s very few even natural wall-like things.
Jack Weatherford (01:35:36) Right. Well, they have wall cliffs in some places, they’re familiar with that and they can climb them but they don’t have people at the top shooting down the mountain but on the … So, he looked but he looked at everything around him and he saw, okay, they have this river and they have all these channels and they’re always moving water around and, like we said, for a Mongol, anything that moves is a potential weapon, anything that doesn’t move is a target. You’ve got moving water, you’ve got a standing non-moving wall so he said, okay, the men are going to dig a channel and they’re going to bring down the wall of the Tangut city.
(01:36:16) Well, they did it and they didn’t know exactly what they were doing and the embankments weren’t high enough and too much water came in from the Yellow River and actually flooded out the Mongol camp. But okay, it happened, we learned that lesson so we’re going to improve it and that became a strategy that actually worked for the Mongols for the next 50 years, all the way to Baghdad. They were able to use it when they conquered Baghdad in 1258.
(01:36:45) So, this ability to see things and to try them and, if they fail, to try them in a different way but a better way … We all think we learn from our mistakes. We all, yeah, yeah, I learned from that, I … And what do we do? We repeat the mistake. I think it’s just a part of human nature. Well, it didn’t work the first eight times but I’m going to do it one more time, I think it’s going to work. I know I’m going to win the lottery this time because I got the right … That’s how we think. But he had that real ability to, first of all, to be humble before these other things he didn’t know about, technology, and to understand that he didn’t understand but he could understand it in his own way and he did. Over and over, the Mongols were excellent at putting together new things and new ways and using them against their enemies.
Lex Fridman (01:37:37) So, rapid, extreme, continued innovation. So, you couple that with a, you have to say, a revolutionary idea that promotion should be based on merit. That idea combined with the innovative approach to military it just feeds on itself because the people who are learning from their mistakes and constantly improving are the ones that get promoted in the positions of power and then they inspire everybody else to do the same. And so, if every action is judged based on the excellence of that action, then over time, repeated iteration in war creates a more and more powerful army.
Jack Weatherford (01:38:25) Yes, yes. And they were able to do that for three generations to create an army that was ever expanding, ever changing its tactics and its technology and they got worse at it over time but Genghis Khan was the one who innovated it. He was the best with it and he used to throughout his lifetime and he was getting better over his lifetime with using foreign information, foreign technology, foreign ideas. He just had a genius for that.
Military tactics and strategy
Lex Fridman (01:39:01) If we can go back to the horses, you mentioned every soldier had five horses. The reason for that is the horses get tired.
Lex Fridman (01:39:08) And so, you can cover a lot of ground in a single day.
Jack Weatherford (01:39:11) Yes. Usually, the way the rotation of the horses were, the horse would usually ride for one day and then rest for the next four to five days and then another horse would be riding the next day. One way to measure it is that, later, at the time of the death of Ogedei Khan, the word went from Mongolia to Hungary in six weeks.
Lex Fridman (01:39:33) Mongolia to Hungary in six weeks.
Lex Fridman (01:39:35) So, let’s just imagine this army that’s able to move at such high speeds, does not need to follow roads because it’s used to riding in the open steppe.
Lex Fridman (01:39:52) And then, also, one of the other famous things is the feigned retreat that was used continuously. Can you explain how that worked?
Jack Weatherford (01:40:00) The Mongols did not fight for honor the way we often think of brave soldiers, Achilles and the Iliad and things like that, they fought for victory. That was the one thing. So, to retreat, to save lives and all, there’s no shame in that. So, the Mongols would often retreat and Genghis Khan, basically, he himself never fought a battle that he thought he could lose and he won every battle he fought. That wasn’t true for every general under him, as we said for Shigi Qutuqu for example, but he won every battle because there was no shame in retreating and in not fighting, not engaging the enemy.
(01:40:42) However, that also becomes a tactic and that they would send in a small group of soldiers to attack and the Mongols were able to fire, of course, going forward on the horse, they were able to then act like they were defeated and turn but they could still fire backwards which is the Parthian shot which is unusual in the world. Not totally unique but unusual to fire backwards. But the Mongols also could lean down and fire under the neck of the horse so they’re protected, they had many different ways.
(01:41:15) So, they’re firing coming, they’re firing going but, usually, the soldiers who are against them would break ranks to chase them. They want to go, they want to get the weapons, they want to kill the Mongols and, if they didn’t immediately break ranks, the Mongols would often start throwing things out like loot from someplace and valuables around and soldiers usually couldn’t resist it.
(01:41:38) So, they’d come chasing out after the Mongols, pale male going in every different direction and then they would get to a certain point and, from behind the two hills, the Mongol army would come and slaughter them. Over and over, this tactic worked, it’s like the one with the water. I’m thinking, the people, how can they not know this is what the Mongols are doing, how can they not know that.
Jack Weatherford (01:42:00) How can they not know this is what the Mongols are doing? How can they not know that?
Lex Fridman (01:42:04) Human nature. There is something that when the forces are retreating-
Jack Weatherford (01:42:04) You want to follow them. You want to run after them.
Lex Fridman (01:42:08) You want to follow them. You can’t help it. I don’t know what that is. That’s maybe the animalistic, but take that with the ability at high speeds for the Mongols to encircle and attack the flanks. Which there has been many great military historians who have written about the great military forces throughout history, and one of the things you write about and in general is the Mongols don’t get written about almost at all, and don’t get credit for the military tactics and the military genius exhibited through the different strategies. This kind of idea of the feigned retreat and then attacking the flanks that’s been, if not invented and perfected by Genghis.
Jack Weatherford (01:43:04) He really was a military genius. But there were other things too. They didn’t like roads. They just didn’t like roads. So they would often be coming from some direction that nobody ever came from, and the people would be unprepared for that.
(01:43:18) The most famous example is probably in Bukhara. This is a beautiful, wonderful old city, a great place in the world to this day. And they came across the desert. Well, nobody had ever attacked across the desert, so people see dust coming. They think, well, caravan. They don’t even know what’s going on. But it was the direction that was a surprise element in that particular case. So he was able to think in ways that the other people were not thinking yet, and to be able to surprise them.
Lex Fridman (01:43:48) What do you think it again, felt like to have this Mongol armada, the horses? The ground must shake when you have that many horses. What do you think it feels like to be in a town when Genghis Khan’s approaching?
Jack Weatherford (01:44:05) I think the terror was one of the greatest weapons that he had. He cultivated this reputation of ferocity. Not only did he win battles, but he… he didn’t allow people to write about him, as we said, but he encouraged refugees. And when he conquered a city, he always made sure there are plenty of refugees to go to the next city because it’s going to weaken them. It’s going to weaken their food supply, and they’re going to terrorize the people with tales of the millions of people that the Mongols killed with their steel chisel teeth and eating children and all kinds of horrible tales. Genghis Khan encouraged it.
(01:44:44) This is propaganda. It’s terrorism of a mental sort to weaken the enemy. And so when you hear, or even if you know they’re coming, you see the dust, you hear the roar that comes with all those horses and the trembling of the earth, it must’ve been truly terrifying.
Lex Fridman (01:45:03) So psychological warfare was a part of the whole process, but as I understand, there was always an offer for the towns and the territories being attacked for them to surrender peacefully without the loss of life.
Lex Fridman (01:45:19) And the alternative would be the near complete loss of life. Can you speak to that?
Jack Weatherford (01:45:26) Genghis Khan had a precise system. Exactly. He sent in envoys first to explain to the people a little bit about the Mongols. Already much was known, but to explain to them that if they surrendered, all the lives would be spared and they could continue in their professions. It’s just that now the rulers would be the Mongols. They would have to pay the taxes, and usually it would be the same taxes they’d paid before, but now they would go to the Mongols. That was the general system. And because you only have 100,000 soldiers, you can’t leave a detachment there. So you’re going to leave the local people in charge to run their country or their city and their area, the way they have done in the past. He was absolutely faithful to that.
(01:46:10) And one episode in the north of Persia, modern Iran, his son-in-law, Toquchar, he violated that and was stealing and looting from the people who had surrendered. Genghis Khan called him in and he stripped him of his rank, and he said, “The next city, you go first as a common soldier.” And of course, he was killed in the next battle. I don’t know the name of the daughter, unfortunately. I’ve tried to figure that out. But anyway, it was a close relative to him, and he was killed in the next by violating this law. So that was the law.
(01:46:46) If the city fought and the Mongols won, they did not kill everyone. What they did was they killed all the leaders. They felt like the elite had not served them well. And they usually kill the army, because they couldn’t incorporate the army into their own, the army had failed. But the one thing that they valued were all the artisans, everybody who had a skill. And that skill could be making a pot. It could be hammering out a metal plate. It can be weaving carpets, it can be translating or just reading and writing. Every person with a skill was spared.
(01:47:23) So the killing of the people who were defeated wasn’t so severe. What was truly severe was if you surrendered, and many of them did, and then they knew they would not be harmed. So they’re not harmed. The Mongols go on. The Mongols are hundreds of miles away and all of a sudden, forget about the Mongols. Chinggis Khan sent word they were supposed to send so many cows or sheep to help. Forget about the Mongols. They’re far away. It’s a… No. He stopped, he returned, he conquered the city, and he killed everyone. That’s the way it worked.
Lex Fridman (01:47:57) So the most drastic slaughter happens when there’s an agreement and then betrayal.
Jack Weatherford (01:48:04) Yes. And as it turned out, I would say it was more the Middle East of what we call around Iran and Afghanistan, where these were the worst cases. I would say only in Afghanistan did sometimes the emotion of the slaughter take over in an unfortunate way. He had a grandson whom he loved very much, and that grandson traveled with him, and he had the happy childhood that had not had. And I think Chinggis Khan just loved that about him.
(01:48:39) But in Afghanistan, he was sent off to conquer the valley of Bamiyan where the great Buddhas are actually. He was sent to Bamiyan, and as it says in the Persian history, the thumb of fate fired the arrow that shot him down. He was killed. And for Chinggis Khan, he had never lost a family member. Not one. None of his sons, none of his grandsons in battle, he had not lost them, and now to lose the most valuable grandson you have, the one that’s your pride and joy in so many ways.
(01:49:20) So he called the father, his own son, to him and did not tell him, did not announce it to the public. And the son came and the son didn’t know why he was being summoned. And Chinggis Khan said, “You have to tell me that you will not cry or moan when I tell you this, but your son is no more.” And the father was… No one was allowed to moan. No one was allowed to cry, no one was allowed to do anything. You just, he said, “Make them cry.” He came down on the people of Afghanistan so harshly. And it went on for weeks and weeks, the killing in Afghanistan. And then it just wore itself out. He recognized that he had allowed his emotions to overcome practicality and the slaughtering of these people should stop. And so he did.
(01:50:29) But that’s the only time I know of that he really kind of lost control of his own emotions. It’s something we can all understand, but his response was truly extreme of we will not cry, we will not mourn. They will cry. They will mourn.
Lex Fridman (01:50:47) So that goes against the cold, rational way he approached war, which is peace is offered, and then betrayal is punished.
Jack Weatherford (01:51:01) I should add, he did not slaughter the people in the peaceful towns. What happened was the killing of what people thought was the heir, and he well may have been, of Chinggis Khan, the killing of him revitalized a lot of people’s hopes and a lot of cities revolted. The ones who did not revolt were not killed. But the cities who revolted, he killed them all. There was a mass slaughter.
Wars of conquest
Lex Fridman (01:51:24) There are estimates that Ghengis Khan and his Mongol Empire were responsible for an estimated 40 million deaths, approximately 10% of the world’s population. To put this number in the perspective of the modern day, that would be equivalent to killing about 800 million people in today’s population. How should we think about the brutality of numbers like these?
Jack Weatherford (01:51:51) The number itself is difficult to deal with. Millions of people were killed. For every family that lost someone, it’s a total loss. It doesn’t matter what the number is, it’s a tremendous loss. And there was tremendous loss of life, as in every war.
(01:52:09) I don’t think we should judge him any differently than other conquerors in history and other countries today that fight wars, including our own country. Whatever we are willing to permit our country to do, we should be able to understand why Chinggis Khan or the Mongols did it. You look today in the world, people are killing children, women, civilians, every day. Every day. And it’s always in the name of something, in the name of peace or in the name of God or in the name of our nation. There are always reasons for the killing. And the United States has certainly involved with that. Supplying the weapons for bombing people, invading Afghanistan, invading, fighting in Iraq, fighting in Syria. The United States is very involved in that. And it’s always, oh, but we’re defending democracy. Yeah, we brought a hell of a lot of democracy to Afghanistan. We killed a lot of people.
(01:53:18) You can even look back to World War II, our great moment of democracy and bringing freedom and democracy to Germany. We dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Those were not military targets. We were not doing anything strategic against the country other than terrorizing the country by killing women and children. That’s America. That’s us. My father fought in that war. In fact, he fought in all. He fought in Vietnam. He fought in that war, and he fought in Korea. And he was a good American. I mean, there was nothing wrong with it.
(01:53:52) And I don’t even condemn America, but I’m saying, how can we condemn one set of people for doing it and then excuse it in ourselves? But we tend to do that. We, especially barbarian people, people from steppe for example, we tend to demonize them. Or any enemy we have, we tend to demonize them.
Lex Fridman (01:54:14) You said a lot of interesting things there. One is just the very nature of war. That war is hell. That sometimes things like dropping the atomic bomb, which is an act of essentially terror, in the same style as Genghis Khan, in an attempt to prevent further war.
Jack Weatherford (01:54:40) It’s a justification. People are always fighting for peace, always fighting for peace. World war I was to make the world safe for democracy and peace. And then World War II. But what happened? We went to war in Korea, we went to war in Vietnam. We bombed Cambodia, we bombed Laos, we bombed Afghanistan, we bombed Syria, we bombed Iraq. We’re always fighting for… And I’m not a pacifist. I am not, I grew up surrounded with soldiers and I’m not a pacifist, but I try to be a realist that all nations kill, it happens everywhere.
Lex Fridman (01:55:16) So can we universally also then, in the way you’re passionately criticizing wars of the 20th century, can we also criticize Genghis Khan and Alexander the Great and the wars fought by Caesar and others in the Roman Empire? That they’re essentially wars of conquest and in some human way were not necessary or were not defensive. They’re just part of this human drive to expand, to explore, and to accumulate power.
Dan Carlin
(01:55:49) Maybe this is a good place to also talk about somebody I respect a lot, Dan Carlin of a Hardcore History podcast. He did an amazing series on Genghis Khan and the Mongols called Wrath of the Khans. I recommend people go listen to it. He had a lot of interesting ideas there. One of them, he presented the idea of historical arsonists. So referring to figures who cause immense destruction, but also paved the way for new developments and progress, basically making this complicated case that destruction often in history paves the way for progress. What do you think about this idea?
Jack Weatherford (01:56:26) Creative destruction, it certainly works in some aspects of life, even with ourselves. For example, if we can creatively destroy some of our habits and build new ones, it sometimes works or we can destroy relationships that we’re in order to create new ones, it can work. When you start applying it to world history, it does become a little bit more difficult.
(01:56:49) I certainly think that these episodes create great changes. You can see great changes that happened because of the Mongol Empire. Now, whether or not that’s a good reason for the Mongol Empire having happened, it seems like a bit of a stretch for me. The Mongols helped to unify many countries. You can think Korea had been three, basically kingdoms, push them together. Everything that you see in China today was a part of the Mongol Empire. They put together North China, South China, Tibet, Manchuria. It was a little bit larger under the Mongols. Even Russia with so many little kingdoms and Duchies and Dukedoms, and the center had been in the Ukraine and Kiev, and they shifted the focus out of Ukraine and more towards into what we call Russia now. And they began the process of the unification and had a great impact on the country.
(01:57:47) So in a way, it’s a new creation. Yes, it does arrive out of the destruction, but also I think we need to look where does the destruction come from? And it often comes because the powers around them have been so debilitated and so corrupted, and so decayed of their own lack of moral fiber, that it was easy to conquer them.
(01:58:12) Kublai Khan finally conquered all of China. He was conquering a decayed dynasty. When the Mongols conquered Baghdad and overthrew the Caliph, they were conquering a very decayed institution. No one likes war, and I certainly don’t like war, but I’m not 100% against it. I think that there are times that people are going to do it for their own protection, if nothing else, or of their family, and it’s justified in that sense to themselves. It may not be justified in a world sense. I just make the case for being tolerant of what the Mongols did if we can tolerate what the Americans did. And I am American through and through, there’s no question about that, but we overlook all of our things that we did.
(01:59:01) That’s interesting, for example, in Afghanistan. We were there for some 20 years. We had made the Taliban stronger before when they were fighting against the Russians, and then we kicked them out, and then they kicked us out. But some of the Taliban leaders are from the Jadran clan, the descended from Jamukha family, from his clan. This is what I mean when I say that The ramifications from that time are still with us, and we don’t even see it.
(01:59:33) And when Saddam Hussein went on television for the last time in Iraq to plead with his people, he said, “The Mongols,” meaning America, “The Mongols have returned. The Mongols have returned.” And he said, “The Americans are just the new…” I can see it. I don’t accept it, but I can see how people think. If we can be honest with ourselves and strip away our own lies about ourselves, then perhaps we will be more ethical in our dealings with other people.
Lex Fridman (02:00:07) And there’s effects that you could talk about. I mean, the unification of China, Mongols or otherwise, is a very important step in the history of China that permeates to today. And then there’s a lot of stuff that we’ll talk about, the ideas of religious freedom, the postal network, the trade routes, all of this. There’s a lot of progressive consequences of the Mongol conquest and the Mongol Empire. We’ll talk about that. But let’s linger on the heavier topic for a little bit longer.
(02:00:39) We were talking about Dan Carlin, he was critical of your work a little bit, showing it respect, but also a little bit critical, as being a bit too… Emphasizing and focusing a lot on the positive impacts correctly and accurately, but not giving enough air time or describing the brutality of the killing, the hell that is war. Can you understand his criticism?
Jack Weatherford (02:01:17) Carlin’s a very smart man. I respect him very much. I like him tremendously. And he’s right. But that is not what I want to stress. It’s not that I want to deny the killing. It’s not that I want to deny the warfare, but that’s pretty much the same everywhere in the world, and how much do we need to say about how the wall was broken down, how this unit was defeated, and all. No, it’s what comes afterwards. Just as the story of our life begins far earlier than we are born, the story of our life goes on for a long time afterwards.
(02:01:54) If you have a nation of 1 million people and you are ruling over hundreds of millions of people, hundreds of millions of people, China, Russia, the Middle East, you do not do that through warfare. You conquer them initially through warfare, but you do not rule them through warfare. You’ve got to be offering something that they want, something that they like. And all the things you’ve mentioned from the trading system, the postal system, the religious freedom, the rights of women, the rights of minorities, these were things that people responded to. So the world benefited tremendously from the life of Chinggis Khan. But all we want to talk about, and I don’t deny it, is the conquest part. Okay, that’s 20 years. It went on for another 150 years. There’s more to the story than just conquest.
Lex Fridman (02:02:51) There is a point that you correctly identify, and you’ve also written about Native Americans and so on, that history does seem to be written by the non-barbarians. But in reality, history is not divided in this way. And the barbarians are not these crude, brutal, plain, simple people. That there is a sophisticated, deep culture within them as well. All the different kinds of peoples that came from the steppe.
Jack Weatherford (02:03:20) Yes. I guess if there’s one thing that I try to do in my career of writing, it is to get us to recognize the importance of tribal people in the history of the world. We tend to have two categories for them. They’re barbarians who kill people and eat one another, or they’re victims and we should feel sorry from them and nostalgic about everything about them, and maybe wear some of their beads or some of their clothing to show how much we sympathize with their suffering. That’s the two roles for tribal people.
(02:03:50) But I’m trying to show them in a different light. That they conquered. Yes, they were conquerors, but they also created great things in the history of the world. And that the Mongol Empire was really the first modern empire in the way that I’m putting together that story. And Chinggis Khan was the genius behind that, who created this idea that there could be one world in which there would be one set of supreme law, but all people could follow their own law.
(02:04:20) You could have any religion you wanted, but ultimately you had to obey the great ethics of the sky. And there were things like that about his vision that I think very few people in history had, a vision. And I look around the world today, and in my lifetime, since the time of Roosevelt’s death, I look around, I don’t see much vision. I see lots of slogans, lots of talk, policy papers. Oh my God, we can produce it. Where’s the vision? It’s always, we’re going to have peace and we’re going to have a better life and vote for me or vote for my party and we’re really for the people. What the heck are they talking about? There is no vision there. So what is this country? What should this country be? What is this world? How should we… No. No vision.
Lex Fridman (02:05:16) Well, those figures, I mean, they’re rare through history. The legendary figures that come along that have vision, but are able to capture the public imagination and heart and mind with the vision, but also have the skill to execute and implement it, and all of those things combined, and have the mental fortitude not to be corrupted by success along the way. All of those things.
Jack Weatherford (02:05:44) That’s very rare in history. Very rare.
Religious freedom
Lex Fridman (02:05:46) And when they come along, they change the direction of history. If we could linger on some of these world-defining ideas. Religious freedom. It’s just surprising and incredible that Genghis Khan was able to enforce, inspire the value of religious freedom throughout all of these disparate lands for whom religion was a very powerful force. So can you speak to that?
Jack Weatherford (02:06:16) Some empires in history, and some rulers have been tolerant of various groups. I mean, Rome to some extent was reasonably tolerant of different sects and religions, not of the Christians, but reasonably. But what happened with Genghis Khan, the first campaign he had outside of Mongolia was for the Uyghur people who lived in Western China. They at that time were being ruled by, actually we had mentioned before, the Naiman king, Tayang Khan. His son Kuchlug had fled. No good, worthless, well son. Kuchlug had fled into what is today the area around Kyrgyzstan. They ruled over the Uyghur people. He had been a Christian. The Naiman had been a Christian tribe, but he converted to Buddhism.
(02:07:07) Well, his subjects were Muslim, and he outlawed the Muslim religion, and he made all kinds of things happen. So the Uyghurs sent a delegation to Genghis Khan. At this time they knew that the emperors of China were too weak to protect them, so they sent delegation to Genghis Khan and asked him to come and save them from him. And he did. He sent down a detachment. He didn’t actually go himself. He said a detachment down there, they drove Kuchlug from power. Kuchlug fled down towards Pakistan, in that direction, they caught up with him. They killed him. That’s what the Mongols did.
(02:07:42) And then Genghis Khan made the first law that he ever made for people outside of Mongolia. Up to this point, it’s been tribal law. And he saw, as we had mentioned before, the tribes were mostly fighting over women. So you outlaw the kidnapping of women, you outlaw the sale of women, and you cut down on a lot of the feuding. But he saw that “civilized” people fought a lot over religion. They weren’t fighting over women, they were fighting over religion. And so he made the law.
(02:08:13) Now, this was very interesting, we talk about religious freedom. Religious freedom comes in many forms. One form is to allow institutions to do what they want. So we’re going to allow the Mormons and the Catholics and the Jews and the Muslims each to do what they want in the organized churches that they have. His law was not that. It presumed that. It allowed that, but he said, every person has the right to choose their religion. No one can stop them. No one can force them. The idea that it was individual choice, no one in history had ever thought of that, that it belonged to the person.
Lex Fridman (02:08:53) I mean, that’s a really, really powerful statement.
Lex Fridman (02:08:56) That alone, I mean, that’s why you talk about Thomas Jefferson being deeply inspired by Genghis Khan. That religious freedom, yes, of the individual, but it’s such a powerful illustration, manifestation of just individual freedom period. If you in the world, in history, are allowed to practice any religion you want, I mean, that is one of the biggest way to say that the individual is fundamentally free in a society.
Jack Weatherford (02:09:33) Yes. It was a great source of power for him also. I don’t say that he did this because of some ideological reason. Just like he didn’t outlaw the kidnapping of women for ideological reasons. He didn’t come to it through studying ideas of moral right. He came to it through practical experience of life. His mother was kidnapped, his wife was kidnapped. He knew that that was a crime against every ethics that you can think of and every form of morality. That’s why he did it, not for ideological reasons, but practical reasons. It hurt people. It hurt people.
(02:10:06) It was the same with religion. He gave this right to everybody because it was going to be their own personal right to keep them from being hurt. And then that gave him tremendous support from minorities of many types. And so they flocked to him. Minorities after that, this was a minority effort of the Muslim Uyghurs to come to him, many people flocked to him for the same reason. For that kind of religious freedom.
Lex Fridman (02:10:32) So that religious freedom and also the other things you mentioned, they create a stable society and that allows him with a small army to administer a large empire.
Jack Weatherford (02:10:45) And also, I will say on a more practical political way of thinking, he recognized the power of having a balance of power of Shiite and Sunni. That both are going to be allowed, equal rights. One is not dominant over the other. And Christians and Jews. Well, that keeps the society from fragmenting against him or uniting against him, and it’s a kind of fragmentation that he’s taken advantage of. I don’t think that was his main reason, but I do think he was quite aware of that. That you give every religion the right, and unfortunately, the only religion he didn’t recognize as a religion was Confucianism. He said, “What do they do?” The Taoists can do magic on the earth and they can give people magic formulas and to cure, or they have all this kind of stuff going on. Well, what did the Confucianist do? So still the people could be Confucianist. That was okay, but he didn’t expend all the tax-free rights.
(02:11:51) See, that was another thing. He dropped all taxes on religious institutions, all types. But since the Confucianists were not necessarily classified. But then of course eventually that was abused so much because the religions were then getting everybody did not own a property. You can still use it. You can still farm your land, but it’s ours. And now you don’t have to pay taxes on it. You just give us some money. Got abused. But it started off as a good idea.
Lex Fridman (02:12:19) And genuinely, as I understand, maybe you can correct me, of course, there’s the practical aspect of those policies, but he himself was just curious about the different religions as well, as I understand. So he never chose any religion except the one from which he came. I guess, can you describe what he believed spiritually himself?
Jack Weatherford (02:12:45) It’s interesting, we said after the death of [inaudible 02:12:49], his grandson in Bamiyan and the slaughter that followed that, he went through a new phase in which he summoned religious scholars of all sorts of famous Chung Chang from China, who I despise. But anyway, he came with all of his magic formulas for things, and then a bunch of various Muslim leaders came. So Chinggis Khan was exploring all these different religions, and not just in a simple way. He had organized public lectures from these people and public debates, not antagonistic debates, but discussions among groups of people who hated each other and would never discuss anything. And suddenly this powerful man summons them and he has to say, “Okay, well explain your religion and explain yours.” And even sometimes you can’t just explain it in terms of your own scripture. What do you say to the people who believe a different?
(02:13:44) So he was exploring, but no, he never changed at all. He was an animist, we would say. That’s about the only term we know to use. Early in life he worshiped that mountain where he took refuge several times. Burkhan Khaldun, Burkhan Khaldun was the great refuge of his life. He would go to the top, he would pray. He would take off his hat. He would take off his belt. He would stand there before the sky and pray. Also later on, actually, this became rather dramatic. He would sometimes go away to pray, should we invade these people? So all of the subjects are waiting to hear what’s God going to tell Chinggis Khan when he goes up the mountain? There are episodes like that, but he was very sincere.
(02:14:28) But I think what happened, the Mongols have so many spirits in the water, the mountains, everything around them and you have to know them personally and pray to them and know what they like and don’t like. And should you sing to them or should you offer some milk products or what do you do? You have to know them. Well, you get away from Mongolia, and this was a problem in China, they didn’t know the spirits. This caused great consternation for the Mongols. You’ve got a land here and the spirits don’t like us. They’re hostile lands. We don’t even know who they are. We don’t know these spirits in China. It took a long time. And so gradually, Chinggis Khan, he moved from just the spirit of the mountain that he worshiped, which remained his main focus of worship his whole life, he removed that to the sky. That was the one universal spirit. It was everywhere in the world. The sky was the same for every people.
(02:15:25) And so for the Mongolians in their language, the word for sky and the word for heaven and the word for God and the word for weather are all the same, Tenger. Or Mönkh Khökh Tenger in the case of the eternal sky when they’re talking about it in a religious terms, the eternal blue sky. So he became more universalistic in this animist vision of the world. So then the sky could embrace all religions, all religions, and all people were trying to attain the same form of enlightenment. Well…
Jack Weatherford (02:16:00) … to attain the same form of enlightenment. Well, enlightenment is too specific a word, but the same form of moral life and guidance from the sky. He felt that each person knew morality, each person could communicate it, know morality within themselves. They didn’t have to just be taught it by somebody from a book. And in fact, as one of his grandson, Mongke Khan said, “You people,” talking to all the others, to the Christians, the Jews, the Muslims, the Daoists, said, “You people have your scriptures and you don’t live by them. We have our spirits and our shamans and our drums, and we live by them” and I think it’s true.
Lex Fridman (02:16:43) Throughout this conversation, it’s just blowing my mind that the kid from the Mongols that lost everything, just had the hardest of lives is now, yes, a military genius, but also this kind of sage-type character, to understand the value of religious freedom. I mean, there is a cynical way to see all these things, because he did awfully a lot of things that look like he’s a feminist. And you’re saying, “Well, the cynical way to see that is what he saw the value of promoting women in positions of power because they create a more stable society, and there’s less power, struggles,” all that. But the reality is, there’s a lot of things that look awfully progressive about the things he’s implemented, and they stayed.
Jack Weatherford (02:17:36) I’m not trying to say it in modern terms. When you have one million people, you’ve got to use every one. And the men are fighting. And so he left women to administer a lot of things inside the country, the economy in particular, and some of the ancillary Turkic kingdoms around the Mongols, such as the Ongud, the Qarluq, and the Uyghur, even, were administered by his daughters, primarily. And then his wives were in charge of administering the land of Mongolia itself, and handling the economy.
(02:18:09) So he was using the women, but in a very practical way, but it wasn’t necessarily in our ideological way. I think it’s the same with the environment. I’m not trying to say he was environmentalist in our modern way, but he passed very strict laws about the use of water, and also about not using water, that you couldn’t move water into an area to irrigate it. That was violating the earth and violating the water.
(02:18:37) So they think, a lot of the historians, they think the Mongols are so stupid, they let the irrigation system be destroyed. No, it takes more work to destroy an irrigation system than it does to create it. They destroyed those systems out of a policy, and that was, “This is going to return to pasture land.”
(02:18:54) This lasted, Kublai Khan was the one who changed that, actually, and then started allowing for more irrigation and the movement of water and things. But Chinggis Khan, we can’t use these modern terms of a human rights crusader, or that I’m trying to say he’s a Democrat, the modern sense, or environmentalist, or a feminist. But all of this was a part of it. Another part was the protection of envoys. He said, “Every envoy, every ambassador, every messenger is protected from arrest, from torture, and from killing. And if you kill one of ours, we will wipe you out.”
(02:19:35) And in 1240, that was the destruction of Kiev. This is after Chinggis Khan already know there’s Ogedei Khan, his son, the happy, happy drunk. Ogedei Khan’s army had come there under Subutai, the greatest general of the history of the world, I would say, Subutai, person who’s not … It wasn’t Chinggis Khan for the military part. He was the greatest strategist for organizing everything together. But the military part was Subutai. So Subutai had been there, and they sent in an ambassador who happened to be a woman. Now, some of the western sources say a daughter of Chinggis Khan. I have no evidence of that, and I don’t quite believe it, but maybe she was kin to him or something. Some say she was a daughter of Chinggis Khan. Others say she was a witch. The people of Kiev decided she was a witch and killed her. Okay. That’s it. That’s it. Kiev was destroyed for killing a Mongol envoy.
Lex Fridman (02:20:32) The envoy is a method of communication.
Lex Fridman (02:20:43) … and that sends a signal to everybody else. We send an envoy, you respect it.
Jack Weatherford (02:20:48) That’s why these plans, I say that the making of the modern world, most of the ideas have, we accept the idea. We don’t do the practice. All of us accept, today, diplomatic freedom. Diplomats are killed around the world yearly. We accept the idea of female equality and emancipation of every way, but in fact, they’re enslaved in many parts of the world today. We accept the idea of religious freedom, oh, but not those people. Theirs isn’t good. Their religion isn’t right. But our religion, we will tolerate them, but they got to be more like … No. We only say these things, but the world still hasn’t achieved some. And he did achieve these within his empire in his time, he achieved those.
Trade and the Silk Road
Lex Fridman (02:21:34) So one of the things we’ve mentioned, but I think is really, really fascinating and maybe in a measurable impact that Chinggis Khan had is on trade, and you could say a lot of stuff, but basically establishing a unified trade network that spanned, I don’t know how many thousands of kilometers, and there’s a lot of interesting things that were done to enable that trade. One is providing safety and security of not just the envoys, like we mentioned, for communication in the military context, but for the merchants. Can you speak to the what Chinggis Khan did for the trade network? Connected to the Silk Road, as an example?
Jack Weatherford (02:22:20) Nomads in general are interested in trade, and throughout most of history, they have been the traders who carried the goods from one city to another or one oasis to another. And so the Mongols were also extremely interested and extremely dependent. They could create very little in their home country. They couldn’t grow hardly anything, and they didn’t have the technological skills for most of the crafts. So they’re very dependent on trade.
(02:22:46) Well, they raised the status of merchants very high. This was particularly a problem in the Chinese world. It wasn’t so much in the Christian or the Muslim world, but certainly in the Chinese world, where merchants were considered extremely low. And all of a sudden he raises them up above scholars. They’re going to have certain rights. For example, they get to be taxed one time. Whatever the national tax is, that’s it. They’re not taxed every time they stop in some new town.
(02:23:15) And he created a set of what we would call rest houses, or recuperation centers, where they could get fresh horses, they could get food, they could deposit their money and get paper receipts that could be used anywhere in the empire. They were guaranteed protection. If they had to pass to an area where it might be dangerous, then a small group, a squad of men and horses would go with them. So trade was extremely important. And then the Mongols also, they supported trade in a very odd way, and that is the merchants would come in, and they would ask for an outrageous price for some goods, much more than they should get, waiting for the Mongols to bargain them down. The Mongols would say, “I’ll give you much more than that.”
(02:24:10) And his son, Ogedei Khan, was the one to ask, “Why do you do that? You’ve got to stop doing that.” This was a Muslim financial advisor. He’d called in. He told him, “Well, you’ve got to stop paying more than people ask.” And Ogedei said, “Where’s the money going to go? It’s still in my empire. It’s going to come back eventually.” And so they had a much different attitude, with great respect. And I think a symbol of that is in the time of Kublai Khan, when we see that his uncle and father went to China and came back from China, and then on the second trip, Marco Polo went with him to China and back. They were safe the whole way. Their goods were safe. They came back with tremendous amount of wealth. They were never harassed. And the mere fact that they could cross, it took two years, but the mere fact that they could cross the whole continent safely and come back, it was unprecedented. We really don’t have any well-documented case of anybody, say, from China visiting Europe or Europe visiting China before the Mongols. But since Chinggis Khan, there’s never been a year without contact between east and west. It was permanent. Once he created it, it was permanent.
Lex Fridman (02:25:19) I don’t think it’s possible to measure the positive impact of that, because it wasn’t just trade of goods. It was also exchange, explicit or implicit, along the way, exchange of ideas. Whether that’s exchange of technologies, exchange of philosophical ideas, scientific ideas, technical, mathematical ideas, all of this spread throughout and constantly circulating. Can you speak to that aspect of it?
Jack Weatherford (02:25:51) Yes. It was an exchange of ideas on every level. Ideas, technology, ideologies, beliefs, scientific information, everything was being exchanged, and even agricultural goods, of new crops for new areas. But Chinggis Khan, he had, a part of his genius of organization, was knowing what skill people had that would contribute towards his empire. For example, the Muslims were very good with arithmetic. In fact, he conquered the little empire of Khorezm, from which we get the word algorithm, because it was a mathematician there who invented algorithms. And so Khorezm, he conquered it very quickly, very easily, no problem, but it belonged to him. But the Muslims were using the zero. The Mongols were absolutely impressed with that. The Chinese less so. They were very suspicious about the zero. But the Mongols were very impressed. Because herders, numbers are important to them for keeping up with their animals.
(02:26:54) In fact, the Mongols have a simple system. They reduce all animals to the number of horses. You can ask somebody how many animals you can have, and they can say, “Well, 100 horses.” And it doesn’t mean they have 100 horses. It’s going to be like five cows count as four horses, five sheep or five goats count as one horse, four camels count as five horses. So they reduce it all down like that. The Mongols take a census of everything.
(02:27:25) And that’s one of the first things Chinggis Khan did. And that was one of the demands he made of every place he went, is a complete census of your people. And every house had to post outside, how many people, how many animals, what did they do, the occupations, all this information.
(02:27:41) So they needed good mathematics for this. The Muslims provided it. So they took the Muslims to China, these Middle Eastern scholars and all. Unfortunately, they were rather ruthless sometimes when it came to implementing the tax policies, but they became the financial advisors to him. Other groups of people had other roles like that, and he was moving them around constantly. And so you had a combination. As I said, he himself had that genius for combining new bits of technology, but it created a new kind of cultural spirit, in which other people were also combining technology at other levels, and being encouraged. It was no longer heresy or the devil’s work to bring in this thing.
(02:28:29) So we had the spread of printing, for example. We had the partial spread of something such as print money, for example. But we had almanacs being created now through printing, that combined different calendars and different information that was coming along. But one simple but lethal form of technology was that, for example, Chinese had gunpowder. Mostly it was used for fireworks, religious things, and then sometimes in warfare was used for kind of primitive hand grenade, or primitive bomb that could be thrown with a trebuchet.
(02:29:04) This was in the time of Kublai Khan more, the grandson. So they had that. The Middle Eastern, the Muslims, and the Byzantines, especially, they had naphtha, what we call Greek fire, flamethrowers that could set things on fire. The Europeans did not excel very much in technology. They were behind in almost everything, but they could cast bells for churches.
(02:29:31) Okay, let’s take that bell and we’re going to turn it on its side, and we’re going to use the principles of the flamethrower, and we’re going to use the gunpowder from China, and you’ve got a cannon. So the Mongols, even early on, by the time they got to the siege of Baghdad, but not, I think, in the lifetime of Chinggis Khan, but soon thereafter, in his sons and grandsons, they were using some very primitive forms of cannon. And even something like firing rods. We can’t even call it anything like a rifle, but it could fire a very small ballistic device and all. So this combination of metallurgy, gunpowder, flamethrowers, you put it all together and you come up with something incredibly different.
Weapons innovation
Lex Fridman (02:30:21) So if we jump around a little bit on the topic of a cannon, what are some technological developments that Chinggis Khan, and his son, and Kublai Khan were using? So how much gunpowder were they using? In general, what was their approach to siege warfare, for example? What are some different ideas there?
Jack Weatherford (02:30:44) If we switch to the grandson, Kublai Khan, first of all, he changed a lot of the strategies that were no longer working. The Mongol system worked perfectly on the grassland, but by the time you get to Hungary, the grassland starts to give out. By the time you get to Poland, it’s so many farms. It’s hard for horses to get through to farms, and they don’t want to go on the roads. By the time you get to the Indus River, it’s too hot, too humid. The bows are beginning to wilt. The horses are exhausted. It’s not working.
(02:31:15) So to conquer South China, Kublai Khan had to come up with new things. One thing, the South Chinese had built a great wall. It was called the Great Wall of the Sea. This is before the wall that we know as the Great Wall, which is really the Ming Wall, of the Ming Dynasty, was built, but the Great Wall of the Sea. And they used it as a defensive navy. They had the largest navy in the world. It was defensive, and it was both literally defensive, and it came time for warfare, they would chain the ships together across the mouth of a harbor to protect the city. And so it became a wall.
Kublai Khan and conquering China
Lex Fridman (02:31:52) So actually, if we rewind, Kublai Khan, who was he? And what was the state of China at that time? That kind of sets up this idea of ships and siege warfare?
Jack Weatherford (02:32:05) In 1215, Chinggis Khan conquered the city we now know as Beijing. It was the capital of the Jin Dynasty of Northern China. And at that time, Southern China was ruled by the Song Dynasty, or usually called the Southern Song. He had already conquered the Xi Xia Kingdom of the Tangut people. And so most of Northern China was under the control of the Mongols from about 1215. And then he conquered middle later, his descendants conquered middle, and then Kublai Khan was the one to take on the south.
(02:32:38) But Kublai Khan was born that year in 1215, about three months after the capture of Beijing. And he was nobody. He was the second son of the fourth son of Chinggis Khan. Well, he’s got lots of cousins out there who’ve been riding around. They’re conquering Russia, and they’ve already burned down Kiev, and they’ve conquered different places in the world.
(02:33:01) They’re real Mongols. That’s their whole life. And he’s born, and he doesn’t meet Chinggis Khan until he’s about seven years old, because Chinggis Khan was away on a conquest in Central Asia. And Chinggis Khan came back and he met him and he said, “Oh, he doesn’t look like a Mongol. He looks like his mother’s people.” His mother was Sorghaghtani, who was actually a part of the royal family of the Merkit people, whom he had conquered sometime earlier.
(02:33:28) And he said, ” He looks like his mother’s people,” who is a little bit more tawny. Mongols tend to be very white with very bright red cheeks, and have a certain very round face, and so on. And so he looked different. And for whatever reason, his mother, I think she recognized the difference, and treated him differently. Her oldest son was called Mongke, later Mongke Khan, Mongke, and she wanted him to become, even though her husband was a drunk, who died out on campaign drunk, and she took over northern China and she began to put it together.
(02:34:07) And she wanted her son to become the Great Khan, the emperor of the Mongol Empire. And this wasn’t in line. This wasn’t going to happen. Because he’s the fourth son out of three, others are way in line, way ahead of her.
(02:34:21) But she calls the revolution. She made it happen. She put her son in, Mongke Khan in 1251. He became Great Khan. He only lived till 1259. He died of something. It could have been cholera, or there are different stories, and I don’t know the truth of it, but he died on campaign in China trying to conquer Southern China.
(02:34:42) Well, up to this point, Kublai Khan had not been distinguishing himself. His mother was, she was a Christian woman, but she had a Buddhist nurse for him. And she had Chinese scholars come in to tutor him. She had a very good education for him. And I think that she planned that he was going to be a great administrator under his older brother, and he was going to administer the lands in China.
(02:35:07) And so he was learning all this stuff for it. But the older brother, he insisted on sending him out on campaign. Oh, but he was overweight, he was fat, he had gout. He needed to go rest. There was always some excuse. And the brother was assigning people, Uriyangkhadai, who was the son of Subutai, the great general, he assigned him to teach him warfare. He wasn’t great on the battlefield. He really was not. But he was very smart. And at first a little bit lazy, he liked talking about the religion, sitting around, go hunting, as long as he had many with him to do the shooting, and then to prepare the food and all. And his territory in Northern China was just being run into the dirt by these administrators the Mongols had brought in. They were just overtaxing the people, cheating the people, doing everything wrong. And his mother basically just pulled his chain and she said, “Go to your land. This is your land. You have to administer this land. You go there, you live there, you take charge.” And everybody was terrified of the mother. So he ran off to China and he started administering his land, and he started learning how to do it.
(02:36:19) Well, when his brother died in 1259, he was down on the Yangtze River, on a campaign that he was sent by his brother. He was having no success at all. But he thought, “Okay, the brother’s dead. I should finish the campaign.” Meanwhile, his youngest brother, Ariq Boke, Ariq Boke was another hothead Mongol like their father, Tolui. He was rather hotheaded. And he was back in Mongolia. And his tolerance for religions, he had to oversee the debate one time between the Daoists and the Buddhists, because the Mongols thought the Daoists were overtaxing everybody, the Buddhists.
(02:36:54) So he had to oversee it. He got mad, and he picked up a statue of the Buddha and beat the Daoist representative to death. So he just wasn’t good for moderating debates. So he was going to be the new Great Khan. So he was declared the Great Khan in Mongolia. But this was a turning life for Kublai Khan, who had never achieved much of anything other than talking to people.
(02:37:20) So his wife, Chabi sent him some coded messages, basically telling him, “Forget about Southern China. It’s going to always be there. You can conquer that some other time. Right now, your brother is taking over the empire. You should be the new Emperor. You are the next son after Mongke Khan.” And somehow she invigorated him, and he came back. And even though he didn’t have all the military strategy, he had Northern China, the resources were immense.
(02:37:52) He could cut off Mongolia. Mongolia was very dependent on Northern China for food. All the Mongols supported Ariq Boke, all the ones in Central Asia, all of whom were supporting Ariq Boke. So he went to get food from them, and then they didn’t want to give up their food. “Yeah, we want to support you for Great Khan, but we’re not giving up our food.” So he was basically starved into submission in 1262. And then he was taken prisoner into China, and then he mysteriously passed away in 1264, while a legal case was being brought against him for trial, but he never made it to trial. He was gone.
(02:38:38) So Kublai Khan had not really distinguished himself very much, but he didn’t have the genius of his grandfather. I won’t say that. But he was smart and clever. He understood more about China than most Mongols did, and he understood more about Mongols than most Chinese did.
(02:38:59) So the great thing left, that Chinggis Khan said on his deathbed, “Finish conquering China.” That was the great objective. So Kublai was going to fulfill this, and they didn’t know how. The Great Wall of Ships was protecting the Southern Song. This huge Yangtze River was so wide, the ocean on the side, all of these things were protecting them.
(02:39:25) So he had one of his very smart generals named Aju, who was a real Mongol, but he was also able to think in innovative way. He was the grandson of Subutai, and he went with his father Uriyangkhadai on the conquest of the Red River of Northern Vietnam against the Dai Viet people. They went down the river. They were trying to surround this Chinese territory. So they were going to hit them from the north, from the west, and from the south. So they went down the Red River to conquer the Dai Viet. The Dai Viet moved the army up on the other side by boat. And then they had a whole core of elephants.
(02:40:05) So they have the Mongols on one side of the river, the Dai Viet forces on the other side. Uriyangkhadai was a smart man, not a genius, but smart. And he already knew from campaigns in Burma that the only way to route the elephants was with flaming arrows to their feet. That was it. But he recognized that they came up on boats. Mongols didn’t like boats. They crossed the river on a goatskin. They wanted to do something organic. A boat was like a cart. A cart belonged to a woman. It was a floating cart. I am not going over on a floating cart. I’m going to ride a goatskin across the river. So he’s assigned one detachment, “You have to burn the boats so the Dai Viet cannot escape when we route the elephants.”
(02:40:54) Well, the battle, I mean, got started. The elephants are running wild. All kinds of chaos is going on. The group that’s sent to burn the boats, they’re Mongols. They want to go to war. Why burn a bunch of women’s carts? It’s just not floating … So they go and join the battle. They leave the boats. Well, the Mongols won the battle, but the Dai Viet forces got on the boats and sailed back to what’s now Hanoi. And then they evacuated the city, took all the food, everything out of the city, and they disappeared into the Delta. The Mongols arrived. They conquered, quote-unquote, Hanoi, the capital city. And they had nothing. They had nothing. They won every battle, they lost the war. They retreated. Aju was the son of Uriyangkhadai, and he saw all this happen, and he recognized the importance of water and boats. And so he knew, and he spent his time studying the Yangtze River and every little river around it, and the cities.
(02:41:55) And the crucial thing he saw was the cities are heavily, heavily fortified on the land side, because invasion comes from the land, and they expect this little line of boats to protect them on the water. And so their city walls are weak. The defenses are weak on that side. That’s where we have to attack. So how?
(02:42:15) They sent off to the Ilkhanate, to Persia, where Chinggis Khan, his uncle was now dead, and his cousins were ruling there, or his nephews, we would say, or cousins, nephews. So they sent over engineers to build special kind of trebuchet, a catapult. And they had to play around with it to adapt it for a boat, because they were usually made for stable ground, but they adapted it for the boat and for throwing heavy things. And also for some incendiary bombs, they developed it. They attacked the first city, it fell. They attacked the … it fell. They had something that was working. They worked their way down the Yangtze River, destroying city after city with this navy. And then the army would move in after the navy had broken down.
Lex Fridman (02:43:02) So this is a catapult on a ship?
Jack Weatherford (02:43:06) Catapult on a ship. But yeah, we call it trebuchet for this type of catapult.
Lex Fridman (02:43:10) So this is an engineering solution for peoples who are deeply uncomfortable with boats?
Jack Weatherford (02:43:19) Yes. Now it’s a great weapon. It’s no longer a woman’s cart. It’s a bow and arrow. It is a giant bow and arrow.
Lex Fridman (02:43:28) Yeah, it’s fascinating. So they hit them hard on the walls, on the weak side, where there’s no, the army protection.
Jack Weatherford (02:43:35) Yes. And they conquer their way down to Hangzhou, the capital of the Southern Song. They’ve been in power for a long time, since 970, on now we’re already into the 1270s. That’s a long time. They’re dissipated. They’ve been, had child, they had imbeciles ruling, all kinds of things going on.
(02:43:59) And at this point, we have a child in command. But Kublai makes a very strange move. He says, “Okay, let’s invade Japan now. They’re thinking, “What? Wait, wait, wait. We’re fighting against the Song Dynasty.” And most people ascribe it to all kinds of things. But actually I think there was a great logic to it. One was, he had abolished his grandfather’s policy of defeat and destroy until they are no more. That was the phrase that was used for their enemies. And he had replaced it with a kind of mercy policy. Try to incorporate them into your army of possible, but be merciful. He did not want to destroy. And he was not. He had a lot of defectors coming in. And because the Mongols prized people with skills, a lot of very clever people, with ship building, and engineers, and these people were flocking to the Mongols. Whereas the scholars were all hanging out in Guangzhou, doing calligraphy, and poetry, and having contests over who could sing or paint or … I don’t know what scholars do, but they were being scholars.
Jack Weatherford (02:45:11) But there actually, I think there’s a very, very good reason for invading Japan. Several. The main one was to cut off the supply of sulfur. They needed it for gunpowder in the South Song. They lost their sources in northern China when they were driven out. They got it from Japan. It was a great source.
(02:45:31) But I think there were other reasons. If they could trade, they could also perhaps flee to Japan. And they didn’t want that to happen. And then there’s this idea of kill the chicken to scare the monkey. It’s like, okay, we’ll go do this. And then maybe they’ll just surrender down there if they see us conquer Japan.
(02:45:50) Well, it was a total failure. You’ve got a bunch of ships that are mainly great on the river and right along the coast, and you’re crossing some treacherous water there. And the Mongols basically just did not know what they were doing. Okay, you can arrive with the trebuchet and you can throw grenades at the beach. It’s not really going to do a lot of damage. It might scare a few horses, but you’re not destroying cities. And the Japanese cities were more in, they weren’t on the beach waiting for Mongols to come invade. So he failed in that invasion.
Lex Fridman (02:46:22) So we should say that this is the time of the samurai, right? In Japan.
Lex Fridman (02:46:29) So there was never a real test of that-
Jack Weatherford (02:46:32) No. There was some fighting. And the Samurai learned some very valuable things. The samurai had such a ritualized way of writing. It’s like the knights of Europe, coming out with armor that had to be lifted up on a crane onto a horse. And I mean, it was just craziness. Craziness.
(02:46:48) The samurai, almost at that point, you ride out in front of your enemy and you recite the story of your genealogy. What? Mongols, they have no use for that. They’re there to fight. They’re there to win. But on the other hand, this was unknown territory to them, and the weather did turn against them. But I don’t want to give too much credit to the weather. I really think that the Japanese defeated them. The Mongols weren’t well-prepared. Their ships were not very good. They were defeated in the first invasion.
Lex Fridman (02:47:20) Could they get off the ships onto the beach?
Jack Weatherford (02:47:23) Oh, they did. They had some skirmishes or small battles on land. Yes, they did.
Lex Fridman (02:47:27) But they didn’t successfully complete them [inaudible 02:47:31]-
Lex Fridman (02:47:31) So they couldn’t do their usual Mongol thing.
Jack Weatherford (02:47:33) Right. Well, see, they don’t have enough horses, for one thing. And there were many tactical things that they had done incorrectly. It’s the first time anybody had ever tried to have such a massive invasion.
Lex Fridman (02:47:46) So they’re just learning the basics of what it means to have a navy.
Jack Weatherford (02:47:50) So he has failed to conquer, and he’s thinking like a Mongol, that you rule those waters and lands. But he ruled the ocean. He stopped the trade. He stopped the supply. He cut off the possibility of the Song dynasty fleeing to Japan. He won, in a certain way. He lost, but he had won his objective of cutting off southern China.
(02:48:16) Also, it gave him, navy some experience with the ocean, and now they were ready to move out into the ocean around Southern China. So they were closing in then. Aju was in command. But actually the head command was a man named Bayan, who was a Mongol who had been raised more in Central Asia. He was perhaps close to the Fergana Valley, in that area. We’re not exactly sure where he was born, but he grew up over there. And then he eventually was living in what’s now Iran.
(02:48:49) But he came and he took over command of the army. He was very cosmopolitan, sophisticated, intelligent. Aju should have been in command. But Bayan recognized that, and he and Aju worked together very well. Aju knew how to fight the war. Bayan was able to negotiate things back with the capital city and handle things. So Bayan is in command.
(02:49:14) And so the generals are deserting the South Song right and left. The artisans are all coming up to join the Mongols, get paid. The generals are loading up the boats with all the jewels, and they grab a couple of brothers to the little five-year- old emperor, and they put them on a boat, and they’re fleeing. They even deserted their own families. The generals were corrupt cowards who fled. The person left in charge was the Dowager Empress, an old lady. She had no children. Cixi was her name, the Dowager Empress Cixi. They said she was missing an eye. She was ugly. They called her Ugly Cixi. That’s what they called her at that time. She was in charge, and she offered the Mongols everything. “I’ll give you everything-“
Jack Weatherford (02:50:00) And she offered the Mongols everything. “I’ll give you everything. Please let the emperor stay. Okay, even if you demote him to just being a king, please let him stay.” Bayan said, “No, total surrender. Total surrender.” So she decided to surrender. Well, she said, “Yes, we will surrender the capitol.” So Bayan came in with a small group of soldiers. They looked around and she invited him to come to the palace to surrender. And he said, “No, I didn’t win this war in a palace. My soldiers won this war in the field. You have to come with the emperor in front of my soldiers to surrender.” But he did not harm her, he respected her, and there was no looting of the city. Now, later, they take everything in a very systematic way. They take the archives and all this kind of stuff away, but there was no wholesale looting, a killing of people, nothing like that.
(02:50:56) So they’ve taken the capitol and she comes out, she surrenders, she bows on the ground towards Beijing, and then she takes the child emperor and they slowly make their way. She was a little bit sick. It took her a longer time to Beijing, and they surrender again in a public ceremony, bowing to the Kublai Khan. He gives each of them a palace. He gives them a new title. He’s trying to show the world this is the new face of Mongols. We don’t kill off the old people anymore who are ruling. We’re gonna give them a palace, treat them nicely and all. But the navy that had fled did not defend the city. Those cowardly generals, they made the new little boy, seven-year-old brother, half-brother to Emperor Gong, was his name. They made him the emperor.
(02:51:54) Well, they’re just floating around on the ocean, losing all support from city after city. The Muslims, who were controlling the trade and controlling many of the ships of that area, they were Chinese Muslims, but they were still Muslims. They switched sides to the Mongols because of the religious freedom thing, and because they were merchants and their status would be raised. The Muslims were switching over. The fleet was kind of a fleet lost without a country out there. They had some loyal supporters, some places. They drop the emperor into ocean.
Jack Weatherford (02:52:37) How do you drop an emperor into ocean? They accidentally spilled him in the ocean, and then they fished him out, but he died. So fortunately they had one more seven year old half brother, so on Lantau Island, exactly where the Hong Kong airport is today, the new… well, it’s not so new anymore, but I still think it was the new airport on Lantau Island. So they went there and they had a big coronation ceremony and all, but the people there were not supportive enough. It certainly wasn’t Hong Kong then, anyway, the delta of the Pearl River. So they sailed out farther south to another island, and then they took it over. And of course, the first thing they did was, well, we have to build a palace. What? The Mongols are chasing you and you’re going to stop and build a palace?
Lex Fridman (02:53:25) So these are the remains of the Chinese?
Jack Weatherford (02:53:39) They chained together the boats across the entrance to the harbor, and they put the palace boat, so-called, in the middle. The generals didn’t trust their own soldiers enough, so they made all of them leave the island and go to the boats to fight the Mongols. So Mongols arrived, and over and over and over they asked them to surrender. You won’t be harmed, all this kind of stuff. But the Mongols now took over the land. So they had the water all around them and they had the land. And once the fighting started, they could just shoot down from the highland right onto the ships. And they’ve cut the ships off from the fresh supply of wood and water. So they can’t boil rice. They have to try to eat rice and drink sea water. They’re all sick as dogs out there. And the leaders refused to surrender.
(02:54:33) The little boy is there, seven-year-old emperor, Bing was his name, with his pet parrot. That’s the only thing he had left in life, was his pet parrot. And then the Mongols, they offered every opportunity, but the prime minister, so-called, coward that he is, although he’s treated as a hero today in China and throughout their history, the coward that he was, he said, “We will not disgrace the country by letting them capture the emperor.”
(02:55:06) So first he threw his own wife and children into the water to drown. And then he took the emperor and held him, he was seven years and one month, he had just turned seven years old, and jumped into the water with his child. A child murderer. He’s a child murderer, to do that. Somehow in the whole ruckus, the cage came undone with the parrot and the parrot fell in the water too. So the seven-year-old boy and the parrot died in the water. That was the end of one of the greatest dynasties in the history of the world. The Song Dynasty, they were intellectually great. They were artistically great. They were technologically great. They were just one of the greatest moments of world history. And it ends with this coward killing a child and his pet parrot in order to save the honor that was betrayed by this woman. The men lost the war. The men lost the war. Who’s to blame? An old one-eyed, ugly lady Empress Xie?
Lex Fridman (02:56:13) Well, the bigger picture there is probably the institutions became corrupt and stale.
Lex Fridman (02:56:19) The army weakened and the politician class probably have lost their skill and competence at ruling and all that kind of stuff.
Jack Weatherford (02:56:31) All that is true. And the Chinese summarize that with losing the mandate of heaven.
Lex Fridman (02:56:35) Right. I mean, everybody has their perspective, maybe. The way you told the story has a very kind of objective sort of way of revealing the absurdity and the cowardice of it. But there’s probably the Chinese perspectives that they tell the story in some maintained honor to the last moment.
Jack Weatherford (02:57:01) Very often, most scholars depict Empress Xie as the traitor to the country. And I say, “No, that boy lived on for another 45 years.” And so she did not betray the country. She protected her emperor that she was supposed to protect. It was the man who killed the child emperor who killed Zhao Bing.
Lex Fridman (02:57:24) So what was the lasting impact of Kublai Khan unifying China?
Jack Weatherford (02:57:30) Well, yes, first of all, he had unified China in the largest sense of the word, with Korea, Tibet, Manchuria, Mongolia, part of Central Asia, he had unified it. But he did so at the expense of his empire. They didn’t recognize him as the great emperor, and there was great opposition from the Golden Horde of Russia, and also from the central region, which is called the Chagataid, the descendants of Chagatai, the second son, the Chagatai Empire, and then from the Il-Khanate of Persia.
Lex Fridman (02:58:03) These are the different sort of fracturings of the Mongol Empire?
Jack Weatherford (02:58:06) The sons of Genghis Khan.
Lex Fridman (02:58:22) So, I mean, it’s very hard it to keep an empire of this size together.
Jack Weatherford (02:58:27) Yes. But he had China. It was unified under him. And then he sent out the first expedition to sail directly to Persia. There had been trade all throughout thousands of years, but it was usually port to port, different merchants trading goods. No, he organized a great fleet to send a queen, or a princess to become a queen in the Il-Khanate, to marry the Il-Khan of Persia. It’s Persia and Azerbaijan and Armenia and Iraq and part of Syria, all of that area. So he organized this, and it so happened that Marco Polo was ready to go home because they knew Kublai Khan was about to die. And in fact, he only had about one year left to live. And they wanted to get their riches out before they didn’t know what’s gonna happen. This is a new dynasty. They’ve been in total control of China for one generation, and they didn’t know what was gonna happen.
(02:59:27) And also, just before that, there’d been a bad sign because Kublai Khan had tried to invade Japan a second time, and he had failed a second time. And the second time, I think again, he had a practical purpose, and that was he had this whole huge Song army that now he’s the new enlightened Mongol who doesn’t slaughter. What is he gonna do? They’re not reliable. They’re not safe. So he sends a bunch of them up into the Amur River of what’s now the Russian Far East, or we call Siberia in English, but the Russian Far East, the Amur River. He sent expeditions up into Tibet, exploring options up there, but there wasn’t enough room, or enough agricultural area for a huge military colony.
(03:00:12) But most of his ships were loaded with former prisoners of the war from the Song Dynasty. And they were not armed. They had hoes and implements for farming. He wanted to create, obviously, a military agricultural farm in Japan to help feed Northern China, ’cause it was very important. Just as they were doing with the Amur River, but it was more complicated. So, again, they lost. They didn’t have it. And part of the reason is the expedition was massive, and they organized it in the Mongol principles of left wing, right wing. This didn’t work at sea ’cause the left wing is from Korea. There’s Korean ships built up there. The right wing is from Southern China, mostly, with ships built down there. They’re not the same. They have a head, but there’s no center point. Genghis Khan always had the gol, they called it, G-O-L, the gol, the center, or Q-O-L, qol [inaudible 03:01:14]. But he had the center in command. No, he sent the two without a clear… And they were arguing with each other, not cooperating, not helping each other, sabotaging each other.
(03:01:25) They get there, and once again, they have the same problems. Even though they’ve come with lots of grenades this time, again, the grenades are exploding. They’re scaring the horses. It’s impressive. And a lot of silk screens are made later showing these impressive battles and all. But they lost. And again, a typhoon happened to be the final destruction of the navy. But I think Japan had defeated the Mongols. I would say. Japanese deserve credit for that victory. And then the sinking of the ships was more caused by the typhoon. But already the Japanese had developed good strategies while the Mongols had been away. They knew how the Mongols fought, and they knew that at night they could fire flaming arrows at the ships, set them on fire, and they were doing great damage. So again, Kublai Khan lost the invasion of Japan, but the soldiers were gone. They drowned. He didn’t kill them off, was his deliberate plan, but the problem was solved.
(03:02:40) It’s one of those ironies of history that is hard to quite understand. So this had happened, but then Kublai Khan was coming to near the end of life, and Marco Polo and those wanted to get out, they’re ready to go. And Kublai Khan allowed them to sail on this expedition with Kokochin, was her name, the Princess Kokochin, to go to Hormuz. And so they went, and that began a whole system of trade, back and forth, back and forth. Kublai Khan died soon after that. His grandson, who’s not so well respected in history, because he’s often called a drunk, but his name was Temur, Temur Oljeitu. But he was a drunk when he was young, but his grandfather had him caned a couple times in public, and he cured him of drinking. And actually he was not a drunk later on.
(03:03:38) And first he reassembled the Mongol Empire. He did. The Golden Horde declared loyalty to him, recognized him as Great Khan, as emperor of the whole empire, the Chagataid of Central Asia, they declared loyalty to him. The Il-Khanate was already loyal to him. They all declared loyalty. He had reassembled the empire and he had the greatest navy in the world, and he sent out envoys to every place they had attacked or traded with to say, “That era is over. We’re no longer attacking anybody. We’re changing from conquest to commerce. We want to trade with you. Come to China, bring your goods. We’re gonna trade with you.” He instituted, it was short, unfortunately didn’t last forever. I wish it could have. But it was a great era of the exchange of all kinds of things going back and forth, actually all the way to Africa, ’cause from Hormuz they had connection to Somaliland. And some people say Kenya already at that time, I’m not sure, but very wide. Very wide.
Lex Fridman (03:04:45) So technically he ruled over the largest size the Mongol Empire ever had?
Jack Weatherford (03:04:53) Yes. But although, actually, the Golden Horde of Russia, they were quite independent by now. And he let them be independent, but they were loyal to him and they were still exchanging back and forth all kinds of things. So there were Ossetian soldiers in China. They had a whole contingent of Ossetian soldiers there, and from Russia, from the Caucus areas of Russia.
Lex Fridman (03:05:19) And how do they communicate? Are they using the postal service? You have to literally deliver the letters?
Jack Weatherford (03:05:26) Over time, those groups started intermarrying, they were allowed to intermarry. The Chinese were not, but they were intermarrying with Mongols, and they were switching to Mongolian language, slowly. At first, I don’t know, it’s not clear. But again, Kublai Khan thinking in this internationalist way, said, “Okay, we need a new alphabet for the world.” Everybody in the world writes with one alphabet, Chinese, Mongolian, Russian, Arabic, everything. It didn’t work. But he tried it for a while and some inscriptions are still there to this day.
Lex Fridman (03:06:03) And we should maybe briefly mentioned Marco Polo that you’ve talked about. So he’s this now famous explorer that traversed the continent, the Silk Road, and then stayed with Kublai Khan for a while. And I guess is one of the primary documenters of everything that’s been going on. Is there something else interesting to say about Marco Polo and about his interaction with Kublai Khan?
Jack Weatherford (03:06:32) I like Marco Polo. I use his work a lot. I find him very reliable. In the areas where he’s not reliable you can kind of tell because he wasn’t there. But the places he was, he reported a lot of stuff. And so I’m very much indebted to him for a lot of things because with something like the Princess Kokochin, and also another fighting princess from Central Asia named Khutulun, he wrote about that. But I also needed other sources. So I found if I could find Chinese sources or Arab sources or something else, or Persian to support it, then I really felt a lot of confidence with him over time. But pieces were romanticized. You have to always discount it, but he’s very good.
(03:07:20) However, I believe the best work written about Marco Polo, aside from his own book, which was actually written by Rustichello, dictated in prison in Genoa. In the 20th century, Eugene O’Neill wrote a play that became a comedy on Broadway called Marco Millions. That was both a play on what he was called, Il Milione, the million, ’cause he had talked about cities of millions of people, and about money in the millions and things that people in Europe just couldn’t believe could happen.
(03:07:58) He then published his whole play as a book to show people what he really meant. And it was an ironic look at capitalism, ’cause this is 20th century already, versus the idea of like a philosopher king, which he saw in Kublai Khan. And so Marco Polo becomes a symbol of capitalism, not at its worst, but at its most basic. And that is like the princess in this story. This is not in real life, but this is in the play written by Eugene O’Neill, but I think it captures a lot. The Princess Kukachin says, “Marco is an excellent judge of quantity,” and there are things like that.
(03:08:45) And then in the play, Bayan, the great general, he talks with Kublai Khan and he said, “Look, these people are dangerous from the West. We should go conquer them now while we can.” Kublai Khan tells Bayan, again in the play, this is fiction, but he tells Bayan, “They are not worth conquering, and if we conquer them, we will become like them.” And he said, “Marco Polo has been in our land. He has seen everything. He has learned nothing. He has seen everything. He understands nothing.”
(03:09:21) For me, this was such an important moment in the history of the world, symbolically. With Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, the coming together of two worlds, it could have gone a different way, it could have gone a different way. It’s not that I’m anticapitalist, I’m procapitalist, but the way so many things worked out, it was a misstep in history. Maybe we took the wrong step at that moment, and we could have learned more from cooperation.
Lex Fridman (03:09:54) They didn’t quite integrate successfully.
Jack Weatherford (03:09:57) No. But today we’ve returned to that, I think. The East and the West are confronting each other again on more equal terms. For a long time, the West was so dominant and the East was so downtrodden by colonialism and other things, and internal rot and other things. But today there’s, not necessarily equality, but there’s more of a balance, and which way will we go?
Lex Fridman (03:10:25) And again, there’s a lot of room and a lot of energy for division, for misunderstanding versus integration. Like the East is demonized in the West. And one of the great regrets I have that I hope to alleviate is just how little I understand China and the East.
Lex Fridman (03:10:56) It’s just sort of not just from economics, politics, reading a few books, but the way you’ve understood and felt the Mongolian steppe, like understand the Chinese people in that way, because it does feel like from that understanding there could be integration of ideas.
Jack Weatherford (03:11:17) My work is often classified as Chinese history, which I think is ironic ’cause for me it’s always a Mongolian history. But for the last book I wrote, which dealt a lot more with China because it was about Kublai Khan, then in that book, I deliberately did not go to China. I’d been there numerous times before. I deliberately did not. I’m an outsider. I do not speak Chinese. I’m not a Chinese scholar. I never even had a course in Chinese art or calligraphy or anything. And I wanted to be very clear. Mine is an outside perspective. But I think it’s possible as an outsider to still have respect for that culture, even if I disagree that they point this one as a hero and that one just the villain. I disagree and they’ll say, oh, I’m wrong. I don’t understand their history. And they’re probably right. That’s quite possible. But this is an outside view that is different and tries to be respectful of what happens in that part of the world.
(03:12:16) Just as I’m respectful towards Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire, I respect China very much. I’m an American. I love the ideals of my country. I love so many aspects of our culture, and there are many aspects I don’t, of course, because it’s impossible to love everything, even about the members of your own family, you know?
Jack Weatherford (03:12:38) And I do hope that through understanding one another, or just making the effort to understand, even if we understand wrongly and we’re incorrect in it, just to make the effort to understand will help us a lot. And the West has had a long couple of centuries of extreme arrogance that they are there to teach the world. And I am sometimes dismayed. I meet these young people all over the world who’ve come to help. They’re an NGO, and they’re gonna teach the people how to take care of the environment. They’re gonna teach the women how to exercise their rights. They’re gonna bring in micro financing to help liberate people. We are arrogant beyond words, and we need to be a little bit more humble and try to put ourselves on an equal basis with some of these people, not a superior basis.
Fall of the Mongol Empire
Lex Fridman (03:13:41) Beautifully put. How did the Mongol Empire come to an end? How did it fall?
Jack Weatherford (03:13:51) Despite the fact that Temur Oljeitu Khan had United the Empire, at least symbolically, all of it, and they had the trade going on, the Mongols never adapted well to China, and they began having problems in different areas. So in some areas of the world, they became more like the local people. So in Central Asia, they became Muslim and they got more absorbed into that world and broke away from the Mongol examples from before. Russia lingered on longer under Mongol domination, but it got weaker and weaker over time, and it was based around the Volga River, but they weakened to the point that they just became a tributary people minority within a Russian empire. But the Mongols had left the framework for empire for Russia. That’s something the Russians don’t wanna hear any more than they wanna hear me criticize the end of the Song Dynasty.
(03:14:49) But it is true that even Yam. Yam is the word that was used for this postal system. And that’s the ministries today in Russia. There are many, many other things in Russia. Even Malchin. Malchin is a herder, mal is an animal, and chin is a person who takes care of animals. It’s all kinds of influences in Russia that some people want to deny. But there’s always a great powerful strand of research and scholarship in Russia that supports this understanding of the Mongols. And I depend on them tremendously.
(03:15:26) It’s not just Gumilev is one of the famous ones, but he was a little bit too romantic with his ideas and all. But I depend upon a lot of the research done by Russian scholars and by early German scholars in the 19th century under sponsorship of the Tsar. So I depend on that work. So you had a great influence there, but it was weakening. So bit by bit, 1368, the Mongols had become so weak within China that they were overthrown, but they weren’t absorbed into China. The Mongols had been there since 1215 to 1368. They packed up, went back to Mongolia. It was just another seasonal migration.
Jack Weatherford (03:16:16) You know? It was just amazing. And they said, “Okay, we’re still the Yuan Dynasty. We’re not giving you the seals. We’re not acknowledging the Ming.” And they never did, throughout the whole of the Ming. In fact, they went down one time and captured the Ming Emperor, took him back to Mongolia, and then they tried to ransom him, and the attorney said, “No, we’re gonna appoint another emperor.” So the Mongols decided, “Okay, the worst thing we can do to the Chinese is give them back the old Emperor.” So you had two emperors back. Okay, let them work it out. And the empire just weakened from internal reasons for the Mongols, but some external things from nature. And I think that was the great plague.
(03:16:59) Everything in history, everything that’s good comes with something underneath it that’s bad. And everything that’s bad seems to have something underneath that sometimes works out good, in a way. But this great system that united, it’s called the Yam or Ortogh, that had united everything, people could move back and forth quickly that it could also take the plague out of Southern China into all parts of the world. And I do think that’s what happened. And the plague destroyed the Mongol system.
(03:17:33) And if all of these people are ruled by Mongols because they’re benefiting so much from this system, and now the system collapses, you don’t need the empire anymore. So it just fell apart. After 1368, the empire just fell apart, and most of them stayed in Persia and Iran and Afghanistan. The Hazara people are still descended from the army there. And then in Russia, some of them stayed. But then finally in the time of Catherine the Great, a lot of them were returned. They had been there for hundreds of years, and then they returned to Mongolia in the 1700s. And so, many Mongols came home. They were still Mongols. Despite hundreds of years of exposure to other cultures, they came back to their tent and squatting around the fire and drinking fermented milk and eating dried curds.
Lex Fridman (03:18:34) It’s interesting that the Mongolian spirit is so strong that it persists through centuries, and they just return right back on the horse, riding in the open steppe.
Jack Weatherford (03:18:49) Yeah, well, it was actually very difficult because they were a little bit lazy and they weren’t so good with doing the task. And so it became difficult, actually, to support so many people coming home and eating up all the animals. The Mongols in China had been used to just eating. They hadn’t been producing much for 150 years.
Lex Fridman (03:19:12) So just to return to Genghis Khan, and we talked about Dan Carlin, and Dan Carlin said that Genghis Khan’s army was the greatest military force in history. And many other historians agree that before rifles came into popular use, Genghis Khan would basically beat every single army, including Napoleon. And you mentioned the Samurai, the whole formal setup, same with Napoleon. There’s a whole several hours to set up the chess pieces on the military board. I mean, you could just imagine what Genghis Khan and the dynamism, the speed of everything, what that would do to Napoleon. So, I guess the question is, do you agree with that notion that Genghis Khan’s army is the greatest military force in history?
Jack Weatherford (03:20:10) Short answer is yes, absolutely. No other power in the history of the world has conquered Russia and China and Persia and Central Asia and Turkey and Korea. No power in the world has done that. Not Alexander, not the Romans. Nobody will ever do it again. Nobody’s going to conquer China and Russia again and rule both countries. It’s just not gonna happen.
Lex Fridman (03:20:41) What lessons can you take from that’s applicable to modern warfare?
Jack Weatherford (03:20:47) Oh, I think there’s a very good lesson. The Mongols took Iraq. They took Baghdad, they held it. The Americans, we followed the exact opposite strategy of the Mongols. The Mongol strategy is first you take the countryside. They’re country people. They think in terms of countryside. You take the countryside, you occupy the countryside, and you cut off the city. It cannot live without the countryside. And that’s how they did it every time. They would come in, as I say, in some cases, two years in advance, to clear people out so they would have room for their horses and have pasture for their horses and all. And you take the small towns and then the small cities, and then the last one is the big city. Americans, they said, “No, we’re gonna take Baghdad. We’re gonna bomb Baghdad. We’re gonna have this shock and awe. We’ll go in, we conquered a country from Baghdad.”
(03:21:41) So they go in, they get trapped in their little tiny green zone. They never conquer Iraq. The strongest army in the world. This is something that worked in Europe, World War II. Yes, we bombed the cities and we took the city ’cause that was the center of production for the modern era. But the countryside is the place that produces the food. The Mongols were very aware of that, and supplies the water. You cut off the water from the city, you cut off the food for the city. What’s the city going to do? They’re going to surrender. The Americans were applying something that worked in Western Europe to conquer Germany. It did not work to conquer Iraq or Vietnam, or even Northern Korea or Cambodia or Laos or Syria or god know. It worked only in Grenada. I think, in my lifetime, that’s the only successful war we had. Lasted a couple of hours. We went in, conquered the little tiny island. Otherwise, we’ve been chased out of every country. We’ve lost it, tail between our legs.
(03:22:46) We dropped more bombs on Cambodia than we dropped on Germany. It’s hard to believe. Hard to believe. We dropped more bombs on Cambodia than on Germany. We did nothing. Because Germany, you destroy the cities, the people surrender. Dresden’s gone, Frankfurt, [inaudible 03:23:07], Berlin. In Cambodia, you can bomb the countryside forever. You can kill the people, and they did. You can use chemical warfare, and they did. And you could still go into the eastern part of Cambodia and you could go to large areas where you don’t hear birds singing because of their chemical warfare of American bombs. So we still do it, but we don’t want to admit it, and we don’t want to go in to win. In World War II, the Americans did have unconditional surrender. Well, I mean, you can support the war, not support the war. We did it right. We did it wrong. These are all issues that people can argue. But we had a clear policy. We go into Afghanistan, we’re fighting terror. We’re gonna bring democracy, we’re gonna free the women. What? I mean, it’s absolute sheer insanity, the things that we did.
Jack Weatherford (03:24:00) It’s absolute sheer insanity, the things that we did, and we kill people. Not only did we use chemical warfare and kill a lot of people in Vietnam and Laos and Cambodia, we killed American soldiers. We killed American soldiers, and my father was one. He died from Agent Orange disease. Oh, but that doesn’t count. He didn’t die on the battlefield and we didn’t mean to kill him. It doesn’t count. Modern warfare is brutal and we just paper over it sometimes.
Lex Fridman (03:24:39) Can you explain Agent Orange?
Jack Weatherford (03:24:41) It was designed to kill all vegetation. This is going to be a humane way. We’re going to kill all the vegetation in the jungle, and that way they can stop moving the army through the jungle and they can stop the supplies from coming. That was the American strategy. Yeah. Henry Kissinger, Nobel Prize winner, he is now resting in hell, is exactly where he belongs for what he did to Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. The bombing was just absolutely horrendous. So Agent Orange comes in, they defoliated, which means they wiped out the crops so people are starving. Literally in the case of Cambodia, starving to death. The animals are being killed and deformed children are being born to this day, and American soldiers died by the thousands. Not immediately. Not on the battlefield, not right there.
(03:25:33) They go home, they have the disease, they linger. They take the whole family down with them in an emotional trauma of becoming slowly paralyzed and dying. We did that to our own people. So yeah, warfare. I don’t think we’re any more humane with it any better today than in the past. It’s just we can hide parts of it more easily and deny it more easily. If you’re killed by a Mongol, it’s very clear you’re killed by a Mongol. You’re killed by friendly fire in American war, it’s a different matter.
Lex Fridman (03:26:10) It seems that what people mean when they say that war is hell, that in some deep sense, everybody loses no matter the narrative you put on top of it.
Jack Weatherford (03:26:22) Yes, yes. I’m not a pacifist again, but I think war is acceptable in some situations, but the more controlled it is, the better. My effort is not to do away with all the things that happened under Chinggis Khan with the brutality and all like that, but it’s to measure it against what goes on today in the world today. And we have different images. There are two images of Chinggis Khan. One is our image. He’s a barbarian on a horseback killing people and raping women all the time. The other image is the Mongolian image. And when they finally built an official statue of him in this century, for the 800th anniversary of his founding of Mongolia, they had to think about how to present him to the world and to themselves, and they chose the Lincoln Memorial as the model.
(03:27:20) He was the late great law giver of the Mongol nation. And so he seated there in front of the Mongolian parliament. There’s another statue that’s better known, but it was a private enterprise that created him on horseback, but not with a weapon. But he’s on horseback out in the countryside. But the official one from the government is Chinggis Khan seated like Abraham Lincoln, and they issued stamps to show that he is the great law giver.
Lex Fridman (03:27:50) And the truth is somewhere in between, I suppose.
Jack Weatherford (03:27:55) Well, or depending on where you are and how you want to see it.
Jack Weatherford (03:28:00) There are many things that happened that were terrible and horrible, and for people who lose a war, it’s going to always be terrible and horrible.
Lex Fridman (03:28:08) Yeah. Let’s return back to Chinggis Khan’s life and the end of it. How and where did he die?
Jack Weatherford (03:28:19) After conquering the Khwarazmian Empire in Central Asia, Chinggis Khan returned and then they had a great, what they called Naadam, a great celebration that went on for a whole summer just about, and they had so much wealth to distribute to everybody, and everybody is being given all kinds of things for what they have done and including the people who helped saved him when he was in the cank in the ox yoke. They were rewarded with… Everybody was rewarded. It was a great time. But the first place he had attacked outside was the Tangut Nation, and they had sworn allegiance to him. And then when he went off to the Middle East, they refused to send troops. He didn’t forget that. He’s going back to the Tangut Nation and he’s going to conquer them again. As he was crossing the Gobi, which takes a while and you’re crossing the Gobi, he was distracted a little bit by hunting the khulan, which is the wild… We say the wild ass, or I used to say wild horse. It sounds a little better, but the khulan to say khulan of the Gobi, he was off hunting khulan.
(03:29:26) He fell from his horse and he injured his leg very badly, and he seemed to decline from that point, and it took some number of months before August of 1227. He was very much near the end of life. You can read online the exact date, and it’s all very specific. But the truth is we don’t know exactly which day he died in that time because one of his wives was running the camp and they were keeping it secret until the defeat of the Tangut was completed. And the Tangut offered all kinds of things for the Mongols to go away again the second time. And Chinggis Khan told his family, “No, accept nothing. And then when they surrender, you kill the royal family, kill them all.” So that the idea, they were Buddhist people, the Tanguts were Buddhists, and the idea was usually you can be reborn into your own family. But he said, “No, you kill off the whole family, so they can’t be reborn.” So he died there.
Lex Fridman (03:30:36) How was the successor chosen?
Jack Weatherford (03:30:38) Oh, the succession issue was always difficult. He did not have the right to appoint a successor. That was not the Mongol way. He could nominate somebody. So before he set off for the Middle Eastern campaign, one of his wives said to him, “Even the biggest tree falls. You’ve got to make a plan and talk to your sons about the future.” So he did. He called the sons together. So this is Jochi, the oldest boy who was born while the father was allied with his anda Jamukha, and he was named Visitor, Jochi. And then the next one was Chagatai, and the next one was Ogedei.
(03:31:27) And the next one was Tolui, the father of Kublai Khan. But he was still alive at this point. So all four of them came. So Chinggis Khan explained to them he wanted to talk about the succession and to get some consensus from them about the succession. And so he said… The Mongols always call on people to speak by order of age. They also serve tea or food, anything by order of age. It’s always done that way from then until now. So he called first on Jochi. And he said, “What do you say, Jochi?” Chinggis Khan favored Jochi. This is the one who was questionable paternity, but he always favored him. The youngest Tolui was too hotheaded. Ogedei was a heavy drinker. Chagatai was very rigid about the law of the Mongols and all, but he seemed to favor Jochi as a good warrior but reasonable person.
(03:32:22) But he called on Jochi, “My son, speak.” Chagatai, the second one who believed in Mongol law supposedly, he jumped up and he said… This is when he accused his father of all kinds. He said, “How can you call on this Mongol, this Merkit bastard? If you call on him first, that means you want him to be the Great Khan. He should not be the Great Khan of the Mongol Empire. This is Mongol Empire now.” On and on. You can imagine kind of scene. Well, Chinggis Khan is the greatest ruler in the world. He’s sitting there being lectured by his second son, and this is when he gave that impassioned speech to his… Actually, the way the secret history, it makes it look like it was his assistant speaker who said it because very often the great power doesn’t say the words directly. They let somebody else say them for them. They have a spokesperson. But anyway, I think it was his words, and I think he said them on that day.
(03:33:22) That’s what I think on this business of, “You do not know. You were not there. The stars were moving in the sky, the head was turning around, the Earth was turning over. You do not know who loved who. You do not know who your mother loved. You do not know what your mother did. And if I say he is my son, who are you to say he is not my son?”
Lex Fridman (03:33:43) By the way, really high integrity, really respectable to do that.
Lex Fridman (03:33:58) And his son in this way. It’s really powerful.
Jack Weatherford (03:34:01) I believe that I don’t know if she was alive at this point or not. We do not have the death recorded. Mongols are not good at recording death. They don’t. They usually just say somebody finished their age or they have some euphemism for it. But he made that impassioned speech and Chagatai had to submit, and he said, “Yes, you are our father, and we accept what you say. But a deer shot with words cannot be loaded on a horse. A deer shot with words cannot be eaten.”
(03:34:36) So Chinggis Khan knew. So he said to the boys… The boys. These are middle-aged men. They’re not boys. He said to the men, “What do you want to do? What do you want to do?” And he said, “I don’t favor Chagatai because of his attitude and the situation and Tolui is still hot-headed.” He actually end up being drunk and dying early. But the other guys, they said, “Well, Ogedei.” They chose him because he was the most generous and the bon vivant. He was for every party and drinking every time. And yeah, one time, Shigi Qutuqu the great judge who wrote The Secret History, Shigi Qutuqu was sleeping on a cart one time for whatever reason. I don’t know what. I think he also had passed out drunk perhaps, but Ogedei came out drunk and grabbed him up and pulled him back into the party. Ogedei was a party guy.
(03:35:37) And so he was chosen as the next Great Khan of the Mongol Empire. But fortunately, there was sort of a plan B, and that Chinggis Khan had set up very powerful women, his daughters, but also he had chosen wives for each of his sons, very, very capable wives. And for Ogedei, he had a wife who wasn’t even his first wife. The first wife would usually be somebody closer by certain clan or something. But he had a very intelligent woman named Toregene. And then she was more or less ruling in his last few years. And then after he died, she ruled Empire in her own name. She was the ruler of the greatest empire in world ever ruled by a woman.
Lex Fridman (03:36:27) It’s incredible. The genius of Genghis to set it up that way.
Lex Fridman (03:36:35) There’s probably very widespread discrimination of women at that time. And to have not care about any of that and just making the right decision.
Lex Fridman (03:36:46) For what will keep the Empire together.
Jack Weatherford (03:36:49) And Toregene was… Actually, there was peace. She stopped all campaigns. There was peace during her time. And the women such as Toregene and others were extremely into economics and trade and running these, they had these private corporations called [foreign language 03:37:05]. She was running her [foreign language 03:37:07] and everything. So she became much more interested in economics of the trade and running the Empire. And it was a time of peace. And she recognized that peace was better for trade. It was better. And so it was a peaceful time. But like all of us, we have our weak points, and she favored a worthless son to become the successor. And none of the sons actually were great, but Ogedei had favored another. But anyway, she favored Guyuk, her son. And so she arranged to have him made a great emperor while she was still alive. And she had her primary minister was also a woman named Fatima from the Middle East. And unfortunately, Guyuk organized a purge of her court and killed off a lot of these people who had been supporting her.
(03:38:02) And a lot of them were Muslims. And he killed awful lot. And then he was going to march against the Golden Horde because they weren’t supporting him. So he set off and he died. He was only in office for 18 months, and he was gone. And then his wife took over, Oghul Qaimish. Unfortunately, she was not capable as her mother-in-law, Toregene. Oghul Qaimish was a bit greedy, and she didn’t start any new wars, but she just kind of messed up things. And she didn’t rule for too long. And this is why Kublai Khan’s mother, Sorghaghtani, was able to have a revolution. She united with the Golden Horde. She was on one end on China. She had Northern China. The Golden Horde had Russia. The two of them united against the center. And they overthrew Oghul Quaimish. And she put her son, Mongke, in who was succeeded by Kublai Khan.
Lex Fridman (03:38:58) And we should say probably that this whole succession by kin probably goes against the initial spirit-
Lex Fridman (03:39:05) … of what Genghis Khan stood for.
Jack Weatherford (03:39:07) Yes. Yes. In the end, he was a father and he favored his sons even knowing they were not so capable. And he had lost a grandson that he loved. But he organized it though, as what we call today, almost a corporation. All lands belonged to everybody in the family, everybody. So Kublai Khan, that’s why he had soldiers. There were Christian soldiers, Ossetian soldiers and Kipchak soldiers. He had 10,000 of each come in. And then the Russians would own silk factories in China. The Ilkhanate would own silk factories and jade mines in China. The people in China, the Mongols, they would own villages in Persia and in Iran. So he organized it all. Everything was owned by the entire clan. It didn’t last too long like that because of the divisions that developed. So the Great Khan was primarily in charge of conquering and expanding the land, so they had more lands to own. That was going to be the job. And Kublai Khan fulfilled it. Mongke Khan, to some extent, fulfilled it. Ogedei did. Guyuk did not.
Lex Fridman (03:40:28) This family ruling the land, all the different territories.
Jack Weatherford (03:40:33) Yeah. And they weakened with every generation.
Lex Fridman (03:40:38) But that reminds me of a very popular idea about Genghis Khan articulated in the 2003 paper titled The Genetic Legacy of the Mongols. So that paper has a finding that estimates that 0.5% of the world’s male population is descended, direct descendants of Genghis Khan. I’ve heard you kind of be a little bit skeptical of this paper, but I actually really like its findings. I talked to a good friend of mine, Manolis Kellis, who’s a biologist, computational biologist and geneticist, and he likes the paper as well. I find it really convincing. But I think your skepticism has to do not necessarily with the paper’s contents but more the implication that it speaks to the thing that maybe the people who think of Genghis Khan as a brutal barbarian assume that the reason is 0.5% of the population is because of some institutionalized mass rape conducted by Genghis Khan.
(03:41:47) But to me, and we actually spoke about this, you can’t get those kinds of numbers with rape. If you want for the empire to propagate the gene, if you were a person that wanted to propagate the genes, you would make sure that all the lands you conquer are stable, flourishing, and happy. And so actually, this is much better explained in the paper. It indicates this. It’s better explained by it was of high value, like social status value to be associated with the lineage of Genghis Khan. And so that means that for many generations, people loved the Great Khan.
Lex Fridman (03:42:34) The Genghis Khan. And so in that sense, given how vast the land was, all the transformational effects it has on trade, on culture and so on, it makes total sense. In fact, the 0.5%, just so people understand, is just male descendants. The way it works, that means if this paper is at all correct in its estimate, that the number of people descendant, not direct male descendants, but the way trees work is there’s women on each step.
Lex Fridman (03:43:12) So the number of descendants could be much larger than that. So I think that’s pretty interesting. And I think there’s singular figures like this in history but none like Genghis.
Jack Weatherford (03:43:25) It’s interesting. It’s fun. Where did they get the DNA from Genghis Khan?
Lex Fridman (03:43:30) Oh, yes. So one of the criticism you have is like, well-
Jack Weatherford (03:43:33) They don’t have one shred of scientific.
Jack Weatherford (03:43:48) There’s no evidence that it was from him. No evidence.
Lex Fridman (03:43:51) It’s from that time. It’s one person.
Jack Weatherford (03:43:53) But from that time or 200 years before?
Lex Fridman (03:43:56) It could be 200 years before.
Jack Weatherford (03:43:58) Yes. Yes. See, I mean, actually, I would like for it to be true in a certain way. I would, and I do think there is a truth there.
Jack Weatherford (03:44:07) I think that by attaching it to the name of Genghis Khan, they’ve done a disservice to themselves. But it gets a lot of publicity and a lot more funding, and it’s exciting and so on. But I think it’s to that Mongol experience. But Genghis Khan’s descendants were almost every one categorized and recorded. He’s the largest conqueror in the world. You do not have just children popping up all over the place. He had four wives all the time. He had children with two of them.
(03:44:35) That’s not a lot of descendants. We know mostly who they are for many generations. His brother, Qasar, had many more children than he did. Many more. And they caused a lot of problems later on for the Empire too by rivaling the power. So it could be that one of these other people, Bodonchar Deful, could have been the origin of this. It could have been back well before Chinggis Khan. And in Mongolia today, we have nobody who claims descent from Chinggis Khan.
Lex Fridman (03:45:09) Well, claims is a different thing than biology, right?
Jack Weatherford (03:45:55) I just can’t believe it the way it is. We have no DNA. Nobody knows where he went.
Lex Fridman (03:46:02) They don’t. So they don’t know where he’s buried?
Jack Weatherford (03:46:04) Okay. Chinggis Khan said, “Let my body go, let my nation live.” And he chose to be buried in an unmarked grave. And the Mongols believe very strongly, it should always be that way. Most of the Khans who followed him were also buried in a similar way. The Chinese emperors were buried in very elaborate tombs, but not the Yuan dynasty. No. And so Kublai Khan was buried back with his grandfather in an anonymous grave.
(03:46:38) And not everyone, like Guyuk died when he was on campaign towards Russia. He was died out there. I mean he was buried out there. I think his father, Ogedei, was also buried out there. That was more their homeland, but many of them were buried with him. And it’s known and not known at the same time. Officially you should not know it. You cannot know it. It should never be disturbed. He should never be disturbed. We’re not going to have a tour group coming in.
Lex Fridman (03:47:16) But you’re saying like the people of Mongolia, they have a sense.
Jack Weatherford (03:47:20) They believe he’s in a certain place. Yes. And they believe they know where the place is. But it’s sacred. You can do nothing, nothing. Just leave it as it is. That’s no roads, no buildings, no killing of animals, no chopping of trees. Nothing can be done. It’s a holy land dedicated to him and his family.
Jack Weatherford (03:48:04) And I say to people, they ask me, “Well, what did he look like?” And I say, “Well, the portrait was painted 50 years later by somebody who never saw him.” And actually, if you look at the portrait of Kublai Khan and Genghis Khan, they look alike except one’s old and one’s younger. And I think that’s because Kublai was trying to establish, he wanted to establish his legitimacy as a real Mongol that they looked alike. But his grandfather said he didn’t. And then Ogedei Khan and Mongke Khan looked different. They looked different. So there was nothing. But I say, “If you want to see the face of Genghis Khan, walk in any ger in Mongolia. The first child you see, that’s the face of Genghis Khan. It’s his nation. He created that nation. That’s his face.”
Lex Fridman (03:48:45) Does that make you sad that there is no, from his time, capturing of his image, that he really made himself sort of disappear into the land? Does that make you sad?
Jack Weatherford (03:49:02) No, not at all. No, because he’s everywhere. When you have these clans that are still operating in Afghanistan, and the Russians are still using the Yam system, there are many aspects of him that are out there in the world. And I think I find personally inspiration the same way that Thomas Jefferson did.
(03:49:27) He found so much inspiration in the life of Genghis Khan and the books of Genghis Khan that you can still read. He bought so many copies and gave to the Library of Congress, to the Library of Virginia, the University of Virginia, and to his granddaughter. These ideas live on, and we still have not fulfilled them. We do not have religious freedom. We do not have the protections for women. We do not have the protections for envoys and ambassadors. The ideas live on, and the rulers do not live as the common people to eat the same food, wear the same clothes, sleep in the same, but not a bed in his case, but sleep in the same situation and simple home. No.
Lex Fridman (03:50:14) I have tremendous respect for leaders that live just as the people who they lead.
Lex Fridman (03:50:24) It’s mostly not done. But when it is, have just infinite respect for that. That is the way. What lessons can we learn from Genghis Khan that apply to the modern world? You’ve already said religious freedom, some of these ideas.
Jack Weatherford (03:50:42) Well, I think his policy ideas I think are important. We can still learn from that about protection of diplomats, not buying and selling women, not kidnapping women and having religious freedom of individuals. But also he had interesting things. He had tax-free status for all religions, all physicians and all teachers. They didn’t pay taxes in his Empire. As a former teacher, I embrace that idea out of pure greed and self-interest. But it’s not, to me, the idea of saving the money. It’s the idea of focusing on that as something important for the society. He didn’t say tax-free for any other category of people, as I recall, just for those. And he’s highlighting the health of the people, the education of the people, and the spirit of the people there spiritually. That’s very important. That’s a profound approach to life. And so these are policies, and I’m not advocating so much to policies, but I think some of the general principles of being willing to learn from our mistakes. Admit your mistake to yourself, correct it and go on with your life.
(03:51:59) All of us say it’s important, but we don’t do it for the most part. We don’t learn from our failures as much as we think. The other idea of promoting people on ability, I think that’s certainly an idea that is very valuable, not in the simple way of meritocracy that we’ve done it with. Oh, if you pass the exam with this score, you get this or that. But really evaluating people and their ability, I think it’s a very good thing. Not the only thing, but I think it’s very important. And even though he failed in the end in his own life, and he turned power over to his sons and his family, it’s a principle that he lived by most of his life, and we can learn from that principle. The other thing I think is just his global feel for the world. His global understanding. Here was a man who had had no education in any formal sense.
(03:52:55) And he had this sense that the world should be united. We should have things that unite all people. Everybody should have their own law, but there should be a higher law of heaven that governs people. And this later was translated, everybody should have their own language, but they all write the same alphabet by Kublai Khan. It didn’t work. Or his idea, he tried to impose the use of paper currency in Iran, the Persian Ilkhanate Chinese paper money. It didn’t work. The people there weren’t used to it but all this international spirit of their Empire, I think that we need today. We talk about, oh, globalization, we’re all connected, it’s just incredible. And we’re more provincial than ever. We are just so provincial, and sometimes we use all this technology to help preserve our provincialism. And we can’t think in global terms. We can’t think about the world. It’s just amazing to me how narrow-minded we are.
Lex Fridman (03:53:58) I also saw the Mongol proverb of, “If you’re afraid, don’t do it. If you do it, don’t be afraid.”
Lex Fridman (03:54:08) That you especially celebrate. There is something to that. In many ways, Genghis Khan is a representation of a person, of a self-made man. That person from nothing.
Lex Fridman (03:54:27) Willed an entire empire into existence.
Jack Weatherford (03:54:30) Yes. And everything against him that you can think of. Your own family deserting you, your father dying at an early age, all these things like that. But as Jamukha said, he had a good mother and he had a good wife. And there were many crucial points at which it was either his mother or his wife who made the deciding point. His wife, Borte was the one who caused the first break with Jamukha to go away. Later on when the shamans had become too powerful, and they had humiliated his younger brother, she was the one who said he had to clamp down on the shamans who were exercising too much power. And she guided him a lot.
Lex Fridman (03:55:23) It cannot be understated how important and critical women are in this story of the Mongol Empire.
Jack Weatherford (03:55:32) Yes. And sometimes because they’re not behind the scenes because they’re always out front. In the Mongol Court, they always sat up front. They were always out front. And this horrified the Chinese who were very good… It horrified the Muslims. It horrified the Christians. They didn’t know what to… They say, “The women even drink in public.” Okay, yeah, they drink in public. They do what? So sometimes it was like that, but other times it is with Toregene. She’s actually the ruler or the case of his daughters, such as Alaqa Beki, who ruled over a part of northern China called the Angut people, and other daughters who ruled over different… They ruled in their own names. And this is something about The Secret History that upset me. All the sections are numbered. I get to chapter or number or section 215, and there’s only half a sentence left.
(03:56:31) In 214, he’s just awarded a girl he calls his daughter, so she’s probably a clan daughter, but she lives with his mother at this point. His youngest son, Tolui, is only four years old. A tatar comes and Mother Hoelun gives him food because you food everybody. He realized this is the mother of Chinggis Khan, and that’s the child of Chinggis Khan. He grabs him up and kidnaps him and runs out, and he’s holding the child in one hand, and he’s pulling out a knife with another hand. Altani raced out and she grabbed his arm and held it down. And two men, Jebe and Jelme, they were back behind the ger, slaughtering an ox with an ax because you have to do it in the shade behind the ger. You don’t do it in the light. And so they were back there doing that. So they raced out with ax and they kill the man.
(03:57:20) And so then Chinggis Khan is rewarding everybody for all their great deeds. And Jelme and Jebe, they wanted to be rewarded for saving the life of Tolui. He said, “No, you killed a tatar. Altani saved his life because she held the hand that had the knife until you got there to kill him. She saved it, and now we reward her.” So he’s finished that story in 214. We get to 215. He says, “Now, let us reward our daughters.” It’s actually only a phrase. I said it as a complete sentence, but it’s not quite complete. The rest is gone, cut out. It’s missing. And I was just so…
Jack Weatherford (03:58:00) It’s missing. And I was just so … And I looked at all these different translations of how to different language, and most often they translate it as, and now let us marry our daughters. Oh, no. Oh, no. He was very clear in his wedding speeches to his daughters, “I give these people to you to rule. You have three husbands. You have your honor, you have your nation, and you have the man that I give to you, but the man I give to you goes in the army with me and brings his soldiers.”
Jack Weatherford (03:58:43) The Chinese, when they arrived in the court of Al Thani, they didn’t know what to think. There she is ruling this area of the Angut people and they said, “Well, she can read and write and she’s a supreme judge and she doesn’t allow any death sentence without her permission.” But they didn’t say which languages she could read and write. That has really puzzled me a lot.
Lex Fridman (03:59:04) So, you’re saying the secret history as we have gotten access to, has been edited to remove the significance of women even though they’re still there?
Jack Weatherford (03:59:17) In that case. I mean, other cases with his mother, they did not and all. But I think in that case, because what happened is most of these women had few offsprings because their husband was gone to war and Al Thani, of course, she married several times, sometimes sons of the last one. But they were going off to war and they weren’t reproducing there. Only one Checheyigen who was ruling in Siberia, she was the one who had a whole bunch of daughters. They wouldn’t be going off to war. And so, they actually spread out through the empire and had a lot of power later.
(03:59:53) But what happened was the area for Alakhai Bekhi, for example, was then taken over by Kublai Khan and then all the Turkey areas, one by one, were taken over by their nephews as they died out, not in their own lifetime, they didn’t kill the women off. But as they died out, the men took it over. And so, then they just wanted to erase it. It’s like, “No. Northern China, even though it was ruled by Sorghaghtani, it always was Mongol.” She was ruling because her husband was Mongol and her sons were Mongol. Therefore, they had the right to rule it. So, they cut out the women for those reasons.
(04:00:34) I think anytime it threatened the power of a particular man, then there are other little things that are added in there. Sometimes you can find a phrase and …
Jack Weatherford (04:00:44) That phrase was not in the original.
Human nature
Lex Fridman (04:00:46) Yeah. In studying human history, what have you learned about human nature and just the trajectory of humanity throughout the past several millennia?
Jack Weatherford (04:00:59) I tend to have a certain love for individuals and persons, but not a love for people, in general, and especially not for institutions. I tend to have a great suspicion about almost everything and mistrust in institutions over and over, and I think that’s my own prejudice, and then I find reasons to support that. And Genghis Khan was very good at destroying a lot of institutions or bringing them to heel within his empire. So, then I like that and I stress that and I see those things. I think that’s one thing.
(04:01:38) But other things that I learned from the Mongol people in general, not just about their history and all, but how it’s possible to live for thousands of years in a place that for many people it’s not the most beautiful in the world. It’s austere. You have a band of mountains and with some trees, and then big band of steppe and then a big band of sand, gravel, desert, the Gobi. And for many people, it’s not appealing. It’s just open. There’s too much space. It’s like we need to build something over here. Boy, you could have a condo right there. We could have a building and we could sell them off.
(04:02:15) They haven’t given into that. They really value their country. They protect their country. Even now, only 1% is privately owned. They keep it down. And Mongolian records, farm and city count is one category. Just it’s settled people. It doesn’t matter. You settle on a farm, you settle in a city, settled people, one category. And they lived there in this land that Genghis Khan would return to and love. If he returned to the capital city, he would not know where he was. He would have no idea. And all the people would just say, “Oh, big Mongolian.” “I’m Mongolian. Yeah. I’m Mongol. I have the hat. I have the belt buckle. I have all the deel that’s all embroidered. Yeah. I’m Mongol.”
(04:03:04) And Genghis Khan would say, “Where’s your horse?” “Oh, keep it in the countryside.” But he wouldn’t recognize the city. But it’s still his country, his people, they worship him in a literal sense, not the way we would worship God asking for favors, but in the sense of worshiping him with praise. They have so many songs to praise him. And about half of the hip-hop in the country is in praise of Genghis Khan. It’s something we can’t understand, because when we pray, we’re usually saying, “Oh, thank you God for this and that and the other, and you’re so wonderful and I love you, so would you please give me and would you please do this, and would you please stop this pain in my knee?” We’re asking for things all over the place. But Genghis Khan, no, no, no one ever asks for anything. They just honor him. They just praise him and honor him.
Visiting Mongolia
Lex Fridman (04:03:59) If I wanted to visit Mongolia, what would you recommend? What’s the right way?
Jack Weatherford (04:04:05) Well, start with my home. Let’s start there. You come over there. It’s a nice valley. I have a nice valley there. I think almost any direction you go outside of the city is going to be interesting. It depends a little bit on your purpose. Most people go south to the Gobi and they do a loop to the Gobi and around to Karakorum, Kharkhorin, the old capital from Ogedei Khan, but it was abandoned by Kublai Khan. And then they circle back to the city and they may stop off to see what we call Przewalski, the wild horse, but they call it Kaktakhi, to see the takhi. Or they may go up to Khovsgol Lake, a big beautiful lake, somewhat like Baikal, but much smaller.
(04:04:52) So, that’s a beautiful trip. If you want to see the more Turkic area where they hunt with eagles, the far west is where the Kazakh people live. And the mountains are absolutely incredibly beautiful. Most mountains in Mongolia are gentle, beautiful but gentle. The farther west you go, the more dramatic they become, the more pointed and peaked and snow covered. Then if you go to the Eastern Mongolia, it tends to be very flat. There are massive, massive flocks of cranes that come in every year, millions and millions of cranes. There are also tundra swans that come in and golden ducks and all kinds of beautiful birds out there. And so, each area has something special.
(04:05:38) If you want, particularly the history of Genghis Khan, the Mongolians love him, they worship him, but they don’t do too much to capitalize on his home area, the Khentii. You can go to the Khentii. There are areas you cannot go to. Large, large areas, it’s forbidden. But you can go. But they don’t capitalize like, “This is the place.” No. They go there themselves out of respect. But the only one place, they built this statue of him, which is the largest equestrian statue in the world, but it’s the place where they say he found his whip, which is when he was coming back from being at the camp of asking Orgal Khan or Toghrul Khan or Wang Khan to support him. And he’s coming back to his family and on the way, he supposedly found a whip there, which is just a small stick with a couple of strands of rawhide at the end of it that’s used.
(04:06:40) But for the Mongolians, it’s a symbolic thing. Because obviously, it’s used for a horse. But for the Mongols, your destiny, yourself is your Khiimori, your wind horse that lives inside of you, your wind horse that guides you and gives you opportunities. But it’s up to you to ride that wind horse. It’s up to you to use the wind horse, not to just go wild with the wind horse. And so, I think it’s at that crucial moment. He’s on his way back home to go with Jamukha and the other soldiers to the market to rescue Börte. And so, symbolically, he found a whip there. But I think it means that he found the way to control his destiny, his fate. It’s very important, very important.
Lex Fridman (04:07:36) And that he did, that was the beginning of everything.
Jack Weatherford (04:07:39) Yes. And it symbolized in that statue. Some people think that he’s holding this stick, that it’s baton or something like that. But no, it’s that what they call a whip or tashuur.
Lex Fridman (04:07:51) We’ve talked a lot about the past. If we look out into the future, what gives you hope for human civilization, for us humans?
Jack Weatherford (04:08:02) Well, almost every day I’m totally dissatisfied with everything on earth. It’s just that old man, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. What are they talking about? My grandchildren are talking to me. I don’t understand a word they say. What are they … What? And who are they talking about? I never heard of this. It’s like that. And who’s running for office? Oh, my God. Oh, my God. It’s everything like that.
(04:08:26) But then almost every day I meet somebody, just one person who gives you some hope. You just see somebody doing something nice or they do something nice for you. And I do find in Asia, that happens a lot, that people just do nice things for old people every day. And so, then my dissatisfaction with all the big things in the world and the way my grandchildren talk and the way young people are, and then I see something like that. And often, it’s something with the young people, something that the young people do.
(04:09:10) And in Asia, they’re always bringing me things. They bring me dried curds. They bring me strawberries that they picked in the forest in the summer, or they bring the pine nuts that they found, or they bring me the milk in various forms or yogurt. Oh, yeah. Everybody thinks “You got to eat the yogurt. This is from my grandmother and all the other yogurt in the world is not good but my grandmother. She knows how to make the best yogurt ever and all.” And so, over and over and over, I’d find despite my all intentions to be in a bad mood, somebody spoils you with these little nice acts that are really very touching, very touching.
Lex Fridman (04:10:00) Yeah. And it reminds you that there’s that little flame of goodness that burns in everybody. I believe that that on the whole will keep humanity flourishing and keep evolving and changing towards something better with every generation.
Jack Weatherford (04:10:17) Yes. The people in Mongolia take such good care of me all the time, all the time. And I think my wife had MS. I’ve talked about this before. Sometimes she had MS and slowly declined for many years, becoming paralyzed, not able to speak, not able to control her movements or anything. And we lived half the year still in Mongolia. Part of it was because the climate and the altitude were better for her situation. It was very helpful for her. But also, the people. There was a poor country. The sidewalks are broken, everything’s not working. But I would go out with her in a wheelchair alone, and I knew that every bump, some arm would pick her up and pick up the wheelchair and lift her over that and not make me do it.
(04:11:08) We could go to the opera and you had to go up this magnificent set of Soviet stairs to get to the opera. We would go and I had no worries. I knew two guys would come from one side, two guys from the other side. They would carry up and they do not say, “Excuse me. May I help you.” They do not wait for you to say thank you, nothing. They just do it and they walk away. They have such respect. Singers would come there all the time to sing, to warm up the house for my wife. And even dancers would come sometimes to dance or play the horse head fiddle, morin khuur, to play that, to warm up the house for her, to see how they treated a totally disabled person.
(04:11:53) And if I was feeding my wife and anyone, anybody saw it, they would come and immediately take over and start feeding her in their place. Children would come up to her. In America, they’re often afraid that she’s somebody in a wheelchair. They just look, they don’t know what to do. But over there, the children would always come to her, always. They were very kind. You just learn something about the people. And living there in a country where out in the countryside, you come to a gare, you never ask for permission to go in. You certainly don’t knock on the door frame. That’s no. That’s hugely offensive.
(04:12:29) And you ask, it’s like insulting the people like, “What? You’re not a hospital people. I have to ask you for something.” No. You walk in and you sit down and they fix food for you. It’s an incredible thing. And these are the things that give me hope. It’s no institution in the world, not the big things, and not the pop culture and not all the platitudes. Oh, my God. Save us from the platitudes of modern life.
Jack Weatherford (04:13:02) It’s the family that will fix tea for you in 2:00 in the morning because there was a flash flood and you got stuck and now you’re cold and wet and they build a fire and take care of you. Or you just show up and you make camp somewhere if you have your own tent. And I swear, within one hour some child is going to be there with water and milk. You think, “Where did you come from?” But the mother sends them over, “Oh, there’s somebody over there in the forest.” They believe that they’re obligated to take care of one another. Anybody in your area, you take care of them and things like that. Individuals do give me hope. People one-by-one or a few at a time, even though I’m lost in the modern world.
Lex Fridman (04:13:48) Well, I’m glad you find your way. You mentioned that your wife is no longer with us. What’s a favorite memory you have with her?
Jack Weatherford (04:14:03) Well, I could tell you a favorite picture is a lake we used to go to called Ogii nuur in the middle, and somebody, a very nice friend, took a picture of us towards the end, we’re just sitting there watching the sunset over the lake that we’ve been to many, many times in life. And we’re holding hands. She’s in the chair paralyzed, and we’re just sitting there staring off in the distance. And that’s one of my favorites. But with my wife, I was just blessed with a good wife that was exciting. She was the most beautiful woman I had ever met my whole life. She was smart. She would talk to people about anything. She talked about jazz or physics or art.
(04:14:53) I mean, my life is so small and narrow. But my wife, she’s the one who gave me a life. The truth is a very odd, people don’t believe sometimes, I failed English in college. I barely got in college. Nobody in my family. I’d grown up with my grandparents, mostly the countryside, and they had third grade education. My father had seventh grade. I went to live with him after the grandparents died and my mother. There was no big education there in the family. But I somehow got to college. My father told me to go. He didn’t want me to go to the war in Vietnam, so he volunteered to go because there was the rule that they couldn’t send two people from one family against their will. That was mainly designed to protect brothers, but he could go as the father and then I could go to college.
(04:15:43) So, I got to college and I can’t say, “Oh, I was drinking and having a party and not serious.” No. I was trying like hell to pass that course. I failed English. I failed it. And this was just a huge shame to me. In fact, after one year I was put on probation to be kicked out of the school. My grades were so low, overall. And then, so it took me a long time to confess this to my wife after we met. I met her. I’d briefly had known her in high school, but just not well or anything. But anyway, we met later and I told her, and she just looked at me. She said, “What does a professor know? It’s just a professor. You can write anything you want.”
(04:16:26) And she had the power to make me believe everything. She said, I don’t care what she said, I would believe it. I would say, “Yeah. That’s right. That’s just a professor. Yeah.” And she inspired me. But she supported me all the way through graduate school. She was taking some courses of her own and she was doing graduate work. But she inspired me. But she told me … I said, “I want to write for more people than just for other scholars. I’ve done this dissertation, a PhD, and it’s just dry as the Gobi Desert, and I didn’t know what to do.”
(04:17:05) And she said, “Just tell the story to me, but I can’t see you while you tell it. You’re on the radio and I’m listening in my car driving somewhere. Just tell the story to me.” And to this day, almost every word I write as always just tell the story to her the way that she would like it. And I always read the books to her even she couldn’t comprehend too much, but she just loved hearing the book, because it was mine.
(04:17:40) And in the last years of her life, I gave up the teaching and we went back to our original home in South Carolina and I said, “Okay. We’re just going to live here and watch the ocean and do things like that and just be worthless teenagers.” And my wife used to have episodes of clarity. I have no idea what would cost. It might be two hours. It might be seven or eight hours. And we would talk a lot. And so, one time she said to me, she said, “This disease is going to take my life, but it’s taking your life.” She said, “You gave up teaching and you gave up writing.” And she said, “How do you expect me to die in peace if I know that you gave up everything to this disease?”
(04:18:36) She said, “You should write.” And so, every single day we sat together by the water, I mean by the window. I moved it into the dining room overlooking the water. We sat there at the desk and she sat in her wheelchair next to me. And sometimes we would play a little soft music in the background a little bit. And for the most part, she couldn’t talk. But she liked to just sit there beside me working. And she knew that she was inspiration. She knew. She was the battery that kept me going. How on earth I ever had a wife like that? I don’t know.
Jack Weatherford (04:19:21) I just hit the jackpot with her. And I see so many people that get by and they even like each other or they’re friends or something. But in my life, there was one person. I love my children. I still do. I love my grandchildren even I don’t understand them.
Jack Weatherford (04:19:42) But there’s one person in my life, and that was my wife for 44 years, and her funeral was on our anniversary. That’s just the way life works out. But I was very lucky, very lucky.
Lex Fridman (04:19:58) If the two of you lived and met a few centuries ago, I might be reading a history book about you conquering.
Jack Weatherford (04:20:17) She was too busy enjoying the world. And in her final, I could not ask her questions and I would not say, “Oh, you remember that” … No, I never would say that, because I knew she could remember. But when she was being restless or something in the night or I used to recite scenes from our life and just give the scene without saying, “Do you remember?” But the last night, I certainly didn’t know that she was going, but it was a rough night.
(04:20:47) And we went back to the first night that we had in Moscow. We came in December in the winter, and the snow was so beautiful and white and the yellow lights shining on it. And then the most beautiful night we went to the Bolshoi and she had this elegant blue wool coat from her grandmother from the 1920s with a huge, so ironic, it was a blue wolf, but it’s gray blue, like the Mongol has a gray blue collar, this huge collar. She just looked like a movie star from the ’20s or something.
(04:21:32) And we went to see Maya Plisetskaya, and it was one of the most beautiful nights. But her last night, I told her that story again, of all the details, I’d gone through it many times with her coat from her grandmother whom she loved very much, and the snow and the yellow lights, and we arrived at night because of course the flight was late. And then the next night going to the Bolshoi and all those beautiful things from Russia, that was it. She was an inspiration. I have many, many nights or many days of great memories.
Lex Fridman (04:22:13) You’re going to make me cry, Jack.
Lex Fridman (04:22:16) That was beautiful. You’re a beautiful human being. It’s really an honor to talk to you. This was such a fascinating journey through human history about one of the most impactful humans in human history.
Jack Weatherford (04:22:30) Well, I thank you very much. And the amount of research, when I realized how much research you had done, I felt like you’re going to know things I don’t know, and you’re going to trick me and pull something out, and I’m going to be shamed in front of the whole world.
Lex Fridman (04:22:44) There’s only one piece of research left is me going to Mongolia and riding there on the steppe, that would be incredible.
Lex Fridman (04:22:58) Thanks for listening to this conversation with Jack Weatherford. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description and consider subscribing to this channel. And now, let me answer some questions and try to articulate some things I’ve been thinking about. If you’d like to submit questions including in audio and video form, go to lexfridman.com/ama. Or if you want to contact me for other reasons, go to lexfridman.com/contact.
Lex: Dan Carlin
(04:23:27) And now, allow me to make a few comments on the ever-evolving moral landscape of human civilization throughout our 10,000-year history. I was listening to Dan Carlin’s excellent eye-opening five-and-a-half-hour episode of Hardcore History titled Human Resources. It covered the topic of slavery, the Atlantic slave trade to be exact. One of the lessons I took from this episode is that the long arc of history is full of atrocities, as we modern-day humans understand them with the wisdom of time and moral progress.
(04:24:03) But during each period of history, as Dan documents, it was difficult for the majority of people to see just where the line between good and evil is. We humans, after all, forever like to weave a story in which we are the good guys. Listening to Dan discuss, and later myself, reading first-hand accounts of slaves, of torture, of rape, of separation of families is incomprehensibly heartbreaking.
(04:24:32) By the way in this topic, first-hand accounts of slavery could be read in Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from interviews with former slaves. I can recommend the book that I’ve been reading, which is Voices from Slavery: 100 Authentic Slave Narratives. It all seems deeply and obviously wrong by today’s standards. But slavery was seen as normal through most of human history. Thomas Jefferson, the man who wrote, “All men are created equal,” which I think is one of the most powerful lines in all of human history. He himself was a slave owner, making him a fascinating case study of contradictions.
(04:25:14) In fact, there’s evidence that Thomas Jefferson drew from Genghis Khan’s ideas about the importance of religious freedom, pulling as he did foundational ideas of human freedom from the jaws of deep history. And Dan, in his episode, documents these contradictions and complexities quite well. The full range of human psychology involved, including how violations of basic human rights breed generational hatred. This I think is an important lesson to understand.
(04:25:45) The consequences of our moral failings can reverberate through decades, even centuries, and that is perhaps one of the values of studying history. It is laden with atrocities, but it also contains people who, while flawed, dare to rise in some way above the moral decrepitude of the day to try to build a foundation of a slightly better future world. As MLK Jr. put it, “The arc of moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”
Lex: Gaza
(04:26:18) And now, please allow me to say a few words about Gaza, Israel and Palestine. I’m not sure I’m eloquent enough or know quite the right words to express what I’m feeling. But let me try. I think what is happening in Gaza is an atrocity, and I think that the Israeli government is directly responsible for it. And to the degree the US government is assisting the Israeli government in this, which I believe it currently is. It needs to stop immediately. For me as an American makes me sick to know that my government has any role in this atrocity. This needs to stop.
(04:27:04) Yes. There’s geopolitical and military complexity, nuance, and historical context that I’m told by some so-called experts that one must understand. And perhaps they are smarter than me. But like mentioned before, unlike the more complexity of deep history that I’ve often spoken about from the Roman Empire to the Atlantic slave trade, this is the 21st century. This is today. In this, the 21st century, I see things quite simply and clearly.
(04:27:39) To me, the death of a child is a tragedy. It doesn’t matter what their skin color is, what their religion is, or what plot of land they call home. In my view, they are all equal, and the death of each child is a tragedy. Hamas did a definitively evil act on October 7th, brutally murdering over 1,000 civilians. But now, the acts of war conducted by the Israeli government have led to the death of over 60,000 people in Gaza, likely over 80,000 people, of which at least 17,000 are children, 17,000. I’m not smart enough to know the path to peace and flourishing of all the peoples in the region. But I do know that what has been happening in Gaza cannot be the way.
(04:28:41) Suffering at this kind of scale breeds generational hate that leads to more evil in the world, not less, to more destruction, to more suffering. This has to stop. Two years ago, I spoke with many Palestinians in the West Bank on camera and off. There’s a video of it up if you want to hear their voices for yourselves. It was a deeply moving experience for me, and I’m grateful for it. In the future, I hope to find a way to talk to people in Gaza. I still think it’s valuable to talk to leaders, historians, soldiers, activists from all perspectives.
(04:29:25) But the most powerful and moving conversations for me on mic and off have always been with everyday people. This always felt like where the truth is, the deeper truth of life, of pain, fear, of hope, and I still have hope. I believe we humans are good at the core, and I know we’ll find our way. Thank you for listening. I love you all.
This is a transcript of Lex Fridman Podcast #475 with Demis Hassabis.
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Lex Fridman (00:00:00) It’s hard for us humans to make any kind of clean predictions about highly nonlinear dynamical systems. But again, to your point, we might be very surprised what classical learning systems might be able to do about even fluid.
Demis Hassabis (00:00:12) Yes, exactly. I mean, fluid dynamics, Navier-Stokes equations, these are traditionally thought of as very, very difficult intractable problems to do on classical systems. They take enormous amounts of compute, weather prediction systems. These kinds of things all involve fluid dynamics calculations.
(00:00:27) But again, if you look at something like Veo, our video generation model, it can model liquids quite well, surprisingly well. And materials, specular lighting, I love the ones where there’s people who generate videos where there’s clear liquids going through hydraulic presses and then it’s being squeezed out. I used to write physics engines and graphics engines in my early days in gaming, and I know it’s just so painstakingly hard to build programs that can do that. And yet somehow these systems are reverse engineering from just watching YouTube videos. So presumably what’s happening is it’s extracting some underlying structure around how these materials behave. So perhaps there is some kind of lower dimensional manifold that can be learned if we actually fully understood what’s going on under the hood. That’s maybe true of most of reality.
Introduction
Lex Fridman (00:01:22) The following is a conversation with Demis Hassabis, his second time on the podcast. He is the leader of Google DeepMind and is now a Nobel Prize winner. Demis is one of the most brilliant and fascinating minds in the world today working on understanding and building intelligence and exploring the big mysteries of our universe. This was truly an honor and a pleasure for me.
(00:01:51) This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description and consider subscribing to this channel. And now, dear friends, here’s Demis Hassabis.
Learnable patterns in nature
Lex Fridman (00:02:06) In your Nobel Prize lecture, you propose what I think is a super interesting conjecture that “any pattern that can be generated or found in nature can be efficiently discovered and modeled by a classical learning algorithm.” What kind of patterns or systems might be included in that? Biology, chemistry, physics, maybe cosmology, neuroscience? What are we talking about?
Demis Hassabis (00:02:32) Sure. Well, look, I felt that it’s sort of a tradition, I think, of Nobel Prize lectures that you’re supposed to be a little bit provocative and I wanted to follow that tradition. What I was talking about there is if you take a step back and you look at all the work that we’ve done, especially with the Alpha X projects, so I’m thinking AlphaGo, of course, AlphaFold, what they really are is we are building models of very combinatorially, high dimensional spaces that if you try to brute force a solution, find the best move and go, or find the exact shape of a protein, and if you enumerated all the possibilities, there wouldn’t be enough time in the time of the universe.
(00:03:08) So you have to do something much smarter. And what we did in both cases was build models of those environments and that guided the search in a smart way and that makes it tractable. So if you think about protein folding, which is obviously a natural system, why should that be possible? How does physics do that? Proteins fold in milliseconds in our bodies, so somehow physics solves this problem that we’ve now also solved computationally. And I think the reason that’s possible is that in nature, natural systems have structure because they were subject to evolutionary processes that shape them. And if that’s true, then you can maybe learn what that structure is.
Lex Fridman (00:03:49) This perspective I think is a really interesting one. You’ve hinted it at it, which is almost like crudely stated, anything that can be evolved can be efficiently modeled. Think there’s some truth to that?
Demis Hassabis (00:04:03) Yeah. I sometimes call it survival of the stablest or something like that because of course there’s evolution for life, living things, but there’s also, if you think about geological times, so the shape of mountains, that’s been shaped by weathering processes over thousands of years, but then you can even take it cosmological, the orbits of planets, the shapes of asteroids. These have all been survived kind of processes that have acted on them many, many times.
(00:04:31) If that’s true, then there should be some sort of pattern that you can kind of reverse learn and a kind of manifold really that helps you search to the right solution, to the right shape and actually allow you to predict things about it in an efficient way because it’s not a random pattern. So it may not be possible for man-made things or abstract things like factorizing large numbers because unless there’s patterns in the number space, which there might be, but if there’s not and it’s uniform, then there’s no pattern to learn, there’s no model to learn that will help you search. So you have to do brute force. So in that case you maybe need a quantum computer, something like this. But in most things in nature that we’re interested in are not like that. They have structure that evolved for a reason and survived over time. And if that’s true, I think that’s potentially learnable by a neural network.
Lex Fridman (00:05:21) It’s like nature is doing a search process and it’s so fascinating that in that search process, it’s creating systems that could be efficiently modeled.
Demis Hassabis (00:05:33) So they can be efficiently rediscovered or recovered because nature’s not random. Everything that we see around us, including the elements that are more stable, all of those things, they’re subject to some kind of selection process pressure.
Computation and P vs NP
Lex Fridman (00:05:47) Do you think because you’re also a fan of theoretical computer science and complexity, do you think we can come up with a complexity class, like a complexity zoo type of class where maybe it’s the set of learnable systems, the set of learnable natural systems, LNS. This is a Demis Hassabis new class of systems that could be actually learnable by classical systems in this kind of way, natural systems that can be modeled efficiently.
Demis Hassabis (00:06:17) Yeah, I mean I’ve always been fascinated by the P equals NP question and what is model-able by classical systems, i.e. non-quantum systems, Turing machines in effect. And that’s exactly what I’m working on actually in my few moments of spare time with a few colleagues about should there be maybe a new class or problem that is solvable by this type of neural network process and kind of mapped onto these natural systems, so the things that exist in physics and have structure. So I think that could be a very interesting new way of thinking about it. And it sort of fits with the way I think about physics in general, which is that I think information is primary, information is the most sort of fundamental unit of the universe, more fundamental than energy and matter. I think they can all be converted into each other, but I think of the universe as a kind of informational system.
Lex Fridman (00:07:07) So when you think of the universe as an informational system, then the P equals NP question is a physics question.
Lex Fridman (00:07:15) And is a question that can help us actually solve the entirety of this whole thing going on.
Demis Hassabis (00:07:20) Yeah, I think it’s one of the most fundamental questions actually if you think of physics as informational and the answer to that, I think it’s going to be very enlightening.
Lex Fridman (00:07:29) More specific to the P and MP question, again, some of the stuff we’re saying is kind of crazy right now just like the Christian Anfinsen Nobel Prize speech, controversial thing that he said sounded crazy and then you went and got a Nobel Prize for this with John Jumper, solved the problem. So let me just stick to the P equals NP. Do you think there’s something in this thing we’re talking about that could be shown if you can do something like a polynomial time or constant time compute ahead of time and construct this gigantic model, then you can solve some of these extremely difficult problems in a theoretical computer science kind of way?
Demis Hassabis (00:08:12) Yeah, I think that there are actually a huge class of problems that could be couched in this way, the way we did AlphaGo and the way we did AlphaFold, where you model what the dynamics of the system is, the properties of that system, the environment that you are trying to understand, and then that makes the search for the solution or the prediction of the next step efficient. Basically polynomial times, so tractable by a classical system, which a neural network is. It runs on normal computers, right? Classical computers, Turing machines in effect. And I think it’s one of the most interesting questions there is, is how far can that paradigm go?
(00:08:53) I think we’ve proven, and the AI community in general that classical systems, Turing machines can go a lot further than we previously thought. They can do things like model the structures of proteins and play go to better than world champion level. And a lot of people would’ve thought maybe 10, 20 years ago that was decades away, or maybe you would need some sort of quantum machines to quantum systems to be able to do things like protein folding. And so I think we haven’t really even sort of scratched the surface yet of what classical systems so-called could do.
(00:09:28) And of course, AGI being built on a neural network system on top of a neural network system on top of a classical computer would be the ultimate expression of that. And I think the limit, what the bounds of that kind of system, what it can do, it’s a very interesting question and directly speaks to the P equals NP question.
Lex Fridman (00:09:47) What do you think, again, hypothetical, might be outside of this? Maybe emergent phenomena? If you look at cellular automata, you have extremely simple systems and then some complexity emerges. Maybe that would be outside or even would you guess even that might be amenable to efficient modeling by a classical machine?
Demis Hassabis (00:10:09) Yeah, I think those systems would be right on the boundary. So I think most emergent systems, cellular automata, things like that could be model-able by a classical system. You just sort of do a forward simulation of it and it’d probably be efficient enough. Of course there’s the question of things like chaotic systems where the initial conditions really matter and then you get to some uncorrelated end state. Now those could be difficult to model. So I think these are kind of the open questions, but I think when you step back and look at what we’ve done with the systems and the problems that we’ve solved, and then you look at things like Veo 3 on video generation sort of rendering physics and lighting and things like that, really core fundamental things in physics, it’s pretty interesting. I think it’s telling us something quite fundamental about how the universe is structured in my opinion. So in a way that’s what I want to build AGI for is to help us as scientists answer these questions like P equals NP.
Lex Fridman (00:11:09) Yeah, I think we might be continuously surprised about what is model-able by classical computers. I mean AlphaFold 3 on the interaction side is surprising that you can make any kind of progress on that direction. AlphaGenome is surprising that you can map the genetic code to the function. Kind of playing with the emergent kind of phenomena, you think there’s so many combinatorial options and then here you go, you can find the kernel that is efficiently model-able.
Demis Hassabis (00:11:36) Yes, because there’s some structure, there’s some landscape in the energy landscape or whatever it is that you can follow, some gradient you can follow. And of course what neural networks are very good at is following gradients. And so if there’s one to follow and you can specify the objective function correctly, you don’t have to deal with all that complexity, which I think is how we maybe have naively thought about it for decades, those problems. If you just enumerate all the possibilities, it looks totally intractable and there’s many, many problems like that.
(00:12:06) And then you think, “Well, it’s like 10 to 300 possible protein structures, 10 to the 170 possible go positions. All of these are way more than atoms in the universe, so how could one possibly find the right solution or predict the next step?” But it turns out that it is possible. And of course reality in nature does do it. Proteins do fold. So that gives you confidence that there must be, if we understood how physics was doing that in a sense and we could mimic that process, i.e. model that process, it should be possible on our classical systems is basically what the conjecture is about.
Lex Fridman (00:12:44) And of course there’s nonlinear dynamical systems, highly nonlinear dynamical systems, everything involving fluid. I recently had a conversation with Terence Tao who mathematically contends with a very difficult aspect of systems that have some singularities in them that break the mathematics, and it’s just hard for us humans to make any kind of clean predictions about highly nonlinear dynamical systems. But again, to your point, we might be very surprised what classical learning systems might be able to do about even fluid.
Demis Hassabis (00:13:16) Yes, exactly. I mean fluid dynamics, Navier-Stokes equations, these are traditionally thought of as very, very difficult, intractable kind of problems to do on classical systems. They take enormous amounts of compute, weather prediction systems. These kind of things all involve fluid dynamics calculations. But again, if you look at something like Veo, our video generation model, it can model liquids quite well, surprisingly well. And materials, specular lighting, I love the ones where there’s people who generate videos where there’s clear liquids going through hydraulic presses and then it’s being squeezed out. I used to write physics engines and graphics engines in my early days in gaming, and I know it’s just so painstakingly hard to build programs that can do that. And yet somehow these systems are reverse engineering from just watching YouTube videos. So presumably what’s happening is it’s extracting some underlying structure around how these materials behave. So perhaps there is some kind of lower dimensional manifold that can be learned if we actually fully understood what’s going on under the hood. That’s maybe true of most of reality.
Veo 3 and understanding reality
Lex Fridman (00:14:26) Yeah, I’ve been continuously precisely by this aspect of Veo 3. I think a lot of people highlight different aspects including the comedic and the mean and all that kind of stuff. And then the ultra realistic ability to capture humans in a really nice way that’s compelling and feels close to reality, and then combine that with native audio. All of those are marvelous things about Veo 3, but exactly the thing you’re mentioning, which is the physics.
Lex Fridman (00:14:53) It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty damn good. And then the really interesting scientific question is what is it understanding about our world in order to be able to do that? Because if the cynical, take with diffusion models, there’s no way to understands anything. But I don’t think you can generate that kind of video without understanding. And then our own philosophical notion of what it means to understand then is brought to the surface. To what degree do you think Veo 3 understands our world?
Demis Hassabis (00:15:25) I think to the extent that it can predict the next frames in a coherent way, that is a form of understanding, not in the anthropomorphic version of, it’s not some kind of deep philosophical understanding of what’s going on, I don’t think these systems have that, but they certainly have modeled enough of the dynamics, put it that way, that they can pretty accurately generate whatever it is, eight seconds of consistent video that by eye, at least at a glance, is quite hard to distinguish what the issues are.
(00:15:57) And imagine that in two or three more years’ time, that’s the thing I’m thinking about and how incredible that will look given where we’ve come from the early versions of that one or two years ago. And so the rate of progress is incredible. And I think I’m like you is like a lot of people love all of the stand-up comedians and that actually captures a lot of human dynamics very well and body language, but actually the thing I’m most impressed with and fascinated by is the physics behavior, the lighting and materials and liquids. And it’s pretty amazing that it can do that. And I think that shows that it has some notion of at least intuitive physics, how things are supposed to work intuitively, maybe the way that a human child would understand physics, right, as opposed to a PhD student really being able to unpack all the equations. It’s more of an intuitive physics understanding.
Lex Fridman (00:16:53) Well, that intuitive physics understanding, that’s the base layer, that’s the thing people sometimes call a common-sense. It really understands something. I think that really surprised a lot of people. It blows my mind that I just didn’t think it would be possible to generate that level of realism without understanding. There’s this notion that you can only understand the physical world by having an embodied AI system, a robot that interacts with that world. That’s the only way to construct an understanding of that world. But Veo 3 is directly challenging that it feels like.
Demis Hassabis (00:17:27) Yes, and it’s very interesting, even if you were to ask me five, 10 years ago, I would’ve said, even though I was immersed in all of this, I would’ve said, “Well, yeah, you probably need to understand intuitive physics. If I push this off the table, this glass, it will maybe shatter and the liquid will spill out. So we know all of these things.” But I thought that, and there’s a lot of theories in neuroscience, it’s called action in perception where you need to act in the world to really, truly perceive it in a deep way. And there was a lot of theories about you’d need embodied intelligence or robotics or something, or maybe at least simulated action so that you would understand things like intuitive physics.
(00:18:06) But it seems like you can understand it through passive observation, which is pretty surprising to me. And again, I think hints at something underlying about the nature of reality in my opinion, beyond just the cool videos that it generates. And of course there’s next stages is maybe even making those videos interactive so one can actually step into them and move around them, which would be really mind-blowing, especially given my games background. So you can imagine. And then I think we’re starting to get towards what I would call a world model, a model of how the world works, the mechanics of the world, the physics of the world, and the things in that world. And of course that’s what you would need for a true AGI system.
Video games
Lex Fridman (00:18:50) I have to talk to you about video games. So you are being a bit trolley. I think you’re having more and more fun on Twitter, on X, which is great to see. So a guy named Jimmy Apples tweeted, “Let me play a video game of my Veo 3 videos already. Google cooked so good. Playable world models wen?” And then you co-tweeted that with, “Now, wouldn’t that be something?” So how hard is it to build game worlds with AI? Maybe can you look out into the future feature of video games five, 10 years out? What do you think that looks like?
Demis Hassabis (00:19:27) Well, games were my first love really. And doing AI for games was the first thing I did professionally in my teenage years and with the first major AI systems that I built and I always want to scratch that itch one day and come back to that. And I will do, I think, and I think I sort of dream about what would I have done back in the nineties if I’d had access to the kind of AI systems we have today? And I think you could build absolutely mind-blowing games.
(00:19:55) And I think the next stage is I always used to love making, all the games I’ve made are open world games, so they’re games where there’s a simulation and then there’s AI characters, and then the player interacts with that simulation and the simulation adapts to the way the player plays. And I always thought they were the coolest games because, so games like Theme Park that I worked on where everybody’s game experience would be unique to them because you’re kind of co-creating the game. We set up the parameters, we set up initial conditions, and then you as the player immersed in it, and then you are co-creating it with the simulation. But of course it’s very hard to program open world games. You’ve got to be able to create content whichever direction the player goes in, and you want it to be compelling no matter what the player chooses. And so it was always quite difficult to build things like cellular automata actually, type of those kind of classical systems, which created some emergent behavior, but they’re always a little bit fragile, a little bit limited. Now we are maybe on the cusp in the next few years, five, 10 years of having AI systems that can truly create around your imagination, can dynamically change the story and storytell the narrative around and make it dramatic no matter what you end up choosing. So it’s like the ultimate choose your own adventure sort of game. And I think maybe we are within reach, if you think of a kind of interactive version of Veo and then wind that forward five to 10 years and imagine how good it’s going to be.
Lex Fridman (00:21:24) Yeah. So you said a lot of super interesting stuff there. So one, the open world, built into that is a deep personalization the way you’ve described it. So it’s not just that it’s open world, that you can open any door and there’ll be something there, it’s that it’s the choice of which door you open in an unconstrained way defines the worlds you see. So some games try to do that, they give you choice, but it’s really just an illusion of choice because you only, like Stanley Parable, a game I actually played, it’s really, there’s a couple of doors and it really just takes you down a narrative. Stanley Parable is a great video game. I recommend people play it, that in a meta way, mocks the illusion of choice, and there’s philosophical notions of free will and so on.
(00:22:12) But I do, one of my favorite games of Elder Scrolls is Daggerfall I believe, that they really played with a random generation of the dungeons of if you can step in and they give you this feeling of an open world. And there you mentioned interactivity. You don’t need to interact. That’s the first step because you don’t need to interact that much. You just, when you open the door, whatever you see is randomly generated for you. And that’s already an incredible experience because you might be the only person to ever see that.
Demis Hassabis (00:22:46) Yeah, exactly. But what you’d like is a little bit better than just sort of a random generation. So you’d like, and also better than a simple AB hard coded choice, right? That’s not really open world, as you say. It’s just giving you the illusion of choice. What you want to be able to do is potentially anything in that game environment. And I think the only way you can do that is to have generated systems, systems that will generate that on the fly. Of course, you can’t create infinite amounts of game assets. It’s expensive enough already how AAA games are made today. And that was obvious to us back in the nineties when I was working on all these games.
(00:23:25) I think maybe Black & White was the game that I worked on early stages of that, that had still probably the best AI, learning AI, in it. It was an early reinforcement learning system that you were looking after this mythical creature and growing it and nurturing it. And depending how you treated it, it would treat the villagers in that world the same way. So if you were mean to it, it would be mean. If you were good, it would be protective. And so it was really a reflection of the way you played it. So actually all of the, I’ve been working on simulations and AI through the medium of games at the beginning of my career, and really the whole of what I do today, it’s still a follow on from those early more hard coded ways of doing the AI to now fully general learning systems that are trying to achieve the same thing.
Lex Fridman (00:24:12) Yeah, it is been interesting, hilarious, and fun to watch you and Elon obviously itching to create games because you’re both gamers. And one of the sad aspects of your incredible success in so many domains of science, like serious adult stuff, that you might not have time to really create a game, you might end up creating the tooling that others will create the game. You have to watch others create the thing you’ve always dreamed of. Do you think it’s possible you can somehow in your extremely busy schedule actually find time to create something like Black & White, an actual video game where you could make the childhood dream become reality?
Demis Hassabis (00:24:58) Well, there’s two things where I think about that is maybe with vibe coding as it gets better and there’s a possibility that I could, one could do that actually in your spare time. So I’m quite excited about that as that would be my project if I got the time to do some vibe coding. I’m actually itching to do that. And then the other thing is maybe it’s a sabbatical after AGI has been safely stewarded into the world and delivered into the world. That, and then working on my physics theory as we talked about at the beginning, those would be my two post-AGI projects, let’s call it that way.
Lex Fridman (00:25:28) I would love to see which you choose, solving the problem that some of the smartest people in human history contended with, P equals NP, or creating a cool video game.
Demis Hassabis (00:25:44) But in my world, they’d be related because it would be an open world simulated game as realistic as possible. So what is the universe? That’s speaking to the same question and P equals NP. I think all these things are related, at least in my mind.
Lex Fridman (00:25:59) I mean in a really serious way, video games sometimes are looked down upon as just this fun side activity. But especially as AI does more and more of the difficult, boring tasks, something we in modern world called work, video games is the thing in which we may find meaning, in which we may find what to do with our time. You could create incredibly rich, meaningful experiences. That’s what human life is. And then in video games, you can create more sophisticated, more diverse ways of living. Right? That’s the point?
Demis Hassabis (00:26:41) I think so. I mean, those of us who love games and I still do is it’s almost can let your imagination run wild, right? I used to love games and working on games so much because it’s the fusion, especially in the nineties and early two thousands, the sort of golden era and maybe the eighties of the games industry. And it was all being discovered. New genres were being discovered. We weren’t just making games, we felt we were creating a new entertainment medium that never existed before. Especially with these open world games and simulation games where you, as the player, were co-creating the story. There’s no other media, entertainment media, where you do that, where you as the audience actually co-create the story.
(00:27:23) And of course now with multiplayer games as well, it can be a very social activity and can explore all kinds of interesting worlds in that. But on the other hand, it’s very important to also enjoy and experience the physical world. But the question is then I think we’re going to have to confront the question again of what is the fundamental nature of reality? What is going to be the difference between these increasingly realistic simulations and multiplayer ones and emergent and what we do in the real world?
Lex Fridman (00:27:55) Yeah, there’s clearly a huge amount of value to experiencing the real world, nature. There’s also a huge amount of value in experiencing other humans directly in person the way we’re sitting here today, but we need to really scientifically rigorously answer the question why and which aspect of that can be mapped into the virtual world.
Lex Fridman (00:28:18) It’s not enough to say, “Yeah, you should go touch grass and hang out in nature.” It’s like why exactly is that valuable?
Demis Hassabis (00:28:25) Yes. And I guess that’s maybe the thing that’s been haunting me or obsessing me from the beginning of my career. If you think about all the different things I’ve done, they’re all related in that way. The simulation, nature of reality, and what is the bounds of what can be modeled.
Lex Fridman (00:28:40) Sorry for the ridiculous question, but so far, what is the greatest video game of all time? What’s up there?
Demis Hassabis (00:28:45) Well, my favorite one of all time is Civilization, I have to say. That was the Civilization I and Civilization II, my favorite games of all time.
Lex Fridman (00:28:54) I can only assume you’ve avoided the most recent one because it would probably, that would be your sabbatical. You would disappear.
Demis Hassabis (00:29:03) Yes, exactly. They take a lot of time, these Civilization games, so I’ve got to be careful with them.
Lex Fridman (00:29:08) Fun question. You and Elon seem to be somehow solid gamers. Is there a connection between being great at gaming and being great leaders of AI companies?
Demis Hassabis (00:29:20) I don’t know. It’s an interesting one. I mean, we both love games and it’s interesting, he wrote games as well to start off with. Probably, especially in the era I grew up in where home computers just became a thing in the late eighties and nineties, especially in the UK, I had a spectrum and then a Commodore Amiga 500, which was my favorite computer ever. And that’s why I learned all my programming. And of course, it’s a very fun thing to program, is to program games. So I think it’s a great way to learn programming, probably still is. And then of course, I immediately took it in directions of AI and simulations, so I was able to express my interest in games and my wider scientific interests all together.
Demis Hassabis (00:30:00) And my sort of wider scientific interests all together. And then the final thing I think that’s great about games is it fuses artistic design, art, with the most cutting edge programming. So again, in the nineties, all of the most interesting technical advances were happening in gaming, whether that was AI, graphics, physics engines, hardware, even GPUs of course were designed for gaming originally. So everything that was pushing computing forward in the nineties was due to gaming. So interestingly, that was where the forefront of research was going on and it was this incredible fusion with art. Graphics, but also music, and just the whole new media of storytelling. And I love that. For me, it’s this sort of multidisciplinary kind of effort is again something I’ve enjoyed my whole life.
AlphaEvolve
Lex Fridman (00:30:52) I have to ask you, I almost forgot about one of the many, and I would say one of the most incredible things recently that somehow didn’t yet get enough attention is AlphaEvolve. We talked about Evolution a little bit, but it’s the Google DeepMind system that evolves algorithms. Are these kinds of Evolution-like techniques promising as a component of future super intelligence systems? So for people who don’t know, it’s kind of, I don’t know if it’s fair to say it’s LLM guided Evolution search because Evolution algorithms are doing the search and LLMs are telling you where.
Demis Hassabis (00:31:28) Yes. Yes, exactly. So LLMs are kind of proposing some possible solutions and then you use evolutionary computing on top to find some novel part of the search space. So actually I think it’s an example of very promising directions where you combine LLMs or foundation models with other computational techniques. Evolutionary methods is one, but you could also imagine Monte Carlo tree search. Basically many types of search algorithms or reasoning algorithms sort of on top of or using the foundation models as a basis. So I actually think there’s quite a lot of interesting things to be discovered probably with these sort of hybrid systems, let’s call them.
Lex Fridman (00:32:10) But not to romanticize Evolution.
Lex Fridman (00:32:12) I’m only human, but you think there’s some value in whatever that mechanism is? Because we already talked about natural systems. Do you think where there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit of us understanding, being able to model, being able to simulate Evolution and then using that, whatever we understand about that nature-inspired mechanism, to then do search better and better and better?
Demis Hassabis (00:32:36) Yes. So if you think about, again, breaking down the solar systems we’ve built to their really fundamental core, you’ve got the model of the underlying dynamics of the system. And then if you want to discover something new, something novel that hasn’t been seen before, then you need some kind of search process on top to take you to a novel of the search space. And you can do that in a number of ways. Evolutionary computing is one. With AlphaGo, we just use Monte Carlo Tree Search and that’s what found move 37, the new never seen before strategy in Go. And so that’s how you can go beyond potentially what is already known. So the model can model everything that you currently know about, all the data that you currently have. But then how do you go beyond that? So that starts to speak about the ideas of creativity.
(00:33:28) How can these systems create something new? In fact discover something new? Obviously this is super relevant for scientific discovery or pushing met science and medicine forward, which we want to do with these systems. And you can actually bolt on some fairly simple search systems on top of these models and get you into a new region of space. Of course, you also have to make sure that you’re not searching that space totally randomly. It would be too big. So you have to have some objective function that you’re trying to optimize and hill climb towards and that guides that search.
Lex Fridman (00:34:00) But there’s some mechanism of Evolution that are interesting maybe in the space of programs. But then the space of programs an extremely important space, because you can probably generalize to everything. But for example, mutation. So it’s not just Monte Carlo Tree Search where it’s like a search. You could every once in a while-
Lex Fridman (00:34:26) So then what Evolution is really good at is not just the natural selection, it’s combining things and building increasingly complex hierarchical systems. So that component is super interesting, especially with AlphaEvolve and the space of programs.
Demis Hassabis (00:34:43) Yeah, exactly. So you can get a bit of an extra property out of evolutionary systems, which is some new emerging capability may come about, right? Of course like happened with life, interestingly with naive, traditional evolutionary computing methods without LLMs and the modern AI, the problem with them, they were very well studied in the nineties and early two thousands and some promising results, but the problem was they could never work out how to evolve new properties, new emerging properties. You always had a sort of subset of the properties that you put into the system, but maybe if we combine them with these foundation models, perhaps we can overcome that limitation.
(00:35:21) Obviously naturally evolution clearly did. It did evolve new capabilities. So bacteria to where we are now. So clearly that it must be possible with evolutionary systems to generate new patterns, going back to the first thing we talked about and new capabilities and emerging properties, and maybe we’re on the cusp of discovering how to do that.
Lex Fridman (00:35:44) Yeah, listen, AlphaEvolve is one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen. I’ve on my desk at home, most of my time is spent on that computer is just programming. And next to the three screens is a skull of a Tiktaalik, which is one of the early organisms that crawled out of the water onto land. And I just kind of watch that little guy. It’s like whatever the competition mechanism of Evolution is, it’s quite incredible.
Lex Fridman (00:36:17) It’s truly, truly incredible. Now whether that’s exactly the thing we need to do to do our search, but never dismiss the power of nature, what it did here.
Demis Hassabis (00:36:27) And it’s amazing, which is a relatively simple algorithm, right? Effectively, and it can generate all of this immense complexity emerges obviously running over 4 billion years of time. But you can think about that as again, a search process that ran over the physics substrate of the universe for a long amount of computational time, but then it generated all this incredible rich diversity.
AI research
Lex Fridman (00:36:54) So many questions I want to ask you. So one, you do have a dream, one of the natural systems you want to try to model is a cell. That’s a beautiful dream. I could ask you about that. I also just for that purpose on the AI scientist front just broadly, so there’s a essay from Daniel Cocotaglio, Scott Alexander and others that online steps along the way to get to ASI and it has a lot of interesting ideas in it, one of which is including a superhuman coder and a superhuman AI researcher. And in that there’s a term of research taste that’s really interesting. So in everything you’ve seen, do you think it’s possible for AI systems to have research taste to help you in the way that AI co-scientist does, to help steer human brilliant scientists and then potentially by itself to figure out what are the directions where you want to generate truly novel ideas? That seems to be a really important component of how to do great science?
Demis Hassabis (00:38:03) Yeah, I think that’s going to be one of the hardest things to mimic or model is this idea of taste or judgment. I think that’s what separates the great scientists from the good scientists. All professional scientists are good technically, otherwise they wouldn’t have made it that far in academia and things like that. But then do you have the taste to sniff out what the right direction is, what the right experiment is, what the right question is? So picking the right question is the hardest part of science and making the right hypothesis. And that’s what today’s systems definitely they can’t do. So I often say it’s harder to come up with a conjecture, a really good conjecture than it is to solve it. So we may have systems soon that can solve pretty hard conjectures. A maths Olympiad problems, where Alpha Proof last year our system got silver medal in that really hard problems. Maybe eventually we’ll better solve a Millennium Prize kind of problem. But could a system have come up with a conjecture worthy of study that someone like Terence Tao would’ve gone? “You know what, that’s a really deep question about the nature of maths or the nature of numbers or the nature of physics.” And that is far harder type of creativity. And we don’t really know. Today’s systems clearly can’t do that. And we’re not quite sure what that mechanism would be. This kind of leap of imagination like Einstein had when he came up with special relativity and then general relativity with the knowledge he had at the time.
Lex Fridman (00:39:33) For conjecture, you want to come up with a thing that’s interesting, it’s amenable to proof?
Lex Fridman (00:39:42) So it’s easy to come up with a thing that’s extremely difficult. It’s easy to come up with a thing that’s extremely easy, but at that very edge-
Demis Hassabis (00:39:48) That sweet spot of basically advancing the science and splitting the hypothesis space into two, ideally. Right? Whether if it’s true or not true, you’ve learned something really useful and that’s hard. And making something that’s also falsifiable and within the technologies that you currently have available. So it’s a very creative process, actually. A highly creative process that I think just a kind of naive search on top of a model won’t be enough for that.
Lex Fridman (00:40:21) The idea of splitting the hypothesis space in two is super interesting. So I’ve heard you say that there’s basically no failure or failure is extremely valuable if you construct the questions right, if you construct the experiments right, if you design them right, that failure or success are both useful, so perhaps because it splits the hypothesis basically in two, it’s like a binary search?
Demis Hassabis (00:40:44) Yes, that’s right. So when you do real Blue Sky research, there’s no such thing as failure really. As long as you are picking experiments and hypotheses that meaningfully split the hypothesis space and you learn something. You can learn something kind of equally valuable from an experiment that doesn’t work. That should tell you if you’ve designed the experiment well and your hypotheses are interesting, it should tell you a lot about where to go next. And then you’re effectively doing a search process and using that information in very helpful ways.
Simulating a biological organism
Lex Fridman (00:41:17) So to go to your dream of modeling a cell, what are the big challenges that lay ahead for us to make that happen? We should maybe highlight that in AlphaFold, I mean there’s just so many leaps. So AlphaFold solved, if it’s fair to say, protein folding. And there’s so many incredible things we could talk about there, including the open sourcing, everything you’ve released AlphaFold 3 is doing protein, RNA, DNA interactions, which is super complicated and fascinating. It’s amenable to modeling. AlphaGenome predicts how small genetic changes if we think about single mutations, how they link to actual function. So it seems like it’s creeping along to sophisticated to much more complicated things like a cell. But a cell has a lot of really complicated components.
Demis Hassabis (00:42:11) So what I’ve tried to do throughout my career is I have these really grand dreams and then I try to, as you’ve noticed, but I try to break them down. It’s easy to have a kind of crazily ambitious dream, but the trick is how do you break it down into manageable, achievable, interim steps that are meaningful and useful in their own right? And so Virtual Cell, which is what I call the project of modeling a cell, I’ve had this idea of wanting to do that for maybe more like 25 years.
(00:42:41) And I used to talk with Paul Nurse, who is a bit of a mentor of mine in biology. He runs the founded the Crick Institute and won the Nobel Prize in 2001. We’ve been talking about it since the nineties, and I used to come back to it every five years. It’s like, what would you need to model the full internals of a cell so that you could do experiments on the virtual cell and what those experiment in silico and those predictions would be useful for you to save you a lot of time in the wet lab. That would be the dream.
(00:43:13) Maybe you could a hundred x speed up experiments by doing most of it in silico the search in silico, and then you do the validation step in the wet lab. That’s the dream. But maybe now, finally, so I was trying to build these components, AlphaFold being one, that would allow you eventually to model the full interaction, a full simulation of a cell, and I’d probably start with a yeast cell. And partly that’s what Paul Nurse studied because the yeast cell is like a full organism, that’s a single cell. So it’s the kind of simplest single cell organism. And so it’s not just a cell, it’s a full organism.
(00:43:49) And yeast is very well understood. And so that would be a good candidate for a kind of full simulated model. Now AlphaFold is the solution to the kind of static picture of what does a 3D structure protein look like? A static picture of it. But we know that biology, all the interesting things happen with the dynamics, the interactions, and that’s what AlphaFold 3 is, the first step towards is modeling those interactions. So first of all, pair wise proteins with proteins, proteins with RNA and DNA. But then the next step after that would be modeling maybe a whole pathway, maybe like the tour pathway that’s involved in cancer or something like this. And then eventually you might be able to model a whole cell.
Lex Fridman (00:44:31) Also, there’s another complexity here that stuff in a cell happens at different time scales. Is that tricky? Protein folding is super fast. I don’t know all the biological mechanisms, but some of them take a long time. And so the levels of interaction has a different temporal scale that you have to be able to model.
Demis Hassabis (00:44:54) So that would be hard. So you’d probably need several simulated systems that can interact at these different temporal dynamics, or at least maybe it’s like a hierarchical system so you can jump up or down the different temporal stages.
Lex Fridman (00:45:07) So can you avoid… One of the challenges here is not avoid simulating, for example, the quantum mechanical aspects of any of this, right? You want to not over model. You can skip ahead to just model the really high level things that get you a really good estimate of what’s going to happen.
Demis Hassabis (00:45:27) Yes. So you got to make a decision when you’re modeling any natural system, what is the cutoff level of the granularity that you’re going to model it to? And then it captures the dynamics that you’re interested in. So probably for a cell I would hope that would be the protein level, and that one wouldn’t have to go down to the atomic level. So of course that’s where AlphaFold stock kicks in. So that would be kind of the basis, and then you’d build these higher level simulations that take those as building blocks and then you get the emergent behavior.
Origin of life
Lex Fridman (00:46:00) I apologize for the pothead questions ahead of time, but do you think we’ll be able to simulate a model, the origin of life? So being able to simulate the first from non-living organisms, the birth of a living organism?
Demis Hassabis (00:46:19) I think that’s one of course one of the deepest and most fascinating questions. I love that area of biology. There’s people, there’s a great book by Nick Lane, one of the top experts in this area called The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution. I think it’s fantastic. And it also speaks to what the great filters might be, prior or are they ahead of us? I think they’re most likely in the past, if you read that book of how unlikely to go have any life at all. And then single cell to multi-cell seems an unbelievably big jump that took a billion years, I think on earth to do, right? So it shows you how hard it was.
Lex Fridman (00:46:55) Right? Bacteria were super happy for a very long time.
Demis Hassabis (00:46:56) For a very long time before they captured mitochondria somehow, right? I don’t see why not, why AI couldn’t help with that. Some kind of simulation. Again, it’s a bit of a search process through a combinatorial space. Here’s all the chemical soup that you start with, the primordial soup, that maybe was on earth near these hot vents. Here’s some initial conditions. Can you generate something that looks like a cell? So perhaps that would be a next stage after the virtual cell project is well, how could something like that emerge from the chemical soup?
Lex Fridman (00:47:31) Well, I would love it if there was a Move 37 for the origin of life. I think that’s one of the great mysteries. I think ultimately what we’ll figure out is their continuum. There’s no such thing as a line between non-living and living. But if we can make that rigorous.
Lex Fridman (00:47:45) That the very thing from the Big Bang to today has been the same process. If you can break down that wall that we’ve constructed in our minds of the actual origin from non-living to living, and it’s not a line that it’s a continuum that connects physics and chemistry and biology. There’s no line.
Demis Hassabis (00:48:03) I mean, this is my whole reason why I worked on AI and AGI my whole life, because I think it can be the ultimate tool to help us answer these kinds of questions. And I don’t really understand why the average person doesn’t worry about this stuff more. How can we not have a good definition of life and not living a non-living and the nature of time and let alone consciousness and gravity and all these things and quantum mechanics weirdness? It’s just to me, I’ve always had this sort of screaming at me in my face and it’s getting louder. It’s like, what is going on here? And I mean that in the deeper sense, the nature of reality, which has to be the ultimate question that would answer all of these things. It’s sort of crazy if you think about it. We can stare at each other and all these living things all the time. We can inspect it microscopes and take it apart almost down to the atomic level. And yet we still can’t answer that clearly in a simple way. That question of how do you define living? It’s kind of amazing.
Lex Fridman (00:49:05) Yeah, living, you can kind of talk your way out of thinking about. But consciousness, we have this very obviously subjective, conscious experience like we’re at the center of our own world and feels like something. And then how are you not screaming at the mystery of it all? I mean, but really humans have been contending with the mystery of the world around them for a long, long… There’s a lot of mysteries like what’s up with the sun and the rain? What’s that about? And then last year we had a lot of rain, and this year we don’t have rain. What did we do wrong? Humans have been asking that question for a long time.
Demis Hassabis (00:49:46) Exactly. So I guess we’ve developed a lot of mechanisms to cope with these deep mysteries that we can’t fully, we can see, but we can’t fully understand and we have to just get on with daily life. And we keep ourselves busy in a way. In a way, did we keep ourselves distracted?
Lex Fridman (00:50:01) I mean, weather is one of the most important questions of human history. We still, that’s the go-to small talk direction of the weather.
Demis Hassabis (00:50:09) Yes. Especially in England.
Lex Fridman (00:50:11) And then which is famously is an extremely difficult system to model. And even that system, Google DeepMind has made progress on.
Demis Hassabis (00:50:22) Yes, we’ve created the best weather prediction systems in the world and they’re better than traditional fluid dynamics sort of systems that usually calculated on massive supercomputers takes days to calculate it. And we’ve managed to model a lot of the weather dynamics with neural network systems, with our WeatherNet system. And again, it’s interesting that those kinds of dynamics can be modeled even though very complicated, almost bordering on chaotic systems in some cases.
(00:50:50) A lot of the interesting aspects of that can be modeled by these neural network systems, including very recently we had cyclone prediction of where paths of hurricanes might go. Of course, super useful, super important for the world and it’s super important to do that very timely and very quickly and as well as accurately. And I think it’s very promising direction again, of simulating so that you can run forward predictions and simulations of very complicated real world systems.
Lex Fridman (00:51:18) I should mention that I’ve gotten a chance in Texas to meet a community of folks called the Storm Chasers. And what’s really incredible about them, I need to talk to them more, is they’re extremely tech-savvy because what they have to do is they have to use models to predict where the storm is. So it’s this beautiful mix of crazy enough to go into the eye of the storm and in order to protect your life and predict where the extreme events are going to be, they have to have increasingly sophisticated models of weather.
Lex Fridman (00:51:50) It is a beautiful balance of being in it as living organisms and the cutting edge of science. They actually might be using DeepMind systems.
Demis Hassabis (00:52:01) Yeah. But hopefully they are. And I’d love to join them in one of those checks. They look amazing. Right. That’s great to actually experience it one time.
Path to AGI
Lex Fridman (00:52:07) Exactly. And then also to experience the correct prediction where something will come and how it’s going to evolve. It’s incredible. You’ve estimated that we’ll have AGI by 2030, so there’s interesting questions around that. How will we actually know that we got there and what may be the move quote, “Move 37” of AGI.
Demis Hassabis (00:52:33) My estimate is sort of 50% chance by in the next five years, so by 2030 let’s say. So I think there’s a good chance that that could happen. Part of it is what is your definition of AGI? Of course people arguing about that now and mind’s quite a high bar and always has been of can we match the cognitive functions that the brain has? So we know our brains are pretty much general Turing machines approximate, and of course we created incredible modern civilization with our minds. So that also speaks to how general the brain is.
(00:53:06) And for us to know we have a true AGI, we would have to make sure that it has all those capabilities. It isn’t kind of a jagged intelligence where some things, it’s really good at, like today’s systems, but other things it’s really flawed at. And that’s what we currently have with today’s systems. They’re not consistent. So you’d want that consistency of intelligence across the board.
(00:53:28) And then we have some missing, I think, capabilities like the true invention capabilities and creativity that we were talking about earlier. So you’d want to see those. How you test that? I think you just test it. One way to do it would be kind of brute force test of tens of thousands of cognitive tasks that we know that humans can do. And maybe also make the system available to a few hundred of the world’s top experts, the Terence Taos of each subject area and give them a month or two and see if they can find an obvious flaw in the system. And if they can’t, then I think you can be pretty confident we have a fully general system.
Lex Fridman (00:54:11) Maybe to push back a little bit, it seems like humans are really incredible as the intelligence improves across all domains to take it for granted, like you mentioned, Terence Tao, these brilliant experts. They might quickly in a span of weeks, take for granted all the incredible things it can do and then focus in on, well, aha, right there. I consider myself, first of all, human. I identify as human. Some people listen to me talk and they’re like, “That guy is not good at talking the stuttering.” So even humans have obvious across domains limits, even just outside of calc, mathematics and physics and so on. I wonder if it will take something like a Move 37, so on the positive side versus a barrage of 10,000 cognitive tasks where it’ll be one or two where it’s like, holy shit, this is special.
Demis Hassabis (00:55:14) So I think that. Exactly. So I think there’s the sort of blanket testing to just make sure you’ve got the consistency. But I think there are the sort of lighthouse moments like the Move 37 that I would be looking for. So one would be inventing a new conjecture or a new hypothesis about physics like Einstein did.
(00:55:33) So maybe you could even run the back test of that very rigorously, have a cut-off of 1900 and then give the system everything that was written up to 1900 and then see if it could come up with special relativity and general relativity, right? Like Einstein did. That would be an interesting test. Another one would be can it invent a game like Go? Go not just come up with Move 37, a new strategy, but can it invent a game that’s as deep as aesthetically beautiful, as elegant as Go? And those are the sorts of things I would be looking out for. And probably a system being able to do several of those things for it to be very general, not just one domain. And so I think that would be the signs at least that I would be looking for, that we’ve got a system that’s AGI level and then maybe to fill that out, you would also check their consistency, make sure there’s no holes in that system either.
Lex Fridman (00:56:27) Yeah, something like a new conjecture or scientific discovery. That would be a cool feeling.
Demis Hassabis (00:56:32) Yeah, that would be amazing. So it’s not just helping us do that, but actually coming up with something brand new.
Lex Fridman (00:56:38) And you would be in the room for that.
Lex Fridman (00:56:40) It would be probably two or three months before announcing it. And you would just be sitting there trying not to Tweet.
Demis Hassabis (00:56:49) Something like that. Exactly. It’s like what is this amazing new physics idea? And then we would probably check it with world experts in that domain and validate it and go through its workings. And I guess it would be explaining its workings too. Yeah. It would be an amazing moment.
Lex Fridman (00:57:07) Do you worry that we as humans, even expert humans, like you might miss it? Might miss-
Demis Hassabis (00:57:12) Well, it may be pretty complicated. So it could be, the analogy I give there is I don’t think it will be totally mysterious to the best human scientists, but it may be a bit like, for example in chess, if I was to talk to Garry Kasparov for Magnus Carlsen and play a game with them and they make a brilliant move, I might not be able to come up with that move. But they could explain why afterwards that move made sense. And we would be to understand it to some degree, not to the level they do, but if they were good at explaining, which is actually part of intelligence too, is being able to explain in a simple way that what you’re thinking about, I think that that will be very possible for the best human scientists.
Lex Fridman (00:57:52) But I wonder, maybe you can educate me on the side of Go, I wonder if there’s moves from Magnus or Garry where they at first will dismiss it as a bad move?
Demis Hassabis (00:58:02) Yeah, sure, it could be. But then afterwards they’ll figure out with their intuition why this works. And then empirically, the nice thing about games is, one of the great things about games is it’s a sort of scientific test. Do you win the game or not win? And then that tells you, okay, that move in the end was good, that strategy was good. And then you can go back and analyze that and explain even to yourself a little bit more why. Explore around it, and that’s how chess analysis and things like that works. So perhaps that’s why my brain works like that because I’ve been doing that since I was four and it’s sort of hardcore training in that way.
Lex Fridman (00:58:39) But even now when I generate code, there is this kind of nuanced, fascinating contention that’s happening where I might at first identify as a set of generated code is incorrect in some interesting nuanced ways. But then I always have to ask the question, is there a deeper insight here that I’m the one who’s incorrect? And that’s going to, as the systems get more and more intelligent, you’re going to have to contend with that. It’s like, is this a bug or a feature, what you just came up with?
Demis Hassabis (00:59:14) Yeah. And they’re going to be pretty complicated to do, but of course it will be, you can imagine also AI systems that are producing that code or whatever that is, and then human programmers looking at it, but also not unaided with the help of AI tools as well. So it’s going to be kind of an interesting, maybe different AI tools to the ones the monitoring tools are the ones that generated it.
Lex Fridman (00:59:36) So if we look at that AGI system, sorry to bring it back up, but AlphaEvolve, it’s super cool. So AlphaEvolve enables on the programming side, something like recursive self-improvement potentially. If you can imagine what that AGI system, maybe not the first version, but a few versions beyond that, what does that actually look like? Do you think it’ll be simple? Do you think it’ll be something like a self-improving-
Lex Fridman (01:00:00) Like, do you think it’ll be simple? Do you think it’ll be something like a self-improving program and a simple one?
Demis Hassabis (01:00:06) I mean potentially that’s possible. I would say I’m not sure it’s even desirable because that’s a kind of hard takeoff scenario. But these current systems like Alpha Evolve, they have human in the loop deciding on various things, there’re separate hybrid systems that interact.
(01:00:22) One could imagine eventually doing that end to end. I don’t see why that wouldn’t be possible, but right now I think the systems are not good enough to do that in terms of coming up with the architecture of the code. And again, it’s a little bit reconnected to this idea of coming up with a new conjectural hypothesis, how they’re good if you give them very specific instructions about what you’re trying to do, but if you give them a very vague high level instruction, that wouldn’t work currently. And I think that’s related to this idea of invent a game as good as Go, right?
(01:00:55) Imagine that was the prompt. That’s pretty. And so the current systems wouldn’t know I think what to do with that, how to narrow that down to something tractable. And I think there’s similar, look, just make a better version of yourself. That’s too unconstrained. But we’ve done it. And as you know with AlphaVol, like things like faster matrix multiplication, so when you hone it down to very specific thing you want, it’s very good at incrementally improving that.
(01:01:21) But at the moment these are more incremental improvements, sort of small iterations. Whereas if you wanted a big leap in understanding, you’d need a much larger advance.
Lex Fridman (01:01:34) Yeah. But it could also be sort of the pushback against hard takeoff scenario. It could be just a sequence of incremental improvements, like matrix multiplication. It has to sit there for days thinking how to incrementally improve a thing and it does solve recursively. And as you do more and more improvement, it’ll slow down.
(01:01:55) So there be, the path to AGI won’t be like a gradual improvement over time.
Demis Hassabis (01:02:03) Yes. If it was just incremental improvements, that’s how it would look. So the question is, could it come up with a new leap like the Transformers architecture? Could it have done that back in 2017 when we did it and Brain did it? And it’s not clear that these systems, something our AlphaVol wouldn’t be able to do, make such a big leap. So for sure these systems are good. We have systems I think that can do incremental hill climbing, and that’s a kind of bigger question about is that all that’s needed from here, or do we actually need one or two more big breakthroughs.
Lex Fridman (01:02:34) And can the same kind of systems provide the breakthroughs also? So make it a bunch of S-curves like incremental improvement, but also every once in a while, leaps.
Demis Hassabis (01:02:44) Yeah, I don’t think anyone has systems that can have shown, unequivocally those big leaps that we have a lot of systems that do the hill climbing of the S-curve that you’re currently on.
Lex Fridman (01:02:55) And that would be the move 37 is a leap.
Demis Hassabis (01:02:59) Yeah, I think it would be a leap, something like that.
Scaling laws
Lex Fridman (01:03:01) Do you think the scaling laws are holding strong on the pre-training/post-training test time compute? Do you on the flip side of that, anticipate AI progress hitting a wall?
Demis Hassabis (01:03:13) We certainly feel there’s a lot more room just in the scaling. So actually all steps pre-training, post-training, and inference time. So there’s sort of three scalings that are happening concurrently. And again there, it’s about how innovative you can be and we pride ourselves on having the broadest and deepest research bench. We have amazing, incredible researchers and people like Noam Shazir who came up with Transformers and Dave Silver who led the AlphaGo project and so on.
(01:03:47) And that research base means that if some new breakthrough is required, like an AlphaGo or Transformers, I would back us to be the place that does that. So I’m actually quite like it when the terrain gets harder, right? Because then it veers more from just engineering to true research, and research plus engineering, and that’s our sweet spot and I think that’s harder. It’s harder to invent things than to fast follow.
(01:04:17) And so we don’t know, I would say it’s kind of 50/50 whether new things are needed or whether the scaling the existing stuff is going to be enough. And so, in true kind of empirical fashion, we are pushing both of those as hard as possible. The new blue sky, ideas and maybe about half our resources are on that. And then scaling to the max, the current capabilities. And we’re still seeing some fantastic progress on each different version of Gemini.
Lex Fridman (01:04:48) That’s interesting the way you put it in terms of the deep bench, that if progress towards AGI is more than just scaling compute, so the engineering side of the problem, and is more on the scientific side where there’s breakthroughs needed, then you feel confident DeepMind as well, Google DeepMind as well positioned to kick ass in that domain.
Demis Hassabis (01:05:13) Well, I mean if you look at the history of the last decade or 15 years, it’s been maybe, I don’t know, 80-90% of the breakthroughs that underpins modern AI field today was from originally Google Brain, Google Research and DeepMind. So yeah, I would back that to continue hopefully.
Lex Fridman (01:05:31) So on the data side, are you concerned about running out of high quality data, especially high quality human data?
Demis Hassabis (01:05:37) I’m not very worried about that. Partly because I think there’s enough data, and it’s been proven to get the systems to be pretty good. And this goes back to simulations again. Do you have enough data to make simulations, so that you can create more synthetic data that are from the right distribution? Obviously that’s the key. So you need enough real-world data in order to be able to create those kinds of data generators, and I think that we’re at that step at the moment.
Lex Fridman (01:06:05) Yeah, you’ve done a lot of incredible stuff on the side of science and biology, doing a lot with not so much data.
Lex Fridman (01:06:12) I mean it’s still a lot of data, but I guess enough to-
Demis Hassabis (01:06:15) To get that going. Exactly. Exactly
Compute
Lex Fridman (01:06:18) Yeah. How crucial is the scaling of compute to building AGI? That’s an engineering question. It’s almost a geopolitical question because it also integrated into that is supply chains and energy. A thing that you care a lot about, which is potentially fusion. So innovating on the side of energy also. Do you think we’re going to keep scaling compute?
Demis Hassabis (01:06:42) I think so, for several reasons. I think compute, there’s the amount of compute you have for training, often it needs to be co-located, so actually even bandwidth constraints between data centers can affect that. So there’s additional constraints even there and that’s important for training, obviously the largest models you can, but there’s also because now AI systems are in products and being used by billions of people around the world, you need a ton of inference compute now.
(01:07:10) And then on top of that there’s the thinking systems, the new paradigm of the last year that where they get smarter, the longer amount of inference time you give them at test time. So all of those things need a lot of compute and I don’t really see that slowing down, and as AI systems become better, they’ll become more useful and there’ll be more demand for them. So both from the training side, the training side actually is only just one part of that. It may even become the smaller part of what’s needed in the overall compute that’s required.
Lex Fridman (01:07:42) Yeah, that’s one sort of almost meme-y kind of thing, which is the success in the incredible aspects of VL3. People kind of make fun of the more successful it becomes, the servers are sweating.
Demis Hassabis (01:07:57) Yeah, yeah, exactly. We did a little video of the servers frying eggs and things. That’s right. And we are going to have to figure out how to do that. There’s a lot of interesting hardware innovations that we do as we have our own TPU line and we’re looking at inference-only things, inference-only chips and how we can make those more efficient.
(01:08:15) We’re also very interested in building AI systems and we have done the help with energy usage, so help data center energy like for the cooling systems be efficient, grid optimization, and then eventually things like helping with plasma-containment fusion reactors. We’ve done lots of work on that with Commonwealth Fusion, and also one could imagine reactor design.
(01:08:38) And then material design I think is one of the most exciting. New types of solar material, solar panel material room temperature superconductors has always been on my list of dream breakthroughs, and optimal batteries. And I think a solution to any one of those things would be absolutely revolutionary for climate and energy usage. And we’re probably close, and again in the next five years to having AI systems that can materially help with those problems.
Future of energy
Lex Fridman (01:09:05) If you were to bet, sorry for the ridiculous question, but what is the main source of energy in 20, 30, 40 years. Do you think it’s going to be nuclear fusion?
Demis Hassabis (01:09:15) I think fusion and solar are the two that I would bet on. Solar, I mean it’s the fusion reactor in the sky of course, and I think really the problem there is batteries and transmission. So as well as more efficient, more and more efficient solar material perhaps eventually in space, these kind of Dyson Sphere type ideas.
(01:09:36) And fusion I think is definitely doable, it seems, if we have the right design of reactor and we can control the plasma and fast enough and so on, and I think both of those things will actually get solved. So we’ll probably have at least those are probably the two primary sources of renewable, clean, almost free or perhaps free energy.
Lex Fridman (01:09:58) What a time to be alive. If I traveled into the future with you a hundred years from now, how much would you be surprised if we’ve passed a type one Kardashev scale civilization?
Demis Hassabis (01:10:11) I would not be that surprised if it was a hundred-year timescale from here. I mean I think it’s pretty clear if we crack the energy problems in one of the ways we’ve just discussed or very efficient solar, then if energy is kind of free and renewable and clean, then that solves a whole bunch of other problems.
(01:10:32) So for example, the water access problem goes away because you can just use desalination. We have the technology, it’s just too expensive. So only fairly wealthy countries like Singapore and Israel and so on actually use it. But if it was cheap, then all countries that have a coast could, but also you’d have unlimited rocket fuel. You could just separate seawater out into hydrogen and oxygen using energy and that’s rocket fuel.
(01:10:57) So combined with Elon’s, amazing self landing rockets, then it could be you sort of like a bus service to space. So that opens up incredible new resources and domains. Asteroid mining I think will become a thing, and maximum human flourishing to the stars. That’s what I dream about as well is like Carl Sagan’s sort of idea of bringing consciousness to the universe, waking up the universe. And I think human civilization will do that in the full sense of time if we get AI right, and crack some of these problems with it.
Lex Fridman (01:11:30) Yeah, I wonder what it would look like if you’re just a tourist flying through space. You would probably notice earth because if you solve the energy problem, you would see a lot of space rockets probably. So it would be traffic here in London, but in space.
Lex Fridman (01:11:46) It’s just a lot of rockets. And then you would probably see floating in space, some kind of source of energy like solar potentially. So earth would just look more on the surface, more technological. And then you would use the power of that energy then to preserve the natural…
Lex Fridman (01:12:06) Like the rainforest and all that kind of stuff.
Demis Hassabis (01:12:07) Exactly. Because for the first time in human history we wouldn’t be resource constrained. And I think that could be amazing new era for humanity where it’s not zero-sum, right? I have this land, you don’t have it. Or if the tigers have their forest, then the local villages can’t, what are they going to use? I think that this will help a lot. No, it won’t solve all problems because there’s still other human foibles that will still exist, but it will at least remove one, I think one of the big vectors, which is scarcity of resources, including land and more materials and energy.
(01:12:45) And we should be sometimes call it another call about this kind of radical abundance era, where there’s plenty of resources to go around. Of course the next big question is making sure that that’s fairly, shared fairly and everyone in society benefits from that.
Human nature
Lex Fridman (01:13:01) So there is something about human nature where I go, its like Borat, like my neighbor. You start trouble. We do start conflicts and that’s why games throughout, as I’m learning actually more and more, even in ancient history, serve the purpose of pushing people away from war, actually hot war. So maybe we can figure out increasingly sophisticated video games that pull us, they give us that… Scratch the itch of conflict, whatever that is, but us, the human nature.
Lex Fridman (01:13:38) And then avoid the actual hot wars that would come with increasingly sophisticated technologies because we’re now, we’ve long passed the stage where the weapons we’re able to create can actually just destroy all of human civilization. So that’s no longer a great way to start with your neighbor. It’s better to play a game of chess.
Demis Hassabis (01:14:05) And I think that’s what my modern sport is and I love football watching it and I just feel like, and I used to play it a lot as well, and it’s very visceral in its tribal, and I think it does channel a lot of those energies into which I think is a kind of human need to belong to some group, but into a fun way, a healthy way and not destructive way, kind of constructive thing.
(01:14:33) And I think going back to games again is I think they’re originally why they’re so great as well for kids to play things like chess is they’re great little microcosm simulations of the world. They’re simulations of the world too. They’re simplified versions of some real world situation, whether it’s poker or Go or chess, different aspects or diplomacy, different of the real world.
(01:14:53) And it allows you to practice at them too, because how many times do you get to practice a massive decision moment in your life? What job to take, what university to go to? You get maybe, I don’t know, a dozen or so key decisions one has to make and you’ve got to make those as best as you can. And games is a kind of safe environment, repeatable environment where you can get better at your decision-making process, and it maybe has this additional benefit of channeling some energies into more creative and constructive pursuits.
Lex Fridman (01:15:24) Well I think it’s also really important to practice losing and winning.
Lex Fridman (01:15:29) Losing is a really, that’s why I love games. That’s why I love even things like Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu where you can get your kicked in a safe environment over and over. It reminds you about physics, about the way the world works about sometimes you lose, sometimes you win, you can still be friends with everybody. But that feeling of losing, I mean it’s a weird one for us humans to really make sense of. That’s just part of life. That is a fundamental part of life is losing.
Demis Hassabis (01:16:00) And I think the martial arts as I understand it, but also in things like light chess is at least the way I took it’s a lot to do with self-improvement, self-knowledge. That, okay, so I did this thing. It’s not about really beating the other person, it’s about maximizing your own potential.
(01:16:16) If you do it in a healthy way, you learn to use victory and losses in a way. Don’t get carried away with victory and think you’re just the best in the world. And the losses keep you humble, and always knowing there’s always something more to learn. There’s always a bigger expert that you can mentor you. I think you learn that I’m pretty sure in martial arts.
(01:16:35) And I think that’s also the way that at least I was trained in chess. And so, in the same way, and it can be very hardcore and very important and of course you want to win, but you also need to learn how to deal with setbacks in a healthy way, and wire that feeling that you have when you lose something into a constructive thing of, next time I’m going to improve this or get better at this.
Lex Fridman (01:16:57) There is something that’s a source of happiness, a source of meaning that improvements that… It’s not about the winning or losing.
Demis Hassabis (01:17:04) Yes, the mastery. There’s nothing more satisfying in a way. It’s like, oh wow, this thing I couldn’t do before. Now I can. And again, games and physical sports and mental sports, their ways of measuring their beautiful, because you can measure that progress.
Lex Fridman (01:17:19) Yeah, there’s something about I guess why I love role-playing games, like the number go up of on the skill tree, literally that is a source of meaning for us humans, whatever our-
Demis Hassabis (01:17:29) Yeah, we’re quite addicted to this sort of, these numbers going up. And maybe that’s why we made games like that because obviously that is something we’re hill climbing systems ourselves, right?
Lex Fridman (01:17:42) Yeah. It would be quite sad if we didn’t have any mechanism-
Demis Hassabis (01:17:45) Color belts, we do this everywhere, where we just have thing that…
Lex Fridman (01:17:51) And I don’t want to dismiss that. There is a source of deep meaning across humans.
Google and the race to AGI
(01:17:55) So one of the incredible stories on the business, on the leadership side is what Google has done over the past year. So I think it’s fair to say that Google was losing on the LLM product side a year ago with Gemini 1.5 And now it’s winning, which… I’m Joe Biden. And you took the helm and you led this effort. What did it take to go from let’s say quote-unquote losing to quote-unquote winning, in the span of a year?
Demis Hassabis (01:18:22) Yeah, well firstly it’s absolutely incredible team that we have led by Corey and Jeff Dean and Oriole and the amazing team we have on Gemini. Absolutely. So you can’t do it without the best talent. And of course we have a lot of great compute as well. But then it’s the research culture we’ve created and basically coming together both different groups in Google that was Google Brain, World-class team, and then the old DeepMind, and pulling together all the best people and the best ideas and gathering around to make the absolute greater system we could.
(01:18:59) And it was been hard, but we’re all very competitive and we love research. This is so fun to do, and it’s great to see our trajectory. It wasn’t a given, but we’re very pleased with where we are and the rate of progress is the most important thing. So if you look at where we’ve come to from two years ago to one year ago to now, I think we call it relentless progress. Along with relentless shipping of that progress is being very successful and it’s unbelievably competitive, the whole space, the whole AI space, with some of the greatest entrepreneurs and leaders and companies in the world, all competing now because everyone’s realized how important AI is. And it’s very been pleasing for us to see that progress.
Lex Fridman (01:19:47) Google’s a gigantic company. Can you speak to the natural things that happen in that case is the bureaucracy that emerges? You want to be careful the natural, there’s meetings and there’s managers and that. What are some of the challenges from a leadership perspective, breaking through that in order to, like you said, ship? Like the number of products, Gemini related products that has been shipped over the past years is insane.
Demis Hassabis (01:20:14) Right? Yeah, exactly. That’s what relentlessness looks like. I think it’s a question of any big company ends up having a lot of layers of management and things like that is sort of the nature of how it works. But I still operate and I was always operating with old DeepMind as a start-up still. A large one, but still as a start-up.
(01:20:37) And that’s what we still act like today with Google DeepMind. And acting with decisiveness and the energy that you get from the best smaller organizations. And we try to get the best of both worlds where we have this incredible, billions of users surfaces and credible products that we can power up with our AI and our research and that’s amazing and that’s very few places in the world you can get that, do incredible world-class research on the one hand and then plug it in and improve billions of people’s lives the next day. That’s a pretty amazing combination.
(01:21:10) And we’re continually fighting and cutting away bureaucracy to allow the research culture and the relentless shipping culture to flourish. And I think we’ve got a pretty good balance, whilst being responsible with it, as you have to be as a large company and also with a number of huge product surfaces that we have.
Lex Fridman (01:21:30) So a funny thing you mentioned about the surface with the billion, I had a conversation with a guy named, brilliant guy here at the British Museum, called Irvin Finkel. He’s a world expert at cuneiforms, which is a ancient writing on tablets and he doesn’t know about ChatGPT or Gemini, he doesn’t even know about AI, but this first encounter with this AI is AI mode on Google.
Lex Fridman (01:21:58) He’s like, is that what you’re talking about, this AI mode? And it’s just a reminder that there’s a large part of the world that doesn’t know about this AI thing.
Demis Hassabis (01:22:08) Yeah, I know. It’s funny. If you live on X and Twitter and I mean it’s sort of at least my feed, it’s all AI. And there’s certain places where in the valley and certain pockets where everyone’s just, all they’re thinking about is AI, but a lot of the normal world hasn’t come across it yet.
Lex Fridman (01:22:24) And that’s a great responsibility to their first interaction. The grand scale of the rural, India or anywhere across the world you get to…
Demis Hassabis (01:22:34) And we want it to be as good as possible and in a lot of cases it’s just under the hood powering, making something like maps or search work better. And ideally for a lot of those people should just be seamless. It’s just new technology that makes their lives more productive and helps them.
Lex Fridman (01:22:50) A bunch of folks on the Gemini product and engineering teams spoken extremely highly of you on another dimension, that I almost didn’t even expect. I kind of think of you as the deep scientists and caring about these big research scientific questions. But they also said you’re a great product guy, like how to create a thing that a lot of people would use and enjoy using. So can you maybe speak to what it takes to create a AI based product that a lot of people enjoy using?
Demis Hassabis (01:23:18) Yeah. Well, I mean, again, that comes back from my game design days where I used to design games for millions of gamers. People would forget about that. I’ve had experience with cutting edge technology in product that is how games was in the nineties.
(01:23:31) And so I love actually the combination of cutting edge research and then being applied in a product and to power a new experience. And so, I think it’s the same skill really of imagining what it would be like to use it viscerally, and having good taste coming back to earlier. The same thing that’s useful in science, I think can also be useful in product design.
(01:23:57) And I’ve just had a very, always been a sort of multidisciplinary person, so I don’t see the boundaries really between arts and sciences, or product and research. It’s a continuum for me. I like working on products that are cutting edge. I wouldn’t be able to have cutting edge technology under the hood. I wouldn’t be excited about them if they were just run-of-the-mill products. It requires this invention, creativity, cap capability.
Lex Fridman (01:24:23) What are some specific things you learned about when you, even on the LLM side, you’re interacting with Gemini? This doesn’t feel like, the layout, the interface, maybe the trade-off between the latency, how to present to the user, how long to wait and how that waiting is shown or the reason capabilities. There are some interesting things because like you said, it’s the very cutting edge. We don’t know how to present it correctly. So is there some specific things you’ve learned?
Demis Hassabis (01:24:55) I mean it’s such a false evolving space, evaluating this all the time, but where we are today is that you want to continually simplify things, whether that’s the interface or what you build on top of the model, you kind of want to get out of the way of the model. The model train is coming down the track and it’s improving unbelievably fast. This relentless progress we talked about earlier.
(01:25:17) You look at 2.5 versus 1.5 and it’s just a gigantic improvement, and we expect that again for the future versions. And so the models are becoming more capable.
(01:25:26) So you’ve got, the interesting thing about the design space in today’s world, these AI first products is you’ve got to design not for what the thing can do today, the technology can do today, but in a year’s time. So you actually have to be a very technical product person, because you’ve got to have a good intuition for and feel for, okay, that thing that I’m dreaming about now can’t be done today, but is the research track on schedule to basically intercept that in six months or a year’s time.
(01:25:55) So you’ve kind of got to intercept where this highly changing technology’s going, as well as the new capabilities are coming online all the time that we didn’t realize before that can allow these research to work. Or now we’ve got video generation, what do we do with that, this multimodal stuff.
(01:26:13) Is it, one question I have is it really going to be the current UI that we have today, these text box chats? Seems very unlikely once you think about these super multimodal systems. Shouldn’t it be something more like Minority Report where you are sort of vibing with it in a kind of collaborative way? It seems very restricted today. I think we’ll look back on today’s interfaces and products and systems as quite archaic in maybe in just a couple of years.
(01:26:41) So I think there’s a lot of space actually for innovation to happen on the product side as well as the research side.
Lex Fridman (01:26:47) And then we are offline talking about the keyboard is, the open question is how, when and how much will we move to audio as the primary way of interacting with the machines around us versus typing stuff?
Demis Hassabis (01:27:00) Yeah, I mean typing is a very low bandwidth way of doing it, even if you’re a very fast typer. And I think we’re going to have to start utilizing other devices, whether that’s smart glasses, audio earbuds, and eventually maybe some sorts of neural devices, where we can increase the input and the output bandwidth to something maybe a 100x of what is today.
Lex Fridman (01:27:24) I think that underappreciated art form is the interface design because I think you can not unlock the power of the intelligence of a system if you don’t have the right interface. The interface is really the way you unlock its power. It’s such an interesting question of how to do that. So how you would think getting out of the way isn’t real art form.
Demis Hassabis (01:27:46) Yes. It’s the sort of thing that I guess Steve Jobs always talked about, right? It’s simplicity, beauty, and elegance that we want. And we’re not that nobody’s there yet, in my opinion. And that’s what I would like us to get to.
(01:27:58) Again, it sort of speaks to Go again as a game, the most elegant, beautiful game. Can you make an interface as beautiful as that? Actually, I think we’re going to enter an era of AI-generated interfaces that are probably personalized to you, so it fits the way that you, your aesthetic, your feel, the way that your brain works and the AI kind of generates that depending on the task. That feels like that’s probably the direction we’ll end up in.
Lex Fridman (01:28:25) Because some people are power users and they want every single parameter on the screen, everything based perhaps me with a keyboard-based navigation and to have shortcuts for everything. And some people like the minimalism.
Demis Hassabis (01:28:37) Just hide all of that complexity. Yeah, exactly.
Lex Fridman (01:28:39) Yeah. Well, I’m glad you have a Steve Jobs mode in you as well. This is great. Einstein mode, Steve Jobs mode.
(01:28:47) All right, let me try to trick you into answering a question. When will Gemini 3 come up? Is it before or after DTS-6? The world waits for both.
(01:28:56) And what does it take to go from 2.5 To 3.0? Because it seems like there’s been a lot of releases of 2.5, which are already leaps in performance. So what does it even mean to go to a new version? Is it about performance? Is it about a completely different flavor of an experience?
Demis Hassabis (01:29:16) Yeah, well, so the way it works with our different version numbers is we try to collect, so maybe it takes roughly six months or something to do a new kind of full run and the full productization of a new version.
(01:29:32) And during that time, lots of new interesting research iterations and ideas come up, and we sort of collect them all together that you could imagine the last six months worth of interesting ideas on the architecture front, maybe it’s on the data front, it’s like many different possible things. And we package that all up, test which ones are likely to be useful for the next iteration, and then bundle that all together. And then we start the new giant hero training run. And then of course that gets monitored.
Demis Hassabis (01:30:00) … run, right? And then of course that gets monitored and then at the end of the pre-training, then there’s all the post-training, there’s many different ways of doing that, different ways of patching it. So there’s a whole experimental phase there which you can also get a lot of gains out. And that’s where you see the version numbers usually referring to the base model, the pre-trained model, and then the interim versions of 2.5 and the different sizes and the different little additions. They’re often patches or post-training ideas that can be done afterwards off the same basic architecture. And then of course on top of that, we also have different sizes, Pro and Flash and Flashlight that are often distilled from the biggest ones, the Flash model from the Pro model. And that means we have a range of different choices. If you’re the developer, do you want to prioritize performance or speed and cost?
(01:30:51) And we like to think of this Pareto frontier of on the one hand, the Y-axis is like performance, and then the X- axis is cost or latency and speed basically. And we have models that completely define the frontier. So whatever your trade-off is that you want as an individual user or as a developer, you should find one of our models satisfies that constraint.
Lex Fridman (01:31:17) So behind the version changes, there is a big run and then there’s just an insane complexity of productization. Then there’s the distillation of the different sizes along that Pareto front. And then as with each step you take, you realize there might be a cool product. There’s side quests.
Lex Fridman (01:31:46) It’s very unclear, but you also get super excited because it’s super cool. How does even look at VLs? Very cool. How does it fit into the bigger Thing?
Demis Hassabis (01:31:55) Yes, exactly. Exactly. And then you’re constantly this process of converging upstream, we call it ideas from the product surfaces or from the post-training and even further downstream and that, you upstream that into the core model training for the next run. So then the main model, the main Gemini track becomes more and more general and eventually, AGI.
Demis Hassabis (01:32:21) Yes, exactly. A few hero runs later.
Lex Fridman (01:32:23) Yeah. So sometimes when you release these new versions or every version, really, are benchmarks productive or counterproductive for showing the performance of a model?
Demis Hassabis (01:32:36) You need them, but it’s important that you don’t overfit to them. So they shouldn’t be the be all and end all. So there’s LMArena, or it used to be called LEMSYS, that’s one of them that turned out organically to be one of the main ways people like to test these systems, at least the chatbots. Obviously there’s loads of academic benchmarks that test mathematics and coding ability, general language ability, science ability and so on. And then we have our own internal benchmarks that we care about.
(01:33:04) It’s a multi objective optimization problem. You don’t want to be good at just one thing. We’re trying to build general systems that are good across the board, and you try and make no-regret improvements. So where you improve in coding, but it doesn’t reduce your performance in other areas. So that’s the hard part because of course you could put more coding data in or you could put more, I don’t know, gaming data in, but then does it make worse your language system or your translation systems and other things that you care about? So you’ve got to continually monitor this increasingly larger and larger suite of benchmarks. And also when you stick them into products, these models, you also care about the direct usage and the direct stats and the signals that you’re getting from the end users, whether they’re coders or the average person using the chat interfaces.
Lex Fridman (01:34:00) Because ultimately, you want to measure the usefulness, but it’s so hard to convert that into a number. It’s really vibe based benchmarks across a large number of users. And it’s hard to know and it would be just terrifying to me, you know have a much smarter model, but it’s just something vibe based. It’s not quite working. That’s such a scary and everything you just said. It has to be smart and useful across so many domains. So you get super excited all of a sudden solving programming problems you’ve never been able to solve before, but now it’s crappier poetry or something and it’s just, I don’t know, that’s a stressful. That’s so difficult-
Lex Fridman (01:34:44) To balance and because you can’t really trust the benchmarks, you really have to trust the end users.
Demis Hassabis (01:34:48) Yeah. And then other things that are even more esoteric come into play, like the style of the persona of the system, is it verbose? Is it succinct? Is it humorous? And different people like different things. So it’s very interesting. It’s almost like cutting edge part of psychology research or personality research. I used to do that in my PhD, like five factor personality, what do we actually want our systems to be like? And different people will like different things as well. So these are all just new problems in product space that I don’t think I’ve ever really been tackled before, but we’re going to rapidly have to deal with now.
Lex Fridman (01:35:27) I think it’s a super fascinating space, developing the character of the thing and in so doing, it puts a mirror to ourselves, what are the kind of things that we like? Because prompt engineering allows you to control a lot of those elements, but can the product make it easier for you to control the different flavors of those experiences, the different characters that you interact with?
Lex Fridman (01:35:52) So what’s the probability of Google DeepMind winning?
Demis Hassabis (01:35:56) Well, I see it as winning. I think winning is the wrong way to look at it given how important and consequential what it is we’re building. So funny enough, I try not to view it like a game or competition even though that’s a lot of my mindset. It’s about in my view, all of us or those of us at the leading edge or have a responsibility to steward this unbelievable technology that could be used for incredible good but also has risks, steward it safely into the world for the benefit of humanity. That’s always what I’ve dreamed about and what we’ve always tried to do. And I hope that’s what eventually the community, maybe the international community will rally around when it becomes obvious that as we get closer and closer to AGI, that’s what’s needed.
Lex Fridman (01:36:43) I agree with you. I think that’s beautifully put. You’ve said that you talk to and are on good terms with the leads of some of these labs. As the competition heats up, how hard is it to maintain those relationships?
Demis Hassabis (01:36:58) It’s been okay so far. I try to pride myself in being collaborative. I’m a collaborative person. Research is a collaborative endeavor. Science is a collaborative endeavor. It’s all good for humanity in the end if you cure terrible diseases and you come up with an incredible cure, this is net win for humanity. And the same with energy, all of the things that I’m interested in helping solve with AI. So I just want that technology to exist in the world and be used for the right things and the benefits of that, the productivity benefits of that being shared for the benefit of everyone. So I try to maintain good relations with all the leading lab people. They’re very interesting characters, many of them as you might expect.
Demis Hassabis (01:37:41) But yeah, I’m on good terms I hope with pretty much all of them. And I think that’s going to be important when things get even more serious than they are now, that there are those communication channels and that’s what will facilitate cooperation or collaboration if that’s what is required, especially on things like safety.
Lex Fridman (01:38:00) Yeah, I hope there’s some collaboration on stuff that’s less high stakes and in so doing, serves as a mechanism for maintaining friendships and relationships. So for example, I think the internet would love it if you and Elon somehow collaborate on creating a video game, that kind of thing. I think that enables camaraderie and good terms. And also you two are legit gamers, so it’s just fun to to create some-
Demis Hassabis (01:38:22) Yeah, that would be awesome. And we’ve talked about that in the past and it may be a cool thing that we can do. And I agree with you, it’d be nice to have side projects in a way where one can just lean into the collaboration aspect of it and it’s a a win-win for both sides and it builds up that collaborative muscle.
Lex Fridman (01:38:44) I see the scientific endeavor as that side project for humanity and I think Google DeepMind has been really pushing that. I would love to see other labs do more scientific stuff and then collaborate because it just seems like it’s easier to collaborate on the big scientific questions.
Demis Hassabis (01:39:01) I agree and I would love to see a lot of people, all of the other labs talk about science, but I think we’re really the only ones using it for science and doing that. And that’s why projects like AlphaFold are so important to me. And I think to our mission is to show how AI can be clearly used in a very concrete way for the benefit of humanity. And also, we spun out companies like Isomorphic off the back of Alpha Fold to do drug discovery and it’s going really well and you can think of build additional AlphaFold type systems to go into chemistry space to help accelerate drug design. And the examples I think we need to show and society needs to understand are where AI can bring these huge benefits.
Lex Fridman (01:39:42) Well, from the bottom of my heart, thank you for pushing the scientific efforts forward with rigor, with fun, with humility, all of it. I just love to see and still talking about P equals NP, it’s just incredible. So I love it. There’s been seemingly a war for talent. Some of it is meme, I don’t know. What do you think about Meta buying up talent with huge salaries and the heating up of this battle for talent? I should say that I think a lot of people see DeepMind as a really great place to do cutting-edge work for the reasons that you’ve outlined. There’s this vibrant scientific culture.
Demis Hassabis (01:40:21) Yeah. Well look, of course there’s a strategy that Meta is taking right now. I think that from my perspective at least, I think the people that are real believers in the mission of AGI and what it can do and understand the real consequences, both good and bad from that and what that responsibility entails, I think they’re mostly doing it to be like myself, to be on the frontier of that research so they can help influence the way that goes and steward that technology safely into the world. And Meta right now are not at the frontier. Maybe they’ll manage to get back on there and it’s probably rational what they’re doing from their perspective because they’re behind and they need to do something. But I think there’s more important things than just money. Of course one has to pay people their market rates and all of these things and that continues to go up. And I was expecting this because more and more people are finally realizing, leaders of companies, what I’ve always known for 30 plus years now, which is that AGI is the most important technology probably that’s ever going to be invented. So in some senses, it’s rational to be doing that. But I also think there’s a much bigger question. People in AI these days are very well paid.
(01:41:32) I remember when we were starting out back in 2010, I didn’t even pay myself a couple of years because it wasn’t enough money. We couldn’t raise any money, and these days, interns are being paid the amount that we raised as our first entire seed round. So it’s pretty funny. And I remember the days where I used to have to work for free and almost pay my own way to do an internship. Right now, it’s all the other around, but that’s just how it is. It’s the new world. But I think that we’ve been discussing what happens post- AGI and energy systems are solved and so on, what is even money going to mean? So I think in the economy and we’re going to have much bigger issues to work through and how does the economy function in that world and companies? So I think it’s a little bit of a side issue about salaries and things like that today.
Lex Fridman (01:42:19) Yeah, when you’re facing such gigantic consequences and gigantic, fascinating scientific questions-
Demis Hassabis (01:42:25) Which may be only a few years away.
Future of programming
Lex Fridman (01:42:27) So the practicals, the pragmatic sense, if we zoom in on jobs, we can look at programmers because it seems like AI systems are currently doing incredibly well at programming and increasingly so. So A lot of people that program for a living, love programming are worried they will lose their jobs. How worried should they be do you think, and what’s the right way to adjust to the new reality and ensure that you survive and thrive as a human in the programming world?
Demis Hassabis (01:42:58) Well, it’s interesting that programming, and it’s again counterintuitive to what we thought years ago, maybe that some of the skills that we think of as harder skills are turned out maybe to be the easier ones for various reasons. But coding and maths, because you can create a lot of synthetic data and verify if that data’s correct. So because of that nature of that, it’s easier to make things like synthetic data to train from. It’s also an area of course we’re all interested in because as programmers to help us and get faster at it and more productive.
(01:43:27) So I think for the next era, like the next five, 10 years, I think what we’re going to find is people who embrace these technologies become almost at one with them, whether that’s in the creative industries or the technical industries will become superhumanly productive, I think. So the great programmers will be even better, but there’ll be even 10X even what they are today. And because there, you’ll be able to use their skills to utilize the tools to the maximum, exploit them to the maximum. And so I think that’s what we’re going to see in the next domain. So that’s going to cause quite a lot of change. And so that’s coming. A lot of people benefit from that.
(01:44:05) So I think one example of that is if coding becomes easier, it becomes available to many more creatives to do more. But I think the top programmers will still have huge advantages as terms of specifying, going back to specifying what the architecture should be. The question should be how to guide these coding assistants in a way that’s useful and check whether the code they produce is good. So I think there’s plenty of headroom there for the foreseeable next few years.
Lex Fridman (01:44:36) So I think there’s several interesting things there. One is there’s a lot of imperative to just get better and better consistently of using these tools so they’re riding the wave of the improving models versus competing against them. But sadly, but that’s the nature of life on earth, there could be a huge amount of value to certain kinds of programming at the cutting edge and less value to other kinds. For example, it could be front-end web design might be more amenable to, as you’ve mentioned, to generation by AI systems and maybe for example, game engine design or something like this or back-end design or guiding systems in high-performance situations, high-performance programming type of design decisions, that might be extremely valuable. But it will shift where the humans are needed most and that’s scary for people to address.
Demis Hassabis (01:45:37) Yeah, I think that’s right. Anytime where there’s a lot of disruption and change, and we’ve had this, it’s not just this time. We’ve had this in many times in human history with the internet, mobile, but before that obviously, the Industrial Revolution and it’s going to be one of those eras where there will be a lot of change. I think there’ll be new jobs we can’t even imagine today, just like the internet created. And then those people with the right skill sets to ride that wave will become incredibly valuable, those skills. But maybe people will have to relearn or adapt a bit, their current skills. And the thing that’s going to be harder to deal with this time around is that I think what we’re going to see is something like probably 10 times the impact the Industrial Revolution had, but 10 times faster as well. So instead of a 100 years, it takes 10 years and so that’s going to make, it’s like a 100X, the impact and the speed combined.
(01:46:31) So I think going to make it more difficult for society to deal with and there’s a lot to think through and I think we need to be discussing that right now. And I encourage top economists in the world and philosophers to start thinking about how is society going to be affected by this and what should we do? Including things like universal basic provision or something like that where a lot of the increased productivity gets shared out and distributed to society and maybe in the form of services and other things where if you want more than that, you still go and get some incredibly rare skills and things like that and make yourself unique. But there’s a basic provision that is provided.
Lex Fridman (01:47:19) And if you think of government as a technology, there’s also interesting questions, not just in the economics, but just politics. How do you design a system that’s responding to the rapidly changing times such that you can represent the different pain that people feel from the different groups and how do you reallocate resources in a way that addresses that pain and represents the hope and the pain and the fears of different people in a way that doesn’t lead to division? Because politicians are often really good at fueling the division and using that to get elected, defining the other and then saying that’s bad. And based on that, I think that’s often counterproductive to leveraging a rapidly changing technology to help the world flourish. So we almost need to improve our political systems as well rapidly, if you think of them as a technology.
Demis Hassabis (01:48:19) Definitely. And I think we’ll need new governance structures, institutions probably to help with this transition. So I think political philosophy and political science is going to be key to that. But I think the number one thing, first of all is to create more abundance of resources. So that’s the number one thing. Increase productivity, get more resources, maybe eventually get out of the zero-sum situation. Then the second question is how to use those resources and distribute those resources. But yeah, you can’t do that without having that abundance first.
John von Neumann
Lex Fridman (01:48:54) You mentioned to me the book, The Maniac by Benjamin Labatut, a book on first of all about you. There’s a bio about you.
Lex Fridman (01:49:06) Yes, sure. It’s unclear how much is fiction, how much is reality. But I think the central figure that is John von Neumann, I would say it’s a haunting and beautiful exploration of madness and genius and let’s say the double-edged sword of discovery. And for people who don’t know, John von Neumann is a legendary mind. He contributed to quantum mechanics. He was on the Manhattan Project. He is widely considered to be the father of or pioneer the modern computer and AI and so on. So many people say he’s one of the smartest humans ever, which is fascinating.
(01:49:45) And what’s also fascinating is he’s a person who saw nuclear science and physics become the atomic bomb, so you got to see ideas become a thing that has a huge amount of impact on the world. He also foresaw the same thing for computing, and that’s a little bit again, beautiful and haunting aspect of the book. Then taking a leap forward and looking at this, at least it all AlphaZero, AlphaGo AlphaZero big moment that maybe John von Neumann’s thinking was brought to reality. So I guess the question is what do you think if you got to hang out with John von Neumann now, what would he say about what’s going on?
Demis Hassabis (01:50:35) Well, that would be an amazing experience. He’s a fantastic mind. And I also love the way he spent a lot of his time at Princeton at the Institute of Advanced Studies, a very special place for thinking. And it’s amazing how much of a polymath he was and the spread of things he helped invent, including of course the Von Neumann architecture that all the modern computers are based on. And he had amazing foresight. I think he would’ve loved where we are today, and I think he would’ve really enjoyed AlphaGo being, he did game theory. I think he foresaw a lot of what would happen with learning machines, systems that are grown, I think he called it rather than programmed. I’m not sure how even maybe he wouldn’t even be that surprised. There’s the fruition of what I think he already foresaw in the 1950s.
Lex Fridman (01:51:25) I wonder what advice he would give. He got to see the building of the atomic bomb with the Manhattan Project. I’m sure there’s interesting stuff that maybe is not talked about enough, maybe some bureaucratic aspect, maybe the influence of politicians, maybe not enough of picking up the phone and talking to people that are called enemies by the said politicians. There might be some deep wisdom that we just may have lost from that time actually.
Demis Hassabis (01:51:48) Yeah, I’m sure there is. I read a lot of books for that time as well, Chronicle Time and some brilliant people involved. But I agree with you. I think maybe there needs to be more dialogue and understanding. I hope we can learn from those times. I think the difference here is that the AI has so many, it’s a multi-use technology. Obviously we’re trying to do things like solve all diseases, help with energy and scarcity, these incredible things. This is why all of us and myself, I started on this journey 30 plus years ago. But of course there are risks too. And probably Von Neumann, my guess is he foresaw both. And I think he said, I think it’s to his wife, that computers would be even more impactful in the world. And as we just discussed, I think that’s right. I think it’s going to be 10 times at least of the Industrial Revolution. So I think he’s right. So I think he would’ve been, I imagine, fascinated by where we are now.
Lex Fridman (01:52:53) And I think one of the, maybe you can correct me, but one of the takeaways from the book is that reason, as said in the book, Mad Dreams of Reason, it’s not enough for guiding humanity as we build these super powerful technology. That there’s something else. There’s also a religious component, whatever God, whatever religion gives, it pulls at something in the human spirit that raw cold reason doesn’t give us.
Demis Hassabis (01:53:22) And I agree with that. I think we need to approach it with whatever you want to call it, a spiritual dimension or humanist dimension. Doesn’t have to be to do with religion, but this idea of a soul, what makes us human, this spark that we have, perhaps it’s to do with consciousness when we finally understand that, I think that has to be at the heart of the endeavor. And technology, I’ve always seen technology as the enabler, the tools that enable us to flourish and to understand more about the world. And I’m with Feynman on this, and he used to always talk about science and art being companions. You can understand it from both sides, the beauty of a flower, how beautiful it is, and also understand why the colors of the flower evolve like that. That just makes it more beautiful, just the intrinsic beauty of the flower.
(01:54:10) I’ve always seen it like that. And maybe in the Renaissance times, the great discoverers then, people like Da Vinci, I don’t think he saw any difference between science and art and perhaps religion. Everything was, it’s just part of being human and being inspired about the world around us. And that’s the philosophy I tried to take. And one of my favorite philosophers is Spinoza. And I think he combined that all very well, this idea of trying to understand the universe and understanding our place in it. And that was his way of understanding religion. And I think that’s quite beautiful. And for me, all of these things are related, interrelated, the technology and what it means to be human.
(01:54:53) And I think it’s very important though that we remember that as when we’re immersed in the technology and the research, I think a lot of researchers that I see in our field are a little bit too narrow and only understand the technology. And I think also that’s why it’s important for this to be debated by society at large. I’m very supportive of things like the AI summits that will happen and governments understanding it. And I think that’s one good thing about the chatbot era and the product era of AI is that everyday person can actually feel and interact with cutting edge AI and feel it for themselves.
Lex Fridman (01:55:30) Yeah, because they force the technologists to have the human conversation. Yeah, for sure.
Lex Fridman (01:55:35) That’s the hopeful aspect of it, like you said, it’s a dual use technology that we’re forcefully integrating the entire humanity into it, into the discussion about AI because ultimately AI, AGI will be used for things that states use technologies for, which is conflict and so on. And the more we integrate humans into this picture by having chats with them, the more we will guide.
Demis Hassabis (01:56:01) Yeah, be able to adapt, society will be able to adapt to these technologies we’ve always done in the past with the incredible technologies we’ve invented in the past.
Lex Fridman (01:56:10) Do you think there will be something like a Manhattan Project where there will be an escalation of the power of this technology and states in their old way of thinking, we’ll try to use it as weapons technologies and there will be this escalation?
Demis Hassabis (01:56:27) I hope not. I think that would be very dangerous to do. And I think also not the right use of the technology. I hope we’ll end up with something more collaborative if needed, more like a CERN project where it’s research-focused and the best minds in the world come together to carefully complete the final steps and make sure it’s responsibly done before deploying it to the world. We’ll see. It’s difficult with the current geopolitical climate, I think, to see cooperation, but things can change. And I think at least on the scientific level, it’s important for the researchers to keep in touch and keep close to each other at least on those kinds of topics.
Lex Fridman (01:57:17) And I personally believe on the education side and immigration side, it would be great if both directions, people from the West immigrated to China and China, back. There is some family human aspect of people just intermixing and thereby those ties grow strong. So you can’t divide against each other, this old school way of thinking. And so multicultural, multidisciplinary research teams working on scientific questions, that’s like the hope. Don’t let the leaders that are warmongers divide us. I think science is the ultimately really beautiful connector.
Demis Hassabis (01:57:55) Yeah, science has always been, I think, quite a very collaborative endeavor and scientists know that it’s a collective endeavor as well, and we can all learn from each other. So perhaps it could be a vector to get a bit of cooperation.
p(doom)
Lex Fridman (01:58:08) Ridiculous question, what’s your P-Doom? Probability of the human civilization destroys itself?
Demis Hassabis (01:58:14) Well, look, I don’t have a P-Doom number. The reason I don’t is because I think it would imply a level of precision that is not there. So I don’t know how people are getting their P-Doom numbers. I think it’s a little bit of ridiculous notion because what I would say is it’s definitely non-zero and it’s probably non-negligible. So that in itself is pretty sobering. And my view is it’s just hugely uncertain what these technologies are going to be able to do, how fast are they going to take off, how controllable are they going to be. Some things may turn out to be, and hopefully way easier than we thought, but it may be there’s some really hard problems that are harder than we guessed today, and I think we don’t know that for sure. And so under those conditions of a lot of uncertainty, but huge stakes both ways.
(01:59:09) On the one hand, we could solve all diseases, energy problems, the scarcity problem, and then travel to the stars and conscious of the stars and maximum human flourishing. On the other hand, is these P-Doom scenarios. So given the uncertainty around it and the importance of it, it’s clear to me the only rational, sensible approach is to proceed with cautious optimism. So we want the benefits of course, and all of the amazing things that AI can bring. And actually, I would be really worried for humanity given the other challenges that we have, climate, aging, resources, all of that if I didn’t know something like AI was coming down the line. How would we solve all those other problems? I think it’s hard. So I think it could be amazingly transformative for good. But on the other hand, there are these risks that we know are there.
Demis Hassabis (02:00:00) But on the other hand, there are these risks that we know are there, but we can’t quite quantify. So the best thing to do is to use the scientific method to do more research to try and more precisely define those risks and of course address them. And I think that’s what we’re doing. I think there probably needs to be 10 times more effort of that than there is now as we are getting closer and closer to the AGI line.
Lex Fridman (02:00:27) What would be the source of worry for you more? Would it be human-caused or AI, AGI caused? Are humans abusing that technology versus AGI itself through mechanism that you’ve spoken about, which is fascinating, deception or this kind of stuff getting better and better and better secretly and then escapes?
Demis Hassabis (02:00:45) I think they operate over different timescales and they’re equally important to address. So there’s just the common garden variety of bad actors using new technology, in this case, general purpose technology and repurposing it for harmful end. And that’s a huge risk and I think that has a lot of complications because generally I’m in huge favor of open science and open source, and in fact, we did it with all our science projects like AlphaFold and all of those things for the benefit of the scientific community. But how does one restrict bad actors access to these powerful systems, whether they’re individuals or even rogue states, but enable access at the same time to good actors to maximally build on top of? It’s pretty tricky problem that I’ve not heard a clear solution to. So there’s the bad actor use case problem, and then there’s obviously, as the systems become more agentic and closer to AGI and more autonomous, how do we ensure the guardrails and they stick to what we want them to do and under our control?
Lex Fridman (02:01:52) Yeah, I tend to, maybe my mind is limited, worry more about the humans, so the bad actors. And there it could be in part how do you not put destructive technology in the hands of bad actors, but in another part from, again, geopolitical technology perspective, how do you reduce the number of bad actors in the world? That’s also an interesting human problem.
Demis Hassabis (02:02:14) Yeah, it’s a hard problem. I mean, look, we can maybe also use the technology itself to help early warning on some of the bad actor use cases, right? Whether that’s bio or nuclear or whatever it is, AI could be potentially helpful there as long as the AI that you’re using is itself reliable, right? So it’s a sort of interlocking problem and that’s what makes it very tricky. And again, it may require some agreement internationally, at least between China and the U.S. of some basic standards. Right.
Humanity
Lex Fridman (02:02:50) I have to ask you about the book, The Maniac. There’s the hand of God moment, Lee Sedol’s move 78 that perhaps the last time a human did a move of pure human genius and beat AlphaGo or broke its brain.
Lex Fridman (02:03:08) Sorry to anthropomorphize, but it’s an interesting moment because I think in so many domains it will keep happening.
Demis Hassabis (02:03:14) Yeah, it’s a special moment and it was great for Lee Sedol. I think it’s in a way they were inspiring each other. We as a team were inspired by Lee Sedol’s brilliance and nobleness. Then maybe he got inspired by what AlphaGo was doing to then conjure this incredible inspirational moment, captured very well in the documentary about it. And I think that’ll continue in many domains where there’s this, at least again for the foreseeable future, of the humans bringing in their ingenuity and asking the right question, let’s say, and then utilizing these tools in a way that then cracks a problem.
Lex Fridman (02:03:58) Yeah. As the AI become smarter and smarter, one of the interesting questions we can ask ourselves is what makes humans special? It does feel perhaps biased that we humans are deeply special. I don’t know if it’s our intelligence, it could be something else, that other thing that’s outside the mad dreams of reason.
Demis Hassabis (02:04:20) I think that’s what I’ve always imagined when I was a kid and starting on this journey of I was of course fascinated by things like consciousness, did a neuroscience PhD to look at how the brain works, especially imagination and memory. I focused on the hippocampus and it’s sort of going to be interesting. I always thought the best way, of course, one can philosophize about it and have thought experiments and maybe even do actual experiments like you do in neuroscience on real brains. But in the end, I always imagine that building AI, a kind of intelligent artifact, and then comparing that to the human mind and seeing what the differences were would be the best way to uncover what’s special about the human mind, if indeed there is anything special.
(02:05:00) And I suspect there probably is, but it’s going to be hard to… I think this journey we’re on will help us understand that and define that. And there may be a difference between carbon based substrates that we are and silicon ones when they process information. One of the best definitions I like of consciousness is it’s the way information feels when we process it, right?
Demis Hassabis (02:05:24) It could be. I mean, it’s not a very helpful scientific explanation, but I think it’s kind of interesting intuitive one. And so on this journey, this scientific journey we’re on will I think help uncover that mystery.
Lex Fridman (02:05:36) Yeah. What I cannot create, I do not understand. That’s somebody you deeply admire, Richard Feynman, like you mentioned. You also reach for the Wigner’s dreams of universality that he saw in constrained domains, but also broadly generally in mathematics and so on. So many aspects on which you’re pushing towards not to start trouble at the end, but Roger Penrose.
Lex Fridman (02:06:04) So do you think consciousness, there’s this hard problem of consciousness, how information feels. Do you think consciousness, first of all, is a computation? And if is, if it’s information processing, like you said, everything is, is it something that could be modeled by a classical computer?
Lex Fridman (02:06:24) Or is it a quantum mechanical in nature?
Demis Hassabis (02:06:26) Well, look, Penrose is an amazing thinker, one of the greatest of the modern era, and we’ve had a lot of discussions about this. Of course, we cordially disagree, which is I feel like… I mean, he collaborated with a lot of good neuroscientists to see if he could find mechanisms for quantum mechanics behavior in the brain. And to my knowledge, they haven’t found anything convincing yet. So my betting is that it’s mostly it is just classical computing that’s going on in the brain, which suggests that all the phenomena are modelable or mimicable by a classical computer. But we’ll see. There may be this final mysterious things of the feeling of consciousness, the qualia, these kinds of things that philosophers debate where it’s unique to the substrate.
(02:07:12) We may even come towards understanding that when if we do things like neural link or have neural interfaces to the AI systems, which I think we probably will eventually, maybe to keep up with the AI systems, we might actually be able to feel for ourselves what it’s like to compute on silicon, right? And maybe that will tell us. So I think it’s going to be interesting. I had a debate once with the late Daniel Dennett about why do we think each other are conscious? Okay, so it’s for two reasons. One is you’re exhibiting the same behavior that I am. So that’s one thing. Behaviorally you seem like a conscious being if I am.
(02:07:49) But the second thing which is often overlooked is that we’re running on the same substrate. So if you’re behaving in the same way and we’re running on the same substrate, it’s most parsimonious to assume you’re feeling the same experience that I’m feeling. But with an AI that’s on silicon, we won’t be able to rely on the second part, even if it exhibits the first part, that behavior looks like a behavior of a conscious being. It might even claim it is, but we wouldn’t know how it actually felt and it probably couldn’t know what we felt, at least in the first stages. Maybe when we get to superintelligence and the technologies that builds, perhaps we’ll be able to bridge that.
Lex Fridman (02:08:26) No, I mean that’s a huge test for radical empathy is to empathize with a different substrate.
Demis Hassabis (02:08:32) Right. Exactly. We’ve never had to confront that before.
Lex Fridman (02:08:36) Yeah. So maybe through brain computer interfaces be able to truly empathize what it feels like to be a computer, to compute.
Demis Hassabis (02:08:42) Well, for information to be computed not on a carbon system.
Lex Fridman (02:08:46) I mean, that’s deeply… Some people kind of think about that with plants, with other life forms which are different.
Demis Hassabis (02:08:51) Yes, it could be exactly.
Lex Fridman (02:08:53) Similar substrate, but sufficiently far enough on the evolutionary tree that it requires a radical empathy, but to do that with a computer.
Demis Hassabis (02:09:02) I mean, look, there are animal studies on this. Of course, higher animals like killer whales and dolphins and dogs and monkeys, they have some, and elephants, they have some aspects certainly of consciousness, right? Even though they might not be that smart on an IQ sense. So we can already empathize with that and maybe even some of our systems one day, like we built this thing called DolphinGemma, which a version of our system was trained on dolphin and whale sounds, and maybe we’ll be able to build an interpreter or translator at some point which would be pretty cool.
Lex Fridman (02:09:35) What gives you hope for the future of human civilization?
Demis Hassabis (02:09:38) Well, what gives me hope is that I think our almost limitless ingenuity, first of all. I think the best of us and the best human minds are incredible. And I love meeting and watching any human that’s the top of their game, whether that’s sport or science or art, it’s just nothing more wonderful than that, seeing them in their element in flow. I think it’s almost limitless. Our brains are general systems, intelligent systems, so I think it’s almost limitless what we can potentially do with them. And then the other thing is our extreme adaptability. I think it’s going to be okay in terms of there’s going to be a lot of change, but look where we are now without effectively our hunter-gatherer brains.
(02:10:24) How is it we can cope with the modern world, right? Flying on planes, doing podcasts, playing computer games and virtual simulations. I mean, it’s already mind blowing given that our mind was developed for hunting buffaloes on the tundra. And so I think this is just the next step, and it’s actually kind of interesting to see how society’s already adapted to this mind blowing AI technology we have today already. It’s sort of like, “Oh, I talked to chat bots. Totally fine.”
Lex Fridman (02:10:54) And it’s very possible that this very podcast activity, which I’m here for, will be completely replaced by AI. I’m very replaceable and I’m waiting for it.
Demis Hassabis (02:11:02) Not to the level that you can do it, Lex, I don’t think.
Lex Fridman (02:11:04) Thank you. That’s what we humans do to each other. We compliment.
Lex Fridman (02:11:09) All right. And I’m deeply grateful for us humans to have this infinite capacity for curiosity, adaptability, like you said, and also compassion and ability to love.
Demis Hassabis (02:11:19) All the things that are deeply human.
Lex Fridman (02:11:21) Well, this is a huge honor, Demis. You are one of the truly special humans in the world. Thank you so much for doing what you do and for talking today.
Demis Hassabis (02:11:29) Well, thank you very much, Lex.
Lex Fridman (02:11:32) Thanks for listening to this conversation with Demis Hassabis. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description and consider subscribing to this channel. And now let me answer some questions and try to articulate some things I’ve been thinking about. If you’d like to submit questions including in audio and video form, go to lexfridman.com/ama. I got a lot of amazing questions, thoughts and requests from folks. I’ll keep trying to pick some randomly and comment on it at the end of every episode. I got a note on May 21st this year that said, “Hi, Lex. 20 years ago today, David Foster Wallace delivered his famous This is Water speech at Kenyon College. What do you think of this speech?
David Foster Wallace
(02:12:21) Well, first, I think this is probably one of the greatest and most unique commencement speeches ever given, but of course, I have many favorites, including the one by Steve Jobs. And David Foster Wallace is one of my favorite writers and one of my favorite humans. There’s a tragic honesty to his work, and it always felt as if he was engaging in a constant battle with his own mind, and the writing, his writing were kind of his notes from the front lines of that battle. Now onto the speech, let me quote some parts. There’s of course the parable of the fish and the water that goes, there are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way who nods at them and says, “Morning boys, how’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?” In the speech, David Foster Wallace goes on to say, “The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence of course, this is just the banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you in this dry and lovely morning.” I have several takeaways from this parable and the speech that follows. First, I think we must question everything, and in particular, the most basic assumptions about our reality, our life, and the very nature of existence, and that this project is a deeply personal one. In some fundamental sense, nobody can really help you in this process of discovery.
(02:14:23) The call to action here, I think, from David Foster Wallace as he puts it, is to ” To be just a little less arrogant, to have just a little more critical awareness about myself and my certainties because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is it turns out totally wrong and deluded.” All right, back to me. Lex speaking. Second takeaway is that the central spiritual battles of our life are not fought on a mountain top somewhere at a meditation retreat, but it’s fought in the mundane moments of daily life.
(02:15:08) Third takeaway is that we too easily give away our time and attention to the multitude of distractions that the world feeds us, the insatiable black holes of attention. David Foster Wallace’s call to action in this case is to be deeply aware of the beauty in each moment and to find meaning in the mundane. I often quote David Foster Wallace in his advice that the key to life is to be unborable, and I think this is exactly right. Every moment, every object, every experience when looked at closely enough contains within it infinite richness to explore. And since Demis Hassabis of this very podcast episode and I are such fans of Richard Feynman, allow me to also quote Mr. Feynman on this topic as well.
(02:16:04) “I have a friend who’s an artist and has sometimes taken a view which I don’t agree with very well. He’ll hold up a flower and say, “Look how beautiful it is,” and I’ll agree. Then he says, “I as an artist can see how beautiful this is, but you as a scientist take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing,” and I think that’s kind of nutty. First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me too, I believe. Although I may not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is, I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside which also have beauty. I mean, it’s not just beauty at this dimension at one centimeter, there’s also beauty at the smaller dimensions.”
(02:17:05) “Their inner structure, also the processes, the fact that the colors and the flower evolved in order to attract the insects to pollinate it is interesting. It means that the insects can see the color. It adds a question. Does this aesthetic sense also exist in lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions, which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery, and the awe of a flower. It only adds.”
(02:17:36) All right, back to David Foster Wallace’s speech. He has a great story in there that I particularly enjoy. It goes, there are these two guys sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness. One of the guys is religious, the other is an atheist, and the two are arguing about the existence of God with that special intensity that comes after about the fourth beer. And the atheist says, “Look, it’s not like I don’t have actual reasons for not believing in God. It’s not like I haven’t ever experimented with the whole God and prayer thing. Just last month, I got caught away from the camp in that terrible blizzard, and I was totally lost and I couldn’t see a thing and it was 50 below. So I tried it. I fell in my knees in the snow and cried out, ‘Oh God, if there is a God, I’m lost in this blizzard and I’m going to die if you don’t help me.”
(02:18:35) And now back in the bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist all puzzled, “Well, then you must believe now?” he says, “After all, there you are, alive.” The atheist just rolls his eyes. “No, man. All that happened was a couple of Eskimos happened to be wandering by and showed me the way back to the camp.” All this, I think, teaches us that everything is a matter of perspective and that wisdom may arrive if we have the humility to keep shifting and expanding our perspective on the world. Thank you for allowing me to talk a bit about David Foster Wallace. He’s one of my favorite writers and he’s a beautiful soul.
Education and research
(02:19:20) If I may, one more thing I wanted to briefly comment on. I find myself to be in this strange position of getting attacked online often from all sides, including being lied about sometimes through selective misrepresentation, but often through downright lies. I don’t know how else to put it. This all breaks my heart, frankly, but I’ve come to understand that it’s the way of the internet and the cost of the path I’ve chosen. There’s been days when it’s been rough on me mentally. It’s not fun being lied about, especially when it’s about things that are usually for a long time have been a source of happiness and joy for me. But again, that’s life.
(02:20:04) I’ll continue exploring the world of people and ideas with empathy and rigor, wearing my heart on my sleeve as much as I can. For me, that’s the only way to live. Anyway, a common attack on me is about my time at MIT and Drexel, two great universities I love and have tremendous respect for. Since a bunch of lies have accumulated online about me on these topics, to a sad and at times hilarious degree, I thought I would once more state the obvious facts about my bio for the small number of you who may care. TLDR, two things. First, as I say often, including in a recent podcast episode that somehow was listened to by many millions of people, I proudly went to Drexel University for my bachelor’s, master’s, and doctorate degrees.
(02:20:59) Second, I am a research scientist at MIT and have been there in a paid research position for the last 10 years. Allow me to elaborate a bit more on these two things now, but please skip if this is not at all interesting. So like I said, a common attack on me is that I have no real affiliation with MIT. The accusation, I guess, is that I’m falsely claiming an MIT affiliation because I taught a lecture there once. Nope, that accusation against me is a complete lie. I have been at MIT for over 10 years in a paid research position from 2015 to today. To be extra clear, I’m a research scientist at MIT working in LIDS, the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems in the College of Computing. For now, since I’m still at MIT, you can see me in the directory and on the various lab pages.
(02:22:05) I have indeed given many lectures at MIT over the years, a small fraction of which I posted online. Teaching for me always has been just for fun and not part of my research work. I personally think I suck at it, but I have always learned and grown from the experience. It’s like Feynman spoke about, if you want to understand something deeply, it’s good to try to teach it. But like I said, my main focus has always been on research. I published many peer-reviewed papers that you can see in my Google Scholar profile. For my first four years at MIT, I worked extremely intensively. Most weeks were 80 to 100-hour work weeks. After that, in 2019, I still kept my research scientist position, but I split my time taking a leap to pursue projects in AI and robotics outside MIT and to dedicate a lot of focus to the podcast.
(02:23:03) As I’ve said, I’ve been continuously surprised just how many hours preparing for an episode takes. There are many episodes of the podcast for which I have to read, write, and think for 100, 200 or more hours across multiple weeks and months. Since 2020, I have not actively published research papers. Just like the podcast, I think it’s something that’s a serious full-time effort. But not publishing and doing full-time research has been eating at me because I love research and I love programming and building systems that test out interesting technical ideas, especially in the context of human-AI or human-robot interaction. I hope to change this in the coming months and years.
(02:23:52) What I’ve come to realize about myself is if I don’t publish or if I don’t launch systems that people use, I definitely feel like a piece of me is missing. It legitimately is a source of happiness for me. Anyway, I’m proud of my time at MIT. I was and am constantly surrounded by people much smarter than me, many of whom have become lifelong colleagues and friends. MIT is a place I go to escape the world, to focus on exploring fascinating questions at the cutting edge of science and engineering. This, again, makes me truly happy and it does hit pretty hard on a psychological level when I’m getting attacked over this. Perhaps I’m doing something wrong. If I am, I will try to do better.
(02:24:43) In all this discussion of academic work, I hope you know that I don’t ever mean to say that I’m an expert at anything. In the podcast and in my private life, I don’t claim to be smart. In fact, I often call myself an idiot and mean it. I try to make fun of myself as much as possible, and in general to celebrate others instead. Now to talk about Drexel University, which I also love, am proud of and am deeply grateful for my time there. As I said, I went to Drexel for my bachelor’s, master’s, and doctorate degrees in computer science and electrical engineering. I’ve talked about Drexel many times, including, as I mentioned, at the end of a recent podcast, the Donald Trump episode. funny enough, that was listened to by many millions of people where I answered a question about graduate school and explained my own journey at Drexel and how grateful I am for it.
(02:25:46) If it’s at all interesting to you, please go listen to the end of that episode or watch the related clip. At Drexel, I met and worked with many brilliant researchers and mentors from whom I’ve learned a lot about engineering, science and life. There are many valuable things I gained from my time at Drexel. First, I took a large number of very difficult math and theoretical computer science courses. They taught me how to think deeply and rigorously, and also how to work hard and not give up even if it feels like I’m too dumb to find a solution to a technical problem.
(02:26:21) Second, I programmed a lot during that time, mostly C, C++. I programmed robots, optimization algorithms, computer vision systems, wireless network protocols, multimodal machine learning systems, and all kinds of simulations of physical systems. This is where I really developed a love for programming, including, yes, Emacs And the Kinesis keyboard. I also, during that time, read a lot, I played a lot of guitar, wrote a lot of crappy poetry, and trained a lot in judo and jiu-jitsu, which I cannot sing enough praises to. Jiu-jitsu humbled me on a daily basis throughout my twenties, and it still does to this very day whenever I get a chance to train.
(02:27:13) Anyway, I hope that the folks who occasionally get swept up in the chanting online crowds that want to tear down others don’t lose themselves in it too much. In the end, I still think there’s more good than bad in people. But we’re all each of us a mixed bag. I know I am very much flawed. I speak awkwardly. I sometimes say stupid shit. I can get irrationally emotional. I can be too much of a dick when I should be kind. I can lose myself in a biased rabbit hole before I wake up to the bigger, more accurate picture of reality. I’m human and so are you for better or for worse, and I do still believe we’re in this whole beautiful mess together. I love you all.
This is a transcript of Lex Fridman Podcast #474 with DHH.
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DHH (00:00:00) No one anywhere who’s serious believes that cookie banners does anything good for anyone, yet we’ve been unable to get rid of it. This is the thing that really gets me about cookie banners too. It’s not just the EU, it’s the entire world. You can’t hide from cookie banners anywhere on this planet. If you go to goddamn Mars on one of Elon’s rockets and you try to access a web page, you’ll still see a cookie banner. No one in the universe is safe from this nonsense.
(00:00:26) It sometimes feels like we’re barely better off. Web pages aren’t that different from what they were in the late ’90s, early 2000s. They’re still just forms. They still just write to databases. A lot of people, I think, are very uncomfortable with the fact that they are essentially crud monkeys. They just make systems that create, read, update, or delete rows in a database and they have to compensate for that existential dread by over complicating things. That’s a huge part of the satisfaction of driving a race car is driving in at the edge of adhesion, as we call it, where you’re essentially just a tiny movement away from spinning out. Doesn’t take much. Then the car starts rotating. Once it starts rotating, you lose grip and you’re going for the wall. That balance of danger and skill is what’s so intoxicating.
Introduction
Lex Fridman (00:01:21) The following is a conversation with David Heinemeyer Hansen, also known as DHH. He is a legend in the programming and tech world, brilliant and insightful, sometimes controversial, and always fun to talk to. He’s the creator of Ruby on Rails, which is an influential web development framework behind many websites used by millions of people, including Shopify, GitHub, and Airbnb. He is the co-owner and CTO of 37signals that created Basecamp, HEY, and ONCE.
(00:01:57) He is a New York Times best-selling author together with his co-author, Jason Fried, of four books, Rework, Remote, Getting Real, and It Doesn’t Have To Be Crazy At Work. And on top of that, he’s also a race car driver, including being a class winner at the legendary twenty-four-hour Le Mans race. This is the Lex Fridman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description and consider subscribing to this channel. And now, dear friends, here’s DHH.
Programming
Lex Fridman (00:02:32) For someone who became a legendary programmer, you officially got into programming late in life, and I guess that’s because you tried to learn how to program a few times and you failed. So can you tell me the full story, the saga of your failures to learn programming? Was Commodore 64 involved?
DHH (00:02:53) Commodore 64 was the inspiration. I really wanted a Commodore 64. That was the first computer I ever sat down in front. And the way I sat down in front of it was I was five years old and there was this one kid on my street who had a Commodore 64. No one else had a computer, so we were all the kids just getting over there and we were all playing Yie Ar Kung-Fu. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen that game. It was one of the original fighting games. It’s really a great game and I was playing that for the first time at five years old, and we were like seven kids sitting up in this one kid’s bedroom all taking our turn to play the game. And I just found that unbelievably interesting. And I begged and I begged and I begged my dad, “Could I get a computer?” And he finally comes home. He’s like, “I got you a computer.” I was like, yes, my own Commodore 64. And he pulls out this black, green and blue keyboard that’s an Amstrad 464. I was like, “Dad, what’s this?”
DHH (00:03:54) This is not a Commodore 64. But it was a computer. So I got my first computer at essentially six years old, that Amstrad 464. And of course, the first thing I wanted to do, I wanted to play video games. And I think the computer, which he by the way had traded for a TV and a stereo recorder or something like that, came with two games. One was this Frogger game where you had to escape from underground. It was actually kind of dark, like this frog, you’re trying to get it out from underground. I was pretty bad at it. And I only had those two games and then I wanted more games. And one way to get more games when you’re a kid who doesn’t have a lot of money and can’t just buy a bunch of games is to type them in yourself. Back in ’84, ’85, magazines would literally print source code at the back of their magazines and you could just sit and type it in.
(00:04:46) So I tried to do that and it would take like two hours to print this game into the Amstrad, and of course I’d make some spelling mistake along the way and something wouldn’t work and the whole thing… I wasn’t that good of English, I was born in Denmark. So I was really trying to get into it because I wanted all these games and I didn’t have the money to buy them. And I tried quite hard for quite a while to get into it, but it just never clicked. And then I discovered the magic of piracy, and after that I basically just took some time off from learning to program because well now suddenly I had access to all sorts of games. So that was the first attempt around six, seven years old. And what’s funny is I remember these fragments. I remember not understanding the purpose of a variable.
(00:05:34) If there’s a thing and you assign something, why would you assign another thing to it? So for some reason, I understood constants. Constants made sense to me, but variables didn’t. Then maybe I’m 11 to 12, I’ve gotten into the Amiga at this point. The Amiga, by the way, still perhaps my favorite computer of all time. I mean, this is one of those things where people get older and they’re like, oh, the music from the ’80s was amazing. To me, even as someone who loves computers and love new computers, the Amiga was this magical machine that was made by the same company that produced the Commodore 64 and I got the Amiga 500 I think in ’87.
Lex Fridman (00:06:16) Look at this sexy thing. That is a sexy machine right there.
DHH (00:06:19) This is from an age by the way where computing wasn’t global in the same sense, that different territories had different computers that were popular. The Amiga was really popular in Europe, but it wasn’t very popular at all in the US as far as I understand. It wasn’t popular in Japan. There were just different machines. The Apple II was a big thing in the US. I’d never even heard of Apple in the ’80s in Copenhagen. But the Amiga 500 was the machine that brought me to want to try it again. And do you know what’s funny? The reason I wanted to try it again was I remembered the first time I tried to learn and then there was this programming language that was literally called EasyAMOS, like the easy version of AMOS. I’m like, if it’s easy AMOS, how hard can it be? I’ve got to be able to figure this out.
(00:07:04) And this time I tried harder. I got into conditionals, I got into loops, I got into all these things and still, I couldn’t do it. And on the second attempt, I really got to the point of maybe I’m not smart enough. Maybe it’s too much math. I like math in this sort of superficial way. I don’t like it in the deep way that some of my perhaps slightly nerdier friends did, who I had tremendous respect for, but I’m not that person. I’m not the math geek who’s going to figure it all out. So after that attempt with EasyAMOS and failing to even get… I don’t even think I completed one even very basic game. I thought, programming’s just not for me. I’m going to have to do something else. I still love computers. I still love video games.
(00:07:53) I actually at that time had already begun making friends with people who knew how to program, who weren’t even programming EasyAMOS, they were programming with freaking Assembly. And I would sit down and just go, the moves and the memories and the copies, how do you even do this? I don’t even understand how you go from this to Amiga demos for example. That was the big thing with the Amiga. It had this wonderful demo scene in Europe. It’s this really interesting period of time in the Amiga’s history where you had all these programmers spread out mostly all over Europe who would compete on graphic competitions where you could probably bring one of these different-
DHH (00:08:36) On this thing. They would make these little almost like music videos, combining some MIDI music, combining some cool graphics, and they would do all of it in like 4K. Four kilobytes that is. Not four Ks of resolution. Four kilobytes of memory. And I just thought that was such a cool scene. This was obviously pre-internet. It was even pre-BBS, bulletin board systems, to some extent. It was you swap your demo software with someone else by sending them a disk in the mail, like the 3.5s. And I was enamored with that whole scene. I was enamored with what they were able to create and I just wanted to be a part of it even though I kind of didn’t have any skills to contribute. And that’s how I got into running BBSs.
(00:09:22) I didn’t learn programming then and I wouldn’t learn programming until much later, until I was almost 20 years old. The bulletin board systems existed in this funny space where they were partly a service to the demo scenes allowing all these demo groups to distribute their amazing demos. And then it was also a place to trade piracy software, pirated software. And I ended up starting one of those when I was 14 years old in my tiny little bedroom in Copenhagen. I had my, at that point, Amiga 4000. I had three telephone lines coming in to my tiny room.
DHH (00:10:00) Which is funny because again, I’m 14 years old. By the time I was installing my third line, you had to get someone from the telephone company to come do it. I get this guy and he’s just looking around, like what is this? Why the hell is a 14 year old having three phone lines into their tiny little bedroom? What’s going on here? Why are all these modems blinking red and black and making funny sounds?
DHH (00:10:24) They did and they didn’t. They knew I had the phone lines. They knew I had the computer. I don’t think they really understood that I was trading pirated software that was both illegal and whatever else was going on.
Lex Fridman (00:10:38) Oh, we should probably say that in Europe, maybe you can comment on this, especially in Eastern Europe, but Europe in general, piracy I think was more acceptable than it was in the United States. I don’t know, maybe it’s just my upbringing-
DHH (00:10:52) Even that conversation wasn’t present. I never spoke to anyone growing up in Denmark-
DHH (00:10:57) Who had any moral qualms whatsoever about piracy. It was just completely accepted that you’re a kid, you want a lot of games, you don’t have a lot of money. What do you do? You trade. Some people would occasionally buy a game. I mean, I once bought a Sega Master system and I bought one game because that was what I could afford. I got After Burner II, I don’t know if you’ve ever played that game. It’s a pretty bad implementation on the Sega Master System, but it was like 600 crowners.
(00:11:28) And I was making money at that time doing newspaper delivery. I had to do that for a month to afford one game. I liked video games way too much to wait a month just to get one game. So piracy was just the way you did it, and that was how I got into running this bulletin board system, being part of the demo scene, being part of the piracy scene to some extent. And then also at some point realizing, oh, you can actually also make money on this and this can fund buying more phone lines and buying more modems and buying more Amigas. Oh yeah, that was one of the demo parties. These were amazing things.
Lex Fridman (00:12:06) Look at all those CRT monitors.
DHH (00:12:08) All these CRT monitors. Again, when I was 14, I don’t understand fully why my parents allowed this, but I traveled from Copenhagen, the capital of Denmark to [inaudible 00:12:20], this tiny little town in Jutland on the train with a bunch of dudes who were late teens, in their twenties. I’m 14 years old. I’m lugging my 14-inch CRT monitor with my computer in the back to go to the party. That was what it was called. That was the biggest demo scene party at that time and it was exactly as you see in that picture, thousands of people just lining up with their computers, programming demos all day long and trading these things back and forth.
Lex Fridman (00:12:48) That’s kind of awesome. Not going to lie. It’s a little ridiculous.
DHH (00:12:52) It’s totally awesome, and I miss it in ways where the internet has connected people in some ways, but the connection you get from sitting right next to someone else who has their own CRT monitor, who’s lugged at halfway around the country to get there is truly special because it was also just this burst of creativity. You’re constantly running around, you’re constantly surrounded by people who are really good at what they could do, they’re really good at programming computers. It’s infectious. It was part of that pang I felt then going like, oh man, why can’t I figure this out? I mean, why can’t I even figure out EasyAMOS? It’s kind of frustrating.
Lex Fridman (00:13:28) But on your third attempt, you were a little more successful.
DHH (00:13:30) So third attempt is when I start getting it. This is when I start helping out, let’s say, building things for the internet. So around ’95 I think it is, or ’96, I discovered the internet. Actually in ninth grade, that was my first experience. I went to some university in Denmark and in ninth grade we had this excursion and they sat us down in front of a computer and the computer had Netscape Navigator, the first version, or maybe it was even the precursor to that, and they had a text editor and us kids [inaudible 00:14:06] hey, build something on the internet. And it was just HTML and the first thing you do is like, oh, I can make the text blink by just putting in this tag and saving it? That moment, that was actually when I reawakened the urge to want to learn to program because I got a positive experience.
(00:14:23) All the other experiences I had with programming was I’d spend hours typing something in, I click run and it wouldn’t work, and I’d get an error message that made no sense to me as a kid either at six or seven or at 12. And here I am sitting in front of a computer connected to the internet and I’m making text blink. I’m making it larger. I’m turning it into an H1 or an H2. And these guys out here, we just did it for like an hour and a half and suddenly I go, oh, I can make things for the internet that someone in Germany can be able to access and see, and I don’t have to ask anyone for permission? This is super cool. I’ve got to do more of this. So I got into the internet. I got into working with HTML, and I still had all these friends from these demo parties, and I started working with them on creating gaming websites.
(00:15:11) I’d rather buy the video games, I’d review them. This was another good way of getting new video games was to walk down to some store and say like, hey, I’m a journalist. I’m like this fifteen-year-old kid and they’re looking at me. “You’re a journalist?” “Yeah, can I borrow some games?” Because this was when games moved on to the PlayStation and these other things. You couldn’t just as easily pirate, at least not at first. So I went down there, did all that, and that started the journey of the internet for me. I started working on these gaming websites, working with programmers, figuring out that I could do something, I could work on the HTML part.
(00:15:44) It’s not really programming, but it kind of smells like it. You’re talking to a computer, you’re making it put text on the screen and you’re communicating with someone halfway around the world. So that became my pathway back into programming, and then slowly I picked up more and more of it. First website I did with someone, one of these programmers from the demo scene that was dynamic was asp.net. It wasn’t even actually called .net. That was what we started on, and then we moved on to PHP and PHP was when I finally got it, when it finally clicked, when conditionals and loops and variables and all of that stuff started to make sense enough to me that I thought, I can do this.
Lex Fridman (00:16:26) So would it be fair to say that we wouldn’t have DHH without PHP and therefore you owe all of your success to PHP?
DHH (00:16:33) A hundred percent, that’s true. And it’s even better than that because PHP to me didn’t just give me a start in terms of making my own web applications. It actually gave me a bar. In many ways I think the pinnacle of web developer ergonomics is late ’90s PHP. You write this script, you FTP it to a server and instantly it’s deployed. Instantly it’s available. You change anything in that file and you reload, boom, it’s right there. There’s no web servers, there’s no setup. There’s just an Apache that runs mod PHP, and it was essentially the easiest way to get a dynamic web page up and going, and this is one of the things I’ve been chasing that high for basically the rest of my career. It was so easy to make things for the internet in the mid to late ’90s.
(00:17:26) How did we lose the sensibilities that allowed us to not just work this way but get new people into the industry to give them those success experiences that I had adding a freaking blink tag to an HTML page, FTPing a PHP page to an Apache web server without knowing really anything about anything? Without knowing anything about frameworks, without knowing anything about setup. All of that stuff have really taken us to a place where it sometimes feels like we’re barely better off. Web pages aren’t that different from what they were in the late ’90s, early 2000s. They’re still just forms. They still just write to databases.
(00:18:06) A lot of people, I think are very uncomfortable with the fact that they are essentially crud monkeys. They just make systems that create, read, update or delete rows in a database, and they have to compensate for that existential dread by over-complicating things. Now, that’s a bit of a character. There’s more to it and there’s things you can learn for more sophisticated ways of thinking about this, but there’s still an ideal here, which is why I was so happy you had Pieter Levels on because he still basically works like this. And I look at that and go, man, that’s amazing.
Lex Fridman (00:18:39) Yeah, you’re chasing that high. He’s been high all along.
Lex Fridman (00:18:43) Using PHP, jQuery and SQLite.
DHH (00:18:47) I think it’s amazing because he’s proving that this isn’t just a nostalgic dream. He’s actually doing it. He’s running all these businesses. Now, some of that is, as he would admit up first upfront, is that he’s just one guy. And you could do different things when you’re just one guy. When you’re working in a team, when I started working on a team, when I started working with Jason Fried on Basecamp, we at first didn’t use version control together.
(00:19:16) I used version control for myself, and then I thought, do you know what? Designers, they’re probably not smart enough to figure out CBS and therefore I was just like, no, no, no, you just FTP it up. You just FTP it. They knew how to do FTP. And then after the third time I had overwritten their changes I was like, goddamn it, I guess I’ve got to teach Jason CBS to not do that again. But I think there’s still way more truth to the fact that we can work the way we did in the ’90s, work the way Pieter works today even in the team context, and that we’ve been far too willing to hand over far too much of our developer ergonomics to the merchants of complexity.
JavaScript
Lex Fridman (00:19:57) And you’ve been chasing that with Rails 8. So how do you bring all the cool features of a modern framework and make it no build, make it as easy to create something and to ship it as it was in the ’90s with just PHP? It’s very difficult for me to beat the Pieter Levels approach of just… It’s so easy to just ship some PHP.
DHH (00:20:21) And it should be. Why should it be harder than that? Our computers today are almost infinitely faster than what they were in the ’90s. So shouldn’t we be able to work in even easier ways? We should be looking back on the ’90s and go, oh, that was way too complicated. Now we have more sophisticated technology that’s way faster and it allows us to work in these easier to use ways. But that’s not true. But now you can see the line I draw in my work with Ruby on Rails, and especially with Rails 8. No build to me is reaching back to that ’90s feeling and going, now we can do some of those things without giving up on all the progress. Because I do think you can get too nostalgic. I do think you can start just fantasizing that everything was better in the ’90s. I wasn’t.
(00:21:10) I mean, I was there, there was a lot of things that sucked. And if we can somehow find a way to combine the advantages and advances we’ve had over the past 20 years with that ease of developer ergonomics, we can win. No build is a rejection of the part of web development I’ve hated the most in the past 10, 15 years, which is the JavaScript scene. And I don’t say that as someone who hates JavaScript. I mean, I often joke that JavaScript is my second favorite program language. It’s a very distant second. Ruby is by far and away number one, but I actually like JavaScript. I don’t think it’s a bad language. It gets a lot of flak. People add a string of two plus a one and it gives something nonsense, and I just go, yeah, but why would you do that? Just don’t do that. The language is actually quite lovely, especially the modern version.
(00:22:02) ES6, that really introduced a proper class syntax to it, so I could work with JavaScript in many of the same ways that I love working with Ruby. It made things so much better. But in the early 2010s until quite recently, all of that advancement happened in pre-processing, happened in build pipelines. The browsers couldn’t speak a dialect of JavaScript that was pleasant to work with so everyone started pre-compiling their JavaScript to be able to use more modern ways of programming with a browser that was seen as stuck with an ancient version of JavaScript that no one actually wanted to work with. And that made sense to me, but it was also deeply unpleasant. And I remember thinking during that time, the dark ages as I refer to them with JavaScript, that this cannot be the final destination. There’s no way that we have managed to turn the internet into such an unpleasant place to work where I would start working on a project in JavaScript using Webpack and all of these dependencies, and I would put it down for literally five minutes and the thing wouldn’t compile anymore.
(00:23:14) The amount of churn that the JavaScript community, especially with its frameworks and its tooling, went through in the decade from 2010 to 2020 was absurd. And you had to be trapped inside of that asylum to not realize what an utterly perverse situation we had landed ourselves in. Why does everything break all the time? I mean, the joke wouldn’t be just that the software would break, that would annoy me personally. But then I’d go on Hacker News and I’d see some thread on the latest JavaScript release of some framework, and the thread would be like, someone would ask, well, aren’t we using the thing we just used three months ago? And people would be like, that thing is so outdated. That’s so three months ago. You’ve got to get with the new program, we’re completely rewriting everything for the [inaudible 00:24:07] time and anything you’ve learned in the framework you’ve been spending the last amount of time on, it’s all useless. You’ve got to throw everything out and you’ve got to start over. Why aren’t you doing it stupid idiot?
Lex Fridman (00:24:18) Is that a kind of mass hysteria that took over the developer community you think? Like where you have to keep creating new frameworks and new frameworks and are we past that dark age?
DHH (00:24:29) I think we’re getting out of it and we’re getting out of it because browsers have gotten so much better. There was a stagnation in browser technology. Some of it was an overhang all the way back from IE5. So IE5 essentially put the whole internet development experience into a deep freeze because Microsoft won the browser wars in the mid-2000s, and then they basically disbanded their browser development team because they’re like all right, job done, we don’t need any more innovation on the internet. Can we just go back to writing Windows forms or something now that we control everything? And it really wasn’t until obviously Firefox kind of kindled a little bit of something. Then Chrome got into the scene and Google got serious about moving to web forward, that you had a kindling of maybe the browser could be better. Maybe the browser wasn’t frozen in time in 2005. Maybe the browser could actually evolve like the development platform that it is. But then what happened was you had a lot of smart people who poured in to the web because the web turned out to be the greatest application development platform of all time. This was where all the money was being made. This was where all the billionaires were being minted. This was where the Facebook’s and whatever of the world came to be. So you had all of this brain power applied to the problem of how to work with the web, and there were some very smart people with some I’m sure very good ideas who did not have programmer happiness as their motivation number one. They had other priorities and those priorities allowed them to discount and even rationalize the complexity they were injecting everywhere. Some of that complexity came from organizational structure. When you have a company like Facebook for example that does depend on the web and want to push it forward, but have sliced the development role job into these tiny little niches… I’m a front-end glob pipeline configurator.
(00:26:41) Oh yeah, well, I’m a front-end whatever engineer. And suddenly the web developer was no longer one person. It was 15 different roles. That in itself injected a ton of complexity. But I also want to give it the bold case here, which was that some of that complexity was necessary to get to where we are today, that the complexity was a bridge. It wasn’t the destination, but we had to cross that bridge to get to where we are today where browsers are frankly incredible. The JavaScript you can write in a text file and then serve on a web server for a browser to ingest is amazing. It’s actually a really good experience. You don’t need any pre-processing. You could just write text files, send them to a browser, and you have an incredible development-
Lex Fridman (00:27:25) And we should also say that it can kind of be broken, at least the HTML, but even the JavaScript could be a little bit broken and it kind of still works. Like maybe it half-ass works, but just the amount of mess of smelly code that a browser has to deal with is insane.
DHH (00:27:44) This is one of the hardest problems in computing today is to parse the entire internet. Because thankfully for us as web developers, but perhaps not so much for the browser developers, every webpage that has ever been created minus the brief period with Flash still runs today. The webpage I did in ninth grade would render on a modern browser today, 30 years later.
DHH (00:28:11) That is completely crazy when you think about the amount of evolution we’ve had with the web, how much better we’ve made it, how many more standards browsers have adopted. It’s essentially an Apollo project today to create a new browser, which is why it doesn’t happen very often, which is why even companies like Microsoft had to throw in the towel and say, we can’t do it. Now, I actually don’t think that’s good for the web. There is the danger of the monoculture if we just get a single browser engine that runs everything, and we are in danger of that. I love the fact that the Ladybird project, for example, is trying to make a new browser engine from scratch. I’ve supported that project. I would encourage people to look into that. It’s really a wonderful thing. It’s staffed by a bunch of people who worked on other browser projects in the past.
Lex Fridman (00:28:57) Truly independent web browser.
DHH (00:28:59) We really need that. But I can hold that thought in my head at the same time I hold the thought in my head that Google Chrome was pivotal to the web surviving as the premier web development platform. If it had not been for Google and their entire business depending on a thriving open web, Apple, Microsoft I think would’ve been just as fine to see the web go away to disappear into being something that’s just served native mobile applications and native desktop applications that they could completely control. So I have all sorts of problems with Google, but it’s not Chrome. Chrome is a complete gift to web developers everywhere, to the web as a development platform, and they deserve an enormous amount of credit I think for that. Even if it’s entangled with their business model and half of Chrome is code that spies on you or informs targeted ads and a bunch of things I’m not a big fan of, I can divorce that from the fact that we need champions in the corner of the web who have trillions of dollars of market cap value riding on the open web.
Google Chrome and DOJ
Lex Fridman (00:30:16) We’re going to take tangents upon a tangent upon a tangent. So let’s go to Chrome. I think Chrome positive impact on humanity is immeasurable for reasons that you just described. On the technology front, the features that present the competition they created, it’s spurred on this wonderful flourishing of web technologies. But anyway, I have to ask you about the recent stuff with the DOJ trying to split up Chrome and Google. Do you think this is a good idea? Do you think this does harm?
DHH (00:30:47) It’s a disaster. And I say that as someone who’s been very sympathetic to the antitrust fight, because I do think we have antitrust problems in technology, but the one place where we don’t have them by and large is with browsers, is with the tools we use to access the open web. First of all, we have Firefox. Now, Firefox is not doing all that great, and Firefox has been propped up by Google for many years to deter from exactly what’s going on with the DOJ that they were the only game in town. Apple has Safari. I have a bunch of problems with Apple too, but I love Safari. I love the fact that we have a premier browser running on a premier operating system that people can’t turn the web into just a Chrome experience. But I also think that the open web needs this trillion dollar champion, or at least benefits from it.
(00:31:44) Maybe it doesn’t need it, but it certainly benefits from it. And of all the things that are wrong with monopoly formation in technology, Chrome is the last thing, and this is why I get so frustrated sometimes about the monopoly fight, that there are real problems and we should be focusing on the premier problems first like the toll booths on our mobile phones. There are far bigger problems. It’s not the open web, it’s not the tools that we use to access the open web. If I don’t want to use Chrome, if my customers of my businesses that run on the internet don’t want to use Chrome, they don’t have to. We’re never forced to go through it. The open internet is still open. So I think it’s a real shame that the DOJ has chosen to pursue Google in this way. I do think there are other things you can nail Google for, their ad monopoly maybe, or the shenanigans they’ve done in controlling both sides of the ad ledger, that they both control the supply and the demand.
(00:32:45) There are problems. Chrome, isn’t it. And you end up making the web much worse. And this is the thing we’ve always got to remember when we think about legislation, when we think about monopoly fights is you may not like how things look today and you may want to do something about it, but you may also make it worse. The good intentions behind the GDPR in Europe currently has amounted to what? Cookie banners that everyone on the internet hates, that helps no one do anything better, anything more efficient, that saves no privacy in any way, shape or form, has been a complete boondoggle that has only enriched lawyers and accountants and bureaucrats.
Lex Fridman (00:33:29) Yeah, you said that the cookie banner is a monument for why Europe is losing, is doing the worst of all the regions in tech.
DHH (00:33:40) It’s a monument to good intentions leading straight to hell, and Europe is actually world-class in good intentions leading straight to hell.
Lex Fridman (00:33:53) So hell is the cookie accept button, that you have to accept all cookies. That’s what hell looks like. Over and over, you don’t actually ever get to the web page-
Lex Fridman (00:34:00) … over. You don’t actually ever get to the web page.
DHH (00:34:03) Just on a human scale, try to imagine how many hours every day are wasted clicking that away and how much harm we’ve done to the web as a platform that people enjoy because of them. The internet is ugly in part because of cookie banners. Cookie banners were supposed to save us from advertisement, and advertisement can make the web ugly. There’s plenty of examples of that, but cookie banners made the entire internet ugly in one fell swoop, and that’s a complete tragedy. But what’s even worse, and this is why I call it out as a monument to everything the EU gets wrong, is that we have known this for a decade. No one anywhere who’s serious believes that cookie banners does anything good for anyone, yet we’ve been unable to get rid of it.
(00:34:50) There’s this one piece of legislation that’s now I think 10 or 12 years old. It’s complete failure on every conceivable metric. Everyone hates it universally, yet we can’t seem to do anything about it. That’s a bankruptcy declaration for any body of bureaucrats who pretend or portend to make things better for not just citizens but people around the world. This is the thing that really gets me about cookie banners, too. It’s not just the EU, it’s the entire world. You can’t hide from cookie banners anywhere on this planet. If you go to goddamn Mars on one of Elon’s rockets and you try to access a webpage, you’ll still see a cookie banner. No one in the universe is safe from this nonsense.
Lex Fridman (00:35:33) Probably the interface on the rocket.
DHH (00:35:36) It’d be slower. You have basically 150 second ping time, so it’ll take you 45 seconds just to get through the cookie banners from Mars.
Lex Fridman (00:35:46) All right, let’s walk back up the stack of this recursive tangents we’ve been taking. So Chrome, we should say, at least in my opinion, is not winning unfairly. It’s winning in the fair way by just being better.
DHH (00:36:03) It is. If I was going to Steelman the other side just for a half second, people would say, well, maybe yes, most people do sort of begrudgingly agree that Chrome is a pretty good browser. But then they’ll say the reason it got dominance was distribution, and the reason it got distribution was because Google also controls Android and therefore can make Chrome the default browser on all these phones.
(00:36:27) Now, I don’t buy that, and the reason I don’t buy that is because on Android, you are actually allowed to ship a different browser that has a browser engine that’s not the same as Chrome. Unlike an iOS where if you want to ship a browser, Chrome, for example, ships for iOS, but it’s not Chrome, it’s Safari wrapped in a dress, and every single alternative browser on iOS have to use the Safari web engine. That’s not competition. That’s not what happened on Android.
(00:36:57) Again, I think there are some nuances to it, but if you zoom out and you look at all the problems we have with Big Tech, Chrome is not it. Chrome One unmerits. I begrudgingly have switched to Chrome on that realization alone. As a web developer, I just prefer it. I like Firefox in many ways. I like the ethos of it, but Chrome is a better browser than Firefox, full stop.
Lex Fridman (00:37:21) And by the way, we’ve never mentioned Edge. Edge is also a good browser.
DHH (00:37:26) Because it’s also Chrome in a dress.
Lex Fridman (00:37:27) But it never gets the love. I don’t think I’ve ever used Bing, and I’m sure Bing is really nice.
DHH (00:37:34) Maybe you have, because you know what is Bing in a dress?
DHH (00:37:38) Which is actually the search engine that I use. DuckDuckGo gets its search results from Bing, or at least it used to. If they changed that, that would be news to me.
Lex Fridman (00:37:47) Well, maybe everything is just a wrap or a dress. Everything is wearing a dress underneath. There’s some other turtles-
Lex Fridman (00:37:56) The turtles, the dress is all the way down. Okay, what were we talking about? They got there from JavaScript and from you learning how to program. So eventually the big success stories when you built a bunch of stuff with PHP and you were like actually chipping things.
Lex Fridman (00:38:15) And that’s when the Ruby story came. So your big love affair with programming began there. So can you take me there? What is Ruby? Tell the story of Ruby. Explain Ruby to me.
DHH (00:38:28) PHP was what converted me from just being able to fondle HTML and turn out some web pages to actually being able to produce web applications myself. So I owe a tremendous gratitude to PHP in that regard. But I never thought of PHP as a calling. I’m a professional programmer who writes PHP. That’s who I am, and that’s what I do. I thought of PHP as a tool I needed to smack the computer with until it produced web applications I wanted. It was very much a means to an end. I didn’t fall in love with PHP. I’m very grateful that it taught me the basics of programming, and I’m very grateful that it set the bar for the economics. But it really wasn’t until Ruby that I started thinking of myself as a programmer. The way that came about was that the first time I ever got hired as a professional programmer to write code was actually by Jason Fried, my business partner still.
(00:39:31) All the way back in 2001, I had been working on these gaming websites in PHP for essentially 18 months at that point. No one had been paying me to do code in that regard, and I connect with Jason Fried over an email sent from Copenhagen, Denmark to Chicago, Illinois to a person who didn’t know who I was. I was just offering solicited advice. Jason had asked a question on the internet, and I had sent him the answer and he was asking me PHP, and I’d sent him the answer to that question and we started talking and then we started working, which by the way is a miracle of what the internet can allow. How can a kid in Copenhagen who’s never met this guy in Chicago connect just over email and start working together? By the way, we’re still working together now 24 years later. That’s incredible. But we started working together and we started working together on some client projects.
(00:40:25) Jason would do the design, 37signals would do the design. I would bring the programming PHP. And after we work on I think two or three client projects together in PHP, we kept hitting the same problem that whenever you work with a client, you start that project off an email, “Oh, yeah, let’s work together. Here’s what we’re building.” And you start trading more and more emails and before a few weeks have passed, you got to add someone to the project. They don’t have the emails, they don’t have the context. You send them, “Where’s the latest file?” “Oh, I’ve uploaded it on the FTP. It’s like final, final V06 2.0.” Right? That’s the one to get. It’s just a mess, a beautiful mess in some ways. It’s a mess that still runs the vast majority of projects to this day. Email is the lowest common denominator. That’s wonderful.
(00:41:13) But we had dropped the ball a couple of times in serious ways with customers and we thought we can do better. We know how to make web applications. Can’t we just make a system that’s better than email for managing projects? It can’t be that hard. We’ve been doing blogs, we’ve been doing to-do lists. Let’s put some of these things together and just make a system where everything that anyone involved in the project needs is on one page. And it has to be simple enough that I’m not going to run a seminar teaching you how to use the system. I’m just going to give you the login code. You’re going to jump into it. So that’s Basecamp. When we started working on Basecamp, I, for the first time in the experience I had with Jason had the freedom of technology choice. There was no client telling me, “Yeah, PHP, that sounds good. We know PHP. Can you build it in PHP?”
(00:42:06) I had free reins. At that time I’d been reading IEEE magazine and a couple of other magazines back from the early 2000s where Dave Thomas and Martin Fowler had been writing about programming patterns and how to write better code. These two guys in particular were both using Ruby to explain their concepts because Ruby looked like pseudocode. Whether you were programming in C or Java or PHP, all three constituencies could understand Ruby because it basically just reads like English. So these guys were using Ruby to describe the concepts, and first of all, I would read these articles for just the concepts they were explaining and I’d be like, “What is this program language?” I mean, I like the concept you’re explaining, but I also want to see the programming language. Why haven’t I heard of this?
(00:43:02) So I started looking into Ruby and I realized at that time, Ruby might not be known by anyone, but it’s actually been around for a long time. Matz, the Japanese creator of Ruby, had started working on Ruby back in ’93 before the internet was even a thing. And here I am in 2003, 10 years later, picking up what seems like this hidden gem that’s just laying in obscurity and plain sight. But Dave Thomas and Martin Fowler, I think successfully put me and a handful of other people on the trail of a programming language that hadn’t been used much in the west, but could be. So I picked up Ruby and I thought, this is very different. First of all, where are all the semicolons? I’d been programming in PHP, in ASP, I’d even done some Pascal. I’d looked at some C. There were semicolons everywhere.
(00:44:05) That was the first thing that struck me is where are the damn semicolons? And I started thinking, actually, why do we have semicolons in programming? They’re to tell the interpreter that there’s a new line of instructions, but I don’t need them as a human. Oh, someone is looking out for the human here, not for the machine. So that really got me interested. And then I thought to myself, do you know what? I know PHP quite well. I’m not an amazing programmer. I haven’t been working in programming for all that long, but maybe I can figure it out. I’m going to give myself two weeks. I’m going to write a proof of concept where I talked to a database, I pulled some records, I format them a bit, and I display them on an HTML page. Can I figure that out in a couple of weeks? It took about one weekend and I was completely mesmerized. I was completely mind blown because Ruby was made for my brain like a perfect tailored glove by someone I’d never met. How is this even possible?
Beautiful code
Lex Fridman (00:45:14) We should say maybe paint the picture of the certain qualities that Ruby has, maybe even compare it to PHP. We should also say that there’s a ridiculous thing that I’m used to that I forget about, that there’s dollar signs everywhere.
Lex Fridman (00:45:31) Line noise. Line noise. That’s such a beautiful phrase. So there’s all these things that look like programs, and with Ruby, I mean there’s some similarities in Python there. It just looks kind of like natural language. You can read it normally,
DHH (00:45:47) Here’s a wild loop that does five iterations. You can literally type the number five, dot, now I’m calling a method under number five. By the way, that’s one of the beautiful aspects of Ruby that primitives like integers are also objects and you can call five dot times start brackets. Now you’re iterating over the code in that bracket five times. That’s it.
DHH (00:46:16) That’s not just nice, that’s exceptional. There’s literally no other programming language that I know of that has managed to boil away the line noise that almost every other programming language would inject into a five-time iteration over a block of code to that extent.
Lex Fridman (00:46:32) Wow. That’s a really nice… Well, thank you for giving that example. That’s a beautiful example. Wow, I don’t think I know a programming language that does that. That’s really nice.
DHH (00:46:41) Ruby’s full of that. So let me dive into a couple of examples because I really think it helps paint the picture and let me preface this by saying I actually, I like the ethos of Python. I think the Ruby and the Python community share a lot of similarities. They’re both dynamic interpreted languages. They’re both focused on immediacy and productivity and ease of use in a bunch of ways, but then they’re also very different in many other ways. One of the one ways they’re very different is aesthetically.
(00:47:12) Python to me, I hope I don’t offend people too much. I’ve said this before, it’s just it’s ugly and it’s ugly in its base because it’s full of superfluous instructions that are necessary for legacy reasons of when Guido made Python back in ’87 that are still here in 2025, and my brain can’t cope with that. Let me give you a basic example. When you make a class in Python, the Initializer method, the starting method is def, okay, fair enough. That’s actually the same as Ruby. D-E-F definition of a method. Then it is underscore not one, underscore, two, init, underscore underscore, parentheses start, self, comma, and then the first argument.
Lex Fridman (00:48:03) Yeah, the whole self thing. Yeah.
DHH (00:48:06) I look at that and go, “I’m sorry I’m out. I can’t do it.” Everything about it offends my sensibilities to the core. Here you have the most important method that all new objects or classes have to implement, and it is one of the most aesthetically offensive ways of typing initialize that I’ve ever seen anywhere, and you guys are okay with this?
Lex Fridman (00:48:29) Hey, you’re making me… You know where you’re talking about my marriage or something like this, and I’m not realizing I’ve been in a toxic relationship all along yet. I just get used to it.
DHH (00:48:39) That to me by the way, was the magic of Ruby.
DHH (00:48:41) It opened my eyes to how beautiful programs could be. I didn’t know. I’d been working in ASP, I’d been working in PHP. I didn’t even have the concept that aesthetics, beautiful code was something we could optimize for. That’s something we could pursue, and even more than that, that we could pursue it above other objectives. That Ruby is as beautiful as it is, it’s not an accident and it’s not easy. Ruby itself is implemented in C. It’s very difficult to parse Ruby code because Ruby is written for humans and humans are messy creatures. They like things in just the right way. I can’t fully explain why the underscore, underscore, init, underscore, underscore make me repulse, but it does. And when I look at the Ruby alternative, it’s really instructive. So it’s def, same part, D-E-F space, initialize, parentheses, not even parentheses if you don’t need to call it within the arguments, there’s not even a parentheses.
(00:49:44) That in itself is actually also a major part. If the human doesn’t need the additional characters, we’re not just going to put them in because it’d be nicer to parse for the computer. We’re going to get rid of the semicolons, we’re going to get rid of the parentheses, we’re going to get rid of the underscores, we’re going to get rid of all that ugliness, all the line noise and boil it down to its pure essentials and at the same time, we’re not going to abbreviate. This is a key difference in the aesthetics between Ruby and Python as well. Init is shorter to type, it’s only five characters. Initialize is a lot longer, but it looks a lot better and you don’t type it very often, so you should look at something pretty. If you don’t have to do it all the time, it’s okay that it’s long.
(00:50:29) Those kinds of aesthetic evaluations are rife all over the Ruby language. But let me give you an even better example. The if conditional, that’s the bedrock of all programming languages. They have the if conditional, if you take most programming languages, they’ll have if, that’s basically the same in almost every language, space, start parentheses, we all do that. And then you have perhaps, let’s say you’re calling a object called user. is admin, close parentheses, close parentheses, start brackets, and here’s what we’re going to do if the user’s an admin, right? That would be a normal programming language. Ruby doesn’t do it like that. Ruby boils almost all of it away. We start with the if. Okay, that’s the same, no parentheses necessary because there’s no ambiguity for the human to distinguish that the next part is just a single statement. So you do if, space, user dot admin, question mark, no open brackets, no parentheses, no nothing. Next open line, here’s your conditional.
(00:51:45) That question mark means nothing to the computer, but it means something to the human. Ruby put in the predicate method style purely as a communication tool between humans. It’s actually more work for the interpreter to be able to see that this question mark is there. Why is this question mark in here? Because it just reads so nicely. If user admin question mark, that’s a very human phrase, but it gets better. You can turn this around. You can have your statement, you want to execute before the conditional. You can do user.upgrade, say you’re calling an upgrade method on a user, space, if, space, user.admin question mark. We do the thing, if the thing is true, instead of saying if the thing is true, do the thing. But it gets even better. This is why I love this example with the conditional because you can keep diving into it. So let’s flip it around. user.downgrade if exclamation point, not user.admin, that’d be a typical way of writing it. Ruby goes that exclamation point is light noise. Why do we have if and then an exclamation point that’s ugly? We could do user.downgrade unless user.admin question mark.
DHH (00:53:17) That to me is an encapsulation of the incredible beauty that Ruby affords the programmer through ambiguity that is only to serve the human reader and writer. All of these statements we’ve just discussed, they’re the same for the computer. It’ll compile down to the same C code. They’ll compile down to the same assembly code. It makes no difference whatsoever. In fact, it just makes it harder to write an interpreter. But for the human who gets to choose whether the statement comes before the conditional or the predicate method has, it’s just incredible. It reads like poetry at some point.
Lex Fridman (00:53:55) It’s also incredible that one language designer is creating that. Guido van Rossum also. It’s like one person gets to make these extremely difficult decision because you have to think about how does that all get parsed and you have to think about the thousands, if it’s a popular language that millions of people that end up using this and what they feel, what that question mark for the if statement, what does that feel like of the user?
DHH (00:54:24) That’s what Matz thought about because he started his entire mission off a different premise than almost every programming language designer that I’d heard at least articulate their vision, that his number one goal was programmer happiness. That his number one goal was the affordances that would allow programmers to articulate code in ways that not just executed correctly, but were a joy to write and were a joy to read. That vision is based on a fundamentally different view of humanity. There’s no greater contrast between Matz and James Gosling, the designer of Java. I wanted to listen to James talk about the design of Java. Why was it the way it was? Why was it so rigid? He was very blunt about it, which by the way, I really appreciate and I think Gosling has done a tremendous job with Java, but his view of humanity is rather dark.
(00:55:24) His view of humanity was programmers at the average are stupid creatures. They cannot be trusted with sophisticated programming languages because they’re going to shoot their foot off or their hand off. And that would be kind of inconvenient to the regional development office of a mid-tier insurance company writing code that has to last for 20 years. Now it’s actually a very Thomas Sowell view of constrained capacity in humans that I’ve come to appreciate much later in life. But it’s also a very depressing view of programmers that there are just certain programmers who are too dumb to appreciate code poetry. They’re too ignorant to learn how to write it well. We need to give them a sandbox where they just won’t hurt themselves too much.
(00:56:20) Matz went the complete opposite direction. He believes in humanity. He believes in the unlimited capacity of programmers to learn and become better so much so that he’s willing to put the stranger at his own level. This is the second part I truly appreciate about Ruby. Ruby allows you to extend base classes. You know how we just talked about five dot times is a way to iterate over a statement five times. That five is obviously a base class, it’s a number. Do you know what? You can add your own methods to that? I did extensively. In Rails, we have something called active support, which is essentially my dialect of Ruby for programming web applications. I’ll give you one example. I’ve added a method called Days to the Number. So if you do five .days, you get five days in seconds because seconds is the way we set cache expiration times and other things like that. So you can say cache expires in five .days and you’re going to get whatever-
DHH (00:57:35) … five times, 24 times 60 times 60 is or whatever the math is, right? Very humanly readable. In a normal programming language, you would type out the seconds and then you would have a little comment above it saying this represent five days. In Ruby, you get to write five days. But even better than that, Matz didn’t come up with it. Matz didn’t need the five days. I needed that because I needed to expire caches. I was allowed by Matz to extend his story with my own chapters on equal footing such that a reader of Ruby could not tell the difference between the code Matz wrote and the code that I wrote.
(00:58:16) He trusted me as a complete stranger from Denmark who he’d never met to mess with his beautiful story. That level of trust is essentially unheard of. I know there are other program languages that allow things with macros and so forth, but none do it in a way like Ruby does it. None does it with an articulated vision of humanity, a trust in humanity like Matz does. That is the opposite end of the spectrum of Java.
Lex Fridman (00:58:46) Yeah, I mean for my aesthetic sensibilities, just the way you described five .days, that’s really pleasant to me. I could see myself sitting alone sleep-deprived and just writing that. It’s just an easy thing. You can write it in a long way with a comment. You can write in multiple lines, you could do… And now with AI, I’m sure it’s going to generate it correctly, but there’s something really pleasant about the simplicity of that. I’m not sure what that is, but you’re right. There is a good feeling there. I’m sure we’ll talk about happiness from all kinds of philosophical angles, but that is what happiness is made of. That little good feeling there.
DHH (00:59:29) Exactly. It’s the good feeling that come out of a concept compressed to its pure essence. There’s nothing you can take away from that statement that’s superfluous.
Lex Fridman (00:59:39) But see, I also want to push back a little bit because it’s not… Because I also programed in Perl a bunch just to be cool. So it’s not all about compression.
DHH (00:59:51) No, you can compress it too far. Perl golf is a thing where you can turn programs into something that’s unreadable for humans. Now the great thing about Perl was that it came out before Ruby. Matz was a great student of Wall, was a great student of Perl, was a great student of Python and Smalltalk and Lisp. He took inspiration from all of these prior attempts at creating good programming languages and really edited down the very best bits into this. So he was able to learn from his lessons. But what I found incredible about Ruby is that here we are, 2025, Ruby has been worked on for over 30 years and essentially the first draft is 90% of what we’re still using.
(01:00:38) There was almost a sense of divine inspiration possible in wherever Matz was writing that initial version of Ruby that transcended time to such a degree that no one has still even begun to reach it. This is the other thing I always find fascinating. I generally believe in the efficient market theory that if someone comes up with a better mousetrap or better idea, others, they’ll eventually copy them to such an extent that perhaps the original mousetrap is no longer even remembered. No one has been able to copy that essence of Ruby. They borrowed elements and that’s totally fine, but Ruby still stands taller than everyone else on these metrics, on this trust in humanity and programmers.
Lex Fridman (01:01:21) And we should also say maybe the perfect programming language is that metric, and then there’s the successful language and those are often different. There’s something wonderful about the Brendan Eich story of creating JavaScript. There’s something truly beautiful about the way JavaScript took over the world. I’ve recently got to visit the Amazon jungle and just one of my favorite things to do is just to watch the ants take over anything, everything. And it’s just like it’s a nice distributed system. It’s a messy thing that doesn’t seem to be ordered, but it just works and the machinery of it.
DHH (01:01:58) Worse is Better. I mean that’s actually the name of a pattern in software development and other ways of how is the pattern of Linux. Linux was quantifiably worse than I think it was Minix at the time, other ways of it that were more cathedral, less bizarre, and it’s still want. That there’s something to it that the imperfections can help something go forward. It’s actually a trick I’ve studied to the degree that I now incorporated in almost all open source that I do. I make sure that when I release the first version of any new thing I work on, it’s a little broken. It’s a little busted in ways that invite people to come in and help me. Because there’s no easier way to get the collaboration of other programmers than to put something out that they know how to fix and improve.
DHH (01:02:49) But Ruby is somehow or was at least a little bit different in that regard. Not in all regards. Matz got the ethos of the language, the design of language just right. But the first versions of Ruby were terribly slow. It’s taken, I mean hundreds of man-years to get Ruby to be both this beautiful yet also highly efficient and really fast.
Metaprogramming
Lex Fridman (01:03:15) We should say that the thing that made you fall in love with this particular programming language is Metaprogramming.
DHH (01:03:21) Yes. So that takes all of these elements we’ve just talked about and turned them up to 11. I’ll explain Metaprogramming real simple.
DHH (01:03:29) Metaprogramming is essentially a version of the five .days. You get to add keywords to the language. Active record is the part of Rails that communicates with the database. This is a system where every table in the database is represented by a class. So if we take the user example, again, you do class, user descends from active record base, and then the first line you can write is this, I want my users to have many posts or have many comments. Let’s do that. We’re making some system where users can make comments. The very next line is, has underscore many space colon comments.
(01:04:15) Now you’ve set up a dependency between users and comments that will give you a whole host of access and factory methods for users to be able to own comments, to create comments, to update comments. In that line alone ” has many” looks like a keyword. It looks like it’s part of the Ruby language. That’s metaprogramming. When Rails is able to add these elements to how you define a class, and then that runs code that adds a bunch of methods to the use of class, that’s Metaprogramming.
(01:04:49) And when Metaprogramming is used in this way, we call it domain-specific languages. You take a generic language like Ruby and you tailor it to a certain domain like describing relationships in a database at a object level. This is one of those early examples where you can do, user has many comments, belongs underscore two space colon account. Now you’ve set up a one-to-one relationship before we had a one-to-many relationship. Rails is rife with all these kinds of domain-specific languages where at sometimes it doesn’t even look like Ruby. You can’t identify Ruby keywords. You can just identify what looks like keywords in its own programming language. Now again, I know that Lisp and others also do this stuff. They just do it with the maximum amount of line noise that can ever be crammed into a programming language and Ruby does it at a level where you cannot tell my metaprogramming from Matz’s keywords and with zero line noise.
Lex Fridman (01:05:56) Yeah, I should say that my first love was Lisp. So there’s a slow tear that you can’t see.
DHH (01:06:01) I’ve actually never written any real Lisp myself.
Lex Fridman (01:06:04) Well, how can you judge it so harshly then?
DHH (01:06:07) Because I have two eyes and I can look at code and my aesthetic sensibilities forbid me to even go much further, which is the limitation, I know. I should actually dive into Lisp because I’ve found that I’ve learned a lot just diving into, maybe I’m insulting Lisp again here, but the past of programming languages. With Smalltalk, for example, I think Smalltalk is a incredible experiment that also worked but isn’t suitable for today’s programming environments.
Dynamic typing
Lex Fridman (01:06:36) I love that we’re talking about Ruby so much and what a beautiful code is and what a beautiful programming language is. So one of the things that is I think implied maybe you made explicit in your descriptions there is that Ruby is dynamic typing versus strict typing. And you have been not just saying that it’s a nice thing, but that you will defend dynamic typing to the death. That freedom is a powerful freedom to preserve.
DHH (01:07:04) It’s the essence of what makes Ruby Ruby. This is why I don’t fully understand when people call for Ruby to add static typing because to me it’s the bedrock of what this is. Why would you want to turn one of the most beautiful languages into something far uglier? This is one of my primary objections to static typing. It’s not just that it limits you in certain ways. It makes metaprogramming harder. I write a bunch of metaprogramming. I’ve seen what it takes to do metaprogramming in TypeScript. That was actually one of the things that just really sent me on a tear of getting meta or getting TypeScript out of some of the projects that I’m involved with.
(01:07:42) We pulled TypeScript out of Turbo, one of the front-end frameworks that we have because I tried to write to Metaprogramming in TypeScript and I was just infuriated. I don’t want that experience, but I also don’t want it from an aesthetic point of view. I hate repetition. We’ve just talked about how much I love that Ruby boils all of these expressions.
DHH (01:08:00) … about how much I love that Ruby boils all of these expressions down to its essence. You can’t remove one dot. You can’t remove one character without losing something. This moment you go for static typing, that you declare at least … I know there are ways to do implied typing and so forth, but let’s just take the stereotypical case of an example, for example. Capital U user, I’m declaring the type of the variable. Lowercase user. I’m now naming my variable, equals uppercase user or new uppercase user. I’ve repeated user three times. I don’t have time for this. I don’t have sensibilities for this. I don’t want my Ruby polluted with this. Now, I understand all the arguments for why people like static typing. One of the primary arguments is that it makes tooling easier. It makes it easier to do auto-complete in editors, for example. It makes it easier to find certain kinds of bugs, because maybe you’re calling methods that don’t exist on an object and the editor can actually catch that bug before you even run it. I don’t care.
(01:09:11) First of all, I don’t write code with tools, I write them with text editors. I chisel them out of the screen with my bare hands. I don’t auto-complete. This is why I love Ruby so much, and this is why I continue to be in love with the text editor rather than the IDE. I don’t want an IDE. I want my fingers to have to individually type out every element of it, because it will force me to stay in the world where Ruby is beautiful. Because as soon as it gets easy to type a lot of boilerplate, well, guess what? You can have a lot of boilerplate. Every single language basically that has great tooling support has a much higher tolerance for boilerplate because the thinking is, well, you’re not typing it anyway, you’re just auto- completing it. I don’t want that at all. I want something where the fabric I’m working in is just a text file, there’s nothing else to it. So these things play together. There’s the aesthetic part, there’s the tooling part, there’s the meta-programming part.
(01:10:16) There’s the fact that Ruby’s ethos of duck typing … I don’t know if you’ve heard that term before. It’s essentially not about, can I call this method if an object is of a certain class? Can I call this method if the method responds? It’s very out of small talk in that regard. You don’t actually check whether that class has the method, which allows you to dynamically add methods at runtime and do all sorts of really interesting things that underpin all the beautiful meta-programming that we do in Ruby. I don’t want to lose any of that and I don’t care for the benefits. One of the benefits I’ve seen touted over and over again is that it’s much easier to write correct software. You’re going to have fewer bugs. You’re going to have less Null Pointer Exceptions, you’re going to have less of all of this stuff. Yeah, I don’t have any of that. It’s just not something that occurs in my standard mode of operation. I’m not saying I don’t have bugs, of course I do, but I catch those bugs with unit testing, with integration testing.
(01:11:19) Those are the kinds of precautions that will catch logical bugs, things that compile but are wrong, along with the uncompilable stuff. So I’ve never been drawn into this world, and part of it is because I work on a certain class of systems. I fully accept that. If you’re writing systems that have five, 10, 50 million lines of code with hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands of programmers, I fully accept that you need different methods. What I object to is the idea that what’s right for a code base of 10 million lines of code, with 100,000 programmers working on it, is also the same thing I should be using in my bedroom to create Basecamp, because I’m just a single individual. That’s complete nonsense. In the real world, we would know that that makes no sense at all. That you don’t, I don’t know, use your Pagani to go pick up groceries at Costco. It’s a bad vehicle for that. It just doesn’t have the space, you don’t want to muddy the beautiful seats. You don’t want to do any of those things.
(01:12:21) We know that certain things that are very good in certain domains don’t apply to all. In programming languages, it seems like we forget that. Now, to be fair, I also had a little bit perhaps of a reputation of forgetting that. When I first learned Ruby, I was so head over heels in love with this programming language that I almost found it unconceivable that anyone would choose any other programming language at all to write web applications. I kind of engaged the evangelism of Ruby on Rails in that spirit as a crusade, as, I just need to teach you the gospel. I just need to show you this conditional code that we just talked about, and you will convert at the point of a sharp argument. Now, I learned that’s not the way, and part of the reason it’s not the way is that programmers think differently. Our brains are configured differently. My brain is configured perfectly for Ruby, perfectly for a dynamically duck-typed language that I can chisel code out of a text editor with.
Scaling
(01:13:22) Other people need the security of an IDE. They want the security of classes that won’t compile unless you call the methods on it. I have come to accept that, but most programmers don’t. They’re still stuck in essentially, I like static typing. Therefore, static typing is the only way to create reliable, correct systems. Which is just such a mind-blowing, to be blunt, idiotic thing to say in the face of mountains of evidence to the contrary. This is one of the reasons I’m so in love with Shopify as the flagship application for Ruby on Rails. Shopify exists at a scale that most programmers will never touch. On Black Friday, I think Shopify did one million requests per second. That’s not one million requests of images, that’s of dynamic requests that are funneling through the pipeline of commerce. I mean, Shopify runs something like 30% of all E-commerce stores on the damn Internet. A huge portion of all commerce in total runs through Shopify and that runs on Ruby on Rails. So Ruby on Rails is able to scale up to that level without using static typing in all of what it does.
(01:14:45) Now, I know they’ve done certain experiments in certain ways, because they are hitting some of the limits that you will hit with dynamic typing. Some of those limits you hit with dynamic typing are actually, by the way, just limits you hit when you write 5 million lines of code. I think the Shopify monolith is about 5 million lines of code. At that scale, everything breaks because you’re at the frontier of what humans are capable of doing with programming languages. The difference in part is that Ruby is such a succinct language that those 5 million, if they had been written in, let’s just say Go or Java, would have been 50 or 25. Now, that might have alleviated some of the problems that you have when you work on huge systems with many programmers, but it certainly would also have compounded them; try to understand 25 million lines of code.
Lex Fridman (01:15:33) So the thing does scale. That’s a persistent myth, that it doesn’t scale, Shopify, and others, but Shopify I think is a great example. By the way, I love Shopify and I love Toby.
DHH (01:15:45) You’ve got to have Toby on. I just talked to him this morning
Lex Fridman (01:15:47) For sure. He’s a brilliant … I got to hang out with him in the desert somewhere, I forget, in Utah. He’s just a brilliant human. Shopify.com/luxe has been supporting this podcast for the longest time. I don’t think actually Toby knows that they sponsor this podcast. I mean, it’s a big company, right?
DHH (01:16:05) It’s a huge company. I think just under 10,000 employees, market cap of $120 billion, GMV of a quarter of a trillion every quarter.
Lex Fridman (01:16:16) He’s involved with the details though.
DHH (01:16:18) He is, very much so. Funny story about Toby, Toby was on the Rails core team back in the mid-2000s. Toby himself-
DHH (01:16:28) … wrote Active Merchant, which is one of the frameworks for creating shops. He wrote the Liquid templating language that Shopify still uses to this day. He has a huge list of contributions to the Rails ecosystem and he’s the CEO of the company. I think it’s very inspiring to me, because it’s such at the opposite end of what I like to do. I like to chisel code with my own hands most of the day, he runs a company of almost 10,000 people. That is literally, world commerce depends on it, a level of criticality I can’t even begin to understand. Yet, we can see eye to eye on so many of these fundamental questions in computer science and program development. That is a dynamic range, to be able to encompass Rails, being a great tool for the one developer who’s just starting out with an idea … who don’t even fully know everything, who is right at the level where PHP would have been a good fit in those late ’90s. Because yeah, I can probably upload something to an FTP server and so on.
(01:17:33) Rails does have more complexity than that, but it also has so much longer runway. The runway goes all the way to goddamn Shopify. That is about the most convincing argument I can make for dynamic range, that we can do a lot of it. And even having said that, Shopify is the outlier of course. I don’t think about Shopify as the primary target when I write Rails, I think of the single developer. Actually, I do think about Shopify, but I don’t think about Shopify now. I think of Shopify when Toby was writing Snow Devil, which was the first E-commerce store to sell snowboards that he created. That was the pre-Shopify Shopify he created all by himself. And that was possible because Ruby on Rails isn’t just about beautiful code, it’s just as much about productivity. It’s just as much about the impact that an individual programmer is able to have.
(01:18:24) That they can build system where they can keep the whole thing in their head and be able to move it forward, such that you can go from one developer sitting and working on something … and that something is Shopify, and it turns into what it is today. When we talk about programming languages and we compare them, we often compare them at a very late stage. Like, what is the better programming language for, let’s say Twitter in 2009 when it’s already a huge success? Twitter was started on Ruby on Rails. They then hit some scaling problems, it was a big debacle at the time. They end up then I think writing it in some other language, which by the way I think is the best advertisement ever for Ruby on Rails, because nothing fucking happened for 10 years after they switched over, essentially zero innovation. Some of that was because they were doing a long conversion, and all of the early success in part came because they had the agility to quickly change and adopt and so forth. That’s what startups need. That’s what Shopify needed, that’s what Twitter needed.
(01:19:24) That’s what everyone needs, and that’s the number one priority for Ruby on Rails, to make sure that we don’t lose that. Because what happens so often when development tools and programming language are driven by huge companies, is that they mirror their org chart, React and everything else needed to use that, is in some ways a reflection of how Meta builds Facebook. Because of course it is, because of course it’s an distraction of that. I’m not saying React isn’t a great tool and that can’t used by smaller teams, of course it can, but it’s born in a very different context than something like Ruby on Rails.
Lex Fridman (01:20:00) Let me say as a small aside … because I think we might return to Shopify and celebrate it often, just a personal note. This particular podcast has way more sponsors, and sponsors that want to be sponsors, than I could possibly ever have. It’s really, really important for me to not give a shit and to be able to celebrate people. I celebrate people, I celebrate companies, and I don’t care that they’re sponsoring. I really don’t care. I just want to make that very explicit, because we’re going to continue saying positive things about Shopify. I don’t care, stop sponsoring, it doesn’t really matter to me. Yeah, I just want to make that explicit. But to linger on the scaling thing with the Twitter and the Shopify, can you just explain to me what Shopify is doing with the JIT? What did they have to try to do to scale this thing, because that’s kind of an incredible story, right?
DHH (01:20:59) Yeah. One of the great contributions that Shopify has made to the entire Ruby ecosystem … not just Rails, but in particular Rails, is YJIT. YJIT is their compiler for Ruby that just makes everything a lot more efficient. At Shopify scale, eking out even a five, 10% improvement in Ruby’s overhead and execution time is a huge deal. Now, Shopify didn’t need YJIT. Shopify was already running on the initial version of Ruby that was I think 10 times slower than what we have today, if you look back upon the Ruby 186 that Toby probably started on, just as I started on. That was enough to propel Shopify to the scale that it has today. A lot of the scaling conversation is lost in a failure to distinguish two things. Scale is one package we talk about when there are really multiple packages inside of it. One is runtime performance, latency, how fast can you execute a single request? Can it happen fast enough that the user will not notice? If your Rails request takes a second and a half to execute, the user’s going to notice. Your app is going to feel slow and sluggish.
(01:22:16) You have to get that response time down below, let’s say at least 300 milliseconds. I like to target a 100 milliseconds as my latency. That kind of performance, how much performance of that kind of latency can you squeeze out of a single CPU core? That tells you something about what the price of a single request will be. But then whether you can deal with one million requests a second, like Shopify is doing right now, if you have one box that can do 1,000 requests a second, you just need X boxes to get up to a million. What you’ll actually find is that when it comes to programming languages, they’re all the same in this way. They all scale, largely, beautifully horizontally, you just add more boxes. The hard parts of scaling a Shopify is typically not the programming language, it’s the database. That’s actually one of the challenges that Shopify has now is, how do you deal with MySQL at the scale that they’re operating at? When do you need to move to other databases to get worldwide performance? All of these things. The questions about scaling Ruby are economic questions.
(01:23:28) If we’re spending so-and- so much on application servers, if we can get just 5% more performance out of Ruby, well, we could save 5% of those servers and that could filter down into the budget. Now, that analysis concludes into basically one thing, Ruby is a luxury language. It’s a luxury, the highest luxury, in my opinion. It is the Coco Chanel of programming languages, something that not everyone can afford, and I mean this in the best possible way. There are some applications on the Internet where each request has so little value, you can’t afford to use a luxurious language like Ruby to program in it. You simply have to slum it with a C or a Go or some other low-level language, or a Rust, talk about line noise there.
Lex Fridman (01:24:17) That’s like the thrift store of languages.
DHH (01:24:19) Exactly. What you need, you need a very low level to do it. You can’t afford to use a luxury language to build it with. That’s not true of Shopify. It wasn’t true of Basecamp even back in 2004. It’s not been true of 99% of all web applications ever created because the main cost component of 99% of web applications, it’s not CPU cores. It’s web cores, it’s human cores. It’s human capacity to understand and involve systems. It’s their personal productivity. I did a calculation once when someone had for the 400th time said, “Oh, if you switch from Ruby to some faster language, you could save a bunch of money.” I calculated it out that at the time … and I think the last time I did this calculation was almost a decade ago, we were spending about 15% of our operating budget on Ruby application servers. So for me, to improve my cost profile of the business by seven percentage points, I’d have to pick something twice as fast. That’s quite hard.
(01:25:27) Versus, if Ruby and Ruby on Rails was even 10% more productive than something else, I would move the needle far more, because making individual programmers more productive actually matters a lot more. This is why people are so excited about AI. This is why they’re freaking out over the fact that a single programmer in Silicon Valley, who makes $300,000 a year, can now do the work of three or five, at least in theory. I haven’t actually seen that fully in practice. But let’s just assume the theory is correct, if not now, then in six months, that’s a huge deal. That matters so much more than whether you can squeeze a few more cycles out of the CPU when it comes to these kinds of business applications. If you’re making Unreal Engine rendering stuff, like Tim Sweeney you had on, yeah, he needs to really sweat all those details. The Nanite engine can’t run on Ruby. It’s never going to, it was not meant for that, fine. These kinds of business applications absolutely can.
(01:26:25) And everything people are excited about AI for right now, that extra capacity to just do more, that was why we were excited about Ruby back in the early 2000s. It was because I saw that if we could even squeeze out a 10% improvement of the human programmer, we’d be able to do so much more for so much less.
Future of programming
Lex Fridman (01:26:47) We probably argue about this, but I really like working together with AI, collaborating with AI. I would argue that the kind of code you want AI to generate is human-readable, human interpretable. If it’s generating pro golf code, it’s not a collaboration. So it has to be speaking the human … it’s not just, you’re writing the prompts in English, you also want to read the responses in the human-interpretable language at Ruby, right? So that actually is beneficial for AI too. Because you’ve said that for you the sculptor, the elitist Coco Chanel sculptor, you want on your fancy keyboard to type every single letter yourself with your own fingers. But it’s also, the benefit of Ruby also applies once that is written by AI and you’re actually doing with your own fingers the editing part, because you can interact with it because it’s human interpretable.
DHH (01:27:47) The paradigm I really love with this was something Elon actually said on one of your shows when you guys were talking about Neuralink, that Neuralink allows the bandwidth between you and the machine to increase. That language, either spoken or written, is very low bandwidth. If you are to calculate just how many bits we can exchange as we’re sitting here, it’s very slow. Ruby has a much higher bandwidth of communication, revealed, conveys so much more concept per character than most other programming languages do. So when you are collaborating with AI, you want really high bandwidth. You want it to be able to produce programs with you, whether you’re letting it write the code or not, that both of you can actually understand really quickly. And that you could compress a grand concept, a grand system into far fewer parts that both of you can understand. Now, I actually love collaborating with AI too. I love chiseling my code, and the way I use AI is in a separate window. I don’t let it drive my code. I’ve tried that. I’ve tried the Cursors and the Windsurfs and I don’t enjoy that way of writing.
(01:29:03) One of the reasons I don’t enjoy that way of writing is, I can literally feel competence draining out of my fingers. That level of immediacy with the material disappears. Where I felt this the most was, I did this remix of Ubuntu called Omakub when I switched to Linux. It’s all written in Bash. I’d never written any serious amount of code in Bash before, so I was using AI to collaborate, to write a bunch of Bash with me, because I needed all this. I knew what I wanted, I could express it in Ruby, but I thought it was an interesting challenge to filter it through Bash. Because what I was doing was setting up a Linux machine, that’s basically what Bash was designed for. It’s a great constraint. But what I found myself doing was asking AI for the same way of expressing a conditional, for example, in Bash over and over again. That by not typing it, I wasn’t learning it. I was using it, I was getting the expression I wanted, but I wasn’t learning it. I got a little scared.
(01:30:08) I got a little scared, is this the end of learning? Am I no longer learning if I’m not typing? The way I, for me, recast that was, I don’t want to give up on the AI. It’s such a better experience as a programmer to look up APIs, to get a second opinion on something, to do a draft, but I have to do the typing myself because you learn with your fingers. If you’re learning how to play the guitar, you can watch as many YouTube videos as you want, you’re not going to learn the guitar. You have to put your fingers on the strings to actually learn the motions. I think there is a parallel here to programming, where programming has to be learned in part by the actual typing.
Lex Fridman (01:30:50) I’m just really, this is fascinating. Listen, part of my brain agrees with you 100%, part doesn’t. I think AI should be in the loop of learning. Now, current systems don’t do that, but I think it’s very possible for Cursor to say, to basically force you to type certain things. So if you set the mode of learning … I don’t want to be this, give up on AI. I think vibe coding is a skill, so for an experienced programmer it’s too easy to dismiss vibe coding as a thing.
Lex Fridman (01:31:32) But I think you need to start building that skill and start to figure out, how do you prevent the competency from slipping away from your fingers and brain? How do you develop that skill in parallel to the other skill? I don’t know. I think it’s a fascinating puzzle though. I know too many really strong programmers that just avoid AI, because it’s currently a little too dumb.
DHH (01:31:57) Yes. It’s a little too slow, is actually my main problem. It’s a little too dumb in some ways, but it’s a little too slow in other ways. When I use Claude’s Code, the terminal version of Claude … which is actually my preferred way of using it, I get too impatient. It feels like I’m going back to a time where code had to compile and I had to go do something else, boil some tea while the code is compiling. Well, I’ve been working in Ruby for 20 years, I don’t have compile wait in me anymore, so there’s that aspect of it. But I think the more crucial aspect for me is, I really care about the competence. I’ve seen what happens to even great programmers the moment they put away the keyboard, because even before AI, this would happen as soon as people would get promoted. Most great programmers who work in large businesses, stop writing code on a daily basis because they simply have too many meetings to attend to, they have too many other things to do, and invariably they lose touch with programming.
(01:32:57) That doesn’t mean they forget everything but if you don’t have your fingers in the sauce, the source, you are going to lose touch with it. There’s just no other way. I don’t want that because I enjoy it too much. This is not just about outcomes. This is what’s crucial to understand, programming for programmers who like to code is not just about the programs they get out of it. That may be the economic value. It’s not the only human value. The human value is just as much in the expression. When someone who sits down on a guitar and plays Stairways to Heaven, there’s a perfect recording of that, that will last in eternity. You can just put it on Spotify, you don’t actually need to do it. The joy is to command the guitar yourself. The joy of a programmer, of me as a programmer, is to type the code myself. If I elevate, if I promote myself out of programming, I turn myself into a project manager, a project manager of a murder of AI crows, as I wrote the other day. I could have become a project manager my whole career.
(01:34:05) I could have become a project manager 20 years ago if I didn’t care to write code myself and I just wanted outcomes. That’s how I got started in programming, I just wanted outcomes. Then I fell in love with programming, and now I’d rather retire than giving it up. Now, that doesn’t mean you can’t have your cake and eat it too. I’ve done some vibe coding where I didn’t care that I wasn’t playing myself. I just wanted to see something that was an idea in my head. I wanted to see something, that’s fine. I also use AI all day long. In fact, I’m already at the point where if you took it away from me, I’d be like, oh my God, how do we even look things up on the Internet anymore? Is Stack Overflow still around, is forum still a thing? How do I even find answers to some of these questions I have all day long? I don’t want to give up AI. In fact, I’d say the way I like to use AI, I’m getting smarter every day because of AI because I’m using AI to have it explain things to me.
(01:35:02) Even the stupid questions I would be a little embarrassed to even enter into Google, AI is perfectly willing to give me the ELI5 explanation of some Unix command I should have known already but I don’t. I’m sorry, can you just explain it to me? Now I know the thing. So at the end of the day, of me working with AI all day long, I’m a little bit smarter, like 5%. Sorry, not 5%, half a percent maybe, that compounds over time. But what I’ve also seen when I worked on the Omakub project and I tried to let AI drive for me, I felt I was maybe half a percent dumber at the end of the day.
Lex Fridman (01:35:41) Okay, you’ve said a lot of interesting things. First of all, let’s just start at the very fact that asking dumb questions, if you go to Stack Overflow and ask a dumb question or read somebody else’s dumb question and the answer to it, there’s a lot of judgment there. AI, sometimes to an excessive degree, has no judgment. It usually says, oh, that’s a great question.
Lex Fridman (01:36:02) Yeah. Oh, that’s wonderful. Yeah. I mean, it’s so conducive to learning. It’s such a wonderful tool for learning and I too would miss it. It’s a great basically search engine into all kinds of nuances of a particular programming language, especially if you don’t know it that well. Or APIs you can load in documentation, it’s just so great for learning. For me personally, I mean, on the happiness scale, it makes me more excited to program. I don’t know what that is exactly. Part of that is the … I’m really sorry, Stack Overflow is an incredible website but there is a negativity there. There’s a judgment there. It’s just exciting to be with a hype man next to me just saying, yeah, that’s a great idea. I’ll say, no, that’s wrong, I’ll correct the AI. The AI will say, you’re absolutely right, how did I not think about that? You’re ready to go. I’m like, holy shit, I’m having, it’s like a buddy that’s really being positive and is very smart and is challenging me to think.
(01:37:12) And even if I never use the code it generates, I’m already a better programmer. But actually the deeper thing is, for some reason I’m having more fun. That’s a really, really important thing.
DHH (01:37:23) I like to think of it as a pair programmer for exactly that reason. Pair programming came vogue in the 2000s, where you’d have two programmers in front of one machine and you’d push the keyboard between you. One programmer would be driving, they’d be typing in. The other programmer would essentially sit and watch the code, suggest improvements, look something up. That was a really interesting dynamic. Now unfortunately, I’m an introvert, so I can do that for about five minutes before I want to jump off a bridge. So it doesn’t work for me as a full-time occupation, but AI allows me to have all the best of that experience all the time. Now, I think what’s really interesting what we said about, it makes it more fun. I hadn’t actually thought about that, but what it’s made more fun to me is to be a beginner again. It made it more fun to learn Bash successfully for the first time.
(01:38:14) Now, I had to do the detour where I let it write all the code for me, and I realized I wasn’t learning nearly as much as I hoped I would. That I started doing once I typed it out myself. But it gave me the confidence that, you know what? If I need to do some iOS programming myself … I haven’t done that in, probably six years was the last time I dabbled in it. I never really built anything for real. I feel highly confident now that I could sit down with AI and I could have something in the app store by the end of the week. I would not have that confidence unless I had a pair programming body like AI. I don’t actually use it very much for Ruby code. I’m occasionally impressed whenever I try it, like, oh, it got this one thing right, that is truly remarkable and it’s actually pretty good. And then I’ll ask two more questions and I go like, oh yeah, okay, if you were my junior programmer I’d start tapping my fingers and going like, you’ve got to shape up.
(01:39:05) Now, the great thing of course is, we can just wait five minutes. The Anthropic CEO seems to think that 90% of all code by the end of the year is going to be written by AI. I’m more than a little bit skeptical about that, but I’m open-minded about the prospect that programming potentially will turn into a horse when done manually. Something we do recreationally is no longer a mode of transportation to get around LA. You’re not going to saddle up and go to the grocery store and pick up stuff from Whole Foods in your saddlebags. That’s just not a thing anymore. That could be the future for programming, for manual programming, entirely possible. I also don’t care. Even though we have great renditions of all the best songs, as I said, there are millions of people who love to play the guitar. It may no longer have as much economic value as it once did. I think that I’m quite convinced is true, that we perhaps have seen the peak.
(01:40:01) Now, I understand the paradox, when the price of something goes down, actually the overall usage goes up, and total spend on that activity goes up. That could also happen maybe. But what we’re seeing right now is that a lot of the big shops, a lot of the big companies, are not hiring like they were five years ago. They’re not anticipating they’re going to need tons more programmers. Controversially, Toby actually put out a memo inside of Shopify asking everyone who’s considering hiring someone to ask the question, could this be done by AI? Now, he’s further ahead on this question than I am. I look at some of the code and [trenches 01:40:37] and I go like, I’d love to use AI more, and I see how it’s making us more productive. But it’s not yet at the level where I just go like, oh, we have this project, let me just give it to the AI agent and it’s going to go off and do it.
Lex Fridman (01:40:47) But let’s just be honest, you’re like a Clint Eastwood type character cowboy on a horse seeing cars going around. You’re like, well-
DHH (01:40:56) That’s part of it. I think it is important to have that humility, that what you are good at may no longer be what society values. This has happened a million times in history … that you could have been exceptionally good at saddle making, for example. That’s something that a lot of people used to care about because everyone rode a horse. And then suddenly riding a horse became this niche hobby, that there’s some people care about it, but not nearly as many. That’s okay. Now, the other thing of this is, I’ve had the good fortune to have been a programmer for nearly 30 years. That’s a great run. I try to look at life in this way, that I’ve already been blessed with decades of economically viable, highly valuable ways of translating what I like best in the working world, to write Ruby code. That that was so valuable that I could make millions and millions of dollars doing it, and if that’s over tomorrow, I shouldn’t look at that with regret. I should look at it with gratitude.
Lex Fridman (01:41:57) But you’re also a highly experienced, brilliant and opinionated human …
Lex Fridman (01:42:00) Brilliant and opinionated human being. So it’s really interesting to get your opinion on the future of the horse because there’s a lot of young people listening to this who love programming or who are excited by the possibility of building stuff with software, with Ruby on Rails, that kind of language and now the possibility.
Lex Fridman (01:42:25) Is it a career and how if indeed a single person can build more and more and more with the help of AI, how do they learn that skill? Is this a good skill to learn? I mean, that to me is the real mystery here because I think it’s still absolutely true that you have to learn how to program from scratch currently, but how do you balance those two skills? Because I too, as I’m thinking now, there is a scary slipping away of skill that happens in a matter of really minutes on a particular piece of code. It’s scary the way driving when you have a car drive for you doesn’t quite slip away that fast. So that really scares me. When somebody comes up to me and asks me how do I learn to program? I don’t know what the advice is because I think it’s not enough to just use Cursor or Copilot to generate code.
DHH (01:43:28) It’s absolutely not enough. Not if you want to learn, none of you want to become better at it. If you just become a tap monkey, maybe you’re productive in a second, but then you have to realize, well, can anyone just tap if that’s all we’re doing is just sitting around all day long tapping? Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. That’s not a marketable skill. Now, I always preface this both to myself and when I speak to others about it, is rule number note one, nobody fucking knows anything. No one can predict even six months ahead.
Future of AI
(01:43:58) Right now, we’re probably at peak AI future hype because we see all the promise, because so much of it is real and so many people have experienced it themselves. This mind-boggling thing that the silicon is thinking in some way that feels eerily reminiscent of humans. I’d actually say the big thing for me wasn’t even ChatGPT, it wasn’t even Claude. It was DeepSeek. Running DeepSeek locally and seeing the think box where it converses with itself about how to formulate the response. I almost wanted to think, is this a gimmick? Is it doing this as a performance for my benefit? But that’s not actually how it thinks. If this is how it actually thinks. Okay, I’m a little scared. This is incredibly human how it thinks in this way, but where does that go? So in ’95, one of my favorite movies, one of my favorite B movies came out, The Lawnmower Man.
DHH (01:44:57) Incredible movie about virtual reality. Being an avatar and living in VR, the story was a mess, but the aesthetics, the world that build up was incredible and I thought, we’re five years away. I’m going to be living in VR now. I’m just going to be floating around. I’m going to be an avatar. This is where most humans can spend most of the day. That didn’t happen. We’re 30 years later, VR is still not here. It’s here for gaming. It’s here for some specialized applications. My oldest loves playing Gorilla Tag. I don’t know if you’ve tried that. That’s basically the hottest VR game. Wonderful. It’s great. It’s really hard to predict the future because we just don’t know. And then when you factor into AI and you have even the smartest people go like, “I don’t think we fully understand how this works.”
Lex Fridman (01:45:49) But then on the flip side, you have Moore’s law that seems to work for many, many, many years in decreasing the size of transistor, for example. Flash didn’t take over the internet, but Moore’s law worked, so we don’t know which one AI is.
DHH (01:46:07) It is what it is. And this is what I find so fascinating to, I forget who did this presentation, but someone in the web community, this great presentation on the history of the airplane. So you go from the Wright brothers flying in, what was 1903 or something like that, and 40 years later you have a jet flight, just an unbelievable amount of progress in four decades. Then in ’56, I think it was, the whole design for the Boeing 747 century precursor was designed and basically nothing has happened since. Just minor tweaks and improvements on the flying experience since the ’50s. Somehow, if you were to predict where flying was going to go and you were sitting in ’42 and you’d seen, you’d remember the Wright brothers flying in oh three and you were seeing that jet engines coming, you’re like, “We’re going to fly to the stars in another two decades.”
(01:47:04) We’re going to invent super mega hypersonic flights that’s going to traverse the earth in two hours, and then that didn’t happen. It tapped out. This is what’s so hard about predicting the future. We can be so excited in the moment because we’re drawing a line through early dots on a chart, and it looks like those early dots is just going up into the right and sometimes it’s just flattened out. This is also one of those things where we have so much critical infrastructure, for example, that still runs on COBOL, that about five humans around the world really understand truly, deeply that it’s possible for society to lose a competence it still needs because it’s chasing the future.
(01:47:44) COBOL is still with us. This is one of the things I think about with programming. Ruby on Rails is at such a level now that in 50 years from now, it’s exceedingly likely that there’s still a ton of Ruby on Rails systems running around now, very hard to predict what that exact world is going to be like, but yesterday’s weather tells us that if there’s still COBOL code from the ’70s operating social security today, and we haven’t figured out a clean way to convert that, let alone understand it, we should certainly be humble about predicting the future.
(01:48:16) I don’t think any of the programmers who wrote that COBOL code back in the ’70s had any idea that in 2025 checks were still being cut off the business logic that they had encoded back then. But that just brings me to the conclusion on the question for what should a young programmer do? You’re not going to be able to predict the future. No one’s going to be able to predict the future. If you like programming, you should learn programming. Now, is that going to be a career forever? I don’t know, but what’s going to be a career forever? Who knows? A second ago we thought that it was the blue-collar labor that was going to be abstracted. First, it was the robots that were going to take over. Then Gen AI comes out, and then all the artists suddenly look like, “Holy shit, is this going to do all animation now? Is going to do all music now?”
(01:48:59) They get real scared, and now I see the latest Tesla robot going like, “Oh, maybe we’re back now to blue-collar being in trouble because if it can dance like that, it can probably fix a toilet.” So no one knows anything, and you have to then position yourself for the future in such a way that it doesn’t matter that you pick a profession or path where if it turns out that you have to retool and re-skill, you’re not going to regret the path you took. That’s a general life principle. For me, how I look at all endeavors I involved myself in is I want to be content with all outcomes.
(01:49:39) When we start working on a new product at 37 Signals, I set up my mental model for success and I go, “Do you know what? If no one wants this, I will have had another opportunity to write beautiful Ruby code to explore greenfield domain, to learn something new, to build a system I want, even if no one else wants it.” What a blessing, what a privilege. If a bunch of people want it, that’s great. We can pay some salaries, we can keep the business running, and if it’s a blowaway success, wonderful. I get to impact a bunch of people.
Vibe coding
Lex Fridman (01:50:13) I think one of the big open questions to me is how far you can get with vibe coding, whether an approach for a young developer to invest most of the time into vibe coding or into writing code from scratch. So vibe coding, meaning I’m leaning into the meme a little bit, but the vibe coding, meaning you generate code, you have this idea of a thing you want to create, you generate the code and then you fix it with both natural language to the prompts and manually. You learn enough to manually fix it. So that’s the learning process. How you fix code that’s generated or you write code from scratch and have the LMS kind of tab, tab, tab, tab, add extra code, like which part do you lean on? I think to be safe, you should find the beauty and the artistry and skill in both, right? From scratch, so there should be some percent of your time just writing from scratch and some percent vibe coding.
DHH (01:51:16) There should be more of the time writing from scratch if you are interested in learning how to program. Unfortunately, you’re not going to get fit by watching fitness videos. You’re not going to learn how to play the guitar by watching YouTube guitar videos. You have to actually play yourself. You have to do the sit-ups. Programming, understanding, learning almost anything requires you to do. Humans are not built to absorb information in a way that transforms into skills by just watching others from afar. Now, ironically, it seems AI is actually quite good at that, but humans are not. If you want to learn how to become a competent programmer, you have to program. It’s really not that difficult to understand. Now, I understand the temptation and the temptation is there because vibe coding can produce things perhaps in this moment, especially in new domain, you’re not familiar with tools you don’t know perfectly well that’s better than what you could do or that you would take much longer to get at, but you’re not going to learn anything.
(01:52:15) You’re going to learn in this superficial way that feels like learning but is completely empty calories, and secondly, if you can just vibe code it, you’re not a programmer. Then anyone could do it, which may be wonderful. That’s essentially what happened with the Access database. That’s what happened with Excel. It took the capacity of accountants to become software developers because the tools became so accessible to them that they could build a model for how the business was going to do next week that required a programmer prior to Excel. Now, it didn’t because they could do it themselves by coding enables non-programmers to explore their ideas in a way that I find absolutely wonderful, but it doesn’t make you a programmer.
Lex Fridman (01:53:02) I agree with you, but I want to allow for room for both of us be wrong. For example, there could be vibe coding could actually be a skill that if you train it and by vibe coding, let’s include the step of correction, the iterative correction, it’s possible if you get really good at that, that you’re outperforming the people that write from scratch that you can come up with truly innovative things, especially at this moment in history while the LLMs are a little bit too dumb to create super novel things and a complete product, but they’re starting to creep close to that, so if you are investing time now into becoming a really good vibe coder, maybe this is the right thing to do. If it’s indeed a skill, we kind of meme about vibe coding, like sitting back and it’s in the name, but if you treat it seriously, a competitive vibe coder and get good at riding the wave of AI and get good at the skill of editing code versus writing code from scratch, it’s possible that you can actually get farther in the long term.
(01:54:12) Maybe editing is a fundamentally different task than writing from scratch if you take that seriously as a skill that you develop. I see. To me, that’s an open question. I just think I personally, now you’re on another level, but just personally, I’m not as good at editing the code that I didn’t write. That’s a different-
Lex Fridman (01:54:38) No one is of this generation, but maybe that’s a skill. Maybe if you get on the same page as the AI, because there’s a consistency to the AI. It’s like it really is a pair of programmers with a consistent style and structure and so on. Plus, with your own prompting, you can control the kind of code you write. I mean, it could legitimately be a skill.
DHH (01:54:59) That’s the dream of the prompt engineer. I think it’s complete pipe dream. I don’t think editors exist that aren’t good at writing. I’ve written a number of books. I’ve had a number of professional editors. Not all of them wrote their own great books, but all of them were great writers in some regard. You cannot give someone pointers if you don’t know how to do it. It’s very difficult for an editor to be able to spot what’s wrong with a problem if the data couldn’t make the solution themselves. The capacity to be a good editor is the reward you get from being a good doer. You have to be a doer first. Now, that’s not the same as saying that vibe coding, prompt engineering won’t be able to produce fully formed amazing systems even shortly. I think that’s entirely possible, but then there’s no skill left, which maybe is the greatest payoff at all.
(01:55:57) Wasn’t that the whole promise of AI anyway, that it was just all natural language that even my clumsy way of formulating a question could result in a beautiful succinct answer? That actually to me is a much more appealing vision that there’s going to be these special prompt engineering wizards who know how to tickle the AI just right to produce what they want. The beauty of AI is to think that someone who doesn’t know the first thing about how AI actually works is able to formulate their idea and their aspirations for what they want, and the AI could somehow take that messy clump of ideas and produce something that someone wants.
(01:56:35) That’s actually what programming has always been. There’s very often been people who didn’t know how to program, who wanted programs, who then hired programmers, who gave them messy descriptions of what they wanted, and then when the programmers delivered that back said, “Oh, no, actually that’s not what I meant. I want else.” AI may be able to provide that cycle if that happens to the fullest extent of it, yeah, there’s not going to be as many programmers around, but hopefully presumably someone still, at least for the foreseeable future, have to understand whether what the AI is producing actually works or not.
Lex Fridman (01:57:11) As an interesting case study, maybe a thought experiment, if I wanted to vibe code Basecamp or hey, some of the products you’ve built, what would be the bottlenecks? Where would I fail along the way?
DHH (01:57:30) What I’ve seen when I’ve been trying to do this, trying to use vibe coding to build something real is you actually fail really early. The vibe coding is able to build a veneer at the current present moment of something that looks like it works, but it’s flawed in all sorts of ways. There are the obvious ways, the meme ways that it’s leaking all your API keys, it’s storing your password in plain text. I think that’s ultimately solvable. It’s going to figure that out, or at least it’s going to get better at that, but its capacity to get lost in its own Labyrinth is very great right now. You let it code something and then you want to change something and it becomes a game of Whack-A-Mole real quick.
(01:58:09) Pieter Levels who’ve been doing this wonderful flight simulator was talking to that where at a certain scale the thing just keeps biting its own tail. You want to fix something and it breaks five other things, which I think is actually uniquely human because that’s how most bad programmers are at a certain level of complexity with the domain. They can’t fix one thing without breaking three other things, so in that way I’m actually in some way it’s almost a positive signal for that. The AI is going to figure this out because it’s done an extremely human trajectory right now. The kind of mistakes it’s making are the kind of mistakes that junior programmers make all the time.
Rails manifesto: Principles of a great programming language
Lex Fridman (01:58:43) Yeah. Can we zoom out and look at the vision, the manifesto, the doctrine of Rails? What are some of the things that make a programming language a framework? Great, especially for web development, so we talked about happiness.
Lex Fridman (01:59:00) The underlying objective of Ruby. What else?
DHH (01:59:04) So you’re looking at the nine points I wrote out in I think 2012 and first, before we dive into them, I want to say the reason I wrote it down is that if you want a community to endure, you have to record its values and you have to record its practices. If you don’t, eventually you’re going to get enough new people come in who have their own ideas of where this thing should go, and if we don’t have a guiding light helping us to make decisions, we’re going to start flailing. We’re going to start actually falling apart. I think this is one of the key reasons that institutions of all kinds start falling apart. We forget why Chesterton’s fence is there. We just go like, why is that fence there? Let’s yank it out. Oh, it was to keep the wolves out. Now we’re all dead.
(01:59:49) Oops. So I wanted to write these things down and if we just take them quick one by one, you talked about optimizing for programmer happiness. I put that at number one in homage of Matz, and that’s a lot about accepting that there is occasionally a trade-off between writing beautiful code and other things we want out of systems. There could be a runtime trade-off. There can be a performance trade-off, but we’re going to do it nonetheless. We’re also going to allow ambiguity in a way that many programmers by default are uncomfortable with. I give the example actually here of in the interactive Ruby Shell where you can play with the language or even interact with your domain model. You can quit it in two ways, at least that I found. You can write exit. Boom, you’re out of the program. You can write quit. Boom, you’re out of the program.
(02:00:38) They do the same thing. We just wrote both exit or the people who built that wrote both exit and quit because they knew humans were likely to pick one or the other. Python is the perfect contrast to this. In the Python interactive protocol, if you write exit, it won’t exit. It’ll give you a fucking lesson. It’ll basically tell you to read the fucking manual. It says, “Use exit() or Ctrl+D i.e. end of file to exit.” I’m like one is very human and another is very engineer, and I mean that both of them in the best possible way. Python is pedantic. Python’s the value from the start stated is that there should be preferably one and only one way to do a certain thing. Ruby is the complete opposite. No, we want the full expression that fits different human brains such that it seems like the language is guessing just what they want.
Lex Fridman (02:01:37) And part of that is also you described the principle of the least surprise, which is a difficult thing to engineer a language because it’s a subjective thing.
DHH (02:01:47) Which is why you can’t do it in one way, which is why I used the example of both exit and quit. The principle of least surprise for some people would be like, “Oh, exit. That’s how I get out of the prompt. For other people, it would be quit.” Why don’t we just do both?
Lex Fridman (02:02:01) Okay, so what’s the convention over configuration? That’s a big one.
DHH (02:02:05) That’s a big one. That’s a huge one. And it was born out of a frustration I had in the early days with especially Java frameworks where when you were setting up a web application framework for Java back in the day, it was not uncommon to literally write right hundreds if not thousands of lines of XML configuration files. Oh, I need this. I want the database to use the foreign keys as post underscore ID. No, no, no. I want it as post capital ID. Oh, no, no, no. You have to do a capital PID. There are all these ways where you can configure how foreign relation keys should work in a database and none of them matter. We just need to pick one and then that’s fine, and if pick one and we can depend on it, it becomes a convention. If it’s a convention, we don’t have to configure it if we don’t have to configure it, you can get started with you actually care about much quicker.
(02:02:57) Convention of a configuration is essentially to take that idea that the system should come pre-assembled. I’m not just handing you a box of fucking Legos and asking you to build the Millennium Falcon. I’m giving you a finished toy. You can edit, you can change it. It’s still build out a Legos. You can still take some pieces off and put in some other pieces, but I’m giving you the final product and this cuts against the grain of what most programmers love. They love a box of Legos. They love to put everything together from scratch. They love to make all these detailed little decisions that just don’t matter at all, and I want to elevate that up such that, hey, I’m not trying to take the decisions away from you. I just want you to focus on decisions that actually matter that you truly care about. No one cares about whether it’s post underscore ID or post ID or PID.
Lex Fridman (02:03:44) It’s just a wonderful thing. You have all these aspirations, they’re going to do some kind of custom, most beautiful Legos castle that nobody’s ever built from these pieces, but in reality to be productive in most situations, you just need to build the basic thing and then on top of that is where your creativity comes.
DHH (02:04:03) Absolutely, and I think this is one of those, part of the doctrine that a lot of programmers who get to use Ruby on Rails begrudgingly will acknowledge it’s a nice thing. Even if they don’t really like it’s hard to beat the attraction to building with Legos from scratch out of programmers. That’s just what we like. This is why we’re programmers in the first place because we’d like to put these little pieces together, but we can direct that instinct towards a more productive end of the stack.
Lex Fridman (02:04:33) Okay. What are some of the other ones?
DHH (02:04:35) The menu is omakase. It actually comes out of the same principle that great defaults really matter. If you look at everything that’s wrong with the JavaScript ecosystem right now, for example, it is that no one is in charge of the menu. There are a billion different dishes and you can configure just your tailored specific configuration of it, but no one done the work to make sure it all fits together, so you have all these unique problems in the JavaScript ecosystem, for example, there’s probably 25 major ways of just doing the controller layer and then as many of how to talk to the database, so you get this permutation of N times N times N of no one is using the same thing.
(02:05:17) And if they are using the same thing, they’re only using the same thing for about five minutes, so we have no retained wisdom. We build up no durable skills. Rails goes the complete opposite way of saying do you know what? Rails is not just a web framework. It is a complete attempt at solving the web problem. It’s complete attempt at solving everything you need to build a great web application, and every piece of that puzzle should ideally be in the box pre-configured, pre-assembled.
(02:05:48) If you want to change some of those pieces later, that’s wonderful, but on day one you’ll get a full menu designed by a chef who really cared about every piece of the ingredient and you’re going to enjoy it, and that’s again one of those things where many programmers think like I know better and they do in some hyperlocal sense of it. Every programmer knows better. This is what Ruby is built on, that every programmer knows better in their specific situation. Maybe they can do something dangerous, maybe they think they know better and then they blow their foot off and then they truly will know better because they’ve blown their foot off once and won’t do it again. But the menu on omakase is that.
Lex Fridman (02:06:28) So you in general see the value in the monolith?
DHH (02:06:35) That someone thought of the whole problem. This is one of the reasons why I’ve been on a crusade against microservices since the term was coined. Microservices was born out of essentially a good idea. What do you do at Netflix scale when you have thousands of engineers working on millions of lines of code? No one can keep that entire system in their head at one time. You have to break it down. Microservices can be a reasonable way to do that when you’re at Netflix scale. When you apply that pattern to a team of 20 programmers working on a code base of half a million lines of code, you’re an idiot. You just don’t need to turn method invocations into network calls. It is the first rule of distributed programming. Do not distribute your programming. It makes everything harder. All the failure conditions you have to consider as a programmer just becomes infinitely harder when there’s a network cable involved, so I hate the idea of premature decomposition and microservices is exactly that.
(02:07:35) The monolith says let’s try to focus on building a whole system that a single human can actually understand and push that paradigm as far as possible by compressing all the concepts such that more of it will fit into memory of a single operating human, and then we can have a system where I can actually understand all of Basecamp. I can actually understand all of HEY. Both of those systems are just over a hundred thousand lines of code. I’ve seen people do this that maybe twice, maybe three times that scale and then it starts breaking down. Once you get north of certainly half a million lines of code, no individual human can do it, and that’s when you get into maybe some degree of microservices can make sense.
Lex Fridman (02:08:12) Basecamp and HEY are both a hundred thousand?
DHH (02:08:16) It’s considering the fact that Basecamp I think has something like 420 screens, different ways and configurations.
Lex Fridman (02:08:23) Do you include the front end in that?
DHH (02:08:25) No, that’s the Ruby code. Well, it’s front end in the sense that some of that Ruby code is beneficial to the front end, but it’s not JavaScript for example. Now, the other thing we might talk about later is we write very little JavaScript actually for all of our applications. HEY, which is a Gmail competitor. Gmail ships I think 28 of uncompressed JavaScript. If you compress it, I think it’s about six megabytes, 28 megabytes. Think about how many lines of code that is.
(02:08:48) When HEY launched, we shipped 40 kilobytes. It’s trying to solve the same problem. You can solve the email client problem with either 28 megabytes of uncompressed JavaScript or with 40 kilobytes if you do things differently, but that comes to the same problem essentially. This is why I have fiercely fought splitting front end and back end. Apart that in my opinion, this was one of the great crimes against web development that we are still atoning for that we separated and divided what was and should be a unified problem solving mechanism. When you are working both on front end and back end, you understand the whole system and you’re not going to get into these camps that decompose and eventually you end up with shit like GraphQL.
Lex Fridman (02:09:36) Okay. Let’s fly through the rest of the doctrine. No one paradigm.
DHH (02:09:44) No one paradigm goes to the fact that Ruby is a fiercely object-oriented programming language at its core, but it’s also a functional programming language. This five times I told you about, you can essentially do these anonymous function calls and you can chain them together very much in the spirit of how true functional programming languages work, Ruby has even moved closer towards the functional programming and of the scale by making strings immutable. There are ideas from all different disciplines of an all different paradigms of software development that can fit together. Smalltalk, for example, was only object-oriented and that was just it. Ruby tries to be mainly object-oriented, but borrow a little bit of functional programming, a little bit of imperative programming, be able to do all of that. Rails tries to do the same thing. We’re not just going to pick one paradigm and run it through everything.
(02:10:35) Object orientation is at the center of it, but it’s okay to invite all these other disciplines in. It’s okay to be inspired. It’s okay to remix it. I actually think one of the main benefits of Rails is that it’s a remix. I didn’t invent all these ideas. I didn’t come up with ActiveRecord. I didn’t come up with the MVC way of dividing an application. I took all the great ideas that I had learned and picked up from every different camp and I put it together. Not because there was going to be just one single overarching theory of everything, but I was going to have a cohesive unit that incorporated the best from everywhere.
Lex Fridman (02:11:10) Is that idea a bit at tension with the beauty of the monolith system?
DHH (02:11:15) I think the monolith can be thought of as quite roomy, quite as a big tent that the monolith needs actually to borrow a little bit of functional programming for the kinds of problems that that excels, that discipline excels its solving and that paradigm excels its solving. If you also want object orientation at its core, I actually think when I’ve looked at functional programming languages, there’s a lot to love and then I see some of the crazy contortions they have to go through when part of the problem they’re solving calls for mutating something and you go like, “Holy shit, this is a great paradigm from 90% of the problem, and then you’re twisting yourself completely out of shape when you try to solve the last 10.”
Lex Fridman (02:12:00) Ooh, Exalt beautiful code is the next one.
DHH (02:12:03) We’ve talked about that at length and here’s a great example that really summarizes the main specific language quality of Ruby on Rails that you can make code actually pleasant to write and read, which is really funny to me because as we talked about when I started learning programming, it wasn’t even a consideration. I didn’t even know that that could be part of the premise, that that could be part of the solution that writing code could feel as good as writing a poem.
Lex Fridman (02:12:31) Class project, application record belongs to account has many participants, class name person, validates presence of name.
DHH (02:12:41) See, you could read it out. You didn’t even change anything.
Lex Fridman (02:12:47) Yeah, it’s nice. It’s really nice. There’s an intuitive nature to it. Okay, so I have specific questions there. I mean ActiveRecord, just to take that tangent, that has to be your favorite feature.
DHH (02:13:00) It’s the crown jewel of Rails. It really is. It’s the defining characteristic of how to work with Ruby on Rails. And it’s born in an interesting level of controversy because it actually uses a pattern that had been described by Martin Fowler in the patterns of enterprise application architecture. One of the greatest books for anyone working on business systems and if you had not read it, you must pick it up immediately. Patterns of enterprise application architecture, I think it was published in 2001. It is one of the very few programming books that I have read many times over. It’s incredible in it. Martin describes a bunch of different patterns of how to build business systems essentially. An ActiveRecord is a little bit of a footnote in there. The pattern is literally called ActiveRecord. You can look it up. It’s called ActiveRecord. I wouldn’t even creative enough to come up a name of my own, but it allows the creation, the marriage of database and object orientation in a way that a lot of programmers find a little off-putting.
(02:14:04) They don’t actually want to pollute the beautiful object-oriented nature of that kind of programming with SQL. There was a rant by Uncle Bob the other day about how SQL is the worst thing ever. Okay, fine, whatever. I don’t care. This is practical. We are making crud applications. You’re taking things out of an HTML form and you’re sticking them into a database. It’s not more complicated than that. The more abstractions you put in between those two ends of the spectrum, the more you’re just fooling yourself. This is what we’re doing. We’re talking to SQL databases.
(02:14:39) By the way, quick aside, SQL was one of those things that have endured the onslaught of NoSQL databases structured list data for a better part of a decade and still reign supreme. SQL was a good thing to invest your time in learning. Every program I’m working with the web should know SQL to a fair degree, even if they’re working with an ORM, an object relational mapper as ActiveRecord, you still need to understand SQL. What ActiveRecord does is not so much try to abstract the SQL away behind a different kind of paradigm. It’s just making it less cumbersome to write, making it more amenable to build domain models on top of other domain models in a way, since you don’t have to write every SQL statement by hand.
Lex Fridman (02:15:23) Let’s just say that ActiveRecord is an ORM, which is a layer that makes it intuitive and human interpretable to communicate with a database.
DHH (02:15:33) Even simpler than that. It turns tables into classes and rows into objects. I actually think SQL is very easy to understand most of it. You can write some SQL golf too, that’s very hard to understand, but SQL at its base and much of the criticism against SQL was it was written for human consumption. It’s actually quite verbose, especially if you’re doing things like inserts over and over again. It’s quite verbose. Insert into table, parentheses, enumerate every column you want to insert, values, parentheses.
DHH (02:16:00) In every column you want to insert values, parentheses, every value that fits with that column, it gets tedious to write SQL by hand, but it’s actually very humanly readable. ActiveRecord just takes that tediousness away, it makes it possible to combine things in a way that a humanly describable language just doesn’t. It composes things into methods and you can combine these methods and you can build structures around them. I don’t dislike SQL, I just like a lot of things in programming, I try to get rid of them. SQL wasn’t really one of them, it was just a sense of, “I don’t want to write the same thing over and over again.” It was a, “Can we be a little more succinct? Can we match it just slightly better to the object orientation without trying to hide away the fact that we’re persisting these objects into a database?”
(02:16:47) That’s where I think a lot of ORMs went wrong. They tried to live in the pure world of objects, never to consider that those objects had to be consistent into a SQL database, and then they came up with convoluted way of translating back and forth. ActiveRecord says, “You know what? Just accept it.” This record, this object is not going to get saved into some no-SQL database, it’s going to be saved into SQL database, so just structure the whole thing around that. It’s going to have attributes, those attributes are going to respond to columns in the database. It’s not more complicated than that stuff making it so.
Lex Fridman (02:17:22) Yeah, but I should say, I personally love SQL, because I’m an algorithms person, so I love optimization, I love to know how the databases actually work, so I can match the SQL queries and the design of the tables such that there is optimal… Squeeze the optimal performance out of the table. Okay. Based on the actual way that that table is used. I think that pushes to the point that there is value in understanding SQL. I wonder, because I started looking at ActiveRecord and it looks really awesome. Does that make you lazy? Not you, but a person that rolls in and starts using Rails, you can probably get away with never really learning SQL, right?
DHH (02:18:10) As long as you want to stay at the entry level of competence. This is actually my overarching mission with Rails, is to lower the barrier of entry so far down that someone can start seeing stuff on their browser without basically understanding anything. They can run Rails, new blog, run a couple of generators. They have a whole system… They don’t understand anything, but it’s an invitation to learn more. Where I get fired up, and this ties back to the AI discussion, is when that’s turned into this meme that programmers no longer have to be competent. “The AI is going to figure it out, the generators is going to figure it out. I don’t need to know SQL, ActiveRecord is going to abstract it away from me.” No, no, no. Dude, hold up. The path here is competence. I’m trying to teach you things.
(02:18:58) I understand I can’t teach you everything in five minutes. No one who’s ever become good at anything worthwhile could be taught everything in five minutes. If you want to be a fully well-rounded application developer, that takes years, but you can actually become somewhat productive in a few days, you can have fun in a few days. For sure, you’re going to have fun in a few minutes, in a few hours, and over time, I can teach you a little more. ActiveRecord says like, “Yeah, yeah. All right, start here and then, next week, we’ll do a class on SQL.”
Lex Fridman (02:19:30) Actually, you have this beautiful expression that I love. That a great programming language, like Ruby, has a soft ramp, but the ramp goes to infinity.
DHH (02:19:45) There’s always more to learn. This is one of the reasons I’m still having fun programming, that I’m still learning new things, I can still incorporate new things. The web is deep enough as a domain, you never going to learn all of it.
DHH (02:19:58) This is a good one, because another way of saying this… The opposite way of saying this, the Java way of saying is, “Do not provide foot guns,” right?
DHH (02:20:06) I don’t want to give you a sharp knife. You’re a child, you can’t handle a sharp knife. Here’s a dull butter knife, cut your damn steak, right? That’s a very frustrating experience. You want a sharp knife, even though you might be able to cut yourself. I trust humans in the same way that maths trust humans. Maybe you cut off a finger. All right, you’re not going to do that again. Thankfully, if it was a virtual finger, it’s going to grow back out. Your competence is going to grow, it’s more fun to work with sharp tools.
Lex Fridman (02:20:35) That actually contributes to the ramp that goes to infinity.
DHH (02:20:42) We hit on that one. Rails is trying to solve the whole problem of the web, not just one little component. It’s not leaving you a bunch of pieces you have to put together yourself.
DHH (02:20:52) You know what? If there’s one that’s dated, it’s probably that one. At this stage, Rails has been incredibly stable over many, many generations. The last major release, Rails 8, was basically a no-op upgrade for anyone running Rails 7. Rails 7 was almost a no-op upgrade for anyone running Rails 6. I used to think it required more churn to get progress, to stay on the leading edge of new stuff, and I wrote this before I experienced the indignity of the 2010s in the JavaScript community, where it seemed like stability was not just unvalued, it was actually despised. The churn in and of itself was a value we should be pursuing. If you were still working with the same framework three months later, you were an idiot, and I saw that and I actually recoiled. If I was going to write the doctrine today, I’d write that differently. I wouldn’t say, “Progress over stability.”
Lex Fridman (02:21:50) Maybe it’d be a function of the age of the programming language also.
DHH (02:21:55) Maybe or a deeper understanding of the problem. I think part of what’s so fascinating about technology is that we have this perception that everything constantly moves so fast. No, it doesn’t. Everything moves at a glacial pace. There is occasionally a paradigm shift, like what’s happening with AI right now, like what happened with the introduction of the iPhone in 2007, like what happened with the internet in ’95. That’s basically the total sum of my career, three things changed. Everything else in between was incremental small improvements. You can recognize a Rails application written in 2003. I know, because the Basecamp I wrote back then is still operating, making millions of dollars in ARR, servicing customers on the initial version that was launched back then, and it looks like the Rails code, if I squint a little, that I would write today. Most things don’t change, even in computing, and that’s actually a good thing. We saw with the JavaScript ecosystem, what happens when everyone gets just mad about constant churn. Things don’t change that often.
Lex Fridman (02:23:00) By the way, on that small tangent, you just visibly verbally changed your mind with the you of 15 years ago?
Lex Fridman (02:23:10) That’s interesting. Have you noticed yourself changing your mind quite a bit over the years?
DHH (02:23:17) I would say, “Oh, yes,” and then also, “Oh, no,” in the sense that there are absolutely fundamental things both about human nature, about institutions, about programming, about business that I’ve changed my mind on, and then I’ve also had experiences that are almost even more interesting, where I thought I had changed my mind and I tried it a new way, realized why I had the original opinion in the first place, and then gone back to it. It happens both ways. An example of the later part, for example, was managers at 37 Signals. For the longest time, I would rail against engineering managers as an unnecessary burden on a small or even medium-sized company, and at one point, I actually started doubting myself a little bit. I started thinking like, “Do you know what? Maybe all programmers do need a one-on-one therapy session every week with their engineering manager to be a whole individual.”
(02:24:11) We tried that for a couple of years where we hired some very good engineering managers who did engineering management the way you’re supposed to do it, the way it’s done all over the place, and after that, I thought, “No. No, I was right. This was correct, we should not have had managers.” Not every programmer needs a therapy session with an engineering manager every week, we don’t need these endlessly scheduled huddles, we don’t need all these meetings. We just need to leave people the hell alone to work on problems that they enjoy for long stretches of uninterrupted time. That is where happiness is found, that’s where productivity is found, and if you can get away with it, you absolutely should. Engineering management is a necessary evil when that breaks down.
Lex Fridman (02:24:54) What’s the case for managers then?
DHH (02:24:57) The case for managers is that, if you do have a lot of people, there’s a bunch of work that just crops up. The one-on-one is one example, that programmers need someone to check in with, there’s another idealized version that someone needs to guide the career of juniors, for example, to give them redirecting feedback, and all this other stuff. It’s not that, in the abstract, I don’t agree with some of those things, but in practice, I’ve found that they often create more problems that they solve. A good example here is, can you get feedback from someone who’s not better at your job than you are? You can get some feedback, you can get feedback on how you show up at work. Are you being courteous to others? Are you being a good communicator? Okay, yes, but you can’t get feedback on your work, and that’s more important.
(02:25:44) It’s more important that you work under and with someone who’s better at your job than you are if you wish to progress in your career, and every single programmer I’ve ever worked with was far more interested in progressing in their career on that metric, getting better at their craft, than they were in picking up pointers that a middle manager could teach them. That’s not saying that there isn’t value in it, it’s not saying there isn’t value in being a better person or a better communicator. Of course, there is all those things, but if I have to choose one or the other, I value competence higher. Again, I cavit this a million times, because I know what people sometimes hear, they hear the genius asshole is just fine, and that’s great and you should excuse all sorts of malicious behavior if someone’s just really good at what they do.
(02:26:30) I’m not saying that at all. What I am saying is that the history of competence is a history of learning from people who are better than you, and that relationship should take precedence over all else. That relationship gets put aside a bit when engineering manager’s introduced. Now, the funny thing is this conversation ties back to the earlier things we were talking about. Most engineering managers are actually former programmers. They at least know program to some extent, but what I’ve seen time and again is that they lose their touch, their feel with it very, very quickly and turn into pointy-haired bosses very, very quickly who are really good at checking for updates, “Just seeing where we are on project A here if you need anything,” or, “We’re really to deliver?” Okay, yes. Also, no. Shut up, leave me the hell alone. Let me program and then I’ll come up for air.
(02:27:22) I’ll talk with other programmers who I can spar with, that we can learn something with, where I can turn the problems over with and we can move forward. If you look back on the history of computer industry, all the great innovation that’s happened, it’s all been done by tiny teams with no engineering managers. Just full of highly-skilled individuals. You’ve had John Carmack on here. I used to look up to its software so much, not just because I love Quake, not just because I loved what they were doing, but because he shared a bit about how the company worked. There were no managers or maybe they had one business guy doing some business stuff, but that was just to get paid. Everything else was basically just designers and programmers, and there were about eight of them and they created goddamn Quake 2. Why do you need all these people again?
(02:28:09) Why do you need all these managers again? I think, again, at a certain scale, it does break down. It’s hard to just have 100,000 programmers running around wild without any product mommies or daddies telling them what to do. I understand that. Then even as I say that, I also don’t understand it, because if you look at something like Gmail for example, that was like a side project done by Buchheit at Google at the time. So much of the enduring long-term value of even all these huge companies were created by people who didn’t have a god damn manager, and that’s not an accident. That’s a direct cause and effect. I’ve turned in some way even more militant over the years against this notion of management, at least for myself and knowing who I am and how I want to work, because the other part of this is I don’t want to be a manager, and maybe this is just me projecting the fact that I’m an introvert who don’t like to talk to people on one-on-one calls every week, but it also encapsulates how I was able to progress my career.
(02:29:06) I did not really go to the next level with Ruby or otherwise until I had a door I could close and no one could bother me for six hours straight.
Lex Fridman (02:29:15) In companies probably one of the reasons is it’s very easy to hire managers, and managers also delegate responsibility from you, so if you just have a bunch of programmers running around, your response… It’s work, it’s intellectual work to have to deal with the first principles of every problem that’s going on.
Lex Fridman (02:29:39) Manager’s like, “You can relax, all will be taken care of,” but they then hire their own managers, and it just multiplies and multiplies and multiplies. I would love it if some of the great companies we have in the United States, if there was an extra side branch that we could always run… Maybe physicists can come up how to split the simulation to where it just all the managers are removed. Just in that branch, just the PR and the comms people also, and even the lawyers. Just the engineers and let’s just see, and then we merge it back.
DHH (02:30:16) I have a sense you run that branch at 37 singles for 20 years. I’ve experimented with forking back on the other side, I’ve experimented with having a full-time lawyer on staff, I’ve experimented with having engineering managers, and I can tell you life is much better at 50, 60 people when none of those individuals or none of those roles… It’s never about the individuals, it’s about the roles. None of those roles are in your organization full-time. Occasionally, you need a manager. Occasionally, you need a lawyer. I can play the role of manager occasionally, fine, and then I can set it back down to zero. It’s almost like a cloud surface. I want a manager service I can call on for seven hours this week and then I want to take it down to zero for the next three months.
Lex Fridman (02:31:01) Yeah, I read, I don’t know if this is still the case, that Basecamp is an LLC and doesn’t have a CFO, like a full-time accountant. Is that [inaudible 02:31:10].
DHH (02:31:10) These days, we do have a head of finance. We did not for the first 19 years of life, I think. We got away with basically just having an accountant do our books in the same way you would do a small ice cream shop, except we would, over time, have done hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. The scale seemed quirky and, at some point, you can also fall in love with your own quirkiness to a degree that isn’t actually healthy, and I’ve certainly done that over time, and we should have had count the beans a little more diligently, a little earlier. This was part of a blessing of just being wildly profitable and selling software that can have infinite margins, basically, that you can get away with a bunch of stuff that you perhaps shouldn’t. What partially taught me this lesson was when we realized we had not been collecting sales tax in different US states where we had Nexus, and it took us about two years and $5 million in settlements and cleanups to get out of that mess. After that, I went like, “Okay, fine, we can hire a finance person.”
DHH (02:32:11) We now have a wonderful finance person, Ron, who actually ended up replacing something else we used to have. We used to have a full-time data analytics person who would do all sorts of insight mining for, “Why are people signing up for this thing?” We ran that for 10 years and realized, “You know what? If I can have either a data analytics person or an accountant, I’m picking the accountant.”
Small teams
Lex Fridman (02:32:30) I love this so much on so many levels. Can we just linger on that advice that you’ve given, that small teams are better? I think that’s really less… Less is more. What did you say before? “Worse is better”? Okay, I’m sorry.
DHH (02:32:47) Worse is better on adoption with technology a lot of times.
DHH (02:32:51) I think it actually comes out of the same thing. It comes out of the fact that many of the great breakthroughs are created by not even just tiny teams, but individuals, individuals writing something. An individual writing something on some parameter, what they do is worse. Of course, it’s worse when one person has to make something that a huge company have hundreds if not thousands of developers that they can have work on that problem, but in so many other parameters, that worstness is the value, that less is the value. In Getting Real, which we wrote back in 2006, we talk about this notion of less software. When we first got started with Basecamp back in 2004, people would ask us all the time, “Aren’t you petrified of Microsoft? They have so many more resources, they have so many more programmers. What if they take a liking to your little niche here and they show up and they just throw a thousand programmers at the problem?”
(02:33:46) My answer, perhaps partly because I was like 24 was, first of all, “No, no care in the world,” but the real answer was they’re not going to produce the same thing. You cannot produce the software that Basecamp is with a team of a 1,000 people. You will build the software that 1,000 people build, and that’s not the same thing at all. So much of the main breakthrough in both end-user systems but also in open-source systems and fundamental systems, they’re done by individuals or very small teams. Even all these classical histories of Apple has always been like, well, there’s a big organization, but then you had the team that was actually working on the breakthrough. It was four people, it was eight people, it was never 200.
Lex Fridman (02:34:32) The large team seems to slow things down.
Lex Fridman (02:34:37) It’s so fascinating, part of it’s the manager thing.
DHH (02:34:40) Because humans don’t scale, communication between humans certainly don’t scale. You basically get the network-cost effect. Every time you add a new node, it goes up exponentially. This is perhaps the key thing of why I get to be so fond of having no managers at Basecamp, because our default team size is two. One programmer, one designer, one feature. When you’re operating at that level of scale, you don’t need sophistication, you don’t need advanced methodologies, you don’t need multiple layers of management, because you can just do. The magic of small teams is that they just do. They don’t have to argue, because we don’t have to set direction, we won’t have to worry about the road map. We can just sit down and make something, and then see if it’s good. When you can get away with just making things, you don’t have to plan, and if you can get out of planning, you can follow the truth that emerges from the code, from the product, from the thing you’re working on in the moment.
(02:35:43) You know far more about what the great next step is when you’re one step behind, rather than if you try 18 months in advance to map out all the steps. “How do we get from here to very far away?” You know what? That’s difficult to imagine in advance, because humans are very poor at that. Maybe AI one day will be much better than us, but humans can put one foot in front of each other. That’s not that hard, and that allows you to get away with all that sophistication. The process has become much simpler, you need far fewer people, it compounds, you need much less process, you need to waste less time in meetings. You can just spend these long glorious days and weeks of uninterrupted time solving real problems you care about and that are valuable, and you’re going to find that that’s what the market actually wants.
(02:36:33) No one is buying something because there’s a huge company behind it, most of the time. They’re buying something because it’s good, and the way you get something good is you don’t sit around and have a meeting about it, you try stuff, you build stuff.
Lex Fridman (02:36:48) It really is incredible what one person, honestly one person can do in 100 hours of deep work, of focused work. Even less.
DHH (02:36:58) I’ll tell you this, I tracked exactly the number of hours I spent on the first version of Basecamp. I was doing this, because at the time, I was working on a contract basis for Jason. He was paying me… I was going to say $15 an hour, that’s what I got paid when we first got started. I think he had bumped my pay to a glorious $25, but I was billing him, and I know that the invoice for the first version of Basecamp was 400 hours. That’s what it took for one sole individual in 2004 to create an entire system that has then gone on to gross hundreds of millions of dollars and continues to do extremely well. One person, just me setting up everything. Part of that story is Ruby, part of that story’s Rails, but a lot of it is also just me plus Jason plus Ryan plus Matt.
(02:37:46) That was the entire company at the time, and we could create something of sheer sustaining value with such a tiny team, because we were a tiny team. Not despite off. Small is not a stepping stone. This is the other thing that people get into their head, this is one of the big topics about a rework, that it gave entrepreneurs the permission to embrace being a small team not as a waypoint, not as, “I’m trying to become 1,000 people.” No, I actually like being a small team. Small teams are more fun. If you ask almost anyone, I’m sure Toby would say this too, even at his scale, the sheer enjoyment of building something is in the enjoyment of building it with a tiny team. Now, you can have impact at a different scale when you have a huge company, I fully recognize that and I see the appeal of it, but in the actual building of things, it’s always small teams. Always.
Jeff Bezos
Lex Fridman (02:38:39) How do you protect the small team? Basecamp has successfully stayed small. What’s been the dragon you had to fight off? Basically, you make a lot of money, there’s a temptation to grow, so how do you not grow?
Lex Fridman (02:39:01) … everybody takes venture capital, so you already went.
DHH (02:39:05) That’s been the answer for the longest time, because the problem isn’t just venture capital, it’s other people’s money. Once you take other people’s money, completely understandably, they want a return, and they would prefer to have the largest return possible, because it’s not them sitting in the code, it’s not them getting the daily satisfaction out of building something, chiseling beautiful code poems out of the editor, right? They don’t get that satisfaction. They get the satisfaction maybe of seeing something nice put into the world, that’s fair, but they certainly also get a satisfaction of a higher return. There is this sense, certainly in venture capital, stated in venture capital, that the whole point of you taking the money is to get to $1 billion or more.
(02:39:44) Now, the path to that usually does go through running established playbooks, and then when it comes to software, the enterprise sales playbook is that playbook. If you’re doing B2B, software SaaS, you will try to find product market fit, and the second you have it, you will abandon your small and medium-sized accounts to chase the big whales with a huge sales force and, by then, you’re 1,000 people and life sucks.
Lex Fridman (02:40:10) That said, people are just curious about this. Have gotten a chance to get to know Jeff Bezos. He invested in Basecamp, not controlling…
DHH (02:40:22) He bought secondaries. This was the funny thing, is that when… Investing have these two dual meanings. Normally, when people think about investing, they think you’re putting in growth capital, because you want the business to hire more people, to do more R&D, so they can grow bigger. Bezos didn’t do that, actually. He bought an ownership stake directly from Jason and I, and 100% of the proceeds of that purchase went into my and Jason’s bank account. Personal bank accounts. Not a single cent went into the account of the company, because we didn’t need the money to grow. What we needed or what we certainly enjoyed was, to some extent, maybe the vote of confidence, but more so the security of taking a little bit off the tables is that we dared turn down the big bucks from venture capitals.
(02:41:14) It was essentially a vaccine against wanting to take a larger check from people who then wanted to take the company to something enormous that we didn’t want to go with it. Jeff gave Jason and I just enough money that we were comfortable turning all these people down in a way where, if it had turned belly up six months later, we wouldn’t have been kicking ourselves and gone, “We had something here that was worth millions, and now we have nothing and I have to worry about rent and groceries again.”
Lex Fridman (02:41:44) It is a vote of confidence. I’d love to hear Jeff’s side of this story of why, because he doesn’t need the money. I think it probably is just believing in people and wanting to have cool stuff be created in the world and make money off of it, but not like-
DHH (02:42:05) 100% the motivation for Jeff wasn’t a return, because he actually has a team, his private office, that runs these investments, who did the calculus on the investment pitch we gave him, which was so ridiculous that Jason and I were laughing our asses off when we were writing down our metrics. I was like, “No one’s going to pay this. No one is going to give us this multiple of this amount of revenue, and that’s fine.” I mean, we took the call essentially out of an awe that Jeff Bezos even wanted to look at us. “Do you know what? We don’t want venture capital, we don’t need other people’s money, but let’s just give him a bullshit number that no sane person would actually say yes to, and then we can each go our own way.”
(02:42:48) His investment team said like, “Jeff, no way. This makes no economic sense at all, they’re asking for way too much money with way too little revenue,” and Jeff just went like, “I don’t care, I want to invest in this guy,” because to him, at the time, it was chump change. Jason and I each got a few million dollars, whatever the currency swing between the yen and the dollar that day probably moved 10X for his net worth than our investment did. Jeff seemed genuinely interested in being around interesting people, interesting companies, helping someone go to distance. I actually look back on that relationship with some degree of regret, because I took that vote of confidence for granted in ways that I’m a little bit ashamed of. Over the years, I’ve been more critical about some of the things that Amazon had done that I feel now is justified.
(02:43:41) That’s just part of that processing of it, but on the economic sense, he gave us that confidence. He gave us the economic confidence, but then he also gave us the confidence of a CEO running, perhaps at the time the most important internet business in the US, showing up to our calls, which we would have with him once a year, and basically, just going like, “Yeah, you guys are doing awesome stuff. You should just keep doing awesome stuff. I read your book, it’s awesome. You launched this thing, it’s awesome. You should just do more of that. I don’t actually know how to run your business, you guys know.”
Lex Fridman (02:44:13) The book was out. From a fan perspective, I’m curious about how Jeff Bezos is able to see… Because to me, you and Jason are special humans in the space of tech, and the fact that Jeff was able to see that, right? How hard is it to see that?
DHH (02:44:29) He certainly saw it very early, and I think this is something that Jeff does better than almost anyone else. He spots that opportunity so far in advance of anyone else even opened their eyes to it, or certainly is willing to bet on it far early and far harder than anyone else is, and he’s just right time and again. We were not the only investment that he made and, certainly, Amazon had an extremely long-term vision, far longer than I have ever had the gumption to keep… I think of myself as a long-term thinker, I’m playing a child’s game compared to the game that Jeff is playing. When I looked at Amazon’s economics around the dot-com boom and bust, they looked ridiculous. They were losing so much money, they were so hated by the market. No one believed that it was going to turn into what it is, but Jeff did in a way that, that level of conviction, I really aspire to.
(02:45:23) I think that’s one of the main things I’ve taken away from that relationship is that you can just believe in yourself. To that degree against those odds? That’s ridiculous. He did that so many times at our level that it’s pathetic if I’m doubting myself.
Lex Fridman (02:45:42) Yeah. I think Amazon is one of those companies. It’s come under a bunch of criticism over the years. This is something about humans that I don’t appreciate so much, that we take for granted the positive that a thing brings real quick, and then we just start criticizing the thing. It’s the Wi-Fi and the airplanes.
Lex Fridman (02:46:04) I think Amazon, there could be a case made that Amazon is one of the greatest companies in the last 100 years.
DHH (02:46:15) For sure, I think it’s an easy case to make. What I also think is that the price you pay to be one of the greatest companies in the last 100 years is a lot of detractors, a lot of pushback, a lot of criticism. That this is actually order restored in the universe. One of my favorite teachers in all the time I’ve been on the internet is Kathy Sierra. I don’t know if you know her work, but she was active for only a few short years before the cruel internet ran her off, but she wrote a blog called Creating Passionate Users, and she carved into my brain this notion of balance in the universe. If you’re creating something of value that a lot of people love, you must create an equal and opposite force of haters. You cannot have people who love what you do without also having people who hate what you do.
(02:47:05) The only escape from that is mediocrity. If you are so boring and so uninteresting that no one gives a damn whether you exist or not, yeah, you don’t get the haters, but you also don’t get the impact of people who really enjoy your work. I think Amazon is that just at the massive scale, right? They’ve brought so much value and change to technology, to commerce that they must simply have a black hole size of haters. Otherwise, the universe is simply going to tip over.
Lex Fridman (02:47:34) Let me ask you about small teams. You mentioned Jason a bunch of times, Jason Fried. You have been partners for a long, long time. Perhaps it’s fair to say he’s more on the the design, business side and you’re the tech, the engineering wizard. How have you guys over all these years, creating so many amazing products, not murder each other? It’s a great story of partnership. What can you say about collaboration? What can you say about Jason that you love, that you’ve learned from? Why does this work?
DHH (02:48:07) First, I’ll say we have tried to murder each other several times over the years, but far less, I think in the last decade. In the early days, our product discussions were so fierce that, when we were having them in the office and there were other employees around, some of them were legitimately worried that the company was about to fall apart, because the volume coming out of the room would be so high and sound so acrimonious that they were legitimately worried the whole thing was going to fall apart. You know what’s funny? Is that it never felt like that in the moment. It always felt like just a peak vigorous search for something better, and that we were able to stomach that level of adversity on the merits of an idea, because it was about the idea. It wasn’t about the person and it never really got personal. Not even never, really, it didn’t get personal. It wasn’t like, “Jason, you’re an asshole.” It was like, “Jason, you’re an idiot, and you’re an idiot because you’re looking at this problem the wrong way, and let me tell you the right way to do it.”
Lex Fridman (02:49:21) As a small tangent, let me say that some people have said, we’ll probably return to this, that you sometimes can have flights of temper on the internet and so on. I never take it that way, because it is the same kind of ilk. Maybe I haven’t seen the right traces of temper, but usually, it’s about the idea, and it’s just excited, passionate human.
DHH (02:49:46) That’s exactly what I like to think of it as. It doesn’t always come across as that and I can see why spectators in particular sometimes would see something that looks like I’m going after the man rather than the ball. I do think I’ve tried to get better at that, but in my relationship with-
DHH (02:50:00) I do think I’ve tried to get better at that, but in my relationship with Jason, I think it’s worked so well because we have our own distinct areas of competence, where we fully trust each other. Jason trusts me to make the correct technical decisions. I trust him to make the correct design and product direction decisions, and then we can overlap and share on the business, on marketing, on writing, on other aspects of it. So that’s one thing, is that if you’re starting a business with someone where you do exactly the same as they do, and you’re constantly contesting who’s the more competent person, I think that’s far more difficult and far more volatile. So if you’re starting a business and you’re both programmers and you both work on the same kind of programming, good luck. I think that’s hard.
(02:50:49) I tried to pick an easier path, working with a designer, where I knew that at least half of the time I could just delegate to his experience and competence and say like, do you know what? I may have an opinion. I have an opinion all the time on design, but I don’t have to win the argument because I trust you. Now, occasionally we would have overlaps on business or direction where we’d both feel like we had a strong stake in the game and we both had a claim to competence in that area, but then for whatever reason, we also both had a long-term vision, where I would go, do you know what? I think we’re wrong here, but as I learned from Jeff Bezos, by the way, I’m going to disagree and commit. That was one of those early lessons he gave us, that was absolutely crucial and perhaps even instrumental in ensuring that Jason and I have been working together for a quarter of a century. Disagree and commit is one of the all time Jeff Bezos’ greats.
Lex Fridman (02:51:42) I’m just surprised that Yoko Ono hasn’t come along. You know what I mean? There’s so many Yokos in this world.
DHH (02:51:51) It might’ve happened if not in part because we don’t sit on each other’s lap all the time. Most of our careers, we haven’t even lived in the same city. I lived in Chicago for a couple of years while we were getting going after I’d moved to the US in 2005, but then I moved to Malibu and then I lived in Spain and then I lived in Copenhagen. And Jason and I, from the foundation of our relationship learned how to work together in a remarkably efficient way where we didn’t have to actually talk that much. On any given week, I’d be surprised if Jason and I spent more than two hours of direct exchange and communication.
Lex Fridman (02:52:33) Yeah. Sometimes it’s the basic human frictions that just accumulate all time.
DHH (02:52:37) Yes. I think if you rub up against another person, that person damn well better be your spouse, if it’s too much for too long.
Lex Fridman (02:52:43) Yeah. But even there, COVID has really tested the relationship. It’s fascinating to watch.
DHH (02:52:48) It has, and I do think that having some separation, which is kind of counterintuitive because I think a lot of people think the more collaboration you can have, the better. The more ideas that can bounce back and forth, the better. And both Jason and I, for whatever reason came to the conclusion early on in careers, absolutely not. That’s complete baloney. This is why we were huge proponents of remote work. This is why I enjoy working in my home office where I can close the door and not see another human for six hours at the time. I don’t want to bounce ideas off you all the time. I want to bounce ideas off you occasionally and then I want to go off and implement those ideas.
(02:53:24) There’s way too much bouncing going on and not enough scoring, not enough dunking, and I think this is one of the great traps of executive rule. Once a founder elevates themselves all the way up to an executive, where what they’re doing is just telling other people what to do, that’s the realm they live in 24/7. They just live in the idea realm. Oh, I can just tell more people, more things what to do and we can just see it happen. If you actually have to be part of implementing that, you slow your horse. Do you know what? I had a good idea last week. I’m going to save the rest of my good ideas until next month.
Why meetings are toxic
Lex Fridman (02:53:58) There is a temptation for the managers and for the people in the executive layer to do something, which that’s something usually means a meeting. And so that’s why you say-
DHH (02:54:11) Yes. Their job is telling other people what to do.
Lex Fridman (02:54:13) Yeah. And the meeting, so this is one of the big things you’re against is meeting-
DHH (02:54:17) Meetings are toxic. And this really I think ties into this with Jason and I. If I had to count out the total number of meetings we’ve had in 24 years of collaborations, where we in person sat in front of each other and discussed a topic, probably it’d be less than whatever three months at a fan company. We just haven’t done that that much. We haven’t worn it out. One of this funny metaphors that Trump came up with at one point was, a human has a limited number of steps in their life. That’s the longevity argument here. You can do so much activity and then you run out.
(02:54:53) There’s some kernel in that idea that can be applied to relationship. There’s some amount of exchange we can have. There’s some amount of time we can spend together, where you can wear it out. Jason and I were diligent about not wearing each other out, and I think that is absolutely key to the longevity of the relationship combined with that level of trust and then just combining with the level that we really like the work itself. We don’t just like the brainstorming the [inaudible 02:55:21] where we just come up with good ideas. Now we like to do the ideas, and we like to be part of that process directly ourselves. I like to program, he likes to do design. We could go off and do our little things for long stretches of time. In case you come together and go like, hey, let’s launch a great product.
Lex Fridman (02:55:35) This might sound like I’m asking you to do therapy, but I find myself to sometimes want or long for a meeting because I’m lonely. Remote work is just sitting by yourself, I don’t know, it can get really lonely for long stretches of time.
DHH (02:56:05) Family really is the great antidote to loneliness, and I mean that as sincerely as I can possibly say it. I certainly had exactly that feeling you described early in my career when I was working remotely, and I was just like me living in an apartment, a total stereotype, where for the longest time when I first moved to Chicago, all I had on the floor was a mattress. And then I bought this big TV and I didn’t even mount it, and then I had a stack of DVDs. And I was basically, I was working a lot of time and then I would just go home and I’d do that, and it wasn’t great. It really wasn’t. I do think that humans need humans. And if you can’t get them at work, and I actually sort of kind of don’t want them at work, at least I don’t want them for 40 hours a week. That’s not what I prefer.
(02:56:51) You need something else. You need other relationships in your life, and there is no greater depth of relationship if you can find someone that you actually just want to spend a lot of time with. That’s key to it and I think it’s key for both Jason and I that we’ve had families for quite a long time, and it grounds you to in a way where the sprint of a startup can get traded in for the marathon of an enduring company, and you get settled in a way. We talked briefly about sometimes I get fired up. I mean, a lot of times, maybe even most of the times I get fired up about topics, but I don’t get fired up in the same way now as I used to when I was 24. I’m still extremely passionate about ideas and trying to find the right things, but having a family, meeting my wife, building a life around that has just mellowed everything out in a completely cliche way, but I think it’s actually key.
(02:57:51) I think if we could get more even younger people not to wait until they were in their god-damn 30s or early 40s to hitch up with someone, we’d be better off and we’d have more stable business relationships as well, because folks would get that nurturing human relation somewhere else. Now, when I say all of that, I also accept that there are plenty of great businesses that’s been built over the years that have not been built remote, that have been built by a gang of hooligans sitting in an office for immense hours at time.
(02:58:23) I mean, both John Carmack and Tim Sweeney talked about that in the ’90s with their careers that that was just basically work, sleep, hang out with the guys at the office, right? Totally fair. That never appealed to me. Both Jason and I saw eye to eye on the idea that 40 hours a week dedicated to work was enough that if we were going to go to distance for not just the five to seven years it takes to build a VC case up to an exit, but for potentially 10 years, 20 years or further, we needed to become whole humans, because only that whole human-ness was going to go to distance, which included building up friendships outside of work, having hobbies, finding a mate and having a family. And that entire existence, those legs of the stool that work is not the only thing in life is completely related to the fact that we’ve been around for 25 years. There’s way too much, especially in America of false trade-offs. Oh, you want to build a successful business? Well, you can either have money enjoyment or family or health, pick one.
(02:59:40) What? Why do we have to give up all of this? Now, again, I’m not saying, and there are moments, prayers, life where you can sprint, but I am saying if that sprint turns into a decade, you’re going to pay for it. And you’re going to pay for it in ways I’ve seen time and again, seemed like a very bad trade, that even if it works. And by the way most of the time it does not. Most of the time startups go bust. Most of the times people spend five, seven years or something that does not pan out, and they don’t get the payout. And then they just sit with regret of like, what the fuck happened to my 20s? Early on, Jason and I basically made the pact that working together was not going to lead to that kind of regret, that we were going to allow ourselves and each other to build a whole life outside of work. And the fact that that worked is something I feel is almost like forbidden knowledge.
(03:00:38) Certainly in technology circles in US, it’s something that we’ve tried to champion for 20 years and we still get slacked for. Just two days ago, I had another Twitter beef with someone saying like, “Oh, well, okay, maybe it worked, but you didn’t turn into Atlassian, so you’re a failure. Basecamp isn’t Jira, so why are you even bothering?” And it’s such a fascinating winner-takes- all mentality that unless you dominate everyone else in all the ways, you’ve lost. When so much of life is far more open to multiple winners, where we can end up with a business that have made hundreds of millions of dollars over the years and we’ve kept much of that to do whatever we want and that that’s enough. That’s good. That’s great. That’s actually something worth aspiring to. Certainly, it should be a path for someone to consider choosing rather than the VC unicorn of bust mentality that dominates everything.
Case against retirement
Lex Fridman (03:01:39) Yeah. I’d love to ask you about this exchange so you can explain to me the whole saga, but so just a link on that a little bit is, I think there’s a notion that success for tech founder is like work for a few years all out and then exit, sell your company for, I don’t know, hundreds of millions of dollars. That’s success. When it seems in reality, when you look at who the people like you, like really smart, creative humans, who they actually are and what happiness entails, it actually entails working your whole life a little bit. Because you actually love the programming, you love the building, you love the designer and you don’t want to exit, and that’s something you’ve talked about really, really eloquently about. So you actually want to create a life, where you’re always doing the building and doing it in a way that’s not completely taken over your life.
DHH (03:02:40) Mojito Island is a mirage. It always was. There is no retirement for ambitious people. There is no just sitting back on the beach and sipping a mojito for what, for two weeks before you go damn crazy and want to get back into the action. That’s exactly what happens to most people who have the capacity to build those kinds of exits. I’ve never seen, I shouldn’t say never. I’ve almost never seen anyone be able to pull that off, yet so many think that that’s why they’re doing it. That’s why they’re sacrificing everything because once I get to the finish line, I’m golden, I’ve won, I can retire, I can sit back, I can just relax. And you find out that that kind of relaxation is actually hell. It’s hell for creative people to squander their God-given creative juices and capacities. And I was really lucky to read the book Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi early on [inaudible 03:03:39].
DHH (03:03:40) Do you know what? I had to practice that with AI over the last few days because I knew I was going to cite him and I butchered his name several times. So AI taught me how to pronounce that at least somewhat correctly. But his main work over his career was essentially the concept of flow that came out of a search for understanding happiness. Why are some people happy? When are they happy? And what he learned was quite illuminating. He learned that people aren’t happy when they sit on Mojito Island. They’re not happy when they’re free of all obligations and responsibilities. No. They’re happy in these moments where they’re reaching and stretching their capacities just beyond what they can currently do. In those moments of flow, they can forget time and space. They can sit in front of the keyboard, program a hard problem, think 20 minutes have passed and suddenly it’s been three hours.
(03:04:36) They look back upon those moments with the greatest amount of joy, and that is what peak happiness is. If you take away the pursuit of those kinds of problems, if you eliminate all the problems from your plate, you’re going to get depressed. You’re not going to have a good time. Now, there are people who can do that, but they’re not the same kind of people who built these kinds of companies. So you have to accept the kind of individual you are. If you are on this path, don’t bullshit yourself. Don’t bullshit yourself into thinking, I’m just going to sacrifice everything, my health, my family, my hobbies, my friends, but in 10 years I’m going to make it all up, because in 10 years I can do it.
(03:05:15) It never works out like that. It doesn’t work out on both ends of it. It does not work out if you’re successful and you sell your company, because you’ll get bored out of your mind after two weeks on retirement. It doesn’t work out if the company is a failure and you regret the last 10 years spent for nothing. It doesn’t work out if it all works and you stay in the business because it never gets any easier. So you’re going to fail on all metrics if you just go, there’s only work and nothing else. And I didn’t want that. I wanted the happiness of flow. I understood that insight was true, but I wanted to do it in a way where I could sustain the journey for 40 or 50 years.
Lex Fridman (03:05:53) And there’s other interesting caveat that I’ve heard you say is that if you do exit and you sell your company, and you want to stay in, you want to do another company, that’s going to usually not be as fulfilling because really your first baby like…
DHH (03:06:09) You can’t do it again or most people can’t do it again. A, because their second idea is not going to be as good as the first one. It is so rare to capture lightning in the bottle like we have, for example with Basecamp. I know this from experience because if you’re trying to build a lot of other businesses since, and some of them have been moderate successes, even good successes, none of them have been Basecamp. It’s really difficult to do that twice. But founders are arrogant pricks, including myself, and we like to think that, do you know what we succeeded in large part because we’re just awesome. We’re just so much better than everyone else. And in some ways that’s true some of the time, but you can also be really good at something that matters for a hot moment. That door is open, the door closes. Now you’re still good at the thing, but it doesn’t matter. No one cares.
(03:06:54) There’s that part of it. And then there’s the part of it that going back to experience things for the first time only happens the first time. You can’t do it again. I don’t know if I have it in me to go through the bullshit of the early days again. And I say bullshit in the sense of the most endearing sense. It’s all great to do it. I know too much. This is one of the reasons why whenever I’m asked the questions, if you could tell your younger self something that would really, what would you say to your younger self? I would fucking not say a thing. I would not rob my younger self of all the life experiences that I’ve been blessed with due to the ignorance of how the world works. Building up the wisdom about how the world works is a joy, and you got to build it one break at a time.
(03:07:40) If you just handed all the results, it’s like, oh, should we watch your movie? Here’s how it ends. I don’t want to watch the movie now. You spoiled it. I don’t want you to spoil my business experience. I don’t want to spoil any of my ignorance. The greatest blessing half the time when you’re starting something new is A, you don’t know how hard it’s going to be. B, you don’t know what you don’t know. The adventure is to pay off. The responsibility is to pay off. This is something Jordan Peterson has really taught me to articulate. This notion that responsibility is actually key to meaning.
(03:08:16) Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl talks about this as well, that we can endure any hardship if there’s a reason why. Now, he talked about it in truly life altering concentration camp ways, but you can also apply at a smaller scale with less criticality of even just your daily life that all that hardship in building the original business that is responsibility you take upon yourself. The appeal, the reason you take that on you is in part because you don’t know fully what it entails. If you had known upfront, if I had known upfront how hard it would be, how much frustration there’d be along the way, if you just told me that in a narrative before I got started, I would’ve been like, eh, maybe I should just go get a job.
Hard work
Lex Fridman (03:09:00) You said so many smart things there. Just to pick one, it’s funny that sometimes the advice givers, the wisdom givers have gone through all the bullshit, and so there is a degree to which you want to make the mistake. So I think I would still give the advice of you want to have a stretch of your life, where you work too hard, including anything that fails. I don’t think you can learn the lessons why that’s a bad idea in any other way except by doing it. There is a degree, but of course you don’t…
DHH (03:09:37) I think you should stretch. Should you have to stretch for a decade? I’m not so sure.
Lex Fridman (03:09:40) Yeah. The decade thing is 20s is a special time.
DHH (03:09:43) It’s a lot to trade. You don’t get your 20s back, you don’t get your 30s back, you don’t get your 40s back. I would’ve regret it personally if I hadn’t done the other things I did in my 20s. If I hadn’t had the fun I had, if I hadn’t had the friends I had, if I hadn’t built up the hobbies that I did, if I hadn’t started driving race cars at an early enough age to actually get really good at it, if I had just gone all in on business because I would’ve got the same out in the end. This is something Derek Sivers really taught me, is he has this great essay about how when he went for a bike ride, he could go really hard all out and he could do the ride, I think, in whatever 19 minutes, or he could enjoy the ride, go 5% slower, do the ride in 21 minutes and realize there’s only two minutes apart.
(03:10:32) Either I go all in all the time, there’s nothing else, I’m completely exhausted at the [inaudible 03:10:37] or I traveled the same distance and I arrived maybe two minutes later, but I got to enjoy the scenery, listen to the birds, smell the flowers. That journey is also valuable. Now, I say that while accepting and celebrating that if you want to be the best at one thing in the world, no, you have to sacrifice everything. You have to be obsessed with just that thing. There is no instant of someone who’s the best in the world at something who’s not completely obsessed. I didn’t need to be best at anything. This was a rare blessing of humility I had early on is like, do you know what? I am not that smart. I’m not that good. I’m not that talented. I can do interesting things by combining different aspects and elements that I know, but I’m not going to be the best at anything.
(03:11:27) And that released me from this singular obsession with just going, I’m going to be the best programmer in the world. I know I’m not. I fucking failed at it twice before I even got how conditional it’s worked. I’m not smart enough to be the best at anything. I’m not dedicated enough to do that. That’s a bit of a blessing. And I think as a society, we have to straddle both celebrating peak excellence, which we do all the time, and celebrating the peak intensity of mission it takes to become that. And then also going like, do you know what? We don’t all need to be Michael Jordan. There’s only going to be one of those.
Lex Fridman (03:12:04) Well, we should say that there’s certain pursuits where a singular obsession is required. Basketball is one of them. By the way, probably racing. If you want to be the best at F-1 in the world-
DHH (03:12:17) If you want to be Senna, you got to be a maniac.
Lex Fridman (03:12:20) But I would argue that there’s most disciplines like programming allows if you want to be, quote, unquote, “the best,” whatever that means. I think that’s judged at the end of your life. And usually if you look at that path, it’s going to be a nonlinear one. You’re not going to look like the life of an Olympic athlete who’s singular focused. There’s going to be some acid there in the 20s or there’s going to be several detours, which should the true greats, there’s going to be detours, and sometimes they’re not going to be Steve Jobs’ asset type of situation. There’ll be just different companies you’ve worked for different careers or different efforts you allocated your life to, but it’s going to be nonlinear. It’s not going to be a singular focus.
DHH (03:13:09) The way I think about this sometimes is I want a good bargain on learning. I can become in the top 5% of whatever I defined as good at something, much, much easier. Perhaps it’s 20 times easier, a hundred times easier to get into the top 5% than it is to get into the top 0.1%. That’s almost impossibly hard to get into that. But if I’m content just being at the top 5%, I could be at the top 5% on five things at once. I can get really good at writing. I can get decent at driving a race car. I can become pretty good at programming, I can run a company, I can have a family.
(03:13:48) I can do a lot of things at the same time that gives me sort of that variety that almost was idealized. Karl Marx has this idea, oh, I’m going to fish in the morning and hammer in the evening and paint on the weekends, right? That there’s a sense for me at least, where his diagnosis of alienation was true, that just that tunnel vision, there’s just this one thing I’m just going to focus on that gives me a sense of alienation. I can’t stomach.
(03:14:15) When I’m really deep on programming. And sometimes I go deep for weeks, maybe even in a few cases months, I have to come up for air and I have to go do something else like, all right, that was programming for this year. I’ve done my part, and I’m going to go off riding or annoy people on the internet or drive some race cars to do something else, and then I can do the programming thing with full intensity again next year.
Why we left the cloud
Lex Fridman (03:14:38) Speaking of annoying people on the internet, you got to explain to me this drama. Okay, so what is this guy that said, “Imagine losing to Jira, but boasting they have a couple million dollars per year.” So this had to do with this almost now a meme decision to leave the cloud. DHH left the cloud. I think that’s literally a meme, but it’s also a fascinating decision. Can you talk through the full saga of DHH leaves the cloud, leaving AWS, saving money, and I guess the case this person is making now?
DHH (03:15:14) Is that we wasted our time optimizing a business that could have been a hundred times bigger if we’d just gone for the moon.
DHH (03:15:22) Venture Capital includes other things, not caring about cost.
Lex Fridman (03:15:26) But also because AGI is around the corner, you should have been investing into AI, right? Is this just part of-
DHH (03:15:32) Sort of [inaudible 03:15:33]. I think it’s a bit of a muddy argument, but if we just take it at its peak ideal, which I actually think is a reasonable point, is that you can get myopically focused on counting pennies when you should be focused on getting pounds that I’ve optimized our spend on infrastructure by getting out of the cloud, and that took some time and I could have taken that time and spend it on making more features that would attract more customers or spend even more time with AI or done other things. Opportunity cost is real. I’m not denying that. I’m pushing back on the idea that for a company of our size saving $2 million a year on our infrastructure bill, which is about somewhere between 1/2 to 2/3 goes directly to the bottom line, which means its return to Jason or I as owners and our employees part of our profit sharing plan is totally worth doing.
(03:16:34) This idea that cost don’t matter is a very Silicon Valley way of thinking that I again understand at the scale of something maybe, but I also actually think it’s aesthetically unpleasing. I find an inefficient business as I find an inefficient program full of line noise to just be a splinter in my brain. I hate looking at an expense report and just seeing disproportionate waste. And when I was looking at our spend at 37signals a while back, a few years back, I saw bills that did not pass my smell test. I remembered how much we used to spend on infrastructure before the cloud, and I saw numbers I could not recognize in proportion to what we needed. The fact that computers had gotten so much faster over time, shouldn’t things be getting cheaper? Why are we spending more and more money servicing more customers? Yes, but with much faster computers. Moore’s law should be lowering the costs, and the opposite is happening. Why is that happening? And that started a journey of unwinding why the cloud isn’t as great as the deal as people like to think [inaudible 03:17:48].
AWS
Lex Fridman (03:17:48) Yeah. Can we look at the specifics just for people who don’t know the story and then generalize to what it means about the role of the cloud in the tech business? So the specifics is you were using AWS S3.
DHH (03:18:03) We were using AWS for everything. Hey.com launches an entirely cloud app. It was completely on AWS for compute, for databases, for all of it. We were using all the systems as they’re best prescribed that we should. Our total cloud bill for Basecamp, our total spend with AWS was I think 3.2 million or 3.4 million at its peak. That’s kind of a lot of money, 3. 4 million. I mean we have a ton of users and customers, but still that just struck me as unreasonable. And the reason why it was so unreasonable was because I had the pitch for the cloud ringing in my ears, hey, this is going to be faster. This is going to be easier. This is going to be cheaper. Why are you trying to produce your own power? Do you have your own power plant? Why would you do that? Leave the computers to the hyperscalers. They’re much better at it anyway.
(03:18:58) I actually thought that was a compelling pitch. I bought in on that pitch for several years and thought, do you know what? I’m done ever owning a server again. We are just going to rent our capacity, and Amazon is going to be able to offer us services much cheaper than we could buy them themselves because they’re going to have these economies of scale. And I was thinking Jeff’s word ringing, “My competitor’s margin is my opportunity.” That was something he used to drive amazon.com with, that if he could just make 2% when the other guy was trying to make 4%, he would end up with all the money and on volume he would still win.
(03:19:34) So I thought that was the operating ethos for AWS. It turns out that’s not true at all. AWS, by the way, operates at almost 40% margin. So just in that, there’s a clue that competitors are not able to do the competitive thing we like about capitalism, which is to lower costs and so forth. So the cloud pitch in my optics, it’s fundamentally false. It did not get easier, first of all. I don’t know if you’ve used AWS recently. It is hella complicated. If you think Linux is hard, you’ve never tried to set up IAM rules or access parameters or whatever for AWS.
Lex Fridman (03:20:13) AWS was always difficult. It was always [inaudible 03:20:15].
DHH (03:20:14) Well, I think it’s gotten even more difficult, but yes, now some of that is, it’s difficult because it’s very capable and you have a bunch of capacity on tap, and there are reasons I don’t think they’re good enough to justify how complicated the whole jing-a-ma-jing has become. But what’s certainly true is that it’s no longer easier, it’s not easier to use AWS than it is to run your own machines, which we learned when we pulled out the cloud and didn’t hire a single extra person. Even though we operate all our own hardware, the team stayed exactly the same. So you have this three-way pitch, right? It’s going to be easier, it’s going to be cheaper. Certainly wasn’t cheaper. We’ve just proved that by cutting our spend on infrastructure by 1/2 to 2/3 and it’s going to be faster. The last bit was true, but way too many people overestimated the value of that speed.
(03:21:05) If you need a thousand computers online in the next 15 minutes, nothing beats the cloud. How would you even procure that? If we just need another 20 servers, it’s going to take a week or two to get boxes shipped on pallets, delivered to a data center and unwrapped and racked and all that stuff. But how often do we need to do that? And how often do we need to do that if buying those servers is way, way cheaper so we get vastly more compute for the same amount of money? Could we just buy more servers and not even care about the fact that we’re not hyper-optimized on the compute utility, that we don’t have to use things like automatic scaling to figure things out because we have to reduce costs? Yes, we can. So we went through this journey over a realization in early 2023, when I had finally had enough with our bills.
(03:21:57) I wanted to get rid of them. I wanted to spend less money. I wanted to keep more of the money ourselves. And in just over six months, we moved seven major applications out of the cloud in terms of compute, caching, databases to works onto our own servers. A glorious, beautiful new fleet bought from the king of servers, Michael Dell, who really, by the way, is another icon of mine. I saw he just celebrated 41 years in business. 41 years, this man has been selling awesome servers that we’ve been using for our entire existence. But anyway, these pallets arrive in a couple of weeks and we rack them up and get everything going, and we were out, at least with the compute part. We then had a long multi-year commitment to S3, because the only way to get decent pricing in the cloud, by the way, is not to buy on a day-to-day basis, not to rent on a day-to-day basis, but to bind yourself up to multi-year contracts. With compute, it’s often a year. That was in our case.
(03:22:58) And with storage, this was four years. We signed a four-year contract to store our petabytes of customer files in the cloud to be able to get something just halfway decent affordable. So all of these projects came together to the sense that we’re now saving literally millions of dollars, projected about 10 million over five years. It’s always hard. How do you do the accounting exactly and TOC this, that and the other thing, but it’s millions of dollars. But it’s not just that. It’s also the fact that getting out of the cloud meant returning to more of an original idea of the internet. The internet was not the sign such that three computers should run everything. It was a distributed network such that the individual nodes could disappear and the whole thing would still carry on. DARPA designed this such that the Russians could take out Washington and they could still fight back from New York, that the entire communication infrastructure wouldn’t disappear because there was no hub and spoke. It was a network. I always found that an immensely beautiful vision, that you could have this glorious…
DHH (03:24:00) An immensely beautiful vision that you could have this glorious internet and no single node was in control of everything and we’ve returned to much more of a single node controlling everything idea with these hyperscalers. When US-East one, the main and original region for AWS goes offline, which has happened more than a few times over the years, seemingly a third of the internet is offline. That in itself is just an insult to DARPA’s design. It doesn’t detract from the fact that what AWS built was marvelous, I think the Cloud has moved so many things so far forward especially around virtualization, automation, setup, it’s all those giant leaps forward for system administration that’s allowing us now to be able to run things on-prem in a way that smells and feels much like the Cloud just at half the cost or less and with the autonomy and the satisfaction of owning hardware.
(03:24:59) I don’t know the last time you looked at an actual server and took it apart and looked inside of, these things are gorgeous. I posted a couple of pictures of our racks out in the data center and people always go crazy for them because we’ve gotten so abstracted from what the underlying metal looks like in this Cloud age that most people have no idea. They have no idea how powerful a modern CPU is, they have no idea how much RAM you can fit into a 1U rack. Progress in computing has been really exciting especially, I’d say, in the last four to five years after TSMC, with Apple’s help, really pushed the envelope. We sat still there for a while while Intel was spinning their wheels going nowhere and then TSMC, with Apple propelling them, really move things forward and now servers are exciting again. You’re getting jumps year over year in the 15, 20% rather than the single digit we were stuck with for a while and that all means that owning your own hardware is a more feasible proposition than it’s ever been, that you need fewer machines to run ever more and that more people should do it because, as much as I love Jeff and Amazon, he doesn’t need another, whatever, 40% margin on all the tech stuff that I buy to run our business.
(03:26:19) And this is just something I’ve been focused on both because of the ideology around honoring DARPA’s original design, the practicality of running our own hardware, seeing how fast we can push things with the latest machines and then saving the money. And that has all been so enjoyable to do but also so counterintuitive for a lot of people because it seemed, I think, for a lot of people in the industry, that we’d all decided that we were done buying computers, that that was something we would just delegate to AWS and Azure and Google Cloud, that we didn’t have to own these things anymore. So, I think there’s a little bit of whiplash for some people that, oh, I thought we agreed we were done with that and then along come us and say, “Ah, you know what? Maybe you should have a computer.”
Owning your own servers
Lex Fridman (03:27:07) Is there some pain points to running your own servers?
DHH (03:27:10) Oh, plenty. There’s pain points to operating computers of all kind. Have you tried using a personal computer these days? Half the time, when my kids or my wife have a problem, I go like, “Have you tried turning it just off and on again?” Computers are inherently painful to humans. Owning your own computer though makes some of that pain worth it, there’s a responsibility that comes with actually owning the hardware that, to me, at least make the burden of operating that hardware seems slightly more enjoyable. Now, there are things you have to learn, certainly at our scale too. We’re not just buying a single computer and plugging it into an Ethernet, we have to have racks and racks of them and you’ve got to set it up with network cabling and there is some specialized expertise in that but it’s not like that expertise is building nuclear rockets, it’s not widely distributed.
(03:27:58) Literally, the entire internet was built on people knowing how to plug in a computer to the internet. Oh, ethernet cable goes here, power cable goes here, let’s boot up Linux. That’s how everyone put anything online until 10, 12 years ago when the Cloud took over. So, the expertise is there and can be rediscovered, you too can learn how to operate a Linux computer.
Lex Fridman (03:28:21) Yeah. And when you get a bunch of them, there’s a bunch of flashing LEDs and it’s just so exciting.
DHH (03:28:26) Well, that’s beautiful, calming, amazing. Computers are really fun. This is actually something I’ve gotten into even deeper after we moved out of the Cloud. Now, my next tingle is that, if you could move out of the Cloud, can you also move out of the data center? Personal servers have gotten really scarily quick inefficient and personal internet connections rival what we connected data centers with just a decade or two ago. So, there’s a whole community around this concept of homelabbing which is essentially installing server hardware in your own apartment, connecting it to the internet and exposing that directly to the internet that harks back to those glorious days of the ’90s when people building for the internet would host the actual website on their actual computer in the closet.
(03:29:20) And I’m pretty fired up about that, I’m doing a bunch of experiments, I’ve ordered a bunch of home servers for my own apartment. I marvel at the fact that I can get a five gigabit fiber connection now, I think. Do you know what five gigabit, that could have taken Basecamp to multiple millions of MRR in the way that back then I ran the whole business on a single box with 2004 technology and probably 100 megabit cable. The capacity we have access to, both in terms of compute and connectivity, is something that people haven’t readjusted to. And this happens sometimes in technology where progress sneaks up on you, this happened with SSDs, I love that by the way.
(03:30:04) We designed so much of our technology and storage approach and database design around spinning metal disks that had certain seek rate properties and then we went to NVMe and SSDs and it took quite a while for people to realize that the systems had to be built fundamentally different now. That the difference between memory and disk was now far smaller when you weren’t spinning these metal plates around with a little head that had to read off them, you were essentially just dealing with another type of memory. I think we’re a little bit in that same phase when it comes to the capacity of new businesses to be launched literally out of your bedroom.
Lex Fridman (03:30:45) So, you can get pretty far with a large user base with homelabbing.
Lex Fridman (03:30:51) That’s exciting. That’s like the old school. That’s really exciting, right?
DHH (03:30:54) It’s bringing back the start-up in the garage in the literal physical sense of the word. Now, some of that is do we need to, you can get relatively cheap Cloud capacity if you don’t need very much.
Lex Fridman (03:31:07) Hell, yes, we need to. The feeling of doing that by yourself, of seeing the LED lights in your own home, there’s nothing like that.
DHH (03:31:17) There’s just an aesthetic to it that I am completely in love with and I want to try to push on. Now, it’s not going to be the same thing as getting out of the Cloud? I’m not sure. Our exit out of the cloud was not the exit out of the data center. We basically just bought hardware, shipped it to a professionally managed data center that we didn’t even actually touch. This is the other misconception people have about moving out of the Cloud, that we have a bunch of people who are constantly driving to a data center somewhere to rack new boxes and change dead RAM, that’s not how things happen in the modern world at all. We have a company called Summit, previously Deft, that is what we call white gloves, they work in the data center.
(03:31:54) When we need something like, “Hey, Deft, can you go down and swap the dead SSD in box number six?” They do it and what we see is akin to what someone working with the Cloud would see. You see IP addresses coming online, you see drives coming online, it’s not that different but it is a whole heck of a lot cheaper when you are operating at our scale. And of course it is, of course it’s cheaper to own things if you need those things for years rather than it is to rent it. In no other domain would we confuse those two things that it’s cheaper to own for the long duration than it is to rent.
Lex Fridman (03:32:29) There is some gray area, I’ve gotten a chance to interact with the XAI team a bunch, I’m probably going back out there in Memphis to do a big podcast associated with the Grok release. And those folks, in order to achieve the speed of building up the cluster and to solve some of the novel aspects that have to do with the GPU, with the training, they have to be a little bit more hands-on, it’s less white glove.
DHH (03:32:54) Oh, and I love that. They’re dealing with a frontier problem and they’re dealing with it not by renting a bunch of GPUs at a huge markup from their main competitor, they’re going like, “No, screw that. We’re going to put 100,000 GPUs in our own tents and build it in absolute record time.” So, I think, if anything, this is testament to the idea that owning hardware can give you an advantage both at the small scale, at the medium scale and at the pioneer levels of computing.
Elon Musk
Lex Fridman (03:33:20) By the way, speaking of teams, XAI, Tesla are large companies but all those folks … I don’t know what it is about. You said Jeff is really good at finding good people, at seeing strength in people. Elon is also extremely … I don’t know what that is. Actually, I’ve never actually seen, maybe you could speak to that, he’s good at finding greatness.
DHH (03:33:48) I don’t think he’s finding as much as he’s attracting. He’s attracting the talent because of the audaciousness of his goals and his mission, the clarity by which he states it. He doesn’t have to go scour earth to find the best people, the best people come to him because he is, talking about Elon here, one of the singular most invigorating figures in both the same order of the universe here, haters and lovers. He’s having such an impact at such a scale that of course he’s got to have literally millions of people think he’s the worst person in the world and he’s also going to have millions of people thinking he’s the greatest gift to humanity. Depending on the day, I’m somewhere in between but I’m more on the greatest gift to humanity end of the scale than I’m on the other end of the scale. And I think that really inspires people in a way that we’ve almost forgotten that that level of audacity is so rare that, when we see it, we don’t fully know how to analyze it.
(03:34:48) We think of Elon as finding great talent, and I’m sure he is also good at that, but I also think that this beacon of the mission. We’re going to fucking Mars, we’re going to transform transportation into using electricity, we’re going to cover the earth in internet is so grand that there are days where I wake up and go like, “What the fuck am I doing with these to-do lists?” Like, “Jesus, should I go sign up for something like that?”
DHH (03:35:17) That sounds invigorating in a sense I can only imagine a Viking back in 1050 going, “Should we go to Normandy? You may die along the way but, oh, boy, does that sound like a journey and an adventure.”
Lex Fridman (03:35:31) There’s a few components there, one definitely this bigger than life mission and really believing it. Every other sentence is about Mars, really believing it. It doesn’t really matter what anybody else, the criticism, anything, there’s a very singular focused big mission. But I think it also has to do a bunch of the other components like being able to hire well once the people, once wants to beacon attracts. And I’ve just seen people that don’t necessarily on paper have a resume with a track record, I’ve seen who now turned out to be legendary people who basically tosses on the ball of leadership, sees something in them and says and gives them the ownership and they run with it and that happens at every scale that, there’s a real meritocracy.
(03:36:23) And there’s just you could see the flourishing of human intellect in these meetings, in these group getting together where the energy is palpable. It’s exciting for me to just be around that because there’s not many companies I’ve seen that in because, when a company becomes successful and larger, it somehow suffocates that energy that, I guess, you see in start-ups at the early stages but it’s cool to see it at a large company that’s actually able to achieve scale.
DHH (03:37:01) I think part of the secret there is that Elon actually knows things and, when you know things, you can evaluate the quality of work products. And when you can evaluate the quality of work products, you can very quickly tell who’s full of shit and who will actually take you to Mars and you can fire the people who is full of shit and you can bet on the people who’ll get us to Mars. That capacity to directly evaluate the competency of individuals is actually a little bit rare. It’s not widely distributed amongst managers, hiring managers. It’s not something you can easily delegate to people who are not very skilled at the work itself. And Elon obviously knows a lot about a lot and he can smell who knows stuff for real.
(03:37:51) And is this, at our tiny scale, something I’ve tried to do in the same order where, when we hire programmers, for example, it’s going to be interesting now with AI as the new challenge, but up until this point, the main pivot point for getting hired was not your resume, was not the schooling you’ve had, it was not your grades, it was not your pedigree, it was how well you did on two things. A, your cover letter because I can only work with people remotely if they’re good writers. So, if you can’t pen a proper cover letter and can’t bother to put in the effort to write it specifically for us, you’re out. Two, you have to be able to program really well to the degree that I can look at your code and go like, “Yeah, I want to work with that person.” Not only I want to work with that person, I want to work on that person’s code when I have to see it again in five years to fix some damn bug.
(03:38:44) So, we’re going to give you a programming test that simulates the way we work for real and we’re going to see how you do. And I’ve been surprised time and again where I thought for sure this candidate is a shoe-in, they sound just right, the CV is just right and then you see the code getting turned in and I’m like, “No way. No way are we hiring this person.” And the other way has been true as well. I’d go like, “I don’t know about this guy or this woman Eeh, I don’t know.” and then they turn in their code stuff and I’m like, “Holy shit, can that person be on my team tomorrow preferably?” The capacity to evaluate work product is a superpower when it comes to hiring.
Lex Fridman (03:39:24) There’s a step that I’ve seen Elon do really well which is be able to show up and say this can be done simpler.
Lex Fridman (03:39:32) But he knows what he’s talking about and then the engineer, because Elon knows enough, the engineer’s first reaction, you can tell, it’s almost like rolling your eyes if your parent tells you something, this is not, no, I’ve been working on this for a month, you don’t … But then, when you have that conversation a little more, you realize, no, it can be done simpler, find the way. So, there’s a good … When two engineers are talking, one might not have perfect information but if the senior engineer has good instinct that’s been battle earned, then you can say simplify and it actually will result in simplification.
DHH (03:40:17) And I think this is the hallmark of the true greats that they, not only have the insight into what’s required to do the work, but they also have the transcendent vision to go beyond what the engineer would do, the programmer would do. I think if we are looking at these rarities, obviously, the myth of Steve Jobs was also this. Even though perhaps he was less technical than Elon is in many ways, he had the same capacity to show up to a product team and really challenge them to look harder for the simplification or for making things greater in a way that would garner disbelief from the people who are supposed to do it. This guy is full of, this is crazy, we can never … And then, two months later, this.
(03:41:05) So, there is something of this where you need the vision, you need it anchored by the reality of knowing enough about what’s possible, knowing enough about physics, knowing enough about software that you’re not just building bullshit. There are plenty of people who can tell a group of engineers, “No, just do it faster,” but that’s not a skill, it’s got to be anchored in something real. But it’s also got to be anchored in, it’s a tired word, but a passion for the outcome to a degree where you get personally insulted if a bad job is done. This is what I’ve been writing about lately with Apple, they’ve lost that asshole who would show up and tell engineers that what they did was not good enough in ways that would actually perhaps make them feel a little small in the moment but would spark that zest to really fix it. Now they have a logistics person who’s very good at sourcing components and lining up production Gantt charts but you’re not getting that magic.
(03:42:12) Now, what’s interesting with that whole scenario was I actually thought how well Tim Cook ran things and has run things at Apple for so long that maybe we were wrong, maybe we were wrong about the criticality of Steve Jobs to the whole mission, maybe you could get away with not having it. I think the bill was just going to come later and now it has, Apple is failing in all these ways that someone who would blow up Steve’s ghost and really exalt him would say like, “See, this is what’s happening now.” So, the other thing here too, of course, is it’s impossible to divorce your perception of what’s a critical component of the system and the messy reality of a million different moving parts in the reality of life and you should be skeptical about your own analysis and your own thesis at all time.
Apple
Lex Fridman (03:43:02) Since you mentioned Apple, I have to ask, somebody in the internet submitted the question. Does DHH still hate Apple? I believe the question is. So, there was a time when Basecamp went to war with Apple over the 30%, can you tell the saga of that battle?
DHH (03:43:25) Yes, but first I’ll tell you how I fell in love with Apple which was all the way back in also early 2000s. When Microsoft was dominating the industry in a way we now see Apple and Google dominate mobile phones, Microsoft was just everything when it came to personal computers and I really did not like the Microsoft of the ’90s. The Microsoft of the ’90s was the cut off the air supply to Netscape kind of characters, was the Bill Gates sitting defiant in an interview with the DOJ asking about what the definition of what is and just overall unpleasant, I think. You can have respect for what was achieved but I certainly didn’t like it. And as we’ve talked about, I came begrudgingly to the PC after Commodore fell apart and I couldn’t continue to use the Amiga so I already had a bit of a bone to pick with PCs just over the fact that I love my Amiga so much.
(03:44:23) But then in the early 2000s, Apple emerged as a credible alternative because they bet the new generation of Macs on Unix underpinnings and that allowed me to escape from Microsoft and suddenly I became one of the biggest boosters of Apple. I was in my graduating class at the Copenhagen Business School, I started with the first white iBook, first person using Mac and, by the time we were done in graduating, I had basically converted half the class to using Apple computers because I would evangelize them so hard and demonstrate them and do all the things that a super fan would do and I continued that work over many years.
(03:45:07) Jason and I actually in, I think, 2004, 2005, did an ad for Apple that they posted on the developer side where we were all about Apple is so integral to everything that we do and we look up to them and we are inspired by them. And that love relationship actually continued for a very long time, I basically just became a Mac person for 20 years. I didn’t even care about looking at PCs, it seemed irrelevant to me whatever Microsoft was doing which felt like such a relief because in the ’90s I felt like I couldn’t escape Microsoft and suddenly I had found my escape. And now I was with Apple and it was glorious and they shared so many of my sensibilities and my aesthetics and they kept pushing the envelope and there was so much to be proud of, so much to look up to.
(03:45:53) And then that started to change with the iPhone which is weird because the iPhone is what made modern Apple. It’s what I lined up in 2007 together with Jason for five hours to stand in the line to buy a first generation product where Apple staff would clap at you when you walked out the store, I don’t know if you remember that. It was a whole ceremony and it was part of that myth and mystique and awe of Apple. So, I wasn’t in the market for other computers, I wasn’t in the market for other computer ideas, I thought perhaps I’d be with the Mac until the end of days. But as Apple discovered the gold mine it is to operate a toll booth where you don’t have to innovate, where you don’t actually even have to make anything, where you can just take 30% of other people’s business, there was a rot that crept in to the foundation of Apple and that started all the way back from the initial launch of the app store.
(03:46:55) But I don’t think we saw at the time, I didn’t see at the time, just how critical the mobile phone would become to computing in general. I thought when the iPhone came out that like, “Oh, it’s like a mobile phone, I’ve had a mobile phone since the early ’90s.” Well, it wasn’t a mobile phone, it was a mobile computer and, even more than that, it was the most important computer or it would become the most important computer for most people around the world which meant that, if you like to make software and wanted to sell it to people, you had to go through that computer. And if going through that computer meant going through Apple’s toll booth and not just having to ask them permission which in and of itself was just an indignity. When you’re used to the internet where you don’t have to ask anyone for permission about anything, you buy a domain and you launch a business and, if customers show up, boom, you’re a success and, if they don’t, well, you’re a failure.
(03:47:47) Now, suddenly, before you could even launch, you’d have to ask Apple for permission? That always sat wrong with me. But it wasn’t until we launched HEY in 2001 that I saw the full extent of the rot that has snuck into Apple’s apple.
Lex Fridman (03:48:05) For people who don’t know and we’ll talk about it, HEY is this amazing attempt to solve the email problem.
DHH (03:48:14) Yes. I like to pitch it as what Gmail would’ve been with 20 years of lessons applied in a way where they could actually ship. Gmail was incredible when it launched in 2004 and it still is a great product but it’s also trapped in its initial success. You can’t redesign Gmail today, it just has way too many users. So, if you want fresh thinking on email, I wanted fresh thinking on email, I needed to build my own email system. And not just my own email client, that’s what a lot of people have done over the years, they build a client for Gmail but you’re severely constrained if you don’t control the email server as well. If you really want to move the ball forward with email, you have to control both the server and the client and that was the audacious mission we set out to do with HEY.
(03:49:00) And that was what’s funny, I thought our main obstacle here would be Gmail, it’s the 800-pound gorilla in the email space. Something like 70% of all email in the US is sent through Gmail, I think their world rates are probably in that neighborhood as well, they’re just absolutely huge. And trying to attack an enormous established competitor like that who’s so, actually, still loved by plenty of people and it’s free seems like a suicide mission. And it was only a mission we signed up for because we had grown ambitious enough after making Basecamp for 20 years that we thought we could tackle that problem. So, I thought, hey, this is dumb, I would not advise anyone to go head to head with Gmail, that seems like a suicide mission. We’re going to try anyway because, you know what, if we fail, it’s going to be fine, we’re just going to build a better email experience for me and Jason and the people at the company and our cat and that’ll be okay because we can afford to do so.
(03:50:03) But when we got ready to launch after spending two years building this product, millions of dollars in investment to it, we obviously needed mobile apps. You’re not going to be a serious contender with email if you’re not on a mobile phone and you need to be there with a native client. So, we had built a great native client for both iOS and for Android and, as we were getting ready to launch, we submitted both of them to the app stores, got both of them approved on, I think, Friday afternoon for the iOS app and we then went live on Monday and we were so excited. Hey, world, we’ve been working on this new thing, I’d love for you to check it out. And of course, as with anything when you launch a new product, there are some bugs so we quickly found a few in the iOS client and submitted a new build to Apple. Hey, here’s our bug fixes, can you please update and that’s when all hell broke loose.
(03:50:56) Not only were they not going to approve our update, they said, “Oh, wait a minute, we gave you permission to be in the app store but, I’m sorry, that was a mistake. We see that you’re not using our in-app payment system which means that we don’t get 30% of your business, you will have to rectify that or you can’t be in the app store.” And first I thought, well, it got approved already, we’re running on the same model we’ve run Basecamp on in the app store for a decade, if you’re not signing up through the app and we’re signing up our own customers on our own website and they’re just going to the app store to download their companion app, we’re going to be fine. That was the truth, right? That was why I never got so fired up about the app store. Even as Apple started tightening the screws, it was like, “My business was okay.”
(03:51:42) Now, suddenly, my business wasn’t okay. Apple was willing to destroy HEY if we did not agree to give them 30% of all the signups that came through the iOS app. And it wasn’t just about the 30%, it was also about splitting and not longer having a direct relationship with our customers. When you sell an app in the app store, you’re not selling an app to a customer, you’re selling an app to inventory at Apple and then Apple sells an app to that customer. That customer has a purchasing relationship with Apple so, if you want to give discounts or refunds or whatever, it’s complete hell. If you want to easily support multi-platform, that’s complete hell. If someone signs up for HEY on their iPhone and they want to switch to Android but, that billing relationship, it’s tied to Apple, it’s complete hell. For a million reasons, I did not want to hand my business over to Apple, I did not want to hand 30% of our revenue over to Apple so we decided to do something that seemingly Apple had never heard before, we said no.
(03:52:48) We’re not going to add the in-app payment. I don’t care if you’re threatening us, this is not fair, this is not reasonable, please approve. And of course they didn’t and it escalated and, after a couple of days, we realized, you know what, this isn’t a mistake, this isn’t going away, we’re going to be dead if they go through with this. If we’re not going to yield and give them the 30%, they’re going to kick us off unless we make such a racket, such noise that they will regret it and that’s exactly what then happened. We were blessed by the fact that we launched HEY one week before the WWDC, the Worldwide Developer Conference, where Apple loves to get up on stage and harp on how much they do for developers, how much they love them and why you should build their new devices and so on and so forth.
(03:53:44) And then we also just happened to have a platform on the internet which is very convenient when you need to go to war with a $3 trillion company. So, I started kicking and screaming-
DHH (03:53:55) … and essentially turning it up to 11 in terms of the fight and going public with our denial to be in the app store. And that turned into a prolonged two-week battle with Apple that essentially ended in the best possible outcome we could have gotten as David fighting Goliath which was a bit of a truce. We wouldn’t hand 30% over to Apple, they wouldn’t kick us out of the app store but we had to build some bullshit dummy accounts such that the app did something when you downloaded it. That was a rule that Phil Schiller seemingly made up on the fly when pressed for the fifth time by the media about why we couldn’t be in the app store when a million other companion apps could. But we just happened to be able to create so much pain and noise for Apple that it was easier for them to just let us be than to keep on fighting.
Tim Sweeney
Lex Fridman (03:54:48) What do you think about Tim Sweeney’s victory with Epic over Apple?
DHH (03:54:54) I think it is incredible and the entire developer ecosystem, not just on iOS but on Android as well, owe Epic, Tim Sweeney and Mark Rein, an enormous debt of gratitude for taking on the only battle that has ever inflicted a serious wound on Apple in this entire sordid campaign of monopoly enforcement and that is Epic’s fight versus them. Tim recently revealed that it has cost well over $100 million in legal fees to carry on this battle against Apple. We, for a hot moment, considered suing Apple when they were threatening to kick us out. We shopped the case around with a few law firms and perhaps, of course, they would tell us you have a good case, they’re trying to sell a product here, but they would also tell us it’s going to cost a minimum of $10 million and it’s going to take five to seven years through all the appeals.
(03:55:54) Now, we now learn the actual price tag was 10 times higher, right? Epic spend over 100 million. It would’ve destroyed us to take on Apple in the legal realm, only a company like Epic could do it. And only a company run by founders like Tim, like Mark could risk the business in the way that they did, the audacity they had to provoke the fight in the first place, which I thought was just incredible, and to stick with it for the long term. No board would’ve signed off on this lawsuit to a professional CEO, no freaking way. So, the fact that they’ve been able to beat Apple in also the most hilarious way possible, I think it’s just incredible. Because, remember, their first victory in the case was actually not much of a victory, there were about 11 counts in the trial, Apple basically won 10 of them and the judge awarded Epic this one little win that Apple couldn’t tell them not to link up to the internet to be able to do the payment processing.
(03:57:04) So, they want this one little thing and, Apple, instead of just taking the 10 out of 11 wins and going, fine, you can have your little links but all these other rules stay in place decided to essentially commit criminal contempt of court as they’ve now been referred to for prosecution and angered the judge to such a degree that the rule of law in the US now is that you can launch an app in the app store and you don’t have to use in-app payment but you can have a direct billing relationship with a customer if you just link out to the open internet when you take the credit card and then hop back into the app. And we owe all of that to Tim and Mark, we owe all of that to Epic. We’re going to launch new apps any minute now, I hope, actually, in the next week to take advantage of this that revamp the HEY app so that people who download the HEY app off the Apple app store can sign up in the app and can then use the web to put in their credit card so we don’t-
DHH (03:58:00) And can then use the web to put in their credit cards so we don’t have to pay 30% of the time. We have a direct billing relationship and such that they can take that subscription to Android, to PCs, whatever, without any hassle. And we have Tim and Mark to thank for it.
Lex Fridman (03:58:16) Yeah, Tim … I mean, like you said, founders, but also specific kind of founders because I think … Maybe you can educate me on this, but Tim is somebody who maintains to this day the unreasonableness of principles.
Lex Fridman (03:58:38) There’s a lot of smart “people” around you, lawyers, and just whispering your ear over time, and you’re like, “Well, just be reasonable.” This is a different thing to maintain … I mean, Steve Jobs did this. Still are the asshole.
Lex Fridman (03:58:57) Who says, “No, this whole company, I’ll sink this whole fucking company over this.”
DHH (03:59:02) That’s the exact language, basically, I used in our original campaign. I will burn this business down before I hand over 30% of it to Apple. And that indignation, that actual rage, is something I try to be a little careful about tapping into because it is a little bit of a volatile compound because, I mean, I have a bunch of employees, we have a bunch of customers. It would be pretty sad if the journey of 37 singles after 25 years would come to an end because Apple would burn us down or I would burn the business down over this fight with Apple. But I think you also need that level of conviction to be able to even drive the day-to-day decisions.
(03:59:42) One of the other Apple examples … And I know we’re racking on Apple a little bit here, and I don’t actually hate them. I really don’t. I am tremendously disappointed at the squandered relationship that did not need to be sold away for so little. Now I understand that the app store toll booth is actually a pretty big business. It’s multiple billions, but Apple is a trillion-dollar company. And I think in the lens of history, this is going to come off as a tremendous mistake, and I think it’s already coming off as a tremendous mistake. The flop that was the Vision Pro was partly because Apple had pissed off every other developer.
(04:00:20) No one was eager to come build the kind of experiences for their new hardware that would perhaps have made it a success. So when you’re on top and you have all the cards, you can dilute yourself into thinking that you can dictate all terms at all times and there are no long-term consequences. Apple is learning, finally, the fact that there are long-term consequences and that developers actually are important to Apple’s business and the relationship is not entirely one-sided. We don’t owe our existence to Apple and Apple alone. We’ve built our own customer bases.
(04:00:53) Apple has been beneficial to the industry. I’m glad the iPhone exists, da da da da. It’s not that it doesn’t go both ways, but Apple wants it only one way. And I think that is a mistake and it’s a mistake that was avoidable and, A, that’s disappointing. Certainly disappointing for me. I’ve literally spent 20 years evangelizing this shit, right? I’ve spent so much money buying Apple hardware, excusing a bunch of things they’ve done over the years, and then for what? For the fact that you wanted 30% of something that I created in the most unreasonable way possible. Couldn’t we have found a better way to do this? I think they’re going to get forced to do a better way. But did you also have to go through the indignity of having a criminal contempt charge against you getting referred to prosecution? It just seems so beneath Apple, but it also seems so in line with what happens to huge companies who are run by “professional managers” rather than founders and unreasonable people.
Lex Fridman (04:02:01) Well, we should probably also say that the thing you love about Apple, the great spirit of Apple, I think, still persists and there’s a case to be made that this 30% thing’s a particular slice of a company, not a defining aspect of the company and that Apple is still on top in the hardware that it makes and a lot of things that it makes. And this is … That could be just a hiccup in a long story of a great company that does a lot of awesome stuff for humanity. So Apple is a truly special company. We mentioned Amazon. There is no company like Apple.
DHH (04:02:40) I agree. This is why the disappointment is all greater.
DHH (04:02:44) Because we had such high aspirations and expectations to Apple, that they were the shining city on the hill and they were guiding the industry in a million positive ways. I think, as we talked about earlier, hardware is exciting again in large part because Apple bought PA Semi and pursued a against all odds mission to get ARM up to the level it is today. And we have these incredible M chips now because of it. And the design sensibilities that Apple bring to the table are unparalleled. No one has taste certainly at the hardware level like Apple does. Even at the software level, I’d say there’s a lot of taste left in Apple, but there’s also some real sour taste now.
(04:03:34) So they have to wash that off first, I think, before they find their way back. But Apple’s been in a mora as before. I mean, Wozniak and Steve Jobs started this thing in the garage, has great success with the Apple II. He hands the company over to a sugar drink salesman who tanks the company into the ’90s. He doesn’t learn the lesson, spends the next 20 years building up this amazing company, then hands the company over again to a logistics person who presumably had more redeeming qualities than the first guy who put in charge, but still ends up leading the company astray.
(04:04:13) Now this is the norm. The norm is that great companies don’t last forever. In the long arc of history, almost no company lasts forever. There are very few companies around that was here a hundred years ago, even fewer 200 years ago, and virtually nothing that are a thousand years old outside of a handful of Japanese swords makers or something like that, right? So you can get deluded into thinking that something is forever when you’re in the moment and they seem so large.
(04:04:43) Apple could absolutely stumble and I think they have more reason to stumble now than ever. They’re behind on AI, terribly behind. Their software quality is faltering in a bunch of ways. The competition is catching up on the hardware game in part because TSMC is not an Apple subsidiary, but a foundry that services AMD and Nvidia, and others who were now able to use the same kind of advanced processes. This is something I learned after not looking at PC hardware for the longest time, that holy smokes, AMD actually makes CPUs that are just as fast, if not faster, than Apple’s. They’re not quite as efficient yet because ARM has some fundamental efficiencies over x86, but they’re still pretty good.
(04:05:27) So Apple should have reason to worry. Apple shareholders should have reason to be concerned, not just about all these stumbles, but also by the fact that Apple is run by old people. Apple’s board has an average age of, I think, 75. Their entire executive team is above 60. Now, that sounds horribly ageist. And in some ways, it a little bit is, in the same way I’m ageist against myself. I’m 45 now. And I have to force myself to really get into AI because it is such a paradigm shift and a lot of people, when they reach a certain age, are just happy to stay with what they know. They don’t want to go back to being a beginner. They don’t want to go back to having to relearn everything. And I think this is a little hard for me at 45. How the hell do you do that at 75?
Fatherhood
Lex Fridman (04:06:22) I have to come back to it. You mentioned it earlier, you’re a parent. Can you speak to the impact that becoming a father has had on your life?
DHH (04:06:32) I think what’s funny about fatherhood is that, for me, I wasn’t even sure it’s something I wanted. It took meeting the right woman and letting her convince me that this was the right idea before we even got started. I didn’t have starting my own family on the list of priorities in my late 20s or even early 30s. It was really the impetus of meeting my wife, Jamie, and her telling me, “This is what I want. I want to have a family, I want to get married, I want to have kids. I want to have three.” And me going for a second like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa.” And then, “All right, let’s do it.” And I think that’s the kind of happy accident where some parts of my life have been very driven, where I knew exactly what I wanted and how to push forward to it, and what the payoff was going to be. But when it comes to having a family, that always felt like a very fuzzy, abstract idea that, sure, someday maybe. And then it became very concrete because I met a woman who knew what she wanted.
(04:07:55) And looking back on it now, it almost seems crazy, like there’s this fork in the road of reality where if that hadn’t happened and I had been sitting here now not being a father, not having a family, the level of regret knowing what I know now about the joys of having that family would have been existential. I don’t know if they would have been devastating. I think men have a little bit of a longer window to pursue these things than women do. There are just certain biological facts, but ending up with the family I have now, ending up with my three boys, have been just a transformative experience in the sense that here’s something that turned out to be the most important thing. And it was an open secret. Not even an open secret. It was an open truth through all of history.
(04:08:59) You listen to anyone who’s ever had children, they will all say, “My children are the most important to me.” Yet somehow that wisdom couldn’t sink in until you were in the situation yourself. I find those truths fascinating when you can’t actually relay them with words. I can tell you, “Hey, Lex, what are you doing? Get a wife, make some kids, get a move on it.” And these are just words. They’re not communicating the gravity of what it actually feels to go through the experience. And you can’t really learn it without going through it.
(04:09:33) Now, of course, you can be influenced and whatever, we can all help contribute and little sparks and little seeds can grow in your mind about it, but it still has to happen. And now that I am in this situation and just the sheer joy on a daily basis where you think your level of life satisfaction is on a scale of one to 10.
DHH (04:09:57) And then the satisfaction of seeing your children understand something, accomplish something, learn something, do something, just be, just goes like, oh my God, the scale doesn’t go from one to 10, it goes from one to a hundred. And I’ve been playing down here in the one to 10 range all this time and there’s a one to a hundred. That has been humbling in a way that is impactful in and of itself. This whole idea that I thought I had a fair understanding of the boundaries of life in my early 30s, like what is this about? I mean, I’ve been on this earth long enough now here to know something.
(04:10:39) And you realize, “I don’t know.” I did not know. I did not know that the scale was much broader. And I’ve often talked about the joys of having kids and just seeing your own DNA, which is remarkable to me because literally that’s been the pursuit of humans since the dawn of time. I am here today because, whatever, 30,000 years ago, some Neanderthal had the same realization that I should procreate and I should continue my bloodline. And that all amounts to me sitting here now, but it didn’t become a practical reality to me before meeting the right woman. And I think that that’s sometimes not part of the conversation enough that there’s something broken at the moment about how people pair up in the western world.
DHH (04:11:33) And it’s at the source of why we’re not having enough children because there’s not enough couples, there’s not enough marriage, there’s not enough of all these traditional values that even 50, 60, 70 years ago was just taken for granted. We’re in this grand experiment of what happens if we just remove a bunch of institutions? What happens if we no longer value marriage as something to aspire to? What happened if parenthood is now seen in some camps as almost something weird or against your own self-expression? It’s a grand experiment that I’m curious how it turns out. I prefer to watch it as a movie, like The Children of Men, that was a good show. I wish that wasn’t reality, but we’re seeing that reality play out while I’m sitting here in a very traditional two-parent loving household with three children and going, “This is now at the top.”
(04:12:38) I’ve done a lot of things in my life. I’ve built software, I’ve built companies, I’ve raced cars, I’ve done all sorts of things, and I would trade all of it in a heartbeat for my kids. That’s just a really fascinating human experience, that the depth of that bond is something you can’t appreciate before you have it. But I also think there is a role to play to talk it up because we’re being bombarded constantly with reasons why not to. Oh, it’s too expensive.
(04:13:14) Well, you could get divorced and then you might lose half. There’s all these voices constantly articulating the case against marriage, the case against having children, that those of us who’ve chosen to do the traditional thing, to get married and to have children, have an obligation to talk it up a little bit, which would have seen ridiculous again 50 years ago that you’d have to talk up something so fundamental of that.
(04:13:42) But I have become obligated in that sense to do just that, to talk it up, to say, “You know what? You can look at everything that I’ve done and if you like some of those parts, realize that to me, in the situation, the kids, the family, the wife is more important than all of it.” And it sounds like a cliche because you’ve heard it a thousand times before, and by becoming a cliché, maybe you start believing it’s not true, that it’s just something people say, but it is reality.
(04:14:16) I know almost no parents that I have personal relationships with that don’t consider their children to be the most important thing in their life.
Lex Fridman (04:14:23) So there’s a lot of interesting things you said. So one, it does seem to be … I know a lot of parents, perhaps more interestingly, I know a lot of super successful people who are parents who really love their kids and who say that the kids even help them to be more successful. Now, the interesting thing, speaking to what you’re saying, is it does seem for us humans, it’s easier to articulate the negatives because they’re concrete, pragmatic. It costs more, it takes some time. They can be crying all over the place. They’re tiny narcissists running around or whatever.
Lex Fridman (04:15:08) Yeah, pooping everywhere, that kind of stuff. But to articulate the thing you were speaking to of there’s this little creature that you love more than anything you’ve ever loved in your life, it’s hard to convert that into words. You have to really experience it. But I believe it and I want to experience that, but I believe, because just from a scientific method, have seen a lot of people who are not honestly not very capable of love, fall completely in love with their kids.
Lex Fridman (04:15:47) They just fall in love and it’s like, all right. People who, just like you said, they don’t really care or don’t really think about having kids, that kind of stuff, once they do, it changes everything. But it’s hard to convert into words.
DHH (04:16:03) One of the reasons I think it’s also difficult is … I mean, I like kids, not that I actively dislike them, but when I was around other people’s kids, I didn’t have a emotional reaction. Some women have. They see a baby and they go, “Oh.” I never had any emotion of that. I mean, I could appreciate, I’m glad for you that you have children. It did not provoke anything in me. The emotions that are provoked in me when I look at my own children, this doesn’t exist in the same universe, so you don’t have a complete parallel or at least a lot of men, or at least me, I didn’t have a framework to put it into, what would it be like to have my own child?
(04:16:41) And then you experience it. It’s like the poof. And it happened so quickly, too. This is what I found fascinating. It happens before that little human is even able to return any words to you that the love you develop to an infant, it happens quite quickly, not necessarily immediately. I don’t know, different people have different experiences, but it took me a little bit. But then once it hit, it just hit like kick of a horse. And I love that it’s also just such a universal experience that you can be the most successful person in the world, you can be the poorest person in the world, you can be somewhere in the middle, and we share this experience that being a parent, for most of them, turns out to be the most important thing in their life.
Lex Fridman (04:17:33) But it is really nice to do that kind of experience with the right partner. But I think because I’m such an empath, the cost of having the wrong partner is high for me. But then I also realized, man … I have a friend of mine who’s divorced happily and he still loves the shit out of his kids and it’s still beautiful. It’s a mess, but all of that love is still there and you just have to make it work. It’s just that, I don’t know, that kind of divorce would destroy me.
DHH (04:18:02) You should listen to The School of Life. He has this great bit on YouTube, you’ll marry the wrong person. If you accept upfront that you will marry the wrong person, that every potential person you can marry is going to be the wrong person on some dimension. They’re going to annoy you. They’re going to be not what you hoped in certain dimensions. The romantic ideal that everything’s just perfect all the time is not very conducive to the reality of hitching up and making babies. Because I think as you just accounted, even when it turns to shit, I find that most of the people I personally know where things have fallen apart and have turned to shit never in a million years would they go, “I regret it. I would rather my children did not exist because a relationship turned sour.” I mean, I think you should try very hard and I think this is also one of those things where we didn’t fully understand those fences, and when we pulled them up and celebrated how easy it is to get divorced, for example, that that wasn’t going to have some negative consequences.
(04:19:12) I’m not saying you shouldn’t have divorces. I’m not saying return to times past. I am saying, though, that civilization over thousands of years developed certain technologies for ensuring the continuation of its own institutions and its own life that perhaps we didn’t fully appreciate. I mean, again, this is something Jordan Peterson and others are far more articulate to speak about, and that I’ve learned a lot to just analyze my own situation. Why is it that this incredible burden it is, to be responsible for someone else’s life that you brought into this world is also the most rewarding part of existence? That’s just curious. Before I heard Peterson articulate the value of taking on the greatest burden you know how to carry, I always thought about burdens as a negative things. Why would I want the burden of a child? I might screw it up. I might be a bad parent. They might have bad … All this stuff, right? All the reasons why you shouldn’t. And so few voices articulating why you should.
Lex Fridman (04:20:21) Yeah, but I should also add on top of that, the thing you mentioned currently, perhaps in the West, the matchmaking process …
Lex Fridman (04:20:29) … is broken and technology made it worse. It’s fascinating, this whole thing that hasn’t been solved. So hiring great teams, that’s probably been solved the best out of matchmaking, finding great people to hire.
Lex Fridman (04:20:50) It’s breaking down. And the third is matchmaking for relationships. That’s the worst. And in fact, technology made it even worse.
DHH (04:20:59) It is. It’s a great example again of how all the greatest intentions still led us straight to hell. I really enjoyed Louise Perry’s analysis of the sexual revolution not being an unqualified good, which was something I hadn’t thought about at all before she articulated it, that, of course, women should be able to have freedom and self-determination and abortions, and all of these things. And Louise Perry is not arguing against that either, of course. But there are second order facts that we don’t appreciate at the time, and we may not have ready-made solutions for, and that’s just interesting.
(04:21:40) You make life better in a million different ways and somehow we end up more miserable. Why is that? Why is it that humans find meaning in hardship? And I think some of that is that it’s a difficult question to answer through science. And again, Peterson articulates well this idea that you have to find some of it through art, some of it through authors, some of it through different … I was just about to say modes of knowing before I stopped myself because that sounds like woo bullshit. But there are different ways to acquire those deep lessons that paper is not going to tell you.
Lex Fridman (04:22:33) I mean, this is really … The point also applies to religion, for example. If you remove from society the software of religion, you better have a good replacement.
DHH (04:22:45) And we’ve had a bunch of bad replacements, especially over the last few decades. Religion is one of those things I’ve struggled with a lot because I’m not religious, but I wish I was. I can now fully appreciate the enormous value having an operating system like that brings, not just at the individual level, but rather at a societal level. And it’s not clear at all what the answer is. I think we’ve tried a lot of dead ends when it came to replacements and people have been filling that void in a million different ways that seem worse than all the religions, despite their faults in a myriad of ways have been able to deliver.
Lex Fridman (04:23:28) Yeah, religions like the cobalt code. It’s just-
DHH (04:23:33) Yes. It’s the institutions where we don’t fully understand the rules and why they’re there and what’s going to happen if we remove them. Some of them seems obvious to me are just bullshit of the time. Oh, you should need, whatever, shellfish, because in that region of the world, there was something, something, something. Okay, fine. But there’s a bunch of other things that are pivotal to keeping society functioning for the long term, and we don’t fully understand which is which. What’s the bullshit and what’s the load-bearing pillars of society?
Lex Fridman (04:24:04) Can you speak to the hit on productivity that kids have? Did they increase your productivity, decrease it, or is that even the wrong question to ask?
DHH (04:24:13) I think it’s one of the reasons why ambitious people are often afraid of having children because they think I have so much more to do and I barely have enough time now. How would I possibly be able to accomplish the things I want to accomplish if I add another human into the mix? Now, A, we’ve always worked 40 hours a week, not 80 or a hundred or 120. I think that’s very beneficial. B, kids don’t exist in this vacuum of just them alone being entered into your life. Hopefully, there’s a partner. And in my life, I’m married to a wonderful woman who decided to stop working her corporate job when we got together and have been able to carry a huge part of that responsibility.
(04:25:02) I was just about to say burden, and I think that’s exactly how it often gets presented, especially from a feminist perspective, that carrying for your own children is some unpaid labor that has to be compensated for in some specific way beyond the compensation of what bringing life into this world, raising wonderful humans. There’s something screwy about that analysis that I actually think the modern trad movement is a reply against. Whether they have all the answers, I’m certainly not sure of either, but there’s something that’s just not right in the analysis that children are a burden and that if woman chooses to stay at home with the kids, that that’s some failure mode of feminist ambition. I think that’s actually a complete dead end. Now, depends on different people, different circumstances. I can just speak to my life being married to a wonderful woman who have decided to be home with the kids, at least at their early age, and taken on a lot of those responsibilities. Now, it doesn’t mean there isn’t plenty of ways that I have to be part of that and have to chip in, but it’s allowed me to continue to work the 40 hours a week that I’ve always worked. But it’s made the 40 hours more strict. I have a schedule where I wake up, whatever, 6:30, and we have to get out of the door a little before 8:00. I usually have to play at least one or two rounds of Fortnite with my youngest and sometimes middle child.
(04:26:48) Then take the kids to school, get in, start work at, I don’t know, 8:39, then work until 5:00, 5:30, sometimes 6:00, but then it’s dinner and I have to be there for that, and then I have to read to the kids. And by the time that’s done, I don’t want to go back to work. So my work time really is 9:00 to 5:00, 9:00 to 6:00, depending of whatever is going on. Sometimes there’s emergencies and you have to tend to them, but it’s made it more structured and I found some benefit in that and I found some productivity in that, that I can’t goof around quite as much, that the day will end at around 5:36. That’s just if I didn’t accomplish what I wanted to do today, if I get to that time, it’s done. I’m over. I have to try again tomorrow. Whereas before having a family and before having kids, I could just not do it and just make it up in the evening.
(04:27:45) So in that way, it’s made me more structured, but it hasn’t really changed my volume of work all that much. I still work about the same amount of hours. And that’s, by the way, enough. This is one of the key points we make in It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work, the latest book we wrote, is that there’s enough time. 40 hours a week is actually a ton if you don’t piss it away. Most people do piss it away. They piss it away in meetings, they piss it away on just stuff that doesn’t matter when even three hours, four hours of concentrated uninterrupted time every day would move the goals they truly care about way down the field.
Lex Fridman (04:28:26) I think kids do make you more productive in that way for people who need it, especially people like me, they create their urgency.
Lex Fridman (04:28:34) If you have to be done by 5:00, it’s maybe counterintuitive notion, but for people like me who like to work, you can really fill the day with fluff of work. And if you have to be done by 5:00, you’re going to have to do the deep work and get it done, really focus singular work. And then you’re just going to cut off all the pressure-
DHH (04:29:02) It just keeps you honest. It keeps you honest because you can squander one day, you can squander two days, but if I squander a whole week, I feel terrible. Now, that’s just some drive I have in me where I feel content and full meaning if I actually do stuff that matters, if I can look back upon the week and go like, “That was a nice week.” Really, we moved forward. Maybe we didn’t get done, but we moved forward and everything got better. And I think kids really helped just time bucks things in that way. And a lot of people need that because I find just so much of the celebration of overwork to be so tiresome. Oh, I work 60 hours or 80 hours, 100 hours a week, and just like, first of all, no, you don’t. No, you don’t.
(04:29:50) Those 80 hours are full of all sorts of fluff that you label work, but that I would laugh at, and that most people laugh at, that you would laugh at if you actually did the analysis of where’s that time going. Most of the important stuff that have to be done is done in these uninterrupted chunks of two hours here or four hours there or five hours there. The hard part is making sure you get them in the whole piece. So don’t give me that. There’s time enough. And also, what’s so important that it ranks above continuing your lineage? I think there’s just some ancient honor in the fact that, again, this DNA that’s sitting on this chair traveled 30,000 years to get here, and you’re going to squander all that away just so you can send a few more emails.
Lex Fridman (04:30:41) There is something that’s also hard to convert into words of just the kind of fun you can have just playing with your kids. I don’t know what that on the surface it’s like, I can have that kind of fun just playing video games by myself, but no, it’s like there’s something magical about it, right?
DHH (04:31:00) I have a thousand hours logged in Fortnite since 19, I think, all of it with my kids. I’d never be playing Fortnite. Well, I don’t know if I never would be. I wouldn’t be playing a thousand hours of Fortnite if it wasn’t for my kids. The enjoyment for me is to do something with them that I also happen to enjoy. I really love Fortnite. It’s a phenomenal game. I don’t have to force myself to play that with them. I often ask like, “Hey, do you want to play Fortnite?” But still, it’s an activity that I get to share with them. It’s a passion that I get to share with them. I’ve started doing go-karting with my oldest. I’ve been driving race cars for a long time, and now they’re getting into go-karting, and just being at the go-kart track, seeing them go around, seeing them get faster, seeing them learn that skill, you just go look at what else would I be doing with my life. At my age, 45, I’m standing here truly enjoying life I brought into this world. What else was so important at this stage that I would otherwise be spending my time on?
DHH (04:32:00) … so important at this stage that I would otherwise be spending my time on.
Racing
Lex Fridman (04:32:04) All right. Like you mentioned, you like to race cars and you do it at a world-class competitive level, which is incredible. So how’d you get into it? What attracts you to racing? What do you love about it?
DHH (04:32:17) The funny thing about getting into racing is I did not get my driver’s license until I was 25. I grew up in Copenhagen, Denmark where the tax on cars is basically over 200%. So you pay for three cars and you get one, and I didn’t even have the money for one car, let alone three. So I could not afford a car growing up. We did not have a car growing up, but Copenhagen is a nice city to be able to get around on a bike or with a bus or as I did for a long period of time, on rollerblades.
(04:32:53) But when I was 25, I realized I wanted to spend more time in the U.S. I wasn’t sure yet that I was going to move there. That turned out later to be true, but I knew that if I wanted to spend time in the U.S., I needed to have a driver’s license. I was not going to get around very well if I didn’t know how to drive a car.
(04:33:10) So I got a driver’s license at 25. Then ended up moving to the U.S. later that year, and I’d always been into video games, racing video games. Metropolitan Street Racer on the Dreamcast was one of those games that really sucked me into … It was the precursor to Project Gotham, which was the precursor to essentially, Forza Horizon, I think.
DHH (04:33:37) I think that’s how the lineage goes. It’s just a great game. I actually just fired it up on an emulator a few weeks ago and it still sort of, kind of holds up because it has enough real car dynamics that it smells a little bit like driving a real car. It’s not just like an arcade racer like Sega Rally or something like that, but I’d always been into that.
(04:33:57) Then I got my driver’s license at 25 and moved to the U.S., and then two years later a friend that I’d met in Chicago took me to the Chicago Autobahn Country Club, which is this great track about 45 minutes from Chicago. And I sat in a race car and I drove a race car for the first time, and I had the same kind of pseudo-religious experience I did as when I started working on Ruby, where I did maybe 20 laps in this basically, a Mazda race car from, I think it was the ’90s or something, a pretty cheap race car, but a real race car. Single-seater, manual gearbox, but exposed slick wheels, all the stuff.
(04:34:42) And after having had that experience, first of all it was just the most amazing thing ever. The physical sensation of driving a race car is really unique. And I think if you’ve driven a car fast, you have maybe a 2% taste of it. The exposure to the elements that you get in a single-seat race car, especially one like that where your head is actually out in the elements, you can see the individual wheels and sensation of speed is just so much higher, is at a completely different level.
Lex Fridman (04:35:13) So can you actually speak to that? So even in that Mazda, so you can feel … What, can you feel the track reverberating? You feel the grip?
DHH (04:35:22) Oh, yeah. Not only can you see the bumps because you’re literally looking straight at the wheels, you can feel all the bumps because you’re running a slick tire and it’s a really stiff setup. It’s nothing like taking a fast street car out on a racetrack and tried to driving a little bit around.
Lex Fridman (04:35:37) So can you feel the slipping, the traction?
DHH (04:35:38) Yeah, you’d feel the slipping. That’s a huge part of the satisfaction of driving a race car, is driving in at the edge of adhesion as we call it, where the car’s actually sliding a little bit. A couple of percent of slip angle is the fastest way to drive a race car. You don’t want to slide it too much. That looks great, lots of smoke, but it’s not fast.
(04:35:58) How you want to drive it is just at the limit of adhesion where you’re rotating the car as much as your tires can manage and then slightly more than that. And playing at it, keeping it just at that level because when you’re at the level of, or at the limit of adhesion, you’re essentially just a tiny movement away from spinning out. I mean, it doesn’t take much. Then the car starts rotating. Once it starts rotating, you lose grip and you’re going for the wall.
(04:36:28) That balance of danger and skill is what’s so intoxicating, and it’s so much better than racing video games too because the criticality is taken up two notches. I often think about people who really like gambling, where I think, “Aren’t you just playing poker? No, the point is not poker. Poker is maybe part of it, but the point is that I could lose my house.” Right? That’s the addiction that some people get to gambling, that there’s something real on the line.
(04:36:58) When you’re in a race car, there’s something very real on the line. If you get it wrong, at the very least you’re going to spin out and probably hit a wall and it’s going to be expensive. At the very worst, you’re not getting out alive. And even if modern race cars have gotten way safer than they used to be, there is that element of danger that’s real, that there are people who still get seriously hurt or even killed in a race car.
(04:37:25) It’s mercifully rare compared to what it used to be when those maniacs in the ’60s would do Formula 1 and whatever, 13% of the grid wouldn’t make it to the end of the year because they’d just die in a fiery flaming fireball, but there’s still some of it there.
(04:37:42) And I think that since that there’s something on the line really contributes to it, but it’s more than that. It’s not just a physical sensation. There’s activation of all your forces. There’s the flow, and I think that really cements why I got addicted, because I love that flow I got out of programming, but getting flow out of programming is a very inconsistent process.
(04:38:06) I can’t just sit down in front of a keyboard and go like, “All right, let’s get the flow going.” It doesn’t happen like that. The problem has to be just right. It has to meet my skills in just the right moment. It’s a bit of a lottery.
(04:38:19) In a race car, it’s not a lottery at all. You sit down in that car, you turn the ignition, you go out on track and I get flow virtually guaranteed because you need, or I need at least 100% of my brain processing power to be able to go at the speed I go without crashing. So there’s no time to think about dinner tonight or the meeting next week or product launch. It’s completely zen in actually, the literal sense of the word.
(04:38:49) I think of someone who’s really good at meditation, that’s probably kind of state they get into where it’s just clear you’re in the now, there’s nothing but you and the next corner. That’s a really addictive experience.
(04:39:02) So after I’ve had that, I couldn’t get enough. I kept going to the track every opportunity I got. Every single weekend for about four years, I would go to the track. And by the end of that time, I’d finally worked up enough skill and enough success with the company that I could afford to go “real racing.”
(04:39:20) So I started doing that. I started driving these Porsches, and then as soon as I got into that, as soon as I got into “real competition,” I was like, “I wonder how far you can take this?” And it didn’t take that long before I decided, “You know what? I can take this all the way.”
(04:39:34) My great hero in racing is Tom Kristensen, fellow Dane. The Mr. Le Mans, as they call him, the greatest endurance race in the world. The 24 Hours of Le Mans has been won more times than any other by Tom Kristensen. He won the race nine times. So Tom just really turned me on to Le Mans. I’d been watching Le Mans since, I think, the ’80s. I have my earliest memories of watching that on TV. The race has been going since, I think, ’20s, but in the ’80s I got kind of into it.
(04:40:07) And then in the late ’90s, early 2000s when Tom started winning, I, like pretty much every other Dane started watching the race almost religiously. So I thought, “You know what? I want to get to Le Mans.”
(04:40:18) This is the magic thing about racing, that if I get into basketball, I can’t set a realistic expectation that I’m going to play in the NBA, that I’m going to go to the finals, or I get into tennis and I’m going to play at Wimbledon. That just doesn’t happen. But racing is special in this way because it requires a fair amount of money to keep these cars running. It’s really expensive. It’s like having a small startup. You need to fly a bunch of people around the world and buy expensive equipment and so forth. So you need a bunch of capital, and I had some through the success of the company so I could do it, which meant that I could get to Le Mans.
(04:40:50) So I set that as my goal. “I want to get to Le Mans,” and I started racing in real competition 2009, and three years later in 2012, I was at the grid of Le Mans for the first time.
Lex Fridman (04:41:02) We should say, so Le Mans, 24-hour race, endurance. I mean, this is insane.
DHH (04:41:10) There are three drivers, mind you. So it’s not like one guy just drives for 24 hours straight, but still it’s a pretty tough race, both physically and mentally, especially mentally. When you’ve been up for 24 plus hours, you’re not quite as sharp as when you first wake up.
(04:41:28) And this is funny about Le Mans too, it starts at around 4:00 in the afternoon, so you’ve already been up for half a day by the time the race starts and then there’s 24 hours to go before you’re done, and you’ll be in the car for anywhere from usually an hour and a half to a maximum of four hours. The regulations say four out of six is the max you can do.
(04:41:46) I’ve spent perhaps two and a half hours in a single stint at Le Mans. It’s pretty taxing. You’re going 200 miles an hour into some of these turns and there’s another 60 cars on track. Whenever I’m in my normal category, which is the LMP2 category, I have GT cars which are more like a Ferrari and a Porsche that I have to overtake, and then I have these hyper cars, which is the top-class that are overtaking me.
(04:42:14) So you got a lot going on and you got to stay sharp for two and a half hours straight to do that. That is just a guaranteed way to get incredible flow for long, long stretches of time. That’s why you get addicted to it. That was why I got addicted.
Lex Fridman (04:42:27) You got to talk me through this video, this video of you in these LMP2s.
Lex Fridman (04:42:31) This is such a cool … This is so cool.
DHH (04:42:34) Yeah, this was probably my favorite battle of my career.
Speaker 1 (04:42:41) And Heinemeier Hansson has beat past to add five-
DHH (04:42:42) Yeah, so this is me driving against Nico Müller at the Shanghai International Circuit.
Lex Fridman (04:42:47) You’re on the outside here?
DHH (04:42:48) I’m on the outside in the blue and white and we go a whole track around with basically a piece of paper between us. See, down this back straight, I get so close to him because I want to force him over on the other side of the track such that he can’t just box me in, and we’ve been fighting already at this point for basically 40 minutes straight.
(04:43:06) I’ve been managing to keep this professional driver behind me for 40 minutes, and he finally passes me, but we just keep the battle on for the whole time. And it really just shows both these kinds of cars, the Le Mans Prototypes. We don’t actually ever touch. We get within about an inch and keep going around the Shanghai Circuit to-
Lex Fridman (04:43:26) How did you get so good? I mean, that’s a fascinating story, right, that you are able to get so good?
DHH (04:43:34) I’m pretty good for the kind of driver I am, which is called the gentleman driver, which means I’m not a professional driver. And like many good gentlemen drivers, when we’re at our really best, we can be quite competitive with even professional drivers who have been doing this their whole life.
(04:43:50) The difference between us and the professionals is the professionals can do it every time, or more or less every time. So I can’t be this good all the time. When everything is just right, I can be competitive with professional drivers, but that’s not how you win championships. That’s not how you get paid by factories to drive. You got to be good every time you go out.
(04:44:07) So that’s a huge difference. But some of it was also just, I really put my mind to it. By the time I realized race cars is what I want to do as my serious hobby, I put in thousands of hours.
Lex Fridman (04:44:21) Have you crashed? What’s the worst crash?
DHH (04:44:23) I’ve had a lot of crashes, but thankfully, knock on wood, I haven’t had any crashes where I’ve gotten really seriously hurt.
DHH (04:44:31) Oh, yes. Oh, yes. I’ve wrecked many a cars.
Lex Fridman (04:44:34) So what’s that feel like, just you wreck a car? How do you get-
DHH (04:44:37) It feels like total shit if you’re in a real race and other people depend on you. It’s not even so much the car, although it’s also sometimes that these cars are expensive to repair and that sucks and it feels so wasteful in a way when you crash some of these cars, but the sense that you’re letting a team down.
(04:44:55) Endurance racing is a team sport. Not only do you have your mechanics, you usually have co- drivers. So when I crash, I just feel like, “Damn it, I could have avoided this.”
Lex Fridman (04:45:05) Yeah, but also you could have died.
DHH (04:45:08) Do you know what’s funny? I never think about that. I don’t think you can because I think the moment you start thinking about being able to die, you can’t do it. You can’t go fast.
Lex Fridman (04:45:18) Well, I’m sure, not to go all Carl Jung and Freud here, but I’m sure that’s always present in the back of your mind somewhere. You’re not just bringing it to the surface.
DHH (04:45:31) It is in the sense that it’s part of the appeal. It’s part of the sense that there’s something on the line, that this isn’t just virtual. I can’t just hit reset, restart, reboot. If I crash this car, we’re going to be out, or we’re going to be disadvantaged, or it’s going to get destroyed, or I might get hurt.
(04:45:49) I’ve gotten lightly hurt a few times. I actually had, the year we won 24 Hours of Le Mans in our class, I’d been training in this Formula 3.5 car. It’s a really fast car, it’s a really nice exercise to do, but it’s also, it doesn’t have power steering. So some of these race cars, especially the open-seaters, they don’t have power steering, which means that the steering wheel is basically, directly connected to the front wheels.
(04:46:19) So if you crash one of those cars and the front wheels suddenly turn, you’re really going to hurt your hands if you don’t get your hands off the wheel. I hadn’t raced enough of those cars to know that I had to get, or to have the instinct, to have developed the instinct that I had to get my hands off the wheel, so I didn’t and I really hurt my hand.
(04:46:36) This was just, I think a month before the 24 Hours of Le Mans. So I thought, “Oh man, I’m going to have to miss it this year.” I had, not a cast. It was just seriously sprained. And then somehow, miraculously a week before the event, I was like, “Oh yeah, actually it’s okay now.” So, got to do it.
(04:46:51) And that would’ve been grave regret if I would’ve seen my team go on to win the race and I would have to sit on the sidelines. But I really have been quite fortunate in the sense that most of my crashes have just been expensive or sporting-inconvenient. They’ve never been something where I got seriously hurt, but I’ve seen plenty of people who have.
(04:47:13) In fact, my co-driver this year, and for several years, Pietro Fittipaldi drove a race car at Spa. Spa is one of the great racetracks of all time and it has this iconic corner called Eau Rouge, which is probably the most famous corner in all of Motorsports that has a great compression before you climb uphill.
(04:47:34) It’s extremely fast, very difficult corner. And just as he does the compression, his car basically sets out and he loses his power steering and he drives straight into the wall and breaks both his legs and basically, face the prospect that maybe his career was over. I’ve had other teammates and people I know have serious injuries that’s really hurt them.
(04:47:57) And yet what’s funny, as you say, you’d think that would sink in. The year before we won in 2014, that same car had a Danish driver in it at Le Mans at the race I was driving, who died. He lost control of the car when there was a bit of rain on the track, and the track was unfortunately designed in such a poor way that there was a very big tree right behind the railing. And he hit that tree at full speed, pulled 90gs and was dead on the spot, which was just such an extremely awful experience to go through.
(04:48:42) I finished second that year, which should have been cause for a bunch of celebration, but it was just tainted by the fact that not only did a driver die, a fellow Dane died, a guy I knew died. That was pretty tough.
Lex Fridman (04:49:01) So throw that into the pile of the things that have to be considered, is the weather conditions, like you mentioned of the track, whether it’s dry or wet.
DHH (04:49:12) It’s a huge part of it. Even just last year at Le Mans, it was raining and I was out and I hadn’t made a serious mistake at 24 Hours of Le Mans since I did the first race in 2012, where I put it in the sand trap with four hours to go. And we lost a couple of laps getting pulled out, but it didn’t actually change anything for our result because that was just how the field was spread out.
(04:49:41) I’d made minor mistakes over the years, but nothing that really set us out. And at the race last year when it was raining, I first clobbered a Ford Mustang when I made an overambitious pass on a damp part of the track and couldn’t stop in time and then felt absolutely awful as I sat in the gravel pit for two laps and knew that our race was over, a race where we were highly competitive.
(04:50:07) You’re not blessed with a competitive car, a competitive team and competitive setup every year. I know how rare that is. So to know that we had had a chance that year and I sort of squandered it felt really bad. But that got compounded when I got back on track, barely made it another stint and then put it into gravel trap again when it started raining on the entrance into Porsche.
(04:50:29) So this is part of why racing is so addicting too because the highs are very, very high. When you win a race like the 24 Hours of Le Mans, it feels just incredible. There’s so much emotion, but if you fuck it up, the lows are very, very low.
Lex Fridman (04:50:44) What are the things you’re paying attention to when you’re driving? What are the parameters? What are you loading in? Are you feeling the grip? Are you basically increasing the speed and seeing a constant feedback system effect it has on the grip, and you’re trying to manage that and trying to find that optimal slip angle?
(04:51:09) Are you looking around using your eyes? Are you smelling things? Are you listening, just feeling the wind or are you looking at the field, too? How’d you not hit that guy at all? You get close within inches, right? So you have to pay attention to that, too.
DHH (04:51:26) It’s really interesting about that specific battle where we’re literally a few inches apart. I can’t fully explain it, but humans can develop an incredible sense of space where I can’t see the edge of the back of my car, but I can know exactly where it is. I can have a mental model in my head that gives me the exact dimensions of this car such that I can run within a few inches of a competitor car or within a few inches of the wall and not hit either when things go well.
(04:51:57) The car is about two meters wide and it’s quite long, five meters and you can’t see everything. The mirrors are actually kind of shit. There’s no rear-view mirror in these cars. You can’t see out the back. You can only see through your two side mirrors, but you form this intuitive mental model when you get good enough at this.
(04:52:14) But what I actually pay attention to most is I run a program. What I try to do when I go to a racetrack is I try to load up the best program I know how for every single corner. What’s my brake point? What’s my acceleration point? What’s my brake trailing curve? And I try to pick up that program in part just by finding it myself and how fast I can go. But even more so than that by copying my professional competitors, or not competitors, co-drivers.
(04:52:45) So I usually always race with a pro, and modern race cars produce an absolute enormous amount of data, and you can analyze all that data after each outing. You can see an exact trace of how much you pushed the brake pedal, how much you did in terms of steering inputs, when you got on the gas. You can see every millisecond you’re losing is evident in those charts.
(04:53:09) So what I try to do is I try to look at the chart and then I try to load that in, and that’s what I got to do. “Oh, in this corner 17, I have to be 10 bar lighter on the brake,” so I try to load that program in and then I try to repeat it.
(04:53:23) Now, then there are all the things that changes. Your tires change quite a lot. These tires are made to only last 40 minutes in many cases. Sometimes at Le Mans we can go longer, but at some racetracks they’ll last as little as 40 minutes before they really fall off. So you got to manage that, that the grip is constantly changing, so your program have to suddenly fit those changing circumstances.
(04:53:45) And then in endurance racing, you’re constantly interacting with other cars because you’re passing slower classes or you’re getting passed by a faster class. So that’s part of the equation. And then you’re trying to dance the car around the limit of adhesion.
(04:53:59) So you got all those factors playing at the same time. But above all else for me is to try to become a robot. How can I repeat this set of steps exactly as I’m supposed to for two and a half hours straight without making 100 milliseconds worth of mistakes?
DHH (04:54:20) That’s really a huge part of it actually. Your latency is enormously important in terms of being able to catch when the car starts slipping. You get this sensation in your body that the G-forces are a little off, the slip angle is a little off and then you have to counter steer.
(04:54:38) And obviously, the best race car drivers just feel like an intuition. I have some intuition. I don’t have all of it, so I do occasionally spin my car, but that’s the challenge.
Lex Fridman (04:54:48) From everything you’ve studied and understand, what does it take to achieve mastery in racing? What does it take to become the best race car driver in the world?
DHH (04:54:58) Obsession is part of it. When I read and hear about Senna and the other greats, they were just singularly focused. Max Verstappen is the current champion of the world and he is the same kind. Max has been fascinating to watch. I mean, he’s a phenomenal race car driver, but he also literally does nothing else. When he’s not at the racetrack, he’s driving sim racing. He’s literally in video games doing more racing when he’s not doing all the racing he’s already doing.
Lex Fridman (04:55:30) Is there a specific skill they have that stands out to you as supernatural through all of that obsession? Is it a bunch of factors or are they actually able to, like you said, develop a sense? Is it, they’re able to get to the very edge of the slip?
DHH (04:55:45) They’re able to develop very fine-tuned sensibilities for when the car is sliding. They can feel just these tiny moments or movements in the chassis that transports up usually through their ass. That’s why you call it a butt meter that goes up and you feel like the car is loose, or you feel like you’re just about to lock up. You can really hone that tuning.
(04:56:10) Then the other thing is you have to have really good reaction time. And when you look at great Formula 1 drivers, they can generally have a reaction time of just under 200 milliseconds, which is awesome, and even 10 milliseconds’ difference makes a huge difference.
(04:56:26) You’ll see it when the Formula 1 grid, for example, they do a standing start and you see the five red lights come on. And when the last light goes out, they’re supposed to release the clutch and get going, and they can time this. So you can see exactly who has the reaction time.
(04:56:40) And even being off by 20 milliseconds can make the difference of whether you’re in front or behind at the first corner.
Lex Fridman (04:56:48) How much of winning is also just the strategy of jostling for position?
DHH (04:56:53) There’s some of that, and some of it is also just nerve. Who wants it more? That’s exactly when that sense of danger comes in. There’s a great quote from Fernando Alonso when he was driving at Suzuka against Schumacher, I think.
(04:57:09) They’re coming up to this incredibly fast corner. It’s very dangerous, and Alonso basically accounts, “I was going to make the pass because I knew he had a wife and kids at home.”
DHH (04:57:26) That, “I knew he valued life more than I did.” So there’s a bit of poker sometimes in that, who’s going to yield? There’s a bit of chicken raised in that regard, and sometimes it doesn’t work. No one yields and you both crash, but very often one person will blink first.
Lex Fridman (04:57:41) Can the pass be both on the inside and the outside or is it-
DHH (04:57:44) You can pass wherever you want as long as you have just a slight part of the car on the racetrack.
Lex Fridman (04:57:50) And then you just improvise and take risks. What a sport. And then Senna, of course is a legendary risk-taker.
DHH (04:58:00) Yes. And even before him. By the time … I mean, he died in the ’90s, but by the time we got to the ’90s, racing was already a lot safer than it was when Nik Lauda raced in the ’60s. That level of danger is no longer there. There’s still just a remnant of it and it is still dangerous, but nothing like that.
(04:58:21) And it’s a little hard to compare through the ages who’s the greatest driver of all time. I think there’s a fair argument that Senna is, but we don’t have the data. We don’t know who he was up against. How would he fare if we pitted him against Max Verstappen today?
(04:58:35) I do think sometimes that you can have a bit of a nostalgia for the all-time greats, but the world moves forward and new records are being set all the time and the professionalism keeps improving, sometimes to the detriment of the sport, I think.
(04:58:48) There’s a lot of professional drivers who are not only just very good at driving, but are very good at being corporate spokespeople, and it used to be quite different. There used to be more characters in racing that had a bit more personality that they were allowed to shine because there weren’t a billion sponsorships on the line that they were afraid to lose.
Cars
Lex Fridman (04:59:06) Ridiculous question, what’s the greatest car ever made, or maybe what’s the funnest one to drive?
DHH (04:59:11) The greatest car for me of all time is the Pagani Zonda.
Lex Fridman (04:59:15) Okay, I’m looking this up, Pagani Zonda.
DHH (04:59:18) So the Pagani Zonda was made by this wonderful Argentinian called Horacio Pagani.
Lex Fridman (04:59:25) My God, that’s a beautiful car. Wow.
DHH (04:59:26) It’s a gorgeous car. You can look up mine. It’s the Pagani Zonda HH. Yep. So, that’s a car I had made in 2010 after we visited the factory in Modena, and by sheer accident ended up with this car, but it became my favorite car in the world basically. When I watched an episode of Top Gear, I think in 2005, where one of the presenters was driving the Pagani Zonda F around and I just thought, “That’s the most beautiful car in the world. It is the most incredibly sounding car in the world. If I one day have the option, this is what I want.”
(05:00:14) And then I had the option in 2010. I’ve had the car ever since. I’m never ever going to sell it. It’s truly a masterpiece that’s stood the test of time. There’s some great cars from history that are recognized as being great in their time. This car is still great.
Lex Fridman (05:00:30) Have you taken it on the racetrack?
DHH (05:00:32) I have. It’s terrible at that. But I don’t want to say it’s terrible at that. That’s not what it’s designed for. It’s designed for the road and that’s why it’s great. There are a lot of fast cars that are straddling their race car for the road. You don’t actually want a race car for the world. A race car for the world is a pain in the ass. It’s way too stiff. It’s way too loud. It’s way too uncomfortable. You can’t actually take it on a road trip.
Lex Fridman (05:00:55) So this actually feels good driving on normal roads?
Lex Fridman (05:00:59) And you, of course always go to speed limit?
DHH (05:01:00) Always. This is why I love having this car in Spain because they’re a little more relaxed. Not entirely relaxed, but more relaxed than they are in a lot of places. In Denmark, I kid you not, if you are on the highway and you go more than twice the speed limit, they confiscate your car and keep it. You’re not getting it back. They don’t even care if it’s your car or not. If you were borrowing my car and you went twice the speed limit, it’s gone.
(05:01:26) So they don’t do that in Spain. I mean, in most places, except for the German Autobahn, they get pissy if you go twice the speed limit for all sorts of fair reasons. I’m not advocating that you should be going much more than that, but there are certain special roads where you can’t open things up and no one’s in harm’s way, and that’s an incredible sensation. And I do think that some of those speed limits actually are kind of silly, and I’m not just saying that in a vacuum.
(05:01:50) In Germany, they have the glorious Autobahn, and on the Autobahn there is no speed limit in a bunch of segments. And they’re so committed to their speed-limitless Autobahn, which is by the way, very weird of Germans. They usually love rules. They’re usually very precise about it, and then they have this glorious thing called the Autobahn.
(05:02:09) There was a great case a couple of years ago where a guy took out a Bugatti Chiron, went 400 kilometers an hour on the Autobahn, and he filmed it and put it on YouTube and a case was brought against him because even though they don’t have a speed limit, they do have rules that you can’t drive recklessly, and he won the case. He wasn’t driving recklessly. He was just going very, very fast.
(05:02:32) I’ve done the Autobahn a couple of times. My wife and I went on a road trip in Europe in 2009, and I got the Lamborghini Gallardo we were driving up to 200 miles an hour. And I’d driven 200 miles an hour or close to it on a racetrack before. That feels like one thing. Driving on a public road 200 miles an hour feels really, really fast.
DHH (05:02:54) Actually a little scary, yes, because you constantly think, on a racetrack you know the road, you know the surface. You can walk the track in most of the time. You can know if there’s a dip. On a public road you can’t know if there’s suddenly a pothole. Presumably there’s not going to be a pothole on the German Autobahn, but it does feel a little scary, but also exhilarating.
(05:03:13) Speed is just intrinsically, really fun. I don’t know anyone I’ve taken out in a fast car … Well, actually I do know a few people. Most people I take out in a fast car, they grin. It’s a human reaction to grin when you go really fast.
Lex Fridman (05:03:28) Do you know what’s the fastest you’ve ever gone?
DHH (05:03:31) It was probably at Le Mans, I think when the LMP2s were at their maximum power and had 600 horsepower and really sticky tires, we were going 340 kilometers an hour, which is just over 200 miles an hour, a bit over 200 miles an hour. That does feel fast.
(05:03:47) And it’s really interesting with speed, is that the difference between going, let’s say 150 and 160 doesn’t feel that much actually, those 10 miles an hour. But the difference between going 190 and 200 feels crazy faster, which as a percentage change is actually less than going from 150 to 160, but there’s some sense of exponentiality once you get up to those limits, where it’s just on a completely different level.
Lex Fridman (05:04:16) Yeah, because to me, 110, 120 feels fast. 200, that’s crazy.
Lex Fridman (05:04:26) I got to ask you about the details of your programming setup, the IDE, all that kind of stuff. Let’s paint the picture of the perfect programming setup. Do you have a programming setup that you enjoy? Are you very flexible? How many monitors? What kind of keyboard? What kind of chair? What kind of desk?
DHH (05:04:51) It’s funny because if you’d asked me, let’s see, a year and a half ago, I would’ve given you the same answer as I would’ve given anyone for basically 20 years. I want a Mac. I like the Magic Keyboard. I like the single monitor. Apple makes an awesome 6K 32-inch XDR screen that I still haven’t found anyone who’ve beaten that I still use. Even though I switched away from Apple computers, I still use their monitor because it’s just fantastic. But I’ve always been a single screen kind of guy.
(05:05:25) I do like a big screen, but I don’t want multiple screens. I’ve never found that, that really works with my perception. I want to be able to just focus on a single thing. I don’t want all of it all over the place, and I’ve always used multiple virtual desktops and being able to switch back and forth between those things.
(05:05:41) But the setup I have today is Linux, I switched to a little over a year ago after I finally got fed up with Apple enough that I couldn’t do that anymore. And then I use this low-profile mechanical keyboard called the Lofree Flow84, which is just a …
DHH (05:06:01) … Flow84, which is just the most glorious-sounding keyboard I’ve ever heard. I know there are a lot of connoisseurs of mechanical keyboards that’ll probably contest me on this. This is too thocky or too clicky or too clacky or whatever. But for me, the Lofree Flow84 is just a delight that I did not even know existed, which is so funny because I’ve been programming for a long time. Mechanical keyboards have been a thing for a long time.
(05:06:31) And the keyboard, when you look at it like this, it looks plain. It doesn’t look extravagant. But the tactile sensation you get out of pushing those keys, the thocky sound that you hear when the keys hit the board, it’s just sublime. And I’m kicking myself that I was in this Mac bubble for so long that I wasn’t even in the market to find this.
(05:06:57) I knew mechanical keyboards existed, but to be blunt, I thought it was a bit of a nerd thing that only real nerds that were much more nerdy than me would ever care about. And then I got out of the Apple bubble and suddenly, I had to find everything again. I had to find a new mouse, I had to find a new keyboard, I had to find everything. And I thought, “All right. Let me give mechanical keyboards a try.” And I gave quite a few of them a try.
(05:07:19) The Keychron is one of the big brands in that. I didn’t like that at all. I tried a bunch of other keyboards. And then I finally found this keyboard and I just went like… Angels are singing. Where have you been my whole life? We spend, as programmers, so much of our time interacting with those keys. It really kind of matters.
(05:07:36) In a way, I didn’t fully appreciate it. I used to defend the Apple Magic Keyboard like, “Hey, it’s great. It’s actually a great keyboard.” And I think for what it is, this ultra-low profile, ultra-low travel, it’s actually a really nice keyboard. But once you’ve tried a longer-travel mechanical keyboard, there’s no going back.
Lex Fridman (05:07:54) You do have to remember, in many ways, both on the software side and the hardware side, that you do spend a lot of hours-
Lex Fridman (05:08:04) And also worth exploring until you find the thing where the angels start singing, whatever.
DHH (05:08:09) That’s exactly right. And I actually do regret that a little bit, especially with this damn keyboard. I could have been listening to these beautiful thocky keys for years and years. But sometimes you have to get really pissed off before you open your eyes and see that something else exists.
(05:08:26) I feel the same way about Linux. So I’ve been using Linux on the server since late ’90s probably. We ran servers on Linux back then. I never seriously considered it as a desktop option. I never ran Linux before directly myself. I always thought, “Do you know what? I want to focus on programming. I don’t have time for all these configuration files and all this setup bullshit and whatnot. And Apple is close enough. It’s built on Unix underpinnings. Why do I need to bother with Linux?”
(05:08:56) And again, it was one of those things. I needed to try new things and try something else to realize that there is other things other than Apple. And again, it’s not because I hate Apple. I think they still make good computers. I think a lot of the software is still also pretty okay. But I have come to realize that as a web developer, Linux is just better.
DHH (05:09:20) Linux is just better. It’s closer to what I deploy on. The tooling is actually phenomenal. And if you spend a bit of time setting it up, you can record a reproducible environment that I’ve now done with this Omakub concept or project that I’ve done, that I can set up a new Linux machine in less than 30 minutes and it’s perfect.
(05:09:41) It’s not pretty good. It’s not like I still need to spend two hours on it. It’s perfect. Because you can encode all aspects of the development environment into this. And I didn’t know. I didn’t even know, to be fair, that Linux could look as good as it can.
(05:09:56) If you look at a stock Ubuntu or Fedora boot, I mean, not that it’s ugly, but I’d pick the Mac any day of the week. You look at Omakub, I mean, I’m biased here, of course, because I built it with my own sensibilities, but I look at that and go like, “This is better. This is beautiful.”
(05:10:13) And then you look at some of those true Linux ricing setups where people go nuts with everything. And you go, “Oh, yeah, I remember when computers used to be fun in this way,” when there was this individuality and this setup, and it wasn’t just all bland, the sameness. And I think that’s the flip side sometimes of something like Apple, where they have really strong opinions and they have really good opinions and they have very good taste, and it looks very nice, and it also looks totally the same.
(05:10:40) And Linux has far more variety and far more texture and flavor, sometimes also annoyances and bugs and whatever. But I run Linux now. It’s Ubuntu-based with the Omakub stuff on top, the Lofree keyboard. I use a Logitech. What’s it called? The MX 3 mouse, which I love how it feels in my hand. I don’t love how it looks.
(05:11:03) I actually was a Magic Mouse stan for the longest time. I thought it was genius that Apple integrated the trackpad into a mouse, and I used that. And I always thought it was ridiculous that people would slag it just because you had to charge it by flipping it over because the battery would last for three months and then you’d charge it for half an hour.
(05:11:23) I thought that was a perfect compatibility with my sensibilities. I don’t mind giving up a little inconvenience if something is beautiful, and that Magic Mouse is beautiful. But it wasn’t going to work on Linux, so I found something else. The MX 3 is nice, but I sometimes do wish the Magic Mouse… That’s pretty good.
Lex Fridman (05:11:40) Yeah. Linux is really great for customizing everything, for tiling, for macros, for all of that. I also do the same in Windows with AutoHotKey, where you just customize the whole thing to your preferences.
DHH (05:11:52) If you’re a developer, you should learn how to control your environment with the keyboard. It’s faster, it’s more fluid. I think one of those silly things I’ve come to truly appreciate about my Omakub setup is that I can, in whatever time it takes to refresh the screen, probably five milliseconds, switch from one virtual desktop to another.
(05:12:14) Even on Windows, you can’t get it that smooth. You can get close. You can’t get it that smooth. On macOS, for whatever reason, Apple insists on having this infuriating animation when you switch between virtual desktops, which makes it just that you don’t want to. You don’t want to run full-screen apps because it’s too cumbersome to switch between the virtual desktops. The kind of immediacy that you can get from a wonderful Linux setup in that regard is just next-level.
Lex Fridman (05:12:43) Yeah. And it seems like a subtle thing, but a difference of milliseconds and latency between switching the virtual desktops, for example, I don’t know, it changes-
DHH (05:12:53) It changes how you use the computer. It really does.
Lex Fridman (05:12:55) Similar thing with VR, right? If there’s some kind of latency, it just completely takes you out of it. Yeah.
DHH (05:13:01) And it’s funny. I actually had to watch… I think it was ThePrimeagen on YouTube when he was showing off his setup, and I was seeing how quickly he was switching between those virtual desktops. And I’d always been using virtual desktops, but I didn’t like switching too much because just of that latency. And it’s like, “Oh, you can do that on Linux? Oh, that’s pretty cool.”
DHH (05:13:34) TextMate. That was the main blocker of moving away from Apple. Everything else, I thought, “Do you know what? I can swing it.” But TextMate was and is a wonderful editor, one I helped birth into this world. The programmer, Allan Odgaard, is a good friend of mine, all the way back from the party days when we were lugging our computers around.
DHH (05:13:55) And he was a big Mac guy. And in 2005, he was writing this editor, and I helped him with the project management of keeping him on track, keeping him focused, and getting something released because I really wanted it for myself. And I thought this was the last editor. I thought I was never going to switch.
Lex Fridman (05:14:14) Forgive me for not knowing, but how featureful is this editor?
DHH (05:14:20) It’s quite featureful, but it’s a GUI-driven editor in some regards. It was really early on with ways of recording macros and having sophisticated syntax highlighting, and it did a bunch of firsts. And it was just a really pleasant editing experience.
(05:14:40) I think these days, a lot of people would just use VS Code. VS Code exists in the same universe as TextMate in some ways. And actually, I think it’s compatible with the original TextMate bundles, the original TextMate format. So it really trailed a path there, but it also just didn’t evolve.
(05:14:58) Now, a lot of people saw a huge problem with that. They were like, “Oh, it needs to have more features. It needs to have all these things.” I was like, I’m happy with this text editor that hasn’t changed at all basically when Allan stopped working on it for a decade or more. I don’t need anything else. Because as our original discussion went, I don’t want an IDE. I don’t want the editor to write code for me. I want a text editor. I want to interact with characters directly.
(05:15:25) And Neovim allows me to do that in some ways that are even better than TextMate, and I love TextMate. But Vi, as you know, once you learn the commands, and it sounds… I sometimes feel like Vi fans overplay how difficult it is to learn because it makes them perhaps seem kind of more awesome that they were able to do it. It’s not that difficult. And it doesn’t take that long, in my opinion, to learn just enough combo moves to get that high of, “Holy shit. I could not do this in any other editor.”
Lex Fridman (05:15:56) How long did it take you? And by the way, I don’t know. I haven’t yet… Well, I know intellectually, but just like with kids, I haven’t gone in all the way in. I haven’t used Vim.
DHH (05:16:08) You have a treat in mind. Well, I switched in about… When I switched here about a year ago, I had three days of cursing, where I thought it was absolutely terrible and it was never going to happen, and I had three days of annoyance. And already, the next week, I was like, “This is sweet. I’m not going anywhere.”
DHH (05:16:26) But I also had a bit of a headstart. About 20 years ago in the early 2000s, I tried Vim for a summer and it didn’t stick. I didn’t, for whatever reason, love it at the time. But Neovim is really good.
(05:16:40) The key to Neovim is to realize that you don’t have to build the whole damn editor yourself. So a lot of Neovim stans are like, “Here’s how to write the config from scratch.” Over 17 episodes, that’s going to take you three weeks. I don’t care that much.
(05:16:54) I love a great editor, I love to tailor it a little bit, but not that much. So you have to pair Neovim with this thing called LazyVim. LazyVim.org is a distribution for Neovim that takes all the drudgery out of getting an amazing editor experience right out of the box.
Lex Fridman (05:17:14) Ridiculous question. We talked about a bunch of programming languages. You told us how much you love JavaScript. It’s your second favorite programming language. Would TypeScript be the third then?
DHH (05:17:26) TypeScript wouldn’t even be in this universe. I hate TypeScript as much as I like JavaScript.
Lex Fridman (05:17:33) You hate… Oh, man. I’m not smart enough to understand the math of that. Okay. Before I ask about other programming languages, if you can encapsulate your hatred of TypeScript into something that could be human-interpretable, what would be the reasoning?
DHH (05:17:50) JavaScript smells a lot like Ruby when it comes to some aspects of its metaprogramming, and TypeScript just complicates that to an infuriating degree when you’re trying to write that kind of code. And even when you’re trying to write the normal kind of code, none of the benefits that accrue to people who like it, like auto-completion, is something I care about. I don’t care about auto-completion because I’m not using an IDE.
(05:18:14) Now, I understand that that is part of what separates it and why I don’t see the benefits. I only see the costs. I see the extra typing, I see the type gymnastics that you sometimes have to do and where a bunch of people give up and just do any instead, right? That they don’t actually use the type system because it’s just too frustrating to use.
(05:18:35) So I’ve ever only felt the frustration of TypeScript and the obfuscation of TypeScript in the code that gave me no payoff. Again, I understand that there is a payoff. I don’t want the payoff. So for my situation, I’m not willing to make the trade and I’m not willing to take a language that underneath is as dynamic of a language as Ruby is and then turn it into this pretend statically typed language. I find that just intellectually insulting.
Lex Fridman (05:19:08) Do you think it will and do you think it should die, TypeScript?
DHH (05:19:12) I don’t want to take something away from people who enjoy it. So if you like TypeScript, all the power to you. If you’re using TypeScript because you think that’s what a professional program is supposed to do, here’s my permission; you don’t have to use TypeScript.
Lex Fridman (05:19:24) There’s something deeply enjoyable about a brilliant programmer such as yourself, DHH, talking shit. It’s one of my favorite things in life. What are the top three programming languages everyone should learn if you’re talking to a beginner?
Programming language for beginners
DHH (05:19:41) I would 100% start with Ruby. It is magic for beginners in terms of just understanding the core concepts of conditionals and loops and whatever, because it makes it so easy. Even if you’re just making a shell program that’s outputting to the terminal, getting hello-world running in Ruby is basically puts, P-U-T-S, space, start quotes, “Hello world,” end quotes, you’re done, right? There’s no fluff, there’s nothing to wrap it into.
(05:20:10) There are other languages that does that, especially the Perl or Python would be rather similar, but Go would not, Java would not. There’s a lot of other languages that have a lot more ceremony and boilerplate. Ruby has none of it. So it’s a wonderful starting language.
(05:20:26) There’s a book called Learn to Program by Pine that uses Ruby essentially to just teach basic programming principles that I’ve seen heavily recommended. So that’s a great language.
Lex Fridman (05:20:38) How quickly would you go to Rails?
DHH (05:20:39) It depends on what you want to do. If you want to build web applications, go to Rails right away, learn Ruby along with Rails. Because I think what really helps power through learning programming is to build programs that you want. Right? If you’re just learning it in the abstract, it’s difficult to motivate yourself to actually do it well.
(05:20:56) Some people learn languages just for the fun of them. Most people do not. Most people learn it because they have a mission; they want to build a program, they want to become a programmer. So you got to use it for something real. And I actually find that it’s easier to learn programming that way too because it drives your learning process.
(05:21:12) You can’t just learn the whole thing upfront. You can’t just sit down and read the language specification and then go like, “Ooh,” like Neo, “Now I know kung fu. Now I know Ruby.” It doesn’t download that way. You actually have to type it out in anger on a real program.
DHH (05:21:30) So I would start there. But then number two probably would be JavaScript because JavaScript just is the language you need to know if you want to work with the web, and the web is the greatest application platform of all time if you’re making business software or collaboration software, all this kind of stuff.
(05:21:47) If you’re making video games, you should probably go off and learn C++ or C or something else like that. But if you’re in the realm of web applications, you got to learn JavaScript. Regardless of what else you learn, you got to learn JavaScript.
Lex Fridman (05:21:58) So if you’re learning Ruby, what does Ruby not have in terms of programming concepts that you would need other languages for?
DHH (05:22:09) I don’t know if there’s any concepts missing, but it doesn’t have the speed or the low-level access of memory manipulation-
DHH (05:22:17) … that you would need to build a 3D gaming engine, for example. No one’s going to build that in Ruby. You could build quite low-level stuff when it comes to web technologies in Ruby, but at some point, you’re going to hit the limit and you should use something else.
(05:22:32) I’m not someone who prescribes just Ruby for everything. Just once you reach the level of abstraction that’s involved with web applications, Ruby is superb. But if you’re writing, for example, a HTTP proxy, Go is great for that. We’ve written quite a few HTTP proxies lately at the company for various reasons, including our cloud exit and so forth.
(05:22:54) And Kevin, one of the programmers I’m working with, he writes all of that in Go. Go just have the primitives and it has the pace and the speed to do that really well. I highly recommend it. If you’re writing an HTTP general proxy, do it in Go. Great language for that. Don’t write your business logic in Go. I know people do, but I don’t see the point in that.
Lex Fridman (05:23:14) So what would you say are the three? So, Go, Ruby, plus Rails, JavaScript.
DHH (05:23:19) Yeah. If you’re interested in working with the web, I’d probably pick those three. Go, Ruby, and JavaScript.
Lex Fridman (05:23:25) Go, Ruby, and JavaScript. Okay. Functional languages.
Lex Fridman (05:23:30) They are always going to show up. It must be some kind of OCaml industrial complex or something like this, but they always say, “Mention OCaml.”
DHH (05:23:41) I love that there are people who love functional languages to that degree. Those people are not me. I don’t care at all. I care about functional principles when they help me in these isolated cases where that’s just better than everything else. But at heart, I’m an object-oriented guy. That’s just how I think about programs. That’s how I like to think about programs. That’s how I carve up a big problem space into the main language. Objects are my jam.
Lex Fridman (05:24:10) Yeah, me too. So I program in Lisp a bunch for AI applications for basic… So, Othello, chess engines, that kind of stuff. And I did try OCaml just to force myself to program just a very basic Game of Life, a little simulation. Lisp is just parentheses everywhere. It’s actually not readable at all.
DHH (05:24:34) That’s the problem I’ve had with Lisp.
Lex Fridman (05:24:38) OCaml is very intuitive, very readable. It’s nice.
DHH (05:24:40) I really should pick up a language like that at some point. I’ve been programming long enough that it’s a little embarrassing that I haven’t actually done anything real in anger in a fully functional programming language.
Lex Fridman (05:24:50) Yeah. But I have to figure out, I’m sure there’s an answer to this, what can I do that would be useful for me that I actually want to build?
DHH (05:25:12) And that’s my problem too. I don’t care as much about these low-level problems in computer science. I care about the high-level. I care about writing software. I care about the abstraction layer that really floats well with web applications and business logic.
(05:25:29) And I’ve come to accept that about myself, even though, as we talked about, when I was a kid, I really wanted to become a games programmer. And then I saw what it took to write a collision-detection engine, and I go like, “Yeah, that’s not me at all.” I’m never going to be into vector matrix manipulation or any of that stuff. It’s way too much math. And I’m more of a writing person than of a math person.
Lex Fridman (05:25:54) I mean, just in the way you were speaking today, you have a poetic, literary approach to programming.
DHH (05:26:04) That’s actually exactly right. So I did actually a keynote at RailsConf 10 years ago, where I called myself a software writer. I mean, I’m not the first person to say that. “Software writer” has been in the vernacular for a long time.
(05:26:16) But the modern identity that most programmers adopt when they’re trying to be serious is software engineer, and I reject that label. I’m not an engineer. Occasionally, I dabble in some engineering, but the vast majority of the time, I’m a software writer. I write software for human consumption and for my own delight.
(05:26:40) I can get away with that because I’m working in a high-level language like Ruby, working on collaboration software and to-do lists and all the other stuff. Again, if I was trying to apply my talent to writing 3D game engines, no, that’s not the right mindset. That’s not the right identity.
(05:26:58) But I find that the software engineering identity flattens things a little bit. I’d like to think that we have software writers and software mathematicians, for example, and then those are actually richer ways of describing the abstraction level that you’re working at than “engineer.”
Lex Fridman (05:27:16) Yeah. And I think if AI becomes more and more successful, I think we’ll need the software writer skill more and more because it feels like that’s the realm of which… Because it’s not writer. You’re going to have to do the software, you’re going to have to be a computer person, but there’s a more… I don’t know. I just don’t want to romanticize it, but it’s more poetic, it’s more literary. It more feels like writing a good blog post than-
DHH (05:27:48) I actually wish that AI had a bit higher standards for writing. I find the fact that it accepts my slobby, incomplete sentences a little offensive. I wish there was a strict mode for AI where it would snap my fingers if I was just feeding it keywords and like, “Speak proper. Do pronunciation, do punctuation.” Because I love that. I love crafting a just-right sentence that hasn’t been boiled down, that has no meat on it, has no character in it. It’s succinct, it’s not overly flowery. It’s just right.
(05:28:26) That writing phase to me is just addictive. And I find that when programming is the best, it’s almost equivalent exactly to that. You also have to solve a problem. You’re not just communicating a solution. You have to actually figure out what are you trying to say. But even writing has that.
(05:28:45) Half the time when I start writing a blog post, I don’t know exactly which arguments I’m going to use; they develop as part of the writing process. And that’s how writing software happens too. You know roughly the kind of problem you’re trying to solve. You don’t know exactly how you’re going to solve it. And as you start typing, the solution emerges.
Lex Fridman (05:29:05) And actually, as far as I understand, you and Jason are working on a new book. It’s in the early days of that kind of topic. I think he said… he tweeted that it’s going to be titled something like, “We don’t know what we’re doing upfront” or something like that. That kind of topic. And you figure it out along the way.
DHH (05:29:22) That’s a big part of it; trying to give more people the permission to trust their own instincts and their own gut and realizing that developing that supercomputer in your stomach is actually the work of a career and that you should not discard those feelings in preference to over… or not even complicated; to analytics, to intellectualism.
(05:29:50) Very often when we look at the big decisions we’ve had to make, they’ve come from the gut, where you cannot fully articulate why do I think this is the right thing. Well, because I’ve been in this business for 20 years and I’ve seen a bunch of things and I’ve talked to a bunch of people, and that is percolating into this being the right answer.
(05:30:08) A lot of people are very skeptical about that in business or unable to trust it because it feels like they can’t rationalize. Why are we doing something? Well, because I feel like it, damn it. That’s a great privilege of being a bootstrapped, independent founder who don’t owe their business to someone else and doesn’t have to produce a return because I feel like a lot of the bullshit really creeps in when you’re trying to rationalize to other people why you do the things you do and why you take the decisions that you do.
(05:30:34) If you don’t have anyone to answer to, you are free to follow your gut, and that’s hell of an enjoyable way to work, and it’s also and very often the correct way to work. Your gut knows a lot. You can’t articulate it, but it’s spot-on more times than not.
Lex Fridman (05:30:54) Yeah. Having to make a plan can be a paralyzing thing. I suppose there’s different kinds of brains. And first of all, I can’t wait to read that book if it materializes.
(05:31:06) I often feel like in the more interesting things I do in my life, I really don’t know what I’m doing upfront. And I think there’s a lot of people around me that care for me that really want me to know what I’m doing. They’re like, “What’s the plan? Why are you doing this crazy thing?”
(05:31:24) And if I had to wait until I have a plan, I’m not going to do it. They have different brains on this kind of stuff. Some people really are planners and it maybe energizes them, but I think most creative pursuits, most really interesting, most novel pursuits are like, you kind of have to just take the leap and then just figure out as you go.
DHH (05:31:45) My favorite essay in Rework is the last one, and it’s entitled, “Inspiration is perishable.” And I think that captures a lot of it, that if you take the time to do a detailed plan, you may very well have lost the inspiration by the time you’re done.
(05:32:02) If you follow the inspiration in that moment and trust your gut, trust your own competence that you will figure it out, you’re going to get so much more back. You’re going to go on the adventure you otherwise wouldn’t have, whether that’s just the business decisions or life decision. You have to seize that inspiration.
(05:32:21) There’s a great set of children’s books written by this Japanese author about chasing an idea and trying to get a hold of it, and it’s beautifully illustrated as an idea is something that’s floating around, as something you have to catch and latch onto, that I really feel captures this notion that inspiration is perishable; it’ll disappear. If you just put it back on the shelf and say, “Well, I got to be diligent about this, I got to line up a plan,” you may run out, and then there’s no steam to keep going.
Open source
Lex Fridman (05:32:54) I have to ask you about open source. What does it take to run a successful open source project? You’ve spoken about that it’s a misconception that open source is democratic. It’s actually meritocratic. That’s a beautiful way to put it. So there often is a benevolent dictator at the top often. So can you just speak to that, having run successful open source projects yourself and being a benevolent dictator yourself?
DHH (05:33:26) Which is going to be a bit of a biased piece of evidence here, but-
DHH (05:33:33) It’s great. We should definitely have dictators and they should control everything, especially when the dictator is me. Now, well, I think I learned very early on that a quick way to burn out in open source is to treat it as a business, as though your users are customers, as though they have claims of legitimacy on your time and your attention and your direction.
(05:33:56) Because I faced this almost immediately with Ruby on Rails. As soon as it was released, there were a million people who had all sorts of opinions about where I ought to take it. And not just opinions, but actually demands. “Unless you implement an Oracle database adapter, this is always going to be a toy.” It was actually more or less that exact demand that prompted me to have a slide at one of the early Rails conferences that just said, “Fuck you.”
DHH (05:34:27) I’m not going to do what you tell me to. I’m here as a bringer of gift. I am sharing code that I wrote on my own time, on my own volition. And you don’t have to say thank you. I mean, it’d be nice if you did. You can take the code and do whatever you want with it, you can contribute back if you want, but you can’t tell me what to do or where to go or how to act.
(05:34:51) I’m not a vendor. This is a fundamental misconception that users of open source occasionally step into because they’re used to buying software from companies who really care about their business. I care about people using my software, I think it’s great, but we don’t have a transactional relationship. I don’t get something back when you tell me what to do, except grief, and I don’t want it, so you can keep it.
(05:35:18) So my open source philosophy from the start has been I got to do this primarily for me. I love when other people find use in my open source. It’s not my primary motivation. I’m not primarily doing it for other people. I’m primarily doing it for me and my own objectives.
(05:35:35) Because as Adam Smith said, it’s not for the benevolence of the butcher that we expect our daily meat. It’s for his self-interest. And I actually find that to be a beautiful thought that our commons increase in value when we all pursue our self-interest, certainly in the realm of open source.
(05:35:57) This is also why I reject this notion that open source is in some sort of crisis, that there’s a funding crisis, that we have to spend more. No, we don’t. Open source has never been doing better. Open source has never controlled more domains in software than it has right now. There is no crisis.
(05:36:14) There’s a misconception from some people making open source and from a lot of people using open source that open source is primarily like commercial software; something you buy and something where you can then make demands as a customer and that the customer is always right. The customer is not always right, not even in business, but certainly not in open source.
(05:36:35) In open source, the customer as it is, is a receiver of gifts. We are having a gift exchange. I show up and give you my code. If you like it, you can use it. And if you have some code that fits in with where I’m going with this, I would love to get those gifts back. And we can keep trading like that.
(05:36:54) I give you more gifts. You give me some of your gifts. Together, we pool all the gifts such that someone showing up brand new just get a mountain of gifts. This is the magic thing of open source is it increases the total sum value of what’s in the commons when we all pursue our own self-interest.
(05:37:10) So I’m building things for Rails that I need. And you know what? You want me to do that. You do not want me to build things that I don’t need on behalf of other people because I’ll do a crap job. I build much better software when I can evaluate the quality of that software by my own use.
(05:37:28) I need this feature. I’m going to build a good version of that feature, and I’m going to build just enough just for me. So I’m not going to bloat it. I’m not trying to attract the customer here. I’m not trying to see some angle. I’m just building what I need. And if you go into open source with that mentality that you’re building for you and everything else is a bonus, I think you have all the ingredients to go the distance.
(05:37:53) I think the people who burn out in open source is when they go in thinking, “I’m making all these gifts. I don’t really need them myself, but I’m hoping someone else does and maybe they’ll also give me some money.” That’s a losing proposition. It never basically works.
(05:38:08) If you want money for your software, you should just sell it. We have a perfectly fine model of commercial software that people can make that kind and then they can sell it. But I find a lot of confusion, let’s just call it that politely, in open source contributors who want to have their cake and eat it too.
(05:38:26) They like the mode of working with open source, they maybe even like the status that comes from open source, but they also would like to earn a living for making that open source. And therefore, they occasionally end up with the kind of grievances that someone who feels underappreciated at work will develop when others aren’t doing enough to recognize their great gifts.
Lex Fridman (05:38:47) And then they might walk away. I wish I had more insight into their mind state of the individual people that are running these projects, if they’re feeling sad or they need more money. It’s just such a dark box.
DHH (05:39:16) You are not obligated to do this code forever. You’re obligated to do this for as long as you want to do it. That’s basically your own obligation.
Lex Fridman (05:39:26) Okay, so you might criticize this and push back. You did write a blog post on forever, ” Until the end of the internet” with [inaudible 05:39:32]. There is a beautiful aspect, and you found a good balance there. But I don’t know, you’re bringing so much joy to people with this thing you created. It’s not an obligation, but there’s a real beauty to taking care of this thing you’ve created.
Lex Fridman (05:39:49) And not forgetting… I think what the open source creator is not seeing enough, how many lives you’re making better. There’s certain pieces of software that I just-
Lex Fridman (05:40:00) … lives you’re making better. There’s certain pieces of software that I just quietly use a lot and they bring my life joy and I wish I could communicate that well. There’s ways to donate, but it’s inefficient. It’s usually hard to donate.
DHH (05:40:16) It is. There’s some ways for some people that made it easier. GitHub donations is one way of doing it. I donate to a few people even though I don’t love the paradigm. I also accept that we can have multiple paradigms. I accept that I can do open source for one set of motivations and other people can do open source for other motivations. We don’t all have to do it the same way, but I do want to counter the misconception that open source is somehow in a crisis unless we all start paying for open source. That model already exists. It’s commercial software. It works very well and plenty of great companies have been built off the back of it and the expectations are very clear. I pay you this amount and I get this software.
(05:40:55) Open source, once you start mixing money into, it gets real muddy real fast, and a lot of it’s just from those misaligned expectations that if you feel like you’re starving artists as an open source developer and you are owed X amount of money because your software is popular, you’re delusional and you need to knock that off. Just get back on track where you realize that you’re putting gifts into the world and if you get something back in terms of monetary compensation, okay, that’s a bonus. But if you need that money back in terms of monetary compensation, just charge for software or go work for a software company that will employ you to do open source. There’s tons of that. That is probably actually the primary mode that open source software is being developed in the world today. Commercial companies making open source that they need themselves and then contributing it back.
WordPress drama
Lex Fridman (05:41:46) So I’m glad you drew some hard lines. Here is a good moment to bring up what I think is maybe one of the greatest open source projects ever, WordPress. And you spoke up in October 24 about some of the stuff that’s been going on with WordPress’s founder, Matt Mullenweg, in a blog post, “Open source royalty and mad kings,” is a really good blog post on just the idea of Benevolent Dictators For Life, this model for open source projects. And then the basic implication was that Matt, as the BDFL of WordPress has lost his way a bit with this battle with WP Engine. So I should also say that I really love WordPress. It brings me joy. I think it’s a beacon of what open source could be. I think it’s made the internet better, a lot of people to create wonderful websites. And I also think, now you might disagree with this, but from everything I’ve seen, WP Engine just gives me bad vibes.
(05:43:03) I think they’re not the good guy in this. I don’t like it. I understand the frustration, I understand all of it, but I don’t think that excuses the behavior. There is a bit of… See this kind of counter to a little bit what you said, which is when you have an open source project of that size, there is a bit of a… When you’re the king of a project of a kingdom that large, there’s a bit of responsibility. Anyway, could you speak maybe, to your empathy of Matt and to your criticism? And maybe paint a path of how he and WordPress can be winning again.
DHH (05:43:52) First, I echo what you said about what a wonderful thing it is that WordPress success, there are not many projects in the open source world or in the world at large that has had as big of an impact on the internet as WordPress has. He deserves a ton of accolades for that work. So that was my engagement, essentially my premise. Do you know what? I had tremendous respect for what Matt has built with WordPress, what that entire ecosystem has built around itself. It’s a true marvel, but there’s some principles that are larger than my personal sympathies to the characters involved. I agree. The Silver Lake private equity company that’s involved with WP Engine is not my natural ally. I’m not the natural ally of private equity doing some game with VP Engine. That’s not my interest in the case. My interest is essentially a set of principles and the principles are if you release something as an open source, people are free to use it as they see fit and they’re free to donate code, or resources, or money back to the community as they see fit.
(05:45:10) You may disagree about whether they’ve done enough, whether they should do more, but you can’t show up after you’ve given the gift of free software to the world and then say, “Now that you’ve used that gift, you actually owe me a huge slide of your business because you got too successful using the thing I gave you for free.” You don’t get to take a gift back. That’s why we have open source licenses. They stipulate exactly what the obligations are on both sides of the equation. The users of open source don’t get to demand what the makers of open source do and how they act and the makers of open source don’t get to suddenly show up with a ransom note to the users and say, “Actually you owe me for all sorts of use.” I’m 100% allergic to that kind of interaction. And I think Matt unfortunately for whatever reason, got so wrapped up in what he was owed that he failed to realize what he was destroying. WordPress and Automatic already makes a ton of money.
(05:46:19) This is part of the wonder of WordPress. This is a project that generates 100s of millions of dollars and Matt didn’t feel like he was getting enough of that. That’s not a good argument, bro. You can’t just violate the spirit and the letter of these open source licenses and just start showing up with demand letters even to characters that are not particularly sympathetic. This goes to the root of my interpretation of open source in general. The GPL is a particular license that actually demands code from people who use it under certain circumstances. I’ve never liked the GPL. I don’t want your shitty code. If you don’t want to give it to me, what am I going to do with that? Some code dump that you’ve… I’m not on board with that part of Stallman’s vision at all. I love the MIT license. To me that is the perfect license because it is mercilessly short.
(05:47:17) I think it’s two paragraphs, three paragraphs, really short and it basically says, “Here’s some software. It comes with no warranty. You can’t sue me. You can’t demand anything, but you can do whatever the hell you want with it. Have a nice life.” That’s a perfect open source interaction in my opinion, and that license needs to be upheld. These licenses in general, even the GPL, even if I don’t like it, we have to abide by them because if we just set aside those licenses, when we in a moment’s notice feel like something’s slightly unfair, we’ve lost everything. We’ve lost the entire framework that allowed open source to prosper and allowed open source to become such an integral part of commerce too. I mean, back when open source was initially finding its feet, it was at war with commercial software. Stallman is at war with commercial software and always has been.
(05:48:11) Bill Gates was in return at war with open source for the longest time. The open source licenses and the clarity that they provide allowed us to end that war. Today, commercial software and open source software can peacefully coexist. I make commercial software, I sell Basecamp, I sell HEY, and then I also make a bunch of open source software that I give away for free gifts. That can’t happen if we start violating these contracts. No commercial company is going to go, “Let me base my next project off this piece of open source if I’m also running the liability that some Matt maker is going to show up seven years in and demand I give them $50 million.” That’s not an environment conducive to commerce collaboration or anything else and it’s just basically wrong. I think there’s one analysis that’s all about the practical outcomes of this, which I think are bad.
(05:49:05) There’s also an argument that’s simply about ethics. This is not right. You can’t just show up afterwards and demand something. This is not too dissimilar in my opinion, to the whole Apple thing we talked about earlier, Apple just showing up and feeling like they’re entitled to 30% of everyone’s business. No, that’s not right. That’s not fair. So I think Matt unfortunately steered himself blind on the indignity he thought was being perpetrated against him because there was all this money being made by BP Engine making a good product and not giving quite enough back in Matt’s opinion, tough cookie.
Lex Fridman (05:49:49) I think there, maybe I’m reading too much into it, but there might be some personal stuff too which weren’t not only not giving enough but probably implicitly promising that they will give and then taking advantage of him in that way in his mind. Just like interpersonal interaction and then you get interpersonally frustrated.
Lex Fridman (05:50:11) You forget the bigger picture ethics of it. It’s like when a guy keeps promising he’ll do something and then you realize you wake up one day a year or two later, “Wait a minute, I was being lied to this whole time,” and that I don’t even know if it’s about money.
DHH (05:50:29) I’d get mad too. It’s totally fine to get mad when people disappoint you. That’s not justification for upending decades of open source licensees and the essential de facto case law we’ve established around it. This is why I chose to even weigh in on this because I like WordPress. I don’t use WordPress. I’m not a part of that community. I don’t actually have a dog in this fight. I’m biased if anything towards Matt just as a fellow BDFL. I would like to see him do well with this, but I also think there’s some principles that stake here that ring much louder. I don’t want Rails to suddenly be tainted by the fact that it’s open source and whether companies can rely on it and build businesses on it because wait, maybe one day I’m going to turn Matt and I’m going to turn Matt King and I’m going to show up with a demand ransom letter. Now screw that. We have way more to protect here. There’s way more at stake than your personal beef with someone or your perceived grievance over what you’re owed.
Lex Fridman (05:51:31) What would you recommend? What do you think he should do, can do to walk it back to heal?
DHH (05:51:40) Decide. This is the curious thing. He could decide to give this up. That’s very, very difficult for driven ambitious people to do, to accept that they’re wrong and to give up and lay down their sword. So I had a hope earlier on in this that was possible. I haven’t seen any evidence that Matt is interested in that and I find that deeply regretful, but that’s his prerogative. I continue to speak out when he’s violating the spirit and ethics of open source, but I wish he would just accept that this was a really bad idea. He made a bad bet and I think he thought he’d just get away with it, that they’d just pay up and that he could put pressure.
(05:52:24) I mean, I know that temptation. When you sit as the head of a very important project, you know that comes with a great degree of power and you really need a great degree of discipline to rein that in and not exercise that power at every step where you feel aggrieved. I’ve felt aggrieved a million times over in the 20 plus years of Ruby on Rails. I’ve really tried very hard not to let those, sometimes petty, sometimes substantial grievances over time seep in to the foundation of the ecosystem and risk ruining everything.
Money and happiness
Lex Fridman (05:53:03) As the king of the Rails kingdom. Has the power gotten to your head over the years?
DHH (05:53:07) I’m sure it has. I mean, who wouldn’t?
Lex Fridman (05:53:10) Do you pace around in your chamber? [inaudible 05:53:12]-
DHH (05:53:11) I do, occasionally, and I do marvel at both what’s been built, what’s been possible. Over a million applications have been made with Ruby on Rails by one estimate that I’ve seen. Businesses like Shopify and GitHub and a million others have been built on top of something that I started. That’s very gratifying. But you really have to be careful not to smell your own exhaust too much and you have to be just as careful not to listen too much to the haters and not to listen too much to the super fans either that you assess the value and the principles of what you’re working towards on its own merits, on your own scoreboard. I try to block that out and then just go, “Well, I’m working on Rails because I love to write Ruby. I love to use Ruby to make web applications. That’s my North Star and I’ll continue to do that and I’ll continue to share all of the open source gifts that I uncover along the ways,” and that’s it. That’s enough too.
(05:54:23) I don’t have to get all of it out of it. This is sometimes just as with the guy who thought I’d given up on being Jira or something, instead of doing Basecamp, there are people over the years who’ve asked like, “Why didn’t you charge for Rails? Don’t you know how much money had been made off Rails?” If we just look at something like Shopify, it’s worth billions of dollars. I’m not a billionaire and so freaking what? I got more than enough. I got plenty of my share.
(05:54:51) I will say though, I’m also introspective enough to realize that if it hadn’t panned out as well as it did for me on my own business, maybe I would’ve been more tempted. Maybe if you see other people build huge successful companies off the back of your work and you really don’t have a pot to piss in, you might be tempted to get a little upset about that. I’ve seen that in the Rails world as well, where there are people who contributed substantial bodies of work and then got really miffed when they didn’t feel like they got enough back. I was fortunate enough that the business that Jason and I built with Ruby on Rails was as successful as it was and I made the money I needed to make that I didn’t need to chase the rest of it.
Lex Fridman (05:55:36) But we should also just make explicit that many people in your position chase the money. It’s not that difficult to chase. Basically you turned away money, you made a lot of decisions that just turned away money.
DHH (05:55:53) Maybe. I also think of this example with Matt. He probably thought there was easy money for the taking and it wasn’t so easy, was it? It looked like low-hanging dollar bills and they turned out to be some really sour grapes. It turned out he probably destroyed vast sums of money by undermining the whole WordPress trust and the ecosystem and putting question marks in the heads of folks who would choose to use WordPress or something else going forward. So I often think when people think like, “Oh, you left money on the table.” First of all, so what? I don’t have to have all the money, but second of all, maybe the money wasn’t on the table at all.
Lex Fridman (05:56:33) And maybe the cost, even if you got the money, maybe the cost in other ways like we’ve talked about, would outweigh all the money that you could have possibly gotten. I think you said that the thing that makes you happy is flow and tranquility. Those two things. Really beautifully put. And gaining money might assign to your responsibility of running a larger thing that takes away the flow that you gain from being… Fundamentally for you what flow means is programming and then tranquility is like… I think you also have a beautiful post of like, “Nirvana is an empty schedule.”
DHH (05:57:17) When I look at a upcoming week and I see that I have no scheduled meetings at all, which is quite common, or maybe I just have one thing for one hour on one day, I think to myself, “Do you know what? This could very easily have been very different. We could have been running a company of 100s of people or 1000s of people and my entire calendar would’ve been packed solid with little Tetris blocks of other people’s demands on my attention and time and I would’ve been miserable as fuck. And I look at that and go, “What more can I ask for?” Which is a really nice state of being, I’d actually say. I didn’t have this always. I did have, early on in my career, some sense of I need a little more, a little more security. And I remember this really interesting study where a bunch of researchers asked people who had made certain amounts of money, “How much money would it take for you to feel secure?”
(05:58:14) They’d ask people who had a million dollars net worth, “How much money do you need?” “Probably need $2 million. $2 million, then I’d be good.” Then they asked people with a net worth of $5 million, how much do you need?” “10. I need 10.” Ask people with $10 million, “What do you need?” “20.” Every single time people would need double of what they did. I did that for a couple of doublings until I realized, “You know what? This is silly. I’m already where I wished I would be and a million times over, so what less is there to pursue?” Now that doesn’t mean that if more money is coming my way, I’m going to say no to it. Of course not. But, it does mean that I’m free to set other things higher. And I also do think you realize, as Jim Carrey would say, “I wish everyone would get all the money that they wished for and they’d realize it wasn’t the answer.”
(05:59:01) That money solves a whole host of problems and anxieties and then it creates a bunch of new ones and then it also doesn’t touch a huge swath of the human experience at all. The world is full of miserable, anxious, hurt, rich people. It’s also full of miserable, anxious, poor people and I’d rather be a miserable, anxious, rich person than a poor person. But it isn’t this magic wand that make everything go away, and that’s again one of those insights, just like having children, that you cannot communicate in words. I’ve never been able to persuade a person who’s not wealthy that wealth wasn’t going to solve all their problems.
Lex Fridman (05:59:42) One quote you’ve returned to often that I enjoy a lot is the Coco Chanel quote of, “The best things in life are free and the second-best things are very, very expensive.” And I guess the task is to focus on surrounding yourself with the best things in life like family and all of this and not caring about the other stuff.
DHH (06:00:07) I would easily say you can care about the other stuff. Just know the order of priority. If you are blessed with a partner that you love, some children that you adore, you’ve already won the greatest prize that most humans are able to achieve. Most humans in this world, if they are of marital age and they have children, if you ask them what’s the most important thing they would all say that, they would all say that, no matter whether they’re rich or poor. It’s easy to lose sight of that when you’re chasing the second-best things because do you know what? They’re also very nice.
(06:00:45) I really like that Pagani Sonda. It was a very expensive car and I would’ve had no chance of acquiring it if I hadn’t become rather successful in business. So I don’t want to dismiss it either. It’s great fun to have money. It’s just not as fun for quite as long or as deep as you think it is. And these other things, having an occupation and a pursuit that you enjoy, being able to carry burdens with a stiff up a lip and with again, a sense of meaning, is incredible. To have family, to have friends, to have hobbies, to have all these things that are actually available to most people around the world, that’s winning. And it doesn’t mean you have to discount your ambitions. It doesn’t mean you can’t reach for more, but it does mean it’s pretty dumb if you don’t realize that it’s not going to complete you in some hocus-pocus woo sense to make more. It really isn’t.
Hope
Lex Fridman (06:01:56) What gives you hope about the future of this whole thing we have going on here, human civilization?
DHH (06:02:04) I find it easier to be optimistic than pessimistic because I don’t know either way. So if I get to choose, why not just choose to believe it’s going to pan out? “We suffer more in our imagination than we do in reality,” that’s one of the quotes out of Stoicism. And I also think we have a tendency, a lot of humans have a tendency to be pessimistic in advance for things they don’t know how it’s going to pan out. Climate change, for example, is making a lot of people very anxious and very pessimistic about the future. You know nothing. 40 years ago, we thought the problem was that the planet was going to be too cool. I happen to believe that it’s probably correct that the planet is getting too hot and that CO2 has something to do with it. Whether we have the right measures to fix it in time, if that’s even possible or not, is completely up in the air and we don’t know.
(06:03:03) If you convince yourself with such certainty that the world is going to turn to shit. It is, right up here in your head, today. Climate change might wipe out this entire species in 200 years. It’s not next year. It’s not 10 years from now. Life might become more unpleasant and there might be more negative effects and so on. Yes, okay, but then deal with that hardship when it arrives. Don’t take that in advance. How are you helping earth by just walking around being depressed?
Lex Fridman (06:03:36) I think our whole conversation today is also an indication, it’s just two humans talking. There’s billions of us and there is something about us that wants to solve problems and build cool stuff and so we’re going to build our way out of whatever shit we get ourselves into. This is what humans do. We create problems for ourselves and figure out how to build rocket ships to get out of those problems. And sometimes, the rocket ships create other problems like nuclear warheads and then we’ll, I hope, figure out ways how to avoid those problems. And then, there’ll be nanobots and then the aliens will come and it’ll be a massive war between the nanobots and the aliens and that will bring all of us humans together.
DHH (06:04:24) The funny thing, just to pick up one of the points you mentioned, the atom bomb, for example. When that was first invented, a lot of people thought we have essentially ended life on earth or maybe we prevented World War III from happening in the past 80 years because assured, neutral annihilation kept the superpowers from attacking each other at least head-on and kept their fighting to proxy wars. You know what? Proxy wars are not great, but they’re probably better than World War III with nuclear weapons. So it’s quite difficult in the moment to tell what’s actually benefit and what’s not, and I think we should be a bit more humble. I’ve certainly become more humble over time of thinking I know which way it’s going to turn. I think the pandemic was a huge moment for a lot of people where there was so much certainty about whether this intervention worked or that intervention didn’t work and most people were wrong.
(06:05:25) Certainly a lot of very smart people, very qualified people got that just utterly and catastrophyingly wrong. So just a little intellectual humility, I think back upon that and go like, “You know what? I’m not a PhD in virology,” and I don’t claim that I somehow saw how it always going to play out, but the people who were really experts in it, they’ve got a bunch of it wrong. Nobody knows anything. I keep reminding myself of that every day. No one knows anything. We can’t predict the economy a month out. We can’t predict world affairs a month… The world is just too complicated.
Lex Fridman (06:06:03) When I watched the Netflix documentary, Chimp Empire, and how there’s a hierarchy of chimps, all of that looks eerily similar to us humans. We’re recent descendants. So these experts, some of the chimps got a PhD, others don’t. Others are really muscular. Others are beta male kind. They’re sucking up to the alpha. There’s a lot of interesting dynamics going on that really maps cleanly to the geopolitics of the day. They don’t have nuclear weapons, but the nature of their behavior is similar to ours. So I think we barely know what’s going on, but do think there’s a basic will to cooperate as a basic compassion that underlies just the human spirit that’s there. And maybe that is just me being optimistic, but if that is indeed there, then we’re going to be okay.
DHH (06:07:03) The capacity is certainly there. Whether we choose that capacity or not, who knows and in what situation. I think accepting that we all have the capacity for both ways, for both incredible generosity and kindness and also cruelty. I think, Young, with this whole theory of the shadow was really spot-on that we all have that capacity in us and accepting that it’s our job to attempt to cultivate the better parts of our human nature is weighed against our propensity to some time be the worst of ourselves.
Lex Fridman (06:07:41) I’m excited to find out what’s going to happen. It’s so awesome to be human. I don’t want to die. I want to be alive for a while to see all the cool shit we do. And one of the cool things I want to see is all the software you create and all the things you tweet, all the trouble you get yourself into on Twitter. David, I’m a huge fan. Like I said, thank you for everything you’ve done for the world, for the millions of developers you’ve inspired and one of whom is me, and thank you for this awesome conversation, brother.
Lex Fridman (06:08:14) Thanks for listening to this conversation with DHH. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description and consider subscribing to this channel. And now, let me leave you with some words from Rework by DHH and Jason Fried, “What you do is what matters, not what you think, or say, or plan.” Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
This is a transcript of Lex Fridman Podcast #473 with Iran-Israel Debate.
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Mark Dubowitz (00:00:00) We want to avoid wars, we have to have serious deterrence because our enemies need to understand, we will use selective, focused, overwhelming military power when we are facing threats like an Iranian nuclear weapon.
Scott Horton (00:00:12) I’m not seeing the peace through strength. I’m seeing permanent militarism and permanent war through strength.
Mark Dubowitz (00:00:16) Do you ever hold our adversaries responsible or do you just don’t think we have any adversaries?
Scott Horton (00:00:22) The easiest kind of nuke to make out of uranium is a simple gun type nuke.
Mark Dubowitz (00:00:26) Are you saying that Mossad fabricated it?
Mark Dubowitz (00:00:30) That’s what you’re claiming. Here’s the offer, take it to leave it. Zero enrichment full dismantlement.
Scott Horton (00:00:34) Through the Iranians, told the IAEA, you can inspect any five out 10 facilities here, carte blanche, go ahead and they did and found nothing.
Mark Dubowitz (00:00:41) Experts in Iran’s nuclear program, including David Albright, who actually saw the archive, went in there, wrote a whole book on it, and there’s a lot of detail about how Iran had an active nuclear weapons program called AMAD to build five nuclear weapons.
Scott Horton (00:00:55) I have to refute virtually everything he just said, which is completely false.
Mark Dubowitz (00:00:58) I mean really everything? There was not one thing I said that was true? Just one thing.
Scott Horton (00:01:02) I mean Iran is a nation over there somewhere. You got that part right.
Mark Dubowitz (00:01:05) 22 years of working on Iran and I got that right.
Lex Fridman (00:01:07) But do you know the population of Iran?
Lex Fridman (00:01:16) The following is a debate between Scott Horton and Mark Dubowitz on the topic of Iran and Israel. Scott Horton is author and editorial director of Ntwar.com, host of the Scott Horton Show and for the past three decades, a staunch critic of US foreign policy and military interventionism. Mark Dubowitz is a chief executive of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, host of the Iran Breakdown Podcast, and he has been a leading expert on Iran and its nuclear program for over 20 years. This is the Lex Fridman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description and consider subscribing to this channel. If you do, I promise to work extremely hard to always bring you nuanced, long-form conversations with a very wide range of interesting people from all walks of life, and now, dear friends, here’s Scott Horton and Mark Dubowitz.
Iran-Israel War
Lex Fridman (00:02:18) Gentlemen. All right, it’s great to have you here. Let’s try to have a nuanced discussion/debate and maybe even steal man-opposing perspectives as much as possible. All right, as a stands now, there’s a barely stable ceasefire between Iran and Israel. Let’s maybe rewind a little bit. Can we first lay out the context for this Iran-Israel war and try to describe the key events that happened over the past two weeks, maybe even a bit of the deep roots of the conflict?
Mark Dubowitz (00:02:50) Sure. First of all, thanks so much for having me on. Great to be on with Scott. I know he and I don’t agree on a lot, but I certainly admire the passion and the dedication to stopping wars. So that’s something we want to talk about. So let’s talk about how we got to this war. So President Trump comes into office and immediately lays out that his Iran strategy is maximum pressure on the regime and he will not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon, and he makes that clear. Consistently, I think made it very clear during his first term, made a clear throughout his career and thus begins this process with the Iranians, which has kind of multiple tracks, but the one that Trump sees most interested in at the time is the diplomatic track, and he makes it very clear from the beginning and a sort of Oval Office remark.
(00:03:38) He says the Iranians can either blow up their nuclear program under US supervision or someone’s going to blow it up for them, and even though at the time we think Netanyahu is really trying to push the president into a military campaign, well, I’m sure we’ll talk about that throughout the podcast. The president authorizes his lead negotiator and close friend Steve Witkoff to begin outreach to the Iranians, and that’s begun the Oman round and it’s Oman round because it’s taking place in Oman with mediation efforts by the Omanis. There are five rounds of negotiations with the Iranians, and through the course of those negotiations, the US finally puts on the table an offer for Iran. We’ll talk about the details of that. The Iranians reject that offer, and we’re now into the sixth round, which is supposed to take place on a Sunday. On the Thursday before the Sunday, the Israelis strike and they go after in a rather devastating campaign over a matter of now 12 days.
(00:04:42) They go over and go after Iran’s nuclear program, the key nuclear sites, going after weapons scientists who are responsible for building Iran’s nuclear weapons program and also go after top IRGC Islamic Revolutionary guard commanders as well as top military commanders, and yet there’s still this one site that is the most fortified site. It’s called Fordow. It’s an enrichment facility. It’s buried under a mountain, goes about 80 meters deep. It’s encased in concrete, it has advanced centrifuges and highly enriched uranium. The Israelis can do damage to it, but it’s clear it’s going to take the United States and our military power in order to severely degrade this facility, and Trump orders United States Air Force to fly B-II bombers and drop 12 massive ordnance penetrators, which are these 30,000 pound bombs on Fordow in order to, as he said, obliterate it, more realistically to severely degrade it. So that happens.
(00:05:46) And then he offers the Iranians as he’s been offering all the way through. You have an option, you can go back to Oman, I told you Oman, and you decided to force me to go to Fordow, but now we can go back for negotiations, and he forces a ceasefire on the Iranians, gets the Israelis to agree and that’s where we are today. That’s where as you say, a tentative ceasefire that just came into effect and we’ll see now if the Iranians decide to take President Trump on his repeated offers, join him in Oman for another round of negotiations. Scott, is there some stuff you want to add to that?
Scott Horton (00:06:21) Sure. Well, he started with January, right? Trump’s second term here and the maximum pressure campaign essentially as should be clear to everyone. Now, all these negotiations were just a pretext for war. Trump and his entire cabinet must have known that the Ayatollah is not going to give up all enrichment. That is their latent nuclear deterrent. Their posture has been heavily implied, “Don’t attack us and we won’t make a nuke.” While America’s position was if you make a nuke, if you start to we’ll attack you. So it was the perfect standoff, but what happened was, and you might remember a few weeks ago, there was some talk about, “Well, maybe we could find a way to compromise on some enrichment. Maybe they could do a consortium with the Saudis.” And then nope, the pressure came down. No enrichment, zero enrichment, but that’s a red line.
(00:07:14) Everyone knows and even now it’s probably less likely than ever that they’re going to give up enrichment. Sure, they bombed Fordow, but they didn’t destroy every last centrifuge in that place, and the Iranians are already announcing that they’re already begun construction on another facility under a taller mountain buried even deeper, and they figured out how to enrich uranium hexafluoride gas, what, 20 years ago now, and they will always be able to, and this is the slippery slope that we’re on with these wars is in fact, I saw a friend here on TV the other day. He almost pretty much just implied there saying, “Well now Trump has to go in.” We were told it’s just Israel doing it, don’t worry, but then no Trump has to hit Fordow or else now they’ll break out toward a nuclear weapon. So in for a penny, in for a pound, in for a ton.
(00:08:09) And now once we bomb Fordow again and Natanz again and the new facility again, then it’ll be decided that nope, as Benjamin Netanyahu said the other day, you know what would really solve this problem? If we just kill the Ayatollah, then everything will be fine. Then we’ll have a regime change and then what? Then we’ll have a civil war with Bin Ladenites again in the catbird seat, just like George Bush put them in Iraq and Barack Obama, put them in Libya and in Syria, and we’ll have Azeris and Baluchi suicide bombers and Shiite revolutionaries and whoever all vying for power in the new absolute chaos stand. If you listen to the administration and Mr. Dubowitz, they’re essentially just implying that like, oh yeah, mission accomplished. We did it. Their nuclear program’s destroyed. Now we don’t have to worry about that anymore, but that’s not true. Now there’s every reason to believe, and we don’t know for sure.
(00:09:02) There’s every reason to believe that at least is much more likely now that the Ayatollah will change his mind about God changing his mind and we’ll say that actually maybe we do need a nuclear deterrent. That’s really what it’s been for this whole time is a bluff. We have bullets in one pocket, revolver in another. Let’s not you and me fight and escalate this thing. It’s the same position by the way as Japan and Germany and Brazil. Two of the three of those are under America’s nuclear umbrella, I admit, but still where they’ve proven they’ve mastered the fuel cycle and they can make nuclear weapons, but hey, since nobody’s directly threatening them now, why escalate things and go ahead and make atom bombs? That has been their position the whole time because after all, they could not break out and make a nuke without everyone in the world knowing about it.
(00:09:45) And that’s why Lex, and I’m sure you could vouch for me on this, if you’ve been watching TV over the past few weeks, you’ll hear Marco Rubio and all the government officials and all the warhawks say, “Oh yes, 60%. What do you think they need with that 60%?” Implying that oh yes, see, they’re racing toward a bomb, but you see how they always just imply that? They won’t come right out and say that because it’s a ridiculous lie. They could have enriched up to 90 plus percent uranium 235 this whole time. The reason they were enriching up to 60% was in reaction to Israeli sabotage. First of all, assassinating their nuclear scientists and then their sabotage [inaudible 00:10:19]. They started enriching up to 60% just like they did in the Obama years to have a bargaining chip to negotiate away.
(00:10:25) Under the JCPOA, they shipped out every bit of their enriched uranium to France to be turned into fuel rods and then ship back into the country to be used in their reactors, and so they’re just trying to get us back in that deal. It is an illusion and I don’t know exactly what’s in this man’s mind, but it’s just not true that they’re making nuclear weapons, and it has been a lie of Benjamin Netanyahu and his Likud party regime, and for that matter, the Khatima regime of Ehud Olmert before him that this is a threat that has to be preempted when in fact it never was anything more than a latent nuclear deterrent.
Iran’s Nuclear Program
Lex Fridman (00:11:00) Maybe a good question to ask here is what is the goal for the United States in Iran in relation to Iran’s nuclear program? What is the red line here? Does Iran have this need for latent nuclear deterrent and what is the thing that’s acceptable to the United States and to the rest of the world? What should be acceptable?
Mark Dubowitz (00:11:24) Yeah, so there was a lot to unpack there. So let’s sort of just back up a little bit. Let’s talk about first of all, the regime itself. Islamic Republic of Iran came into power in 1979. It has been declared a leading state sponsor of terrorism by multiple administrations dating back to the Clinton administration, by Obama, by Biden, by Trump and it is a regime that has killed and maimed thousands of Americans, not to mention obviously hundreds of thousands of Middle Easterners. It is a regime that has lied about its nuclear program and never actually disclosed its nuclear sites. All these sites were discovered by Iranian opposition groups, by western intelligence agencies, and the International Atomic Energy Agency, which is the UN agency responsible for preventing proliferation has come out again and again over many years in very detailed reports describing Iran’s nuclear weapons program.
(00:12:24) There have been multiple attempts at diplomacy with Iran. I’m sure we’re going to talk about, it’s mentioned the JCPOA, so we should certainly talk about the JCPOA, which was the 2015 deal that Barack Obama reached with Iran, but multiple attempts to actually get the Iranians to negotiate away their nuclear weapons program. I mean it’s worth mentioning that if Iran wanted to have civilian nuclear energy. There are 23 countries in the world that have it, but they don’t have enrichment and they don’t have reprocessing. We sign these deals called the gold standard with the South Koreans, with the Emiratis, with others, and we say if you want civilian energy, you can have power plants, you can buy your fuel rods from abroad, but there’s no reason to have enrichment or plutonium reprocessing because those are the key capabilities you need to develop nuclear weapons. Now, the five countries that have those capabilities and don’t have nuclear weapons are Argentina, Brazil, Holland, Germany, and Japan.
(00:13:22) And I think it’s the view of many administrations over many years, including many European leaders, that the Islamic Republic of Iran is very different from those aforementioned countries because that it has been dedicated to terrorism, it’s been killing Americans and other Westerners and other Middle Easterners, and it is a dangerous regime. You don’t want to have that dangerous regime retaining the key capabilities and needs to develop nuclear weapons, but I want to get back more to the present. I mentioned this was around negotiations at Oman. Scott’s saying that President Trump had said, “Here’s the offer, take it to leave it, zero enrichment full dismantlement.” Well, in fact, that wasn’t the offer that was presented to the Iranians at Oman. The offer was a one-page offer and it said you can temporarily enrich above ground. You’ve got to render your below ground facilities, quote, non-operational and then at some time in the future, three, four years as Scott said, there’ll be a consortium that’ll be built not on Iranian territory.
(00:14:23) It’ll be a partnership with the Saudis and the Emiratis. It’ll be under IAEA supervision, and that enrichment facility will create fuel rods for your nuclear reactors. So that was the offer presented to Iran, and that offer would come with significant sanctions relief, billions of dollars that would go to the regime. Obviously the economy there has been suffering. The regime has not had the resources that it’s had in the past to fund what I call its axis of misery, its proxy terror armies around the world, and it was a good offer and I was shocked that Khamenei rejected it. He did reject it and I think he rejected it because I think he believed that he could continue to do to President Trump what he had done to President Obama, which is just continue to squeeze and squeeze the Americans at the table in order to ensure that he could keep all these nuclear facilities, all these nuclear capabilities so that at a time of his choosing when President Trump is gone, he can develop nuclear weapons.
(00:15:21) Now, it is a bit interesting to say that Iran has no intention to develop nuclear weapons. Let’s examine the nuclear program and ask, “Does this sound like a regime that’s not interested in building nuclear weapons?” So they built deeply buried underground enrichment facilities that they hid from the international community and they didn’t disclose. They had an active nuclear warhead program called the AMAD, which ended in 2003 formally when the United States invaded Iraq, and we know that because not only has that been detailed by the IAEA, but actually Mossad and a daring operation in Tehran took out a nuclear archive and brought it back to the west, and then the IAEA, the United States, and the intelligence communities went after this detailed archive, went into it and discovered that this Supreme leader, Ali Khamenei had an active program to build five atomic warheads and was a very detailed program with blueprints and designs, all of which was designed under AMAD to build a nuclear weapons program. So again, it’s interesting to say that he doesn’t have the intention to build nuclear weapons when he actually had an active nuclear weapons program, and we can talk about what happened to that program after 2003, and there’s a lot of interesting details. So when you combine the fact that he has an active nuclear weapons program, he has sites that are buried deep underground. He has weapons scientists who come out of the AMAD program and continue to work on the initial metallurgy work and computer modeling designed to actually begin that process of building a warhead, and all of this has been hidden from the international community. He has spent estimates of a half a trillion dollars on his nuclear program in direct costs and in sanctions costs, and one has to ask and I think it’s an interesting question to compare the UAE and Iran.
(00:17:22) The UAE signed the gold standard. They said, “We’ll have no enrichment capability or reprocessing.” They spent about $20 billion on that and it supplies 25% of their electrical generation. Khamenei spent a half a trillion dollars, and that program supplies maybe 3% of their electrical needs. In fact, they have a reactor that they bought from the Russians called Boucher, and that reactor, it’s exactly what you’d want in a proliferation proof reactor. They buy fuel rods from the Russians, they use it and they send the spent fuel back to Russia so it cannot be reprocessed in the plutonium. So I just think it’s important for your listeners to understand just some of the technical nuclear history here in order to unpack this question of did Khamenei want nuclear weapons? What was his goal here? And then we can talk about was this the right operation for the United States to order the B-II bombers to strike these facilities, again was a limited operation as President Trump has said, and in order to drive the Iranians back to the negotiating table and finally do the deal that President Trump has asked them to do since he came into office in January.
Lex Fridman (00:18:35) Yeah, that is one of the fascinating questions, whether this Operation Midnight Hammer increase or decreased the chance that the Iran will develop a nuclear weapon.
Scott Horton (00:18:44) Before you ask any more questions, I have to refute virtually everything he just said, which is completely false.
Mark Dubowitz (00:18:49) I mean really everything, there was not one thing I said that was true. Just one thing.
Scott Horton (00:18:52) I mean Iran is a nation over there somewhere. You got that part right.
Mark Dubowitz (00:18:56) All right, 22 years of working on Iran and I got that right.
Lex Fridman (00:18:59) But do you know the population of Iran?
Scott Horton (00:19:02) So first of all, they were trying to buy a light water reactor from the Europeans or the Chinese in the 1990s, and Bill Clinton wouldn’t let them and put tremendous pressure on China to prevent them from selling them a light water reactor, a turnkey reactor that produces waste that’s so polluted with impurities that you can’t make nuclear weapons fuel out of it. By the way, they never have to this day had a reprocessing facility for reprocessing plutonium. Even their current plutonium waste from their heavy water reactor at Boucher to make weapons fuel out of that. They have no plutonium route to the bomb under the JCPOA.
Mark Dubowitz (00:19:37) At Iraq, not Boucher. There’s a difference.
Scott Horton (00:19:40) Iraq is where they pour concrete into the reactor and shut it down.
Mark Dubowitz (00:19:45) And the reason they pour concrete-
Mark Dubowitz (00:19:48) Not they, but the Obama administration, he’s right, under the JCPOA poured concrete into the Kalindria in order to prevent them from using that reactor to reprocess plutonium. So there’s a distinction between Iraq and Boucher. Scott’s exactly right. Boucher is a heavy water reactor provided by the Russians as I described for the generation of electricity. Its proliferation proof. Iraq is the opposite. It’s a heavy water reactor that was built for a plutonium pathway to nuclear weapons, which is exactly why under the JCPOA, they literally had to pour concrete into the middle of it to prevent it from reprocessing plutonium.
Scott Horton (00:20:25) I think we’re going to need a scientist to come in here and split the difference or maybe we need to go and look up some IAEA documents because I don’t believe that Iraq ever had a reprocessing facility for their plutonium waste and the deal under the JCPOA, the Russians would come and get all their plutonium waste, which the waste comes out all polluted and not useful. You need the reprocessing facility to get all of the impurities out.
Scott Horton (00:20:52) It could be that I’m wrong about that, but I don’t believe that they ever had a reprocessing facility at Iraq that they could use to remove all those impurities and then have weapons-grade plutonium fuel as the North Koreans do.
Mark Dubowitz (00:21:05) So the Obama administration was very clear under the JCPOA, we are going to pour concrete into the Iraq facility as Scott acknowledged because we are concerned that Iraq can be used for reprocessing plutonium, for plutonium pathway to a nuclear weapon.
Lex Fridman (00:21:21) Can be used, but we don’t know if it was used.
Scott Horton (00:21:24) Oh, we know it never was. There never was any reprocessing of weapons fuel there.
Lex Fridman (00:21:28) But there was concrete poured.
Mark Dubowitz (00:21:36) I just recently had David Albright on my podcast who is actually a physicist and a weapons inspector and goes into a lot of detail about the Iranian nuclear program. Please listen to the podcast.
Lex Fridman (00:21:47) Iran Breakdown by the way is the name of the podcast.
Mark Dubowitz (00:21:50) And David’s the president of the Institute for Science International Security and by the way, spent decades on this and to his credit, he was one of the deep skeptics of the Bush administration’s rush to war with Iraq.
Scott Horton (00:22:00) That’s not true. He vouched for claims that there were chemical weapons in Iraq and later said he was sorry for it.
Mark Dubowitz (00:22:06) Again, I mentioned the Bush administration’s rush to war based on their claims that Saddam was building nuclear weapons.
Scott Horton (00:22:11) He did debunk the aluminum tubes though.
Mark Dubowitz (00:22:14) He debunked it and it was a deep skeptic again of the rush to war in Iraq. The argument today, Lex, which I think is the more interesting argument, because there are very few people left today who don’t believe that the Iranians were building the nuclear weapons capability that gave them the option to build nuclear weapons.
Mark Dubowitz (00:22:35) We can debate whether they had decided to, and I’m interested to hear Scott’s opinion on this, but the recent intelligence that has come out that the Iranian nuclear weapons scientists have begun preliminary work on building a warhead.
Scott Horton (00:22:49) Came out from where? This intelligence that came out, who put that? Israeli claims. Not verified by the US and the Wall Street Journal anywhere, right? Let’s talk about all of my list of refutations of all your false claims from 10 years ago.
Mark Dubowitz (00:23:04) The Wall Street Journal did verify.
Scott Horton (00:23:06) That’s a lot of [inaudible 00:23:08] to refute.
Mark Dubowitz (00:23:09) Lawrence Norman actually wrote a piece and this was during the Biden administration because the Biden DNI had actually come out and for the first time in their annual threat assessment had removed a line that said Iran is not currently working on developing any capabilities that would put it in a position to actually deliver a nuclear warhead, and what became the Norman piece in the Wall Street Journal was that there actually was initial work done on metallurgy and on computer modeling, and so those actually were defined terms in Section T of the 2015 JCPOA, which defined weaponization in that section, and metallurgy and computer modeling were some of the initial steps so that the DNI was very concerned under Biden that these initial steps meant that either Khamenei had given the green lights or nuclear weapons scientists in order to get ahead of the boss so they could be in a position if he decided to move forward on this, were in a position and their timelines were therefore expedited.
(00:24:12) So it’s interesting, I mean again, you’ve got the DNI under Biden, you’ve got the CIA director, John Radcliffe, you’ve got Israeli intelligence, you’ve got the Wall Street Journal, and you’ve got the IAEA asking questions of Iran on its past weaponization activities. Why are you denying us?
Scott Horton (00:24:29) Who’s the dog that didn’t bark there? The current director of National Intelligence who issued her threat assessment, Trump’s director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard who issued her threat assessment in February that repeated the exact same language that from the National Intelligence estimate of 2007, and that the CIA and the NIE, the National Intelligence Council have reaffirmed repeatedly ever since then, which is that supreme leader has not decided to pursue nuclear weapons. He has not made the political decision to pursue nuclear weapons. She testified in fact under oath in front of the senate in March and then according to CNN and the New York Times, there was a brand new assessment that was put together the week before the attack was launched reaffirming the same thing and at least in history, if you read it in Haaretz, Massad agreed with the CIA.
Mark Dubowitz (00:25:19) I’d like to just sort of quote CIA director John Radcliffe because Scott brought up the CIA and the intelligence committee. I think Radcliffe had a good way of looking at this and that he said is when you’re in the 99 yard line as a football team, you have the intention of score a goal, and what he was actually pointing to is let’s not talk about this debate about whether Khamenei had given the order or not given the order, because Khamenei knows that if he gives an order, the US and Israeli intelligence community will pick up on that order and that will be the trigger for strikes. What Radcliffe is saying is that Khamenei had built the nuclear weapons capability. He’s at the 99 yard line, and both the CIA and European leaders, the European Intelligence Committee has said for yours that if Iran has that capability and they’re on the 99 yard line, at that point, it’s going to be too late to stop them. Once that decision is made to assemble the final warhead, which by the way is the final piece of what you need for a deliverable nuclear weapon.
Scott Horton (00:26:18) That’s not true at all, right? They have to resort to a crude analogy about football yard lines because they can’t say the truth, which is that they had zero weapons grade uranium, they were not producing it. They were trying to get the United States back in the deal that they are still officially within the JCPOA with the rest of the UN Security Council wherein they shipped all of their enriched uranium stockpile out of the country to France to be transferred to fuel rods. Their insistence was on their continued ability to enrich uranium, and so this goes to one of the things that he at least sort of brought up that deserves addressing. When Trump came into power in 2017, he decided on this Israeli influence maximum pressure campaign, and he said the JCPOA was the worst deal in the history of any time any two men ever shook hands and all these kinds of things in his hyperbolic way, which of course made it very difficult for him to figure out a way to stay in the thing or to compromise along its lines.
(00:27:21) But the fact of the matter is if he had just played it straight and said, “Listen, Ayatollah, we don’t have to be friends, but we do have a deal here, which my predecessor struck with you, but I don’t like these sunset provisions and I want to send my guys over there and see if we can figure out a way to convince you that we really wish you’d shut down and them all together.” Or this or that or the other thing, and tried to approach them in good faith. We talk about yard lines and things. We had a JCPOA, okay? So toward peace, we were past the 50 yard line. Donald Trump could have gone to Tehran and shook hands with the Ayatollah as Dick Cheney complained that we had cold relations with Iran back in 1998 when he was the head of Halliburton and said, “We can do business with these guys.”
(00:28:08) Donald Trump could have gone right over there and done business, and instead he gave into Netanyahu’s lies in this ridiculous hoax that they had uncovered all these Iranian nuclear documents, which he pretends is legit, where all they did was recycle the fake Israeli forged smoking laptop of 2005, which they lied and pretended was the laptop of an Iranian scientist that was smuggled out of Iran by his wife and had all this proof of a secret Iranian nuclear weapons program on it, but every bit of that was refuted, including the thing about the warhead he said was refuted by David Albright and his friend David Sanger in the New York Times, that all those sketches of the warhead for the missile were wrong because when Mossad forged the documents, they were making a good educated guess, but they didn’t know that Iran had completely redesigned the nose cone of their mid-range missiles and had an entirely different nose cone that would require an entirely different warhead than that described in the documents.
(00:29:09) And why would they have been designing a warhead to fit in a nose cone that they were abandoning? And so that was refuted. David Albright completely discredited your claims there pal, and then they later admitted that it was a CIA laptop. There was no laptop and they later admitted Ali Hainan admitted who was a very hawkish, not director, but a high level executive at the International Atomic Energy Agency, admitted that that intelligence was brought into the stream by the Mujahideen-e-Khalq communist terrorist cult that used to work for the Ayatollah during the revolution, then turned on him, and he turned on them and kicked them out. Then they went to work for Saddam Hussein where they helped crush the Shiite and Kurdish insurrection of 1991, and then they became America, Donald Rumsfeld’s and Ariel Sharon’s sock puppets and later Ehud Olmert’s sock puppets when the United States invaded Iraq and took possession of them.
(00:30:02) They’re now under American protection in Albania, and these are the same kooks who just a few weeks ago you might remember saying, “Look, new satellite pictures of a whole new nuclear facility in Iran.” Isn’t it funny how no one ever brought that up again? Didn’t bomb it. It was nothing. It was fake. Just like before when they said, “Hey, look, here’s a picture of a vault door.” And behind that is where the secret nuclear weapons program is except turned out that vault door was a stock photo from a vault company. It meant nothing and they had repeatedly made claims that were totally refuted, just like I’m about to refute his claim, that they ever were the ones who revealed for example, Natanz. He was implying that Natanz and Kham were both buried and hidden until revealed I think you said by dissident groups. That is the MEK sock puppets of the Israelis, but it was your friend David Albright, not the Israeli Mossad through the MEK who revealed Natanz facility. Ask him, he’ll fist fight you over it. He claims credit he was first and said, “This is a facility.” However…
Scott Horton (00:31:00) Claims credit he was first and said this is a facility. However, they were not in violation of their safeguards agreement with the IAEA. They were still six months away from introducing any nuclear material to that facility. When it was revealed, they weren’t in violation of anything. And then on com we had a huge fight about this at the time. The party line came down from all the government officials in the media that they had just exposed the facility there. Com is Fordo. Same thing. When in fact that wasn’t true. The Iranians had announced to the IAEA that we had built a new facility here, and we are going to introduce nuclear material into it within six months. Here’s your official notification. And then a few days later, they just pretended to expose it, when it was the Iranians themselves who had admitted to it in going along with their obligations under their safeguards agreement.
(00:31:58) It’s just completely wrong. Why do they bury them? They buried them for protection because clearly the Israelis have indicated since the 1990s that they consider any nuclear program in Iran to be the same thing as an advanced nuclear weapons program. You’re hearing that today. For them to have a nuclear facility at all is equivalent to them going ahead and breaking out and making a nuclear weapon, and so of course they know that they have to have it buried to protect it from Israel. That doesn’t mean that they are trying to get nukes.
(00:32:27) It does mean, as I already said, that they wanted to prove to the world that they know how to enrich uranium and that they have facilities buried deeply enough where, if we attack them, that would incentivize them to making nukes, and then we might be unable to stop them without going all the way toward a regime change, which they’re bluffing, basically betting, that we won’t go that far, considering how gigantic their country is and how mountainous and populous it is compared to Iraq next door.
(00:32:55) Now, here’s some more things that he said that weren’t true. He said Iran has been killing Americans all this time. Well, that’s almost always a reference to Beirut 1983, which you can read in the book By Way of Deception, by Victor Ostrovsky, the former Mossad officer, that the Israelis knew that they were building that truck bomb to bomb the Marines with and withheld that information from the United States and said, “That’s what they get for sticking their big noses in.” And that is in the book, By Way of Deception by Victor Ostrovsky. And by the way, the Israelis were friends with them, with Iran, at the time all through the 1980s. And it was just a couple of years later when Ronald Reagan sold Iran missiles and using the Israelis as cutouts to do so when he switched sides temporarily in the Iran-Iraq war.
(00:33:42) And that was in 1983. If Ronald Reagan can sell a missiles a year or two years after that, three years after that, then surely the United States and the Ayatollah can bury the hatchet from that. And no one’s ever even, I don’t believe, ever really proven that Tehran ordered that. It was a Shiite militia backed by Iran, that sort of proto-Hezbollah, that did that attack that killed those Marines. And if there’s some responsibility for it, then damn them. If there’s direct responsibility for that, not just their support for the group, then damn them for that, but that’s still no reason in the world to say that we can’t get along with them now when that was in the same year Return of the Jedi came out.
(00:34:20) And then the other one, and this is always referred to, you’ll see this on TV News today. Anyone watching this, turn on TV News, and you’ll hear them say, “Iran killed 600 Americans in Iraq War II,” but that’s a lie. There was a gigantic propaganda campaign by Dick Cheney and his co-conspirators, David Petraeus and Michael Gordon of the New York Times, now at the Wall Street Journal, where they lied and lied like the devil for about five, six months in early 2007 that every time a Shiite set off a roadside bomb, these new improved copper cord enhanced … They’re called EFPs, explosively formed penetrators.
(00:35:02) Now, anytime that happened, Iran did it, which is what George Bush called short-handing it. In other words, just implying the lie. What they’re saying is Iran backed Muqtada al-Sadr, and America attacked Muqtada al-Sadr, who actually they were fighting the whole war for him. He remains a powerful kingmaker in that country to this day. He’s part of the United Iraqi Alliance. And in fact, as long as we’re taking a long form here, he was the least Iran-tied of the three major factions in the United Iraqi Alliance in Iraq War II.
(00:35:31) The other two major factions were Dawa and the Supreme Islamic Council, and they had been living in Iran for the last 20 years. They’re the ones who came and took over Baghdad. Muqtada al-Sadr was a Shiite and close to Iran, but he was also an Iraqi nationalist. And at times, he allied with the Sunnis and tried to limit American and Iranian influence in the country. Was more of an Arab and an Iraqi nationalist. And the Americans decided they hated him the most, not because he was the most Iran-tied, but because he was willing to tell us and them two to get the hell out. And America was betting that, if we backed the same parties that Iran backed in Iraq War II, that they would eventually end up needing our money and guns more than they would need their Iranian friends and co-religionists and sponsors next door, which of course did not work out. America’s had minimal influence in supermajority Shiite Iraq ever since the end of Iraq War II. And we can get back later in the show to how Israel helped lie us into that horrific war as well.
(00:36:27) But the fact of the matter is it was not Iranians setting off those bombs, and it was not even Iranians making those bombs. And I show in my book, Enough Already, I have a solid dozen sources.
Scott Horton (00:36:40) Thank you. I have a solid dozen sources including Michael Gordon’s own colleague, Alissa Rubin at the New York Times, and many others where they found these bomb factories in Shiite Iraq. They were being made by Shiite Arab Iraqis. When David Petraeus was going to have a big press conference, and they laid out all the components, all the reporters gathered around, and they started noticing that the components said “Made in UAE. Made in Haditha.” That is Iraq. In other words, there was no evidence whatsoever that these came from Iran. And then they called off the press conference. And Stephen Hadley, George Bush’s second national security advisor, admitted that we didn’t have the evidence that we needed to present that. And I also quote two, one Marine and one high-level Army intelligence officer in there, who were deeply involved in Iraq war reconfirming that there was never any evidence that these bombs were coming across from Iran or especially that then, even if they were, that that was at the direction of the Quds Force or the Ayatollah.
(00:37:46) This was all just a propaganda campaign because Dick Cheney and David Petraeus were trying to give George Bush a reason to hit IRGC bases and start the war in 2007. And this sounds crazy, but there’s four major confirming sources for it. Dick Cheney’s national security advisor, David Wurmser, who was the author of the Clean Break Strategy, which we’re going to talk about today. David Wurmser in 2007 was saying, “We want to work with the Israelis to start the war with Iran to force George Bush, to do an end run around George Bush and force him into the war.” And that was reported originally by Steven Clemons in The Washington Note, but it was later confirmed in the New York Times and by The Washington Post reporter, Barton Gellman in his book, Angler, on Dick Cheney, that there was this huge … This was the end that they were going for was they were trying so hard to force a war in 2007. And it was the commander of CENTCOM, Admiral Fallon, who said, “Over my dead body. We are not doing this.”
(00:38:42) And then a few months later, the National Intelligence Council put out their NIE saying that there is no nuclear weapons program at all. And W. Bush complained in his memoir that in his story it’s the Saudi king, his Royal Highness Abdullah rather than Ehud Olmert, but he’s saying, ” I’m sorry, your Highness Majesty. I can’t attack Iran’s nuclear program because my own intelligence agency says they don’t have a military program. How am I supposed to start a war with them when my own intelligence agencies say that?” This is what Donald Trump just did started anyway. Had his man Rubio say, “Well, screw the intelligence. I don’t care what it says. We can just do this if we want to.”
Lex Fridman (00:39:21) First, let me say on the cover of Enough Already, “Devastating,” Daniel Ellsberg, “Outstanding,” Daniel L. Davis, “Essential,” Ron Paul. You are respected by a very large number of people. You have decades of experience. And the same thing with Mark. Extremely respected by a very large number of people. Experts. There’s a lot of disagreements here, and we’re going to unfortunately leave a lot of the disagreements on the table for the aforementioned nuclear scientist to deconstruct later. Let’s not try to … Every single claim does not have to be perfectly refuted. Let’s just leave it on the table, the statements as they stand, and let’s try to also find things we kind of agree on and try … I know this might be difficult, but to steelman the other side. That’s the thing I would love to ask you.
(00:40:06) Maybe give Mark a chance to speak a little bit but to try to … For both of you to try to steelman on the other side. People who are concerned about Iran developing a nuclear program … Can you steelman that case? And the same. The people who are concerned-
Scott Horton (00:40:20) I think that, in my opening statement, quite frankly, I don’t carry any brief for the Ayatollah. I’m a Texan. I don’t give a damn about what some Shiite theocrat says about nothing, right? My interest is the people of this country and its future and what’s true. And so I don’t mind telling you. Even though the Iranians never said, “We’re building a latent nuclear weapons capability,” that’s clearly what they’re doing is showing that they can make a nuke, so don’t make me make a nuke. That has been their position. Their position has not been, “I’m making a nuke so I can wipe Israel off the map.” Their position has been, “Look, if you guys don’t attack us, we could just keep this civilian program the way it is.” And again, there’s always the implication that they’re just building up this uranium stockpile, but no, they’re not.
(00:41:05) That’s in reaction to, one, Donald Trump leaving the deal in 2018, two, the assassination in December of 2020 of the Iranian nuclear scientist, Fakhrizadeh, or however you say that, and then in April of ’21, the sabotage at Natanz. And there’s a Reuters story that says, right after they sabotage Natanz, that’s when the Ayatollah decided let’s enrich up to 60%, which why stop 30% short of 90% 235? It’s because they’re not even making a threat. They’re making the most latent a threat. A bargaining chip to negotiate away. They’re trying to put pressure on the United States to come back to the table. That’s not the same as racing to the bomb. That’s why Marco Rubio says, “Never mind the intelligence,” because the intelligence says what I just said.
Lex Fridman (00:41:52) Point made. Let’s try, if possible, to keep it to a minute and two of back and forth-
Scott Horton (00:41:58) I said the problem is we’re talking about nuclear stuff, which is all very complicated, and most people don’t know much about it, which is what the war party is relying on, that people just hear nuclear, afraid, and mushroom cloud and give the benefit of the doubt to the hawks. And so we got to get into the details of this stuff.
Lex Fridman (00:42:13) Details 100%, but I like the tension between two people with different perspectives exploring those details. And the more we can go back and forth, the better. And there’s a lot of disagreement on the table. I personally enjoy learning from the disagreement, I think, a lot-
Scott Horton (00:42:28) That was a very long list of claims that he made, though, where I felt I had to go down the list as much as I could because there was a lot-
Lex Fridman (00:42:34) I think you addressed maybe one or two claims, and it took 15 minutes. That’s why I’m just commenting on-
Lex Fridman (00:42:40) … let’s do one at a time. I like the tension of the debate of back and forth. That’s all. Mark, do you want to comment on stuff a little bit here? Pick whichever topic you want to go with here.
Nuclear weapons and uranium
Mark Dubowitz (00:42:51) There’s a lot there. Just couple of things, I think, that are worth your viewers knowing. Because Scott’s right. I mean, the nuclear physics is complicated, and it’s also important. The Iranians have assembled about … They say about 15 to 17 bombs worth of 60% enriched uranium. And I think it’s always important for your listeners to understand, what does this all mean? Enriched to 3.67%, to 20%, to 60%, and then to 90% weapons-grade uranium. What does this actual process mean?
(00:43:21) First of all, obviously enriched uranium is a key capability to develop a nuclear weapon. It can also be used for either purposes, civilian purposes and research purposes. You can use it to power nuclear submarines. Let’s just, if you don’t mind, if I could just break it down-
Mark Dubowitz (00:43:37) I think it’s, again, important just to understand the sort of basics before we jump into the allegations and claims and counterclaims. If you’re going to enrich to 3.67% enriched uranium, that’s for civilian nuclear power. But when you do that, you’re basically 70% of what you need to get to weapons grade. You’ve done all the steps, 70% of the steps, in order to get to weapons-grade uranium.
(00:44:02) If you’re enriched to 20%, you are now at 90% of what you need to get to weapons-grade uranium. Now, why would you need 20%? You may need it for something like a research reactor, right?
Mark Dubowitz (00:44:16) Correct. Iran has a Tehran research reactor for medical isotopes. By the way, you can buy those isotopes from abroad, or you can produce them at home. If you’re going to enrich to 60%, then you’ve done 99% of what you need to get to weapons-grade uranium. And then 90% is quote weapons-grade uranium. By the way, you can use 60% to actually deliver a crude nuclear device. That has been done in the past, but you want to get to quote 90%. That’s weapons-grade uranium, as Scott’s defining it. But just again, to clarify, these huge stockpiles of 60% that Iran has accumulated, this 16, 17 bombs worth of 60%, is 99% of what they need for weapons-grade. I just wanted to explain that.
Scott Horton (00:45:03) But when you say … You’re saying if you include the mining, the refining of the ore into yellow cake, the transformation of that into uranium hexafluoride gas, the driving of it in a truck over to the centrifuge, and then spinning it, this is where we get this 90% number from, right? In place of 90% enriched uranium or 80% enriched uranium. It’s 90% of the way on some chart that includes picking up a shovel and beginning to mine. Right?
Mark Dubowitz (00:45:34) Again, just to clarify, I just think it’s important to understand the definition of terms. Once you have 60% enriched uranium, you’ve done 99% of all the steps, including some of the steps that Scott’s talking about. You’ve done 99% of what you need to have weapons-grade-
Scott Horton (00:45:51) Well, as I’ve already established numerous times here, under the JCPOA, they shipped out every bit of their enriched uranium stockpile. The French turned it into fuel rods and then shipped it back. That’s the deal they’re trying to get the US back into and were obviously clearly willing to do. And again, the only reason they were enriching up to 60% was to put the pressure on the Americans to go ahead and get back into the deal. And bad bet. It gave them an excuse to bomb based on the idea that people are going to listen to him, pretend that somehow that’s 99% of the way to the bomb, when you’re including driving to the mine and mining it and converting it to yellow cake and all these other things.
Mark Dubowitz (00:46:28) You’re going to have a deliverable nuclear weapon, so you need the weapons-grade uranium. And just to repeat, they have multiple bombs worth of the 60% enriched uranium, which, again, is 99% of the steps you need to take for weapons grade. They’re very close to weapons grade. It’s 1% more that they need to do to enrich to weapons grade.
(00:46:48) The second aspect of a deliverable nuclear weapon is obviously the delivery vehicle, and those are the missiles. And according to the DNI and other incredible sources, Iran has got the largest missile inventory in the Middle East, 3,000 missiles before the war began and at least the ballistic missiles, 2,000, capable of reaching Israel. There’s no doubt that Iran has the ability once they have a weapons-grade uranium and the warhead to affix that to a missile and deliver that, certainly to hit Israel, hit our Gulf neighbors, hit Southern Europe.
(00:47:23) They also have a active intercontinental ballistic missile program, an ICBM program, which ultimately is designed not to hit the Israelis or the Gulfies but to hit deeper into Europe and ultimately to target the United States. This just to understand the missile program. I think it’s an important part of it.
(00:47:42) The third leg of the stool, and Scott has already alluded to this, and we’ve had some debate on this, and I think we should talk about it, what it really means in detail, is you’ve got to develop a warhead or a crude nuclear device. And according to estimates from both US government sources and nuclear experts, it would take about four to six months for Iran to develop a crude nuclear device. This is something that you wouldn’t use a missile to deliver, but you would use a plane or a ship. And it would take somewhere in the neighborhood of about a year and a half to deliver or to develop a warhead, and that’s to affix to the missile.
(00:48:18) It’s sort of the three legs of the nuclear stool. The weapons-grade uranium. The missiles to deliver it. And the warhead. I just wanted to sort of define terms so that, when we’re having this big debate, your listeners kind of understand what we’re talking about-
Scott Horton (00:48:35) If I can jump in here on this point, too, and I’ll turn it back over to you, but I actually have a bit of a correction to make. For anyone who’s seen me on Piers Morgan or a Saagar and Krystal, I actually oversimplified and made a mistake. I’ve been off of the Iran nuclear beat for a little while doing other things, and so I’d like to take this opportunity to clarify, and I’m going to try to clarify with them on their shows, too, was I have … An old friend of mine used to make nuclear bombs, Gordon Prather, and I only just found out that he died two years ago, unfortunately. He used to write for us at antiwar.com. He’s a brilliant nuclear physicist and H-bomb developer, and he had really taught me all about this stuff.
(00:49:13) I’m not correcting anything you said. What he said essentially is right. I’d maybe add a little more detail. The easiest kind of nuke to make out of uranium is a simple gun-type nuke like they dropped on Hiroshima. It was Little Boy. It’s essentially a shotgun firing a uranium slug into a uranium target, and that’s enough. They didn’t even test it. They knew it’d worked. It was so easy to do the Hiroshima bomb.
(00:49:37) The Nagasaki bomb was a plutonium implosion bomb. It’s virtually always plutonium that’s used in implosion bombs and in miniaturized nuclear warheads that can be married to missiles as opposed to a bomb you can drop out of the belly of a plane, as he was saying, right? Gun-type nuke. You can’t put that on a missile. That is by far the easiest kind of nuclear weapon for Iran to make if they broke out and made one, but it’d essentially be useless to them. What are they going to do? Drive it to Israel in a flatbed truck? They got no way to deliver that.
Lex Fridman (00:50:11) They could drop it as a bomb?
Scott Horton (00:50:13) They could test it in the desert and beat their chest, but essentially that’s all they could do.
Mark Dubowitz (00:50:16) Or you could drop it from a plane like we did, as Scott said, in with Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Scott Horton (00:50:22) Well, very slim chance of Iranian heavy bombers getting through Israeli airspace, but anyway.
(00:50:28) But to make an implosion bomb, they would have to do years worth of experiments, unless the Chinese or the Russians just gave them the software or gave them the finished blueprints or something, which there’s no indication of that whatsoever. The only people gave them blueprints for a nuclear bomb was the CIA. Remember Operation Merlin where they just changed one little thing and gave them nuclear bomb blueprints, but the Iranians didn’t take the bait?
Mark Dubowitz (00:50:49) The blueprints were given. Just to clarify, it’s just interesting just in the terms of the history of proliferation. Iran’s initial nuclear program, which is built on centrifuges, as Scott and I have been talking about … That was actually given to … The designs of that were given to them by AQ Khan who was really the father of the Pakistani nuclear program, and he actually stole those designs from the Dutch and handed it to the Iranians. He also handed it to the North Koreans and the Libyans and others. They were able to illicitly acquire this technology, or at least the blueprints for this technology, from the father of the Pakistani bomb. I think that’s an interesting point, but if you don’t mind-
Scott Horton (00:51:31) As I said earlier, because Bill Clinton clamped down on the Chinese and wouldn’t let them sell or anyone else wouldn’t let them sell them light water reactors, so then they went to AQ Khan and bought the stuff on the black market.
Mark Dubowitz (00:51:41) And they obviously bought heavy water reactors from the Russians, which they’ve been using for electricity. I want to just get to the second thing. I think it’s just important for listeners to know, and then I want to get to JCPOA-
Scott Horton (00:51:52) I was in the middle of saying, though, when you’re trying to make a uranium implosion bomb or a plutonium implosion bomb, it’s a much more difficult task than putting together a gun-type nuke. Takes an extraordinary amount of testing. And that’s why he repeated, probably unknowingly, some false propaganda about Iran having this advanced testing facility. I think he was implying … Correct me if I’m wrong. I’m pretty sure you’re implying at Parchin that they were testing these implosion systems, but that’s completely debunked. It’s completely false.
(00:52:19) What they were testing … What they were doing at Parchin with that implosion chamber was making nanodiamonds, and the scientist in charge of it was a Ukrainian who had studied in the Soviet Union at this military university where they said, “See, they study nuclear stuff there,” but that wasn’t his specialty. His name was Dan Olenko, and he was a specialist in making nanodiamonds.
(00:52:39) And that facility was vouched by Robert Kelly in the Christian Science Monitor. Told Scott Peterson of the Christian Science Monitor that that stuff was nonsense, that that facility, that implosion chamber, could not be used for testing an implosion system for nuclear weapons. And I know from Dr. Prather telling me that, when the Americans were doing this, and the Russians, too, that they tested all their implosion systems outside. And you have to do it over and over and over again with lead instead of uranium in the core. And then you take all this high-speed X-ray film of the thing, and it’s this huge and drawn-out and incredibly complicated engineering process.
(00:53:16) And this is probably why, the week before the war, the CIA said, “Not only do we think that they’re a year away from having enough nuclear material to make one bomb. We think they’re three years away from having a finished warhead.” That must have been, assuming that they would try to make an implosion system that you could put on, in other words, miniaturize, and put on a missile as opposed, in other words, skipping a gun-type nuke that would be useless to them.
(00:53:41) It’s very important to understand then that, if they have a uranium route to the bomb, if they withdraw from the treaty and kick out the IAEA inspectors and announce that now we’re making nuclear bombs, they can either, one, race to a gun-type nuke that’s essentially useless to them, or they can take their ponderous-ass time trying to figure out how to make an implosion system work.
Mark Dubowitz (00:54:05) First of all, I’m glad Scott knows about what’s going on at Parchin because the IAEA doesn’t, and they’ve been asking the Iranians-
Scott Horton (00:54:10) That’s not true. That’s not true. The Iranians told the IAEA, “You can inspect any five out of 10 facilities here carte blanche. Go ahead.” And they did and found nothing. Then they made up the lies about the implosion chamber later. And the IAEA … Again, Robert Kelly is the American IAEA guy. Debunked that in the Christian Science Monitor.
Mark Dubowitz (00:54:27) All right. I want to just, again, just put it out there for your listeners. They should just Google AMAD, A-M-A-D, program, and they should learn about the AMAD program because it’s detailed in US government documents, experts in Iran’s nuclear program, including David Albright who actually saw the archive, went in there, wrote a whole book on it, and there’s a lot of detail about how Iran had an active nuclear weapons program called AMAD to build five nuclear weapons.
Nuclear deal
(00:54:55) But I want to get to the JCPOA because I actually think that’s an interesting discussion for Scott and I to have because I think there’s things that we agree on there and things that we disagree on. This is the 2015 nuclear deal that Obama reaches. It’s negotiated painstakingly over two years between 2013 and 2015, and it follows the interim agreement that the United States negotiated with Iran. And it’s in that interim agreement in 2013 where the United States for the first time actually gives Iran the right to enrich uranium.
(00:55:27) There were five UN Security Council resolutions passed with the support of Russia and China that said Iran should have no enrichment capability and no plutonium reprocessing capability because of the fears that Iran would turn that into a nuclear weapons program. But in 2013, they give that up. 2015, we reached the JCPOA. And under the JCPOA, Iran is allowed to retain enrichment capability and reprocessing capability but over time. Scott mentioned the sunsets, and just want your listeners to understand what these sunsets are. Essentially, the restrictions that are placed on Iran’s nuclear program. And there’s some really serious restrictions placed on it, especially in the short term. Scott’s right. The enriched material. It has to be shipped out not to the French but to the Russians.
(00:56:09) And there’s restrictions on Iran’s ability to operate these facilities, Natanz and Fordo. They’re not closed. They still remain open, but there are restrictions on what they can do with it. There’s also restrictions on Iran’s ability to test and install advanced centrifuges. Now, the reason you’d want an advanced centrifuge rather than the first-generation centrifuge that AQ Khan, the father of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb, gave to the Iranians is you need a smaller number of these centrifuges to produce weapons-grade uranium. If it’s smaller, Lex, it’s easier to hide, right? You can put it in clandestine facilities without this large enrichment centrifuge footprint. There’s restrictions on these advanced centrifuge R&D. And Iran gets significant sanctions relief as part of this.
(00:56:56) But the whole assumption here, from both an Iranian and American perspective, is these restrictions are going to sunset. They’re going to disappear over time. In fact, 2025 is the year where some of the significant restrictions on Iran’s capabilities begin to sunset, and all of them are effectively gone by 2031. In 2031, Iran can emerge with an industrial size enrichment capability. They can emerge with advanced centrifuges that they can install in as many enrichment facilities as they want to build, and Iran can enrich to higher and higher levels. They can go from 3.67 to 20%. They can go to 60%. There’s nothing in the JCPOA that actually prohibits them from going to 90% enriched uranium.
(00:57:41) And I think at the time, the Obama administration’s theory of the case was, sure, in 15 years time, but in 15 years time, we’ll be gone. Hopefully, there’ll be a different government in Iran, and maybe we can renegotiate a different agreement with that government that will extend the sunsets. That’s the JCPOA.
(00:58:01) The reason that critics of the JCPOA, and I was one of them … We objected to the deal is not because it didn’t have some short-term temporary restrictions that were useful, but that if you got it wrong, and there was the same regime and power in 15 years, that regime could emerge with this huge nuclear program with the capabilities to develop nuclear weapons in these multiple hardened sites. Iran, we estimated, would have $1 trillion in sanctions relief over that 15- year period. And if you got it wrong that it was the same regime in power as had been in power in 2015, then you had some difficulties. I just wanted to lay out the case against the JCPOA.
(00:58:41) Now, to steelman Scott’s argument, I think there’s a legitimate argument because I actually didn’t support the withdrawal from the agreement President Trump withdrew in 2018. I did a similar version of what Scott was suggesting, was I thought that the United States should negotiate with the Europeans, the French, the Germans, and the UK who are part of the original deal, extend the sunsets as an agreement between the United States and Europe, and then collectively go to the Iranians and say, “Let’s renegotiate this agreement to extend the sunsets. If you don’t want a nuclear weapons program, then you should agree that you don’t need these capabilities, and let’s extend the sunsets for another 15, 20, 30 years.” President Trump-
Scott Horton (00:59:23) Somebody give me a screenshot of this. Give me a pound, dude.
Scott Horton (00:59:30) And I think the Ayatollah would’ve gone for it too.
Mark Dubowitz (00:59:32) Well, I’m not sure if he would’ve, but let’s … Just a little bit of history. I think it’s just useful for the viewers to know, again, the context, especially when Scott and I agree. A process was begun-
Mark Dubowitz (00:59:44) … by the Trump administration. Trump appointed Brian Hook, or Secretary Pompeo actually appointed Brian Hook, who was the lead Iran envoy, and he began a process of talking to the Europeans. Now, the Europeans actually rejected this idea. And so at some point Trump said, “Look, if the Europeans aren’t prepared to get onside, then I’m out of the deal. I’m out of the deal.” And if you’re interested, I can talk about why I thought we should have stayed in the deal. Because I thought it gave us some important restrictions in the short term, certain leverage, but Trump decides to withdraw from that agreement because he recognizes that the fatal flaw of the agreement, the fatal flaws of the agreement are, one, giving them any enrichment capability, especially at an industrial size, within 15 years.
(01:00:24) And two, are these sunsets, as Scott said, which under which these restrictions are going to go away, and Iran’s going to end up with a massive nuclear program. I think that’s just important. We can talk about the JCPOA, the process, and everything else, if you’re interested-
Scott Horton (01:00:39) I’d like to go ahead and quickly accuse the FBI and the CIA of framing Trump for treason with Russia and pushing the Russiagate hoax. I’m trying to agree with my friend here. Because what it is is that that completely ruined Donald Trump’s ability to engage in real diplomacy with Russia for his entire first term. Certainly, for the first three years of it, he was completely handcuffed. It was terrible, as I’m sure you’re well aware, for the future, now our past, and current history of Ukraine, as well as for this deal too.
(01:01:11) Why couldn’t Trump pick up the phone? I don’t know the details here, but I’ll take his word for it, that the British and the French and the Germans weren’t being nice to Trump. They didn’t like him. They didn’t want to do it. Why couldn’t he pick up the phone and say, “Hey, Putin, I need you to call the Ayatollah for me and tell him, hey, you’d like to see him lift these sunsets too and this and that,”? Why? Because they framed him for treason, so he was completely unable to engage in real diplomacy with Russia, and I bet that he’d agree with me on that one too.
Mark Dubowitz (01:01:39) Actually, can I just say one thing interesting? And again, I think it’s going to be a later topic, and so it’s going to be a provocative statement, but I think let’s put it on the table. I absolutely agree with Scott. I think it was a travesty of the accusations against Donald Trump as a Russian agent. I mean, completely debunked, but it did … I think it paralyzed.
Mark Dubowitz (01:02:00) I mean, completely debunked. But it did, I think it paralyzed his presidency for two, two and a half years. I agree with Scott. The idea that you would accuse the President of the United States of being a foreign agent for Vladimir Putin, I think is unfounded. And I thought at the time, disgraceful, and I thought it was really important. I think Scott did really good work in debunking that.
(01:02:24) I would say that just a couple of days ago, I was watching a podcast Scott was on and he accused Trump of being an agent for Netanyahu and the Israeli government. So I think again, the accusations that the President of the United States is a foreign agent for some foreign government, I think we should just put all of that aside in any discussion and just say, President Trump makes his own decisions whether we agree with them or agree with them, but he’s not working for the FSB and he’s not working for Mossad. President Trump makes his own decisions based on American national security.
Scott Horton (01:02:54) Now, I was making a point. That’s hyperbole, making a point. But he did. In fact, could you Google this for me? Because I always forget exactly how many hundreds of millions of dollars that he took from Sheldon Adelson and Miriam Adelson.
Mark Dubowitz (01:03:04) Who are Americans by the way.
Scott Horton (01:03:06) Who are Americans. Who, Sheldon Adelson said his only regret in life is that he served in the American Army instead of the IDF, and said America should nuke Iran in order to get them to give up their nuclear weapons. He said, “I have one issue, one. Israel. And they gave Trump hundreds of millions of dollars over three campaigns.” That’s not just a, “Geez, I really hope you’ll think of me in the future.”
Lex Fridman (01:03:27) Scott, first of all, a couple of things. So one, there’s a lot of people that are friends with Trump and try to gain influence. I believe that Trump, as an American, is making his own decisions. Let’s, for the purpose of this conversation, just focus on that and see what are the right decisions and what are the wrong decisions, and maybe-
Scott Horton (01:03:45) I wonder what decisions I could get you to make if I gave you hundreds of millions of dollars.
Lex Fridman (01:03:49) Well, me personally, you couldn’t give me… It doesn’t matter.
Scott Horton (01:03:52) I couldn’t get you to drop in on a vert ramp or nothing for a hundred million bucks.
Lex Fridman (01:03:56) Nothing. You cannot control my decisions with money.
Scott Horton (01:03:59) It’s the American system, Lex. That’s how it works. It’s money.
Scott Horton (01:04:04) It’s the same if we were talking about Archer Daniels Midland company throwing hundreds of millions of dollars around. They get policies based on their hundreds of millions of dollars. The squeaky wheel gets the grease, right? All that.
Mark Dubowitz (01:04:14) So Lex, I think you’re right. I mean, I think Elon Musk spent what, $400 million helping Trump get elected. And obviously, there are a number of philanthropists. I think, clearly his son, Don Jr’s had a lot of influence in who gets selected in these positions in the Pentagon, NSC, and Tucker Carlson has had a lot of influence. So I think as you say, he surrounds himself with people who have certain ideas, ideologies, policies. The President makes his own decisions.
(01:04:37) I just want to touch on just one thing because I don’t want to leave this alone. Just out of respect for the victims of Iran-backed terrorism and hostage-taking and assassinations since 1979. This is the regime that took hostages in ’79, took our diplomats hostage. Scott says ’83 was really the only thing that happened and throws out a lot of information, certainly some pretty breathtaking accusations that somehow the Israelis knew about this and didn’t tell the Americans.
Scott Horton (01:05:10) It’s a Mossad officer’s accusation.
Scott Horton (01:05:13) Victor Ostrovsky, is his name.
Mark Dubowitz (01:05:15) Yeah. I know exactly who he is, and he has been widely discredited and having an ax to grind with Mossad. But anyway, not only ’83, but all through the 90s, the 2000s, 2010s, 2020s, there have been hundreds of attacks, of assassinations, of hostage taking. There are thousands Americans who have been killed and maimed by the regime.
Scott Horton (01:05:41) Can you be specific what you’re talking about here?
Mark Dubowitz (01:05:43) Yeah, I mean, I can give you a whole list.
Scott Horton (01:06:04) I got my pen in my hand. Go ahead.
Mark Dubowitz (01:06:05) Yeah, and again, according to US intelligence findings, it was actually Hezbollah that worked with Al-Qaeda, trained Al-Qaeda in that attack in the Khobar Towers. They were kidnapping our diplomats in Beirut. They launched attacks against our soldiers while in Iraq. The notion that somehow-
Mark Dubowitz (01:06:27) No, I don’t think, well, you say you debunked it, you just made your claim. But those were Iran-backed militias, backed by Qasem Soleimani, who Scott referred to, who was the commander of the IRGC Quds Force, who supplied them with those IEDs or those EFPs, actually, those explosives.
Mark Dubowitz (01:06:48) Well, again, this has been all confirmed.
Scott Horton (01:06:52) Why don’t you search Alyssa Rubin, New York Times EFP factory? Or you can look in the Christian Science Monitor for Operation Eagle Claw where-
Scott Horton (01:07:02) It’s easy to find in my book. You can flip right to Soda Straws and EFPs. And you see where I have all my citations for the solid dozen American newspaper reporters who were embedded with American soldiers who found these factories in Iraqi Shiaistan with Iraqi Arabs working the machines, not Iran.
Mark Dubowitz (01:07:23) So I’d like your viewers to Google not just a couple of sources, but actually Google the US government reports that did a whole after-action report on the Iraq War. All the mistakes were made in the Iraq war, and there were legion of mistakes made. But it was very clear that Iran had actually provided the technology, the training, the funding for these Iran-backed militias to kill Americans. I mean, I could see, Scott-
Scott Horton (01:07:48) In fact they learned a method from Lebanese, Hezbollah that got it from the IRA.
Scott Horton (01:08:03) … and that design did not come from Persia.
Mark Dubowitz (01:08:05) Yeah. So again, I think we all admit, Scott admits as well that Hezbollah was trained, financed, and supported by Iran. Hezbollah’s been responsible for many of these terrorist attacks.
Scott Horton (01:08:15) Where does Hezbollah come from? It’s a reaction to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon where they went after the PLO and horribly mistreated the poor local Iraqi Shiites until they rose up and created these militias to fight in self-defense.
Scott Horton (01:08:26) That’s where Hezbollah comes from.
Mark Dubowitz (01:08:27) Hezbollah was actually created by the IROGC before the Israeli invasion. Why-
Scott Horton (01:08:30) This was the CIA’s Bin Laden unit. Mike Scheuer says it was Osama bin Laden and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed that did the Khobar Towers attack. And who did they kill? They killed 19 American airmen who were stationed there to bomb Iraq from bases in Saudi Arabia under the Israeli insisted upon Dual Containment Policy-
Scott Horton (01:08:50) That came from Yitzhak Shamir who had sent his man Martin Indyk to work for Bill Clinton and push the Dual Containment Policy, is where that comes from in the first place. The main reason Al-Qaeda turned against the United States, and the Khobar Towers attack was Bin Laden, and he bragged about it himself to Abdel Bari Atwan, the reporter from Al-Quds, Al-Arabi in London, and spent days with him and bragged all about it and blessed the martyrs and the rest of that and has widely discredited the claim that it was Iranian-backed Shiite Hezbollah that did the Khobar Towers attack.
(01:09:25) That was what the Saudi government told the US. In fact, there’s a great documentary about John O’Neill who was the head of FBI counterterrorism who told Louis Free, “Boss, the Saudis are blowing smoke up your ass about this Hezbollah thing. It was Al-Qaeda that did it.” And then Louis Free got all upset because he used the A word. He was a very conservative Catholic guy, Louis Free, and then refused to listen to another word from John O’Neill about it.
Mark Dubowitz (01:09:51) So what we know now from Scott, because he’s given certainly a lot of context to how he actually sees things, is here’s who lies to you and here’s who doesn’t. US government lies to you. Israeli government lies to you. The Israelis clearly lie to you. Mendacious bunch. Saudis lie to you. But you know who doesn’t lie to you, actually? Hezbollah doesn’t lie to you. AL-Qaeda doesn’t lie to you.
Scott Horton (01:10:16) I didn’t cite Al-Qaeda or-
Lex Fridman (01:10:28) Scott, straight up, I hear you, but you’re interrupting and please, just honestly, it’s not about the content, but honestly.
Scott Horton (01:10:34) How come you’re not saying to him, isn’t that weird that you just said he trusts Hezbollah even though he didn’t say anything about trusting Hezbollah?
Lex Fridman (01:10:39) I’m not calling out the content. I’m calling out the interruptions. He hasn’t interrupted you. It’s great. I’m loving the back and forth.
Lex Fridman (01:10:46) It is great. But just a little less talking over each other. That’s all.
Mark Dubowitz (01:10:49) Yeah. So I mean, again, the sort of view of the regime in Iran, and I think Scott wisely said at the beginning of this discussion, what did you say? “I don’t have any love for the Ayatollah. I’m a Texan. I don’t have any love for the Ayatollah in Iran.” And yet, despite the fact, Scott, doesn’t have love for the Ayatollah, I agree with him and I think he’s being sincere, in every discussion that we’ve had on every topic, it’s always about everyone’s lying except the Ayatollah in Iran. He’s not lying about having a nuclear weapons program.
(01:11:20) He didn’t actually support all of these terrorist organizations that he founded, financed, and supported to kill Americans. It wasn’t the Ayatollah in Iran. He’s not lying about his deception campaign against the United States. He’s not lying about negotiations with the Americans. It’s the American’s fault all the time. So he’s presented all the time in Scott’s conception here as a sincere actor who doesn’t want to develop nuclear weapons, who doesn’t actually want to kill Americans. He’s just always a victim of American and Israeli aggression.
(01:11:56) I think it’s an interesting conception. I think let’s talk about it. And I mean, I’m fascinated by the conception because it’s very contrary to mine, obviously. It’s very contrary to I think, decades of overwhelming evidence that the Islamic Republic has been worth the United States since 1979. And I don’t take too much stock in what people say. I take stock in what they do. So “Death to America, Death to Israel” could just be a slogan. It could be just propaganda. But when it’s actually operationalized, then you start to ask, “Well, maybe it’s not just propaganda, maybe it’s intention operationalized into capabilities.”
(01:12:35) What we’re forgetting here, and again, it’s this causal relationship. It’s we aggress against Iran and the Israelis aggress against Iran, and Iran is always reacting. I mean, let’s give the Iranians their due, because Khomeini made it very clear when he established the Islamic Republic that there will be a revolutionary and expansionist regime, and they will expand their power through the Middle East. And so he built, and to his credit, was very successful until October 7th, this axis of resistance, as he calls it, which are these terror proxy armies, Hezbollah, Hamas, Palestinian, Islamic Jihad, the Iraqi Shiite militias, the Houthis in Yemen, and certainly supporting the Assad regime in Syria.
(01:13:15) He built a very, very impressive and deadly axis that he turned against the United States and against Israel, which saw its culmination on October 7th. I think after October 7th, that was a huge miscalculation for Khomeini, and we’ve seen the results of what’s happened to his axis of resistance through quite devastating Israeli military capabilities over the past number of months. But he has an ideology, and I think where I agree with Scott is I’m not sure if Khomeini would actually use a nuclear weapon against Israel, the United States, because I don’t think Khomeini is suicidal.
(01:13:50) But I think what Khomeini wants is he wants a nuclear weapon as a backstop for his conventional power, right? It’s very much the Kim Jong-Un model of North Korea, right? I’m going to have nuclear weapons with ICBMs to threaten America, but what I’m actually going to do is threaten South Korea with having massive conventional capabilities on the DMZ that I could take South Korea in a week, I could destroy in a week. So, you, the United States and South Korea have no military option. That’s Khomeini’s view. He can actually building up this massive ballistic missile arsenal that he’s unleashed in the past 12 days that according to, again, the US and Israel was going to go from 2,000 to 6,000 to 20,000, that from Khomeini’s perspective, he didn’t need to drop a nuclear bomb on Tel Aviv.
(01:14:35) What he needed to do was use the threat of nuclear escalation in order to use his conventional capabilities, his missiles, to destroy Tel Aviv. And you’ve already seen the damage from just a few dozen ballistic missiles getting through the kind of damage that he’s wrought on Tel Aviv already. That is the conception that Khomeini has. It’s a revolutionary regime. It aggresses. And I do think it’s interesting, and I think we should talk about it.
Lex Fridman (01:14:59) Actually, that’s a good cue.
Lex Fridman (01:15:04) Okay. We took a quick break and now, Scott.
Scott Horton (01:15:07) Yeah. Okay. So a few things there. First of all, on Ahmad, the pre-2003 nuclear weapons research, the CIA estimate in 2007 concluded that all research had stopped in 2003, and Seymour Hersh reported that the reasoning behind that was mainly that America had gotten rid of Saddam Hussein for them. Now, in Gareth Porter’s book Manufactured Crisis, he shows that the major conclusion that the DIA had made, that the Iranians were researching nuclear weapons, was based on some invoices that they had intercepted for some dual use materials, some specialty magnets and things that they thought, “Boy, this looks like this could be part of a weaponization program, a secret program here.”
(01:15:55) And Gareth Porter, who’s a really great critic of all of these policies and claims says, “Hey, this was a good faith misunderstanding by DIA. They were doing their job.” But it turned out the IAEA later, when America gave them that information, the IAEA went and verified, “Oh, there’s the magnet and there’s this and there’s that.” And all those dual use items actually were being used for civilian purposes. And so then as Gareth writes in his book, “The only real reason that the NIE said that they even had a program before 2003 was essentially because they didn’t want to dispute their last mistaken conclusion. So they said, ‘Okay, well, that was right up until then, but that was when that changed'”
(01:16:33) And then the other half of their reason for accepting that there ever was a nuclear weapons research program in the country before 2003 was the smoking laptop. And I’m sorry, I think I misspoke earlier when I said that the laptop was in 2005, that was just the Washington Post story that had a bunch of stuff about it. That was in 2003 as well, or 2004 possibly. So this was why the, but it was still all, again, forged by the Israelis and funneled through the MEK cult, but was obsolete essentially, and had nothing in it. At least the accusations in it weren’t passed ’03. And so there’s really no reason to believe that there was actually a nuclear weapons research program even before ’03, which then again, the National Intelligence Council says ended in 2003 and hasn’t been restored since then.
Mark Dubowitz (01:17:24) Scott, can I ask you a question? Not a comment by me, but a question.
Mark Dubowitz (01:17:25) Just your perspective. So just so I understand this, so the nuclear archive, this massive archive that the Israelis were able to take out of Tehran, bring to the United States, bring to the IAEA, which is very detailed blueprints.
Scott Horton (01:17:39) It’s just the alleged studies documents again, it’s the same stuff from the smoking laptop.
Mark Dubowitz (01:17:43) Yeah. So let me just ask you, because it’s huge, and it’s very detailed, and it shows clearly that Iran had an active nuclear weapons program, certainly until 2003. And then we can have a discussion about what happened after that. Are you suggesting that that’s all been forged by Israel?
Scott Horton (01:18:01) Yes. Nothing in this smoking laptop held up.
Mark Dubowitz (01:18:03) All four? Not the laptop, but this entire archive that they pulled out with the stats-
Mark Dubowitz (01:18:15) … many of the documents. There’s thousands of pages. I’m asking, this is not what I’m claiming. Is that all forged by Israel?
Scott Horton (01:18:21) Is that not all about the uranium tetra fluoride and the warhead that David Albright debunked and all the same claims that were in the smoking laptop from the Bush years?
Mark Dubowitz (01:18:31) David Albright actually wrote an entire book. It’s a very detailed book your listeners should Google. It’s David Albright in the archive where he goes in, he went in detail and he confirms the information in that archive that Iran had an active program under something called Ahmad to develop five atomic weapons. So again, you and I can debate this all day.
Scott Horton (01:18:53) Now, this would’ve been before Natanz was even dug and before a single centrifuge was spinning right?
Mark Dubowitz (01:18:53) And again, forget all that.
Scott Horton (01:18:58) I’m just making sure everybody understands, assuming that was true, we were talking about a piece of paper?
Mark Dubowitz (01:19:01) It’s not a piece of paper. It’s a massive archive. I’m just asking the question. You believe Mossad fabricated all of this as a lie to deceive the United States, the IAEA, and the international community? That’s just my question.
Scott Horton (01:19:13) My understanding is that there’s nothing significant in the 2018 archive that was not already in the debunked claims from the laptop.
Mark Dubowitz (01:19:22) But my question is not that it’s debunked because we can argue about whether it’s debunked or not, but are you saying that Mossad fabricated it? That’s what you’re claiming?
Scott Horton (01:19:32) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, because the CIA admitted that there was no laptop and Oli Heinonen admitted-
Scott Horton (01:19:37) … that he got it from the MEK.
Mark Dubowitz (01:19:37) I’m not asking about laptop. I’m not asking for-
Scott Horton (01:19:37) He got it from the MEK. Where did the MEK get it? The MEK got it from the Israelis.
Mark Dubowitz (01:19:43) Scott, I’m not asking about the laptop. I’m asking about this huge archive that was sitting in a warehouse in Tehran full of-
Scott Horton (01:19:49) I don’t know the truth behind those documents. I don’t believe Israeli claims of what they were and where they came from without, for example, reading Albright’s book and seeing what he has to say about all of that. I don’t take Netanyahu’s claims. Okay, so what’s so significant in there? You say that there’s a document that has a plan to make five bombs, but isn’t the rest of the proof the same green salt experiments and the warhead for the missile that David Albright showed was obviously fake, because the warhead was purportedly being designed for a missile that was now going to have an entirely different nose cone on it?
Mark Dubowitz (01:20:26) No. So David Albright, again, we should bring David Albright here.
Iran Nuclear Archive
Lex Fridman (01:20:29) David Albright is a prominent physicist nuclear proliferation expert known for his detailed research and publication on nuclear weapons.
Lex Fridman (01:20:35) He has a bunch of books Peddling Peril, Iran’s Perilous Pursuit of Nuclear Weapons, Plutonium and Highly Enriched Uranium, 1996 and so on.
Mark Dubowitz (01:20:43) Yeah, so folks should read the book on the archive because David had full access to the archive, all the detailed documents and blueprints, and he writes a book that, again, the conclusion of which is Iran had an active nuclear weapons program.
Scott Horton (01:21:00) No, no, no. The conclusion of which was they were researching it right before 2003. They had no nuclear material to introduce into a single machine, right?
Scott Horton (01:21:14) Natanz was empty until the end of 2006, right? They didn’t even start spinning centrifuges in there until ’06.
Mark Dubowitz (01:21:21) They had gotten centrifuges for AQ-Khan. They’d built a deeply buried underground facility at Natanz. They were putting in place the component parts for a nuclear weapons capability. And Ahmad showed, conclusively, unless you believe Mossad fabricated all-
Mark Dubowitz (01:21:50) You’re claiming that America fabricated-
Scott Horton (01:21:51) … that when America invaded Iraq and overthrew Saddam Hussein for them, that was when they gave up, even considering the need for it. Remember, the Iranians held a million-man vigil for the Americans on September 11th. The Iranians hated the Taliban. In fact, the Americans thought Iran might invade Afghanistan earlier in 2001, and they hated Saddam Hussein.
Mark Dubowitz (01:22:18) … let’s not go to al-Qaeda, the Taliban and 9/11 and the Iranians, and the Million People Vigil. Let’s just stay on the topic.
Scott Horton (01:22:23) You’re asking me what I already answered.
Mark Dubowitz (01:22:25) Do you believe Mossad fabricated that entire-
Scott Horton (01:22:29) … I don’t take their word for anything. And as far as I understand, the accusations in there are the same ones from the laptop that are already discredited. And I haven’t read David Albright’s book. You’re distracting from me refuting this giant list of false claims that you made previously that I haven’t got a chance-
Mark Dubowitz (01:22:44) Okay. Let’s all agree. Let’s all agree, you’re going to read the book? Maybe Lex, you’re going to read the book. Viewers, you should read the book. I think David Albright has done a meticulous job. By the way, just warning, it’s a big book, very detailed, hundreds of pages. And he goes through it in meticulous detail in analyzing this archive, and showed again that Iran had an active nuclear weapons program designed to build five atomic warheads. Now we can talk about what happened after 2003, and did they make the decision to totally stop it?
Scott Horton (01:23:10) Yeah, God changed his mind after the Neoconservatives lied America into war with Iraq for Ariel Sharon.
Lex Fridman (01:23:16) So just to clarify, you, Mark, and David Albright believed that Iran was developing a nuclear weapon. And you, Scott are saying they were not before 2003?
Lex Fridman (01:23:28) That’s just to summarize what we were just talking about.
Scott Horton (01:23:31) Well, I could tell you that, so Gareth’s book came out in 2014, which is before this archive was supposedly revealed in Tehran. But in Gareth’s book, he shows that the CIA and National Intelligence estimate of 2007 that said that there was a program before 2003, and was halted after America invaded Iraq was based on one, the DIA’s mistaken, but sincere interpretation of these invoices for these dual use technologies. And then the smoking laptop, which was completely fake and funneled into the stream by the Mujahideen e-cult, communist terrorist cult. The same people who’ve come off with 10 major hoaxes. The NCRI, the National Council for Resistance in Iran, that’s the MEK. They just put out a fake story, what, three, four weeks ago about a big secret nuclear weapons site in Iran. Don’t you remember? And then nothing happened with that because it was another lie by the MEK. It happens all the time.
Mark Dubowitz (01:24:28) So Lex, maybe we should talk about what happened after 2003. What about this 2007 NIE? What does it mean? Did it mean Iran had now abandoned its nuclear weapons program or did something else happen?
Scott Horton (01:24:38) They never had a nuclear weapons program.
Mark Dubowitz (01:24:40) All right, but let’s talk about that. They had-
Scott Horton (01:24:43) According to NIE, They had a nuclear weapons research program that never made anything at all. So you can try to conflate that if you want.
Scott Horton (01:24:51) But I think everybody can see what you’re doing there.
Mark Dubowitz (01:24:53) … what the 2007 NIE says. But the 2007 NIE says is that, and you are correct, according to the 2007 NIE is Iran made the decision after the invasion of Iraq not to pursue an active nuclear weapons program anymore.
Scott Horton (01:25:09) Because we were putting their best friends in power in Baghdad for them.
Mark Dubowitz (01:25:13) Well, because the United States had gone in-
Scott Horton (01:25:14) So they didn’t need to worry no more.
Mark Dubowitz (01:25:15) And in a matter of 100 days, had taken down the Iraqi army.
Scott Horton (01:25:19) And put in Abdul Aziz al-Hakim’s faction-
Scott Horton (01:25:31) As far as I possibly could. Thank you.
Mark Dubowitz (01:25:32) I should have publicly opposed it rather than just working on Iran in 2003. But you’re right, it redounded to the benefit of Iran, that invasion. But that’s not actually what I’m talking about. What I’m talking about is 100 days the Iranian Sea that the US military has taken down the Iraqi army, that they had fought an eight-year war with where almost a million people, Scott, as you know, had been killed. So they were afraid that the United States was going to march from Baghdad to Tehran. So they make a decision to end their active Ahmad program. They make a decision to build up the key capabilities they need to retain an Iranian nuclear weapons option, specifically the enrichment capabilities at Natanz, and then Fordow, and at Iraq given them the plutonium route. And then what they do is they take the members of the Ahmad program, the nuclear weapons scientists that have worked on this, and they disperse them. So they’re now no longer in a formal weapons program. They’re put in a number of different research centers and universities.
(01:26:39) And Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, who you mentioned earlier, who’s in some respects, I wouldn’t call him the Oppenheimer of the Iranian nuclear weapons program. He’s more like… Who was in the Oppenheimer movie, Leslie Grove, the guy who was actually responsible for the organization, and the training, and the recruitment, and the guy that actually ran the program as opposed to Oppenheimer, the sort of brilliant nuclear physicist. This is Fakhrizadeh. Fakhrizadeh takes control of this program. And now it is dispersed and it is unstructured in that sense because they recognize that if they continue with this, the United States may march to Tehran.
(01:27:21) And so the NIE says, “Iran is retaining the key capabilities, the enrichment capabilities to give them an option for a nuclear weapon. But we, the NIE, have decided, or we have concluded that they no longer have an active structured nuclear weapons program.” However, since then, what have we seen? We’ve seen them actually do what many suspected they would do, which is build all the key capabilities that they need so that at time of their choosing, they can decide to develop a nuclear bomb, whether it’s a crude nuclear device as you’ve described, whether it’s a nuclear warhead. We’ve had that discussion so far.
Mark Dubowitz (01:27:58) But, sorry, just to finish. So just understand the brilliance of Iranian nuclear deception, right? I think it’s really interesting to get in the minds of the Ayatollah and understand this, because he doesn’t want to provoke the United States. He doesn’t want to see another Iraq-style invasion, this time of his country. He’s building this capability on the enrichment side and on the reprocessing side. He is framing this as I’m only building a civilian nuclear program. He’s taken the weapons scientists who are building part of an active nuclear weapons program, and he’s dispersing them, putting them under the guidance and direction of Fakhrizadeh and starting to build out these capabilities.
(01:28:38) I mean, I have to say, I really admire the way he’s played this three-dimensional nuclear chess game. It’s very, very interesting. And I think he made a tragic mistake about six weeks ago when he rejected the offer from Trump at Oman and then provoked both an Israeli and then an American strike. But he was playing this game almost perfectly before then in building out these capabilities. And I think what he should have done, if I were him, I would’ve waited out Trump. I would’ve waited three and a half years. I would’ve taken the offer in Oman, which gave him enrichment capability above ground. This consortium that was going to be built in three and a half years would never be built.
(01:29:19) And even if it was built, he could just say, “I’m not interested anymore,” and challenge the next president, whoever that is, Republican or Democrat, to do anything about it. And I think the political calculation should have been, ” The next president’s not going to do anything about this. I’ll be able to then be able to complete my nuclear weapons program.” But he challenged Trump. He thought Trump was a paper tiger. He rejected that offer at Oman. And we’ve seen what’s happened over the past couple of weeks.
Lex Fridman (01:29:45) Two things. One, can you go and respond to certain things that you heard? And two, can we generally move in the direction of the modern day and trying to see what is the right thing now, our analysis of the situation now, we’ve been kind of staying in the context of history, which is really important, but sort of moving it forward? But yeah, go ahead please.
Scott Horton (01:30:08) I’m not sure how much time we have. I kind of hoped-
Scott Horton (01:30:11) … you’d let me talk about Israel’s role in Iraq War, too, and for that matter in Barack Obama’s dirty war in Syria that led to the rise of the bin Ladenites there. It’s all part of America’s Israel policy. So I don’t want to, I’d rather go back before we go forward. But I also do, I need to go back over so many claims that he’s made here that I’d like to address.
Lex Fridman (01:30:31) So I strongly prefer we go, because there’s so much history, we’re going to lose ourselves in it. There’s not enough hours. We should take certain moments in history that instruct the modern day, but let’s not get lost there if it’s okay.
Lex Fridman (01:30:58) A lot of stuff happened this week and a lot of stuff will happen tomorrow and the next week. And everyone wants to know what is going to happen. What is the worst case, what is the best case? Should we be freaking out? What do we need to understand about today? That’s all.
Scott Horton (01:31:13) All right, so there’s a lot of things to address here. So first of all, something that me and Mr. Dubowitz agree about.
Scott Horton (01:31:19) Mark. Something that Mark and I agree about is that there actually is not a threat of an aggressive first strike by Iran. I’m a little surprised to hear him say that, but I’m grateful to hear him say that. It is honest. I would advise you, you may be unfamiliar with this, but I can tell you anyone in America who drives for a living and listens to AM radio have heard claims that Iran was making nuclear weapons probably 50,000 times in the last 25 years. Over and over and over again, we hear this propaganda.
(01:31:57) They still don’t have a single atom bomb. The reason why they haven’t been able to cobble together an atom bomb in this 1940s technology is because they have not tried to. Okay, so people can just essentially flog this dead horse, pretend there’s this threat. Oh, he’s going to break out any day now. But here’s the thing about that. As the Ayatollah well knows, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and now Trump again, have all vowed with all sincerity that they would bomb Iran off the face of the earth if they attempted to break out and make a nuclear weapon.
(01:32:39) Hillary Clinton, when she ran, said they’d be obliterated from the face of the earth. Barack Obama did an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg in the Atlantic in 2012, called “As President I Don’t Bluff.” And essentially the interview is him begging Jeffrey Goldberg to explain to the Israelis that he really, really, really, really means it, that he’s trying to negotiate, but if the Ayatollah breaks out for a nuke, “I’ll nuke him if I have to.”
Mark Dubowitz (01:33:02) No, they never said that.
Mark Dubowitz (01:33:09) … all options are on the table.
Scott Horton (01:33:11) Anyone can Google her word.
Mark Dubowitz (01:33:12) She was never our president.
Scott Horton (01:33:13) No, I said she was running for president.
Mark Dubowitz (01:33:15) But she was never our president. But no US president ever said they’re to obliterate Iran. Nobody ever said they could drop a nuke on Iran.
Scott Horton (01:33:20) The implication was clear under W. Bush, Barack Obama, Trump, Biden, and Trump again-
Mark Dubowitz (01:33:25) That they would strike Iran’s nuclear facilities.
Scott Horton (01:33:27) If they broke out toward a nuclear weapon, America would do whatever it took to prevent that from happening.
Mark Dubowitz (01:33:34) Strike their nuclear facilities.
Scott Horton (01:33:36) That was always the case there.
Mark Dubowitz (01:33:38) But please clarify, just to be accurate, I was talking about nuking Iran.
Scott Horton (01:33:38) I’m almost certain no one’s-
Mark Dubowitz (01:33:42) No one’s talking about bombing Iran to smithereens or obliterating or any of that.
Scott Horton (01:33:46) That’s really not true. I mean.
Scott Horton (01:33:48) Barack Obama changed America’s nuclear posture to say, because it used to say we reserve the right to use a nuclear first strike against any country. He changed that to say, “No, we promise not to use a nuclear first strike against any non-nuclear weapon state except maybe Iran.” That’s true. In fact, that was the threat.
(01:34:09) I got more here. Netanyahu also did an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg back when Ehud Barak was his defense minister in, I think this is also 2012, it might’ve been 2014, where the two of them explained that they agreed with what he said too, that the threat is not of a nuclear first strike. Unlike every AM radio audience has been led to believe that the Ayatollah, as soon as he gets an atom bomb, he will nuke Tel Aviv and he doesn’t care if all of Persia is nuked by Israel’s 200 nukes in response. He’s trying to cause the end of the world by causing a nuclear war and all these things. Well, Netanyahu himself admitted that that’s not true.
Mark Dubowitz (01:34:48) I think it’s really important. I agree with that.
Scott Horton (01:34:49) I’m just agreeing with you so you don’t have to stop me.
Mark Dubowitz (01:34:51) But I’m agreeing with you.
Scott Horton (01:34:52) I know, but I’m agreeing with you so it’s all right. Netanyahu told Jeffrey Goldberg that he was not concerned about a first strike, that his only concern was that talented young Israelis would move to Miami, that there would be a brain drain. That was his words, a brain drain from Israel. That also then Hezbollah, as this is what he put it, and I agree with this, that conventional forces would have a bit more freedom of action in the region if Iran was sitting on an A-bomb. Neither of them said that there was a threat of an offensive first strike against Israel. I would point out, and I’m skipping ahead to Trump, but I’m skipping back here again in a second because I got more things to refute. But Trump just said the other day when he announced American airstrikes there that this has neutralized a threat to Israel. He did not even pretend that it was a threat to the United States that he had ended in doing so.
Mark Dubowitz (01:35:43) Actually, he said exactly that.
Scott Horton (01:35:44) Well, actually you can Google the state [inaudible 01:35:47].
Mark Dubowitz (01:35:47) He actually said, president Trump has said that an Iranian nuclear weapon is a threat to the United States. [inaudible 01:35:53]. He said that over and over again.
Scott Horton (01:35:53) Not in the state [inaudible 01:35:53]. He announced his great victory in bombing, which is what I just said, right?
Mark Dubowitz (01:35:57) President Trump sends out 20 Truth posts a day. Let’s look at the many, many, many things that he said.
Scott Horton (01:36:03) Then we have this whole thing about how I always believe Hezbollah, and I always believe the Ayatollah, when in fact, I did not quote the Ayatollah and I did not quote Hezbollah on anything. I did quote Osama bin Laden taking responsibility for the Khobar Towers attack, which he shared that with Abdul Bari Atwan. Anyone can read it. He agrees with Michael Scheuer, the former chief of the CIA’s Bin Laden unit, who also said that it was a hoax, that it was Iranian-backed Saudi Hezbollah that did that attack. Again, who did they attack? They killed 19 American airmen, which was the number one complaint of al-Qaeda against the United States that we had air forces and Army stationed in Saudi Arabia in order to bomb and blockade Iraq, which again, and this was the thing that you had asked about before, was part of the dual containment policy in the 1990s.
Scott Horton (01:36:57) The fact is you’re sitting here saying that I trust them all so much. Well, what do you think, Lex, what do you think Ronald Reagan meant by trust but verify? He meant don’t trust but be polite. That’s what he meant. Verify means we know with sensors and cameras and inspections what’s going on. No one can find a quote that I said here about how we can trust the Ayatollah because he promised this or that or the other thing. I didn’t say that. What I’m talking about is the process. They sign agreements and then we have inspectors to verify their claims. As anyone can search at IAEA.org, they have continued to verify the non-diversion of nuclear material in Iran to any military or other special purpose.
Mark Dubowitz (01:37:39) The IAEA has now said that they actually can no longer do this before this war started.
Scott Horton (01:37:43) Because America withdrew from the-
Mark Dubowitz (01:37:46) I mean, at the end of the day, let’s just be factually accurate. The fact of the matter is anybody who knows anything about nuclear weapons program knows that we do not have 100% certainty on anything. I mean, Scott is making claims here that Mossad is fabricating the CIA is fabricating, everybody’s fabricating, but he’s also assuming that we have 100% certainty about what Iran is doing inside a country more than two and a half times the size of Texas.
(01:38:09) As Scott rightly said, mountainous, incredibly difficult to monitor, incredibly difficult to surveil. They built underground facilities at Natanz and Fordow without our knowledge. They didn’t disclose it. We finally found out about it.
Scott Horton (01:38:23) [inaudible 01:38:23] refuted that an hour ago. You can rewind it.
Mark Dubowitz (01:38:24) Anyone can refute it, but the fact of matter is they did it. It’s there.
Scott Horton (01:38:26) We know the facilities are there. By the way, you keep saying that I just say lies, lies, lies. But I have explained exactly what I meant. I’ve cited my sources and I haven’t just sat here and said, “Uh huh, that’s a lie,” because I don’t like it. I sat here and explained to you exactly how I know who was building those EFP bombs in Iraq, exactly how I know what the IAEA said about the state of inspections here, or what Robert Kelly told the Christian Science Monitor about Parchin and the rest and on and on and on. I don’t sit here like I’m just saying, “Well, that’s not true because I like it,” when in fact I’m explaining exactly why your claims are not true, which they’re not. Just like saying that I said I trust Hezbollah when anyone can rewind that and break their finger trying to find the part where I said that because I never did.
(01:39:12) Now you brought up the DPRK. Well, in 2002, when George W. Bush said that they were part of the axis of evil, they were part of the NPT and they had a safeguards agreement with the IAEA. Yes, they had bought centrifuge equipment from aqcon, but they had not used it. It was John Bolton’s lie that they were enriching uranium to weapons grade and violating the agreed framework. John Bolton and George W. Bush in the fall of ’02 then canceled the agreed framework deal that Bill Clinton had struck based on this misinformation. They added new sanctions and they launched what was called the Proliferation Security Initiative, which was an illegal and unilateral claim of the authority to seize any North Korean ship on the high seas if they suspected it of proliferation. Then they added them to the Nuclear Posture Review, putting them on the short list for a potential first strike.
(01:40:04) It was only then in the end of 2002 after these, what, four or five major things that the Bush government did to antagonize them that North Korea then announced that they were going to withdraw from the treaty and begin making nuclear weapons, which is what they did. Then as we know from all the scientists say every time that they’ve tested a nuclear bomb, it’s been a plutonium bomb and never tested, never once used a uranium bomb. There’s no evidence that John Bolton’s claims there that they were enriching uranium were ever true. They had Sig Hecker who’s this important American nuclear expert, went and toured their facilities and all of these things. We know quite a bit about what they have. It was simply Bush pushed North Korea to nukes, as Gordon Prather wrote in his last great article for us at Antiwar.com. It was through this exact kind of belligerence when we already had a deal that we could have continued to work with them on-
Mark Dubowitz (01:40:57) But Scott, this is the constant theme in your analysis. Again, want to look at it, maybe steel man it, maybe challenge it, but the constant theme is the United States and Israel and the West, we constantly aggress against North Korea, against Iran, against Russia, against these countries, and they respond to us. They respond to us in ways that they build nuclear weapons programs that are peaceful, but we force them to develop nuclear weapons. They don’t actually mean to kill us.
Scott Horton (01:41:34) Look, it’s not right that I’m saying everything anyone does-
Scott Horton (01:41:38) You’re saying that everything I say is that everyone anyone else does is the reaction, but that’s not true. The subject here is what has America done to make things worse rather than better?
Mark Dubowitz (01:41:48) That’s not the topic here.
Scott Horton (01:41:49) I’m citing provocations. That doesn’t mean I’m saying that everything that happens in the world is only an equal and opposite reaction to an American provocation, and you can’t find me saying that. You can only somehow try to paraphrase me claiming that somehow or something like that. But that’s what’s at issue is as I said, for example, there’s the Reuters story that says that after Israel did the sabotage, which they bragged about at Natanz in April of ’21, that was when they started enriching up to 60%. now I’m saying that, and I’m just denying the agency of the Iranians or anything except that, no, I’m not. I’m just citing the Reuters news agency saying that this proactive action by Israel caused a negative reaction by your own lights, a very negative reaction in their beginning to again enrich up to 60% uranium.
(01:42:38) That means I’m just spinning for the Ayatollah or I believe that no one ever does anything except in reaction to Israel and America, except that I’m just citing specific examples of where that’s exactly the case. Donald Trump withdrew from the deal. He could have stayed in the deal and tried hard to make it better. He didn’t.
Lex Fridman (01:43:10) … use everything we just talked about and talk about today, what is maybe Mark, can you lay out what is the best case and the worst case in Scotland? Lay out the best case and the worst case that can happen now.
Mark Dubowitz (01:43:22) Lex, I think the best case, and something I’ve advocated for, I’ve been working on this for 22 years, is that the Iranians return to negotiations at Oman, sit down with the United States and conclude an agreement that peacefully and permanently and fully dismantles their nuclear program. They agree to that, which means they shut down any remaining facilities. They give up all the remaining centrifuges and enriched material that they could use to develop nuclear weapons. They let the IAEA in in order to supervise this. They actually commit to not rebuilding this nuclear program. We commit, as we’ve done with 23 other countries, to helping them provide civilian nuclear energy. Because it seems to me a little fanciful that Khamenei would build a civilian nuclear program under 80 meters of concrete surrounded by rock and take all the risks he’s taken. By the way, he faces a risk to his regime, spent a half a trillion dollars to do this when it makes no commercial sense.
(01:44:33) But let’s take him at his word that he wants civilian nuclear energy. Let’s build it for him. As long as there’s no enrichment or reprocessing, gives him the key capabilities that he could if he decides to build nuclear weapons. That seems to me a thoughtful approach. I think Scott would probably agree with it. Proliferation proof he can’t build nuclear weapons, and we can do this all peacefully. That’s my preference.
Lex Fridman (01:44:56) What can Trump do to help make that happen?
Mark Dubowitz (01:44:59) I think what he can do is he can say to the Iranians, “Look, I made you that offer last time. You rejected it. Now that offer’s no longer on the table because that offer gave you enrichment. Now temporarily, but I now see the game that you would’ve played when I left office, to turn that enrichment capability into nuclear weapons. That deal’s off the table, but here’s the deal that’s on the table. It’s a one-page deal. You give up your nuclear capabilities, we help you build civilian nuclear energy.” I think that’s best case.
(01:45:33) I think worst case is that the Iranians do what they’ve unfortunately been doing over and over again and rejecting these deals and holding firm that they want to retain this enrichment capability. The only reason they want to retain enrichment capability is the option to develop nuclear weapons. Otherwise, they can have civilian energy. Tomorrow makes much more commercial sense to do that, and the entire international community would help them and pay for that.
(01:45:59) I worry that they’re going to just remain intransigent at the negotiating table. I think if they do that, then what I worry that they’re going to do is whatever remaining capabilities they have left, they’ll bide their time. They’ll wait for the opportunity. Maybe it’s not now. Maybe it’s when Trump’s gone, and they will rebuild this nuclear weapons program. They’ll be then inviting further strikes, further war and further suffering. I worry that that is the worst case.
(01:46:29) By the way, it’s part of that worst case in retaining the capabilities, the extra worst case is they take those capabilities and they go for a nuclear bomb. Now, if Scott’s right and the regime has never had any desire for a nuclear bomb, then we don’t have to worry about that. According to Scott, all of this has been fabricated. All of this has been result of US and Israeli intelligence mendacity, and we don’t have to worry about a nuclear weapon. I personally worry about it knowing this regime, looking at two and a half decades of nuclear deception. I worry that they want to retain those capabilities and at time of their choosing, develop a nuclear bomb.
(01:47:09) I think if you’re responsible and you’re trying to think through the various scenarios, you’ve got to consider an Iranian nuclear weapons breakout as a possibility and you’ve got to try to mitigate that. You either mitigate that at the negotiating table through a full dismantlement deal or, and it’s the least good option for sure is you’re going to have to go back in there, either the Israelis and-or the United States, and you’re going to have to continue to use both covert action and air power to destroy those capabilities.
Lex Fridman (01:47:41) Can I just even dig in further on the worst case? Do you think it’s possible to have where US gets pulled into a feet on the ground full-on war with Iran?
Mark Dubowitz (01:47:54) I think one must never dismiss possibilities because as I said, you’ve got to plan against worst case options, and I think-
Scott Horton (01:48:00) That’s what the Israel lobby has in store for you guys. American lives mean nothing to the Israel-firsters. They don’t care that Israel motivated September 11th and killed 3,000 of our guys. I was at the airport yesterday, had a big American flag with all the red and white stripes made out of the names of the dead of September 11th who were killed by people motivated by Israel’s crimes in Palestine and in Lebanon and enforcing Bill Clinton’s dual containment policy from Saudi Arabia. They don’t care about that. They don’t care about the 4,500 Americans who died in Iraq War Two or the million something people who died in Iraq War Two, the half a million in Syria as long as the Shiite Crescent is somehow is limited. They’ll even celebrate openly.
(01:48:42) I don’t know about him, but I know Ben Shapiro, many other leaders of the Israel lobby in America celebrated the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad in Syria by Abu Mohammed al-Jilani, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq in Syria. Why? Because he’s not a Shiite. He’s not an Alawite friends with the Shiites and friends with Iran and friends with Hezbollah. That’s good for Israel even though it’s the worst thing that you could possibly imagine for the people of the United States of America, those sworn loyal to Osama Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri ruling Damascus now, their own ISIS caliphate in our era.
(01:49:17) This is why they always pretend. They go, over there, the Muslims, the terrorists, greatest state sponsors of terrorism. It’s al-Qaeda that threatens the United States of America. It wasn’t Hezbollah that knocked those towers down. They have us siding with our enemies against their enemies. As you just said, well, I guess time will tell, Lex, whether we’re going to have to drop the 82nd Airborne in there, whether Americans are going to have to do a regime change in Tehran.
Mark Dubowitz (01:49:44) I wish you’d listened and not put words in my mouth.
Lex Fridman (01:49:47) I heard what he said. I forced him kind of to say what the worst case possibility of a full-on invasion as a thought experiment, and you can let him finish that as opposed to making the accusations. Let’s just minimize both ways accusations, please. Just talk about the ideas. That’s the most charitable interpretation of those ideas.
Scott Horton (01:50:06) I’m from the United States of America, unlike him, and I care about the future of this country, unlike him, who’s here to serve a foreign power and make their case at our expense.
Lex Fridman (01:50:16) Scott, and next you’re going to say that I’m un-American.
Mark Dubowitz (01:50:21) Because an immigrant too.
Scott Horton (01:50:21) You’re just hosting the show. I don’t know. It seems like you’re trying to be fair.
Lex Fridman (01:50:29) Stop. It’s not about being fair. The implication here is somebody who’s un-American because where they’re from.
Scott Horton (01:50:36) I didn’t say anyone who’s not from here. I’m talking about him.
Lex Fridman (01:50:41) I think that’s a really deeply disrespectful accusation.
Scott Horton (01:50:45) Can I ask you, does it bother you that when Naftali Bennett bombed a UN shelter full of 106 women and children in Qana, Lebanon in 1996, that that’s what motivated Mohamed Atta and Ramzi bin al-Shibh to join Al-Qaeda and attack our towers?
Mark Dubowitz (01:51:00) Scott, you know what bothers me? I came to this country 22 years ago. I became a proud US citizen 10 years ago. I’m proud to be an American and accusing me or Lex or any immigrants to this country of not being un-American is deeply offensive. Let me answer Lex’s question. Lex, let’s get back to your question because I think it’s an important question. What are the chain of events that could lead 500,000 mechanized US troops to have to invade Iran, which would be a disaster? That’s something we never want to see again. That’s one of the lessons of Iraq.
(01:51:26) I think Scott has done a good job over the years in demonstrating that we don’t want to do that again. Is there such a scenario? I think one must never rule it out because there is a scenario, for example, where the regime collapses and there’s chaos inside Iran. Not suggesting that’ll happen. There are a whole bunch of scenarios maybe we should talk about with respect to the collapse of the regime.
(01:51:54) But you could see a scenario where the United States would have to go in there in order to try to secure military and nuclear and missile assets so that it doesn’t end up the hands of warring factional and ethnic groups that Scott referred to. Because again, as he’s rightly pointed out, Iran is not Persia.
Mark Dubowitz (01:52:16) Can I just finish just who can handle it, who cannot handle it? I think that it’s a potential scenario, which is why I don’t think anybody should be advocating for a US decapitation of the regime in Iran. I have long been on record of supporting the Iranian people, providing support to the Iranian people, to at one point take back their country and take back their flag. It’s very much sort of Reagan’s strategy that Reagan ran in the Cold War of maximum pressure on the regime, maximum support for anti-Soviet dissidents. While by the way, he was negotiating arms control agreements for the Soviet Union in order to try to reduce the number of nuclear tipped ICBMs that both countries had pointed at each other. I think the Reagan strategy of providing support to the people is a far better strategy for trying to get transition, leadership transition, government transition inside Iran. But I think the scenario of decapitation strikes, killing Khamenei, taking out the entire government could potentially lead to that scenario. I think we have to be conscious of that. We have to guard against that. I think that’s important.
(01:53:18) I think Scott’s right. I mean if a scenario happened like that, I mean I think the Israelis have demonstrated extraordinary capabilities and they could go in there and they could secure loose nuclear materials that you would be worried, could be fashion for nuclear weapons. Scott doesn’t seem to worry about these materials. I worry about these materials and capabilities in the hands of anybody because they’re all capabilities that just the physics of it, you can produce nuclear weapons.
(01:53:45) Best case scenario, negotiation. We fully dismantle their program in Oman. Worst case scenario is having to return for continued military strikes that continue to escalate the situation. Worse situation is some kind of decapitation strike that collapses the regime and causes chaos. There are a whole bunch of other scenarios we can talk about that are embedded in that, but I think if you’re a responsible person and a responsible analyst, and certainly if you’re a responsible policymaker, you got to be planning for all of these scenarios and more.
Lex Fridman (01:54:17) Scott, what do you think is the best case and the worst case here?
Scott Horton (01:54:20) Well, the best case scenario is that we quit right now and that Trump figures out a way to reorder some paragraphs and get back in something like the JCPOA, which was also signed with the rest of the UN security council power.
Lex Fridman (01:54:34) Can I ask you like JCPOA is a pretty good approximation of what would be a good deal?
Scott Horton (01:54:39) Pretty good. It could have been better, as I said at the beginning. Trump could have gone in there and tried to negotiate a better result with the sunset provisions on some of those things. But the concept that America is just going to insist on zero enrichment, zero nuclear program whatsoever when they have the unalienable “in the nonproliferation treaty to civilian nuclear material and a civilian program”, it’s a poison pill. It’s meant to fail just like it was a poison pill meant to destroy the tox here, good enough to start a war. Again, as I quoted from earlier, he said on TV last week, “Well, America has to take out Fordo now because now they’re more likely to break out towards a nuke.” I think that’s exactly right. There still is, or there’s strong reason to be skeptical, including Israeli and American officials told the New York Times that they thought that the damage was quite incomplete.
Mark Dubowitz (01:55:34) The IAEA just came out recently just point of fact, sort of interesting. We’ll see on the battle damage assessment, but they actually think the facility was destroyed and that the sensitive centrifuges were destroyed. Just interesting for the viewers. It may be premature.
Scott Horton (01:55:50) All the uranium mines, and all the aluminum smelters so that they can’t make any more centrifuges.
Scott Horton (01:55:57) They know how to make centrifuges. At this point, this is why government doesn’t work. They make matters worse and create more work for themselves and make things worse and worse and worse. We can make the same criticism about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine making matters worse for themselves and causing them to have to escalate even further.
(01:56:16) Now, America’s in the situation where the danger that Iran will now break out to a nuke is so heightened that now we’re talking about, well, maybe we’ll have to do a full regime change. I appreciate you, Mark, saying that we should not kill the Ayatollah, but Benjamin Netanyahu says we should. He said just the other day that if we get rid of the Ayatollah, that will solve all the problems, which is just crazy to think that they have, Israeli officials have been tweeting out pictures of and palling around with the son of the Shah, talking about reinstalling his royal majesty’s monarchy, sock puppet dictatorship. That’s taking back Iran for the people of Iran, giving them over to a bunch of foreign-backed exiles?
(01:56:57) Was that what Trump meant when he gave that speech in Qatar saying, “We don’t believe in neoconservatism and spreading democracy anymore.” He’s just setting up because we’re going to try to reinstall a monarch?
Lex Fridman (01:57:05) Can you go into the analysis of best case and worst case? You laid out the best case. What’s the worst case would be feet on the ground?
Lex Fridman (01:57:17) Basically, you guys agree on the best case.
Scott Horton (01:57:19) We respect their right to a civilian nuclear program and try to negotiate, as I said, back into something like the JCPOA, which again had them exporting their entire stockpile of uranium out of the country.
Scott Horton (01:57:38) [inaudible 01:57:38] entire dependence on other countries to supply their fuel needs.
Lex Fridman (01:57:41) Can you teach me the difference when we [inaudible 01:57:43]?
Mark Dubowitz (01:57:42) Let me just step back from this because we agree on some and we disagree on a major issue. Then if we both agree Iran deserves a civilian nuclear program-
Scott Horton (01:57:52) The point is the Ayatollah is never going to give in on enrichment.
Scott Horton (01:57:55) We know that. That’s a premise for our whole discussion here. Therefore, what he’s saying is we’re going to have to keep escalating the war until the mission is accomplished.
Mark Dubowitz (01:58:03) Not sure I said that. Scott, I think it’s, again, important that the distinction here. We both agree that Iran deserves a civilian nuclear program. 23 countries have civilian nuclear programs and they don’t have enrichment and they don’t have reprocessing. Where we differ is, I don’t think Iran should have the Iran standard. I think that Iran should agree to the gold standard that 23 US allies have agreed to. Have civilian nuclear program, but you don’t get to keep the key enrichment and reprocessing capabilities that you need to develop nuclear weapons.
Scott Horton (01:58:34) Do you think that Bill Clinton should have just let the Chinese sell them the light water reactor that they wanted to back in the ’90s?
Mark Dubowitz (01:58:40) America, of course, allowed Russia to sell them a heavy water reactor for the same purpose. But I agree with Scott that I think one of the ways out of this is, yes, whether it’s the Chinese or preferably as an American, I prefer the Americans actually sell reactors to the Iranians, a great nuclear industry in this country. Let’s do that. But if they can’t, the South Koreans can, the Russians can, the Chinese can. I wouldn’t want to have significant Russian and Chinese influence in Iran, so better that it’d be a western country that does it. Nevertheless, provide those reactors. They’re proliferation proof. There’s no enrichment and no reprocessing. You buy your fuel rods from abroad, you put them in the reactors, you power the Iranian electrical grid, which is in terrible shape because the Ayatollah has spent a half a trillion dollars trying to build nuclear weapons. They’re not trying to provide electricity for these people.
(01:59:31) Let’s help him. Let’s help his people get electricity. But the key difference in our argument, and it’s a fundamental difference, Scott’s right, the key difference is I do not want to give this regime enrichment or reprocessing because they have shown over time, for whatever reason, whether you believe it’s they intended to or we were lying about it or we broke them, it doesn’t matter. What they have shown over the past number of years is they have gone up from 3.67% enriched uranium for civilian purpose all the way up to 60%, which is 99% of what you need for weapons grade. Since we’ve seen them do it before, we don’t want to see them do it again. No enrichment, full dismantlement, full deal. Then there’s a peaceful resolution to- What I worry about is positions that are taken that undermine President Trump’s negotiating leverage in Oman.
Scott Horton (02:00:23) Can I ask you, you were saying you supported the JCPOA, you were opposed to it.
Mark Dubowitz (02:00:23) No, no, I was opposed to JCPOA.
Scott Horton (02:00:28) That’s right. You were opposed to withdrawing from it?
Scott Horton (02:00:30) Don’t you think that Trump could have gone over there and negotiate to make it better? Would you agree that it was a huge mistake to withdraw that because they were, as we agreed, shipping out all of their enriched uranium to only be brought back in a form that they could not use to make nukes. The scientists had decided that if they kicked all the inspectors out and beat their chests and started making a nuke, it would take them a full year to have enough weapons grade uranium for a single gun type nuke under the JCPOA.
Mark Dubowitz (02:00:58) Let me ask you a question.
Mark Dubowitz (02:00:59) Because you’re right. I mean, I’m glad you’ve pointed out because I tried to take a nuanced position during the JCPOA debate, and I got hammered by the left and I got hammered by the right. The left hammered me because I criticized the JCPOA because it’s fundamental flaw was twofold. One, it gave Iran enrichment capability that would expand over time as the restrictions sunset it. Number two, the sunsets were going to kick in and Iran would emerge with this industrial size program, which we would not be able to stop. Now, the nuanced position, which I got hammered on by the right, was I said, “Go negotiate with the Europeans. Agree on a common transatlantic position to approach the Iranians and say, ‘Look, that deal that we did back in 2015, we think it’s flawed. We want to extend that deal. We want to get rid of the sunsets and we are going to negotiate a deal.'” Now, does that mean we have to give you more sanctions relief? Yeah, probably. The Iranians are not going to just agree without sanctions relief.
(02:01:56) What happened is the Trump administration tried to negotiate with the Europeans. The Europeans were opposed because they didn’t want to revisit the agreement. We knew the Iranians were completely opposed, and there was no way they were going to do this if the United States and Europe were divided. Just a little bit of history, I just think it’s interesting history. It was at that point that President Trump decided to withdraw from the agreement.
Scott Horton (02:02:20) But what I’m asking you is if say you were the national security advisor under the JCPOA where they’re still shipping all their enriched uranium out of the country and all that, which you would be advising him to not leave, in the negotiations to improve the deal, would you have been willing to accept some level of enrichment then as long as we have the restriction part where they’re shipping it all out of the country, or to you, enrichment at all is always a red line, essentially equivalent to them being 99% of the way to a nuclear weapon?
Mark Dubowitz (02:02:53) Look, enrichment capability is a red line. It has to be a red line.
Scott Horton (02:02:58) Even though you know it’s protected by the NPT, the right to peace nuclear technology? They call it a loophole, but they have the right to enrich uranium.
Mark Dubowitz (02:03:05) There’s different interpretations of everything, including agreements. There is a raging debate about whether the NPT actually gives you a right to enrich. In fact, the Obama administration, even with the JCPOA, was not willing to recognize Iran’s right to enrich, but they were willing to recognize its de facto reality that they were enriching.
Mark Dubowitz (02:03:27) It’s the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Iran is a member of it. It’s supposed to promote peaceful civilian nuclear energy, and it’s supposed to prevent countries from developing nuclear weapons. I think that’s a basic summary of it.
Scott Horton (02:03:41) It mandates that non-nuclear weapons states have a safeguards agreement with the IAEA and full of additional protocols and whatever, where they have the right to inspect.
Mark Dubowitz (02:03:42) Which Iran refused to sign, by the way.
Scott Horton (02:03:52) Well, no, they had an additional protocol that they were abiding, not even enriching at all while they were negotiating with the E-III. Then what the JCPOA really did was add a bunch of additional protocols and subsidiary arrangements and agreements.
Scott Horton (02:04:00) Had a bunch of additional protocols and subsidiary arrangements and agreements [inaudible 02:04:04].
Mark Dubowitz (02:04:04) Ironically refused to ratify the additional protocol. I just wanted just be clear on the facts. I mean, it’s really important.
Scott Horton (02:04:07) Well, at which point in time did they refuse to ratify? Because they did ratify the JCPOA, which was full of additional protocols and subsidiary arrangements and agreements they’re called.
Mark Dubowitz (02:04:17) There’s an important additional protocol that Iran refused.
Scott Horton (02:04:19) Which one was that? The one where they promised not to enrich at all, which they actually did abide by while they were negotiating with the E3 in the W. Bush years before they even started spinning centric engines in response.
Mark Dubowitz (02:04:30) The important point is that you asked me what I would advise the National Security Advisor of the United States, or if I was the National Security Advisor of the United States, which I guess I can’t be because I’m a foreigner, but the fact of the matter is-
Scott Horton (02:04:39) I think you could still be National Security Advisor. Zbigniew Brzezinski sure was.
Lex Fridman (02:04:43) I think he was taking a shot back at the fact that you took a shot.
Scott Horton (02:04:46) You know what, Lex? I think that you probably would recognize that there are many people who lobby for Israel’s interests in the United States who clearly don’t care that much about what happens to the United States of America in it as a consequence because they care about Israel, which is a different country than America, right? It’s not part of the 50 states.
Lex Fridman (02:05:05) I think an American citizen cares primarily about America. That is a fundamental belief for me. To make an accusation that they don’t requires a very large amount of proof for each individual. I don’t care.
Scott Horton (02:05:19) Pretend that American and Israel’s interests are the same, requires a tremendous amount of cognitive dissonance by those who support Israel’s interests.
Mark Dubowitz (02:05:28) He’s right. They’re not all the same.
Scott Horton (02:05:29) State sponsor of terror as though Iran has anything to do with anti-American terrorists.
Lex Fridman (02:05:35) I don’t know who is the they that we’re talking about, but I believe American citizens care about America first. They may discuss how their nations and the interests in the Middle East or in Europe and those interests might align with their own worldview, whatever. But when it comes, at the end of the day, if everybody starts a war with everybody else, they’re America first. I am America first. If there’s a war that breaks out and we have to pick up guns, I’m fighting for America.
Scott Horton (02:06:05) I’ll take them on a case by case basis.
Scott Horton (02:06:07) I know immigrants. I know immigrants who are absolutely super patriots who know American history and love and care about America more than their next door neighbors who are from here, but that ain’t universal. Okay?
Lex Fridman (02:06:19) Sure. Let’s talk about case by case then. That’s fine.
Mark Dubowitz (02:06:21) Well, I think he’s clearly accusing me.
Scott Horton (02:06:24) I think a worse war with Iran. He was entertaining the possibility of putting ground troops in there, [inaudible 02:06:29] catastrophe for this country.
Lex Fridman (02:06:29) Don’t take personal shots. Don’t take personal shots. Either of you. You’ve taken personal shots. Let’s not do it. You guys are just having fun and I’m having fun.
Scott Horton (02:06:37) He said that there, there’s a threat from the missiles. There’s a threat from Iranian missiles to America’s bases in the Middle East. Yeah. Because of Israel and because of this war, the first time Iran ever fired missiles at an American base over there was in response to Trump bombing them.
Mark Dubowitz (02:06:53) Never Iran’s fault. It’s never Iran’s fault.
Scott Horton (02:06:55) Is that what everybody thinks?
Mark Dubowitz (02:06:56) Never his [inaudible 02:06:57] fault.
Scott Horton (02:06:56) It was Iran who started this?
Mark Dubowitz (02:06:58) Never Iran’s fault. Let’s bring it back, Scott. What a joke.
Mark Dubowitz (02:07:01) Scott. It’s a remarkable management. I want to reiterate this-
Scott Horton (02:07:03) Trump bombed Ordo and then Iran shot missiles at Qatar and Iraq.
Mark Dubowitz (02:07:08) Scott, you’re a patriotic American. God bless you. God bless the United States. Thank you for allowing me to come to this country and become an American. It’s a great country and as a patriotic American, I assume that the United States government and the United States intelligence community and the United States military has America’s best interest at heart. However, we have learned from the history, and Scott’s done a very good job of detailing this during the Iraq war, that the United States gets it wrong. I don’t think the United States lied us into war, but the United States got it wrong. So I think Scott’s right. We must make sure that we learn the lessons of Iraq, but not overlearn the lessons of Iraq. I would also say this. There are many lobby organizations in the United States. There’s the China lobby, there’s the oil lobby, there’s the pharmaceutical lobby, there’s the Qatar lobby.
(02:07:58) I live in Washington. I see all these lobby organizations. Okay? The fact of the matter is the pro-Israel lobby, which actually lobbies in support of the U.S.-Israel relationship. It’s comprised of tens of millions of Christians and Jews and Hindus and yes, yes, Muslims who believe strongly in a strong U.S.-Israel relationship. The reason that relationship has been so strong over so many years and that this quote “lobby” has been so successful is they’re pushing through an open door with policymakers. Not because some nefarious money influence, but because at the end of the day, the interests align. We counter terrorism together, we counter nuclear proliferation together, and we believe that the U.S.-Israel relationship is a strong relationship and these accusations of dual loyalty and these accusations of Israel Firsters that Scott’s thrown around, I think distract us from the conversation, which I think we should return to. Let’s talk about today.
(02:08:51) We’ve talked about best case scenarios. We’ve talked about worst case scenarios, and we talked about really worst case scenarios. So I think let’s talk about the way forward, and I’d be interested in hearing from Scott where he thinks we’re going, and I’m certainly, I don’t crystal ball these things. It’s always difficult to predict, but I think President Trump has done a really good job. He has led this. He has not been at the beck and call of Bibi Netanyahu or Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia or anyone else. He has led this effort. He has made these decisions. This is a man who throughout his entire career, and not just his political career, but many, many years before that, believed that an Iranian nuclear weapon was a threat to the United States of America, not just to our allies, but to the United States of America. And he’s been very clear on record.
(02:09:41) He led this campaign since he started in January. He offered negotiations. He got rebuffed by the Iranians in Oman. He put pressure on the regime economically. He continued to offer negotiations. He offered something that I thought was flawed. I mean, I got to tell you the offer in Oman that he gave to the Iranians, I thought it was flawed because I think it allowed Iran to retain this key enrichment capability. The Iranians turned it down, and I think Khamenei to his everlasting regret is going to wonder why did I turn that down? I could have got the enrichment capability that Scott thinks they deserve, and yet I rejected it. Why did I reject it? Because now look what’s happened in the past 12 days. I’ve lost Fordo mostly. We’ll see what happens on the BDA, the battle damage assessment. I’ve certainly lost Natanz. I’ve lost my conversion facility at Isfahan, which converts uranium Hexafluoride into, well converts yellowcake into uranium hexafluoride to pump into centrifuges. And the most important thing I lost at Isfahan is a conversion facility that takes 90% enriched uranium and turns it into uranium metal. Without uranium metal-
Scott Horton (02:10:52) They don’t have any 90% enriched uranium. He just means hypothetically, if they did have some, to be clear.
Mark Dubowitz (02:10:58) You know the 60%, that’s 99% of the way to 90% enriched uranium. By the way, you can make a crude nuclear device with 60% enriched uranium. I just want to put that on the record, but he lost that key conversion facility that turns 90% enriched uranium or even 60% enriched uranium into uranium metal. You need uranium metal to fashion a crude nuclear device or a warhead. That’s been destroyed. And when I was coming in this morning, I just checked, I thought it was interesting and a whole lot of discussion about the fact that about 12 or 16 trucks showed up at Fordo in the days before the U.S strikes and moved something out of Fordo. Well, according to reports, just this morning, we’ll see if they’re verified. I don’t trust single sourcing. I don’t trust what some reporter just says in their stories because reporters got it wrong over and over again, especially all the ones who accuse President Trump have been a Russian agent.
(02:11:51) But we’ll see what happens. We’ll see if it’s verified. But according to the reports, most of the material remained at Fordo because the Iranians were calculating this was the most heavily fortified facility. They were also calculating that President Trump was not going to strike it because what they had been doing was listening to lots of voices and we can name the voices or we can just talk to them about a collective who they thought were telling Trump, “Don’t do it,” and we’re telling Trump “Don’t do it.” And Trump decided on his own to do it. So they kept the enriched material at Fordo, and if that’s the case, it may be that much of it was destroyed. Again, caveat, it’s just one or two stories right now, one in NBC News and let’s see what happens over the coming days. But if that’s the case, that material may have been destroyed.
(02:12:40) One other element that we haven’t even talked about at all today, which I think your listeners should be aware of, we talked a lot about nuclear weapons development, warhead development. What the Israelis did was they took out the top 15 nuclear weapons scientists who have been part of, remember I talked about that original Ahmad program and the development of those five atomic weapons? Well, some of them who are old enough come from the Ahmad program, which is the early two thousands. Some of them are new, but they’ve, or not new, but younger, and they’ve been trained by the veterans, the 15 top guys taken out. That is akin to its January or February 45, and the entire central team of Oppenheimer gets eliminated three to four months between the Trinity test, before the Trinity test where we explode our first nuclear weapon. So I would say significant damage to Iran’s nuclear weapons program suggests that we potentially have rolled them back for years.
(02:13:39) I don’t know how many years and all those technical assessments are still to come, but significant damage. So the question as I said is have they retained enough capabilities that they’ve squirreled away, stored in covert sites, put under deeply buried tunnels to break out to nuclear weapons? Scott’s concern, it’s my concern, I’m sure it’s your concern that they could do that or have they set back the program so significantly that Khamenei then has to decide, “Will I be inviting another Israeli and or US attack if I try to break out? And if I do, do I risk my regime?”
Scott Horton (02:14:14) Who thinks that if they break out and try to start making nukes now that any hawks supporting this war will take responsibility for driving them to it.
Lex Fridman (02:14:22) So the suggestion you’re making is we’re actually driving as opposed to doing the opposite, we’re actually driving them to develop nuclear weapons.
Lex Fridman (02:14:31) Can you make the case of that?
Scott Horton (02:14:32) Yeah. Previously he said, “Let’s take the Ayatollah at his word that he only wants a civilian electricity program.” Well, let’s not take him at his word. Again, I never said in this conversation, “Trust the Ayatollah.” He did. Now he’s kind of-,
Mark Dubowitz (02:14:47) Yeah, but you said that the Ayatollah doesn’t want nuclear a weapons programs. Scott, you were very clear about that.
Mark Dubowitz (02:14:53) Ayatollah never wanted a nuclear weapons program. Are you going back on that now?
Scott Horton (02:14:55) Jesus Christ. What I was very clear about from my very first statement when we sat down was that the Ayatollah was building himself a latent nuclear deterrent, putting Iran as what they call a threshold nuclear weapons state just like Brazil and Germany and Japan, so that everyone knows they have mastered the fuel cycle, they could enrich uranium up to 90%, don’t make me do it. That was his position.
Mark Dubowitz (02:14:55) None of those countries have a nuclear weapons program. None of them.
Scott Horton (02:15:18) Did you ever hear me say anything about believing the Ayatollah saying he only wanted an electricity program? This is why enrichment is a red line. It’s because if all the enrichment is done overseas somewhere, then it’s not a latent nuclear deterrent at all.
Mark Dubowitz (02:15:37) So it’s a red line for you, as well as for me, we agree, Scott.
Scott Horton (02:15:40) I’m saying it’s a red line for the Ayatollah that he’s clearly not going to give in on, and it’s a poison pill by the Israelis in the west. They know he’s never going to give up enrichment a hundred percent because that’s the whole point of it. So it’s just disingenuous to say, “Oh, let’s believe him that he wants an electricity program.” He’s not saying that. I don’t even think that’s his official position. Or if it is, it’s with a strong implication as everyone understands that it’s a latent nuclear weapons capability and a potential actual nuclear weapons capability.
Lex Fridman (02:16:13) To you, a deal will have to include enrichment.
Lex Fridman (02:16:16) That is a red line. He will move off.
Scott Horton (02:16:17) Yes. And then the thing is too, just like I was saying before, if Trump had come in 2017 and said, “Screw this, I hate this deal.” And then got on a plane and flown straight to Tehran and said, or sent his guys and said, “Now listen here Ayatollah, I want to fix this deal up better.” I think that he really could have, and I already said, I don’t know the details, but I believe Mark when he says that the Europeans were being intransigent on that. And again, I criticized the CIA and FBI for framing Trump for treason, for preventing him from being able to work with the Russians to see if maybe they could put pressure on the Ayatollah to deal with him.
(02:16:52) But I think that it’s clear, when the Ayatollah was willing in the JCPOA to, well, first of all, to sign the additional protocol back in the W. Bush years, for three years, he didn’t enrich anything under that deal as long as he was negotiating with the E3 and then under the JCPOA where he’s shipping out every bit of his declared nuclear material, he’s clearly keeping the ability to enrich if necessary to weapons grade if a crisis breaks out and he feels like he has to make nukes. But he had no stockpile to enrich this whole thing about 99% of the way there. He had no stockpile. So even if you count gassing up your truck on the way to the mine as part of this long timescale of percentages here, they were much further from a nuke under the deal, which he agrees we shouldn’t have even gotten out of.
Mark Dubowitz (02:17:39) Can I just say technically, just I think, again, important for your listeners trying understand, under the JCPOA, Iran is allowed to keep a stockpile of a maximum of 300 kilograms, as I remember, of 3.67% enriched material. They’re allowed to continue to enrich as long as if they go over the 300 kilogram, they have to continue to send that out to Russian, to Russia to blend down. And so they kept the enrichment capability, the ability to enrich. They did keep a stockpile. Scott’s right. They’re not allowed in those early years to go under 3.67%. They would be allowed to go to 20% and 60% and 90% as the restrictions sunsetted, but they were able to keep all of those key capabilities. So I just want to clarify just technically what the JCPOA actually said and what it didn’t say.
US attack on Iran
Lex Fridman (02:18:30) Yeah. Can you comment on the so-called Operation Midnight Hammer? Now that we can look back at it, what parts were successful, what parts were a mistake? Was the whole operation a mistake that accelerates the Iran nuclear program or the incentives for it? Or is there some components that actually is a disincentive for Iran to develop the program? And then maybe you can comment on the same. It’d be nice just to get comments on each.
Scott Horton (02:18:56) Well, I think we really don’t know, right? There’s some initial battle assessments and arguments and all that about just how much was destroyed, and we don’t know exactly what their reaction is going to be. There were reports of them saying, “Hey, we’re already starting up a new facility somewhere else.” There were reports where they said, “Hey, a lot of our centrifuges survived and we’re going to start spinning them up right now,” and this kind of thing. The potential is there. I don’t know what the Ayatollah is going to do. And I think this goes to the larger argument about the apocalyptic threat of the Ayatollah, which Mark has not made, but which Israel hawks often do that these guys just can’t wait to get into a war and all this. In fact, if you look at Iran-
Mark Dubowitz (02:19:35) Well, they’re in a war, but the argument I make is they’re not going to use a nuclear weapon.
Scott Horton (02:19:39) Jesus, man, you stop me, you interrupt me every time I try to say anything.
Mark Dubowitz (02:19:41) But Scott, just You’re mischaracterizing what I’m saying. I need to clarify when you mischaracterize.
Lex Fridman (02:19:45) He’s not interrupting every time, but sometimes interrupting. Yes. So try not to interrupt as much. Go ahead, Scott. Don’t take it personally. Come on, let’s go.
Scott Horton (02:19:54) It seems like a deliberate attempt to obfuscate and prevent me-
Scott Horton (02:19:58) From just being able to complete a point. He does it virtually every time.
Lex Fridman (02:20:02) No, it’s not. As a listener, I’m enjoying this.
Scott Horton (02:20:05) Well, look, on the face of it, they blew up a lot of stuff and they made them very angry. So are they going to now give in or they’re now going to double down or they’re now going to hold still? We don’t really know. As I was trying to explain, from the Ayatollah’s position that he’s in, what are you going to do with a problem like the United States of America, right? They can chant great Satan, this and that all they want. They have no ability to really threaten this country in any way. And they know that America absolutely does have the ability to, in fact, even without nuclear weapons, essentially wipe their civilization off the face of the earth just with B52s if we wanted to carpet bomb their major cities. So they know, the Ayatollah knows, he’s in a very difficult position.
(02:20:51) And look at what he did. When they assassinated Soleimani, he sent essentially a symbolic strike at an empty corner of an American base in Iraq. It did cause some concussions and head trauma, but he deliberately did that to not cause casualties and then Trump let him have the last word. And then also when they shot down the drone, which I think Trump was suspicious that the Pentagon had flown that into Iranian airspace and they demanded strikes and Trump said “No, it’s just a drone. How many Iranians will die at the base you want me to hit? No, I don’t want to kill them. I don’t want to do it.” And again, he let the Ayatollah get the last word. Same thing happened again with yesterday’s strikes. Iran hit America’s, our central command headquarters to al-Yudid air base in Qatar and also an American base I think in Baghdad, and I’m not sure about in Iraqi Kurdistan.
Scott Horton (02:21:40) Zero casualties so far. So what is going on there essentially is he’s got to do something. He’s doing these symbolic strikes essentially to say like, “Hey, you can’t do that to me.” But then he’s also telegraphing that, “Hey, I can’t do anything about you and I don’t really want to fight.” And so in a way, he’s kind of backing down. He’s doing, and then what did Donald Trump say? Donald Trump again, let him have the last word and in fact, bragged and mocked and said, “Hey, thanks Ayatollah for giving us a warning that you were about to shoot missiles at our base so we could be ready to shoot them all down,” and this kind of thing. And he said, “Now is the time for peace.” In other words, Trump again, letting the Ayatollah get the last word. Why? Because the Ayatollah, he might be a horrible leader if you live in Iran, but he is not perfectly, but essentially cautious in foreign policy because what’s he going to do?
(02:22:31) He’s going to decimate our naval base at Bahrain. He’s going to slaughter all our troops in Kuwait. And then what’s Trump going to do? And so the Ayatollah knows. So it’s the same people who, and I don’t include him in this, but you hear a lot of the hawkish talk about just how easy this has been, these same people talking about what an absolutely irrational religiously motivated and therefore crazy and irrational group of people the Mullahs are, and why they can only be dealt with with force when in fact what they’re showing is essential conservatism, trying to hold onto what they got, making a latent deterrent because they know if they break out toward a bomb, that’ll get them bombed. So they were hoping having a latent deterrent would be enough to just keep them at the status quo.
(02:23:19) That’s why it’s so disingenuous, just again with Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State saying, “Forget the intelligence,” because 60%, hey, it’s 99% of the way there, close enough for us. So it doesn’t matter if the Ayatollah’s decided to make or nuke or not. They’re just too close to one as it is, which is really silly because they’re not much closer than they’ve been for 20 years. Since the W. Bush administration, they proved they’ve mastered the fuel cycle.
Lex Fridman (02:23:45) That is one of the fundamental disagreements in the room that you’re saying they really don’t have interest to develop a nuclear weapon. And they’re not quite-
Scott Horton (02:23:55) Well, not exactly. I mean, what I said-
Lex Fridman (02:23:57) More towards that direction, then Mark is saying-
Scott Horton (02:23:59) More toward, but they’re saying, “Look at us. We’re a threshold state. Don’t push your luck and force us to make the bad decision.” Now, that’s an implication. They have not said that outright, but clearly the implication is that if we force them, then they will go ahead and make a nuclear weapon.
Lex Fridman (02:24:16) What I mean is if left on their own devices, they would not develop. That’s the case you’re making, the case-
Scott Horton (02:24:22) Well, not just on their own devices, but if we were to try to negotiate with them in good faith and try to have normal relations with them, that would disincentivize a nuclear weapon even further.
Lex Fridman (02:24:32) Okay. Can you comment on the mission on operation and in general?
Mark Dubowitz (02:24:34) Sure. A couple of things I think were interesting, what Scott said, and I agree certainly with some of it. I mean, the first thing is I do believe President Trump has negotiated in good faith. I mean, he sent Steve Witkoff, he’s chief negotiator for five rounds of negotiations since he came in office. The second is, I mean, we can keep going around in circles, but the fact of the matter is I do believe that Iran and Iran-backed terrorist organizations have for since 1979 killed and tried to kill and maim Americans and taken them hostage. I think it’s important for me again to put that on the record, but where I agree with with Scott is, and it’s interesting, and I don’t know if Khamenei has changed. He’s 86 years old. He’s been in power since 1989. And there’s a little bit of history that I think is really interesting.
(02:25:20) It was 1988 and Iran and Iraq had fought this brutal eight-year war, a million people dead. And the United States accidentally shot down a Iranian passenger airline. United States offered to pay compensation and apologized. And the Iranians didn’t believe it. They didn’t believe we could accidentally do that. They thought we were going to be intervening militarily on behalf of Saddam. So Khamenei, who’s not the supreme leader at the time, he was the Iranian president. He and Rafsanjani, they go to Khomeini and they say, “Mr. Ayatollah, we got to sue for peace with the Iraqis because the Americans are intervening and we cannot fight the Americans. We fought this brutal war. We’ll continue with Saddam. We cannot fight the United States of America.” I think Scott’s right, that perception that there’s no way they can fight the United States of America because that’s regime ending potentially, even if we don’t intend to, that could actually happen.
(02:26:15) And there’s a famous line where Khomeini says, “All right, I agree. I will drink the poison chalice. I’ll drink the poison chalice and I will agree to a ceasefire on pretty tough terms for Iran.” It’s interesting, now, 36 years later or 37 years later, Khamenei is now got to decide to drink the poison chalice. Does he agree to a negotiated deal with the United States? Does he agree to deal that President Trump? And I mean, Scott criticizes me for it, but that’s president Trump’s position is no enrichment, full dismantlement, by the way, that’s backed up by 52 of 53 Republican senators and 177 House GOP members and backed by everybody in his administration, including JD Vance, who’s been emphatic about that. Does he agree to that deal or does he decide, “I’m not going to drink the poison chalice and I’m going to take other options.” Now, I agree with Scott, going after US military bases, except in a symbolic way, suicidal.
(02:27:15) Closing the Straits of Hormuz, 40% of Chinese oil goes through there. The Chinese have been saying to Iranians, “Don’t you dare.” By the way, a hundred percent of Iranian oil goes from Iran in Karg Island through the Straits of Hormuz. So economically suicidal for the Iranians to do that. Terror attacks, absolutely. I mean that has been their modus operandi for years. So I would be concerned about terrorist attacks against US targets against civilians, potentially sleeper cells in the United States. So he’s used Tera cells around the world. He’s engaged in a decades long assassination campaign, including on American soil, by the way, sometimes successfully, sometimes not, including most recently, where he went after an Iranian American three times to try to assassinate her in New York, a woman named Masih Alinejad. And so he’s got to be calculating what is my play? So if I don’t do a deal, how can I actually squeeze the Americans? And Scott’s right.
(02:28:15) He must be thinking to himself, “You know what? I was literally on the 99 yard line with an entire nuclear weapons capability. I should have crossed the goal line. If I had had a warhead, a nuclear warhead, or multiple nuclear warheads as they had been trying to build since the Ahmad plan in early 2000s, there’s no way Israel and the United States would’ve hit me militarily if I had nuclear weapons, then I would’ve had the ultimate deterrence to prevent that. And then I would be like Kim Jong-un with nuclear weapons. I would then build ICBMs and then I’d have the ultimate deterrent to stop that.” So he’s got to be thinking “Maybe now,” and I can guarantee you the revolutionary guards-
Scott Horton (02:28:55) Do you think that that might have anything to do with the fact that America attacked Iraq and Libya when they did not have weapons of mass destruction programs?
Mark Dubowitz (02:29:04) Can I tell you the Libya example? I think Scott is the most interesting one for me, right? Because the Libya example-
Scott Horton (02:29:09) When they lynched the guy?
Mark Dubowitz (02:29:09) It was a big mistake. By the way, Ukraine is another good example of this. We went to the Libyans and we said, “You must fully dismantle your program.” And Gaddafi said, reluctantly under huge American pressure, “Okay, I’ll do it.” And the Brits and the Americans went in there and literally hauled out his entire nuclear-
Scott Horton (02:29:26) It wasn’t really a program, it was just a bunch of AQ cons junk sitting in crates in a warehouse. They did not have the capability to make a nuclear program at all in Libya. They didn’t have the engineers, the scientists or anyone. So Gaddafi had bought that junk just to trade it away. Just to be clear, there never was a nuclear weapons program or a nuclear program of any kind in Libya, unlike what you just heard.
Mark Dubowitz (02:29:48) That wasn’t my point. Okay? My point is you had a nuclear program-
Mark Dubowitz (02:29:52) We can debate about, again, how we were debating about whether-
Scott Horton (02:29:52) He had warehouses full of crates.
Mark Dubowitz (02:29:56) Again, it’s always Gaddafi and Khamenei and all these people, they don’t really want nuclear weapons. We just misunderstand them. But that’s not the point. The point is, we did a deal with Gaddafi. We pulled out his nuclear program and then I don’t know how many years later, but it wasn’t too many years late.
Mark Dubowitz (02:30:10) Seven years later, thank you, Scott. We actually took Gaddafi out and he didn’t have a nuclear program, so we took him out in the Libya operation. Now, Ukraine is another great example. The Ukrainians after the fall of the Soviet Union, you know this, they had the Soviet nuclear arsenal or good parts of it on their soil. So we went to them and we said, “All right, well here’s the deal for you. Give up the nuclear arsenal off your territory, and we and the Russians and the French guarantee your territorial integrity and your sovereignty as a country.” So the Ukrainians said, “Fair deal to me,” gave up all the nuclear weapons, and then Putin has now invaded Ukraine twice.
Scott Horton (02:30:49) That’s not what the Bucharest Declaration says, that we promised their security, we promised to respect it, and the Russians promised to, and both sides broke that promise. But there is nothing like a guarantee.
Scott Horton (02:31:00) That America would protect Ukraine’s sovereignty. They gave up those nukes and they had no ability to use those nukes anyway, because they were Soviet nukes with Soviet codes and they belonged to the Soviet military, and the Ukrainians would’ve had no ability to use them or deliver. They were married to missiles that were made to fly around the world, not to Russian next door.
Mark Dubowitz (02:31:18) But Scott, my point is, and I think you’ll agree with this, my point is if you’re Khamenei, and you’ve seen those two examples of Libya, you gave up your nuclear program, Gaddafi gets taken down. You’re Ukraine, you gave up your nuclear weapons, and the Russians invaded twice. If you’re Khamenei thinking to yourself, “The only thing that matters more to me than my nuclear weapons program is my regime survival. And in 12 days of war, the Israelis specifically, because we hit Fordo and Isfahan and the Khans, we the United States hit those sites. We the United States hit those sites.
Lex Fridman (02:31:53) The gleeful nation, Scott, stop. Take that out. There’s no place here in this room with me, the un-American bullshit, don’t do that. The implication here, man, is that I, me, am un-American. I’ve been attacked just like the Russian hoax for being a Putin shill. I’m an American.
Scott Horton (02:32:14) Well, when you talk about Ukraine’s war with Russia, do you say we or do you say they?
Mark Dubowitz (02:32:19) I said we the United States, we actually-
Scott Horton (02:32:21) Well, you added the United States, but you just described Israel’s strikes.
Mark Dubowitz (02:32:24) Israel didn’t strike Fordo, Scott.
Lex Fridman (02:32:25) He talked about the US attack. You’re speaking to this other people that you’ve heard that somehow. They do say we, and they talk about, I would say ridiculously as if, I’ve even heard some people basically put Israel above US, and they’re American citizens. Yeah, that’s fucking ridiculous. But none of those people are in this room. There are demons under the bed. I’m sure those people exist. There’s ridiculous people on the internet. There’s ridiculous people in Congress who can criticize them, make fun of them, say they’re fucking crazy.
Scott Horton (02:33:02) The foundation for a defense of democracy has been the vanguard of the war party in this country for 25 years.
Lex Fridman (02:33:07) Well, that’s a different criticism, but I was-
Lex Fridman (02:33:10) Yes, that, but no, you just switched. You just switched. No, no, no. You just switched from the un-American discussion to criticizing policies that that particular institute, fine, criticize the policies, do that. What is the un-American bullshit? Not here.
Scott Horton (02:33:27) Lex, the neoconservative movement is the vanguard of the Israel lobby. That’s who they are. That’s what Neoconservatism is about.
Scott Horton (02:33:40) There is a massive Israel lobby in America, in Washington that is inseparable from the American War party.
Lex Fridman (02:33:47) Yeah, yeah. I’ve talked to John Mersham. I respect him deeply. He’s one of the most brilliant people speaking on that topic. Great, great. Let’s just talk about today and the nuclear proliferation. You guys have been brilliant on this. I’m learning a lot. Let’s continue [inaudible 02:34:01].
Mark Dubowitz (02:34:01) Yeah. Sorry. Let’s go back to where Khamenei may be. I mean, in a bunker, 86 years old thinking he’s going to drink the poison chalice and agree to a deal with Donald Trump and Oman, or is he going to do all of the things that Scott and I are concerned about? And one of those, and Scott has pointed this out rightly so, is he may decide now to break out for the nuke or creep out for the nuke. He may decide not to do it now, he may decide to do it in three and a half years when President Trump is gone. And I think that the important thing is he’s seen, we, the United States, we took out Fordo and Natanz and Isfahan in one operation with B-II bombers and 12 30,000 pound massive orange penatrators and Tomahawk missile. So if he didn’t think if that the United States had serious military power before, he now knows we do.
Lex Fridman (02:34:56) So to you, that operation was geopolitically a success. It sends a message of strength that if you try to build, you’re going to be punished.
Lex Fridman (02:35:00) It sends a message of strength that if you try to build, you’re going to be punished for it.
Mark Dubowitz (02:35:04) So I’ve said online in the past 12 days, and even before that, “Curb your enthusiasm. Curb your enthusiasm.” So all the people-
Mark Dubowitz (02:35:13) … Yeah, just this idea that this has been this unbelievable success and everything’s great. And everything’s going to be amazing. And we stopped the nuclear weapons program and this has been a resounding success.
(02:35:24) I’ve just said, “Curb your enthusiasm.” Khamenei remains very dangerous. The regime reigns very dangerous. A wounded animal is the most dangerous animal in the animal kingdom. He retains key capabilities to build weapons.
Scott Horton (02:35:37) You demanded unconditional surrender on Twitter again last night, right? After Trump said there’s a ceasefire?
Mark Dubowitz (02:35:46) Yes, exactly right. It’s exactly what President Trump … Well, I can’t-
Scott Horton (02:35:49) Not a regime change? Unconditional surrender in World War II meant the end of the Nazi regime and the imperialist Japanese regime entirely. Right?
Lex Fridman (02:35:55) Does President Trump know what that means?
Mark Dubowitz (02:35:56) He made it very clear. President Trump made it very clear.
Lex Fridman (02:36:11) And what did he also mean? We have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing. What’s that about?
Scott Horton (02:36:18) He was angry that Israel was still attacking after he promised they weren’t. He demanded they turn their planes around. He felt that they were doing it in defiance of their agreement.
Lex Fridman (02:36:27) But he didn’t say Israel. He says that both countries [inaudible 02:36:30].
Scott Horton (02:36:29) Different quote. He did say, I believe it was a tweet from Truth Social, “I demand that Israel turn those planes around right now.” Was how upset he was about it.
Mark Dubowitz (02:36:39) Well, I guess Donald Trump doesn’t listen to Bibi all the time, does he?
Scott Horton (02:36:41) Yeah, I guess he’s finding out they respect him about as much as they respect the Palestinian. He’s just the help.
Lex Fridman (02:36:47) Well, that’s how world leaders …. World leaders are interested in their own nation.
Scott Horton (02:36:51) Good important lesson there everyone. What does Israel care about? Israel.
Mark Dubowitz (02:36:55) Every country then defends its national interests. That’s not unusual for Israel or any other country. But I think to understand-
Scott Horton (02:37:02) We’re supposed to pretend that, “Hey, whatever Israel needs, we’re here to serve their interests.”
Lex Fridman (02:37:06) If those people exist, they aren’t American. If people put Israel’s interest first-
Scott Horton (02:37:15) He just said we fight terrorism together.
Mark Dubowitz (02:37:22) … Israeli intelligence community has saved? And ask people in the FBI and CIA who work counter-terrorism, how many American lives the Israelis have saved because of their intelligence capabilities.
Scott Horton (02:37:34) How about when Naftali Bennett, again, bombed that shelter full of women and children and caused the September 11th attack. That’s what happened. In fact, I don’t know if you know the story, but you could Google this. You like Googling things. It’s on Google Books.
(02:37:46) You can read Perfect Soldiers by Terry McDermott, or you could read The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright, where both of them explained how when Shimon Peres launched Operation Grapes of Wrath, that Ramzi bin al-Shibh and Mohammed Atta filled out their last will and testament, which was like symbolically joining the army to fight against the infidels, et cetera, et cetera.
(02:38:04) And when Bin Laden put out his first declaration of war, a couple of months later, it began with a whole rant about the 106 women and children that Naftali Bennett had killed with an artillery strike in a UN shelter in Qana in 1996. And he said, “We’ll never forget the severed arms and heads and legs of the little babies,” et cetera.
(02:38:26) And it was then that Mohammed Atta and Ramzi bin Al-Shib decided that they would join Al-Qaeda and that these Egyptian engineering students studying in Hamburg, Germany would volunteer for the Saudi Sheik to kill 3000 Americans to get revenge for what Israel was doing to helpless women and children in Lebanon. As well as, of course, what’s going on in Palestine.
Mark Dubowitz (02:38:46) Of course, that’s ignores the history of Al-Qaeda-
Scott Horton (02:38:48) Which for years before that was for the United States, Britain, and Saudi Arabia.
Mark Dubowitz (02:38:52) … operations against the United States, but executing them.
Lex Fridman (02:38:55) You guys love pulling each other into history.
Scott Horton (02:38:57) No, no, no. History is, America’s problem with Al-Qaeda-
Mark Dubowitz (02:39:14) It’s all us, Scott. It’s all us.
Scott Horton (02:39:15) Anyone can read Michael Shearer’s book, the former chief of the CIA’s Bin Laden where he wrote his great book.
Mark Dubowitz (02:39:21) We’re responsible for our enemies attacking us.
Scott Horton (02:39:23) It’s called Imperial Hubris.
(02:39:23) And it’s about how the number one reason they attacked us was American bases on Saudi soil, they bombed Iraq as part of Israel’s dual containment policy. And the second reason was American support for Israel in their merciless persecution of the Palestinians and the Lebanese.
Mark Dubowitz (02:39:38) That’s the most articulate justification I’ve ever heard for Al-Qaeda in my life. But let’s-
Scott Horton (02:39:42) It’s not a justification. I’m not saying that makes what they did right? I’m saying that was how Bin Laden recruited his foot soldiers to attack this country was by citing American foreign policies that were directly to the detriment of the people of the Middle East. And specifically, our support for Israel.
(02:40:01) And I’ve never heard a pro, in fact … I take that back. There’s one guy, a liberal from the Nation magazine named Eric Alterman is the only pro-Israel guy I’ve ever heard say, “Well, that may be true, but I still say we got to support Israel anyway.”
(02:40:15) The others, they’ll just pretend that Terry McDermott never wrote that book. That Lawrence Wright never wrote that book. That Mohammed Atta had no motive to turn on the United States except for Muhammad made him do it. When in fact, what it was is it was the ultra violence of Shimon Peres and artillery officer Naftali Bennett slaughtering women and children that turned America’s mercenaries.
(02:40:35) America backed the Arab Afghan army in Afghanistan, in Bosnia, in Kosovo, and in Chechnya, as I demonstrate in my book. And yet, as he correctly says, they turned on us all through the 1990s. Bill Clinton was still backing them anyway, after they were attacking us and including at Khobar Towers, and they were doing that.
(02:40:53) This was a Bin Ladenite plot, not Hezbollah, not the Shiites. This was the Bin Ladenites getting revenge against us for support for Israel and being too close to their local dictators that they wanted to overthrow, namely the King of Saudi and the El Presidente of Egypt.
(02:41:09) That is the cause of the September 11th attack against the United States. Not the Taliban hate freedom, but the Bin Ladenites hate American support for Israel and America adopting Israeli-centric policies like Martin Indyk’s dual-containment policy in 1983.
Mark Dubowitz (02:41:27) I think Al-Qaeda hates America, Scott.
Scott Horton (02:41:28) Why? You know what? I’ll tell you what, Ali Soufan … You know, Ali Soufan, the former FBI agent, counter-terrorism agent? He wrote in his book, The Black Banners, that the Bin Ladenites said to Bin Laden, “We don’t understand why you’re so angry at America. They’ve been so good to us in Afghanistan, in Bosnia, in Kosovo, and now here in Chechnya. Why do you want to attack them?”
Mark Dubowitz (02:41:50) And Bin Laden attacked America.
Scott Horton (02:41:50) Bin Laden said, “I have a larger agenda that you don’t understand.”
Lex Fridman (02:41:54) The disagreement between you is clear. I’ve talked to Noam Chomsky twice. Scott, you focus on the criticism.
Scott Horton (02:41:59) You should interview Michael Scheuer. Well, although he’s gone pretty crazy lately. I don’t know. Maybe not.
Nuclear proliferation in the future
Lex Fridman (02:42:04) Anyway, we’re going into history. We’re learning a lot. The perspectives differ strongly. Can we look into the, maybe a ridiculous question, but a nuclear proliferation? You already started to speak to, both of you.
(02:42:16) If you look like 10, 20 years out now, does the US attacking Iran, does that send a message, even to MBS to other Middle Eastern nations, that they need to start thinking about a nuclear weapon program? Specifically, do you think just in a numbers way, does the number of nukes in the world go up in 10, 20, 30 years?
Mark Dubowitz (02:42:41) So look, I think it’s a great question. Will there be more nuclear weapons powers in the future or less as a result of this decision by President Trump?
(02:42:49) So I actually think there’ll be less, and I’ll tell you succinctly as I can. And that is, that it’s been very clear from the Saudis, from the Turks, certainly from even the Algerians and others, that if Iran gets a nuclear weapon, they too want a nuclear weapon.
(02:43:08) In fact, the Saudis have gone even further and said, “If Iran is allowed to retain the key enrichment capability that they have under JCPOA, that we want that too. If there’s an Iran standard, we want the Iran standard. We don’t want the gold standard.”
(02:43:23) In fact, that’s been the subject of intensive negotiations between the United States and Saudi Arabia for the past couple of years, both under Biden and Trump, as part of the US-Saudi defense agreement, an economic agreement that has been underway.
(02:43:38) It’s very clear that there’s going to be a proliferation cascade in the Middle East if the Iranians get a nuclear weapon. And certainly, if they’re allowed to retain this enrichment capability. I also worry about, we haven’t even talked about it at all this conversation, the most important area in the world for the United States is not the Middle East. It’s China and the Indo-Pacific.
(02:43:57) And I worry that the South Koreans, the Taiwanese, and the Japanese will say, “You know what? We don’t trust any US commitments to stop nuclear weapons. You failed on Iran. We don’t trust you. We don’t trust your nuclear umbrella. We too want nuclear weapons in order to guard our security against China.”
(02:44:18) And so what you would see, I hope it doesn’t happen but I worry about, is this proliferation cascade in the Middle East and in the Indo-Pacific. Two of the most important areas for American national security, which is why I think it’s very important that Iran’s be stopped.
(02:44:34) Now, whether this attack succeeds in stopping Iran’s nuclear weapon or accelerates it, we disagree, but I think neither us know yet. Hard to predict. But what I think is absolutely certain is that if Iran develops that nuclear weapon and is allowed to retain the key capabilities to do so, you’re going to see five, six countries in the Middle East, at least three, four countries in the Indo-Pacific asking for the same capability. And then you’re going to have a club of nuclear weapons powers that will have an additional 5, 6, 7 over the next 10 to 20 years.
Lex Fridman (02:45:07) What if they don’t? What if they’re prevented? Doesn’t that still send the same message to everybody that they should build?
Mark Dubowitz (02:45:15) Oh, I think it sends the opposite message, Lex. I think if they see what has happened and that it’s successful, and it stopped Iran from developing nuclear weapons. And in addition, if Trump is able to negotiate an agreement for zero enrichment and full dismantlement, then the message to all these other countries is, number one, you don’t need it. And number two, if you try to get it, then the United States is going to use American power.
(02:45:40) Now, I’m not suggesting the United States is going to start bombing the Saudis or the Turks or the Emiratis. Clearly, not the Japanese, many of them are allies. But I think the United States retains many counter-proliferation tools to prevent these countries from developing nuclear weapons, including sanctions and export controls, and many other things.
(02:45:59) And plus, I think those countries … Understand, that in the Middle East, despite Scott’s focus on Israel, when you talk to Arab leaders, their biggest concern is the threat from Iran. It’s not the threat from Israel. They’re not concerned with the threat from Israel. That’s why he had the Abraham Accords.
(02:46:19) This is why the UAE and Bahrain and Morocco entered into this peace agreement with Israel. The Saudis will one day and they’ll bring many other Arab and Muslim countries in it. They don’t say Israel is a threat. They see Iran as a threat. And so if you counter that threat, you eliminate Iran’s nuclear weapons, proliferation and expansion, those countries now no longer have to build nuclear capabilities to counter the Iranians.
(02:46:44) Now, we’ve also restored our credibility. We don’t bluff. We said Iran doesn’t develop nuclear weapons. They won’t. And now it’s the Japanese who have, as Scott rightly pointed out, they do have reprocessing and plutonium capabilities. The Taiwanese who used to have a military nuclear weapons program and gave it up. And the South Koreans who agreed to our gold standard of zero enrichment, zero reprocessing. Those three countries can now say, “Okay, we rely on the United States. On your word, on your power, and on your ability to actually turn words into action. We don’t need nuclear weapons.”
(02:47:22) So I’d say if successful, big if, big if. If successful, then it’s going to be a significant guard against the potential of greater nuclear proliferation/ and we will have less nuclear weapons powers than we otherwise would’ve.
Lex Fridman (02:47:42) My favorite thing is when you guys point out, when you agree with the other person. Anyway, Scott, what do you think? Everything that’s just happened over the past two weeks does to nuclear proliferation over the next 5, 10, 20 years?
Scott Horton (02:47:56) I really don’t know for sure. But I would think that there’s a very great danger that it’s going to reinforce the lessons of North Korea, Iraq, and Libya, which is, “You better get a nuke to keep America out. And you better hurry before it’s too late.”
(02:48:12) Now for the Saudis, they’re not going to do that, because they’re obviously a very close American client state, so it’s a different dynamic there. But for any country that has trouble with the United States or is worried about the future of their ability to maintain their national sovereignty, obviously getting their hands on an A-bomb as quickly as possible has been re-incentivized to a great degree.
(02:48:34) Also, I’m really worried about the future of the Non-Proliferation Treaty with a nuclear weapons state’s promise to respect the right of non-nuclear weapons states to civilian nuclear energy. And where here you have a non-NPT signatory nuclear weapons state, Israel, launch an aggressive war against an NPT signatory that was not attacking them and was not making nuclear weapons. And with the assistance of the world empire, the United States, another nuclear weapons state signatory to the NPT.
(02:49:08) And I don’t really take this that seriously, but it’s worth at least listening to, is Medvedev, the once and probably future president of Russia. He said, “Oh yeah, well maybe we’ll just give him a nuke,” or implied maybe give Pakistan too. Now for people familiar with Key & Peele, Medvedev is angry at Obama, right? For Putin, that skit where it’s Obama talks all calm.
Scott Horton (02:49:34) And Peele goes off like an angry Black guy kind of character. Right?
Lex Fridman (02:49:37) He’s been going nuts on Twitter.
Scott Horton (02:49:38) Yeah, he goes way out, above and beyond, but I think he’s probably acting on instructions to talk that way. And it is a real risk that the NPT could just fall apart when it’s treated so callously by the United States who invented it. And insisted that the rest of the world adopt the thing to such a great degree.
Lex Fridman (02:49:59) Trump did say, ” Don’t use the N word.” He talked down to Medvedev.
Scott Horton (02:50:02) That’s right. Yeah, he did.
Lex Fridman (02:50:04) Don’t throw around the nuclear word.
Scott Horton (02:50:05) Yeah. Well, and I appreciate that.
Lex Fridman (02:50:07) That’s good. He’s right. He’s right in that. It’s a serious thing.
Scott Horton (02:50:12) And look, Pakistanis could give a nuke to Iran who are their friends, I think not the tightest of allies. I’m not saying I predict that, but there’s a danger of that.
(02:50:20) Now, when it comes to Eastern Asia, obviously there’s a concern about a Chinese threat to Taiwan, but nobody thinks China’s coming for South Korea or Japan. The question of Taiwan is one that’s very different because as the American president agreed with Mao Zedong years ago, Taiwan is part of China and eventually will be reunited, although we hope that’s not by force.
(02:50:45) Since then, they have essentially abandoned Marxism, although it’s still a one-party authoritarian state. But they’ve essentially abandoned Marxism, adopted markets. At least to the degree that they’ve been able to afford to now build up a giant naval force that is capable of retaking Taiwan.
(02:51:02) And so I think the way to prevent that is not from making a bunch of threats and setting examples in other places about how tough we are, but to negotiate with the Chinese and the Taiwanese. And figure out a way to reunite the two in a peaceful way in order to prevent that war from breaking out.
(02:51:19) Because in fact, we don’t really have the naval and air capability to defend Taiwan. We could lose a lot of guys trying and probably kill a lot of Chinese trying. But in the end, they’d probably take Taiwan anyway. And we’d have lost a bunch of ships and planes for nothing. So we can negotiate an end to that.
(02:51:37) And then even if America just withdrew from the region, we could still negotiate long-term agreements between China, Japan, South Korea, and whoever. There’s no reason to think that everyone would make a mad scramble to a bomb to protect them the moment they are out from under America’s nuclear umbrella and so forth.
(02:51:58) And the fact of the matter is that the greatest threat to the status quo as far as the nuclear powers go, probably is what just happened. America and Israel launching this war against a non-nuclear weapon state as a member in good standing of this treaty, throws the whole, as they call it, the liberal rules-based world order into question.
(02:52:21) If these rules repeatedly always apply to everyone else, but very often not to us, then are they really the law? Or this is just the will of men in Washington, D.C.? And how long do we expect the rest of the world to go ahead and abide by that? If a deal is a deal until we decide, as Bill Clinton said, to wake up one morning and decide that we don’t like it anymore and change it. That was a phrase from the Founding Act of ’97. Maybe we’ll wake up one morning and decide that we all want to do something else entirely.
Lex Fridman (02:52:53) Is that your Bill Clinton impression?
Scott Horton (02:52:55) That was pretty good. After the show, when we’re not recording much.
Mark Dubowitz (02:53:00) Can I respond to a couple of things here? Just really quickly. I’ll try to do it quickly.
(02:53:04) First of all, the notion that Iran is in full compliance with the NPT is just not the case. The International Atomic Energy Agency has made it clear in report after report after report that Iran is in violation of its obligations under the protocols of the IAEA. Under the request that the IAEA have made and under the NPT.
(02:53:24) So they are a serial violator of the NPT, unlike all these other countries we’ve been talking about that are our allies. Second is this quote, “Iran is not attacking Israel.” That’s quite an amazing quote, which kind of ignores, I think 50, 60 years of Iranian attacks against Israel, including suicide bombings, and missiles, and drones, and October 7th.
(02:53:55) And it’s indisputable that Iran has been attacking Israel and they’ve been doing it for many years through their terror proxies that they fund and finance and weaponize. And since October 7th, they directly struck Israel with hundreds of ballistic missiles in April and October of last year.
(02:54:14) So this notion that before 12 days ago, Iranians were just playing nice with the Israelis and the Israelis just came out out of the blue-
Mark Dubowitz (02:54:37) Suicide bomb ordered in Tehran.
Scott Horton (02:54:39) The Wall Street Journal says that US intelligence does not believe that Tehran ordered that attack. But they found out about-
Mark Dubowitz (02:54:43) What the Wall Street Journal says and what the US intelligence says, and we can dispute whether they directed it on October 7th. Everybody knows indisputably, that Iran financed Hamas, provided Hamas with weapons.
Mark Dubowitz (02:54:58) Well, just a second, provided Hamas with weapons. That the IRGC and the Quds force were training Hamas. Hezbollah backed by Iran was training Hamas. There were three meetings before October 7th, one in Beirut, one in Damascus, and one in Tehran where the IRGC, Hezbollah, Hamas, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad were together. There was a meeting in Tehran that was attended by Khamenei the Supreme leader.
(02:55:22) Now at those three meetings right before October 7th, maybe they’re discussing the weather. Maybe they were discussing Persian poetry, I don’t know, but it’s hard to believe they weren’t discussing something. And the fact that they had armed Hamas, financed Hamas, and weaponized Hamas, suggests to me that there is pretty overwhelming evidence that Iran has been at war with Israel for decades.
Lex Fridman (02:55:43) Critics of Israel will say that Benjamin Netanyahu has also been indirectly financing Hamas by allowing the funds going into-
Scott Horton (02:55:51) I’ll say that America backs Israel, so anything Israel does is America’s responsibility too under that same logic, right?
Lex Fridman (02:55:58) … I think you started to make a point disagreeing with Scott about that they’re not a good member of the NPT.
Scott Horton (02:56:04) That’s all tiny technical violations. None of that has anything to do with weaponization. It’s always so, “Yeah, how do you explain this isotope?” And they go, “Well, it must’ve came with the Pakistani junk that we bought from [inaudible 02:56:14].”
(02:56:14) And then later that’s verified. And they go, “Yeah, well, we want to inspect this. Let us.” And they go, “No.” And then they do a year later, and then they find nothing there.
Mark Dubowitz (02:56:21) Yeah, that’s just not the case.
Scott Horton (02:56:22) That’s the entire history of the IAEA’s objections to Iran.
Mark Dubowitz (02:56:27) So your listeners, I know they’re not going to do it, because it’s a lot of technical reading.
Scott Horton (02:56:31) Nothing to do with weaponization. A diversion of nuclear material.
Mark Dubowitz (02:56:31) But just go out, go out and read IAEA reports dating back at least 20 years. And you’ll see the IAEA meticulously, methodically, dispassionately outlining all of the violations that Iran has embarked on of the NPT.
Scott Horton (02:56:50) Virtually all those are resolved later. They won’t answer this, and then later they do. Well, they won’t answer that, and then later they do.
Mark Dubowitz (02:56:56) And many open files are still there. Again, I just want your viewers to walk away from this conversation thinking, “Okay, that’s interesting. I didn’t know that.” And that, “I’m going to go fact check Mark and fact check Scott, and just see what this is all about.” Right? Because otherwise, it’s just he says, she says, or he says, he says.
(02:57:15) The fact of the matter is, is that Iran has been in violations of its obligations under the NPT. Under the additional protocol, it never ratified under its safeguards obligations under the NPT. It suggests a pattern of nuclear mendacity.
Scott Horton (02:57:34) They abided by the additional protocol without having ratified it. They abided by it for three years and did not proceed with any enrichment at all as long as they were dealing in good faith with the EU until W. Bush ruined those negotiations and closed them down. Only then did they begin to install the centrifuges at Natanz.
Mark Dubowitz (02:57:51) It’s always the Americans who screw things up.
Scott Horton (02:57:52) You complain they didn’t ratify the thing, but they abided by it for years.
Mark Dubowitz (02:57:56) So that’s an interesting-
Lex Fridman (02:57:57) They were in violation of it. But I think a more pragmatic and important disagreement that we already spoke to is how do we decrease the incentive for Iran to build nuclear programs? Not just the next couple of years, but the next 10, 20 years.
Lex Fridman (02:58:12) You’re mocking that. There’s a lot of people that will … There’s neocons that say basically, “Invade everything. Let’s make money off of war.”
(02:58:19) But there is people that will say that Operation Midnight Hammer is actually a focused, hard demonstration of strength. A piece of strength that is an effective way to do geopolitics. There’s cases to be made for all of it.
Lex Fridman (02:58:35) So it’s a big risk is your case.
Mark Dubowitz (02:58:36) So here’s some practical recommendations that I think the United States should follow. I think the first is get the Iranians back to Oman, negotiate with them and do a deal.
(02:58:46) Again, the deal has to be no enrichment full dismantlement. I think for the reasons we talked about today, Scott and I passionately disagreed, but that’s fine. This is a reasonable debate. Neither of us is crazy. Neither of us is irrational. It is, what would it take to get a deal with Iran? I’d say, this is the deal. This has to be our red line. Scott disagrees. That’s fine, but we got to get a deal.
(02:59:07) In that deal, we got to provide them financial incentives. We’re going to have to lift a certain number of sanctions because they’re going to have to get something in return. We can argue about exactly how much, but I think our opening negotiating position is no-sanctions relief. And then we’ll get negotiated down from that. Right?
(02:59:25) I think a lot of this is about how do you position yourself for negotiation? How do you come in with leverage? And then how do you find areas of compromise where you satisfy your objectives? One is Oman. Two is the credible threat of military force needs to remain, right?
(02:59:42) Khamenei needs to understand that the United States of America and Israel will use military force to stop him from developing nuclear weapons. If he didn’t believe that before, 12 days ago, he now believes that. And I think that’s the credibility of that military force has to be maintained in order to ensure that he does not break out or sneak out to a nuclear weapon. I think that’s absolutely critical.
(03:00:04) Third is I think we have to reach agreements with all the other countries in the Middle East to say, “Hey, listen, we’re demanding zero enrichment and full dismantlement from the Iranians. You don’t get enrichment. And you don’t get a nuclear program that is capable of developing nuclear weapons. Our gold standard is the American standard.”
(03:00:21) Civilian nuclear energy, like 23 countries, no enrichment in reprocess. We should be consistent. We should be consistent, not just with American allies, but also very clear with American enemies. I think that’s the third important thing we do.
(03:00:33) Fourth is I think it’s really important that we find some accommodation between the Israelis and the Palestinians. We can go down many rabbit holes on that, but I think that lays the predicate for a Saudi-Israeli normalization deal that then brings in multiple Arab countries and Muslim countries.
(03:00:54) And finally, is we talked about the Abraham Accords. I think we need to start thinking about what do the Cyrus Accords look like, right? Cyrus was the great Persian king who, by the way, brought the Jews back from the diaspora to Jerusalem. And Cyrus Accords would be, “Let’s find an agreement between the United States and Israel and Iran.” That would be a remarkable transformation in the region if we could actually do that.
(03:01:21) So imagine a Middle East, and again, I know this sounds fanciful. But I think this is what Trump has in mind when he starts to talk about the things you’re seeing in these Truth posts. Is actually a Middle East that can be fundamentally transformed where we actually do bring peace between Israel, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the rest of these countries.
(03:01:40) I, by the way, completely agree with you on Syria. The idea that we are trusting a former Al-Qaeda ISIS jihadist to rule Syria, I think is a big bet President Trump has made. He’s made it on the advice of MBS. We’ll see how that transforms or transpires, and see if Syria is transformed. But the notion that somehow we should just be rolling the dice, lifting all the sanctions, and taking this former Al-Qaeda jihadist at his word is a big bet.
(03:02:13) If we got the bet right, that is actually a remarkable occurrence because now all of a sudden Syria and Lebanon are brought into this Abraham Accords, Cyrus Accords structure. And then we actually have what I think all three of us want is peace in the Middle East, stability in the Middle East. I don’t think we need democracy in the Middle East.
(03:02:31) I think if the Middle East looked like the UAE, that’d be a pretty good Middle East. I think we’d all be pretty comfortable with that if that kind of stability and prosperity. And ultimately, you could put these countries on a pathway to greater democracy. The way that we did during the Cold War where countries like Taiwan and South Korea that were military dictatorships ended up becoming pro-Western democracy.
(03:02:52) So that’s, stepping back, maybe a little bit Pollyannish. But I think we should also always keep in mind what a potential vision for peace could look like.
Libertarianism
Lex Fridman (03:03:02) So Scott, as many people know, here in Austin, Texas, you’re the director of the Libertarian Institute. Let’s zoom out a bit. What are the key pillars of libertarianism and how that informs how you see the world?
Scott Horton (03:03:17) Well, the very basis of libertarianism is the non-aggression principle, which essentially is the same thing as our social rules for dealing with each other in private life. No force, no theft, no fraud, and keep your hands to yourself. And we apply that same moral law to government.
(03:03:36) And so some libertarians are anarcho-capitalists. Some are so-called minarchists, meaning we want the absolute minimum amount of government, a night-watchman-type state. In other words, just enough to enforce contracts and protect property rights and allow freedom and a free market to work.
(03:03:55) There’s also, of course, natural rights theory, Austrian school economics and a lot of revisionist history. And something very key to libertarian theory is expressed by Murray Rothbard was that war is the key to the whole libertarian business. Because, especially in the United States of America, as long as we maintain a world empire, makes it impossible for us to have a limited and decentralized government here at home as our constitution describes.
(03:04:24) And so I was going to crack a joke, but neither of you have called me an isolationist yet. But I was going to joke that yes, as Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Isolation, the same guy, a principal author of the Declaration of Isolation, he said in his first inaugural address, “We seek peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations and entangling alliances with none.”
(03:04:45) And that’s the true libertarian philosophy. Think Dr. Ron Paul, the great Congressman for many years up there. He was opposed to all sanctions, all economic war on the rest of the world, and the entire state of the United States as world empire.
(03:04:59) And what’s strange now is that anyone who wants just peace as the standard is considered an isolationist. And people who are for world empire and a permanent state of conflict with the rest of the world, economic war, coups and regime changes, and even invasions, those are considered normal people.
(03:05:20) It’s almost like people who want peace should be called cis foreign policy because now we have to come up with a funny word to describe a normal state of being when no one calls Mexico an isolationist state, just because they mind their own business. And is there any faction anywhere in America that calls themselves isolationist?
(03:05:41) Even the Paleoconservatives who favor much more trade protectionism and that kind of thing than libertarians, they don’t call themselves isolationists. They still want to have an open relationship with the world to some degree. When isolation means like the hermit kingdom of North Korea or some crazy thing like that. No one wants that for the United States of America. What we want is independence.
Scott Horton (03:06:00) For the United States of America, what we want is independence, non-interventionism and peace.
Lex Fridman (03:06:05) So to you, isolationism is a kind of dirty word-
Scott Horton (03:06:08) That’s right. It’s a smear term-
Scott Horton (03:06:10) Invented by interventionists and internationalists to attack anyone who didn’t want to go along with their agenda. The term itself is used essentially as a smear against anyone who doesn’t want to go to war.
Lex Fridman (03:06:22) So can you actually just deeper describe what non-interventionism means? So how much display of military strength should be there, do you think?
Scott Horton (03:06:32) Dr. Paul said, we could defend this country with a couple of good submarines, which by the way, for people who don’t know, one American Trident sub could essentially kill every city and military base in Russia, just one. So he’s absolutely right about that. A couple of good submarines are enough to defend our coast and deter anyone from messing with the United States of America. And then I admit, I’m a little bit idealistic about this, that I think of that old William Jennings Bryan speech, ” Behold the Republic,” where unlike the empires of Europe burdened under the weight of militarism. Here we have a free country and where you know what we could do? We could be the host of peace conferences everywhere. There are frozen conflicts in the Donbass, in Kaliningrad, in Transnistria, in Taiwan, in Korea, virtually all the borders of Africa and Eurasia were drawn by European powers to either divide and conquer their enemies or artificially group their enemies together in order to keep them internally divided and conquered in those ways.
(03:07:37) So there are great many borders in the world that are in contention and that people might even want to fight about. And I think that America could play a wonderful role in helping to negotiate and resolve those types of conflicts without resorting to force or even making any promises on the part of the US government, like we’ll pay Egypt to pretend to be nice to Israel or anything like that, but just find ways to host conferences and find resolutions to these problems. And I think quite sincerely that Donald Trump right now could get on a plane to Tehran. He could then go to Moscow, to Beijing and Pyongyang, and he could come home and be Trump The Great. We in fact don’t have to have, especially the American hyper power as the French called it, of the World Empire. We have everything to give and nothing to lose to go ahead. And Donald Trump even talked like this.
(03:08:29) You might remember when he first was sworn in this time, he said, “You know what? Instead of pivoting from terrorism to great power competition with Russia and China, I don’t want to do that. I just want to get along with both of them. Let’s just move on and have the rest of the century be peace and prosperity and not fighting at all. Why should we have to pivot to China? Let’s just pivot to capitalism and trade and freedom. And peace.” That’s America first.
Lex Fridman (03:08:54) Yeah, I’ve criticized Trump a lot, but I think maybe he’s just rhetoric, but I think he talks about peace a lot. Even just recently, the number of times the word peace is mentioned and with seriousness, not you get a genuine desire for peace from him. And that’s just beautiful to see for the leader of this country.
Scott Horton (03:09:15) And look, man, there used to be a time when a third of the planet was dominated by the communists, right? So I’m not going to sit here and argue the first Cold War with you. My book’s about the second one, and I’m not as good on the first. But since the end of the first Cold War, we have let the neoconservative policy of the defense planning guidance of ’92 and rebuilding America’s defenses and the rest of this American dominance-centered policy control our entire direction in the world. It’s led to the war on terrorism in the Middle East, seven countries we’ve attacked. It’s led to the disaster in Eastern Europe, and it’s leading toward disaster in Eastern Asia when there’s just no reason in the world that it has to be this way with the commies dead and gone.
(03:10:01) And again, to stipulate here, the Chinese flag is still red. It’s still a one-party dictatorship, but they have abandoned Marxism. I mean, people were starving to death by the tens of millions there. It’s a huge, it’s probably the greatest improvement in the condition of mankind anywhere ever in the shortest amount of time when Deng Xiaoping in the right of the Communist Party took over in that country.
Lex Fridman (03:10:22) Just one more thing. You mentioned the two submarines. What’s the role of nuclear weapons?
Scott Horton (03:10:28) Well, I would like for America to have an extremely minimal nuclear deterrent and work toward a world free of nuclear weapons. And I know that that sounds utopian. However, I would remind your audience that Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev came within a hair of achieving a deal just like that at Reykjavik Iceland in 1986, and they were both of them dead serious about it, complete and total nuclear disarmament. Then Reagan was essentially bullied by Richard Pearl and others on his staff saying, “You promised the American people that you would build them a defensive anti-missile system, the Star Wars system,” which was total pie in the sky, technological fantasy of the 1980s. And if you’re getting rid of all the ICBMs, then why the hell do you need a missile shield anyway? Is the world’s probably greatest tragedy that ever took place that Ronald Reagan walked away from those negotiations.
(03:11:23) They literally were within a hair and it wasn’t magic and there was no trust in evil, bad guys. This is, by the way, two years before the wall came down, this is when everybody still thought the USSR was going to last. And Reagan, the plan was that America and the Soviet Union would dismantle our nuclear weapons until we were right around parity with the other nuclear weapon states who all have right around two or 300 nukes, France, Britain at that time, Israel and China, India and Pakistan came later. South Africa only had a few of them, but gave up whatever they had. And the idea was we would get down to two or 300 and then America and the Soviet Union both together would lean hard on Britain, France, and China, let’s all get down to 100. Let’s all see if we can get down to 50, etc. Like that in stages. Again, Ronald Reagan we’re talking about here, trust but verify means do not trust at all. It means be polite while you verify.
(03:12:17) And in fact, America did help dismantle upwards of 60 something thousand Soviet nuclear missiles after the end of the Cold War. And so it is possible to live in a world where at the very least we have a situation where the major powers have a few nukes and potentially can even come to an arrangement to get rid of the rest.
Lex Fridman (03:12:40) We should also just say one more thing, not to be ageist, but most of the major leaders with nukes and those with power in the world are in their 70s and 80s. I don’t know if that contributes to it, but they kind of are grounded in a different time. I have a hope for the fresher, younger leaders to have a more optimistic view towards peace and to be able to reach towards peace.
Scott Horton (03:13:06) And underlying so much of what we’re talking about here is all this enmity, but if America could just work, remember when China cut that pseudo sort of peace deal between Saudi and Iran a couple of years ago or last year was it? We could try to double up on that. We could try to come up with ways for Saudi and Iran to exchange as much as possible. I know you don’t like all the going back too far in history, but it’s important. It’s in my book that in 1993, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who the revolution had happened on his watch Operation Eagle Claw, the disaster of the rescue mission in ’79 after the hostage crisis and everything, all that egg was on ZB’s face. But in ’93 he said, “We should normalize relations. We should build an oil pipeline across Iran so they can make money. We can make money and we can start to normalize.”
(03:13:53) And Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state, Alexander Haig, who had been Kissinger’s right-hand man, agreed. They both were trying to push that. But the Clinton administration went ahead with Martin Indick who had been Yitzhak Shamir’s man and inaugurated the dual containment policy instead, because the Israelis were concerned that America had just beaten up on Iraq so bad in Iraq War one that now Iraq wasn’t powerful enough to balance against Iran, so America had to stay in Saudi to balance against them both. And that was the origin of the dual containment policy. It was Martin Indick who had been Yitzhak Shamir’s man who pushed it on Clinton. And this was not the Israelis, it was the Kuwaitis who lied that there was a truck bomb attempt assassination against HW Bush, which was a total hoax. It was debunked by Seymour Hersh by the end of the year.
(03:14:41) It was just a whiskey smuggling ring, and it was the same guy whose daughter had claimed to have seen the Iraqi soldiers throw the babies out of the incubators. He was the guy who two years later made up this hoax about Saddam Hussein trying to murder Bush Senior. But when he did, that was when Bill Clinton finally gave in and adopted the dual-containment policy, because he had been interested in potentially reaching out to Saddam and the Ayatollah both at that time, but instead of having normalization with both, we had to have permanent Cold War through the end of the century with both. And my argument is simply, it just didn’t have to be that way. It’s the same thing with Russia. Look at how determined the Democrats especially are to have this conflict with Russia where to Donald Trump? Nah, not at all. We could get along with them. And so it’s perfectly within reason.
(03:15:28) If Zbigniew Brzezinski says, we can talk with Iran and get along with Iran, and Donald Trump says we can get along with Russia, then the same thing for North Korea, the same thing for China. And then who do we have left to fight? Hezbollah?
Lex Fridman (03:15:51) Mark, you’re the CEO of FDD, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, it’s a DC-based organization that focuses on national security and foreign policy. What has been your approach to solving some of these problems of the world?
Mark Dubowitz (03:16:09) So look, I love the vision that Scott painted, and I agree with some of the libertarian instincts that he has, but my view is that America is the indispensable power. Scott mentioned earlier in the conversation about the rules-based order that is so important and the NPT and all these rules-based agreements that are important to maintain. Well, the rules-based order has been maintained by the United States since World War II. There is no American prosperity to the degree that we have. There’s no recovery of Europe, there’s no recovery of Asia after the devastation of World War II without American power and the rules-based order that America has led and back stopped.
(03:16:53) I think America first is about American power and deterrence. I think if you want to avoid war, I think you cannot just believe in some fantasy where all the world’s leaders are going to get together in some place and are just going to agree to disarm all their nuclear weapons and we’ll disarm our entire military and we’ll have one submarine off our coast. And some of all of that is going to lead to peace. I mean, I think what has led to peace in the past has been American for deterrence of our military and a belief that our enemies think we will credibly use it. I think if they believe we’ll credibly use it, then it’s less likely they will challenge us. And if they less likely to challenge us and challenge our allies, there’s less likely to be war. So for me, deterrence leads to peace and any kind of unilateral disarmament, any kind of, I think sort of fanciful notion that somehow our enemies are going to respect the non-aggression principle that is the core fundamental underpinnings of libertarianism, which I think in a personal relationship I think is very important.
(03:18:07) But remember, these are aggressors, they don’t respect the non-aggression principle. I think we can spend a lot of time, we did over how many hours now has it been talking about the fact that in Scott’s view of the world, it’s America that provokes, it’s America that provokes, and then if not America provoking, it’s Israel provoking. And oh, by the way, America provokes because we’re being seduced or paid or brow beaten by those Israelis and those Jews in America. I mean, I think that whole notion that somehow we are the provocative force in global politics, I think is wrong. I think the fact of the matter is we make mistakes. We are an imperfect nation. We have made some serious, sometimes catastrophic mistakes, but there is a bad world out there. There are evil men who want to do us harm and we have to prevent them from doing us harm.
(03:19:02) And to do that, we need an American military that is serious and well supported. We don’t need a military industrial complex that ultimately is going to pull us into wars. We need thoughtful leaders like President Trump who will resist that and will say, “At the end of the day, I will use force when it is selective, narrow, overwhelming, and deadly.” And that was Trump’s operation just a few days ago. He went after three key facilities that were being used to develop the capability for nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons are the greatest danger to humanity. I totally agree with Scott. I think a world without nuclear weapons, the kind of world that Reagan envisioned and others have envisioned since is really the only way we can eliminate the most devastating weapons that could end humankind. But we have to make sure that those weapons don’t end up in the hands of regimes that seek to do us harm and that have done us harm over many, many decades.
(03:20:01) So yeah, I mean deterrence, peace through strength, rules-based order. The foundation for defense of democracies is not the foundation for promotion of democracy. We don’t believe in this important concept that we have to promote democracy around the world. I’ll speak for myself, because we have many people at my think tank. We’re 105 people. We have different views. I don’t personally believe that it is the role of the United States to bring democracy to the Middle East or democracy around the world. I think to the extent we’ve tried, we failed. I’m not sure the Middle East is ready for democracy. Now, Iran is interesting because it’s not an Arab country. It is a different country altogether. Culturally, it’s a very sophisticated country. It has a long history. It actually has a history where it has had democracy in the past. It is a country that I think could have incredible potential under the right leadership and under right circumstances.
(03:20:52) I don’t know if the right circumstances are a constitutional monarchy with Reza Pahlavi as the Crown Prince or the Shah. I don’t don’t know whether it’s a secular democracy or not. Let Iranians make that decision.
Scott Horton (03:21:04) Have I been pronouncing it wrong this whole time?
Mark Dubowitz (03:21:18) The only thing you’ve ever gotten wrong for pronouncing [inaudible 03:21:21] that’s not bad. That’s
Lex Fridman (03:21:22) Pronouncing so many things correctly, I think people will give you a pass.
Scott Horton (03:21:25) Can I ask you though? I mean all this militarization has led to a state of permanent war. We’ve been bombing Iraq for 34 years. We put a war against the Taliban who didn’t attack us instead of Al-Qaeda who did fought for 20 years, and the Taliban won anyway. We overthrew or launched an aggressive war against Saddam Hussein put the Ayatollah’s best friends in power, launched an aggressive war against Libya on this ridiculous hoax that Gaddafi was about to murder every last man, woman, and child in Benghazi. Imagine Charlotte, North Carolina being wiped off the map, Barack Obama lied in order to start that war and completely destroyed Libya. It’s now three pieces in a state of semi-permanent civil war including, and this wasn’t just back then, this is to this day the re-legalization and re-institutionalization of chattel slavery of sub-Saharan Black Africans in Libya to this day, as a result.
(03:22:21) Our intervention, this was not a direct overt war, but America, Israel, Saudi, Qatar, and Turkey all backed the Bin Ladenites in Syria completely destroyed Syria to the point where the caliphate grew up. And then we had to launch Iraq War III to destroy the caliphate again. And so I’m not seeing the peace through strength. I’m seeing permanent militarism and permanent war through strength
Lex Fridman (03:22:42) Point well made. He’s speaking to the double-edged sword of a strong military that what you mentioned that Trump did, seems like a very difficult thing to do, which is keep it hit hard and keep it short.
Scott Horton (03:22:57) We don’t know how this ended yet.
Lex Fridman (03:22:59) But even the beginning part is not trivial to do. Just hitting one mission and vocalizing except for one post, no regime change, really pushing peace, make a deal, ceasefire like that’s an uncommon way to operate. So I guess you said that we should resist the military industrial complex. That’s not easy to do. That’s the double-edged sword of a strong military.
Scott Horton (03:23:29) Oh, I forgot Yemen. Let me say real quick, and I promise… Look, I’m going to say one thing then and then I’ll stop.
Scott Horton (03:23:33) I just want to add that this is a really important point, okay. Is grassroots efforts. There is no Houthi lobby in America. It was grassroots efforts by libertarians, Quakers, and leftists to get War Powers resolutions introduced in Trump’s first term to stop war in Yemen, which was launched not for Israel, for Saudi Arabia and UAE by Barack Obama in 2015.
Scott Horton (03:23:56) It’s not a first. The Afghan war wasn’t about Israel either. Okay, but this Yemen war was-
Mark Dubowitz (03:24:01) I thought 9/11 was about Israel.
Scott Horton (03:24:03) Well, it was in great part, but the decision to sack Cobble and do a regime change and all that had nothing to do with the Likud whatsoever other than, well, we got to keep the war going long enough to go to Baghdad.
Mark Dubowitz (03:24:16) Oh, okay. So it was Israel’s fault.
Scott Horton (03:24:17) I was in the middle of saying about the war in Yemen that we got the war powers resolution through twice, and Trump vetoed it twice. And his man, Pete Navarro, explained to the New York Times that this was just welfare for American industry. A lot of industrialists were angry about the tariffs disrupting trade with China, and somehow they substituted Raytheon for all American industry somehow and said, industry will be happy if we funnel a lot of money to Raytheon. That’s Pete Navarro talking to the New York Times about why they continued the war in Yemen throughout Trump’s entire first term. He had no interest in it at all. The whole thing was it was Obama’s fault. The whole thing was essentially on autopilot. And what was he doing? He’s flying Al-Qaeda’s Air Force against the Houthis, who originally, if you go back to January of 2015, America was passing intelligence to the Houthis to use to kill Al-Qaeda. You know AQAP, the guys that tried to blow up the plane over Detroit with the underpants bomb on Christmas Day 2009 that did all those horrific massacres in Europe, real As Bin Ladinist terrorists.
(03:25:18) The Houthis were our allies against them before Barack Obama stabbed them in the back. And why did Trump keep that going when he inherited that horrific war from Barack Obama? Why did he do it? According to his trade guy so that they could keep funneling American taxed and inflated dollars into the pocketbooks of stockholders of Raytheon Incorporated.
Lex Fridman (03:25:38) Right, military, industrial complex. The point was made.
Mark Dubowitz (03:25:40) Yeah, maybe I could respond to that, because I mean, again, it’s always America’s fault according Scott.
Lex Fridman (03:25:46) Just take jab at each other.
Scott Horton (03:25:46) Saudi and UAE asked Barack Obama for permission to start that war and for American help in prosecuting it, and he said yes, and helped them do it.
Mark Dubowitz (03:25:53) I’m going to segue into an answer, because I think it deserves an answer. Military industrial complex is a serious concern because I think you’re right. The bigger it gets, and the more weapons you have, you think the more the greater the temptation to use it, right? I think that’s sort of the argument. And then there’s also self enrichment and how much money can be made, and all of that I think is of serious concern to people. Look, I think Trump is somebody who, it’s hard pressed to say that Donald Trump is a great advocate of the military industrial complex, or that he is in their pocket the same way that he’s in the pocket of the Israelis and in the pocket of the Saudis and in the pocket of everybody. I mean, I think the one thing with Trump is that Trump, he has learned the lessons of American engagement over the past few decades, and I think Scott’s done a good job of laying out the mistakes that have been made, even though we can discuss about causal connections and who’s responsible. And I lean on-
Mark Dubowitz (03:26:53) Well, Scott, can I finish? Because your causal connection is always, it’s America aggressing, Israel aggressing, and all these poor people responding to us. But nonetheless, I think Trump has, he’s learned the lessons, but he hasn’t over-learned the lessons. He’s not paralyzed by Iraq or Afghanistan or the mistakes made by his predecessors. He understands that at the end of the day, we need serious American power. We need lethal power. We need four deterrence. And he’s been very careful and very selective about how he uses American power. I mean, we’ve talked about it throughout this whole conversation. Trump used American power to kill Qasem Soleimani, one of the world’s most dangerous terrorists. He killed Baghdadi, the head of ISIS, one of the world’s most dangerous terrorists.
(03:27:36) He refrained from going after the Iranian take down of our drone. He refrained from when the Iranians fired on Saudi Aramco and took off 20% of our oil. He’s been very, very selective about the use of American power. He did go after the Houthis who are Iran backed, and were using Iranian missiles to go after our ships.
Scott Horton (03:27:57) That’s not true. Those are North Korean missiles completely debunked by Janes’ Defense Weekly. Nice try.
Mark Dubowitz (03:28:02) Yeah, nice try. Anyway, everybody knows that the Iranians have been financing the Houthis. Hezbollah has been training the Houthis, and Iran has given capabilities to the Houthis to develop their own indigenous missile capability. The fact of the matter is he did in a way go after the Houthis much more intensively than Biden did in order to prevent them from continuing to shut down Red Sea shipping on which both America and our allies depend as a trade route. He actually did it quite successfully because after a few days of pretty intensive bombing, the Houthis got the message and they cut a deal with Donald Trump, they’re not going to interfere with our ships anymore.
Scott Horton (03:28:41) He got a deal with them. They kept bombing Israel, which is what got him involved in the first place. He completely backed out. Sounds to me like they won, and he backed down.
Mark Dubowitz (03:28:48) Well, it sounds like in terms of promoting American national security interests, it sounds like he did a pretty good job of sending a message to the Houthis and the Iranians don’t mess with the United States, and that gets us to the contemporary reality. He took a decision one day on one day to send our B2s and our subs in order to severe damage to three nuclear facilities. It was a one day campaign. It was selective. It was narrow, it was overwhelming. And I think it sends a message to Khamenei. I think it sends a message to regimes around the world, anti-American regimes around the world, that Donald Trump has not over-learned the lessons of the past 20 years, but that in fact, he is not going to dismantle the U.S military and dismantle our nuclear program and fly around through all these cities and call peace conferences and hope that these dictators will just sit down with America and say, “You know what? All is forgiven the United States of America. It’s all your fault. You did this all. We admit our responsibility,” and then we have peace and paradise on earth.
(03:29:53) I think Trump is much more pragmatic and in some respects, cynical when he looks at the world and he realizes the world is a dangerous place, I have to be very careful about how I use American military forces. I am not going to send hundreds of thousands of people around the world. By the way, I mean, we all talk about Israel. I mean, the Israelis are one of the best allies we could possibly have. They fight and they die in their own defense. They fought multiple wars against American enemies. They haven’t asked for American troops on the ground. There are no boots on the ground in Israel defending Israel. The best we’ve given them is we’ve given them a fad system to help them shoot down ballistic missiles that have aimed at them.
(03:30:35) And our American pilots have been in the air recently with our Israeli friends shooting down ballistic missiles. But the Israelis have had a warrior ethos, we will fight and we will die in our own defense. I would just say, if you’re going to actually build out a model where you’re going to minimize the risk to American troops, let’s find more allies like that. I worry about, I’m like, Scott, I really worry about China, Taiwan. I really, really worry about that because the Taiwanese are not capable of defending themselves without U.S assistance. And we may have to send American men and women to go defend Taiwan, and we can have a whole debate about the wisdom of that. But again, it would be very, very helpful to have more Israelis in the world, more countries that are capable of fighting against common enemies and against common threats without having to always put American boots on the ground in order to do that.
Trump and Peacemaking process
Lex Fridman (03:31:26) So you made a case for, if it’s okay, you made a case for strength here. Just practically speaking, why do you think Trump has talked about peace a lot, why do you think he hasn’t been able to get to a ceasefire with Ukraine and Russia, for example? If we just move away from Iran without getting into the history of the whole thing, why he’s been talking peace, peace, peace, peace, peace. He’s been pushing it and pushing it. What can we learn about that so far failure, that’s also instructed for Iran?
Mark Dubowitz (03:31:57) Look, I’m not a Russia expert. I’m not a Ukraine expert. I’m sitting in front of two people who know a lot more about that conflict than I do.
Lex Fridman (03:32:03) You are, we should say, banned by Putin.
Mark Dubowitz (03:32:06) I am. I have been sanctioned by Russia and by Iran.
Mark Dubowitz (03:32:15) Thank you. Thank you. Well, it causes some difficulties. But anyway, I think the answer to that is that for Putin, he needs to understand that like Khamenei, he has two options here. Option one, which President Trump has signaled over and over and over again is come sit down and negotiate a ceasefire with the Ukrainians. I don’t want to get into the details and the back and forth about who’s responsible for the fact there’s no ceasefire, Putin or Zelensky. I mean, that’s a whole other debate, and I’m sure you guys have a lot of opinions on that. But path one is sit down and let’s negotiate a ceasefire. Path two is the United States will use American power in order to build our leverage so that Vladimir Putin understands that he has to do a ceasefire. Now, I’m not suggesting US troops, absolutely not. What I am suggesting is, there’s a package right now of sanctions that have ADA co-sponsors in the Senate across party lines.
(03:33:13) And I think Trump is using that and will use that as a sort of Damocles hanging over Putin and the Russian economy to say, “Look, if Vladimir, we either do a ceasefire or I’m going to have no choice but to have to start imposing much more punishing sanctions on you and on the Russian economy.” So I think there’s an economic option. I think there’s a military option. And I think the biggest mistake Biden made in this whole war, and there’s many mistakes in terms of signaling not having US credibility. Afghan debacle, which signaled to Putin that he could invade without any kind of American response is he kind of went in and he tied Ukraine’s hands behind their back. I mean, he actually tied one hand behind their back while they were fighting with the other hand. And he refused to give him the kinds of systems that early on in the war would’ve allowed the Ukrainian military to be able to hit Russian forces that were mobilizing on the Russian-Ukrainian border.
(03:34:08) And I think if he had done that, I think this war would’ve ended sooner. There’d be far less casualties. And I think Putin would then understand maybe I need to strike a deal. I’m not a Russia expert or Ukraine expert. I don’t know what the deal looks like. You keep the Donbas, you keep Crimea, you keep larger chunks of Eastern Ukraine. That’s for smarter people than me on this issue to decide what the deal looks like. But there’s no doubt today Putin thinks that he can just keep fighting, keep killing Ukrainians, keep driving forward. Eventually, he’s going to wear down the Ukrainians through a sheer war of attrition. He’ll throw hundreds of thousands of Russians at this. He doesn’t care how many Russians are going to die.
(03:34:46) That’s the way that Russians and the Soviets have fought wars for many, many years. Just endless number of Russian bodies being thrown into the meat grinder. He thinks he can continue without any consequences. And I worry that as a result of the fact that we are not showing Putin that we’ve got leverage, it’s made war more likely, it’s made a war more brutal, and it’s going to make a war more proactive.
Lex Fridman (03:35:10) Increasing military aid to Ukraine, in the case that you described, also has to be coupled with extreme pressure to make peace.
Mark Dubowitz (03:35:17) Correct. Extreme pressure to make peace,
Lex Fridman (03:35:19) Which Trump hopefully appears to be doing now in Iran.
Mark Dubowitz (03:35:23) I think Trump is early… I mean, it’s interesting you said that because he’s early indicators. Again, who knows where the ceasefire goes. But I think it was important he slapped Khamenei, but he also said to Bibi, “Enough, enough.” And it’s like, okay, now we’re going back to Oman. There’s going to be a temporary ceasefire. Now let’s negotiate. And I think that’s important. And I think it shows that Donald Trump is leading, not following. It shows that Donald Trump is his own man, not on the payroll of the Russians or the Iranians or the Israelis or all these other crazy accusations that have been made about this guy for many, many years. And he’s going to give, as they say, peace a chance, and he’s going to give a ceasefire a chance. He’s going to give negotiations a chance. But I’ll think he’s sending the message to the Iranians and he needs to send it to Putin is, if you don’t take me up on my offer, I’ve already demonstrated that I am serious and I will use American power carefully and selectively in the way that I’ve done in the past.
WW2
Lex Fridman (03:36:23) At the risk of doing the thing I shouldn’t do. But just to test the ideas of libertarianism and the things we’ve been talking about. Can we, for a brief time unrelated to everything we’ve been talking about, talk about World War II, what was the right thing to do in 1938, 1939? What would you do? Okay. To be clear, World War II has nothing to do with current events. In fact, many of the horrible policies of the United States, in my opinion, have to do with projecting World War II onto every single conflict in the world. Okay.
Lex Fridman (03:37:02) Overlearning. But it is an interesting extreme case. Just to clarify, I’m just philosophically talking about at which point do you hit, do you do military intervention, and that’s a nice case. Maybe you have a better case study, but that’s such an extreme one that it’s interesting.
Scott Horton (03:37:22) We’re talking about Germany or Japan?
Scott Horton (03:37:24) So Japan attacked us and Germany declared war on us. Tough for them. And that’s what happens when you declare war on the United States, you get hit.
Lex Fridman (03:37:33) That was idiotic on the part of Hitler to declare war on the United States.
Scott Horton (03:37:36) I never understood why he ever did that. They always said it was just because he was crazy. But what it was is he was trying to get the Japanese to invade the Soviet Union from the East and in order to divide Stalin’s forces, which failed and it didn’t work. And it was a huge blunder from his point of view, I guess.
Lex Fridman (03:37:50) Philosophically from an interventionism perspective, you’re saying United States should have stayed out from that war as long as possible, until they’re attacked?
Scott Horton (03:37:59) Yes. I mean, look at how powerful they ended up being and the amount of damage that they were able to inflict on the Soviets, better them than us.
Mark Dubowitz (03:38:13) … of sort of libertarianism or isolationism in practice. I mean, I think the ’30s are more interesting to me than what happened between ’39 and ’45. I think the debate in America was very interesting in the ’30s where there was really a strong isolationist movement with Charles Lindbergh and Henry Ford and Father Coughlin and many.
Mark Dubowitz (03:38:35) Yeah, and Joe Kennedy. I mean they defined themselves as sort of America-firsters, but it was very much an isolationist strain. And I think we can talk about that history and-
Lex Fridman (03:38:44) Coughlin was a New-Dealer, not a right-winger.
Mark Dubowitz (03:38:46) Anyway, very much an isolationist talking about America having to stay out of these entangling alliances. This is not our war. Emotionally understandable. Right? Because you can also overlearn the lessons of World War I. and I think they over-learned the lessons of World War I, which was a brutal war and a devastating war mostly for Europe, but obviously for the United States. We lost thousands of American men and women. So the ’30s was this big debate between those who saw the gathering storm of what was happening with Nazi Germany and those who wanted to keep America out.
(03:39:20) And I think in some respects, it’s like today with a contemporary reality with Khamenei, is that because these isolationist voices were so prominent and so vocal and in some cases quite persuasive to American leaders, Hitler calculated that the United States would not enter the war. And so he could do what Scott says, he could focus on the eastern front, he could gather his forces, and then he could do a kill shot on the Western democracies in Western Europe. And the United States would not intervene. I mean, you’re right. The big mistake he makes is declaring war on the United States after Pearl Harbor. But he believes all through the ’30s and before Pearl Harbor that the isolationist voices are keeping FDR from entering the war even while Churchill and the Brits and the French and others are imploring the Americans, not only just to provide them with material support with weapons so that they could hold onto the island and defend themselves.
(03:40:22) And I think Hitler miscalculates. In the same way I think Khamenei miscalculates. Khamenei heard the debate over the past number of years. He believed that the sort of isolationist wing of the Republican Party represented, I think by Tucker Carlson and others who have been very anti-intervention with respect to Iran. I think he believed that that was the dominant voice within Trump’s MAGA coalition, and that as a result, the United States would not use military force. So in the same way that Hitler miscalculated the influence of the isolationists on FDR, Khamenei misjudged the influence of the isolationists on Trump and both ended up miscalculating to their great regret. So to me, that’s the sort of parallel between World War II in the ’30s and the prelude to World War II and what we’re seeing in the current reality over the past few weeks.
Lex Fridman (03:41:14) To make clear, you mentioned there’s a parallel, but mostly there’s no parallel. It’s a fundamentally different…
Lex Fridman (03:41:20) There will never be a war like that.
Scott Horton (03:41:22) It’s a real problem, too, because they always say everybody’s Hitler, all enemies are Hitler. And to compromise with them at all is to appease Hitler and you can never do that.
Scott Horton (03:41:38) … too crazy to negotiate with, when let’s get real, and I think we’re agreed about this probably, that in 2002, W. Bush could have just sent Colin Powell, the four-star general former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Secretary of State, to read the Riot Act to Saddam Hussein and tell him, “Look, man, you help keep Al-Qaeda down and we’ll let you live.” And everything would’ve been fine. And in fact, just like Saddam Hussein, there’s a great article by James Risen-
Mark Dubowitz (03:42:05) For the record, I don’t agree.
Scott Horton (03:42:06) Hang on, hang on now. There’s an article by James-
Scott Horton (03:42:08) There’s an article by James Risen in the New York Times, and there’s another one by Seymour Hirsch as well about how Saddam Hussein offered to give in on everything. He said, “You want to search for weapons of mass destruction, you can send your Army and FBI everywhere you want. You want us to switch sides in the Israel-Palestine conflict, we’ll stop backing Hamas. You want us to hold elections, we’ll hold elections. Just give us a couple years. If this is about the oil, we’ll sign over mineral rights.” This is James Risen, New York Times.
(03:42:33) They sent an emissary to meet with Richard Pearl in London, that was who was the chair of the Defense Policy Board and was a major ringleader of getting us into a Iraq War II. And then, I don’t know why, this is a real mistake. If you want to talk about Saddam’s mistakes, why does he always send his guys to meet with Richard Pearl? Because there was a Saudi businessman, pardon me, Lebanese businessman, I think that they tried to get to intervene as well, who again offered virtually total capitulation. And Pearl told him, “Tell Saddam, we’ll see you in Baghdad,” after he was attempting to essentially unconditionally surrender.
(03:43:05) The same thing happened with Iran in 2003. Right after America invaded they issue what was called the golden offer, which the Bush administration buried and they castigated the Swiss ambassador who had delivered it, but in the golden offer, and you can find the PDF file of it online they talk about, “We’re happy to negotiate with you our entire nuclear program,” which didn’t even really exist yet, but nuclearization, “We’re willing to negotiate with you about Afghanistan and Iraq,” because again, they hated Saddam Hussein and wanted rid of him too. They’re perfectly happy to work with us on Afghanistan and Iraq. And they had captured a bunch of Bin Ladenites and they were willing to trade them for the MEK. And that included one of Bin Laden’s sons and another guy named Atef, both of whom the Iranians held under house arrest for years. And it was only in the, I think late Obama-
Mark Dubowitz (03:43:54) And they were giving refuge to Al-Qaeda. And the CIA said, “This is a key facilitation pipeline between Iran and Al-Qaeda.” Quote unquote.
Scott Horton (03:44:01) They were willing to negotiate a trade-
Mark Dubowitz (03:44:03) Key facilitation pipeline.
Scott Horton (03:44:04) … between these dangerous Bin Ladenites and the MEK and America refused to negotiate that. And it was years later when the Bin Ladenites abducted some Iranian diplomats in Pakistan that they then traded them away to get their diplomats back. And Atef, I think Bin Laden’s son ended up being killed not long after that, Hamza, and Atef too. But both of those dangerous terrorists were released and were involved in terrorism between then and the time that they were later killed, I think within a couple of years of that. So the hawks always like to say, “Oh yeah, Iran gives such aid and comfort to Al-Qaeda,” and all that. There’s a great document at the Counterterrorism Center at West Point where they debunk all of that.
Mark Dubowitz (03:44:44) Yeah, there’s a 9/11 report by the 9/11 Commission. There’s a 9/11 commission report, people can Google it, which talks about the cooperation between Iran and Al-Qaeda.
Scott Horton (03:44:53) Only in Bosnia when they were doing a favor for Bill Clinton.
Mark Dubowitz (03:44:56) Beyond that, and the CIA released thousands of pages of classified material that they declassified showing the relationship between Iran and Al-Qaeda. The US Treasury Department under Obama and under Trump actually designated a number of Iranian individuals for facilitating Al-Qaeda. So anyway, I mean, these are important facts, but I actually want to-
Scott Horton (03:45:19) You mentioned Baghdadi and Soleimani in the same breath a minute ago, and they’re deadly enemies. And it was Soleimani’s Shiite forces in a Iraq war three that helped destroy [inaudible 03:45:27]-
Mark Dubowitz (03:45:27) The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
Scott Horton (03:45:28) … with America flying air power for them.
Mark Dubowitz (03:45:30) The greatest error that we’ve made in the Middle East is this notion, not the greatest, but one of the greatest, is this sort of conceptual error that somehow Sunnis and Shiites don’t work together and Iran doesn’t work with Al-Qaeda-
Mark Dubowitz (03:45:43) I’m not saying you say that, but many people think that, and of course they do work, they hate each other, but of course they work together because they hate us more. But can I just say something, Lex, because I actually think just stepping back from all of this detail-
Lex Fridman (03:45:54) The more we start to zoom out now, the better.
Mark Dubowitz (03:45:56) Yeah. I’d like to zoom out a little bit. Look, I think the lessons for me over 22 years on working on these issues is one must learn about the mistakes that we’ve made in Iraq and in Afghanistan, in Libya. One must learn about the mistakes that we made in Vietnam, mistakes that we made in World War II-
Scott Horton (03:46:13) So we can make them all over again in Iran this time.
Mark Dubowitz (03:46:18) All right. So I think that what President Trump is trying to do is learn but not overlearn. I think he understands the mistakes that have been made. I think he’s trying to rectify those mistakes and he also understands that American power is important. It is a force for good in the world, even though we have made major mistakes. I think there is a great danger amongst certain people to believe that no power should ever be exercised, that all American power is a bad thing and a destructive thing. And sometimes to confuse major tactical decisions that have been made, whether it’s been made by the Brits in World War II or the Americans or us or whoever it is in whatever war, with the fact that there is a strategic reality that we always have to be conscious about and that we have enemies. This is not the Garden of Eden, yet.
(03:47:13) I hope the libertarians create one. I want to go live there when they do, and Scott and I will be neighbors, believe it or not, living in that Garden of Eden together. But there are major threats in this world, and we need to find the right balance between the overuse of military power and the underuse of military power. If we want to avoid wars, we have to have serious deterrents because our enemies need to understand we will use selective and narrowly focused overwhelming military power when we are facing threats like an Iranian nuclear weapon. That is a serious threat. It’s a serious threat to us. It’s a serious threat to the region. It’s a serious threat with respect to proliferation around the world. And I think with that respect, I think President Trump’s decision to drop bombs on three key nuclear facilities was a selective targeted military action that I hope will drive the Iranians back to the negotiating table where they can negotiate finally the dismantlement of their nuclear weapons program. I think there’s a danger-
Scott Horton (03:48:12) They don’t have a nuclear weapons program.
Mark Dubowitz (03:48:16) Again, we’ve had a four-hour debate on this, so I’m sure if you want to rewind, you can listen to all our arguments once again. But the fact of the matter is that our unwillingness to use power, if we’re never going to use power, all that’s going to do is send a signal to our enemies that they can do whatever they want. They can violate whatever agreements they want, they can use aggression against anyone they want. And I think that puts American lives in danger.
(03:48:43) And we’ve seen the results of that, where we delayed and delayed and delayed, and we didn’t move and we didn’t move too early and we didn’t preempt, and the threat grew and we ignored gathering storm. And so I think the lessons of a hundred years of American military involvement is if you have an opportunity early on as the storm is gathering to use all instruments of American power, with the military one being the last one you use, then deter when you can and strike when you must in order to prevent the kinds of escalation and wars that everybody at this table, and I’m sure everybody listening in your audience is seeking to avoid.
WW3
Lex Fridman (03:49:23) On that topic, question for both of you, Scott. If human civilization destroys itself in the next 75 years, it probably most likely will be a World War III type of scenario, maybe a nuclear war. How do we avoid that? We’ve been talking about Iran, but there’ll be new conflicts. There’s Ukraine, China…
Mark Dubowitz (03:49:47) Don’t forget North Korea.
Lex Fridman (03:49:48) Yeah, I mean, there was time when North Korea was the biggest threat to human civilization, according to…
Scott Horton (03:49:53) We could have had a deal except John Bolton ruined it.
Lex Fridman (03:49:56) So that’s the bigger question, not so much in the specifics.
Scott Horton (03:50:00) Oh, I mean the second time. He ruined the Clinton deal of ’94, then he ruined the Trump deal of 2018.
Mark Dubowitz (03:50:06) Or maybe the North Korean dictator ruined it. But again, one doesn’t want to blame our enemies for their mistakes.
Scott Horton (03:50:12) Well, at the second meeting, Trump sent John Bolton to Outer Mongolia so that he couldn’t sit at the table and ruin the deal. But what happened then? The Democrats had his lawyer testify against him while he was at the meeting and they had this huge propaganda campaign that Kim Jong Un is going to walk all over Trump and take such advantage of him, and they made it virtually impossible for him to walk away claiming a victory.
Mark Dubowitz (03:50:33) Scott, do you ever blame the enemy ever? Do you ever blame the enemy?
Scott Horton (03:50:37) North Korea is not my enemy.
Mark Dubowitz (03:50:38) North Korea is not your enemy?
Mark Dubowitz (03:50:40) Really? They build nuclear weapons, ICBMs that targeted America.
Scott Horton (03:50:45) That’s George Bush and John Bolton’s fault. I already said that.
Mark Dubowitz (03:50:47) Well, whatever fault it is, the fact of the matter is do you ever, ever blame an American adversary or is it always our fault?
Scott Horton (03:50:55) In fact, what happened was-
Scott Horton (03:50:58) See, all you can do is characterize, but you don’t want to talk about the details. The details are that Stephen Biegun, who worked for Donald Trump gave a speech and said, “you know what? We can put normalization first and denuclearization later.”
Scott Horton (03:51:12) And then Donald Trump brought John Bolton to the meeting and he prevented that from being the message of the meeting and ruined the deal.
Mark Dubowitz (03:51:24) So it’s always John Bolton’s fault. Always the neocon’s fault.
Scott Horton (03:51:25) Yes. That’s right. It’s all John Bolton’s fault, because how reasonable does this sound to you, Lex-
Scott Horton (03:51:29) Give up all your nuclear weapons first, then we’ll talk about every other issue. Does that sound like a poison pill or that sounds like a reasonable negotiation? Give me a break.
Mark Dubowitz (03:51:37) Sounds like a beginning of a negotiation.
Scott Horton (03:51:39) Yeah. Well, they got nowhere because Trump brought John Bolton with him and helped to ruin it.
Mark Dubowitz (03:51:44) And maybe they went nowhere because the North Korean dictator at the end of the day, is a dictator who wants threaten the United States with ICBMs and nuclear. Listen, you’re criticizing the sequential decisions made in a negotiation.
Mark Dubowitz (03:52:07) I think there’s been areas of agreement, obviously real disagreement. But here’s the question to you, really. I mean, do you ever, ever hold our adversaries responsible or do you just don’t think we have any adversaries?
Scott Horton (03:52:19) This is ridiculous. The topic has been-
Scott Horton (03:52:23) … from your point of view, it’s all the adversaries and all American and Israel are trying to do is survive and fix the situation the best they can.
Mark Dubowitz (03:52:31) I think I’ve acknowledged America’s has made mistakes the whole time.
Scott Horton (03:52:33) I’m refuting that by bringing up all the things that America and Israel have done to make matters worse. I didn’t ever say that the Ayatollah’s some great guy or that Kim Jong Un is some hero or any kind of-
Mark Dubowitz (03:52:42) But do you think they’re threats to America?
Scott Horton (03:52:42) … thing to spin for their side.
Mark Dubowitz (03:52:44) Are there a threat to America?
Scott Horton (03:52:45) No, of course not. As Zbigniew Brozinsky said in 1993-
Mark Dubowitz (03:52:48) They’re not a threat to America? Wow.
Scott Horton (03:52:50) … we could have perfectly normalized relations then. You talk about Iranian support for Al-Qaeda, Iran supported Al-Qaeda in Bosnia-
Scott Horton (03:53:02) … is why they supported Al-Qaeda in Bosnia.
Mark Dubowitz (03:53:04) I understand it, your position, your position-
Scott Horton (03:53:05) Yes. My position is whatever you say it is, not what I say.
Mark Dubowitz (03:53:08) No, no. I’m just, I’m trying to summarize.
Scott Horton (03:53:10) You know who’s the last person who told me I need to be ware about over-learning the lessons of Iraq? It was Charlie Savage from the New York Times when on the subject was his absolute ridiculous hoax, that Russia was paying the Taliban to murder American soldiers in Afghanistan in 2020, which ruined Trump’s potential, which he was floating trial balloons about withdrawing in the summer of 2020, which would’ve absolutely prevented-
Scott Horton (03:53:41) … that were later refuted by the general in charge of the Afghan war, the head of CENTCOM, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the director of Intelligence-
Mark Dubowitz (03:53:47) You flood the zone with as much detail as possible.
Scott Horton (03:53:48) He told me, “You know what your problem is, Horton, is you have over-learned the lessons of Iraq War II.” But it turned out those lessons were perfectly apt for Charlie Savage’s hoax. It wasn’t true what Charlie Savage said, you know what he resorted to? He said, “Well, it’s true that there was a rumor I was reporting on.”
Mark Dubowitz (03:54:05) Scott. You made it very clear, America has no adversaries.
Scott Horton (03:54:08) That’s called learning the lessons of Iraq, not over-learning them.
Lex Fridman (03:54:12) All right, so I guess the answer to the question I asked about avoiding World War III is the two of you becoming friends. That’s my goal. If we can try to find the light at the end of the tunnel. One last question. What gives you hope to the degree of hope about the future? What gives you hope about this great country of ours and humanity too?
Scott Horton (03:54:33) Yeah, I mean, look, there are a million wonderful things about this country. The land, the people, our culture and our resources and everything, and the kind of society that we could build in, not with a controlled system, but with just a pure free market capitalist system in this country where people are allowed to own their property, improve its value, and exchange it on the market and build this country up. We would be living in, comparatively, a paradise compared to what we have now. And if you look at the opportunity costs just since the end of the Cold War on all that has been wasted on militarism in the Middle East especially, but also in Eastern Europe and in East Asia, all of that wealth put here could have gone much more to something like perfecting our society.
(03:55:25) It’s always an unfinished project, so that then we really have something to point to the rest of the world and say, “This is how you’re supposed to do it. Not like that.” I think it’s crucial that for all of the problems that Somalia, Syria, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan have, the worst thing about those countries is America’s wars there. It’s what we have done to them is the worst thing about those places. So we’re not in much of a position to criticize whatever horrible and political practices, cultural and things about their societies that we would like to criticize when the worst chaos that’s happened to them has been inflicted by our country against them virtually all in wars of choice that were unnecessary from the get-go.
Mark Dubowitz (03:56:15) What gives me hope? I think first of all, I have a lot of hope and confidence in the wisdom of the American people. I think Americans understand at the end of the day that they need leaders who are about making America great again. I think they elected Donald Trump who is flawed in many, many ways. But I think Trump is wrestling with some of the questions that we have been wrestling with for the past five hours. I think most Americans know that we have adversaries and it’s just overwhelming numbers of Americans understand that. They may disagree on exactly who is an adversary and how you rank them, but they know we have adversaries. I think the third thing is Americans greatly admire the men and women in uniform. I mean, I think the institution with the greatest popularity in America still remains the US military.
(03:57:04) While many of our other institutions are failing the American people and are reflected in the polling, I think we’ve got to be very judicious about how we use this incredibly powerful military because most importantly, it comes down to it’s not about weapons and technology, it’s about the people, it’s about the men and women who have sacrificed their lives to serve our country. At the end of the day, if we understand we have adversaries, we’re careful about how we use our military, we understand the importance of for deterrence in order to actually confront threats before they become so severe that we ended up plunging ourselves in a war. I agree totally with Scott in terms of how we use our money and how judiciously we have to guard it. I agree with how we’ve run out these massive debts and we have to be actually, if we’re serious, and conservatives are really serious, they need to tackle these massive budgets deficits.
(03:57:58) And it would be really easy if it was just all about the military and we could just kind of get rid of the Pentagon and all of a sudden we’d be running balanced budgets. It’s not the case. We have much deeper structural economic problems in this country and everybody knows that. And so we got huge challenges as a country, but I really believe, as I believe since I was a little kid, that America is the greatest force for good in the world and that we make mistakes, sometimes tragic mistakes. We make huge miscalculations. And I think we will be much more clear in how to rectify those mistakes if we stop obsessing with these bogeymen that are out there, the Israelis, the Jews, the Influencers-
Mark Dubowitz (03:58:41) Well, and we start focusing on our adversaries, which are not the Iranians, because the 80% of Iranians despise this regime. And Lex, I feel really bad that in five hours we actually haven’t even talked about that in any detail.
Lex Fridman (03:58:52) Many of my friends are Iranian. They’re beautiful people. And it’s one of the great cultures on earth, yeah.
Mark Dubowitz (03:58:57) And you know the only place they don’t succeed in the world is inside the Islamic Republic. When they come to America and Canada and Europe, they’re incredibly successful people. And 80% of Iranians despise this regime and they long for a free and prosperous Iran. And so it’s a big question that they’re ever going to get there. And who knows the right way to get them there. But at the end of the day, I am convinced that the vast majority of Iranians are our friends. But there is a regime that has been trying to build nuclear weapons, has been engaged in terrorism for decades, has killed and maimed thousands of Americans and our allies. And it’s a regime that has to be stopped.
(03:59:35) And I think Donald Trump in the past couple of weeks, I would argue in the past number of months, has try to play a strategy, try to figure out a way to offer the Iranians negotiations and a peaceful solution to this, but used overwhelming military power recently against Iran’s nuclear sites in a very targeted way in order to send a message to the Islamic Republic of Iran that they cannot continue to build nuclear weapons and threaten America.
(04:00:00) And so I hope that things will work out well on this. I’ve always said curb your enthusiasm because we have still a lot of pieces that still need to fall into place and this is going to be a windy road as we try to figure this out. I’m hoping for the best, preparing for the worst and want to thank you very much for having me on the show. Scott, it was a real pleasure to meet you. I enjoyed the debate, very lively, I admire your dedication to the issue and your attention of detail, and I think all of that speaks well of you and your commitment and your passion for this. Thank you.
Lex Fridman (04:00:36) I am deeply grateful that you guys will come here. This is really mind-blowing, also that you have, it’s silly maybe to say, but the courage to sit down and talk through this, through the tension. I’ve learned a lot. I think a lot of people are going to learn a lot. I’m a fan of both of your work and it means a lot that you’ll come here today and talk to a silly kid like me. So Scott, thank you so much, brother.
Lex Fridman (04:01:09) Thanks for listening to this debate between Scott Horton and Mark Dubowitz. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description and consider subscribing to this channel. And now let me leave you with some sobering words on the cost of war from Dwight D. Eisenhower. For some context, Eisenhower was the 34th President of the United States. But before that, during World War II, he was the supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force, orchestrating some of the most significant military operations at the war with leadership marked by strategic and tactical brilliance. It is in this context that the following words carry even more power and wisdom, spoken in 1953.
(04:01:54) “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed. Those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientist, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this, a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It’s two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, that is humanity hanging from a cost of iron.”
(04:03:05) And now allow me to have some additional brief excerpts. In 1946, Eisenhower said, “I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.” In 1950, Eisenhower said, “Possibly my hatred of war blinds me so that I cannot comprehend the arguments they adduce. But in my opinion, there’s no such thing as a preventative war. Although the suggestion is repeatedly made, none has yet explained how war prevents war. Worse than this, no one has been able to explain away the fact that war creates the conditions that beget war.” And finally, an excerpt from Eisenhower’s farewell address in 1961 on the military-industrial complex.
(04:03:57) “A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense. We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. In the councils of government, we must guard against an acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”
(04:05:03) Thank you listening and hope to see you next time.
This is a transcript of Lex Fridman Podcast #472 with Terence Tao.
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Lex Fridman (00:00:00) The following is a conversation with Terence Tao, widely considered to be one of the greatest mathematicians in history, often referred to as The Mozart of Math. He won the Fields Medal and the Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics, and has contributed groundbreaking work to a truly astonishing range of fields in mathematics and physics. This was a huge honor for me for many reasons, including the humility and kindness that Terry showed to me throughout all our interactions. It means the world. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description or at LexFridman.com/sponsors. And now, dear friends, here’s Terence Tao.
First hard problem
Lex Fridman (00:00:49) What was the first really difficult research-level math problem that you encountered, one that gave you pause maybe?
Terence Tao (00:00:57) Well, in your undergraduate education you learn about the really hard impossible problems like the Riemann Hypothesis, the Twin-Primes Conjecture. You can make problems arbitrarily difficult. That’s not really a problem. In fact, there’s even problems that we know to be unsolvable. What’s really interesting are the problems just on the boundary between what we can do rather easily and what are hopeless, but what are problems where existing techniques can do 90% of the job and then you just need that remaining 10%. I think as a PhD student, the Kakeya Problem certainly caught my eye. And it just got solved actually. It’s a problem I’ve worked on a lot in my early research. Historically, it came from a little puzzle by the Japanese mathematician Soichi Kakeya in 1918 or so. So, the puzzle is that you have a needle on the plane or think like driving on a road something, and you want it to execute a U-turn, you want to turn the needle around, but you want to do it in as little space as possible. So, you want to use this little area in order to turn it around, but the needle is infinitely maneuverable. So, you can imagine just spinning it around. As the unit needle, you can spin it around its center, and I think that gives you a disc of area, I think pi over four. Or you can do a three-point U-turn, which is what we teach people in their driving schools to do. And that actually takes area of pi over eight, so it’s a little bit more efficient than a rotation. And so for a while people thought that was the most efficient way to turn things around, but Besicovitch showed that in fact you could actually turn the needle around using as little area as you wanted. So, 0.01, there was some really fancy multi back and forth U-turn thing that you could do that you could turn a needle around and in so doing it would pass through every intermediate direction. Is
Lex Fridman (00:02:51) This in the two-dimensional plane?
Terence Tao (00:02:52) This is in the two-dimensional plane. So, we understand everything in two dimensions. So, the next question is: what happens in three dimensions? So, suppose the Hubble space Telescope is tube in space, and you want to observe every single star in the universe, so you want to rotate the telescope to reach every single direction. And here’s unrealistic part, suppose that space is at a premium, which totally is not, you want to occupy as little volume as possible in order to rotate your needle around, in order to see every single star in the sky. How small a volume do you need to do that? And so you can modify Besicovitch’s construction. And so if your telescope has zero thickness, then you can use as little volume as you need. That’s a simple modification of the two-dimensional construction. But the question is that if your telescope is not zero thickness, but just very, very thin, some thickness delta, what is the minimum volume needed to be able to see every single direction as a function of delta?
(00:03:45) So, as delta gets smaller, as the needle gets thinner, the volume should go down. But how fast does it go down? And the conjecture was that it goes down very, very slowly like logarithmically roughly speaking, and that was proved after a lot of work. So, this seems like a puzzle. Why is it interesting? So, it turns out to be surprisingly connected to a lot of problems in partial differential equations, in number theory, in geometry, combinatorics. For example, in wave propagation, you splash some water around, you create water waves and they travel in various directions, but waves exhibit both particle and wave-type behavior. So, you can have what’s called a wave packet, which is a very localized wave that is localized in space and moving a certain direction in time. And so if you plot it in both space and time, it occupies a region which looks like a tube. What can happen is that you can have a wave which initially is very dispersed, but it all focuses at a single point later in time. You can imagine dropping a pebble into a pond and the ripples spread out, but then if you time-reverse that scenario, and the equations of wave motion are time-reversible, you can imagine ripples that are converging to a single point and then a big splash occurs, maybe even a singularity. And so it’s possible to do that. And geometrically what’s going on is that there’s also light rays, so if this wave represents light, for example, you can imagine this wave as a superposition of photons all traveling at the speed of light.
(00:05:15) They all travel on these light rays and they’re all focusing at this one point. So, you can have a very dispersed wave focus into a very concentrated wave at one point in space and time, but then it de-focuses again, it separates. But potentially if the conjecture had a negative solution, so what that meant is that there’s a very efficient way to pack tubes pointing different directions to a very, very narrow region of a very narrow volume. Then you would also be able to create waves that start out some… There’ll be some arrangement of waves that start out very, very dispersed, but they would concentrate, not just at a single point, but there’ll be a lot of concentrations in space and time. And you could create what’s called a blowup, where these waves amplitude becomes so great that the laws of physics that they’re governed by are no longer wave equations, but something more complicated and nonlinear.
Navier–Stokes singularity
(00:06:08) And so in mathematical physics, we care a lot about whether certain equations and wave equations are stable or not, whether they can create these singularities. There’s a famous unsolved problem called the Navier-Stokes regularity problem. So, the Navier-Stokes equations, equations that govern the fluid flow for incompressible fluids like water. The question asks: if you start with a smooth velocity field of water, can it ever concentrate so much that the velocity becomes infinite at some point? That’s called a singularity. We don’t see that in real life. If you splash around water in the bathtub, it won’t explode on you or have water leaving at the speed of light or anything, but potentially it is possible.
(00:06:49) And in fact, in recent years, the consensus has drifted towards the belief that, in fact, for certain very special initial configurations of, say, water, that singularities can form, but people have not yet been able to actually establish this. The Clay Foundation has these seven Millennium Prize Problems as a $1 million prize for solving one of these problems, and this is one of them. Of these of these seven, only one of them has been solved, at the Poincare Conjecture [inaudible 00:07:18]. So, the Kakeya Conjecture is not directly directly related to the Navier-Stokes Problem, but understanding it would help us understand some aspects of things like wave concentration, which would indirectly probably help us understand the Navier-Stokes Problem better.
Lex Fridman (00:07:32) Can you speak to the Navier-Stokes? So, the existence of smoothness, like you said, Millennium Prize Problem, You’ve made a lot of progress on this one. In 2016, you published a paper, Finite Time Blowup For An Average Three-Dimensional Navier-Stokes Equation. So, we’re trying to figure out if this thing… Usually it doesn’t blow up, but can we say for sure it never blows up?
Terence Tao (00:07:56) Right, yeah. So yeah, that is literally the $1 million question. So, this is what distinguishes mathematicians from pretty much everybody else. If something holds 99.99% of the time, that’s good enough for most things. But mathematicians are one of the few people who really care about whether really 100% of all situations are covered by it. So, most fluid, most of the time water does not blow up, but could you design a very special initial state that does this?
Lex Fridman (00:08:29) And maybe we should say that this is a set of equations that govern in the field of fluid dynamics, trying to understand how fluid behaves. And it’s actually turns out to be a really… Fluid is extremely complicated thing to try to model.
Terence Tao (00:08:43) Yeah, so it has practical importance. So this Clay Prize problem concerns what’s called the Incompressible Navier-Stokes, which governs things like water. There’s something called the Compressible Navier-Stokes, which governs things like air, and that’s particularly important for weather prediction. Weather prediction, it does a lot of computational fluid dynamics. A lot of it’s actually just trying to solve the Navier-Stokes equations as best they can. Also gathering a lot of data, so that they can initialize the equation. There’s a lot of moving parts, so it’s very important from practically.
Lex Fridman (00:09:09) Why is it difficult to prove general things about the set of equations like it not not blowing up?
Terence Tao (00:09:17) Short answer is Maxwell’s Demon. So, Maxwell’s Demon is a concept in thermodynamics. If you have a box of two gases in oxygen and nitrogen, and maybe you start with all the oxygen on one side and nitrogen on the other side, but there’s no barrier between them. Then they will mix and they should stay mixed. There’s no reason why they should un-mix. But in principle, because of all the collisions between them, there could be some sort of weird conspiracy that maybe there’s a microscopic demon called Maxwell’s Demon that will… every time an oxygen and nitrogen atom collide, they’ll bounce off in such a way that the oxygen sort of drifts onto one side and then nitrogen goes to the other. And you could have an extremely improbable configuration emerge, which we never see, and which statistically it’s extremely unlikely, but mathematically it’s possible that this can happen and we can’t rule that out.
(00:10:06) And this is a situation that shows up a lot in mathematics. A basic example is the digits of pi 3.14159 and so forth. The digits look like they have no pattern, and we believe they have no pattern. On the long-term, you should see as many ones and twos and threes as fours and fives and sixes, there should be no preference in the digits of pi to favor, let’s say seven over eight. But maybe there’s some demon in the digits of pi that every time you compute more and more digits, it biases one digit to another. And this is a conspiracy that should not happen. There’s no reason it should happen, but there’s no way to prove it with our current technology. So, getting back to Navier-Stokes, a fluid has a certain amount of energy, and because the fluid is in motion, the energy gets transported around.
(00:10:53) And water is also viscous, so if the energy is spread out over many different locations, the natural viscosity of the fluid will just damp out the energy and will go to zero. And this is what happens when we actually experiment with water. You splash around, there’s some turbulence and waves and so forth, but eventually it settles down and the lower the amplitude, the smaller velocity, the more calm it gets. But potentially there is some sort of demon that keeps pushing the energy of the fluid into a smaller and smaller scale, and it’ll move faster and faster. And at faster speeds, the effect of viscosity is relatively less. And so it could happen that it creates some sort of what’s called a self-similar blob scenario where the energy of the fluid starts off at some large scale and then it all sort of transfers energy into a smaller region of the fluid, which then at a much faster rate moves into an even smaller region and so forth.
(00:11:55) And each time it does this, it takes maybe half as long as the previous one, and then you could actually converge to all the energy concentrating in one point in a finite amount of time. And that’s scenario is called finite time blowup. So, in practice, this doesn’t happen. So, water is what’s called turbulent. So, it is true that if you have a big eddy of water, it will tend to break up into smaller eddies, but it won’t transfer all energy from one big eddy into one smaller eddy. It will transfer into maybe three or four, and then those ones split up into maybe three or four small eddies of their own. So the energy gets dispersed to the point where the viscosity can then keep everything under control. But if it can somehow concentrate all the energy, keep it all together, and do it fast enough that the viscous effects don’t have enough time to calm everything down, then this blowup can occur.
(00:12:51) So, there were papers who had claimed that, “Oh, you just need to take into account conservation of energy and just carefully use the viscosity and you can keep everything under control for not just the Navier-Stokes, but for many, many types of equations like this.” And so in the past there have been many attempts to try to obtain what’s called global regularity for Navier-Stokes, which is the opposite of finite time blowup, that velocity stays smooth. And it all failed. There was always some sign error or some subtle mistake and it couldn’t be salvaged.
(00:13:17) So, what I was interested in doing was trying to explain why we were not able to disprove finite time blowup. I couldn’t do it for the actual equations of fluids, which are too complicated, but if I could average the equations of motion of Navier-Stokes, basically if I could turn off certain types of ways in which water interacts and only keep the ones that I want. So, in particular, if there’s a fluid and it could transfer as energy from a large eddy into this small eddy or this other small eddy, I would turn off the energy channel that would transfer energy to this one and direct it only into this smaller eddy while still preserving the lower conservation energy.
Lex Fridman (00:13:58) So, you’re trying to make a blowup?
Terence Tao (00:14:00) Yeah, yeah. So, I basically engineer a blowup by changing rules of physics, which is one thing that mathematicians are allowed to do. We can change the equation.
Lex Fridman (00:14:08) How does that help you get closer to the proof of something?
Terence Tao (00:14:11) Right. So, it provides what’s called an obstruction in mathematics. So, what I did was that basically if I turned off the certain parts of the equation, which usually when you turn off certain interactions, make it less nonlinear, it makes it more regular and less likely to blow up. But I find that by turning off a very well-designed set of interactions, I could force all the energy to blow up in finite time. So, what that means is that if you wanted to prove the regularity for Navier-Stokes for the actual equation, you must use some feature of the true equation, which my artificial equation does not satisfy. So, it rules out certain approaches.
(00:14:55) So, the thing about math, it’s not just about taking a technique that is going to work and applying it, but you need to not take the techniques that don’t work. And for the problems that are really hard, often though are dozens of ways that you might think might apply to solve the problem, but it’s only after a lot of experience that you realize there’s no way that these methods are going to work. So, having these counterexamples for nearby problems rules out… it saves you a lot of time because you’re not wasting energy on things that you now know cannot possibly ever work.
Lex Fridman (00:15:30) How deeply connected is it to that specific problem of fluid dynamics or is this some more general intuition you build up about mathematics?
Terence Tao (00:15:38) Right. Yeah. So, the key phenomenon that my technique exploits is what’s called super-criticality. So, in partial [inaudible 00:15:46] equations, often these equations are like a tug of war between different forces. So, in Navier-Stokes, there’s the dissipation force coming from viscosity, and it’s very well understood. It’s linear, it calms things down. If viscosity was all there was, then nothing bad would ever happen, but there’s also transport that energy from… in one location of space can get transported because the fluid is in motion to other locations. And that’s a nonlinear effect, and that causes all the problems. So, there are these two competing terms in the Navier-Stokes Equation, the dissipation term and the transport term. If the dissipation term dominates, if it’s large, then basically you get regularity. And if the transport term dominates, then we don’t know what’s going on. It’s a very nonlinear situation, it’s unpredictable, it’s turbulent.
(00:16:32) So, sometimes these forces are in balance at small scales but not in balance at large scales or vice versa. Navier-Stokes is what’s called supercritical. So at smaller and smaller scales, the transport terms are much stronger than the viscosity terms. So, the viscosity terms are things that calm things down. And so this is why the problem is hard. In two dimensions, so the Soviet mathematician Ladyzhenskaya, she in the ’60s shows in two dimensions there was no blowup. And in two dimensions, the Navier-Stokes Equation is what’s called critical, the effect of transport and the effect of viscosity about the same strength even at very, very small scales. And we have a lot of technology to handle critical and also subcritical equations and prove regularity. But for supercritical equations, it was not clear what was going on, and I did a lot of work, and then there’s been a lot of follow up showing that for many other types of supercritical equations, you can create all kinds of blowup examples.
(00:17:27) Once the nonlinear effects dominate the linear effects at small scales, you can have all kinds of bad things happen. So, this is sort of one of the main insights of this line of work is that super-criticality versus criticality and subcriticality, this makes a big difference. That’s a key qualitative feature that distinguishes some equations for being sort of nice and predictable and… Like planetary motion, there’s certain equations that you can predict for millions of years or thousands at least. Again, it’s not really a problem, but there’s a reason why we can’t predict the weather past two weeks into the future because it’s a supercritical equation. Lots of really strange things are going on at very fine scales.
Lex Fridman (00:18:04) So, whenever there is some huge source of nonlinearity, that can create a huge problem for predicting what’s going to happen?
Terence Tao (00:18:13) Yeah. And if non-linearity is somehow more and more featured and interesting at small scales. There’s many equations that are nonlinear, but in many equations you can approximate things by the bulk. So, for example, planetary motion, if you want to understand the orbit of the Moon or Mars or something, you don’t really need the microstructure of the seismology of the Moon or exactly how the mass is distributed. Basically, you can almost approximate these planets by point masses, and it’s just the aggregate behavior is important. But if you want to model a fluid, like the weather, you can’t just say, “In Los Angeles the temperature is this, the wind speed is this.” For supercritical equations, the fine scale information is really important.
Lex Fridman (00:18:54) If we can just linger on the Navier-Stokes Equations a little bit. So, you’ve suggested, maybe you can describe it, that one of the ways to ways solve it or to negatively resolve it would be to construct a kind of liquid computer, and then show that the halting problem from computation theory has consequences for fluid dynamics, so show it in that way. Can you describe this idea?
Terence Tao (00:19:22) Right, yeah. So, this came out of this work of constructing this average equation that blew up. So, as part of how I had to do this, so there’s this naive way to do it, you just keep pushing. Every time you get one scale, you push it immediately to the next scale as fast as possible. This is sort of the naive way to force blowup. It turns out in five and higher dimensions, this works, but in three dimensions there was this funny phenomenon that I discovered, that if you change laws of physics, you just always keep trying to push the energy into smaller and smaller scales, what happens is that the energy starts getting spread out into many scales at once, so that you have energy at one scale. You’re pushing it into the next scale, and then as soon as it enters that scale, you also push it to the next scale, but there’s still some energy left over from the previous scale.
(00:20:16) You’re trying to do everything at once, and this spreads out the energy too much. And then it turns out that it makes it vulnerable for viscosity to come in and actually just damp out everything. So, it turns out this direct abortion doesn’t actually work. There was a separate paper by some other authors that actually showed this in three dimensions. So, what I needed was to program a delay, so kind of like airlocks. So, I needed an equation which would start with a fluid doing something at one scale, it would push this energy into the next scale, but it would stay there until all the energy from the larger scale got transferred. And only after you pushed all the energy in, then you open the next gate and then you push that in as well.
(00:21:01) So, by doing that, the energy inches forward, scale by scale in such a way that it’s always localized at one scale at a time, and then it can resist the effects of viscosity because it’s not dispersed. So, in order to make that happen, I had to construct a rather complicated nonlinearity. And it was basically… It was constructed like an electronic circuit. So, I actually thank my wife for this because she was trained as an electrical engineer, and she talked about she had to design circuits and so forth. And if you want a circuit that does a certain thing, maybe have a light that flashes on and then turns off and then on and off. You can build it from more primitive components, capacitors and resistors and so forth, and you have to build a diagram.
(00:21:47) And these diagrams, you can sort of follow up your eyeballs and say, “Oh yeah, the current will build up here and it will stop, and then it will do that.” So, I knew how to build analog of basic electronic components, like resistors and capacitors and so forth. And I would stack them together in such a way that I would create something that would open one gate. And then there’d be a clock, and then once the clock hits a certain threshold, it would close it. It would become a Rube Goldberg type machine, but described mathematically. And this ended up working. So, what I realized is that if you could pull the same thing off for the actual equations, so if the equations of water support a computation… So, you can imagine a steampunk, but it’s really water-punk type of thing where… So, modern computers are electronic, they’re powered by electrons passing through very tiny wires and interacting with other electrons and so forth.
(00:22:39) But instead of electrons, you can imagine these pulses of water moving a certain velocity. And maybe there are two different configurations corresponding to a bit being up or down. Probably that if you had two of these moving bodies of water collide, they would come out with some new configuration, which would be something like an AND gate or OR gate, that the output would depend in a very predictable way on the inputs. And you could chain these together and maybe create a Turing machine. And then you have computers which are made completely out of water. And if you have computers, then maybe you can do robotics, so hydraulics and so forth. And so you could create some machine which is basically a fluid analog, what’s called a von Neumann machine.
(00:23:26) So, von Neumann proposed if you want to colonize Mars, the sheer cost of transporting people in machines to Mars is just ridiculous, but if you could transport one machine to Mars, and this machine had the ability to mine the planet, create some more materials, smelt them and build more copies of the same machine, then you could colonize a whole planet over time. So, if you could build a fluid machine, which yeah, so it’s a fluid robot. And what it would do, its purpose in life, it’s programmed so that it would create a smaller version of itself in some sort of cold state. It wouldn’t start just yet. Once it’s ready, the big robot configuration of water would transfer all its energy into the smaller configuration and then power down. And then they clean itself up, and then what’s left is this newest state which would then turn on and do the same thing, but smaller and faster.
(00:24:19) And then the equation has a certain scaling symmetry. Once you do that, it can just keep iterating. So, this, in principle, would create a blowup for the actual Navier-Stokes. And this is what I managed to accomplish for this average Navier-Stokes. So, it provided this sort of roadmap to solve the problem. Now, this is a pipe dream because there are so many things that are missing for this to actually be a reality. So, I can’t create these basic logic gates. I don’t have these special configurations of water. There’s candidates, these include vortex rings that might possibly work. But also analog computing is really nasty compared to digital computing because there’s always errors. You have to do a lot of error correction along the way.
(00:25:05) I don’t know how to completely power down the big machine, so it doesn’t interfere the writing of the smaller machine, but everything in principle can happen. It doesn’t contradict any of the laws of physics, so it’s sort of evidence that this thing is possible. There are other groups who are now pursuing ways to make Navier-Stokes blow up, which are nowhere near as ridiculously complicated as this. They actually are pursuing much closer to the direct self-similar model, which can… It doesn’t quite work as is, but there could be some simpler scheme they want to just describe to make this work.
Lex Fridman (00:25:40) There is a real leap of genius here to go from Navier-Stokes to this Turing machine. So, it goes from what the self-similar blob scenario that you’re trying to get the smaller and smaller blob to now having a liquid Turing machine gets smaller and smaller and smaller, and somehow seeing how that could be used to say something about a blowup. That’s a big leap.
Game of life
Terence Tao (00:26:08) So, there’s precedent. So, the thing about mathematics is that it’s really good at spotting connections between what you might think of as completely different problems, but if the mathematical form is the same, you can draw a connection. So, there’s a lot of previously on what called cellular automata, the most famous of which is Conway’s Game of Life. There’s this infinite discrete grid, and at any given time, the grid is either occupied by a cell or it’s empty. And there’s a very simple rule that tells you how these cells evolve. So, sometimes cells live and sometimes they die. And when I was a student, it was a very popular screen saver to actually just have these animations go on, and they look very chaotic. In fact, they look a little bit like turbulent flow sometimes, but at some point people discovered more and more interesting structures within this Game of Life. So, for example, they discovered this thing called glider.
(00:27:00) So, a glider is a very tiny configuration of four or five selves which evolves and it just moves at a certain direction. And that’s like this vortex rings [inaudible 00:27:09]. Yeah, so this is an analogy, the Game of Life is a discrete equation, and the fluid Navier-Stokes is a continuous equation, but mathematically they have some similar features. And so over time people discovered more and more interesting things that you could build within the Game of Life. The Game of Life is a very simple system. It only has like three or four rules to do it, but you can design all kinds of interesting configurations inside it. There’s some called a glider gun that does nothing that spit out gliders one at a time. And then after a lot of effort, people managed to create AND gates and OR gates for gliders.
(00:27:48) There’s this massive ridiculous structure, which if you have a stream of gliders coming in here and a stream of gliders coming in here, then you may produce extreme gliders coming out. Maybe if both of the streams have gliders, then there’ll be an output stream, but if only one of them does, then nothing comes out. So, they could build something like that. And once you could build these basic gates, then just from software engineering, you can build almost anything. You can build a Turing machine. It’s enormous steampunk type things. They look ridiculous. But then people also generated self-replicating objects in the Game of Life, a massive machine, a [inaudible 00:28:31] machine, which over a huge period of time and always look like glider guns inside doing these very steampunk calculations. It would create another version of itself which could replicate.
Terence Tao (00:28:42) A lot of this was like community crowdsourced by amateur mathematicians actually. So, I knew about that work. And so that is part of what inspired me to propose the same thing with Navier-Stokes. Seriously, analog is much worse than digital. It’s going to be… You can’t just directly take deconstructions in the Game of Life and plunk them in. But again, it shows it’s possible.
Lex Fridman (00:29:06) There’s a kind of emergence that happens with these cellular automata local rules… maybe it’s similar to fluids, I don’t know, but local rules operating at scale can create these incredibly complex dynamic structures. Do you think any of that is amenable to mathematical analysis? Do we have the tools to say something profound about that?
Terence Tao (00:29:34) The thing is, you can get these emergent very complicated structures, but only with very carefully prepared initial conditions. So, these glider guns and gates and self-propelled machines, if you just plunk on randomly some cells and you unlink them, you will not see any of these. And that’s the analogous situation with Navier-Stokes again, that with typical initial conditions, you will not have any of this weird computation going on. But basically through engineering, by specially designing things in a very special way, you can make clever constructions.
Lex Fridman (00:30:07) I wonder if it’s possible to prove the negative of… basically prove that only through engineering can you ever create something interesting.
Terence Tao (00:30:16) Yeah. This is a recurring challenge in mathematics that I call the dichotomy between structure and randomness, that most objects that you can generate in mathematics are random. They look like random, like the digital supply, well, we believe is a good example. But there’s a very small number of things that have patterns. But now, you can prove something has a pattern by just constructing… If something has a simple pattern and you have a proof that it does something like repeat itself every so often, you can do that and you can prove that… For example, you can prove that most sequences of digits have no pattern. So, if you just pick digits randomly, there’s something called low-large numbers. It tells you you’re going to get as many ones as twos in the long run. But we have a lot fewer tools to…
(00:31:01) If I give you a specific pattern like the digits of pi, how can I show that this doesn’t have some weird pattern to it? Some other work that I spent a lot of time on is to prove what are called structure theorems or inverse theorems that give tests for when something is very structured. So, some functions are what’s called additive. If you have a function of natural numbers of the natural numbers, so maybe two maps to four, three maps to six and so forth, some functions are what’s called additive, which means that if you add two inputs together, the output gets added as well. For example, a multiply by constant. If you multiply a number by 10… If you multiply A plus B by 10, that’s the same as multiplying A by 10 and B by 10, and then adding them together. So, some functions are additive, some functions are kind of additive but not completely additive.
(00:31:47) So, for example, if I take a number, and I multiply by the square of two and I take the integer part of that, so 10 by square route of two is like 14 point something, so 10 up to 14, 20 or up to 28. So, in that case, additivity is true then, so 10 plus 10 is 20 and 14 plus 14 is 28. But because of this rounding, sometimes there’s round-up errors, and sometimes when you add A plus A, this function doesn’t quite give you the sum of the two individual outputs, but the sum plus/minus one. So, it’s almost additive, but not quite additive.
(00:32:21) So, there’s a lot of useful results in mathematics, and I’ve worked a lot on developing things like this, to the effect that if a function exhibits some structure like this, then it’s basically there’s a reason for why it’s true. And the reason is because there’s some other nearby function, which is actually completely structured, which is explaining this sort of partial pattern that you have. And so if you have these inverse theorems, it creates this dichotomy that either the objects that you study are either have no structure at all or they are somehow related to something kind of structured. And in either way, in either case, you can make progress. A good example of this is that there’s this old theorem in mathematics-
Infinity
Terence Tao (00:33:01) A good example of this is that there’s this old theorem in mathematics called Szemerédi’s Theorem, proven in the 1970s. It concerns trying to find a certain type of pattern in a set of numbers, the patterns of arithmetic progression. Things like three, five, and seven or 10, 15 and 20, and Szemerédi, Endre Szemerédi proved that any set of numbers that are sufficiently big, what’s called positive density, has arithmetic progressions in it of any length you wish.
(00:33:28) For example, the odd numbers have a density of one half, and they contain arithmetic progressions of any length. So in that case, it’s obvious, because the odd numbers are really, really structured. I can just take 11, 13, 15, 17, I can easily find arithmetic progressions in that set, but Szemerédi’s theorem also applies to random sets. If I take a set of odd numbers and I flip a coin for each number, and I only keep the numbers for which I got a heads… So I just flip coins, I just randomly take out half the numbers, I keep one half. That’s a set that has no patterns at all, but just from random fluctuations, you will still get a lot of arithmetic progressions in that set.
Lex Fridman (00:34:10) Can you prove that there’s arithmetic progressions of arbitrary length within a random-
Terence Tao (00:34:17) Yes. Have you heard of the infinite monkey theorem? Usually, mathematicians give boring names to theorems, but occasionally they give colorful names.
Terence Tao (00:34:24) The popular version of the infinite monkey theorem is that if you have an infinite number of monkeys in a room, each with typewriter, they type out text randomly, almost surely, one of them is going to generate the entire script of Hamlet, or any other finite string of text. It’ll just take some time, quite a lot of time, actually, but if you have an infinite number, then it happens.
(00:34:44) So basically, the theorem is that if you take an infinite string of digits or whatever, eventually any finite pattern you wish will emerge. It may take a long time, but it will eventually happen. In particular, arithmetic progressions of any length will eventually happen, but you need an extremely long random sequence for this to happen.
Lex Fridman (00:35:04) I suppose that’s intuitive. It’s just infinity.
Terence Tao (00:35:08) Yeah, infinity absorbs a lot of sins.
Lex Fridman (00:35:11) Yeah. How we humans supposed to deal with infinity?
Terence Tao (00:35:15) Well, you can think of infinity as an abstraction of a finite number of which you do not have a bound. So nothing in real life is truly infinite, but you can ask yourself questions like, “What if I had as much money as I wanted?”, or, “What if I could go as fast as I wanted?”, and a way in which mathematicians formalize that is mathematics has found a formalism to idealize, instead of something being extremely large or extremely small, to actually be exactly infinite or zero, and often the mathematics becomes a lot cleaner when you do that. I mean, in physics, we joke about assuming spherical cows, real world problems have got all kinds of real world effects, but you can idealize, send some things to infinity, send some things to zero, and the mathematics becomes a lot simpler to work within.
Lex Fridman (00:36:06) I wonder how often using infinity forces us to deviate from the physics of reality.
Terence Tao (00:36:17) So there’s a lot of pitfalls. So we spend a lot of time in undergraduate math classes teaching analysis, and analysis is often about how to take limits and whether…
(00:36:28) So for example, A plus B is always B plus A. So when you have a finite number of terms and you add them, you can swap them and there’s no problem, but when you have an infinite number of terms, they’re these sort of show games you can play where you can have a series which converges to one value, but you rearrange it, and it suddenly converges to another value, and so you can make mistakes. You have to know what you’re doing when you allow infinity. You have to introduce these epsilons and deltas, and there’s a certain type of wave of reasoning that helps you avoid mistakes.
(00:36:58) In more recent years, people have started taking results that are true in infinite limits and what’s called finitizing them. So you know that something’s true eventually, but you don’t know when. Now give me a rate. So such… If I don’t have an infinite number of monkeys, but a large finite number of monkeys, how long do I have to wait for Hamlet to come out? That’s a more quantitative question, and this is something that you can attack by purely finite methods, and you can use your finite intuition, and in this case, it turns out to be exponential in the length of the text that you’re trying to generate.
(00:37:36) So this is why you never see the monkeys create Hamlet. You can maybe see them create a four letter word, but nothing that big, and so I personally find once you finitize an infinite statement, it does come much more intuitive, and it’s no longer so weird.
Lex Fridman (00:37:51) So even if you’re working with infinity, it’s good to finitize so that you can have some intuition?
Terence Tao (00:37:57) Yeah, the downside is that the finitized groups are just much, much messier. So the infinite ones are found first usually, decades earlier, and then later on, people finitize them.
Math vs Physics
Lex Fridman (00:38:07) So since we mentioned a lot of math and a lot of physics, what is the difference between mathematics and physics as disciplines, as ways of understanding, of seeing the world? Maybe we can throw engineering in there, you mentioned your wife is an engineer, give it new perspective on circuits. So this different way of looking at the world, given that you’ve done mathematical physics, so you’ve worn all the hats.
Terence Tao (00:38:30) Right. So I think science in general is interaction between three things. There’s the real world, there’s what we observe of the real world, observations, and then our mental models as to how we think the world works.
(00:38:46) We can’t directly access reality. All we have are the observations, which are incomplete and they have errors, and there are many, many cases where we want to know, for example, what is the weather like tomorrow, and we don’t yet have the observation, but we’d like to. A prediction.
(00:39:04) Then we have these simplified models, sometimes making unrealistic assumptions, spherical cow type things. Those are the mathematical models.
(00:39:11) Mathematics is concerned with the models. Science collects the observations, and it proposes the models that might explain these observations. What mathematics does, we stay within the model, and we ask what are the consequences of that model? What observations, what predictions would the model make of future observations, or past observations? Does it fit? Observe data?
(00:39:35) So there’s definitely a symbiosis. I guess mathematics is unusual among other disciplines is that we start from hypotheses, like the axioms of a model, and ask what conclusions come up from that model. In almost any other discipline, you start with the conclusions. “I want to do this. I want to build a bridge, I want to make money, I want to do this,” and then you find the paths to get there. There’s a lot less sort of speculation about, “Suppose I did this, what would happen?”. Planning and modeling. Speculative fiction maybe is one other place, but that’s about it, actually. Most of the things we do in life is conclusions driven, including physics and science. I mean, they want to know, “Where is this asteroid going to go? What is the weather going to be tomorrow?”, but mathematics also has this other direction of going from the axioms.
Lex Fridman (00:40:32) What do you think… There is this tension in physics between theory and experiment. What do you think is the more powerful way of discovering truly novel ideas about reality?
Terence Tao (00:40:42) Well, you need both, top down and bottom up. It’s really an interaction between all these… So over time, the observations and the theory and the modeling should both get closer to reality, but initially, and this is always the case out there, they’re always far apart to begin with, but you need one to figure out where to push the other.
(00:41:04) So if your model is predicting anomalies that are not predicted by experiment, that tells experimenters where to look to find more data to refine the models. So it goes back and forth.
(00:41:21) Within mathematics itself, there’s also a theory and experimental component. It’s just that until very recently, theory has dominated almost completely. 99% of mathematics is theoretical mathematics, and there’s a very tiny amount of experimental mathematics. People do do it. If they want to study prime numbers or whatever, they can just generate large data sets.
(00:41:41) So once we had the computers, we had to do it a little bit. Although even before… Well, like Gauss for example, he discovered a reconjection, the most basic theorem in number theory, called the prime number theorem, which predicts how many primes up to a million, up to a trillion. It’s not an obvious question, and basically what he did was that he computed, mostly by himself, but also hired human computers, people whose professional job it was to do arithmetic, to compute the first hundred thousand primes or something, and made tables and made a prediction. That was an early example of experimental mathematics, but until very recently, it was not…
(00:42:22) I mean, theoretical mathematics was just much more successful. Of course, doing complicated mathematical computations was just not feasible until very recently, and even nowadays, even though we have powerful computers, only some mathematical things can be explored numerically.
(00:42:37) There’s something called the combinatorial explosion. If you want us to study, for example, Szemerédi’s theorem, you want to study all possible subsets of numbers one to a thousand. There’s only 1000 numbers. How bad could it be? It turns out the number of different subsets of one to a thousand is two to the power of 1000, which is way bigger than any computer can currently enumerate.
(00:42:59) So there are certain math problems that very quickly become just intractable to attack by direct brute force computation. Chess is another famous example. The number of chess positions, we can’t get a computer to fully explore, but now we have AI, we have tools to explore this space, not with 100% guarantees of success, but with experiment. So we can empirically solve chess now. For example, we have very, very good AIs that don’t explore every single position in the game tree, but they have found some very good approximation, and people are using actually these chess engines to do experimental chess. They’re revisiting old chess theories about, “Oh, when you do this type of opening… This is a good type of move, this is not,” and they can use these chess engines to actually refine, and in some cases, overturn conventional wisdom about chess, and I do hope that that mathematics will have a larger experimental component in the future, perhaps powered by AI.
Lex Fridman (00:44:05) We’ll, of course, talk about that, but in the case of chess, and there’s a similar thing in mathematics, I don’t believe it’s providing a kind of formal explanation of the different positions. It’s just saying which position is better or not that you can intuit as a human being, and then from that, we humans can construct a theory of the matter.
Nature of reality
(00:44:27) You’ve mentioned the Plato’s cave allegory. In case people don’t know, it’s where people are observing shadows of reality, not reality itself, and they believe what they’re observing to be reality. Is that, in some sense, what mathematicians and maybe all humans are doing, is looking at shadows of reality? Is it possible for us to truly access reality?
Terence Tao (00:44:55) Well, there are these three ontological things. There’s actual reality, there’s observations and our models, and technically they are distinct, and I think they will always be distinct, but they can get closer over time, and the process of getting closer often means that you have to discard your initial intuitions. So astronomy provides great examples, like an initial model of the world is flat because it looks flat and it’s big, and the rest of the universe, the skies, is not. The sun, for example, looks really tiny.
(00:45:38) So you start off with a model, which is actually really far from reality, but it fits the observations that you have. So things look good, but over time, as you make more and more observations, bring it closer to reality, the model gets dragged along with it, and so over time, we had to realize that the earth was round, that it spins, it goes around the solar system, solar system goes around the galaxy, and so on and so forth, and the universe was expanding. Expansions is self-expanding, accelerating, and in fact, very recently this year… So even the acceleration of the universe itself, this evidence now is non-constant.
Lex Fridman (00:46:13) The explanation behind why that is…
Lex Fridman (00:46:18) It’s catching up. I mean, it’s still the dark matter, dark energy, this kind of thing.
Terence Tao (00:46:23) We have a model that explains, that fits the data really well. It just has a few parameters that you have to specify. So people say, “Oh, that’s fudge factors. With enough fudge factors, you can explain anything,” but the mathematical point over the model is that you want to have fewer parameters in your model and data points in your observational set.
(00:46:43) So if you have a model with 10 parameters that explains 10 observations, that is a completely useless model, its what’s called overfitted, but if you have a model with two parameters and it explains a trillion observations, which is basically the dark matter model, I think it has 14 parameters, and it explains petabytes of data that the astronomers have.
(00:47:06) You can think of a theory. One way to think about a physical mathematical theory is it’s a compression of the universe, and a data compression. So you have these petabytes of observations, you like to compress it to a model which you can describe in five pages and specify a certain number of parameters, and if it can fit, to reasonable accuracy, almost all of your observations, the more compression that you make, the better your theory.
Lex Fridman (00:47:32) In fact, one of the great surprises of our universe and of everything in it is that it’s compressible at all. That’s the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics
Terence Tao (00:47:40) Yeah, Einstein had a quote like that. “The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.”
Lex Fridman (00:47:45) Right, and not just comprehensible. You can do an equation like e=MC2.
Terence Tao (00:47:49) There is actually some possible explanation for that. So there’s this phenomenon in mathematics called universality. So, many complex systems at the macro scale are coming out of lots of tiny interactions at the macro scale, and normally, because of the commutative explosion, you would think that the macro scale equations must be infinitely, exponentially more complicated than the macro scale ones, and they are, if you want to solve them completely exactly. If you want to model all the atoms in a box of air…
(00:48:21) Like Avogadro’s number is humongous. There’s a huge number of particles. If you actually tried to track each one, it’ll be ridiculous, but certain laws emerge at the microscopic scale that almost don’t depend on what’s going on at the macro scale, or only depend on a very small number of parameters.
(00:48:35) So if you want to model a gas of a quintillion particles in a box, you just need to know is temperature and pressure and volume, and a few parameters, like five or six, and it models almost everything you need to know about these 10 to 23 or whatever particles. So we don’t understand universality anywhere near as we would like mathematically, but there are much simpler toy models where we do have a good understanding of why universality occurs. The most basic one is the central limit theorem that explains why the bell curve shows up everywhere in nature, that so many things are distributed by what’s called a Gaussian distribution, famous bell curve. There’s now even a meme with this curve.
Lex Fridman (00:49:18) And even the meme applies broadly. The universality to the meme.
Terence Tao (00:49:22) Yes, you can go meta if you like, but there are many, many processes. For example, you can take lots of independent random variables and average them together in various ways. You can take a simple average or more complicated average, and we can prove in various cases that these bell curves, these Gaussians, emerge, and it is a satisfying explanation.
(00:49:44) Sometimes they don’t. So if you have many different inputs and they’re all correlated in some systemic way, then you can get something very far from a bell curve to show up, and this is also important to know when [inaudible 00:49:55] fails. So universality is not a 100% reliable thing to rely on. The global financial crisis was a famous example of this. People thought that mortgage defaults had this sort of Gaussian type behavior, that if a population of a hundred thousand Americans with mortgages ask what proportion of them would default on their mortgages, if everything was de-correlated, it would be an asset bell curve, and you can manage risk of options and derivatives and so forth, and there’s a very beautiful theory, but if there are systemic shocks in the economy that can push everybody to default at the same time, that’s very non-Gaussian behavior, and this wasn’t fully accounted for in 2008.
(00:50:45) Now I think there’s some more awareness that this systemic risk is actually a much bigger issue, and just because the model is pretty and nice, it may not match reality. So the mathematics of working out what models do is really important, but also the science of validating when the models fit reality and when they don’t… You need both, but mathematics can help, because for example, these central limit theorems, it tells you that if you have certain axioms like non-correlation, that if all the inputs were not correlated to each other, then you have this Gaussian behavior and things are fine. It tells you where to look for weaknesses in the model.
(00:51:25) So if you have a mathematical understanding of Szemerédi’s theorem, and someone proposes to use these Gaussian [inaudible 00:51:32] or whatever to model default risk, if you’re mathematically trained, you would say, “Okay, but what are the systemic correlation between all your inputs?”, and so then you can ask the economist, “How much of a risk is that?”, and then you can go look for that. So there’s always this synergy between science and mathematics.
Lex Fridman (00:51:52) A little bit on the topic of universality, you’re known and celebrated for working across an incredible breadth of mathematics, reminiscent of Hilbert a century ago. In fact, the great Fields Medal winning mathematician Tim Gowers has said that you are the closest thing we get to Hilbert. He’s a colleague of yours.
Lex Fridman (00:52:16) But anyway, so you are known for this ability to go both deep and broad in mathematics. So you’re the perfect person to ask. Do you think there are threads that connect all the disparate areas of mathematics? Is there a kind of a deep, underlying structure to all of mathematics?
Terence Tao (00:52:36) There’s certainly a lot of connecting threads, and a lot of the progress of mathematics can be represented by taking… By stories of two fields of mathematics that were previously not connected, and finding connections.
(00:52:50) An ancient example is geometry and number theory. So in the times of the ancient Greeks, these were considered different subjects. I mean, mathematicians worked on both. Euclid worked both on geometry, most famously, but also on numbers, but they were not really considered related. I mean, a little bit, like you could say that this length was five times this length because you could take five copies of this length and so forth, but it wasn’t until Descartes, who developed analytical geometry, that you can parameterize the plane, a geometric object, by two real numbers. So geometric problems can be turned into problems about numbers.
(00:53:35) Today this feels almost trivial. There’s no content to this. Of course, a plane is X and Y, because that’s what we teach and it’s internalized, but it was an important development that these two fields were unified, and this process has just gone on throughout mathematics over and over again. Algebra and geometry were separated, and now we have this fluid, algebraic geometry that connects them, and over and over again, and that’s certainly the type of mathematics that I enjoy the most.
(00:54:06) I think there’s sort of different styles to being a mathematician. I think hedgehogs and fox… A fox knows many things a little bit, but a hedgehog knows one thing very, very well, and in mathematics, there’s definitely both hedgehogs and foxes, and then there’s people who can play both roles, and I think ideal collaboration, British mathematicians involves very… You need some diversity, like a fox working with many hedgehogs or vice versa, but I identify mostly as a fox, certainly. I like arbitrage, somehow. Learning how one field works, learning the tricks of that wheel, and then going to another field which people don’t think is related, but I can adapt the tricks.
Lex Fridman (00:54:49) So see the connections between the fields.
Terence Tao (00:54:52) Yeah. So there are other mathematicians who are far deeper than I am. They’re really hedgehogs. They know everything about one field, and they’re much faster and more effective in that field, but I can give them these extra tools.
Lex Fridman (00:55:05) I mean, you’ve said that you can be both a hedgehog and the fox, depending on the context, depending on the collaboration. So can you, if it’s at all possible, speak to the difference between those two ways of thinking about a problem? Say you’re encountering a new problem, searching for the connections versus very singular focus.
Terence Tao (00:55:26) I’m much more comfortable with the fox paradigm. Yeah. So yeah, I like looking for analogies, narratives. I spend a lot of time… If there’s a result, I see it in one field, and I like the result, it’s a cool result, but I don’t like the proof, it uses types of mathematics that I’m not super familiar with, I often try to re-prove it myself using the tools that I favor.
(00:55:53) Often, my proof is worse, but by the exercise they’re doing, so I can say, “Oh, now I can see what the other proof was trying to do,” and from that, I can get some understanding of the tools that are used in that field. So it’s very exploratory, very… Doing crazy things in crazy fields and reinventing the wheel a lot, whereas the hedgehog style is, I think, much more scholarly. You’re very knowledge-based. You stay up to speed on all the developments in this field, you know all the history, you have a very good understanding of exactly the strengths and weaknesses of each particular technique. I think you rely a lot more on calculation than sort of trying to find narratives. So yeah, I can do that too, but other people are extremely good at that.
Lex Fridman (00:56:44) Let’s step back and maybe look at a bit of a romanticized version of mathematics. So I think you’ve said that early on in your life, math was more like a puzzle-solving activity when you were young. When did you first encounter a problem or proof where you realized math can have a kind of elegance and beauty to it?
Terence Tao (00:57:11) That’s a good question. When I came to graduate school in Princeton, so John Conway was there at the time, he passed away a few years ago, but I remember one of the very first research talks I went to was a talk by Conway on what he called extreme proof.
(00:57:28) So Conway just had this amazing way of thinking about all kinds of things in a way that you wouldn’t normally think of. So he thought proofs themselves as occupying some sort of space. So if you want to prove something, let’s say that there’s infinitely many primes, you have all different proofs, but you could rank them in different axes. Some proofs are elegant, some proofs are long, some proofs are elementary and so forth, and so there’s this cloud, so the space of all proofs itself has some sort of shape, and so he was interested in extreme points of this shape. Out of all these proofs, what is one of those, the shortest, at the expense of everything else, or the most elementary or whatever?
(00:58:09) So he gave some examples of well-known theorems, and then he would give what he thought was the extreme proof in these different aspects. I just found that really eye-opening, that it’s not just getting a proof for a result that was interesting, but once you have that proof, trying to optimize it in various ways, that proofing itself had some craftsmanship to it.
(00:58:40) It’s certainly informed my writing style, like when you do your math assignments and as you’re an undergraduate, your homework and so forth, you’re sort of encouraged to just write down any proof that works and hand it in, and as long as it gets a tick mark, you move on, but if you want your results to actually be influential and be read by people, it can’t just be correct. It should also be a pleasure to read, motivated, be adaptable to generalize to other things. It’s the same in many other disciplines, like coding. There’s a lot of analogies between math and coding. I like analogies, if you haven’t noticed. You can code something, spaghetti code, that works for a certain task, and it’s quick and dirty and it works, but there’s lots of good principles for writing code well so that other people can use it, build upon it so it has fewer bugs and whatever, and there’s similar things with mathematics.
Lex Fridman (00:59:37) Yeah, first of all, there’s so many beautiful things there, and [inaudible 00:59:42] is one of the great minds in mathematics ever, and computer science, just even considering the space of proofs and saying, “Okay, what does this space look like, and what are the extremes?”
(00:59:56) Like you mentioned, coding as an analogy is interesting, because there’s also this activity called the code golf, which I also find beautiful and fun, where people use different programming languages to try to write the shortest possible program that accomplishes a particular task, and I believe there’s even competitions on this, and it’s also a nice way to stress test not just the programs, or in this case, the proofs, but also the different languages. Maybe that’s a different notation or whatever to use to accomplish a different task.
Terence Tao (01:00:31) Yeah, you learn a lot. I mean, it may seem like a frivolous exercise, but it can generate all these insights, which, if you didn’t have this artificial objective to pursue, you might not see…
Lex Fridman (01:00:43) What, to you, is the most beautiful or elegant equation in mathematics? I mean, one of the things that people often look to in beauty is the simplicity. So if you look at e=MC2… So when a few concepts come together, that’s why the Euler identity is often considered the most beautiful equation in mathematics. Do you find beauty in that one, in the Euler identity?
Terence Tao (01:01:08) Yeah. Well, as I said, what I find most appealing is connections between different things that… So if you… Pi equals minus one. So yeah, people use all the fundamental constants. Okay. I mean, that’s cute, but to me…
(01:01:24) So the exponential function, which is by Euler, was to measure exponential growth. So compound interest or decay, anything which is continuously growing, continuously decreasing, growth and decay, or dilation or contraction, is modeled by the exponential function, whereas pi comes around from circles and rotation, right? If you want to rotate a needle, for example, a hundred degrees, you need rotate by pi radians, and i, complex numbers, represents the swapping imaginary axes of a 90 degree rotation. So a change in direction.
(01:01:53) So the exponential function represents growth and decay in the direction that you already are. When you stick an i in the exponential, now instead of motion in the same direction as your current position, the motion as a right angles to your current position. So rotation, and then, so E to the pi i equals minus one tells you that if you rotate for a time pi, you end up at the other direction. So it unifies geometry through dilation and exponential growth or dynamics through this act of complexification, rotation by pi i. So it connects together all these two as mathematics, dynamics, geometry and complex numbers. They’re all considered almost… They were all next-door neighbors in mathematics because of this identity.
Lex Fridman (01:02:37) Do you think the thing you mentioned as Q, the collision of notations from these disparate fields, is just a frivolous side effect, or do you think there is legitimate value in when notation… Although our old friends come together in the night?
Terence Tao (01:02:54) Well, it’s confirmation that you have the right concepts. So when you first study anything, you have to measure things, and give them names, and initially sometimes, because your model is, again, too far off from reality, you give the wrong things the best names, and you only find out later what’s really important.
Lex Fridman (01:03:14) Physicists can do this sometimes, but it turns out okay.
Terence Tao (01:03:18) So actually, physics [inaudible 01:03:19] e=MC2. So one of the big things was the E, right? So when Aristotle first came up with his laws of motion, and then Galileo and Newton and so forth, they saw the things they could measure, they could measure mass and acceleration and force and so forth, and so Newtonian mechanics, for example, F=ma, was the famous Newton’s second law of motion. So those were the primary objects. So they gave them the central billing in the theory.
(01:03:44) It was only later after people started analyzing these equations that there always seemed to be these quantities that were conserved. So in particular, momentum and energy, and it’s not obvious that things have an energy. It’s not something you can directly measure the same way you can measure mass and velocity, so both, but over time, people realized that this was actually a really fundamental concept.
(01:04:05) Hamilton, eventually in the 19th century, reformulated Newton’s laws of physics into what’s called Hamiltonian mechanics, where the energy, which is now called the Hamiltonian, was the dominant object. Once you know how to measure the Hamiltonian of any system, you can describe completely the dynamics like what happens to all the states. It really was a central actor, which was not obvious initially, and this change of perspective really helped when quantum mechanics came along, because the early physicists who studied quantum mechanics, they had a lot of trouble trying to adapt their Newtonian thinking, because everything was a particle and so forth, to quantum mechanics, because everything was a wave, but it just looked really, really weird.
(01:04:51) You ask, “What is the quantum version of F=ma?”, and it’s really, really hard to give an answer to that, but it turns out that the Hamiltonian, which was so secretly behind the scenes in classical mechanics, also is the key object in quantum mechanics, that there’s also an object called a Hamiltonian. It’s a different type of object. It’s what’s called an operator rather than a function, but again, once you specify it, you specify the entire dynamics.
(01:05:17) So there’s something called Schrodinger’s equation that tells you exactly how quantum systems evolve once you have a Hamiltonian. So side by side, they look completely different objects. One involves particles, one involves waves and so forth, but with this centrality, you could start actually transferring a lot of intuition and facts from classical mechanics to quantum mechanics. So for example, in classical mechanics, there’s this thing called Noether’s theorem. Every time there’s a symmetry in a physical system, there was a conservation law. So the laws of physics are translation invariant. Like if I move 10 steps to the left, I experience the same laws of physics as if I was here, and that corresponds to conservation momentum. If I turn around by some angle, again, I experience the same laws of physics. This corresponds to the conservation of angular momentum. If I wait for 10 minutes, I still have the same laws of physics.
Terence Tao (01:06:00) It If I wait for 10 minutes, I still have the same laws of physics. So there’s time transition invariance. This corresponds to the law of the conservation of energy. So there’s this fundamental connection between symmetry and conservation. And that’s also true in quantum mechanics, even though the equations are completely different, but because they’re both coming from the Hamiltonian, the Hamiltonian controls everything, every time the Hamiltonian has a symmetry, the equations will have a conservation wall. Once you have the right language, it actually makes things a lot cleaner.
(01:06:32) One of the problems why we can’t unify quantum mechanics and general relativity, yet we haven’t figured out what the fundamental objects are. For example, we have to give up the notion of space and time being these almost Euclidean-type spaces, and it has to be, we know that at very tiny scales there’s going to be quantum fluctuations. There’s space-time foam and trying to use Cartesian coordinates X, Y, Z. It’s a non-starter, but we don’t know what to replace it with. We don’t actually have the concepts, the analog Hamiltonian that sort of organized everything.
Theory of everything
Lex Fridman (01:07:09) Does your gut say that there is a theory of everything, so this is even possible to unify, to find this language that unifies general relativity and quantum mechanics?
Terence Tao (01:07:19) I believe so. The history of physics has been out of unification much like mathematics over the years. [inaudible 01:07:26] magnetism was separate theories and then Maxwell unified them. Newton unified the motions of heavens for the motions of objects on the Earth and so forth. So it should happen. It’s just that, again, to go back to this model of the observations and theory, part of our problem is that physics is a victim of it’s own success. That our two big theories of physics, general relativity and quantum mechanics are so good now is that together they cover 99.9% of all the observations we can make. And you have to either go to extremely insane particle accelerations or the early universe or things that are really hard to measure in order to get any deviation from either of these two theories to the point where you can actually figure out how to combine together. But I have faith that we’ve been doing this for centuries and we’ve made progress before. There’s no reason why we should stop.
Lex Fridman (01:08:18) Do you think you’ll be a mathematician that develops a theory of everything?
Terence Tao (01:08:24) What often happens is that when the physicists need some theory of mathematics, there’s often some precursor that the mathematicians worked out earlier. So when Einstein started realizing that space was curved, he went to some mathematician and asked, “Is there some theory of curved space that mathematicians already came up with that could be useful?” And he said, “Oh yeah, I think Riemann came up with something.” And so yeah, Riemann had developed Riemannian geometry, which is precisely a theory of spaces that are curved in various general ways, which turned out to be almost exactly what was needed by Einstein’s theory. This is going back to weakness and unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics. I think the theories that work well, that explain the universe, tend to also involve the same mathematical objects that work well to solve mathematical problems. Ultimately, they’re just both ways of organizing data in useful ways.
Lex Fridman (01:09:17) It just feels like you might need to go some weird land that’s very hard to intuit. You have string T=theory.
Terence Tao (01:09:25) Yeah, that was a leading candidate for many decades. I think it’s slowly pulling out of fashion. It’s not matching experiment.
Lex Fridman (01:09:33) So one of the big challenges of course, like you said, is experiment is very tough because of how effective both theories are. But the other is just you’re talking about you’re not just deviating from space-time. You’re going into some crazy number of dimensions. You’re doing all kinds of weird stuff that to us, we’ve gone so far from this flat earth that we started at, like you mentioned, and now it’s very hard to use our limited ape descendants of a cognition to intuit what that reality really is.
Terence Tao (01:10:10) This is why analogies are so important. So yeah, the round earth is not intuitive because we’re stuck on it. But round objects in general, we have pretty good intuition over and we have interest about light works and so forth. And it’s actually a good exercise to actually work out how eclipses and phases of the sun and the moon and so forth can be really easily explained by round earth and round moon and models. And you can just take a basketball and a golf ball and a light source and actually do these things yourself. So the intuition is there, but you have to transfer it.
Lex Fridman (01:10:47) That is a big leap intellectually for us to go from flat to round earth because our life is mostly lived in flat land. To load that information and we’re all like, take it for granted. We take so many things for granted because science has established a lot of evidence for this kind of thing, but we’re on a round rock flying through space. Yeah, that’s a big leap. And you have to take a chain of those leaps. The more and more and more we progress,
Terence Tao (01:11:15) Right, yeah. So modern science is maybe, again, a victim of own success is that in order to be more accurate, it has to move further and further away from your initial intuition. And so for someone who hasn’t gone through the whole process of science education, it looks more suspicious because of that. So we need more grounding. There are scientists who do excellent outreach, but there’s lots of science things that you can do at home. Lots of YouTube videos I did at YouTube video recently, Grant Sanderson, we talked about this earlier, that how the ancient Greeks were able to measure things like the distance of the moon, distance the earth, and using techniques that you could also replicate yourself. It doesn’t all have to be fancy space telescopes and very intimidating mathematics.
Lex Fridman (01:12:01) Yeah, I highly recommend that. I believe you give a lecture and you also did an incredible video with Grant. It’s a beautiful experience to try to put yourself in the mind of a person from that time shrouded in mystery. You’re on this planet, you don’t know the shape of it, the size of it. You see some stars, you see some things and you try to localize yourself in this world and try to make some kind of general statements about distanced places.
Terence Tao (01:12:29) Change of perspective is really important. You say travel broadens the mind, this is intellectual travel. Put yourself in the mind of the ancient Greeks or person some other time period, make hypotheses, spherical [inaudible 01:12:41], whatever, speculate. And this is what mathematicians do and some other, what artists do actually.
Lex Fridman (01:12:48) It’s just incredible that given the extreme constraints, you could still say very powerful things. That’s why it’s inspiring. Looking back in history, how much can be figured out when you don’t have much to figure out stuff with.
Terence Tao (01:13:01) If you propose axioms, then the mathematics does. You follow those axioms to their conclusions and sometimes you can get quite a long way from initial hypotheses.
General relativity
Lex Fridman (01:13:10) If we can stay in the land of the weird. You mentioned general relativity. You’ve contributed to the mathematical understanding, Einstein’s field equations. Can you explain this work and from a mathematical standpoint, what aspects of general relativity are intriguing to you? Challenging to you?
Terence Tao (01:13:31) I have worked on some equations. There’s something called the wave maps equation or the Sigma field model, which is not quite the equation of space-time gravity itself, but of certain fields that might exist on top of space-time. So Einstein’s equations of relativity just describe space and time itself. But then there’s other fields that live on top of that. There’s the electromagnetic field, there’s things called Yang-Mills fields, and there’s this whole hierarchy of different equations of which Einstein’s considered one of the most nonlinear and difficult, but relatively low on the hierarchy was this thing called the wave maps equation. So it’s a wave which at any given point is fixed to be on a sphere. So I can think of a bunch of arrows in space and time. Yeah, so it’s pointing in different directions, but they propagate like waves. If you wiggle an arrow, it would propagate and make all the arrows move kind of like sheaves of wheat in a wheat field.
(01:14:27) And I was interested in the global regularity problem. Again for this question, is it possible for the energy here to collect at a point? So the equation I considered was actually what’s called a critical equation where it’s actually the behavior at all scales is roughly the same. And I was able barely to show that you couldn’t actually force a scenario where all the energy concentrated at one point, that the energy had to disperse a little bit at the moment, just a little bit. It would stay regular. Yeah, this was back in 2000. That was part of why I got interested in [inaudible 01:14:58] afterwards actually. So I developed some techniques to solve that problem. So part of it, this problem is really nonlinear because of the curvature of the sphere. There was a certain nonlinear effect, which was a non-perturbative effect. It was when you sort looked at it normally it looked larger than the linear effects of the wave equation. And so it was hard to keep things under control even when your energy was small.
(01:15:23) But I developed what’s called a gauge transformation. So the equation is kind of like an evolution of sheaves of wheat, and they’re all bending back and forth, so there’s a lot of motion. But if you imagine stabilizing the flow by attaching little cameras at different points in space, which are trying to move in a way that captures most of the motion, and under this stabilized flow, the flow becomes a lot more linear. I discovered a way to transform the equation to reduce the amount of nonlinear effects, and then I was able to solve the equation. I found the transformation while visiting my aunt in Australia, and I was trying to understand the dynamics of all these fields, and I couldn’t do a pen and paper, and I had not enough facility of computers to do any computer simulations.
(01:16:08) So I ended up closing my eyes being on the floor and just imagining myself to actually be this vector field and rolling around to try to see how to change coordinates in such a way that somehow things in all directions would behave in a reasonably linear fashion. And yeah, my aunt walked in on me while I was doing that and she was asking, “Why am I doing this?”
Lex Fridman (01:16:28) It’s complicated as the answer.
Terence Tao (01:16:30) “Yeah, yeah. And okay, fine. You are a young man. I don’t ask questions.”
Solving difficult problems
Lex Fridman (01:16:34) I have to ask about how do you approach solving difficult problems if it’s possible to go inside your mind when you’re thinking, are you visualizing in your mind the mathematical objects, symbols, maybe what are you visualizing in your mind? Usually when you’re thinking?
Terence Tao (01:16:57) A lot of pen and paper. One thing you pick up as a mathematician is I call it cheating strategically. So the beauty of mathematics is that you get to change the problem and change the rules as you wish. You don’t get to do this by any other field. If you’re an engineer and someone says, “Build a bridge over this river,” you can’t say, “I want to build this bridge over here instead,” or, “I want to put it out of paper instead of steel,” but a mathematician, you can do whatever you want on. It’s like trying to solve a computer game where there’s unlimited cheat codes available. And so you can set this, there’s a dimension that’s large. I’ve set it to one. I’ll solve the one-dimensional problem first. So there’s a main term and an error term. I’m going to make a spherical call assumption [inaudible 01:17:45] term is zero.
(01:17:45) And so the way you should solve these problems is not in this Iron Man mode where you make things maximally difficult, but actually the way you should approach any reasonable math problem is that if there are 10 things that are making your life difficult, find a version of the problem that turns off nine of the difficulties, but only keeps one of them and solve that. And then so you solve nine cheats. Okay, you solve 10 cheats, then the game is trivial, but you solve nine cheats. You solve one problem that teaches you how to deal with that particular difficulty. And then you turn that one-off and you turn someone else something else on, and then you solve that one. And after you know how to solve the 10 problems, 10 difficulties separately, then you have to start merging them a few at a time.
(01:18:26) As a kid, I watched a lot of these Hong Kong action movies from our culture, and one thing is that every time it’s a fight scene, so maybe the hero gets swarmed by a hundred bad-guy goons or whatever, but it’ll always be choreographed so that he’d always be only fighting one person at a time and it would defeat that person and move on. And because of that, he could defeat all of them. But whereas if they had fought a bit more intelligently and just swarmed the guy at once, it would make for much worse cinema, but they would win.
Lex Fridman (01:19:02) Are you usually pen and paper? Are you working with computer and LaTeX?
Terence Tao (01:19:08) Mostly pen and paper actually. So in my office I have four giant blackboards and sometimes I just have to write everything I know about the problem on the four blackboards and then sit my couch and just see the whole thing.
Lex Fridman (01:19:20) Is it all symbols like notation or is there some drawings?
Terence Tao (01:19:23) Oh, there’s a lot of drawing and a lot of bespoke doodles that only makes sense to me. And the beauty of a blackboard is you erase and it’s a very organic thing. I’m beginning to use more and more computers, partly because AI makes it much easier to do simple coding things that if I wanted to plot a function before, which is moderately complicated, has some iteration or something, I’d had to remember how to set up a Python program and how does a full loop work and debug it and it would take two hours and so forth. And now I can do it in 10, 15 minutes as much. I’m using more and more computers to do simple explorations.
AI-assisted theorem proving
Lex Fridman (01:20:01) Let’s talk about AI a little bit if we could. So maybe a good entry point is just talking about computer-assisted proofs in general. Can you describe the Lean formal proof programming language and how it can help as a proof assistant and maybe how you started using it and how it has helped you?
Terence Tao (01:20:25) So Lean is a computer language, much like standard languages like Python and C and so forth, except that in most languages the focus is on using executable code. Lines of code do things, they flip bits or they make a robot move or they deliver your text on the internet or something. So lean is a language that can also do that. It can also be run as a standard traditional language, but it can also produce certificates. So a software language like Python might do a computation and give you that the answer is seven. Okay, does the sum of three plus four equal to seven?
(01:20:59) But Lean can produce not just the answer, but a proof that how it got the answer of seven as three plus four and all the steps involved. So it creates these more complicated objects, not just statements, but statements with proofs attached to them. And every line of code is just a way of piecing together previous statements to create new ones. So the idea is not new. These things are called proof assistance, and so they provide languages for which you can create quite complicated mathematical proofs. They produce these certificates that give a 100% guarantee that your arguments are correct if you trust the compiler of Lean, but they made the compiler really small and there are several different compilers available for the Lean.
Lex Fridman (01:21:45) Can you give people some intuition about the difference between writing on pen and paper versus using Lean programming language? How hard is it to formalize statement?
Terence Tao (01:21:56) So Lean, a lot of mathematicians were involved in the design of Lean. So it’s designed so that individual lines of code resemble individual lines of mathematical argument. You might want to introduce a variable, you want to prove our contradiction. There are various standard things that you can do and it’s written. So ideally should like a one-to-one correspondence. In practice, it isn’t because Lean is explaining a proof to extremely pedantic colleague who will point out, “Okay, did you really mean this? What happens if this is zero? Okay, how do you justify this?” So Lean has a lot of automation in it to try to be less annoying. So for example, every mathematical object has to come with a type. If I talk about X, is X a rule number or a natural number or a function or something? If you write things informally, it’s often if you have context. You say, “Clearly X is equal to let X be the sum of Y and Z and Y and Z were already rule number, so X should also be a rule number.” So Lean can do a lot of that, but every so often it says, wait a minute, can you tell me more about what this object is? What type of object it is? You have to think more at a philosophical level, not just computations that you’re doing, but what each object actually is in some sense.
Lex Fridman (01:23:17) Is he using something like LLMs to do the type inference or you match with the real number?
Terence Tao (01:23:23) It’s using much more traditional what’s called good old-fashioned AI. You can represent all these things as trees, and there’s always algorithm to match one tree to another tree.
Lex Fridman (01:23:30) So it’s actually doable to figure out if something is a real number or a natural number.
Terence Tao (01:23:36) Every object comes with a history of where it came from, and you can kind of trace it.
Terence Tao (01:23:41) Yeah. So it’s designed for reliability. So modern AIs are not used in, it’s a disjoint technology. People are begin to use AIs on top of lean. So when a mathematician tries to program proven in lean, often there’s a step. Okay, now I want to use the fundamental thing on calculus, say to do the next step. So the lean developers have built this massive project called Mathlib, a collection of tens of thousands of useful facts about methodical objects.
(01:24:09) And somewhere in there is the fundamental calculus, but you need to find it. So a lot of the bottleneck now is actually lemma search. There’s a tool that you know is in there somewhere and you need to find it. And so there are various search engine engines specialized for Mathlib that you can do, but there’s now these large language models that you can say, “I need the fundamental calculus at this point.” And it was like, okay, for example, when I code, I have GitHub Copilot installed as a plugin to my IDE, and it scans my text and it sees what I need. Says I might even type, now I need to use the fundamental calculus. And then it might suggest, “Okay, try this,” and maybe 25% of the time it works exactly. And then another ten-fifty percent of the time it doesn’t quite work, but it’s close enough that I can say, oh yeah, if I just change it here and here, it’ll work. And then half the time it gives me complete rubbish. But people are beginning to use AIs a little bit on top, mostly on the level of basically fancy auto-complete that you can type half of one line of a proof and it will find, it’ll tell you.
Lex Fridman (01:25:11) Yeah, but a fancy, especially fancy with the sort of capital letter F, remove some of the friction mathematician might feel when they move from pen and paper to formalizing.
Terence Tao (01:25:23) Yes. Yeah. So right now I estimate that the time and effort taken to formalize it, proof is about 10 times the amount taken to write it out. So it’s doable, but it’s annoying.
Lex Fridman (01:25:36) But doesn’t it kill the whole vibe of being a mathematician? Having a pedantic coworker?
Terence Tao (01:25:42) Right? Yeah, if that was the only aspect of it, but there’s some cases was actually more pleasant to do things formally. So there’s a theorem I formalized, and there was a certain constant 12 that came out in the final statement. And so this 12 had been carried all through the proof and everything had to be checked all these other numbers that had to be consistent with this final number 12. And so we wrote a paper through this theorem with this number 12. And then a few weeks later someone said, “Oh, we can actually improve this 12 to an 11 by reworking some of these steps.” And when this happens with pen and paper, every time you change your parameter, you have to check line by line that every single line of your proof still works. And there can be subtle things that you didn’t quite realize, some properties, not number 12, that you didn’t even realize that you were taking advantage of. So a proof can break down at a subtle place.
(01:26:29) So we had formalized the proof with this constant 12, and then when this new paper came out, we said, “Oh,” so that took three weeks to formalize and 20 people to formalize this original proof. I said, “Now let’s update the proof to 11.” And what you can do with Lean is in your headline theorem, you change your 12 to 11, you run the compiler and off the thousands of lines of code, you have 90% of them still work and there’s a couple that are lined in red. Now, I can’t justify these steps, but immediately isolates which steps you need to change, but you can skip over everything, which works just fine.
(01:27:04) And if you program things correctly with good programming practices, most of your lines will not be red. And there’ll just be a few places where you, if you don’t hard code your constants, but you use smart tactics and so forth, you can localize the things you need to change to a very small period of time. So within a day or two, we had updated our proof because it’s this very quick process, you make a change. There are 10 things now that don’t work. For each one, you make a change and now there’s five more things that don’t work, but the process converges much more smoothly then with pen and paper.
Lex Fridman (01:27:40) So that’s for writing? Are you able to read it? If somebody else has a proof, are you able to, what’s the versus paper and?
Terence Tao (01:27:48) Yeah, so the proofs are longer, but each individual piece is easier to read. So if you take a math paper and you jump to page 27 and you look at paragraph six and you have a line of text of math, I often can’t read it immediately because it assumes various definitions, which I have to go back and maybe on 10 pages earlier this was defined and the proof is scattered all over the place, and you basically are forced to read fairly sequentially. It’s not like say a novel where in a theory you could open up a novel halfway through and start reading. There’s a lot of context. But when [inaudible 01:28:23] Lean, if you put your cursor on a line code, every single object there, you can hover over it and it would say what it is, where it came from, where stuff is justified. You can trace things back much easier than flipping through a math paper.
(01:28:34) So one thing that Lean really enables is actually collaborating on proofs at a really atomic scale that you really couldn’t do in the past. So traditionally with pen and paper, when you want to collaborate with another mathematician, either you do it at a blackboard where you can really interact, but if you’re doing it sort of by email or something, basically, yeah, you have to segment it. Say, “I’m going to finish section three, you do section four,” but you can’t really work on the same thing, collaborate at the same time.
(01:29:03) But with Lean, you can be trying to formalize some portion of proof and say, “I got stuck at line 67 here. I need to prove this thing, but it doesn’t quite work. Here’s the three lines of code I’m having trouble with.” But because all the context is there, someone else can say, “Oh, okay, I recognize what you need to do. You need to apply this trick or this tool,” and you can do extremely atomic-level conversations. So because of Lean, I can collaborate with dozens of people across the world, most of who I have never met in person, and I may not know actually even whether they’re how reliable they are in the proof-taking field, but Lean gives me a certificate of trust so I can do trustless mathematics.
Lex Fridman (01:29:43) So there’s so many interesting questions there. So one, you’re known for being a great collaborator. So what is the right way to approach solving a difficult problem in mathematics when you’re collaborating? Are you doing a divide and conquer type of thing? Or are you focused in on a particular part and you’re brainstorming?
Terence Tao (01:30:05) There’s always a brainstorming process first. Yeah, so math research projects, by their nature, when you start, you don’t really know how to do the problem. It’s not like an engineering project where somehow the theory has been established for decades and it’s implementation is the main difficulty. You have to figure out even what is the right path. So this is what I said about cheating first. It’s like to go back to the bridge building analogy. So first assume you have infinite budget and unlimited amounts of workforce and so forth. Now can you build this bridge? Okay, now have infinite budget, but only finite workforce, right? Now can you do that? And so forth. So, of course no engineer can actually do this. Like I say, they have fixed requirements. Yes, there’s this sort of jam sessions always at the beginning where you try all kinds of crazy things and you make all these assumptions that are unrealistic, but you plan to fix later.
(01:30:57) And you try to see if there’s even some skeleton of an approach that might work. And then hopefully that breaks up the problem into smaller sub problems, which you don’t know how to do. But then you focus on the sub ones. And sometimes different collaborators are better at working on certain things. So one of my themes I’m known for is a theme of Ben Green, which now called the Green-Tao theorem. It’s a statement that the primes contain mathematic progressions of an event. So it was a modification of his [inaudible 01:31:26] already. And the way we collaborated was that Ben had already proven a similar result for progressions of length three. He showed that such like the primes contain loss and loss of progressions of length three, even subsets of the primes, certain subsets do, but his techniques only worked for the three progressions. They didn’t work for longer.
(01:31:46) But I had these techniques coming from a [inaudible 01:31:48] theory, which is something that I had been playing with and I knew better than Ben at the time. And so if I could justify certain randomness properties of some set relating for primes, there’s a certain technical condition, which if I could have it, if Ben could supply me to this fact, I could conclude the theorem. But what I asked was a really difficult question in number theory, which he said, “There’s no way we can prove this.” So he said, “Can you prove your part of the theorem using a weak hypothesis that I have a chance to prove it?” And he proposed something which he could prove, but it was too weak for me. I can’t use this. So there was this conversation going back and forth, a hacker-
Terence Tao (01:32:31) Yeah, yeah, I want to cheat more. He wants to cheat less, but eventually we found a property which A, he could prove, and B, I could use, and then we could prove our theorem. So there are all kinds of dynamics. Every collaboration has some story. No two are the same.
Lean programming language
Lex Fridman (01:32:51) And then on the flip side of that, like you mentioned with Lean programming, now that’s almost like a different story because you can create, I think you’ve mentioned a blueprint for a problem, and then you can really do a divide and conquer with Lean where you’re working on separate parts and they’re using the computer system proof checker essentially to make sure that everything is correct along the way.
Terence Tao (01:33:17) So it makes everything compatible and trustable. Yeah, so currently only a few mathematical projects can be cut up in this way. At the current state of the art, most of the Lean activity is on formalizing proofs that have already been proven by humans. A math paper basically is a blueprint in a sense. It is taking a difficult statement like big theorem and breaking up into me a hundred little lemmas, but often not all written with enough detail that each one can be sort of directly formalized.
(01:33:46) A blueprint is a really pedantically written version of a paper where every step is explained as much detail as possible and just trying to make each step kind of self-contained or depending on only a very specific number of previous statements that been proven so that each node of this blueprint graph that gets generated can be tackled independently of the others. And you don’t even need to know how the whole thing works. So it’s like a modern supply chain. If you want to create an iPhone or some other complicated object, no one person can build up a single object, but you can have specialists who just, if they’re given some widgets from some other company, they can combine them together to form a slightly bigger widget.
Lex Fridman (01:34:27) I think that’s a really exciting possibility because you can have, if you can find problems that could be broken down in this way, then you could have thousands of contributors, right? To be completely distributed.
Terence Tao (01:34:39) So I told you before about this split between theoretical and experimental mathematics. And right now most mathematics is theoretical, only a tiny bit it’s experimental. I think the platform that Lean and other software tools, so GitHub and things like that will allow experimental mathematics to scale up to a much greater degree than we can do now. So right now, if you want to do any mathematical exploration of some mathematical pattern or something, you need some code to write out the pattern. And I mean, sometimes there are some computer algebra packages that could help, but often it’s just one mathematician coding lots and lots of Python or whatever. And because coding is such an error-prone activity, it’s not practical to allow other people to collaborate with you on writing modules for your code because if one of the modules has a bug in it, the whole thing is unreliable. So you get these bespoke spaghetti code written by non-professional programmers, mathematicians, and they’re clunky and slow. And so because of that, it’s hard to really mass-produce experimental results.
(01:35:45) But I think with Lean, I’m already starting some projects where we are not just experimenting with data, but experimenting with proofs. So I have this project called the Equational Theories Project. Basically we generated about 22 million little problems in abstract algebra. Maybe I should back up and tell you what the project is. Okay, so abstract algebra studies operations like multiplication, addition and the abstract properties. So multiplication for example, is commutative. X times Y is always Y times X, at least for numbers. And it’s also associative. X times Y times Z is the same as X times Y times Z. So these operations obey some laws that don’t obey others. For example, X times X is not always equal to X. So that law is not always true. So given any operation, it obeys some laws and not others. And so we generated about 4,000 of these possible laws of algebra that certain operations can satisfy.
(01:36:38) And our question is which laws imply which other ones, so for example, does commutativity imply associativity? And the answer is no, because it turns out you can describe an operation which obeys the commutative law but doesn’t obey the associative law. So by producing an example, you can show that commutativity does not imply associativity. But some other laws do imply other laws by substitution and so forth, and you can write down some algebraic proof. So we look at all the pairs between these 4,000 laws and this up 22 million of these pairs. And for each pair we ask, does this law imply this law? If so, give a proof. If not, give a counterexample. So 22 million problems, each one of which you could give to an undergraduate algebra student, and they had a decent chance of solving the problem, although there are a few, at least 22 million, like a hundred or so that are really quite hard, but a lot are easy. And the project was just to work out to determine the entire graph which ones imply which other ones.
Lex Fridman (01:37:31) That’s an incredible project, by the way. Such a good idea, such a good test that the very thing we’ve been talking about at a scale that’s remarkable.
Terence Tao (01:37:38) So it would not have been feasible. The state of the art in the literature was like 15 equations and sort of how they applied, that’s at the limit of what a human with pen and paper can do. So you need to scale that up. So you need to crowdsource, but you also need to trust all the, no one person can check 22 million of these proofs. You need it to be computerized. And so it only became possible with Lean. We were hoping to use a lot of AI as well. So the project is almost complete. So at these 22 million, all but two had been settled.
Terence Tao (01:38:12) Well, actually, and of those two, we have a pen and paper proof of the two, and we’re formalizing it. In fact, this morning I was working on finishing it, so we’re almost done on this.
Lex Fridman (01:38:25) How many people were you able to get?
Terence Tao (01:38:26) About 50, which in mathematics is considered a huge number.
Lex Fridman (01:38:30) It’s a huge number. That’s crazy.
Terence Tao (01:38:32) Yeah. So we’re going to have a paper of 50 authors and a big appendix of who contributed what.
Lex Fridman (01:38:38) Here’s an question, not to maybe speak even more generally about it. When you have this pool of people, is there a way to organize the contributions by level of expertise of the people, of the contributors? Now, okay, I’m asking a lot of pothead questions here, but I’m imagining a bunch of humans, and maybe in the future, some AIs, can there be an ELO rating type of situation?
Lex Fridman (01:39:00) Can there be an Elo-rating type of situation where a gamification of this.
Terence Tao (01:39:07) The beauty of these lean projects is that automatically you get all this data, so everything’s being uploaded for this GitHub. GitHub tracks who contributed what. So you could generate statistics at any later point in time. You can say, “Oh, this person contributed this many lines of code” or whatever. These are very crude metrics. I would definitely not want this to become part of your tenure review or something. But I mean, I think already in enterprise computing, people do use some of these metrics as part of the assessment of performance of an employee. Again, this is the direction which is a bit scary for academics to go down. We don’t like metrics so much.
Lex Fridman (01:39:49) And yet academics use metrics. They just use old ones, number of papers.
Lex Fridman (01:40:06) It’s interesting. At least it’s a very interesting metric.
Terence Tao (01:40:08) Yeah, I think it’s interesting to study. I think you can do studies of whether these are better predictors. There’s this problem called Goodhart’s Law. If a statistic is actually used to incentivize performance, it becomes gamed, and then it’s no longer a useful measure.
Terence Tao (01:40:25) It’s rational. So what we’ve done for this project is self-report. So there are actually standard categories from the sciences of what types of contributions people give. So there’s the concept and validation and resources and coding and so forth. So there’s a standard list of twelve or so categories, and we just ask each contributor to… There’s a big matrix of all the authors and all the categories just to tick the boxes where they think that they contributed, and just give a rough idea. Also, you did some coding and you provided some compute, but you didn’t do any of the pen- and-paper verification or whatever.
(01:41:02) And I think that that works out. Traditionally, mathematicians just order alphabetically by surname. So we don’t have this tradition as in the sciences of “lead author” and “second author” and so forth, which we’re proud of. We make all the authors equal status, but it doesn’t quite scale to this size. So a decade ago I was involved in these things called polymath projects. It was the crowdsourcing mathematics but without the lean component. So it was limited by, you needed a human moderator to actually check that all the contributions coming in were actually valid. And this was a huge bottleneck, actually, but still we had projects that were 10 authors or so. But we had decided, at the time, not to try to decide who did what, but to have a single pseudonym. So we created this fictional character called DHJ Polymath in the spirit of [inaudible 01:41:51]. This is the pseudonym for a famous group of mathematicians in the 20th century.
(01:41:56) And so the paper was authored on the pseudonym, so none of us got the author credit. This actually turned out to be not so great for a couple of reasons. So one is that if you actually wanted to be considered for tenure or whatever, you could not use this paper in your… As you submitted as one your publications, because it didn’t have the formal author credit. But the other thing that we’ve recognized much later is that when people referred to these projects, they naturally referred to the most famous person who was involved in the project. So “This was Tim Gower’s playoff project.” “This was Terence Tao’s playoff project,” and not mention the other 19 or whatever people that were involved.
Terence Tao (01:42:37) So we’re trying something different this time around where we have, everyone’s an author, but we will have an appendix with this matrix, and we’ll see how that works.
DeepMind’s AlphaProof
Lex Fridman (01:42:45) So both projects are incredible, just the fact that you’re involved in such huge collaborations. But I think I saw a talk from Kevin Buzzard about the Lean Programming Language just a few years ago, and you’re saying that this might be the future of mathematics. And so it’s also exciting that you’re embracing one of the greatest mathematicians in the world embracing this, what seems like the paving of the future of mathematics.
(01:43:12) So I have to ask you here about the integration of AI into this whole process. So DeepMind’s alpha proof was trained using reinforcement learning on both failed and successful formal lean proofs of IMO problems. So this is sort of high-level high school?
Lex Fridman (01:43:33) Very high-level, high-school level mathematics problems. What do you think about the system and maybe what is the gap between this system that is able to prove the high-school level problems versus gradual-level problems?
Terence Tao (01:43:47) Yeah, the difficulty increases exponentially with the number of steps involved in the proof. It’s a commentarial explosion. So the thing of large language models is that they make mistakes and so if a proof has got 20 steps and your [inaudible 01:44:01] has a 10% failure rate at each step of going the wrong direction, it’s extremely unlikely to actually reach the end.
Lex Fridman (01:44:09) Actually, just to take a small tangent here, how hard is the problem of mapping from natural language to the formal program?
Terence Tao (01:44:19) Oh yeah. It’s extremely hard, actually. Natural language, it’s very fault-tolerant. You can make a few minor grammatical errors and speak in the second language, can get some idea of what you’re saying. But formal language, if you get one little thing wrong, then the whole thing is nonsense. Even formal to formal is very hard. There are different incompatible prefaces and languages. There’s Lean, but also Cox and Isabelle and so forth. And even converting from a formal action to formal language is an unsolved problem.
Lex Fridman (01:44:52) That is fascinating. Okay. But once you have an informal language, they’re using their RL trained model, something akin to AlphaZero that they used to go to then try to come up with tools, also have a model. I believe it’s a separate model for geometric problems.
Lex Fridman (01:45:12) So what impresses you about the system, and what do you think is the gap?
Terence Tao (01:45:18) Yeah, we talked earlier about things that are amazing over time become kind of normalized. So now somehow, it’s of course geometry is a silver bullet problem.
Lex Fridman (01:45:27) Right. That’s true, that’s true. I mean, it’s still beautiful to…
Terence Tao (01:45:31) Yeah, these are great work that shows what’s possible. The approach doesn’t scale currently. Three days of Google’s server time can solve one high school math format there. This is not a scalable prospect, especially with the exponential increase as the complexity increases.
Lex Fridman (01:45:49) We should mention that they got a silver medal performance. The equivalent of the silver medal performance.
Terence Tao (01:45:55) So first of all, they took way more time than was allotted, and they had this assistance where the humans started helped by formalizing, but also they’re giving themselves full marks for the solution, which I guess is formally verified. So I guess that’s fair. There are efforts, there will be a proposal at some point to actually have an AI math Olympiad where at the same time as the human contestants get the actual Olympiad problems, AI’s will also be given the same problems, the same time period and the outputs will have to be graded by the same judges, which means that it’ll have be written in natural language rather than formal language.
Lex Fridman (01:46:37) Oh, I hope that happens. I hope that this IMO happens. I hope next one.
Terence Tao (01:46:41) It won’t happen this IMO. The performance is not good enough in the time period. But there are smaller competitions, there are competitions where the answer is a number rather than a long form proof. And AI is actually a lot better at problems where there’s a specific numerical answer, because it’s easy to do reinforcement learning on it.” Yeah, you’ve got the right answer, you’ve got the wrong answer.” It’s a very clear signal, but a long form proof either has to be formal, and then the Lean can give it thumbs up or down, or it’s informal, but then you need a human to create it to tell. And if you’re trying to do billions of reinforcement learning runs, you can’t hire enough humans to grade those. It’s already hard enough for the last language to do reinforcement learning on just the regular text that people get. But now we actually hire people, not just give thumbs up, thumbs down, but actually check the output mathematically, yeah, that’s too expensive.
Human mathematicians vs AI
Lex Fridman (01:47:45) So if we just explore this possible future, what is the thing that humans do that’s most special in mathematics, that you could see AI not cracking for a while? So inventing new theories? Coming up with new conjectures versus proving the conjectures? Building new abstractions? New representations? Maybe an AI turnstile with seeing new connections between disparate fields?
Terence Tao (01:48:17) That’s a good question. I think the nature of what mathematicians do over time has changed a lot. So a thousand years ago, mathematicians had to compute the date of Easter, and they really complicated calculations, but it is all automated, the order of centuries, we don’t need that anymore. They used to navigate to do spherical navigation, circle trigonometry to navigate how to get from the Old World to the New or something, like very complicated calculation. Again, have been automated. Even a lot of undergraduate mathematics even before AI, like Wolfram Alpha for example. It’s not a language model, but it can solve a lot of undergraduate-level math tasks. So on the computational side, verifying routine things, like having a problem and saying, ” Here’s a problem in partial differential equations, could you solve it using any of the 20 standard techniques?” And say, “Yes, I’ve tried all 20 and here are the 100 different permutations and my results.”
(01:49:12) And that type of thing, I think it will work very well, type of scaling to once you solve one problem to make the AI attack a hundred adjacent problems. The things that humans do still… So where the AI really struggles right now is knowing when it’s made a wrong turn. It can say, “Oh, I’m going to solve this problem. I’m going to split up this one into these two cases. I’m going to try this technique.” And sometimes, if you’re lucky and it’s a simple problem, it’s the right technique and you solve the problem and sometimes it will have a problem, it would propose an approach which is just complete nonsense, but it looks like a proof.
(01:49:53) So this is one annoying thing about LLM-generated mathematics. So yeah, we’ve had human generated mathematics as a very low quality, like submissions who don’t have the formal training and so forth, but if a human proof is bad, you can tell it’s bad pretty quickly. It makes really basic mistakes. But the AI-generated proofs, they can look superficially flawless. And it’s partly because what the reinforcement learning has actually trained them to do, to make things to produce tech that looks like what is correct, which for many applications is good enough. So the air is often really subtle and then when you spot them, they’re really stupid. Like no human would’ve actually made that mistake.
Lex Fridman (01:50:36) Yeah, it’s actually really frustrating in the programming context, because I program a lot, and yeah, when a human makes low quality code, there’s something called “code smell”, right? You can tell immediately there’s signs, but with the AI generated code…
Lex Fridman (01:51:00) It’s very tricky, too, and frustrating, for some reason, to have to work.
Terence Tao (01:51:05) So the sense of smell, this is one thing that humans have, and there’s a metaphorical mathematical smell that it’s not clear how to get the AI to duplicate that eventually. So the way AlphaZero and so forth make progress on Go and chess and so forth, is in some sense they have developed a sense of smell for Go and chess positions, that this position is good for white, it’s good for black. They can’t initiate why, but just having that sense of smell lets them strategize. So if AIs gain that ability to a sense of viability of certain proof strategies, because I’m going to try to break up this problem into two small subtasks and they can say, “Oh, this looks good. The two tasks look like they’re simpler tasks than your main task and they’ve still got a good chance of being true. So this is good to try.” Or “No, you’ve made the problem worse, because each of the two subproblems is actually harder than your original problem,” which is actually what normally happens if you try a random thing to try normally it’s very easy to transform a problem into an even harder problem. Very rarely do you transform into a simpler problem. So if they can pick up a sense of smell, then they could maybe start competing with a human level of mathematicians.
Lex Fridman (01:52:24) So this is a hard question, but not competing but collaborating. Okay, hypothetical. If I gave you an Oracle that was able to do some aspect of what you do and you could just collaborate with it, what would you like that Oracle to be able to do? Would you like it to maybe be a verifier, like check, do the codes? Like “Yes, Professor Tao, correct, this is a promising fruitful direction”? Or would you like it to generate possible proofs and then you see which one is the right one? Or would you like it to maybe generate different representation, different totally different ways of seeing this problem?
Terence Tao (01:53:10) Yeah, I think all of the above. A lot of it is we don’t know how to use these tools, because it’s a paradigm that… We have not had in the past. Systems that are competent enough to understand complex instructions that can work at massive scale, but are also unreliable. It’s an interesting… A bit unreliable in subtle ways, whereas was providing sufficiently good output. It’s an interesting combination. I mean, you have graduate students that you work with who kind of like this, but not at scale. And we had previous software tools that can work at scale, but very narrow, so we have to figure out how to use, so Tim Gowers is actually, you mentioned he actually foresaw in 2000. He was envisioning what mathematics would look like in actually two and a half decades.
Terence Tao (01:54:09) Yeah, he wrote his article, a hypothetical conversation between a mathematical assistant of the future and himself. He’s trying to solve a problem and they would have a conversation. Sometimes the human would propose an idea and the AI would evaluate it, and sometimes the AI would propose an idea and sometimes a competition was required and AI would just go and say, “Okay, I’ve checked the 100 cases needed here,” or “The first you set this through for all N, I’ve checked N up to 100 and it looks good so far,” or “Hang on, there’s a problem at N equals 46.” So just a freeform conversation where you don’t know in advance where things are going to go, but just based on, “I think ideas are going to propose on both sides.” Calculations could propose on both sides.
(01:54:53) I’ve had conversations with AI where I say, “Okay, we’re going to collaborate to solve this math problem,” and it’s a problem that I already know the solution to, so I try to prompt it. “Okay, so here’s the problem.” I suggest using this tool, and it’ll find this.” Okay, it might start using this, and then it’ll go back to the tool that it wanted to do before. You have to keep railroading it onto the path you want, and I could eventually force it to give the proof I wanted, but it was like herding cats. And the amount of personal effort I had to take to not just prompt it but also check its output because a lot of what it looked like is going to work, I know there’s a problem on line 17, and basically arguing with it. It was more exhausting than doing it unassisted, but that’s the current state of the art.
Lex Fridman (01:55:44) I wonder if there’s a phase shift that happens to where it’s no longer feels like herding cats. And maybe you’ll surprise us how quickly that comes.
Terence Tao (01:55:54) I believe so. In formalization, I mentioned before that it takes 10 times longer to formalize a proof than to write it by hand. With these modern AI tools and also just better tooling, the Lean developers are doing a great job adding more and more features and making it user-friendly going from nine to eight to seven… Okay, no big deal, but one day it’ll drop a little one. And that’s a phase shift, because suddenly it makes sense when you write a paper to write it in Lean first, or through a conversation with AI, which is generally on the fly with you, and it becomes natural for journals to accept. Maybe they’ll offer expedite refereeing. If a paper has already been formalized in Lean, they’ll just ask the referee to comment on the significance of the results and how it connects to literature and not worry so much about the correctness, because that’s been certified. Papers are getting longer and longer in mathematics, and it’s harder and harder to get good refereeing for the really long ones unless they’re really important. It is actually an issue, and the formalization is coming in at just the right time for this to be.
Lex Fridman (01:57:04) And the easier and easier to guess because of the tooling and all the other factors, then you’re going to see much more like math lib will grow potentially exponentially, as it’s a virtuous cycle.
Terence Tao (01:57:16) I mean, one phase shift of this type that happened in the past was the adoption of LaTeX. So LaTeX is this typesetting language that all mathematicians use now. So in the past people used all kinds of word processors and typewriters and whatever, but at some point LaTeX became easier to use than all other competitors, and people would switch within a few years. It was just a dramatic base shift.
AI winning the Fields Medal
Lex Fridman (01:57:37) It’s a wild, out-there question, but what year, how far away are we from a AI system being a collaborator on a proof that wins the Fields Medal? So that level.
Terence Tao (01:57:55) Okay, well it depends on the level of collaboration, right?
Lex Fridman (01:57:58) No, it deserves to be get the Fields Medal. So half-and-half
Terence Tao (01:58:03) Already. I can imagine if it was a medal-winning paper, having some AI assistance in writing it just like the order complete alone is already, I use it speeds up my own writing. You can have a theorem and you have a proof, and the proof has three cases, and I write down the proof of first case and the autocomplete just suggests that. Now here’s how the proof of second case could work. And it was exactly correct. That was great. Saved me like five, ten minutes of typing.
Lex Fridman (01:58:30) But in that case, the AI system doesn’t get the Fields Medal. Are we talking 20 years, 50 years, a hundred years? What do you think?
Terence Tao (01:58:42) Okay, so I gave a prediction in print by 2026, which is now next year, there will be math collaborations with the AI, so not Fields-Medal winning, but actual research-level papers.
Lex Fridman (01:58:54) Published ideas that are in part generated by AI.
Terence Tao (01:58:58) Maybe not the ideas, but at least some of the computations, the verifications.
Terence Tao (01:59:04) That already happened. There are problems that were solved by a complicated process conversing with AI to propose things and the human goes and tries it and the contract doesn’t work, but it might pose a different idea. It’s hard to disentangle exactly. There are certainly math results which could only have been accomplished because there was a human authentication and an AI involved, but it’s hard to disentangle credit. I mean, these tools, they do not replicate all the skills needed to do mathematics, but they can replicate some non-trivial percentage of them, 30, 40%, so they can fill in gaps. So coding is a good example. So it’s annoying for me to code in Python. I’m not a native, I’m a professional programmer, but with AI, the friction cost of doing it is much reduced. So it fills in that gap for me. AI is getting quite good at literature review.
(02:00:15) I mean, it’s still a problem with hallucinating references that don’t exist, but this, I think, is a solvable problem. If you train in the right way and so forth and verify using the internet, you should, in a few years, get to the point where you have a lemma that you need and say, “Has anyone proven this lemma before?” And it will do basically a fancy web search and say, yeah, there are these six papers where something similar has happened. I mean, you can ask it right now and it’ll give you six papers of which maybe one is legitimate and relevant, one exists but is not relevant, and four are hallucinated. It has a non-zero success rate right now, but there’s so much garbage, so much the signal-to-noise ratio is so poor, that it’s most helpful when you already somewhat know the relationship, and you just need to be prompted to be reminded of a paper that was already subconsciously in your memory.
Lex Fridman (02:01:14) Versus helping you discover new you were not even aware of, but is the correct citation.
Terence Tao (02:01:20) Yeah, that it can sometimes do, but when it does, it’s buried in a list of options for which the other-
Lex Fridman (02:01:26) That are bad. I mean, being able to automatically generate a related work section that is correct. That’s actually a beautiful thing. That might be another phase shift because it assigns credit correctly. It breaks you out of the silos of thought.
Terence Tao (02:01:42) Yeah, no, there’s a big hump to overcome right now. I mean it’s like self-driving cars. The safety margin has to be really high for it to be feasible. So yeah, there’s a [inaudible 02:01:54]-Morrow problem with a lot of AI applications that they can develop tools that work 20%, 80% of the time, but it’s still not good enough. And in fact, even worse than good, in some ways.
Lex Fridman (02:02:08) I mean, another way of asking the Fields Medal question is what year do you think you’ll wake up and be like real surprised? You read the headline, the news or something happened that AI did, real breakthrough. Something. Like Fields Medal, even a hypothesis. It could be really just this AlphaZero Go moment would go that kind of thing.
Terence Tao (02:02:33) Yeah, this decade I can see it making a conjecture between two things that people would thought was unrelated.
Lex Fridman (02:02:42) Oh, interesting. Generating a conjecture. That’s a beautiful conjecture.
Terence Tao (02:02:45) Yeah. And actually has a real chance of being correct and meaningful.
Lex Fridman (02:02:50) Because that’s actually kind of doable, I suppose, but the word of the data is…
Lex Fridman (02:02:56) No, that would be truly amazing.
Terence Tao (02:02:59) The current models struggle a lot. I mean, so a version of this… The physicists have a dream of getting the AI to discover new laws of physics. The dream is you just feed it all this data, and this is here is a new patent that we didn’t see before, but it actually, even the current state of the art even struggles to discover old laws of physics from the data. Or if it does, there’s a big concern of contamination, that it did it only because it’s somewhere in this training, somehow new, Boyle’s Law or whatever you’re trying to reconstruct.
(02:03:35) Part of it is we don’t have the right type of training data for this. So for laws of physics, we don’t have a million different universes with a million different laws of nature. And a lot of what we are missing in math is actually the negative space of… So we have published things of things that people have been able to prove, and conjectures that end up being verified or we counter examples produced, but we don’t have data on things that were proposed and they’re kind of a good thing to try, but then people quickly realized that it was the wrong conjecture and then they said, “Oh, but we should actually change our claim to modify it in this way to actually make it more plausible.”
(02:04:16) There’s a trial and error process, which is a real integral part of human mathematical discovery, which we don’t record because it’s embarrassing. We make mistakes, and we only like to publish our wins. And the AI has no access to this data to train on. I sometimes joke that basically AI has to go through grad school and actually go to grad courses, do the assignments, go to office hours, make mistakes, get advice on how to correct the mistakes and learn from that.
Grigori Perelman
Lex Fridman (02:04:47) Let me ask you if I may, about Grigori Perelman, you mentioned that you try to be careful in your work and not let a problem completely consume you just you’ve really fall in love with the problem and it really cannot rest until you solve it. But you also hastened to add that sometimes this approach actually can be very successful, and an example you gave is Grigori Perelman who proved the Poincare Conjecture and did so by working alone for seven years, with basically little contact with the outside world. Can you explain this one Millennial Prize problem that’s been solved, Poincare Conjecture, and maybe speak to the journey that Grigori Perelman has been on?
Terence Tao (02:05:31) All right, so it’s a question about curved spaces. Earth is a good example. So think of Earth as a 2-D surface. Injecting around you could maybe be a torus with a hole in it or can have many holes and there are many different topologies, a priori, that a surface could have, even if you assume that it’s bounded and smooth and so forth. So we have figured out how to classify surfaces as a first approximation. Everything is determined by some called the genus, how many holes it has. So a sphere has genus zero, or a donut has genus one, and so forth. And one way you can tell the surfaces apart, probably the sphere has, which is called simply connected. If you take any closed loop on the sphere, like a big closed loop of rope, you can contract it to a point while staying on the surface. And the sphere has this property, but a torus doesn’t. If you’re on a torus and you take a rope that goes around say the outer diameter of torus, there’s no way… It can’t get through the hole. There’s no way to contract it to a point.
(02:06:25) So it turns out that the sphere is the only surface with this property of contractibility, up to continuous deformations of the sphere. So things that are what called topologically equivalent of the sphere. So Poincare asks the same question, higher dimensions, so it becomes hard to visualize because surface you can think of as embedded in three dimensions, but a curved three-space, we don’t have good intuition of four-dimensional space to live it. And there are also three-dimensional spaces that can’t even fit into four dimensions. You need five or six or higher. But anyway, mathematically you can still pose this question, that if you have a bounded three- dimensional space now, which also has this simply connected property that every loop can be contracted, can you turn it into a three-dimensional version of the sphere? And so this is the Poincare conjecture.
(02:07:09) Weirdly, in higher dimensions, four and five was actually easier. So it was solved first in higher dimensions, there’s somehow more room to do the deformation. It is easier to move things around to your sphere. But three was really hard. So people tried many approaches. There’s sort of commentary approaches where you chop up the surface into little triangles or tetrahedra and you just try to argue based on how the faces interact each other. There were algebraic approaches, there’s various algebraic objects like things called the fundamental group that you can attach to these homologies and co-homology and all these very fancy tools. They also didn’t quite work, but Richard Hamilton’s proposed a partial differential equations approach.
(02:07:52) So the problem is that… So you have this object, which is secret is a sphere, but it’s given to you in a weird way. So I think of a ball that’s being crumpled up and twisted, and it’s not obvious that it’s the ball, but if you have some sort of surface, which is a deformed sphere, you could for example, think that as a surface of a balloon, you could try to inflate it, you blow it up and naturally as you fill it with air, the wrinkles will sort of smooth out and it will turn into a nice round sphere, unless of course it was a torus or something, which case it would get stuck at some point.
(02:08:32) If you inflate a torus, there be a point in the middle when the inner ring shrinks to zero, you get a singularity and you can’t blow up any further and you can’t flow further. So he created this flow, which is now called Ricci Flow, which is a way of taking an arbitrary surface or space and smoothing it out to make it rounder and rounder to make it look like a sphere. And he wanted to show that either this process would give you a sphere, or it would create a singularity, actually very much like how PDEs either they have global regularity or finite and blow up. Basically, it’s almost exactly the same thing. It’s all connected. And he showed that for two dimensions, two-dimensional surfaces, if you start to simply connect it, no singularities ever formed, you never ran into trouble and you could flow and it will give you a sphere. So he got a new proof of the two-dimensional result.
Lex Fridman (02:09:20) But by the way, that’s a beautiful explanation of Ricci flow in its application in this context. How difficult is the mathematics here for the 2D case? Is it?
Terence Tao (02:09:27) Yeah, these are quite sophisticated equations on par with the Einstein equations. Slightly simpler, but they were considered hard nonlinear equations to solve, and there’s lots of special tricks in 2D that helped. But in 3D, the problem was that this equation was actually super critical. The same problem as [inaudible 02:09:48]. As you blow up, maybe the curvature could get concentrated in smaller and smaller regions, and it looked more and more nonlinear and things just looked worse and worse. And there could be all kinds of singularities that showed up. Some singularities, these things called neck pinches where the surface behaves like a barbell and it pinches at a point. Some singularities are simple enough that you can sort of see what to do next. You just make a snip and then you can turn one surface into two and e-bolt them separately. But there was the prospect that there’s some really nasty knotted singularities showed up that you couldn’t see how to resolve in any way, that you couldn’t do any surgery to. So you need to classify all the singularities, like what are all the possible ways that things can go wrong? So what Perelman did was, first of all, he made the problem, he turned the problem from a super critical problem to a critical problem. I said before about how the invention of energy, the Hamiltonian, really clarified Newtonian mechanics. So he introduced something which is now called Perelman’s reduced volume and Perelman’s entropy. He introduced new quantities, kind of like energy, that looked the same at every single scale, and turned the problem into a critical one where the non-linearities actually suddenly looked a lot less scary than they did before. And then he had to solve… He still had to analyze the singularities of this critical problem. And that itself was a problem similar to this wave map thing I worked on actually. So on the level of difficulty of that.
(02:11:18) So he managed to classify all the singularities of this problem, and show how to apply surgery to each of these. And through that was able to resolve the Poincare Conjecture. So quite a lot of really ambitious steps, and nothing that a large language model today, for example, could… At best, I could imagine a model proposing this idea as one of hundreds of different things to try, but the other 99 would be complete dead ends. But you’d only find out after months of work, he must have had some sense that this was the right track to pursue. It takes years to get from A to B.
Lex Fridman (02:11:54) So you’ve done, like you said, actually, you see even strictly mathematically, but more broadly in terms of the process, you’ve done similar-
Lex Fridman (02:12:01) In terms of the process, you’ve done similarly difficult things. What can you infer from the process he was going through because he was doing it alone? What are some low points in a process like that when you start to, you’ve mentioned hardship, AI doesn’t know when it’s failing. What happens to you, you’re sitting in your office when you realize the thing you did for the last few days, maybe weeks is a failure?
Terence Tao (02:12:27) Well, for me, I switch to a different problem. So I’m a fox, I’m not a hedgehog.
Lex Fridman (02:12:33) But you’re generally, that is a break that you can take, is to step away and look at a different problem?
Terence Tao (02:12:37) Yeah, yeah. You can modify the problem too. I mean, you can ask some cheater if there’s a specific thing that’s blocking you that some bad case keeps showing up, that for which your tool doesn’t work. You can just assume by fiat this bad case doesn’t occur. So you do some magical thinking, but strategically okay for the point to see if the rest of the argument goes through. If there’s multiple problems with your approach, then maybe you just give up. But if this is the only problem but everything else checks out, then it’s still worth fighting. So yeah, you have to do some forward reconnaissance sometimes too.
Lex Fridman (02:13:18) And that is sometimes productive to assume like, “Okay, we’ll figure it out eventually”?
Terence Tao (02:13:21) Oh, yeah, yeah. Sometimes actually it’s even productive to make mistakes. So one of, there was a project which actually we won some prizes for with four other people. We worked on this PDE problem. Again, actually this blow-off regularity type problem, and it was considered very hard. Jean Bourgiugnon was another Fields mathematist who worked on a special case of this, but he could not solve the general case. And we worked on this problem for two months and we thought we solved it. We had this cute argument that if everything fit, and we were excited, we were planning celebration, to all get together and have champagne or something, and we started writing it up. And one of us, not me actually, but another co-author said, “Oh, in this lemma here, we have to estimate these 13 terms that show up in this expansion.
(02:14:13) And we estimate 12 of them, but in our notes, I can’t find the estimation of the 13th. Can someone supply that?” And I said, “Sure, I’ll look at this.” Yeah, we didn’t cover it, we completely omitted this term and this term turned out to to be worse than the other 12 terms put together. In fact, we could not estimate this term. And we tried for a few more months and all different permutations, and there was always this one term that we could not control. And so this was very frustrating. But because we had already invested months and months of effort in this already, we stuck at this, which we tried increasingly desperate things and crazy things. And after two years we found an approach that was somewhat different, but quite a bit from our initial strategy, which actually didn’t generate these problematic terms and actually solve the problem.
(02:14:58) So we solve the problem after two years, but if we hadn’t had that initial false dawn of nearly solving a problem, we would’ve given up by month two or something and worked on an easier problem. If we had known it would take two years, not sure we would’ve started the project. Sometimes actually having the incorrect, it’s like Columbus struggling in the new world, they had an incorrect measurement of the size of the Earth. He thought he was going to find a new trade route to India, or at least that was how he sold it in his prospectus. I mean, it could be that he actually secretly knew, but.
Lex Fridman (02:15:31) Just from a psychological element, do you have emotional or self-doubt that just overwhelms you in moments like that? Because this stuff, it feels like math is so engrossing that it can break you when you invest so much of yourself in the problem and then it turns out wrong. You could start to… A similar way chess has broken some people.
Terence Tao (02:15:59) Yeah, I think different mathematicians have different levels of emotional investment in what they do. I mean, I think for some people it’s as a job, you have a problem and if it doesn’t work out, you go on the next one. So the fact that you can always move on to another problem, it reduces the emotional connection. I mean, there are cases, so there are certain problems that are what are called mathematical diseases where just latch onto that one problem and they spend years and years thinking about nothing but that one problem. And maybe their career suffers and so forth, but they say, “Okay, I’ve got this big win. Once I finish this problem, it will make up for all the years of lost opportunity.” I mean, occasionally it works, but I really don’t recommend it for people without the right fortitude.
(02:16:54) So I’ve never been super invested in any one problem. One thing that helps is that we don’t need to call our problems in advance. Well, when we do grant proposals, we say we will study this set of problems, but even though we don’t promise, definitely by five years I will supply a proof of all these things. You promise to make some progress or discover some interesting phenomena. And maybe you don’t solve the problem, but you find some related problem that you can say something new about and that’s a much more feasible task.
Twin Prime Conjecture
Lex Fridman (02:17:27) But I’m sure for you, there’s problems like this. You have made so much progress towards the hardest problems in the history of mathematics. So is there a problem that just haunts you? It sits there in the dark corners, twin prime conjecture, Riemann hypothesis, Goldbach’s conjecture?
Terence Tao (02:17:48) Twin prime, that sounds… Look, again, I mean, the problems like the Riemann hypothesis, those are so far out of reach.
Terence Tao (02:17:55) Yeah, there’s no even viable stretch. Even if I activate all the cheats that I know of in this book, there’s just still no way to get from A to B. I think it needs a breakthrough in another area of mathematics to happen first and for someone to recognize that it would a useful thing to transport into this problem.
Lex Fridman (02:18:18) So we should maybe step back for a little bit and just talk about prime numbers.
Lex Fridman (02:18:23) So they’re often referred to as the atoms of mathematics. Can you just speak to the structure that these atoms provide?
Terence Tao (02:18:31) So the natural numbers have two basic operations, addition, and multiplication. So if you want to generate the natural numbers, you can do one of two things. You can just start with one and add one to itself over and over again. And that generates you the natural numbers. So additively, they’re very easy to generate one, two, three, four, five. Or you can take the prime number if you want to generate multiplicatively, you can take all the prime numbers, two, three, five, seven and multiply them all together. Together that gives you all the natural numbers except maybe for one. So there are these two separate ways of thinking about the natural numbers from an additive point of view and a multiplicative point of view. And separately, they’re not so bad. So any question about that natural was it only was addition, it’s relatively easy to solve.
(02:19:11) And any question that only was multiplication is relatively easy to solve. But what has been frustrating is that you combine the two together and suddenly you get the extremely rich… I mean, we know that there are statements in number theory that are actually as undecidable. There are certain polynomials in some number of variables. Is there a solution in the natural numbers? And the answer depends on an undecidable statement whether the axioms of mathematics are consistent or not. But even the simplest problems that combine something more applicative such as the primes with something additives such as shifting by two, separately we understand both of them well, but if you ask when you shift the prime by two, can you get up? How often can you get another prime? It’s been amazingly hard to relate the two.
Lex Fridman (02:19:59) And we should say that the twin prime conjecture is just that, it pauses that there are infinitely many pairs of prime numbers that differ by two. Now the interesting thing is that you have been very successful at pushing forward the field in answering these complicated questions of this variety. Like you mentioned the Green-Tao Theorem. It proves that prime numbers contain arithmetic progressions of any length.
Lex Fridman (02:20:25) It’s just mind-boggling that you could prove something like that.
Terence Tao (02:20:27) Right. Yeah. So what we’ve realized because of this type of research is that different patterns have different levels of indestructibility. What makes the twin prime problem hard is that if you take all the primes in the world, three, five, seven, 11, and so forth, there are some twins in there, 11 and 13 is a twin prime, pair of twin primes and so forth. But you could easily, if you wanted to redact the primes to get rid of these twins. The twins, they’d show up and they’re infinitely many of them, but they’re actually reasonably sparse. There’s not, I mean, initially there’s quite a few, but once you got to the millions, the trillions, they become rarer and rarer. And you could actually just, if someone was given access to the database of primes, you just edit out a few primes here and there.
(02:21:15) They could make the twin prime conjecture false by just removing 0.01% of the primes or something, just well-chosen to do this. And so you could present a censored database of the primes, which passes all of these statistical tests of the primes. It obeys things like the polynomial theorem and other effects of the primes, but doesn’t contain any twin primes anymore. And this is a real obstacle to the twin-prime conjecture. It means that any proof strategy to actually find twin primes in the actual primes must fail when applied to these slightly edited primes. And so it must be some very subtle, delicate feature of the primes that you can’t just get from aggregate statistical analysis.
Terence Tao (02:22:02) Yeah. On the other hand, progressions has turned out to be much more robust. You can take the primes and you can eliminate 99% of the primes actually, and you can take any 90% you want. And it turns out, and another thing we proved is that you still get arithmetic progressions. Arithmetic progressions are much, they’re like cockroaches.
Lex Fridman (02:22:21) Of arbitrary length though.
Lex Fridman (02:22:25) So for people who don’t know, arithmetic progressions is a sequence of numbers that differ by some fixed amount.
Terence Tao (02:22:32) Yeah. But it’s again like, it’s an infinite monkey type phenomenon. For any fixed length of your set, you don’t get arbitrary length progressions. You only get quite short progressions.
Lex Fridman (02:22:40) But you’re saying twin-prime is not an infinite monkey phenomena. I mean, it’s a very subtle monkey. It’s still an infinite monkey phenomena.
Terence Tao (02:22:48) Right. Yeah. If the primes were really genuinely random, if the primes were generated by monkeys, then yes, in fact the infinite monkey theorem would-
Lex Fridman (02:22:56) Oh, but you’re saying that twin prime, you can’t use the same tools. It doesn’t appear random almost.
Terence Tao (02:23:05) Well, we don’t know. We believe the primes behave like a random set. And so the reason why we care about the twin prime conjecture is a test case for whether we can genuinely confidently say with 0% chance of error that the primes behave like a random set. Random versions of the primes we know contain twins at least with 100% probably, or probably tending to 100% as you go out further and further. So the primes, we believe that they’re random. The reason why arithmetic progressions are indestructible is that regardless of whether it looks random or looks structured like periodic, in both cases the arithmetic progressions appear, but for different reasons. And this is basically all the ways in which the thing was… There are many proofs of this sort of arithmetic progression-type theorems.
(02:23:54) And they’re all proven by some sort of dichotomy where your set is either structured or random and in both cases you can say something and then you put the two together. But in twin primes, if the primes are random, then you are happy, you win. If the primes are structured, they could be structured in a specific way that eliminates the twins. And we can’t rule out that one conspiracy.
Lex Fridman (02:24:16) And yet you were able to make, as I understand, progress on the K-tuple version
Terence Tao (02:24:21) Right. Yeah. So the one funny thing about conspiracies is that any one conspiracy theory is really hard to disprove. That if you believe the word is one by lizards is that here’s some evidence that it’s not [inaudible 02:24:32] work, that it was just talked about lizards. You might have encountered this kind of phenomena.
Terence Tao (02:24:41) There’s almost no way to definitively rule out a conspiracy. And the same is true in mathematics. A conspiracy that is solely devoted to eliminating twin primes, you would have to also infiltrate other areas of mathematics, but it could be made consistent at least as far as we know. But there’s a weird phenomenon that you can make one conspiracy rule out other conspiracies. So if the world is run by lizards, it can’t also be one by aliens, right?
Terence Tao (02:25:09) So one unreasonable thing is hard to disprove, but more than one, there are tools. So yeah, so for example, we know there’s infinitely many primes that no two, which… So there are infinite pairs of primes which differ by at most, 246 actually is the code.
Lex Fridman (02:25:26) Oh, so there’s like a bound on the-
Terence Tao (02:25:28) Right. So there’s twin primes, there’s a thing called cousin primes that differ by four. There’s a thing called sexy primes that differ by six.
Terence Tao (02:25:45) So you can make a conspiracy rule out one of these, but once you have 50 of them, it turns out that you can’t rule out all of them at once. It requires too much energy somehow in this conspiracy space.
Lex Fridman (02:25:55) How do you do the bound part? How do you develop a bound for the differented team deposit-
Lex Fridman (02:26:01) … that there’s an infinite number of?
Terence Tao (02:26:03) So it’s ultimately based on what’s called the pigeonhole principle. So the pigeonhole principle is a statement that if you have a number of pigeons, and they all have to go into pigeonholes and you have more pigeons than pigeonholes, then one of the pigeonholes has to have at least two pigeons in it. So there has to be two pigeons that are close together. So for instance, if you have 100 numbers and they all range from one to 1,000, two of them have to be at most 10 apart because you can divide up the numbers from one to 100 into 100 pigeonholes. Let’s say if you have 101 numbers. 101 numbers, then two of them have to be a distance less than 10 apart because two of them have to belong to the same pigeonhole. So it’s a basic feature of a basic principle in mathematics.
(02:26:45) So it doesn’t quite work with the primes already because if the primes get sparser and sparser as you go out, that there are fewer and fewer numbers are prime. But it turns out that there’s a way to assign weights to numbers. So there are numbers that are kind of almost prime, but they don’t have no factors at all other than themselves and one. But they have very few factors. And it turns out that we understand almost primes a lot better than primes. And so for example, it was known for a long time that there were twin almost primes. This has been worked out. So almost primes are something we can understand. So you can actually restrict the attention to a suitable set of almost primes. And whereas the primes are very sparse overall relative to the almost primes actually are much less sparse.
(02:27:33) You can set up a set of almost primes where the primes have density like say 1%. And that gives you a shot at proving by applying some sort of pigeonhole principle that there’s pairs of primes that are just only 100 apart. But in order to prove the twin prime conjecture, you need to get the density of primes, this having also up to a threshold of 50%. Once you get up to 50%, you will get twin primes. But unfortunately, there are barriers. We know that no matter what kind of good set of almost primes you pick, the density of primes can never get above 50%. It’s what the parity barrier and I would love to fight. So one of my long-term dreams is to find a way to breach that barrier because it would open up not only the twin prime conjecture but the Goldbach conjecture.
(02:28:12) And many other problems in number theory are currently blocked because our current techniques would require going beyond this theoretical parity barrier. It’s like going fast as the speed of light.
Lex Fridman (02:28:24) Yeah. So we should say a twin prime conjecture, one of the biggest problems in the history of mathematics. Goldbach conjecture also. They feel like next-door neighbors. Has there been days when you felt you saw the path?
Terence Tao (02:28:37) Oh, yeah. Yeah. Sometimes you try something and it works super well. You again, get the sense of mathematical smell we talked about earlier. You learn from experience when things are going too well because there are certain difficulties that you sort of have to encounter. I think the way of colleague might put it is that if you are on the streets of New York and you’re put in a blindfold and you’re put in a car and after some hours the blindfold is off and then you’re in Beijing. I mean that was too easy somehow. There was no ocean being crossed. Even if you don’t know exactly what was done, you’re suspecting that something wasn’t right.
Lex Fridman (02:29:21) But is that still in the back of your head? Do you return to the prime numbers every once in a while to see?
Terence Tao (02:29:29) Yeah, when I have nothing better to do, which is less and less. I get busy with so many things these days. But when I have free time and I’m not, I’m too frustrated to work on my real research projects, and I also don’t want to do my administrative stuff or I don’t want to do some errands for my family. I can play with these things for fun. And usually you get nowhere. You have to just say, “Okay, fine. Once again, nothing happened. I will move on.” Very occasionally one of these problems or actually solved. Well, sometimes as you say, you think you solved it and then you forward for maybe 15 minutes and then you think, “I should check this. This is too easy, too good to be true.” And it usually is.
Lex Fridman (02:30:11) What’s your gut say about when these problems would be solved, the twin prime and Goldbach?
Terence Tao (02:30:16) The twin prime, I’ll think we’ll-
Terence Tao (02:30:19) … keep getting more partial results. It does need at least one… This parity barrier is the biggest remaining obstacle. There are simpler versions of the conjecture where we are getting really close. So I think in 10 years we will have many more much closer results, we may not have the whole thing. So twin primes is somewhat close. The Riemann hypothesis I have no clue. It has happened by accident I think.
Lex Fridman (02:30:47) So the Riemann hypothesis is a kind of more general conjecture about the distribution of prime numbers, right?
Terence Tao (02:30:53) Right. Yeah. It’s states that sort of viewed multiplicatively, for questions only involving multiplication, no addition. The primes really do behave as randomly as you could hope. So there’s a phenomenon in probability called square root cancellation that if you want to poll, say America on some issue, and you ask one or two voters and you may have sampled a bad sample, and then you get a really imprecise measurement of the full average. But if you sample more and more people, the accuracy gets better and better. And it accuracy improves the square root of the number of people you sample. So if you sample 1, 000 people, you can get a 2 or 3% margin of error. So in the same sense, if you measure the primes in a certain multiplicative sense, there’s a certain type of statistic you can measure and it’s called the Riemann’s data function, and it fluctuates up and down.
(02:31:42) But in some sense, as you keep averaging more and more, if you sample more and more, the fluctuation should go down as if they were random. And there’s a very precise way to quantify that. And the Riemann hypothesis is a very elegant way that captures this. But as with many other ways in mathematics, we have very few tools to show that something really genuinely behaves really random. And this is actually not just a little bit random, but it’s asking that it behaves as random as it actually random set, this square root cancellation. And we know because of things related to the parity problem actually, that most of us’ usual techniques cannot hope to settle this question. The proof has to come out of left field. But what that is, no one has any serious proposal. And there’s various ways to solve. As I said, you can modify the primes a little bit and you can destroy the Riemann hypothesis.
(02:32:37) So it has to be very delicate. You can’t apply something that has huge margins of error. It has to just barely work. And there’s all these pitfalls that you dodge very adeptly.
Lex Fridman (02:32:50) The prime numbers is just fascinating.
Lex Fridman (02:32:53) What to you is most mysterious about the prime numbers?
Terence Tao (02:33:00) That’s a good question. Conjecturally, we have a good model of them. I mean, as I said, I mean they have certain patterns, like the primes are usually odd, for instance. But apart from there’s some obvious patterns, they behave very randomly and just assuming that they behave. So there’s something called the Kramer random model of the primes that after a certain point, primes just behave like a random set. And there’s various slight modifications to this model. But this has been a very good model. It matches the numerics. It tells us what to predict. I can tell you with complete certainty the twin prime conjecture is true. The random model gives overwhelming odds it is true, I just can’t prove it. Most of our mathematics is optimized for solving things with patterns in them.
(02:33:39) And the primes have this anti-pattern, as do almost everything really, but we can’t prove that. I guess it’s not mysterious that the primes be random because there’s no reason for them to have any kind of secret pattern. But what is mysterious is what is the mechanism that really forces the randomness to happen? This is just absent.
Collatz conjecture
Lex Fridman (02:34:04) Another incredibly surprisingly difficult problem is the Collatz conjecture.
Lex Fridman (02:34:10) Simple to state, beautiful to visualize in it simplicity and yet extremely difficult to solve. And yet you have been able to make progress. Paul Erdos said about the Collatz conjecture that mathematics may not be ready for such problems. Others have stated that it is an extraordinarily difficult problem, completely out of reach, this is in 2010, out of reach of present-day mathematics, and yet you have made some progress. Why is it so difficult to make? Can you actually even explain what it is, is the key to-
Terence Tao (02:34:41) Oh, yeah. So it’s a problem that you can explain. It helps with some visual aids. But yeah, so you take any natural number, like say 13, and you apply the following procedure to it. So if it’s even, you divide it by two, and if it’s odd, you multiply it by three and add one. So even numbers get smaller, odd numbers get bigger. So 13 would become 40 because 13 times 3 is 39, add one you get 40. So it’s a simple process. For odd numbers and even numbers, they’re both very easy operations. And then you put it together, it’s still reasonably simple. But then you ask what happens when you iterate it? You take the output that you just got and feed it back in. So 13 becomes 40, 40 is now even divide by two is 20. 20 is still even divide by 2, 10, five, and then five times three plus one is 16, and then eight, four, two, one. And then from one it goes one, four, two, one, four, two, one. It cycles forever. So this sequence I just described, 13, 40, 20, 10, so both, these are what is known hailstorm sequences, because there’s an oversimplified model of hailstorm formation which is not actually quite correct but it’s still somehow taught to high school students as a first approximation, is that a little nugget of ice gets an ice crystal forms and clouded. It goes up and down because of the wind. And sometimes when it’s cold it acquires a bit more mass and maybe it melts a little bit. And this process of going up and down creates this partially melted ice which eventually causes hailstorm, and eventually it falls down to the earth. So the conjecture is that no matter how high you start up, you take a number which is in the millions or billions, this process that goes up, if you are odd and down, it eventually comes down to Earth all the time.
Lex Fridman (02:36:23) No matter where you start with very simple algorithm, you end up at one. And you might climb for a while-
Terence Tao (02:36:29) Yeah. So yeah, if you plotted these sequences, they look like Brownian motion. They look like the stock market. They just go up and down in a seemingly random pattern. And in fact, usually that’s what happens, that if you plug in a random number, you can actually prove, at least initially, that it would look like a random walk. And that’s actually a random walk with a downward drift. It’s like if you are always gambling on a roulette at the casino with odds slightly weighted against you. So sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. But over in the long run, you lose a bit more than you win. And so normally your wallet will go to zero if you just keep playing over and over again.
Lex Fridman (02:37:07) So statistically it makes sense that we go here?
Terence Tao (02:37:11) Yes. So the result that I proved roughly speaking such that statistically like 99% of all inputs would drift down to maybe not all the way to one, but to be much, much smaller than what you started. So it’s like if I told you that if you go to a casino, most of the time you end up, if you keep playing it for long enough, you end up with a smaller amount in your wallet then when you started. That’s kind of like the result that I proved.
Lex Fridman (02:37:35) So why is that result… Can you continue down that thread to prove the full conjecture?
Terence Tao (02:37:42) Well, the problem is that I used arguments from probability theory, and there’s always this exceptional event. So in probability, we have this law of large numbers, which tells you things like if you play a casino with a game at a casino with a losing expectation over time you are guaranteed, almost surely with probability as close to 100% as you wish, you’re guaranteed to lose money. But there’s always this exceptional outlier. It is mathematically possible that even in the game is the odds are not in favor, you could just keep winning slightly more often than you lose. Very much like how in Navier-Stokes it could be, most of the time your waves can disperse, there could be just one outlier choice of initial conditions that would lead you to blow up. And there could be one outlier choice of a special number they stick in that shoots off infinity while all other numbers crash to Earth, crash to one.
(02:38:40) In fact, there’s some mathematicians who, Alex Kontorovich for instance, who’ve proposed that actually these collapse iterations are like these similar Automator. Actually, if you look at what they happen in binary, they do actually look a little bit like these game of life type patterns. And in analogy to how the game of life can create these massive self-replicating objects and so forth, possibly you could create some sort of heavier-than-air flying machine. A number which is actually encoding this machine, which is just whose job it’s to encode, is to create a version of something which is larger.
Lex Fridman (02:39:17) Heavier-than-air machine encoded in a number-
Terence Tao (02:39:26) Conway, so similar, in fact, that was more on inspirations for the Navier-Stokes project. Conway studied generalizations of the collapse problem where instead of multiplying by three and adding one or dividing by two, you have more complicated branching list. But instead of having two cases, maybe you have 17 cases and then you go up and down. And he showed that once your iteration gets complicated enough, you can actually encode Turing machines and you can actually make these problems undecidable and do things like this. In fact, he invented a programming language for these kind of fractional linear transformations. He called it frac-trat as a play on full-trat. And he showed that you can program, it was Turing-complete, you could make a program that if your number you insert in was encoded as a prime, it would sink to zero.
(02:40:13) It would go down, otherwise it would go up and things like that. So the general class of problems is really as complicated as all the mathematics.
Lex Fridman (02:40:23) Some of the mystery of the cellular automata that we talked about, having a mathematical framework to say anything about cellular automata, maybe this same kind of framework is required. Yeah, Goldbach’s conjecture.
Terence Tao (02:40:35) Yeah. If you want to do it, not statistically, but you really want 100% of all inputs to for the earth. Yeah. So what might be feasible is, yeah, statistically 99% go to one, but everything, that looks hard.
P = NP
Lex Fridman (02:40:50) What would you say is out of these within reach famous problems is the hardest problem we have today? Is it the Riemann hypothesis?
Terence Tao (02:40:59) Well, it’s up there. P equals NP is a good one because that’s a meta problem. If you solve that in the positive sense that you can find a P equals NP algorithm, potentially, this solves a lot of other problems as well.
Lex Fridman (02:41:14) And we should mention some of the conjectures we’ve been talking about. A lot of stuff is built on top of them now. There’s ripple effects. P equals NP has more ripple effects than basically any other-
Terence Tao (02:41:24) Right. If the Riemann hypothesis is disproven, that’d be a big mental shock to the number theorists. But it would have follow-on effects for cryptography, because a lot of cryptography uses number theory, uses number-theory constructions involving primes and so forth. And it relies very much on the intuition that number-theories are built over many, many years of what operations involving primes behave randomly and what ones don’t? And in particular, encryption methods are designed to turn text-written information on it into text, which is indistinguishable from random noise. And hence, we believe to be almost impossible to crack, at least mathematically. But if something has caught our beliefs as the Riemann hypothesis is wrong, it means that there are actual patterns of the primes that we’re not aware of.
(02:42:21) And if there’s one, there’s probably going to be more. And suddenly a lot of our crypto systems are in doubt.
Lex Fridman (02:42:27) Yeah. But then how do you then say stuff about the primes-
Terence Tao (02:42:43) Yeah. So more broadly, I’m just looking for more tools, more ways to show that things are random. How do you prove a conspiracy doesn’t happen?
Lex Fridman (02:42:49) Right. Is there any chance to you that P equals NP? Can you imagine a possible universe?
Terence Tao (02:42:57) It is possible. I mean, there’s various scenarios. I mean, there’s one where it is technically possible, but in fact it’s never actually implementable. The evidence is sort of slightly pushing in favor of no, that probably P is not a good NP.
Lex Fridman (02:43:11) I mean, it seems like it’s one of those cases similar to Riemann hypothesis. I think the evidence is leaning pretty heavily on the no.
Terence Tao (02:43:20) Certainly more on the no than on the yes. The funny thing about P equals NP is that we have also a lot more obstructions than we do for almost any other problem. So while there’s evidence, we also have a lot of results ruling out many, many types of approaches to the problem. This is the one thing that the computer science has actually been very good at. It’s actually saying that certain approaches cannot work. No-go theorems. It could be undecidable, yeah, we don’t know.
Fields Medal
Lex Fridman (02:43:43) There’s a funny story I read that when you won the Fields Medal, somebody from the internet wrote you and asked, what are you going to do now that you’ve won this prestigious award? And then you just quickly, very humbly said that a shiny metal is not going to solve any of the problem I’m currently working on, so I’m going to keep working on them. First of all, it’s funny to me that you would answer an email in that context, and second of all, it just shows your humility. But anyway, maybe you could speak to the Fields Medal, but it’s another way for me to ask about Gregorio Perlman. What do you think about him famously declining the Fields Medal and the Millennial Prize, which came with a $1 million of prize money. He stated that, “I’m not interested in money or fame. The prize is completely irrelevant for me. If the proof is correct, then no other recognition is needed.”
Terence Tao (02:44:40) Yeah, no, he’s somewhat of an outlier, even among mathematicians who tend to have somewhat idealistic views. I’ve never met him. I think I’d be interested to meet him one day, but I’ve never had the chance. I know people who met him. He’s always had strong views about certain things. I mean, it’s not like he was completely isolated from the math community. I mean, he would give talks and write papers and so forth, but at some point he just decided not.
Terence Tao (02:45:00) … He talks and write papers and so forth, but at some point he just decided not to engage with the rest of the community. He was disillusioned or something, I don’t know. And he decided to peace out and collect mushrooms in St. Petersburg or something. And that’s fine, you can do that. That’s another sort of flip side. A lot of our problems that we solve, some of them do have practical application and that’s great. But if you stop thinking about a problem, so he hasn’t published since in this field, but that’s fine. There’s many, many other people who’ve done so as well.
(02:45:39) Yeah. So I guess one thing I didn’t realize initially with the Fields Medal is that it sort of makes you part of the establishment. So most mathematicians, just career mathematicians, you just focus on publishing the next paper, maybe promote it one rank, and starting a few projects, may have taken some students or something. But then suddenly people want your opinion on things and you have to think a little bit about things that you might just foolishly say, because you know no one’s going to listen to you, it’s more important now.
Lex Fridman (02:46:11) Is it constraining to you? Are you able to still have fun and be a rebel and try crazy stuff and play with ideas?
Terence Tao (02:46:19) I have a lot less free time than I had previously, mostly by choice. I always say I have the option to sort of decline, so I decline a lot of things. I could decline even more or I could acquire a reputation of being so unreliable that people don’t even ask anymore.
Lex Fridman (02:46:38) I love the different algorithms here. This is great.
Terence Tao (02:46:41) It’s always an option, but there are things that I don’t spend as much time as I do as a postdoc, just working on one problem at a time or fooling around. I still do that a little bit. But yeah, as you advance in your career, the more soft skills, so math somehow front-loads all the technical skills to the early stages of your career. So as a postdoc, you publish or perish. You’re incentivized to basically focus on proving very technical theorems, so prove yourself as well as prove the algorithms. But then as you get more senior, you have to start mentoring and giving interviews and trying to shape direction of field both research-wise and sometimes you have to do various administrative things. And it’s kind the right social contract because you need to work in the trenches to see what can help mathematicians.
Lex Fridman (02:47:40) The other side of the establishment, the really positive thing is that you get to be a light that’s an inspiration to a lot of young mathematicians or young people that are just interested in mathematics. It’s like-
Lex Fridman (02:47:52) … just how the human mind works. This is where I would probably say that I like the Fields Medal, that it does inspire a lot of young people somehow. This is just how human brains work. At the same time, I also want to give sort of respect to somebody like Grigori Perlman, who is critical of awards. In his mind, those are his principles and any human that’s able for their principles to do the thing that most humans would not be able to do, it’s beautiful to see.
Terence Tao (02:48:25) Some recognition is necessary and important, but yeah, it’s also important to not let these things take over your life and only be concerned about getting the next big award or whatever. So again, you see these people try to only solve really big math problems and not work on things that are less sexy, if you wish, but actually still interesting and instructive. As you say, the way the human mind works, we understand things better when they’re attached to humans, and also if they’re attached to a small number of humans. The way our human mind is wired, we can comprehend the relationships between 10 or 20 people. But once you get beyond like 100 people, there’s a limit, I think there’s a name for it, beyond which it just becomes the other.
(02:49:18) And so you have to simplify the [inaudible 02:49:21] 99.9% of humanity becomes the other. Often these models are incorrect, and this causes all kinds of problems. So yeah, to humanize a subject, if you identify a small number of people and say these are representative people of a subject, role models, for example, that has some role, but it can also be too much of it can be harmful because I’ll be the first to say that my own career path is not that of a typical mathematician. The very accelerated education, I skipped a lot of classes. I think I always had very fortunate mentoring opportunities, and I think I was at the right place at the right time. Just because someone doesn’t have my trajectory, it doesn’t mean that they can’t be good mathematicians. They would be, but in a very different style, and we need people of a different style.
(02:50:16) And sometimes too much focus is given on the person who does the last step to complete a project in mathematics or elsewhere that’s really taken centuries or decades with lots and lots of, building on lots of previous work. But that’s a story that’s difficult to tell if you’re not an expert. It’s easier to just say one person did this one thing. It makes for a much simpler history.
Lex Fridman (02:50:40) I think on the whole, it is a hugely positive thing. To talk about Steve Jobs as a representative of Apple, when I personally know and of course everybody knows the incredible design, the incredible engineering teams, just the individual humans on those teams. They’re not a team. They’re individual humans on a team, and there’s a lot of brilliance there, but it’s just a nice shorthand, like π, Steve Jobs, π.
Terence Tao (02:51:08) Yeah, as a starting point, as a first approximation that’s how you-
Lex Fridman (02:51:13) And then read some biographies and then look into much deeper first approximation.
Lex Fridman (02:51:22) … he was a professor there. It’s a funny moment how history is just all interconnected, and at that time, he announced that he proved Fermat’s Last Theorem. What did you think, maybe looking back now with more context about that moment in math history?
Terence Tao (02:51:37) Yeah, so I was a graduate student at the time. I vaguely remember there was press attention and we all had the same, we had pigeonholes in the same mail room, so we all got mail and suddenly Andrew Wiles’ mailbox exploded to be overflowing.
Terence Tao (02:51:54) Yeah. We all talked about it at tea and so forth. We didn’t understand. Most of us sort of didn’t understand the proof. We understand high level details. In fact, there’s an ongoing project to formalize it in Lean. Kevin Buzzard is actually-
Lex Fridman (02:52:09) Yeah. Can we take that small tangent? How difficult is that ’cause as I understand the proof for Fermat’s Last Theorem has super complicated objects?
Lex Fridman (02:52:21) It’s really difficult to formalize now.
Terence Tao (02:52:22) Yeah, I guess. Yeah, you’re right. The objects that they use, you can define them. So they’ve been defined in Lean, so just defining what they are can be done. That’s really not trivial, but it’s been done. But there’s a lot of really basic facts about these objects that have taken decades to prove in all these different math papers. And so lots of these have to formalized as well. Kevin Buzzard’s goal, actually he has a five-year grant to formalize Fermat’s Last Theorem, and his aim is that he doesn’t think he will be able to get all the way down to the basic axioms, but he wants to formalize it to the point where the only things that he needs to rely on is black boxes, are things that were known by 1980 to a number of theorists at the time, and then some other person or some other work would have to be done to get from there.
(02:53:13) So it’s a different area of mathematics than the type of mathematics I’m used to. In analysis, which is my area, the objects we study are kind of much closer to the ground. I study things like prime numbers and functions and things that are within scope of a high school math education to at least define. But then, there’s this very advanced algebraic side of number theory where people have been building structures upon structures for quite a while, and it’s a very sturdy structure. It’s been very… At the base, at least it’s extremely well-developed with textbooks and so forth. But it does get to the point where if you haven’t taken these years of study and you want to ask about what is going on at level six of this tower, you have to spend quite a bit of time before they can even get to the point where you can see something that you recognize.
Lex Fridman (02:54:07) What inspires you about his journey that was similar, as we talked about, seven years mostly working in secret?
Terence Tao (02:54:15) Yeah, so it kind of fits with the romantic image I think people have of mathematicians to the extent that they think of them all as these kind of eccentric wizards or something. So that’s certainly kind of accentuated that perspective. It is a great achievement. His style of solving problems is so different from my own, which is great. We need people like that.
Lex Fridman (02:54:46) Can you speak to it, like in terms of you like the collaborative?
Terence Tao (02:54:49) I like moving on from a problem if it’s giving too much difficulty.
Terence Tao (02:54:55) But you need the people who have the tenacity and the fearlessness. I’ve collaborated with people like that where I want to give up ’cause the first approach that we tried didn’t work and the second one didn’t work. But they’re convinced and they have third, fourth, and the fifth, which works. And I’d have to eat my words, “Okay. I didn’t think this was going to work, but yes, you were right all along.”
Productivity
Lex Fridman (02:55:16) And we should say for people who don’t know, not only are you known for the brilliance of your work, but the incredible productivity, just the number of papers, which are all very high quality. So there’s something to be said about being able to jump from topic to topic.
Terence Tao (02:55:31) Yeah, it works for me. But there are also people who are very productive and they focus very deeply. I think everyone has to find their own workflow. One thing which is a shame in mathematics is that mathematics has a sort a one-size-fits-all approach to teaching mathematics, and so we have a certain curriculum and so forth. Maybe if you do math competitions or something, you get a slightly different experience. But I think many people, they don’t find their native math language until very late or usually too late. So they stop doing mathematics and they have a bad experience with a teacher who’s trying to teach them one way to do mathematics that they don’t like it.
(02:56:12) My theory is that humans don’t come, evolution has not given us a math center of a brain directly. We have a vision center and a language center and some other centers, which evolution has honed, but we don’t have an innate sense of mathematics. But our other centers are sophisticated enough that we can repurpose other areas of our brain to do mathematics. So some people have figured out how to use the visual center to do mathematics, and so they think things very visually when they do mathematics. Some people have repurposed their language center and they think very symbolically. Some people, if they are very competitive and they’re gaming, there’s a part of your brain that’s very good at solving puzzles and games, and that can be repurposed.
(02:57:02) But when I talk about the mathematicians, they don’t quite think that, I can tell that they’re using some other different styles of thinking, not disjoint, but they may prefer visual. I don’t actually prefer visual so much. I need lots of visual aids myself. Mathematics provides a common language, so we can still talk to each other even if we are thinking in different ways.
Lex Fridman (02:57:26) But you could tell there’s a different set of subsystems being used in the thinking process?
Terence Tao (02:57:32) Yeah, they take different paths. They’re very quick at things that I struggle with and vice versa, and yet they still get to the same goal.
Terence Tao (02:57:41) But the way we educate, unless you have a personalized tutor or something, education, sort of just financial skill has to be mass-produced, you have to teach the 30 kids. If they have 30 different styles, you can’t teach 30 different ways.
Advice for young people
Lex Fridman (02:57:55) On that topic, what advice would you give to students, young students who are struggling with math, but are interested in it and would like to get better? Is there something in this complicated educational context? What would you advise?
Terence Tao (02:58:10) Yeah, it’s a tricky problem. One nice thing is that there are now lots of sources for mathematical enrichment outside the classroom. So in my days, there were math competitions and there are also popular math books in the library. But now you have YouTube. There are forums just devoted to solving math puzzles. And math shows up in other places. For example, there are hobbyists who play poker for fun and they, for very specific reasons, are interested in very specific probability questions. And actually, there’s a community of amateur probabilists in poker, in chess, in baseball. There’s math all over the place, and I’m hoping actually with these new tools for Lean and so forth, that actually we can incorporate the broader public into math research projects. This almost doesn’t happen at all currently.
(02:59:13) So in the sciences, there’s some scope for citizen science, like astronomers. There are amateurs who would discover comets, and there’s biologists that people who could identify butterflies and so forth. And in math, there are a small number of activities where amateur mathematicians can discover new primes and so forth. But previously, because we had to verify every single contribution, most mathematical research projects, it would not help to have input from the general public. In fact, it’ll just be time-consuming because just error checking and everything. But one thing about these formalisation projects is that they are bringing in more people. So I’m sure there are high school students who’ve already contributed to some of these formalizing projects, who’ve contributed to mathlib. You don’t need to be a PhD holder to just work on one atomic thing.
Lex Fridman (03:00:03) There’s something about the formalisation here that also, as a very first step, opens it up to the programing community too. The people who are already comfortable with program. It seems like programing is somehow maybe just the feeling, but it feels more accessible to folks than math. Math is seen as this extreme, especially modern mathematics is seen as this extremely difficult-to-enter area, and programing is not. So that could be just an entry point.
Terence Tao (03:00:31) You can execute code and you can get results. You can print out the world pretty quickly. If programing was taught as an almost entirely theoretical subject where you’re just taught the computer science, the theory of functions and routines and so forth, and outside of some very specialized homework assignments, you’re not actually programing, like on the weekend for fun, they would be as considered as hard as math. So as I said, there are communities of non-mathematicians where they’re deploying math for some very specific purpose, like optimizing their poker game, and for them, then math becomes fun for them.
Lex Fridman (03:01:13) What advice would you give in general to young people how to pick a career, how to find themselves, what they could be good at?
Terence Tao (03:01:25) That’s a tough, tough, tough question. Yeah, so there’s a lot of uncertainty now in the world. There was this period after the war where, at least in the West, if you came from a good demographic, there was a very stable path to it, to a good career. You go to college, you get an education, you pick one profession and you stick to it. It’s becoming much more a thing of the past. So I think you just have to be adaptable and flexible. I think people will have to get skills that are transferable, like learning one specific programing language or one specific subject of mathematics or something. That itself is not a super transferable skill, but sort of knowing how to reason with abstract concepts or how to problem solve when things go wrong. Anyway, these are things which I think we will still need even as our tools get better, and you’ll be working with AI supports and so forth.
Lex Fridman (03:02:13) But actually you’re an interesting case study. You’re one of the great living mathematicians, and then you had a way of doing things, and then all of a sudden you start learning. First of all, you kept learning new fields, but you learned Lean. That’s not a non-trivial thing to learn. For a lot of people, that’s an extremely uncomfortable leap to take, right?
Terence Tao (03:02:42) First of all, I’ve always been interested in new ways to do mathematics. I feel like a lot of the ways we do things right now are inefficient. Many of my colleagues, who spend a lot of time doing very routine computations or doing things that other mathematicians would instantly know how to do and we don’t know how to do them, like how we search and get a quick response and so forth. So that’s why I’ve always been interested in exploring new workflows.
(03:03:09) About four or five years ago, I was on a committee where we had to ask for ideas for interesting workshops to run at a math institute. And at the time, Peter Scholze had just formalized one of his new theorems, and there were some other developments in computer-assisted proof that look quite interesting. And I said, “Oh, we should run a workshop on this. This would be a good idea.” And then I was a bit too enthusiastic about this idea, and so I got volun-told to actually run it. So I did with a bunch of other people, Kevin Buzzard and Jordan Ellenberg and a bunch of other people, and it wasn’t a nice success. We pulled together a bunch of mathematicians and computer scientists and other people, and we got up to speed on state of the yard, and it was really interesting developments that most mathematicians didn’t know was going on, lots of nice proofs of concept, just hints of what was going to happen. This was just before ChatGPT, but even then there was one talk about language models and the potential capability of those in the future.
(03:04:11) So that got me excited about the subject. So I started giving talks about this is something more of us should start looking at, now that I had arranged, run this conference. And then ChatGPT came out and suddenly AI was everywhere. And so I got interviewed a lot about this topic and in particular, the interaction between AI and [inaudible 03:04:33]. I said, “Yeah, they should be combined. This is perfect synergy to happen here.” And at some point I realized that I have to actually not just talk the talk, but walk the walk. I don’t work in machine learning and I don’t work in proof formalisation, and there’s a limit to how much I can just rely on authority and say, “I’m a mathematician. Just trust me when I say that this is going to change mathematics,” and I don’t do any of it myself. So I felt like I had to actually justify it.
(03:05:03) A lot of what I get into, actually, I don’t quite see in advance as how much time I’m going to spend on it, and it’s only after I’m sort of waist deep in a project that I realize, but at that point, I’m committed.
Lex Fridman (03:05:15) Well, that’s deeply admirable that you’re willing to go into the fray, be in some small way a beginner, or have some of the challenges that a beginner would, right?
Lex Fridman (03:05:27) New concepts, new ways of thinking, also sucking at a thing that others… I think in that talk, you could be a Fields Medal-winning mathematician and an undergrad knows something better than you.
Terence Tao (03:05:42) Yeah, I think mathematics inherently, mathematics is so huge these days that nobody knows all of modern mathematics. And inevitably, we make mistakes and you can’t cover up your mistakes with just bravado because people will ask for your proofs, and if you don’t have the proofs, you don’t have the proofs.
Terence Tao (03:06:04) Yeah, so it does keep us honest. It’s not a perfect panacea, but I think we do have more of a culture of admitting error because we’re forced to all the time.
The greatest mathematician of all time
Lex Fridman (03:06:17) Big ridiculous question. I’m sorry for it once again. Who is the greatest mathematician of all time, maybe one who’s no longer with us? Who are the candidates? Euler, Gauss, Newton, Ramanujan, Hilbert?
Terence Tao (03:06:32) So first of all, as mentioned before, there’s some time dependence.
Terence Tao (03:06:38) Yeah. Like if you plot cumulatively over time, for example, Euclid is one of the leading contenders, and then maybe some unnamed anonymous mathematicians before that, whoever came up with the concept of numbers.
Lex Fridman (03:06:53) Do mathematicians today still feel the impact of Hilbert, just-
Lex Fridman (03:06:58) Directly of what? Everything that’s happened in the 20th century?
Terence Tao (03:07:00) Yeah, Hilbert spaces, we have lots of things that are named after him of course. Just the arrangement of mathematics and just the introduction of certain concepts, 23 problems have been extremely influential.
Lex Fridman (03:07:12) There’s some strange power to the declaring which problems are hard to solve, the statement of the open problems.
Terence Tao (03:07:19) Yeah, this is bystander effect everywhere. If no one says you should do X, everyone just mills around waiting for somebody else to do something, and nothing gets done. And the one thing that actually you have to teach undergraduates in mathematics is that you should always try something. So you see a lot of paralysis in an undergraduate trying a math problem. If they recognize that there’s a certain technique that can be applied, they will try it. But there are problems which they see and none of their standard techniques obviously applies and the common reaction is than just paralysis, I don’t know what to do. I think there’s a quote from the Simpsons, “I’ve tried nothing and I’m all out of ideas.” So the next step then is to try anything no matter how stupid and in fact almost the stupider, the better, which technically is almost guaranteed to fail, but the way it fails is going to be instructive. It fails ’cause you are not at all taking into account this hypothesis. Oh, this hypothesis must be useful. That’s a clue.
Lex Fridman (03:08:26) I think you also suggested somewhere this fascinating approach, which really stuck with me as they’re using it, and it really works, I think you said it’s called structured procrastination.
Lex Fridman (03:08:37) It’s when you really don’t want to do a thing that you imagine a thing you don’t want to do more that’s worse than that and then in that way, you procrastinate by not doing the thing that’s worse. It’s a nice hack, it actually works.
Terence Tao (03:08:51) Yeah, yeah. With anything, psychology is really important. You talk to athletes like marathon runners and so forth and they talk about what’s the most important thing, is it the training regimen or the diet and so forth? So much of it is psychology, just tricking yourself to think that the problem is feasible so that you’re motivated to do it.
Lex Fridman (03:09:15) Is there something our human mind will never be able to comprehend?
Terence Tao (03:09:21) Well, as a mathematician, [inaudible 03:09:23]. There must be some large number that you can’t understand. That was the first thing that came to mind.
Lex Fridman (03:09:31) So that, but even broadly, is there something about our mind that we’re going to be limited even with the help of mathematics?
Terence Tao (03:09:41) Well, okay, how much augmentation are you willing. Like for example, if I didn’t even have a pen and paper, if I had no technology whatsoever, so I’ve not allowed blackboard, pen and paper-
Lex Fridman (03:09:52) You’re already much more limited than you would be.
Terence Tao (03:09:55) … Incredibly limited. Even language, the English language is a technology. It’s one that’s been very internalized.
Lex Fridman (03:10:03) So you’re right, the formulation of the problem is incorrect ’cause there really is no longer just a solo human already augmented in extremely complicated intricate ways, right?
Lex Fridman (03:10:18) So like a collective intelligence?
Terence Tao (03:10:20) Yes. Yeah, I guess, so humanity plural has much more intelligence in principle on its good days than the individual humans put together. It can have less, but yeah, so the mathematical community plural is incredibly super intelligent entity that no single human mathematician can come closer to replicating. You see it a little bit on these question analysis sites. So this math overflow, which is the math version of stackable flow, sometimes you get this very quick response to very difficult questions from the community, and it’s a pleasure to watch actually, as an expert.
Lex Fridman (03:11:01) I’m a fan spectator of that site, just seeing the brilliance of the different people, the depth and knowledge that people have. And the willingness to engage in the rigor and the nuance of the particular question, it’s pretty cool to watch. It’s almost like just fun to watch. What gives you hope about this whole thing we have going on with human civilization?
Terence Tao (03:11:25) I think the younger generation is always really creative and enthusiastic and inventive. It’s a pleasure working with young students. The progress of science tells us that the problems that used to be really difficult can become trivial to solve. Like navigation, just knowing where you work on the planet was this horrendous problem. People died or lost fortunes because they couldn’t navigate. And we have devices in our pockets that do this automatically for us, like it is a completely solved problem. So things that seem unfeasible for us now, could be maybe just homework exercises.
Lex Fridman (03:12:13) Yeah. One of the things I find really sad about the finiteness of life is that I won’t get to see all the cool things we create as a civilization because in the next 100 years, 200 years, just imagine showing up in 200 years.
Terence Tao (03:12:27) Yeah, well, already plenty has happened. If you could go back in time and talk to your teenage self or something, the internet and now AI, again, they’re getting to internalize and yeah, of course, AI can understand our voice and give reasonable slightly incorrect answers to any question. But yeah, this was mind-blowing even two years ago.
Lex Fridman (03:12:50) And in the moment, it’s hilarious to watch on the internet and so on, the drama, people take everything for granted very quickly, and then we humans seem to entertain ourselves with drama. Out of anything that’s created, somebody needs to take one opinion, another person needs to take an opposite opinion, argue with each other about it. But when you look at the arc of things, just even in the progress of robotics, just to take a step back and be like, “Wow, this is beautiful, that we humans are able to create this.”
Terence Tao (03:13:19) When the infrastructure and the culture is healthy, the community of humans can be so much more intelligent and mature and rational than the individuals within it.
Lex Fridman (03:13:31) Well, one place I can always count on rationality is the Comment section of your blog, which I’m a big fan of. There’s a lot of really smart people there. And thank you, of course, for putting those ideas out on the blog. And I can’t tell you how honored I am that you would spend your time with me today. I was looking forward to this for a long time. Terry, I’m a huge fan. You inspire me, you inspire millions of people. Thank you so much for time.
Terence Tao (03:13:58) Thank you. It was a pleasure.
Lex Fridman (03:14:00) Thanks for listening to this conversation with Terrence Tao. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description or at lexfridman.com/sponsors. And now, let me leave you with some words from Galileo Galilei, “Mathematics is a language with which God has written the universe.”
(03:14:21) Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
This is a transcript of Lex Fridman Podcast #471 with Sundar Pichai.
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Sundar Pichai (00:00:00) It was a five-year waiting list, and we got a rotary telephone. But it dramatically changed our lives. People would come to our house to make calls to their loved ones. I would have to go all the way to the hospital to get blood test records and it would take two hours to go and they would say, “Sorry, it’s not ready. Come back the next day.”, two hours to come back. And that became a five-minute thing. So as a kid, this light bulb went in my head, this power of technology to change people’s lives.
(00:00:32) We had no running water. It was a massive drought, so they would get water in these trucks, maybe eight buckets per household. So me and my brother, sometimes my mom, we would wait in line, get that and bring it back home. Many years later, we had running water and we had a water heater, and you could get hot water to take a shower. For me, everything was discreet like that.
(00:01:02) So, I’ve always had this thing, first-hand feeling of how technology can dramatically change your life, and the opportunity it brings. I think if p(doom) is actually high, at some point, all of humanity is aligned in making sure that’s not the case, and so we’ll actually make more progress against it, I think. So the irony is there is a self-modulating aspect there. I think if humanity collectively puts their mind to solving a problem, whatever it is, I think we can get there.
(00:01:38) Because of that, I think I’m optimistic on the p(doom) scenarios, but that doesn’t mean I think the underlying risk is actually pretty high. But I have a lot of faith in humanity rising up to meet that moment.
Lex Fridman (00:01:55) Take me through that experience, when there’s all these articles saying, ” You’re the wrong guy to lead Google through this. Google’s lost. It’s done. It’s over.”
Introduction
Lex Fridman (00:02:08) The following is a conversation with Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google and Alphabet on this, the Lex Fridman podcast.
Growing up in India
Lex Fridman (00:02:18) Your life story is inspiring to a lot of people. It’s inspiring to me. You grew up in India, whole family living in a humble two-room apartment, very little, almost no access to technology. And from those humble beginnings, you rose to lead a $2 trillion technology company.
(00:02:41) If you could travel back in time and told that, let’s say, twelve-year-old Sundar that you’re now leading one of the largest companies in human history, what do you think that young kid would say?
Sundar Pichai (00:02:51) I would’ve probably laughed it off. Probably too far-fetched to imagine or believe at that time.
Lex Fridman (00:03:00) You would have to explain the internet first.
Sundar Pichai (00:03:02) For sure. Computers to me, at that time, I was 12 in 1984, so probably… By then, I’d started reading about them, but I hadn’t seen one.
Lex Fridman (00:03:16) What was that place like? Take me to your childhood.
Sundar Pichai (00:03:19) I grew up in Chennai. It’s in south of India. It’s a beautiful, bustling city, lots of people, lots of energy, simple life. Definitely fond memories of playing cricket outside the home. We just used to play on the streets. All the neighborhood kids would come out and we would play until it got dark and we couldn’t play anymore, barefoot. Traffic would come. We would just stop the game. Everything would drive through and you would just continue playing, just to get the visual in your head.
(00:03:51) Pre computers, there a lot of free time, now that I think about it. Now you have to go and seek that quiet solitude or something. Newspapers, books is how I gained access to the world’s information at the time [inaudible 00:04:06].
(00:04:07) My grandfather was a big influence. He worked in the post office. He was so good with language. His English… His handwriting, till today, is the most beautiful handwriting I’ve ever seen. He would write so clearly. He was so articulate, and so he got me introduced into books. He loved politics. We could talk about anything.
(00:04:33) That was there in my family throughout. Lots of books, trashy books, good books, everything from Ayn Rand to books on philosophy to stupid crime novels. Books was a big part of my life, but the soul, it’s not surprising I ended up at Google, because Google’s mission always resonated deeply with me. This access to knowledge, I was hungry for it.
(00:04:58) But definitely have fond memories of my childhood. Access to knowledge was there, so that’s the wealth we had. Every aspect of technology I had to wait for a while. I’ve obviously spoken before about how long it took for us to get a phone, about five years, but it’s not the only thing.
Sundar Pichai (00:05:16) There was a five-year waiting list, and we got a rotary telephone. But it dramatically changed our lives. People would come to our house to make calls to their loved ones. I would have to go all the way to the hospital to get blood test records, and it would take two hours to go and they would say, “Sorry, it’s not ready. Come back the next day.”, two hours to come back. And that became a five-minute thing. So as a kid, this light bulb went in my head, this power of technology to change people’s lives.
(00:05:48) We had no running water. It was a massive drought, so they would get water in these trucks, maybe eight buckets per household. So me and my brother, sometimes my mom, we would wait in line, get that and bring it back home. Many years later, we had running water and we had a water heater, and you could get hot water to take a shower. For me, everything was discreet like that. So, I’ve always had this thing, first-hand feeling of how technology can dramatically change your life, and the opportunity it brings. That was a subliminal takeaway for me throughout growing up. I actually observed it and felt it.
(00:06:41) We had to convince my dad for a long time to get a VCR. Do you know what a VCR is?
Sundar Pichai (00:06:49) I’m trying to date you now. Because before that, you only had one TV channel. That’s it. So, you can watch movies or something like that, but this was by the time I was in 12th grade, we got a VCR. It was a Panasonic, which we had to go to some shop which had smuggled it in, I guess, and that’s where we bought a VCR. But then being able to record a World Cup football game or get bootleg videotapes and watch movies, all that.
(00:07:26) So I had these discrete memories growing up, and so always left me with the feeling of how getting access to technology drives that step change in your life.
Lex Fridman (00:07:38) I don’t think you’ll ever be able to equal the first time you get hot water.
Sundar Pichai (00:07:42) To have that convenience of going and opening a tap and have hot water come out? Yeah.
Lex Fridman (00:07:47) It’s interesting. We take for granted the progress we’ve made. If you look at human history, just those plots that look at GDP across 2,000 years, and you see that exponential growth to where most of the progress happened since the Industrial Revolution, and we just take for granted, we forget how far we’ve gone. So, our ability to understand how great we have it and also how quickly technology can improve is quite poor.
Sundar Pichai (00:08:17) Oh. I mean, it’s extraordinary. I go back to India now, the power of mobile. It’s mind blowing to see the progress through the arc of time. It’s phenomenal.
Advice for young people
Lex Fridman (00:08:27) What advice would you give to young folks listening to this all over the world, who look up to you and find your story inspiring, who want to be maybe the next Sundar Pichai, who want to start, create companies, build something that has a lot of impact in the world?
Sundar Pichai (00:08:45) You have a lot of luck along the way, but you obviously have to make smart choices, you’re thinking about what you want to do, your brain is telling you something. But when you do things, I think it’s important to get that… Listen to your heart and see whether you actually enjoy doing it. That feeling of if you love what you do, it’s so much easier, and you’re going to see the best version of yourself. It’s easier said than done. I think it’s tough to find things you love doing. But I think listening to your heart a bit more than your mind in terms of figuring out what you want to do, I think is one of the best things I would tell people.
(00:09:26) The second thing is trying to work with people who you feel… At various points in my life I’ve worked with people who I felt were better than me. You almost are sitting in a room talking to someone and they’re wow. you want that feeling a few times. Trying to get yourself in a position where you’re working with people who you feel are stretching your abilities is what helps you grow, I think, so putting yourself in uncomfortable situations. And I think often you’ll surprise yourself.
(00:10:01) So, I think being open minded enough to put yourself in those positions is maybe another thing I would say.
Styles of leadership
Lex Fridman (00:10:09) What lessons can we learn? Maybe from an outsider perspective, for me, looking at your story and gotten to know you a bit, you’re humble, you’re kind. Usually when I think of somebody who has had a journey like yours and climbs to the very top of leadership in a cutthroat world, they’re usually going to be a bit of an asshole. What wisdom are we supposed to draw from the fact that your general approach is of balance, of humility, of kindness, listening to everybody. What’s your secret?
Sundar Pichai (00:10:41) I do get angry. I do get frustrated. I have the same emotions all of us do in the context of work and everything. But a few things: I think I… Over time I figured out the best way to get the most out of people. You find mission-oriented people who are in the shared journey, who have this inner drive to excellence to do the best. You motivate people and you can achieve a lot that way. It often tends to work out that way.
(00:11:19) But have there been times I lose it? Yeah. Maybe less often than others, and maybe over the years less and less so, because I find it’s not needed to achieve what you need to do.
Lex Fridman (00:11:35) So, losing your shit has not been productive?
Sundar Pichai (00:11:38) Less often than not. I think people respond to that.
Sundar Pichai (00:11:41) They may do stuff to react to that. You actually want them to do the right thing. I’m a sports fan. In soccer, not football, people often talk about man management. Great coaches do. I think there is an element of that in our lives. How do you get the best out of the people you work with?
(00:12:08) At times, you’re working with people who are so committed to achieving, if they’ve done something wrong, they feel it more than you do, so you treat them differently than… Occasionally, there are people who you need to clearly let them know that wasn’t okay or whatever it is. But I’ve often found that not to be the case.
Lex Fridman (00:12:28) And sometimes the right words at the right time spoken firmly can reverberate through time.
Sundar Pichai (00:12:35) Also sometimes, the unspoken words. People can sometimes see that you’re unhappy without you saying it, and so sometimes the silence can deliver that message even more.
Sundar Pichai (00:13:05) It is. It’s been interesting. Because my son is a big Cristiano Ronaldo fan, and so we’ve had to watch El Clasicos together with that dynamic in there. I so admire CR7s. I mean, I’ve never seen an athlete more committed to that kind of excellence, and so he’s one of the all-time greats. But for me, Messi is it.
Lex Fridman (00:13:31) When I see Lionel Messi, you just are in awe that humans are able to achieve that level of greatness and genius and artistry. We’ll talk about AI, maybe robotics and this kind of stuff, that level of genius, I’m not sure you can possibly match by AI in a long time. It’s just an example of greatness. And you have that kind of greatness in other disciplines, but in sport, you get to visually see it, unlike anything else. Just the timing, the movement, there’s just genius.
Sundar Pichai (00:14:03) Had the chance to see him a couple of weeks ago. He played in San Jose against the Quakes, so I went to see the game. I had good seats, knew where he would play in the second half hopefully. And even at his age, just watching him when he gets the ball, that movement… You’re right, that special quality. It’s tough to describe, but you feel it when you see it, yeah.
Impact of AI in human history
Lex Fridman (00:14:27) He’s still got it. If we rank all the technological innovations throughout human history… Let’s go back maybe the history of human civilizations, 12,000 years ago, and you rank them by how much of a productivity multiplier they’ve been. We can go to electricity or the labor mechanization of the Industrial Revolution, or we can go back to the first Agricultural Revolution 12,000 years ago. In that long list of inventions, do you think AI… When history is written 1,000 years from now, do you think it has a chance to be the number one productivity multiplier?
Sundar Pichai (00:15:08) It’s a great question. Many years ago, I think it might’ve been 2017 or 2018, I said at the time, AI is the most profound technology humanity will ever work on. It’ll be more profound than fire or electricity. So, I have to back myself. I still think that’s the case.
(00:15:27) When you ask this question, I was thinking, do we have a recency bias? In sports, it’s very tempting to call the current person you’re seeing the greatest…
Sundar Pichai (00:15:36) … player. Is there a recency bias? I do think, from first principles I would argue, AI will be bigger than all of those. I didn’t live through those moments. Two years ago, I had to go through a surgery, and then I processed that. There was a point in time people didn’t have anesthesia when they went through these procedures. At that moment, I was like, that has got to be the greatest invention humanity has ever, ever done. We don’t know what it is to have lived through those times.
(00:16:12) Many of what you’re talking about were this general things, which pretty much affected everything: electricity or internet, et cetera. But I don’t think we’ve ever dealt with the technology both which is progressing so fast, becoming so capable it’s not clear what the ceiling is, and the main, unique…. It’s recursively self-improving, it’s capable of that.
(00:16:41) The fact it is the first technology will dramatically accelerate creation itself, like creating things, building new things, can improve and achieve things on its own, I think puts it in a different. So, I think the impact it’ll end up having will far surpass everything we’ve seen before. Obviously, with that comes a lot of important things to think and wrestle with, but I definitely think that’ll end up being the case.
Lex Fridman (00:17:15) Especially if it gets to the point of where we can achieve superhuman performance on the AI research itself. So, it’s a technology that may… It’s an open question, but it may be able to achieve a level to where the technology itself can create itself better than it could yesterday.
Sundar Pichai (00:17:33) It’s like the move 37 of Alpha research or whatever it is.
Sundar Pichai (00:17:39) You’re right, when it can do novel, self-directed research. Obviously, for a long time we’ll have hopefully always humans in the loop and all that stuff. These are complex questions to talk about. But yes, I think the underlying technology… I’ve said this, if you watched seeing AlphaGo start from scratch, be clueless, and become better through the course of a day, really, it hits you when you see that happen.
(00:18:13) Even the Veo 3 models, if you sample the models when they were 30% done and 60% done, and looked at what they were generating, and you see how it all comes together, I would say it’s inspiring, a little bit unsettling, as a human. So all of that is true, I think.
Lex Fridman (00:18:36) The interesting thing of the Industrial Revolution, electricity, like you mentioned. You can go back to, again, the first Agricultural Revolution, there’s what’s called the Neolithic package of the first Agricultural Revolution. It wasn’t just that the nomads settled down and started planting food, but all this other kinds of technology was born from that, and it’s included this package. So, it wasn’t one piece of technology.
(00:19:05) There’s these ripple effects, second- and third-order effects that happen, everything from something profound like pottery, it can store liquids and food, to something we take for granted: social hierarchies and political hierarchies. Early government was formed. Because it turns out if humans stop moving and have some surplus food, they get bored and they start coming up with interesting systems. And then trade emerges, which turns out to be a really profound thing, and like I said, government. Second- and third-order effects from that, including that package, is incredible and probably extremely difficult. If you ask one of the people in the nomadic tribes to predict that, it would be impossible, and it’s difficult to predict.
(00:19:56) But all that said, what do you think are some of the early things we might see in the, quote, unquote, “AI package”?
Sundar Pichai (00:20:07) Most of it probably we don’t know today, but the one thing which we can tangibly start seeing now is… Obviously with the coding progress, you got a sense of it. It’s going to be so easy to imagine… Thoughts in your head, translating that into things that exist. That’ll be part of the package. It’s going to empower almost all of humanity to express themselves.
(00:20:34) Maybe in the past you could have expressed with words, but you could build things into existence. Maybe not fully today, we are at the early stages of vibe coding. I’ve been amazed at what people have put out online with Veo 3. But it takes a bit of work, you have to stitch together a set of prompts. But all this is going to get better. The thing I always think: this is the worst it’ll ever be, at any given moment in time.
Lex Fridman (00:21:02) It’s interesting you went there as a first thought: an exponential increase of access to creativity.
Sundar Pichai (00:21:11) Software, creation… Are you creating a program, a piece of content to be shared with others, games down the line? All of that just becomes infinitely more possible.
Lex Fridman (00:21:25) I think the big thing is that it makes it accessible. It unlocks the cognitive capabilities of the entire 8 billion.
Sundar Pichai (00:21:33) I agree. Think about 40 years ago, maybe in the US there were five people who could do what you were doing.
Sundar Pichai (00:21:41) Go do a interview… But today, think about, with YouTube and other products, et cetera, how many more people are doing it. I think this is what technology does. When the internet created blogs, you heard from so many more people. But with AI, I think that number won’t be in the few hundreds of thousands. It’ll be tens of millions of people, maybe even a billion people putting out things into the world in a deeper way.
Lex Fridman (00:22:17) And I think it’ll change the landscape of creativity. And it makes a lot of people nervous. For example, whatever, Fox, MSNBC, CNN are really nervous about this podcast. You mean this dude in a suit could just do this? And YouTube and thousands of others, tens of thousands, millions of other creators can do the same kind of thing? That makes them nervous. And now you get a podcast from Notebook LM that’s about five to 10 times better than any podcast I’ve ever done.
Lex Fridman (00:22:47) I’m joking at this time, but maybe not. And that changes. You have to evolve. On the podcasting front, I’m a fan of podcasts much more than I am a fan of being a host or whatever. If there’s great podcasts that are both AIs, I’ll just stop doing this podcast. I’ll listen to that podcast. But you have to evolve and you have to change, and that makes people really nervous, I think. But it’s also really exciting future.
Sundar Pichai (00:23:11) The one thing I may say is, I do think in a world in which there are two AI, I think people value and choose… Just like in chess, you and I would never watch Stockfish 10 or whatever and AlphaGo play against each… It would be boring for us to watch. But Magnus Carlsen and Gukesh, that game would be much more fascinating to watch. So, it’s tough to say.
(00:23:36) One way to say is you’ll have a lot more content, and so you will be listening to AI-generated content because sometimes it’s efficient, et cetera. But the premium experiences you value might be a version of the human essence wherever it comes through. Going back to what we talked earlier about watching Messi dribble the ball, I don’t know, one day I’m sure a machine will dribble much better than Messi. But I don’t know whether it would evoke that same emotion in us, so I think that’ll be fascinating to see.
Lex Fridman (00:24:05) I think the element of podcasting or audio books that is about information gathering, that part might be removed, or that might be more efficiently and in a compelling way done by AI. But then it’ll be just nice to hear humans struggle with the information, contend with the information, try to internalize it, combine it with the complexity of our own emotions and consciousness and all that kind of stuff. But if you actually want to find out about a piece of history, you go to Gemini. If you want to see Lex struggle with that history, or other humans, you look at that.
(00:24:47) The point is, it’s going to continue to change the nature of how we discover information, how we consume the information, how we create that information, the same way that YouTube changed everything completely. It changed the news. And that’s something our society’s struggling with.
Sundar Pichai (00:25:04) YouTube enabled… You know this better than anyone else. It’s enabled so many creators. There is no doubt in me that we will enable more filmmakers than have ever been. You’re going to empower a lot more people. So I think there is an expansionary aspect of this, which is underestimated, I think. I think it’ll unleash human creativity in a way that hasn’t been seen before. It’s tough to internalize. The only way is if you brought someone from the ’50s or ’40s and just put them in front of YouTube, I think it would blow their mind away. Similarly, I think we would get blown away by what’s possible in a 10- to 20-year timeframe.
Lex Fridman (00:25:45) Do you think there’s a future? How many years out is it that, let’s say… Let’s put a marker on it… 50% of good content is generated by Veo 4, 5, 6?
Sundar Pichai (00:25:59) I think it depends on what it is for. Maybe if you look at movies today with CGI, there are great filmmakers. You still look at who the directors are and who use it. There are filmmakers who don’t use it at all. You value that. There are people who use it incredibly. Think about somebody like a James Cameron, like what he would do with these tools in his hands.
(00:26:24) But I think there’ll be a lot more content created. Just like writers today use Google Docs and not think about the fact that they’re using a tool like that, people will be using the future versions of these things. It won’t be a big deal at all to them.
Veo 3 and future of video
Lex Fridman (00:26:40) I’ve gotten a chance to get to know Darren Aronofsky. He’s been really leaning in and trying to figure out… It’s fun to watch a genius who came up before any of this was even remotely possible. He created Pi, one of my favorite movies. And from there, he just continued to create a really interesting variety of movies. And now he’s trying to see how can AI be used to create compelling films. You have people like that.
(00:27:07) You have people I’ve gotten just to know, edgier folks, they are AI firsts, like Dor Brothers. Both Aronofsky and Dor Brothers create at the edge of the Overton window society. They push, whether it’s sexuality or violence. It’s edgy, like artists are, but it’s still classy. It doesn’t cross that line. Whatever that line is. Hunter S. Thompson has this line, “The only way to find out where the edge, where the line is, is by crossing it.” And I think for artists, that’s true. That’s their purpose sometimes. Comedians and artists just cross that line.
(00:27:49) I wonder if you can comment on the weird place that it puts Google. Because Google’s line is probably different than some of these artists. How do you think about, specifically Veo and Flow, how to allow artists to do crazy shit, but also the responsibility for it not to be too crazy?
Sundar Pichai (00:28:15) It’s a great question. You mentioned Darren. He’s a clear visionary. Part of the reason we started working with him early on Veo is, he’s one of those people who’s able to see that future, get inspired by it, and showing the way for how creative people can express themselves with it. I think when it comes to allowing artistic free expression… It’s one of the most important values in a society, I think. Artists have always been the ones to push boundaries, expand the frontiers of thought.
(00:28:56) I think that’s going to be an important value we have, so I think we will provide tools and put it in the hands of artists for them to use and put out their work. Those APIs, I almost think of that as infrastructure. Just like when you provide electricity to people or something, you want them to use it, and you’re not thinking about the use cases on top of it.
Sundar Pichai (00:29:20) Yeah. So, I think that’s how. Obviously, there have to be some things. And society needs to decide at a fundamental level what’s okay, what’s not, will be responsible with it. But I do think when it comes to artistic free expression, I think that’s one of those values we should work hard to defend.
Lex Fridman (00:29:44) I wonder if you can comment on maybe earlier versions of Gemini were a little bit careful on the kind of things it’d be willing to answer. I just want to comment on I was really surprised, and pleasantly surprised, and enjoy the fact that Gemini 2.5 Pro is a lot less careful, in a good sense. Don’t ask me why, but I’ve been doing a lot of research on Genghis Khan and the Aztecs, so there’s a lot of violence there in that history. It’s a very violent history. I’ve also been doing a lot of research on World War I and World War II.
(00:30:19) Earlier versions of Gemini were very… Basically this sense, are you sure you want to learn about this. And now, it’s actually very factual, objective, talks about very difficult parts of human history, and does so with nuance and depth. It’s been really nice. But there’s a line there that I guess Google has to walk. And it’s also an engineering challenge how to do that at scale across all the weird queries that people ask.
(00:30:49) Can you just speak to that challenge? How do you allow Gemini to say… Again, forgive, pardon my French… crazy shit, but not too crazy?
Sundar Pichai (00:31:00) I think one of the good insights here has been as the models are getting more capable, the models are really good at this stuff. And so I think in some ways, maybe a year ago, the models weren’t fully there, so they would also do stupid things more often. So you’re trying to handle those edge cases, but then you make a mistake in how you handle those edge cases and it compounds. But I think with 2.5, what we particularly found is once the models cross a certain level of intelligence and sophistication, they are able to reason through these nuanced issues pretty well.
(00:31:37) And I think users really want that. You want as much access to the raw model as possible. I think it’s a great area to think about. Over time, we should allow more and more closer access to it. Obviously, let people custom prompts if they wanted to and experiment with it, et cetera. I think that’s an important direction.
(00:32:04) The first principles we want to think about it is, from a scientific standpoint, making sure the models… And I’m saying scientific in the sense of how you would approach math or physics or something like that. From first principles, having the models reason about the world, be nuanced, et cetera, from the ground up is the right way to build these things, not some subset of humans hard-coding things on top of it. I think it’s the direction we’ve been taking and I think you’ll see us continue to push in that direction.
Lex Fridman (00:32:43) I took extensive notes and I gave them to Gemini and said, “Can you ask a novel question that’s not in these notes?”, and it wrote… Gemini continues to really surprise me, really surprise me. It’s been really beautiful. It’s an incredible model. The question it generated was, “You…”, meaning Sundar, “… told the world Gemini is churning out 480 trillion tokens a month. What’s the most life-changing, five-word sentence hiding in that haystack?”. That’s a Gemini question.
(00:33:17) I don’t think you can answer that, but it woke me up to all of these tokens are providing little aha moments for people across the globe. So, that’s like learning. Those tokens are people are curious, they ask a question and they find something out, and it truly could be life-changing.
Sundar Pichai (00:33:37) Oh, it is. I had the same feeling about Search many, many years ago. These tokens per month has grown 50 times in the last 12 months.
Lex Fridman (00:33:49) Is that accurate, by the way? The 4…
Sundar Pichai (00:33:49) Yeah, it is. It is. It is accurate. I’m glad it got it right. But that number was 9.7 trillion tokens per month, 12 months ago. It’s gone up to 480. It’s a 50x…
Sundar Pichai (00:34:00) … right, it’s gone up to 480, it’s a 50 X increase. So there’s no limit to human curiosity. And I think it’s one of those moments, I don’t think it is there today, but maybe one day there’s a five word phrase which says what the actual universe is or something like that and something very meaningful, but I don’t think we are quite there yet.
Scaling laws
Lex Fridman (00:34:25) Do you think the scaling laws are holding strong on, there’s a lot of ways to describe the scaling laws for AI, but on the pre-training, on post-training fronts, so the flip side of that, do you anticipate AI progress will hit a wall? Is there a wall?
Sundar Pichai (00:34:42) It’s a cherished micro kitchen conversation, once in a while I have it, like when Demis is visiting or if Demis, Koray, Jeff, Norm, Sergey, a bunch of our people, we sit and talk about this. Look, we see a lot of headroom ahead, I think. We’ve been able to optimize and improve on all fronts, pre-training, post-training, test time compute, tool use, over time, making these more agentic. So getting these models to be more general world models in that direction.
(00:35:22) Like Veo 3, the physics understanding is dramatically better than what Veo 1 or something like that was. So you kind of see on all those dimensions, I feel progress is very obvious to see and I feel like there is significant headroom. More importantly, I’m fortunate to work with some of the best researchers on the planet, they think there is more headroom to be had here. And so I think we have an exciting trajectory ahead. It’s tougher to say… Each year I sit and say, okay, we are going to throw 10 X more compute over the course of next year at it and will we see progress? Sitting here today, I feel like the year ahead will have a lot of progress.
Lex Fridman (00:36:11) And do you feel any limitations like the bottlenecks, compute limited, data limited, idea limited, do you feel any of those limitations or is it full steam ahead on all fronts?
Sundar Pichai (00:36:24) I think it’s compute limited in this sense, part of the reason you’ve seen us do Flash, Nano Flash and Pro models, but not an Ultra model, it’s like for each generation we feel like we’ve been able to get the Pro model at, I don’t know, 80, 90% of Ultra’s capability, but Ultra would be a lot more slow and lot more expensive to serve. But what we’ve been able to do is to go to the next generation and make the next generation’s Pro as good as the previous generation’s Ultra, but be able to serve it in a way that it’s fast and you can use it and so on. So I do think scaling laws are working, but it’s tough to get, at any given time, the models we all use the most, this maybe a few months behind the maximum capability we can deliver because that won’t be the fastest, easiest to use, et cetera.
Lex Fridman (00:37:26) Also, that’s in terms of intelligence, it becomes harder and harder to measure ” performance” because you could argue Gemini Flash is much more impactful than Pro just because of the latency, it’s super intelligent already. I mean sometimes latency is maybe more important than intelligence, especially when the intelligence is just a little bit less and Flash not, it’s still incredibly smart model. And so you have to now start measuring impact and then it feels like benchmarks are less and less capable of capturing the intelligence of models, the effectiveness of models, the usefulness, the real world usefulness, of models.
AGI and ASI
(00:38:07) Another kitchen question. So lots of folks are talking about timelines for AGI or ASI, artificial super intelligence. So AGI loosely defined is basically human expert level at a lot of the main fields of pursuit for humans. And then ASI is what AGI becomes, presumably quickly, by being able to self-improve. So becoming far superior in intelligence across all these disciplines than humans. When do you think we’ll have AGI? It’s 2030 a possibility?
Sundar Pichai (00:38:41) There’s one other term we should throw in there. I don’t know who used it first, maybe Karpathy did, AJI. Have you heard AJI, the artificial jagged intelligence? Sometimes feels that way, both their progress and you see what they can do and then you can trivially find they make numerical errors or counting R’s in strawberry or something, which seems to trip up most models or whatever it is. So maybe we should throw that term in there. I feel like we are in the AJI phase where dramatic progress, some things don’t work well, but overall you’re seeing lots of progress.
(00:39:19) But if your question is will it happen by 2030? Look, we constantly move the line of what it means to be AGI. There are moments today like sitting in a Waymo in a San Francisco street with all the crowds and the people and work its way through, I see glimpses of it there. The car is sometimes impatient, trying to work its way using Astra like in Gemini Live or asking questions about the world.
Speaker 1 (00:39:49) What’s a skinny building doing in my neighborhood?
Speaker 2 (00:39:51) It’s a street light, not a building.
Sundar Pichai (00:39:54) You see glimpses, that’s why use the word AJI because then you see stuff which obviously we are far from AGI too, so you have both experiences simultaneously happening to you. I’ll answer your question, but I’ll also throw out this. I almost feel the term doesn’t matter, what I know is by 2030 there’ll be such dramatic progress. We’ll be dealing with the consequences of that progress, both the positive externalities and the negative externalities that come with it in a big way by 2030. So that I strongly feel.
(00:40:31) Whatever, we may be arguing about the term or maybe Gemini can answer what that moment is in time in 2030, but I think the progress will be dramatic. So that I believe in. Will the AI think it has reached AGI by 2030? I would say we will just fall short of that timeline, so I think it’ll take a bit longer. It’s amazing, in the early days of Google DeepMind in 2010, they talked about a 20-year timeframe to achieve AGI, which is kind of fascinating to see, but for me, the whole thing, seeing what Google Brain did in 2012, and when we acquired DeepMind in 2014, right close to where we are sitting, in 2012, Jeff Dean showed the image of when the neural networks could recognize a picture of a cat and identify it. This is the early versions of Brain.
(00:41:24) And so we all talked about couple decades. I don’t think we’ll quite get there by 2030, so my sense is it’s slightly after that, but I would stress it doesn’t matter what that definition is because you will have mind-blowing progress on many dimensions. Maybe AI can create videos. We have to figure out as a society, we need some system by which we all agree that this is AI-generated and we have to disclose it in a certain way because how do you distinguish reality otherwise?
Lex Fridman (00:41:58) Yeah, there’s so many interesting things you said. So first of all, just looking back at this recent, now feels like distant, history with Google Brain, I mean that was before TensorFlow, before TensorFlow was made public, and open-sourced. So the tooling matters too. Combined with GitHub, ability to share code. Then you have the ideas of a potential transformers and the diffusion now and then there might be a new idea that seems simple in retrospect but will change everything, and that could be the post-training, the inference time innovations.
(00:42:28) And I think shadcn Tweeted that Google is just one great UI from completely winning the AI race, meaning UI is a huge part of it. How that intelligence, I think the [inaudible 00:42:45] Project likes to talk about this right now, it’s an LLM, but when is it going to become a system where you’re talking about shipping systems versus shipping a particular model? Yeah, that matters too, how the system manifests itself and how it presents itself to the world. That really, really matters
Sundar Pichai (00:43:02) Oh, hugely so. There are simple UI innovations which have changed the world and I absolutely think so. We will see a lot more progress in the next couple of years as I think AI itself on a self-improving track for UI itself. Today, we are constraining the models, the models can’t quite express themselves in terms of the UI to people. But if you think about it, we’ve kind of boxed them in that way, but given these models can code, they should be able to write the best interfaces to express their ideas over time.
Lex Fridman (00:43:46) That is an incredible idea. So the API is already open, so you create a really nice agentic system that continuously improves the way you can be talking to an AI. But a lot of that is the interface. And then of course the incredible multimodal aspect of the interface that Google has been pushing.
Sundar Pichai (00:44:08) These models are natively multimodal. They can easily take content from any format, put it in any format, they can write a good user interface, they probably understand your preferences better over time. And so all this is the evolution ahead. And so that goes back to where we started the conversation, I think there’ll be dramatic evolutions in the years ahead.
P(doom)
Lex Fridman (00:44:34) Maybe one more kitchen question. This even further ridiculous concept of p(doom). So the philosophically minded folks in the AI community, think about the probability that AGI and then ASI might destroy all of human civilization. I would say my p(doom) is about 10%. Do you ever think about this kind of long-term threat of ASI and what would your p(doom) be?
Sundar Pichai (00:45:03) Look, I mean for sure. Look, I’ve both been very excited about AI, but I’ve always felt this is a technology you have to actively think about the risks and work very, very hard to harness it in a way that it all works out well. On the p(doom) question, look, it wouldn’t surprise you to say that’s probably another micro kitchen conversation that pops up once in a while. And given how powerful the technology is maybe stepping back, when you’re running a large organization, if you can align the incentives of the organization, you can achieve pretty much anything. If you can get people all marching towards a goal, in a very focused way, in a mission-driven way, you can pretty much achieve anything.
(00:45:50) But it’s very tough to organize all of humanity that way. But I think if p(doom) is actually high, at some point, all of humanity is aligned in making sure that’s not the case. And so we’ll actually make more progress against it, I think. So the irony is, so there is a self-modulating aspect there. I think if humanity collectively puts their mind to solving a problem, whatever, it is, I think we can get there. So because of that, I think I’m optimistic on the p(doom) scenarios, I think the underlying risk is actually pretty high, but I have a lot of faith in humanity kind of rising up to meet that moment.
Lex Fridman (00:46:39) That’s really, really, well put. I mean, as the threat becomes more concrete and real, humans do really come together and get their shit together. Well, the other thing I think people don’t often talk about is probability of doom without AI. So there’s all these other ways that humans can destroy themselves and it’s very possible, at least I believe so, that AI will help us become smarter, kinder to each other, more efficient. It’ll help more parts of the world flourish where it wouldn’t be less resource constrained, which is often the source of military conflict and tensions and so on. So we also have to load into that, what’s the [inaudible 00:47:22] without AI? p(doom) with AI, p(doom) without AI, because it’s very possible that AI will be the thing that saves us, saves human civilizations from all the other threats.
Sundar Pichai (00:47:32) I agree with you. I think it’s insightful. Look, I felt to make progress on some of the toughest problems would be good to have AI, like Pear, helping you, and so that resonates with me for sure. Yeah.
Lex Fridman (00:47:53) If NotebookLM was the same, like what I saw today with Beam, if it was compelling in the same kind of way, blew my mind. It was incredible. I didn’t think it’s possible. I didn’t think it’s [inaudible 00:48:06].
Sundar Pichai (00:48:05) Can you imagine the US president and the Chinese president being able to do something like Beam with the live Meet translation working well, so they’re both sitting and talking, make progress a bit more.
Lex Fridman (00:48:20) Just for people listening, we took a quick bathroom break and now we’re talking about the demo I did. We’ll probably post it somewhere somehow maybe here. I got a chance to experience Beam and it’s hard to describe in words how real it felt with just, what is it, six cameras. It’s incredible. It’s incredible.
Sundar Pichai (00:48:42) It’s one of the toughest products of, you can’t quite describe it to people. Even when we show it in slides, et cetera, you don’t know what it is. You have to kind of experience it.
Lex Fridman (00:48:54) On the world leaders front, on politics, geopolitics, there’s something really special again with studying World War II and how much could have been saved if Chamberlain met Stalin in person. And I sometimes also struggle explaining to people, articulating, why I believe meeting in person for world leaders is powerful. It just seems naive to say that, but there is something there in person and with Beam, I felt that same thing, and then I’m unable to explain, all I kept doing is what a child does. You look real. And I mean, I don’t know if that makes meetings more productive or so on, but it certainly makes them more, the same reason you want to show up to work versus remote sometimes, that human connection. I don’t know what that is, it’s hard to put into words. There’s something beautiful about great teams collaborating on a thing that’s not captured by the productivity of that team or by whatever on paper. Some of the most beautiful moments you experience in life is at work. Pursuing a difficult thing together for many months, there’s nothing like it.
Sundar Pichai (00:50:13) You’re in the trenches. And yeah, you do form bonds that way, for sure.
Lex Fridman (00:50:17) And to be able to do that somewhat remotely in that same personal touch, I don’t know, that’s a deeply fulfilling thing. I know a lot of people, I personally hate meetings because a significant percent of meetings when done poorly don’t serve a clear purpose. But that’s a meeting problem, that’s not a communication problem. If you could improve the communication for the meetings that are useful, that’s just incredible. So yeah, I was blown away by the great engineering behind it. And then we get to see what impact that has, that’s really interesting, but just incredible engineering. Really impressive.
Sundar Pichai (00:50:51) No, it is. And obviously we’ll work hard over the years to make it more and more accessible. But yeah, even on a personal front outside of work meetings, a grandmother who’s far away from her grandchild and being able to have that kind of an interaction, all that I think will end up being very… Nothing substitutes being in person but it’s not always possible. You could be a soldier deployed trying to talk to your loved one. So I think so that’s what inspires us.
Toughest leadership decisions
Lex Fridman (00:51:24) When you and I hung out last year and took a walk, I don’t think we talked about this, but I remember outside of that seeing dozens of articles written by analysts and experts and so on, that Sundar Pichai should step down because the perception was that Google was definitively losing the AI race, has lost its magic touch, in the rapidly evolving technological landscape,. And now a year later, it’s crazy. You showed this plot of all the things that were shipped over the past year. It’s incredible. And Gemini Pro is winning across many benchmarks and products as we sit here today. So take me through that experience when there’s all these articles saying you’re the wrong guy to lead Google through this. Google is lost, is done, it’s over, to today where Google is winning again. What were some low points during that time?
Sundar Pichai (00:52:27) Look, lots to unpack. Obviously, the main bet I made as a CEO was to really make sure the company was approaching everything in a AI-first way, really setting ourselves up to develop AGI responsibly, and make sure we are putting out products which embodies that, things that are very, very useful for people. So look, I knew even through moments like that last year, I had a good sense of what we were building internally. So I’d already made many important decisions bringing together teams of the caliber of Brain and DeepMind and setting up Google DeepMind. There were things like we made the decision to invest in TPUs 10 years ago, so we knew we were scaling up and building big models.
(00:53:33) Anytime you’re in a situation like that, a few aspects. I’m good at tuning out noise, separating signal from noise. Do you scuba dive? Have you…?
Sundar Pichai (00:53:47) It’s amazing. I’m not good at it, but I’ve done it a few times. But sometimes you jump in the ocean, it’s so choppy, but you go down one feet under, it’s the calmest thing in the entire universe. So there’s a version of that. Running Google, you may as well be coaching Barcelona or Real Madrid. You have a bad season. So there are aspects to that. But look, I’m good at tuning out the noise. I do watch out for signals. It’s important to separate the signal from the noise. So there are good people sometimes making good points outside, so you want to listen to it, you want to take that feedback in, but internally, you’re making a set of consequential decisions.
(00:54:39) As leaders, you’re making a lot of decisions, many of them are inconsequential it feels like, but over time you learn that most of the decisions you’re making on a day-to-day basis doesn’t matter. You have to make them and you’re making them just to keep things moving. But you have to make a few consequential decisions and we had set up the right teams, right leaders, we had world-class researchers, we were training Gemini.
(00:55:15) Internally, there are factors which were, for example, outside people may not have appreciated. I mean TPUs are amazing, but we had to ramp up TPUs too. That took time to scale actually having enough TPUs to get the compute needed. But I could see internally the trajectory we were on and I was so excited internally about the possible, to me this moment felt like one of the biggest opportunities ahead for us as a company that the opportunity space ahead or the next decade, next 20 years, is bigger than what has happened in the past. And I thought we were set up better than most companies in the world to go realize that vision.
Lex Fridman (00:56:04) I mean, you had to make some consequential, bold decisions like you mentioned the merger of DeepMind and Brain. Maybe it’s my perspective, just knowing humans, I’m sure there’s a lot of egos involved, it’s very difficult to merge teams, and I’m sure there were some hard decisions to be made. Can you take me through your process of how you think through that? Do you go to pull the trigger and make that decision? Maybe what were some painful points? How do you navigate those turbulent waters?
Sundar Pichai (00:56:36) Look, we were fortunate to have two world-class teams, but you’re right, it’s like somebody coming and telling to you, take Stanford and MIT and then put them together and create a great department, easier said than done. But we were fortunate in phenomenal teams, both had their strengths, they were run very differently. Brain was kind of a lot of diverse projects, bottoms up and out of it came a lot of important research breakthroughs. DeepMind at the time had a strong vision of how you want to build AGI, and so they were pursuing their direction. But I think through those moments, luckily tapping into, Jeff had expressed a desire to go back to more of a scientific individual contributor roots. He felt like management was taking up too much of his time. And Demis naturally I think was running DeepMind and was a natural choice there.
(00:57:41) But I think, you are right, it took us a while to bring the teams together, credit to Demis, Jeff, Koray, all the great people there. They worked super hard to combine the best of both worlds when you set up that team. A few sleepless nights here and there, as we put that thing together. We were patient in how we did it so that it works well for the long term and some of that in that moment. I think, yes, with things moving fast, I think you definitely felt the pressure, but I think we pulled off that transition well, and I think they’re obviously doing incredible work and there’s a lot more incredible things ahead coming from them.
Lex Fridman (00:58:26) Like we talked about, you have a very calm, even-tempered, respectful demeanor, during that time, whether it’s the merger or just dealing with the noise, were there times where frustration boiled over? Did you have to go a bit more intense on everybody than you usually would?
Sundar Pichai (00:58:48) Probably. You’re right. I think in the sense that there was a moment where we were all driving hard, but when you’re in the trenches working with passion, you’re going to have days, you disagree, you argue. But all that, I mean just part of the course of working intensely. And at the end of the day, all of us are doing what we are doing because the impact it can have, we are motivated by it.
(00:59:21) For many of us, this has been a long-term journey, and so it’s been super exciting. The positive moments far outweigh the kind of stressful moments. Just early this year, I had a chance to celebrate back-to-back over two days Nobel Prize for Geoff Hinton and the next day a Nobel Prize for Demis and John Jumper. You worked with people like that, all that is super inspiring.
Lex Fridman (00:59:48) Is there something like with you where you had to put your foot down maybe with less versus more or, I’m the CEO and we’re doing this?
Sundar Pichai (01:00:01) To my earlier point about consequential decisions you make, there are decisions you make, people can disagree pretty vehemently, but at some point you make a clear decision and you just ask people to commit. You can disagree, but it’s time to disagree and commit so that we can get moving. And whether it’s putting the foot down, it’s a natural part of what all of us have to do. And I think you can do that calmly and be very firm in the direction you are making the decision, and I think if you’re clear actually people over time respect that, if you can make decisions with clarity.
(01:00:43) I find it very effective in meetings where you’re making such decisions to hear everyone out. I think it’s important, when you can, to hear everyone out. Sometimes what you’re hearing actually influences how you think about, and you’re wrestling with it and making a decision. Sometimes you have a clear conviction and you state, so look, this is how I feel and this is my conviction, and you kind of place the bet and you move on.
Lex Fridman (01:01:13) Are there big decisions like that? I kind of intuitively assume the merger was the big one?
Sundar Pichai (01:01:19) I think that was a very important decision for the company to meet the moment. I think we had to make sure we were doing that and doing that well. I think that was a consequential decision. There were many other things. We set up a AI infrastructure team to really go meet the moment to scale up the compute we needed to and really brought teams from disparate parts of the company, created it to move forward.
(01:01:51) Getting people to work together physically, both in London with DeepMind at what we call Gradient Canopy, which is where the Mountain View Google DeepMind teams are. But one of my favorite moments is I routinely walk multiple times per week to the Gradient Canopy building where our top researchers are working on the models, Sergey is often there amongst them, just looking at getting an update on the model, seeing the loss curves, so all that. I think that cultural part of getting the teams together back with that energy, I think ended up playing a big role too.
AI mode vs Google Search
Lex Fridman (01:02:32) What about the decision to recently add AI mode? So Google Search is, as they say, the front page of the internet, it’s like a legendary minimalist thing with 10 blue links. When people think internet, they think that page and now you’re starting to mess with that. So the AI mode, which is a separate tab, and then integrating AI in the results, I’m sure there were some battles in meetings on that one.
Sundar Pichai (01:03:02) Look, in some ways when mobile came, people wanted answers to more questions, so we are kind of constantly evolving it, but you’re right, this moment, that evolution because the underlying technology is becoming much more capable. You can have AI give a lot of context, but one of our important design goals though, is when you come to Google Search, you are going to get a lot of context, but you’re going to go and find a lot of things out on the web. So that will be true in AI mode, in AI overviews, and so on.
(01:03:39) Pertaining to our earlier conversation, we’re still giving you access to links, but think of the AI as a layer, which is giving you context, summary, maybe in AI mode, you can have a dialogue with it back and forth on your journey, but through it all, you’re kind of learning what’s out there in the world. So those core principles don’t change. But I think AI mode allows us to push the… We have our best models there, models that are using search as a deep tool, really for every query you’re asking, kind of fanning out doing multiple searches, kind of assembling that knowledge in a way so that you can go and consume what you want to, and that’s how we think about it.
Lex Fridman (01:04:25) I got a chance to listen to a bunch of Elizabeth, Liz Reid, describe, there’s two things stood out to me that you mentioned. One thing is what you were talking about is the query fan-out, which I didn’t even think about before, is the powerful aspect of integrating a bunch of stuff on the web for you in one place, so that, yes, it provides that context so that you can decide which page to then go onto. The other really, really big thing speaks to the earlier in terms of productivity multiply that we’re talking about, that she mentioned, was language.
(01:05:01) So one of the things you don’t quite understand is through AI mode for non-English speakers, you make, let’s say, English language websites accessible in the reasoning process as you’ve tried to figure out what you’re looking for. Of course once you show up to a page, you can use a basic translate, but that process of figuring it out, if you empathize with a large part of the world that doesn’t speak English, their web is much smaller in that original language. And so it, again, unlocks that huge cognitive capacity there. You take for granted here with all the bloggers and the journalists writing about AI mode, you forget that this now unlocks because Gemini is really good at translation.
Sundar Pichai (01:05:54) Oh it is. I mean the multimodality, the translation, it’s ability to reason, we’re dramatically improving tool use, and putting that power in the flow of Search, look, I’m super excited with AI overviews. We’ve seen the product has gotten much better, we measured using all kinds of user metrics. It’s obviously driven strong growth of the product, and we’ve been testing AI mode. It’s now in the hands of millions of people and the early metrics are very encouraging. So look, I’m excited about this next chapter of Search.
Lex Fridman (01:06:36) For people who are not thinking through or aware of this, so there’s the 10 blue links with the AI overview on top, that provides a nice summarization, you can expand it.
Sundar Pichai (01:06:45) And you have sources and links now embedded.
Lex Fridman (01:06:49) Yeah, I believe, at least Liz said so, I actually didn’t notice it, but there’s ads in the AI overview also. I don’t think there’s ads in AI mode. When ads in AI mode, Sundar? When do you think…? Okay, we should say that in the nineties, I remember the animated GIFs, banner GIFs, that take you to some shady websites that have nothing to do with anything. AdSense revolutionized advertisement. It’s one of the greatest inventions in recent history because it allows us, for free, to have access to all these kinds of services. So ads fuel a lot of really powerful services. And at its best it’s showing you relevant ads, but also very importantly in a way that’s not super annoying, in a classy way. So when do you think it’s possible to add ads into AI mode and what does that look like from a classy, non-annoying perspective?
Sundar Pichai (01:07:52) Two things. Early part of AI mode, we’ll obviously focus more on the organic experience to make sure we are getting it right. I think the fundamental value of ads are-
Sundar Pichai (01:08:00) I think the fundamental value of ads are it enables access to deploy the services to billions of people. Second is ads are the reason we’ve always taken ads seriously is we view ads as commercial information, but it’s still information. So we bring the same quality metrics to it. I think with AI mode, to our earlier conversation about… I think AI itself will help us, over time, figure out the best way to do it. I think given we are giving context around everything, I think it’ll give us more opportunities to also explain, “Okay, here’s some commercial information.” Like today as a podcaster, you do it at certain spots, and you probably figure out what’s best in your podcast. I think so, there are aspects of that, but I think the underlying need of people value commercial information, businesses are trying to connect to users.
(01:08:58) All that doesn’t change in an AI moment, but look, we will rethink it. You’ve seen us in YouTube now do a mixture of subscription and ads. Like, obviously, we are now introducing subscription offerings across everything. So as part of that, the optimization point will end up being a different place as well.
Lex Fridman (01:09:23) Do you see a trajectory in the possible future where AI mode completely replaces the 10 blue links plus AI overview?
Sundar Pichai (01:09:32) Our current plan is AI mode is going to be there as a separate tab for people who really want to experience that, but it’s not yet at the level there, our main search pages. But as features work will keep migrating it to the main page, and so you can view it as a continuum. AI mode will offer you the bleeding edge experience, but things that work will keep overflowing to AI overviews and the main experience.
Lex Fridman (01:10:02) And the idea that AI mode will still take you to the web to human created web?
Sundar Pichai (01:10:06) Yes, that’s going to be a core design principle for us.
Lex Fridman (01:10:08) So really, if users decide, right? They drive this.
Lex Fridman (01:10:13) It’s just exciting. A little bit scary that it might change the internet because Google has been dominating with a very specific look and idea of what it means to have the internet. As you move to AI mode, I mean, it’s just a different experience. I think Liz was talking about it. I think you’ve mentioned that you ask more questions. You ask longer questions.
Sundar Pichai (01:10:41) Dramatically different types of questions.
Lex Fridman (01:10:43) Yeah, it actually fuels curiosity. I think, for me, I’ve been asking just a much larger number of questions of this black box machine, let’s say, whatever it is, and with the AI overview, it’s interesting because I still value the human… I still ultimately want to end up on the human created web, but like you said, the context really helps.
Sundar Pichai (01:11:09) It helps us deliver higher-quality referrals, right? Where people, they have much higher likelihood of finding what they’re looking for. They’re exploring. They’re curious. Their intent is getting satisfied more. So that’s what all our metrics show.
Lex Fridman (01:11:25) It makes the humans that create the web nervous. The journalists are getting nervous. They’ve already been nervous. Like we mentioned, CNN is nervous because the podcasts… It makes people nervous.
Sundar Pichai (01:11:37) Look, I think news and journalism will play an important role in the future. We are pretty committed to it, right? So I think making sure that ecosystem, in fact, I think we’ll be able to differentiate ourselves as a company over time because of our commitment there. So it’s something, I think, I definitely value a lot, and as we are designing, we’ll continue prioritizing approaches.
Lex Fridman (01:12:05) I’m sure for the people who want, they can have a fine-tuned AI model that’s clickbait hit pieces that will replace current journalism. That’s a shot of journalism. Forgive me. But I find that if you’re looking for really strong criticism of things, that Gemini is very good at providing that.
Lex Fridman (01:12:24) T’s better than anything they… For now, I mean. People are concerned that there would be bias that’s introduced that as the AI systems become more and more powerful, there’s incentive from sponsors to roll in and try to control the output of the AI models. But for now, the objective criticism that’s provided is way better than journalism.
(01:12:46) Of course, the argument is the journalists are still valuable, but then, I don’t know, the crowdsourced journalism that we get on the open internet is also very, very powerful.
Sundar Pichai (01:12:56) I feel like they’re all super important things. I think it’s good that you get a lot of crowdsourced information coming in, but I feel like there is real value for high-quality journalism, right? I think these are all complimentary, I think. Like, I view it as I find myself constantly seeking out, also, like, try to find objective reporting on things too. Sometimes you get more context from the crowd-funded sources you read online, but I think both end up playing a super important role.
Lex Fridman (01:13:32) So you’ve spoken a little about this. Dennis talked about this, it’s sort of the slice of the web that will increasingly become about providing information for agents. So we can think about as two layers of the web. One is for humans, one is for agents. Do you see the AI agents? Do you see the one that’s for AI agents growing over time? Do you there still being long-term 5, 10 years value for the human created for the purpose of human consumption web, or will it all be agents in the end?
Sundar Pichai (01:14:09) Today, not everyone does, but you go to a big retail store, you love walking the aisle, you love shopping or grocery store, picking out food, et cetera, but you’re also online shopping, and they’re delivering, right? So both are complementary, and that’s true for restaurants, et cetera. So I do feel like, over time, websites will also get better for humans. They will be better design. AI might actually design them better for humans.
(01:14:41) So I expect the web to get a lot richer, and more interesting, and better to use. At the same time, I think there’ll be an agentic web, which is also making a lot of progress, and you have to solve the business value and the incentives to make that work well, right? For people to participate in it.
(01:15:05) But I think both will coexist, and obviously, the agents may not need the same… Not may not. They won’t need the same design and the UI paradigms which humans need to interact with. But I think both will be there.
Google Chrome
Lex Fridman (01:15:23) I have to ask you about Chrome. I have to say, for me personally, Google Chrome is probably, I don’t know, I’d like to see where I would rank it, but in this temptation, and this is not a recency bias, although it might be a little bit, but I think it’s up there, top three, maybe the number one piece of software for me of all time. It’s incredible. It’s really incredible.
(01:15:46) The browser is our window to the web, and Chrome really continues for many years. But even initially, to push the innovation on that front when it was stale, and it continues to challenge. It continues to make it more performant, so efficient, and just innovate constantly, and the Chromium aspect of it.
(01:16:07) Anyway, you were one of the pioneers of Chrome pushing for it when it was an insane idea, probably one of the ideas that was criticized, and doubted, and so on. So can you tell me the story of what it took to push for Chrome? What was your vision?
Sundar Pichai (01:16:29) Look, it was such a dynamic time around 2004, 2005 with AJAX, the web suddenly becoming dynamic. In a matter of few months, Flickr, Gmail, Google Maps, all kind of came into existence, right? Like, the fact that you have an interactive dynamic web. The web was evolving from simple text pages, simple HTML to rich dynamic applications, but at the same time, you could see the browser was never meant for that world, right? Like, JavaScript execution was super slow.
(01:17:12) The browser was far away from being an operating system for that rich modern web which was coming into place. So that’s the opportunity we saw. It’s an amazing early team. I still remember the day we got a shell on WebKit running and how fast it was. We had the clear vision for building a browser. We wanted to bring Core OS principles into the browser, right?
(01:17:44) So we built a secure browser, sandbox. Each tab was its own. These things are common now, but at the time, it was pretty unique. We found an amazing team in Aarhus, Denmark with a leader who built the JavaScript VM, which at the time, was 25 times faster than any other JavaScript VM out there. By the way, you are right. We open-sourced it all and put it in Chromium too, but we really thought the web could work much better, much faster, and you could be much safer browsing the web, and the name Chrome came because literally felt people were… Or the Chrome of the browser was getting clunkier.
(01:18:32) We wanted to minimize it. So that was the origins of the project. Definitely, obviously, highly-biased person here talking about Chrome, but it’s the most fun I’ve had building a product from the ground up, and it was an extraordinary team. My co-founders on the project were terrific, so definite fond memories.
Lex Fridman (01:18:56) So for people who don’t know, Sundar, it’s probably fair to say, you’re the reason we have Chrome. Yes, I know there’s a lot of incredible engineers, but pushing for it inside a company that probably was opposing it because it’s a crazy idea, because as everybody probably knows, it’s incredibly difficult to build a browser.
Sundar Pichai (01:19:13) Yeah, look, Eric was the CEO at the time. I think it was less that he was supposed to it. He kind of first-hand knew what a crazy thing it is to go build a browser, and so he definitely was like, “This is…” There was a crazy aspect to actually wanting to go build a browser, but he was very supportive. Everyone… The founders were.
(01:19:36) I think once we started building something, and we could use it. And see how much better, from then on, you’re really tinkering with the product and making it better. It came to life pretty fast.
Lex Fridman (01:19:48) What wisdom do you draw from that? From pushing through on a crazy idea in the early days that ends up being revolutionary, for future crazy ideas like it?
Sundar Pichai (01:20:00) I mean, this is something Larry and Sergey have articulated clearly. I really internalized this early on, which is their whole feeling around working on moonshots as a way. When you work on something very ambitious, first of all, it attracts the best people, right? So that’s an advantage you get. Number two, because it’s so ambitious, you don’t have others working on something crazy. So you pretty much have the path to yourselves, right? It’s like Waymo and self-driving. Number three, even if you end up quite not accomplishing what you set out to do and you end up doing 60, 80% of it, it’ll end up being a terrific success. So that’s the advice I would give people, right? I think it’s just aiming for big ideas, has all these advantages, and it’s risky, but it also has all these advantages which people I don’t think fully internalize.
Lex Fridman (01:20:57) I mean, you mentioned one of the craziest biggest moonshots, which is Waymo. It’s when I first saw, over a decade ago, a Waymo vehicle, a Google self-driving car vehicle. For me, it was an aha moment for robotics. It made me fall in love with robotics even more than before. It gave me a glimpse into the future. So it’s incredible. I’m truly grateful for that project, for what it symbolizes, but it’s also a crazy moonshot.
(01:21:28) For a long time, Waymo’s been, like you mentioned with scuba diving, just not listening to anybody, just calmly improving the system better, and better, more testing, just expanding the operational domain more and more. First of all, congrats on the 10 million paid Robotaxi rides. What lessons do you take from Waymo about, like, the perseverance, the persistence on that project?
Sundar Pichai (01:21:57) Really proud of the progress we have had with Waymo. One of the things I think we were very committed to, the final 20% can look like… I mean, we always say, right? The first 80% is easy, the final 20% takes 80% of the time. I think we definitely were working through that phase with Waymo, but I was aware of that, but we knew we were at that stage.
(01:22:21) We knew while there were many other self-driving companies, we knew the technology gap was there. In fact, right at the moment, when others were doubting Waymo is when, I don’t know, made the decision to invest more in Waymo, right? Because so in some ways it’s counterintuitive, but I think, look, we’ve always been a deep technology company, and waymo is a version of kind of building a AI robot that works well, and so we get attracted to problems like that. The caliber of the teams there, phenomenal teams.
(01:23:03) So I know you followed the space super closely. I’m talking to someone who knows the space well, but it was very obvious, it’s going to get there, and there’s still more work to do, but it’s a good example where we always prioritized being ambitious and safety at the same time, right? Equally committed to both and pushed hard and couldn’t be more thrilled with how it’s working, how much people love the experience. This year, definitely, we’ve scaled up a lot, and we’ll continue scaling up in ’26.
Lex Fridman (01:23:42) That said, the competition is heating up. You’ve been friendly with Elon even though, technically, he’s a competitor, but you’ve been friendly with a lot of tech CEOs, in that way, just showing respect towards them and so on. What do you think about the Robotaxi efforts that Tesla is doing? Do you see it as competition? What do you think? Do you like the competition?
Sundar Pichai (01:24:02) We are one of the earliest and biggest backers of SpaceX as Google, right? So thrilled with what SpaceX is doing and fortunate to be investors as a company there, right? We don’t compete with Tesla directly. We are not making cars, et cetera, right? We are building L4, 5 autonomy. We are building a Waymo driver, which is general purpose and can be used in many settings.
(01:24:32) They’re obviously working on making Tesla self-driving too. I’ve just assumed it’s a de facto that Elon would succeed in whatever it does. So that is not something I question, but I think we are so far from… These spaces are such vast spaces. Like, I think about transportation, the opportunity space, the Waymo driver is a general purpose technology we can apply in many situations. So you have a vast green space in all future scenarios, I see Tesla doing well and Waymo doing well.
Lex Fridman (01:25:13) Like we mentioned with the Neolithic package, I think it’s very possible that in the “AI package” when the history is written, autonomous vehicles, self-driving cars is like the big thing that changes everything. Imagine, over a period of a decade or two, just the complete transition from manually-driven to autonomous, in ways we might not predict, it might change the way we move about the world completely.
(01:25:41) So the possibility of that and then the second and third order effects, as you’re seeing now with Tesla, very possibly, would see some… Internally, with Alphabet, maybe Waymo, maybe some of the Gemini robotics stuff, it might lead you into the other domains of robotics because we should remember that Waymo is a robot.
Lex Fridman (01:26:05) It just happens to be on four wheels. So you said that the next big thing, we can also throw that into AI package. The big aha moment might be in the space of robotics. What do you think that would look like?
Sundar Pichai (01:26:20) Demis and the Google DeepMind team is very focused on Gemini robotics, right?
Sundar Pichai (01:26:23) So we are definitely building the underlying model as well. So we have a lot of investments there, and I think we are also pretty cutting-edge in our research there. So we are definitely driving that direction. We obviously are thinking about applications in robotics. We’ll kind of work CSD. We are partnering with a few companies today, but it’s an area I would say stay tuned.
(01:26:48) We are yet to fully articulate our plans outside, but it’s an area we are definitely committed to driving a lot of progress. But I think AI ends up driving that massive progress on robotics. The field has been held back for a while. I mean, hardware has made extraordinary progress. The software had been the challenge, but with AI now and the generalized models we are building, we are building these models, getting them to work in the real world in a safe way, in a generalized way is the frontier we are pushing pretty hard on.
Lex Fridman (01:27:25) Well, it’s really nice to see the models and the different teams integrated to where all of them are pushing towards one world model that’s being built. So from all these different angles, multimodal, you’re ultimately trying to get Gemini. So the same thing that would make AI mode really effective in answering your questions, which requires a kind of world model is the same kind of thing that would help a robot be useful in the physical world. So everything’s aligned.
Sundar Pichai (01:27:54) That is what makes this moment so unique because running, a company for the first time, you can do one investment in a very deep horizontal way. On top of it, you can drive multiple businesses forward, right? That’s effectively what we are doing in Google and Alphabet, right?
Lex Fridman (01:28:14) Yeah, it’s all coming together. Like, it was planned ahead of time, but it’s not, of course. It’s all distributed. I mean, if Gmail, and Sheets, and all these other incredible services, I can sing Gmail praises for years. I mean, just this revolutionized email.
(01:28:28) But the moment you start to integrate AI Gemini into Gmail, I mean that’s the other thing, speaking of productivity multiplier, people complain about email, but that changed everything. Email, like the invention of email changed everything, and it has been ripe. There’s been a few folks trying to revolutionize email. Some of them on top of Gmail, but that’s like ripe for innovation, not just spam filtering, but you demoed a really nice demo of-
Lex Fridman (01:28:56) Personalized responses. At first, I felt really bad about that, but then I realized that there’s nothing wrong to feel bad about because the example you gave is when a friend asks you went to whatever hiking location, “Do you have any advice?” It just searches through all your information to give them good advice, and then you put the cherry on top, maybe some love, or whatever camaraderie, but the informational aspect, the knowledge transfer, it does for you.
Sundar Pichai (01:29:28) I think there’ll be important moments. Like, today, if you write a card in your own handwriting and send it to someone, that’s a special thing. Similarly, there’ll be a time, I mean, to your friends, maybe your friend wrote and said he’s not doing well or something, those are moments you want to save your times for writing something, reaching out. But like saying, “Give me all the details of the trip you took to me makes a lot of sense for AI assistant to help you.” Right?
(01:29:59) So I think both are important, but I think I’m excited about that direction.
Lex Fridman (01:30:04) Yeah, I think, ultimately, it gives more time for us humans to do the things we humans find meaningful. I think it scares a lot of people because we’re going to have to ask ourselves the hard question of what do we find meaningful? I’m sure there’s answers, and it’s the old question of the meaning of existence. As you have to try to figure that out, that might be ultimately parenting, or being creative in some domains of art or writing, and it challenges to…
(01:30:32) It’s a good question of to ask yourself like, “In my life, what is the thing that brings me most joy and fulfillment?” If I’m able to actually focus more time on that, that’s really powerful.
Sundar Pichai (01:30:45) I think that’s the holy grail. If you get this right, I think it allows more people to find that.
Programming
Lex Fridman (01:30:52) I have to ask you, on the programming front, AI is getting really good at programming. Gemini, both the agentic and just the LLM has been incredible, so a lot of programmers are really worried that they will lose their jobs. How worried should they be, and how should they adjust so they can be thriving in this new world, or more and more code is written by AI?
Sundar Pichai (01:31:16) I think a few things. Looking at Google, we’ve given various stats around 30% of code now uses AI- generated suggestions or whatever it is. But the most important metric, and we carefully measure it is, like, how much has our engineering velocity increased as a company due to AI, right? It’s tough measure, and we rigorously try to measure it, and our estimates are that number is now at 10%, right?
(01:31:51) Like, now, across the company, we’ve accomplished a 10% engineering velocity increase using AI, but we plan to hire more engineers next year, right? Because the opportunity space of what we can do is expanding too, right?
Sundar Pichai (01:32:15) So I think, hopefully, at least in the near to midterm, for many engineers, it frees up more and more of the… Even in engineering and coding, there are aspects which are so much fun. You’re designing. You’re architecting. You’re solving a problem. There’s a lot of grant work, which all goes hand in hand, but hopefully, it takes a lot of that away, makes it even more fun to code ,frees you up more time to create, problem, solve, brainstorm with your fellow colleagues and so on, right? So that’s the opportunity there.
(01:32:56) Second, I think it’ll attract, it’ll put the creative power in more people’s hands, which means people will create more. That means there’ll be more engineers doing more things. So it’s tough to fully predict, but I think in general, in this moment, it feels like people adopt these tools and be better programmers. Like, there are more people playing chess now than ever before, right? So it feels positive that way, to me, at least, speaking from within a Google context, is how I would talk to them about it.
Lex Fridman (01:33:36) Still. I just know anecdotally, a lot of great programmers are generating a lot of code, so their productivity, they’re not always using all the code. There’s still a lot of editing, but even for me, still programming as a side thing, I think I’m like 5x more productive. I think even for a large code base that’s touching a lot of users like Google’s does, I’m imagining, very soon, that productivity should be going up even more.
Sundar Pichai (01:34:08) No. The big unlock will be as we make the agentic capabilities much more robust, right? I think that’s what unlocks that next big wave. I think the 10% is a massive number. Like, if tomorrow, I showed up and said, “You can improve a large organization’s productivity by 10%,” when you have tens of thousands of engineers, that’s a phenomenal number, and that’s different than what other site or statistic saying like, “This percentage of code is now written by AI.”
Sundar Pichai (01:34:43) The actual productivity. Right? Engineering productivity, which is two different things, which is the more important metric, but I think it’ll get better, right? I think there’s no engineer who, tomorrow, if you magically became 2x more productive, it’s just going to create more things. You’re going to create more value-added things, and so I think you’ll find more satisfaction in your job, right?
Lex Fridman (01:35:08) There’s a lot of aspects. I mean, the actual Google code base might just improve because it’ll become more standardized, more easier for people to move about the code base because AI will help with that, and therefore, that will also allow the AI to understand the entire code base better, which makes the engineering aspect.
(01:35:25) So I’ve been using Cursor a lot as a way to program with Gemini and other models. One of its powerful things is it’s aware of the entire code base, and that allows you to ask questions of it. It allows the agents to move about that code base in a really powerful way. I mean, that’s a huge unlock.
Sundar Pichai (01:35:52) Yeah. I mean, think about once we can do all this in a much better, more robust way than where we are today.
Lex Fridman (01:35:57) I think in the end, everything will be written in JavaScript and run in Chrome. I think it’s all going to that direction. I mean, just for fun, Google has legendary coding interviews, like rigorous interviews for the engineers. Can you comment on how that has changed in the era of AI? It’s just such a weird… The whiteboard interview, I assume, is not allowed to have some prompts.
Sundar Pichai (01:36:24) Such a good question. Look, we are making sure we’ll introduce at least one round of in-person interviews for people just to make sure the fundamentals are there. I think they’ll end up being important, but it’s an equally important skill. Look, if you can use these tools to generate better code, I think that’s an asset. So overall, I think it’s a massive positive.
Lex Fridman (01:36:56) Vibe coding engineer, do you recommend people, students interested in programming still get an education in computer science in college education? What do you think?
Sundar Pichai (01:37:06) I do. If you have a passion for computer science, I would. Computer science is obviously a lot more than programming alone, so I would. I still don’t think I would change what you pursue. I think AI will horizontally allow impact every field. It’s pretty tough to predict in what ways. So any education in which you’re learning good first principles thinking, I think, is good education.
Android
Lex Fridman (01:37:37) You’ve revolutionized web browsing. You’ve revolutionized a lot of things over the years. Android changed the game. It’s an incredible operating system. We could talk for hours about Android. What does the future of Android look like? Is it possible it becomes more and more AI-centric, especially now you throw into the mix, Android XR, with being able to do augmented reality, and mixed reality, and virtual reality in the physical world?
Sundar Pichai (01:38:09) The best innovations in computing have come through a paradigm IO change, right? When with GUI, and then with a graphical user interface, and then with multi-touch in the context of mobile voice later on. Similarly, I feel like AR is that next paradigm. I think it was held back. Both the system integration challenges of making good AR is very, very hard.
(01:38:38) The second thing is you need AI to actually kind of… Otherwise, the IO is too complicated for you to have a natural seamless IO to that paradigm. AI ends up being super important, and so this is why Project Astra ends up being super critical for that Android XR world. But it is. I think when you use glasses and… Always been amazed at how useful these things are going to be.
(01:39:10) So look, I think it’s a real opportunity for Android. I think XR is one way it’ll kind of really come to life, but I think there’s an opportunity to rethink the mobile OS too, right? I think we’ve been kind of living in this paradigm of apps and shortcuts. All that won’t go away.
(01:39:28) But again, if you’re trying to get stuff done at an operating system level, it needs to be more agentic so that you can kind of describe what you want to do or it proactively understands what you’re trying to do, learns from how you’re doing things over and over again and kind of as adapting to you all. That is kind of like the unlock we need to go and do.
Lex Fridman (01:39:51) Well, the basic efficient minimalist UI. I’ve gotten a chance to try the glasses and they’re incredible. It’s the little stuff. It’s hard to put into words, but no latency. It just works. Even that little map demo, where you look down and you look up, and there’s a very smooth transition between the two, and very small amount of useful information is shown to you, enough not to distract from the world outside, but enough to provide a bit of context when you need it.
(01:40:25) In order to bring that into reality, you have to solve a lot of the OS problems to make sure it works when you’re integrating the AI into the whole thing. So everything you do launches an agent that answers some basic question.
Sundar Pichai (01:40:42) I love it. But I think we are, but it’s much closer to reality than other moonshots. We expect to have classes in the hands of developers later this year and in consumer science next year. So it’s an exciting time.
Lex Fridman (01:40:59) Yeah, well, extremely well-executed beam, all this stuff, because sometimes you don’t know. Like, somebody commented on a top comment on one of the demos of Beam. They said, “This will either be killed off in five weeks or revolutionize all meetings in five years.” And there’s very much, Google tries so many things, and sometimes, sadly, kills off very promising projects. But because there’s so many other things to focus on.
(01:41:27) I use so many Google products. Google Voice, I still use. I’m so glad that’s not being killed off. That’s still alive. Thank you, whoever is defending that, because it’s awesome, and it’s great. They keep innovating. I just want to list off, just as a big thank you, so Search, obviously, Google revolutionized, Chrome, and all of these could be multi-hour conversations. Gmail, I’ve been singing Gmail praises forever. Maps, incredible technological innovation on revolutionizing mapping. Android, like we talked about. YouTube, like we talked about. AdSense, Google Translate for the academic mind…
Lex Fridman (01:42:01) … Google Translate. For the academic mind Google Scholar is incredible. And also the scanning of the books. So making all the world’s knowledge accessible, even with that knowledge is a kind of niche thing, which Google Scholar is. And then obviously with DeepMind, with AlphaZero, AlphaFold and AlphaEvolve, I could talk forever about AlphaEvolve. That’s mind-blowing. All of that released. And as part of that set of things you’ve released in this year when those brilliant articles were written about Google is done. And like we talked about, pioneering self-driving cars and quantum computing, which could be another thing that is low-key that’s scuba diving its way to changing the world forever. So another pothead/ [inaudible 01:42:53] question. If you build AGI, what kind of question would you ask it? What would you want to talk about? Definitively, Google has created AGI that can basically answer any question. What topic are you going to? Where are you going?
Questions for AGI
Sundar Pichai (01:43:14) It’s a great question. Maybe it’s proactive by then and should tell me a few things I should know. But I think if I were to ask it, I think it’ll help us understand ourselves much better in a way that’ll surprise us, I think. And so maybe that, you already see people do it with the products, but in a AGI context, I think that’ll be pretty powerful.
Lex Fridman (01:43:43) On a personal level, or a general human nature?
Sundar Pichai (01:43:47) So you talking to AGI, I think there is some chance it’ll understand you in a very deep way, I think in a profound way, that’s a possibility. I think there is also the obvious thing of maybe it helps us understand the universe better in a way that expands the frontiers of our understanding of the world. That is something super exciting. But look, I really don’t know. I think I haven’t had access to something that powerful yet, but I think those are all possibilities.
Lex Fridman (01:44:29) I think on the personal level, asking questions about yourself, a sequence of questions like that about what makes me happy, I think we would be very surprised to learn through a sequence of questions and answers, we might explore some profound truths in a way that sometimes art reveals to us, great books reveal to us, great conversations with loved ones reveal. Things that are obvious in retrospect, but are nice when they’re said. But for me, number one question is about, how many alien civilizations are there? 100%.
Sundar Pichai (01:45:05) That’s going to be your first question?
Lex Fridman (01:45:06) Number one, how many living and dead alien civilizations? Maybe a bunch of follow-ups, like how close are they? Are they dangerous? If there’s no alien civilizations, why? Or if there’s no advanced alien civilizations, but bacteria-like life everywhere. Why? What is the barrier preventing it from getting to that? Is it because that when you get sufficiently intelligent, you end up destroying ourselves, because you need competition in order to develop an advanced civilization. And when you have competition it’s going to lead to military conflict, and conflict eventually kills everybody. I don’t know, I’m going to have that kind of discussion.
Sundar Pichai (01:45:47) Get an answer to the Fermi Paradox, yeah.
Lex Fridman (01:45:49) Exactly. And have a real discussion about it. I’m realizing now with your answer is a more productive answer, because I’m not sure what I’m going to do with that information. But maybe it speaks to the general human curiosity that Liz talked about, that we’re all just really curious, and making the world’s information accessible allows our curiosity to be satiated some with AI even more, we can be more and more curious and learn more about the world, about ourselves. And in so doing, I always wonder, I don’t know if you can comment on, is it possible to measure the, not the GDP productivity increase like we talked about, but maybe whatever that increases, the breadth and depth of human knowledge that Google has unlocked with Google Search, and now with AI mode with Gemini, it’s a difficult thing to measure.
Sundar Pichai (01:46:47) Many years ago there was, I think it was a MIT study, they just estimated the impact of Google Search. And they basically said it’s the equivalent to, on a per person basis, it’s few thousands of dollars per year per person, like is the value that got created per year. But yeah, it’s tough to capture these things, right? You kind of take it for granted as these things come, and the frontier keeps moving. But how do you measure the value of something like AlphaFold over time, and so on?
Lex Fridman (01:47:25) And also the increasing quality of life when you learn more. I have to say with some of the programming I do done by AI, for some reason I’m more excited to program.
Lex Fridman (01:47:36) And so the same with knowledge, with discovering things about the world, it makes you more excited to be alive. It makes you more curious, and the more curious, you are more exciting it is to live and experience the world. And it’s very hard to… I don’t know if that makes you more productive. Probably not nearly as much as it makes you happy to be alive. And that’s a hard thing to measure, the quality of life increases some of these things do. As AI continues to get better and better at everything that humans do, what do you think is the biggest thing that makes us humans special?
Future of humanity
Sundar Pichai (01:48:14) Look, I think [inaudible 01:48:19] the essence of humanity, there’s something about the consciousness we have, what makes us uniquely human, maybe the lines will blur over time. And it’s tough to articulate. But I hope, hopefully we live in a world where if you make resources more plentiful and make the world lesser of a zero-sum game over time, which it’s not, but in a resource constrained environment, people perceive it to be. And so I hope the values of what makes us uniquely human, empathy, kindness, all that surfaces more is the aspirational hope I have.
Lex Fridman (01:49:11) Yeah, it multiplies the compassion, but also the curiosity, just the banter, the debates we’ll have about the meaning of it all. And I also think in the scientific domains, all the incredible work that DeepMind is doing, I think we’ll still continue to play, to explore scientific questions, mathematical questions, physics questions, even as AI gets better and better at helping us solve some of the questions. Sometimes the question itself is a really difficult thing.
Sundar Pichai (01:49:43) Both the right new questions to ask and the answers to them and the self-discovery process, which it’ll drive, I think. Our early work with both co-scientist and AlphaEvolve, just super exciting to see.
Lex Fridman (01:49:59) What gives you hope about the future of human civilization.
Sundar Pichai (01:50:04) I’m an optimist, and I look at, if you were to say you take the journey of human civilization, we have relentlessly made the world better in many ways. At any given moment in time, there are big issues to work through it may look, but I always ask myself the question, would you have been born now or any other time in the past? I most often, not most often, almost always would rather be born now. And so that’s the extraordinary thing the human civilization has accomplished, and we’ve kind of constantly made the world a better place. And so something tells me as humanity, we always rise collectively to drive that frontier forward. So I expect it to be no different in the future.
Lex Fridman (01:51:00) I agree with you totally. I’m truly grateful to be alive in this moment. And I’m also really excited for the future, and the work you and the incredible teams here are doing is one of the big reasons I’m excited for the future. So thank you. Thank you for all the cool products you’ve built. And please don’t kill Google Voice. Thank you, Sundar.
Lex Fridman (01:51:22) Thank you for talking today. This was incredible. Thank you.
Sundar Pichai (01:51:24) Real pleasure. Appreciate it.
Demo: Google Beam
Lex Fridman (01:51:27) Thanks for listening to this conversation with Sundar Pichai. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description or at lexfridman.com/sponsors. Shortly before this conversation, I got a chance to get a couple of demos that frankly blew my mind. The engineering was really impressive. The first demo was Google Beam, and the second demo was the XR glasses. And some of it was caught on video, so I thought I would include here some of those video clips.
Andrew (01:52:03) I lead the Google Beam team and we’re going to be excited to show you a demo. We’re going to show you, I think, a glimpse of something new. So that’s the idea, a way to connect, a way to feel present from anywhere with anybody you care about. Here’s Google Beam. This is a development platform that we’ve built. So there’s a prototype here of Google Beam. There’s one right down the hallway. I’m going to go down and turn that on in a second. We’re going to experience it together. We’ll be back in the same room.
Andrew (01:52:37) Good to see you. This is Google Beam. We’re trying to make it feel like you and I could be anywhere in the world, but when these magic windows open, we’re back together. I see you exactly the same way you see me. It’s almost like we’re sitting at the table sharing a table together, I could learn from you, talk to you, share a meal with you, get to know you.
Lex Fridman (01:52:37) So you can feel the depth of this.
Andrew (01:53:15) You’re naturally attuned to seeing the world like this, and you just get used to seeing people this way, but literally from anywhere in the world with these magic screens.
Lex Fridman (01:53:25) Wow. So I saw demos of this, but they don’t come close to the experience of this. I think one of the top YouTube comments and one of the demos I saw was like, why would I want a high definition? I am trying to turn off the camera. But this actually, this feels like the camera has been turned off and we’re just in the same room together. This is really compelling.
Andrew (01:53:44) That’s right. I know it’s kind of late in the day too. So I brought you a snack just in case you’re a little bit hungry.
Lex Fridman (01:53:50) So can you push it farther and it just becomes-
Andrew (01:53:52) Yeah. Let’s try to float it between rooms. It kind of fades it from my room into yours.
Lex Fridman (01:53:56) And then you see my hand. The depth of my hand.
Andrew (01:54:11) So it’s kind of a magical experience.
Lex Fridman (01:54:12) Oh, this is really nice. How much does it cost?
Andrew (01:54:14) Yeah. We’ve got a lot of companies testing it. We just announced that we’re going to be bringing it to offices soon as a set of products. We’ve got some companies helping us build these screens. But eventually, I think this will be in almost every screen.
Lex Fridman (01:54:26) There’s nothing, I’m not wearing anything. Well, I’m wearing a suit and tie to clarify, I am wearing clothes. This is not CGI. But outside of that, cool. And the audio is really good. And you can see me in the same three-dimensional way.
Andrew (01:54:40) Yeah, the audio is spatialized. So if I’m talking from here, of course it sounds like I’m talking from here. If I move to the other side of the room to here.
Andrew (01:54:48) So these little subtle cues, these really matter to bring people together, all the non-verbals, all the emotion, the things that are lost today. Here it is. We put it back into the system.
Lex Fridman (01:54:57) You pulled this off. Holy shit, they pulled it off. And integrated into this, I saw the translation also. This is the-
Andrew (01:55:05) Yeah, we’ve got a bunch of things. Let me show you a couple kind of cool things. Let’s do a little bit of work together. Maybe we could critique one of your latest videos. So you and I work together, so of course we’re in the same room. But with the super power, I can bring other things in here with me. And it’s nice. It’s like we could sit together, we could watch something. We could work. We’ve shared meals as a team together in this system. But once you do the presence aspect of this, you want to bring some other superpowers to it.
Lex Fridman (01:55:35) Wow. And so you could do review code together.
Andrew (01:55:38) Yeah, yeah, exactly. I’ve got some slides I’m working on. Maybe you could help me with this. Keep your eyes on me for a second. I’ll slide back into the center. I didn’t really move. But the system just kind of puts us in the right spot and knows where we need to be.
Lex Fridman (01:55:50) Oh, so you just turned to your laptop, the system moves you, and then it does the overlay automatically.
Andrew (01:55:55) It kind of warps the room to put things in the spot that they need to be in.
Andrew (01:55:59) Everything has a place in the room, everything has a sense of presence or spatial consistency. And that makes it feel like we’re together with us and other things.
Lex Fridman (01:56:06) I should also say, you’re not just three-dimensional, it feels like you’re leaning out of the screen, you’re coming out of the screen. You’re not just in that world three-dimensionaly. Yeah, exactly. Holy crap. Move back to center. Okay.
Andrew (01:56:23) Let me tell you how this works. You probably already have the premise of it. But there’s two things, two really hard things that we put together. One is a AI video model. So there’s a set of cameras, you asked about those earlier. There’s six color cameras, just like webcams that we have today, taking video streams and feeding them into our AI model and turning that into a 3D video of you and I. It’s effectively a light field. So it’s kind of an interactive 3D video that you can see from any perspective. That’s transmitted over to the second thing. And that’s a light field display. And it’s happening bidirectionally. I see you and you see me both in our light field displays. These are effectively flat televisions or flat displays, but they have the sense of dimensionality, depth, size is correct. You can see shadows and lighting are correct. And everything’s correct from your vantage point.
(01:57:12) So if you move around ever so slightly, and I hold still, you see a different perspective here. You see kind of things that were included become revealed. You see shadows that move in the way they should move. All of that’s computed and generated using our AI video model for you. It’s based on your eye position, where does the right scene need to be placed in this light field display for you just to feel present?
Lex Fridman (01:57:33) It’s real time. No latency. I’m not seeing latency. You weren’t freezing up at all.
Andrew (01:57:37) No, no, I hope not. I think it’s you and I together real time. That’s what you need for real communication. And at a quality level it’s realistic.
Lex Fridman (01:57:46) This is awesome. Is it possible to do three people? Is that going to move that way also?
Andrew (01:57:50) Yeah. Let me kind of show you. So if she enters the room with us, you can see her, you can see me. And if we had more people, you eventually lose a sense of presence. You kind of shrink people down. You lose a sense of scale. So think of it as the window fits a certain number of people. If you want to fit a big group of people, you want the boardroom or the big room, you need a much wider window. If you want to see just grandma and the kids, you can do smaller windows. So everybody has a seat at the table, or everybody has a sense of where they belong, and there’s this sense of presence that’s obeyed. If you have too many people, you kind of go back to 2D metaphors that we’re used to people in tiles placed anywhere.
Lex Fridman (01:58:27) For the image I’m seeing, did you have to get scanned?
Andrew (01:58:29) I mean, I see you without being scanned. So it’s just so much easier if you don’t have to wear anything. You don’t have to pre-scan.
Andrew (01:58:34) And you just do it the way it’s supposed to happen without anybody having to learn anything or put anything on.
Lex Fridman (01:58:39) I thought you had to solve the scanning problem. But here you don’t. It’s just cameras. Its just vision.
Andrew (01:58:46) That’s right. It’s video. Yeah, we’re not trying to make an approximation of you, because everything you do every day matters. I cut myself shaving, I put on a pin. All the little kind of aspects of you, those just happen. We don’t have the time to scan or kind of capture those or dress avatars. We kind of appear as we appear. And so all that’s transmitted truthfully as it’s happening.
Speaker 3 (01:59:12) Nice to meet you. So as Max mentioned, got the eye glasses here. We start with the foundation of great glasses, something stylish, lightweight, wearable. Then we say how can we build great technology and experiences on top of that? One of the core tenets of the Android XR platform, this idea of a multimodal conversational device. See what you see, hear what you hear. So you’ve got a camera, you’ve got speakers, multiple microphones for speaker isolation. I’ll give you a chance to try these yourself. Yeah, sorry, I woke it up there.
Speaker 3 (01:59:45) So you probably see the time, the weather, calendar, appointments there. This is designed to be sort of your one-stop shop for quick glanceable information throughout the day. We want it to do something that’s easy to get what you need, and then go back to what you’re doing. So you can imagine turning on the display, getting that quick glance, and then continuing on your way. You can be fully conversational at this point. You can ask questions for example about the paintings. You can interrupt. You can ask follow up questions. And as I mentioned before, if you want to at any time, pause, you just tap there on the right.
Lex Fridman (02:00:12) Gemini, how much does this painting cost?
Gemini (02:00:15) The painting is called the Bridge of Louis-Philippe, 1875 by Armand Guillaumin. It appears to be a print. And it would be impossible to know it’s cost without finding the seller.
Lex Fridman (02:00:25) Okay, so this is fake. I understand. Why do humans pay so much money for paintings?
Gemini (02:00:30) People pay a lot for paintings, because of their artistic merits, the artist’s name and rarity, and for the appreciation you learn.
Speaker 3 (02:00:38) So a few more things that we want to show you just for sake of time, you go ahead and long press on the side again to salute Gemini there. There you go. Did you catch Google I/O last week by any chance?
Speaker 3 (02:00:48) So you might’ve seen on stage the Google Maps experience very briefly. I wanted to give you a chance to get a sense of what that feels like today. You can imagine you’re walking down the street. If you look up like you’re walking straight ahead, you get quick turn-by-turn directions, so you have a sense of what the next turn is like.
Speaker 3 (02:01:14) Yeah. So let’s say you’re coming out of Subway, getting out of a cab. You can just glance down at your feet. We have it set up to translate from Russian to English. I think I get to wear the glasses and you speak to me, if you don’t mind.
Lex Fridman (02:01:22) I can speak Russian. [foreign language 02:01:27].
Speaker 3 (02:01:29) I’m doing well. How are you doing?
Lex Fridman (02:01:30) I’m tempted to swear, tempted to say inappropriate things. [foreign language 02:01:37].
Speaker 3 (02:01:41) I see it transcribed in real time. And so obviously based on the different languages and the sequence of subjects and verbs, there’s a slight delay sometimes, but it’s really just like subtitles for the real world. Cool.
Biggest invention in human history
Lex Fridman (02:01:53) Thank you for this. All right, back to me. Hopefully watching videos of me having my mind blown like the apes in 2001 Space Odyssey playing with a monolith was somewhat interesting. Like I said, I was very impressed. And now I thought, if it’s okay, I could make a few additional comments about the episode and just in general. In this conversation with Sundar Pichai, I discussed the concept of the Neolithic package, which is the set of innovations that came along with the first agricultural revolution about 12,000 years ago, which included the formation of social hierarchies, the early primitive forms of government, labor specialization, domestication of plants and animals, early forms of trade, large scale cooperations of humans like that required to build, yes, the pyramids and temples like Göbekli Tepe. I think this may be the right way to actually talk about the inventions that changed human history, not just as a single invention, but as a kind of network of innovations and transformations that came along with it.
(02:03:02) And the productivity multiplier framework that I mentioned in the episode, I think is a nice way to try to concretize the impact of each of these inventions under consideration. And we have to remember that each node in the network of the fast follow-on inventions is in itself a productivity multiplier. Some are additive, some are multiplicative. So in some sense, the size of the network in the package is the thing that matters when you’re trying to rank the impact of inventions on human history. The easy picks for the period of biggest transformation, at least in sort of modern day discourse is the Industrial Revolution, or even in the 20th century, the computer or the internet. I think it’s because it’s easiest to intuit for modern day humans, the exponential impact of those technologies.
(02:04:05) But recently, I suppose this changes week to week, but I have been doing a lot of reading on ancient human history. So recently my pick for the number one invention would have to be the first agricultural revolution, the Neolithic package that led to the formation of human civilizations. That’s what enabled the scaling of the collective intelligence machine of humanity, and for us to become the early bootloader for the next 10,000 years of technological progress, which yes, includes AI and the tech that builds on top of AI. And of course it could be argued that the word invention doesn’t properly apply to the agricultural revolution. I think actually Yuval Noah Harari argues that it wasn’t the humans who were the inventors, but a handful of plant species, namely wheat, rice and potatoes. This is strictly a fair perspective. But I’m having fun, like I said, with this discussion. Here, I just think of the entire earth as a system that continuously transforms. And I’m using the term invention in that context. Asking the question of when was the biggest leap on the log-scale plot of human progress?
(02:05:23) Will AI, AGI, ASI eventually take the number one spot on this ranking? I think it has a very good chance to do so due again to the size of the network of inventions that will come along with it. I think we discuss in this podcast the kind of things that would be included in the so-called AI package. But I think there’s a lot more possibilities, including discussed in previous podcasts and many previous podcasts, including with Dario Amodei, talking on the biological innovation side, the science progress side. And this podcast, I think we talk about something that I’m particularly excited about in the near term, which is unlocking the cognitive capacity of the entire landscape of brains that is the human species. Making it more accessible through education and through machine translation, making information, knowledge and the rapid learning and innovation process accessible to more humans, to the entire 8 billion, if you will. So I do think language or machine translation apply to all the different methods that we use on the internet to discover knowledge is a big unlock. But there are a lot of other stuff in the so-called AI package like discussed with Dario, curing all major human diseases. He really focuses on that in The Machines of Love and Grace essay. I think there will be huge leaps in productivity for human programmers and semi-autonomous human programmers. So humans in the loop, but most of the programming is done by AI agents. And then moving that towards a superhuman AI researcher that’s doing the research that develops and programs the AI system in itself. I think there’ll be huge transformative effects from autonomous vehicles. These are the things that we maybe don’t immediately understand, or we understand from an economics perspective, but there will be a point when AI systems are able to interpret, understand, interact with the human world to sufficient degree to where many of the manually controlled human in the loop systems we rely on become fully autonomous.
(02:07:43) And I think mobility is such a big part of human civilization that there will be effects on that, that they’re not just economic, but are social cultural and so on. And there’s a lot more things I could talk about for a long time. So obviously the integration utilization of AI in the creation of art, film, music, I think the digitalization and automating basic functions of government, and then integrating AI into that process, thereby decreasing corruption and costs and increasing transparency and efficiency. I think we as humans, individual humans, will continue to transition further and further into cyborgs. There’s already a AI in the loop of the human condition, and that will become increasingly so as AI becomes more powerful. The thing I’m obviously really excited about is major breakthroughs in science, and not just on the medical front but on fundamental physics, which would then lead to energy breakthroughs increasing the chance that we become, we actually become a Kardashev Type I civilization. And then enabling us in so doing to do interstellar exploration of space and colonization of space. I think there also in the near term, much like with the industrial revolution that led to rapid specialization of skills of expertise, there might be a great sort of de-specialization. So as the AI system become superhuman experts at particular fields, there might be greater and greater value to being the integrator of AIs for humans to be generalists. And so the great value of the human mind will come from the generalists, not the specialists. That’s a real possibility that that changes the way we are about the world, that we want to know a little bit of a lot of things and move about the world in that way. That could have when passing a certain threshold, a complete shift in who we are as a collective intelligence as a human species. Also as an aside, when thinking about the invention that was the greatest in human history, again for a bit of fun, we have to remember that all of them build on top of each other.
(02:10:15) And so we need to look at the Delta, the step change on the, I would say impossibly to perfectly measure plot of exponential human progress. Really we can go back to the entire history of life on earth. And a previous podcast guest, Nick Lane does a great job of this in his book Life Ascending, listing these 10 major inventions throughout the evolution of life on earth like DNA, photosynthesis, complex cells, sex, movement, sight, all those kinds of things. I forget the full list that’s on there. But I think that’s so far from the human experience that my intuition about, let’s say productivity multipliers of those particular inventions completely breaks down, and a different framework is needed to understand the impact of these inventions of evolution. The origin of life on Earth, or even the Big Bang itself of course is the OG invention that set the stage for all the rest of it. And there are probably many more turtles under that which are yet to be discovered.
(02:11:26) So anyway, we live in interesting times, fellow humans. I do believe the set of positive trajectories for humanity outnumber the set of negative trajectories, but not by much. So let’s not mess this up. And now let me leave you with some words from French philosopher Jean de La Bruyère, “Out of difficulties, grow miracles.” Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.
This is a transcript of Lex Fridman Podcast #470 with James Holland.
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James Holland (00:00:00) And you see that manifest itself on D-Day, where you’ve got 6,939 vessels, of which there are 1,213 warships, 4,127 assault craft, 12,500 aircraft. 155,000 men landed, and dropped from the air, in a 24-hour period. It is phenomenal. It is absolutely phenomenal.
Introduction
Lex Fridman (00:00:27) The following is a conversation with James Holland, a historian specializing in World War II, who has written a lot of amazing books on the subject, especially covering the Western front, often providing fascinating details at multiple levels of analysis, including strategic, operational, tactical, technological, and of course the human side, the personal accounts from the war.
(00:00:51) He also co-hosts a great podcast on World War II, called We Have Ways of Making You Talk. This is the Lex Fridman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description, or at lex fridman.com/sponsors. And now, dear friends, here’s James Holland.
World War II
Lex Fridman (00:01:13) In Volume One of the War in the West, your book series on World War II, you write, “The Second World War witnessed the deaths of more than 60 million people, from over 60 different countries. Entire cities were laid waste, national borders were redrawn, and many millions more people found themselves displaced. Over the past couple of decades, many of those living in the Middle East, or parts of Africa and the Balkans, Afghanistan, and even the United States, may feel justifiably that these troubled times have already proved the most traumatic in their recent past. Yet globally, the Second World War was and remains the single biggest catastrophe of modern history. In terms of human drama, it is unrivaled. No other war has affected so many lives, in such a large number of countries.”
(00:02:11) So what to you makes World War II the biggest catastrophe in human drama in modern history, and maybe from a historian perspective, the most fascinating subject to study?
James Holland (00:02:22) The thing about World War II is, it really is truly global. It’s fought in deserts, it’s fought in the Arctic, it’s fought across oceans, it’s fought in the air, it’s in jungle, it’s in the hills, it is on the beaches, it’s also on the Russian steppe, and it’s also in Ukraine. So it’s that global nature of it.
(00:02:44) And I just think, where there’s war, there is always incredible human drama. And I think for most people, and certainly the true, in my case, you get drawn to the human drama of it. It’s that thought that, “Gosh, if I’d been 20 years old, how would I have dealt with it? Would I have been in the Army? Would I have been in the Air Force? Would I have been on a Royal Navy destroyer? Or how would I have coped with it? And how would I have dealt with that separation?”
(00:03:08) I mean, I’ve interviewed people who were away for four years. I remember talking to a tank man from Liverpool in England called Sam Bradshaw, and he went away for four years. And when he came home, he’d been twice wounded, he’d been very badly wounded in North Africa, and then, he was shot in the neck in Italy, eventually got home.
(00:03:27) And when he came home, his mother had turned gray. His little baby sister, who had been 13 when he left, was now a young woman. His old school had been destroyed by Luftwaffe bombs. He didn’t recognize the place. And do you know what he did? He joined up again, went back out of Europe, and was one of the first people in Belsen, so …
Lex Fridman (00:03:49) What was his justification for that, for joining right back?
James Holland (00:03:52) He just felt completely disconnected to home. He felt that the Gulf of time, his experiences had separated him from all the normalities of life, and he felt that the normalities of the life that he had known, before he’d gone away to war, had just been severed, in a really kind of cruel way, that he didn’t really feel he was able to confront at that particular point.
(00:04:14) But he decided to rejoin, couldn’t go back to the Third Royal Tank Regiment, so he went back to a different unit. It went from, kind of the Italian campaign, to the European theater. Didn’t see so much action at the end, but a lot of British troops, if you were in a certain division at a certain time, you know, ended up passing very close to Belsen, and you suddenly realize, “Okay, this was the right thing to do. We did have to get rid of Nazism. We did have to do this, because this is the consequence. It’s not just the oppression, it’s not just the secret police. It’s not just the expansionism of Nazism.” It is also the Holocaust, which hadn’t been given its name at that point, but you’re witnessing this kind of untold cruelty.
(00:04:55) And I’ve always sort of, I think a lot about Sam. I mean, he’s no longer with us, but he was one of the first people that I interviewed, and I interviewed him at great length. And I know you like a long interview, Lex, and I totally, totally get that. Because when you have a long interview, you really start getting to the nuts and bolts of it.
(00:05:14) One of the frustrations, for me, when I’m looking at oral histories of Second World War vets is usually, they’re kind of, they’re put on YouTube, or they’re put on a museum website. They’re 30 minutes, an hour, if you’re lucky, and you’re just scratching the surface. You never really get to know it, and you feel that they’re just repeating kind of stuff they’ve read in books themselves after the war, and stuff.
(00:05:36) I always leave, kind of feeling frustrated that I haven’t had a chance to kind of grill them on the kind of stuff that I would grill them on, if I was put in front of them.
Lex Fridman (00:05:44) So tank man. What was maybe the most epic, the most intense, or the most interesting story that he told you?
James Holland (00:05:53) Well, I do remember him telling me, funny enough, it’s not really about the conflict. I remember him telling me about the importance of letters, and there was this guy who, literally every few weeks, the post would arrive intermittently. There was no kind of regular post, so it was supposed to be regular, but it didn’t come around regularly. So you might suddenly, suddenly get a flurry of five, all in one day.
(00:06:18) But he said there was this guy in his tank, a member of a different tank troop. He was a good friend of his in the same squadron. You had British half squadrons for their armor, which is,Americans would have a company.
Lex Fridman (00:06:32) I should say that in your book, one of the wonderful things you do is you use the correct term in the language for the particular army involved, whether it’s the German or the British or the American.
James Holland (00:06:42) Well, that’s not to be pretentious. That’s really just because you’re dealing with so many numbers, and different units, and it can go over your head, and you can get sort of consumed by the detail, if you’re not careful. And as a reader, it can be very unsatisfying, because you just can’t keep pace with everything.
(00:06:58) So one of the things about writing in the vernacular German, or in the American spelling, or more, rather than our mauer, as we Brits would spell it, is it just immediately tells the reader, “Okay, this is American, yeah, okay, I’ve got that. Or, this is German, I’ve got that, or Italian, or whatever it might be.”
(00:07:17) But yeah, to go back to Sam, so Sam, there was this guy in his squadron, and he’d get his letters from his girlfriend, his wife, and he said, “It was like a soap opera.” He said, “We all just waited for his letters to come in, so we could find out whether his daughter had got to school or something, won the swimming contest, or whatever it was.” The sort of details of this day to day kind of banal life was just absolute catnip to these guys. They absolutely loved it.
(00:07:49) And then, the letter arrived, the Dear John letter saying, “Sorry, I’ve found someone else, and it’s over.” And his friend was just absolutely devastated. It was the only thing that was keeping him going, this sense of this sort of continuity of home, this sort of foundation of his life back at home.
(00:08:12) Sam said he could see he was in a really, really bad way, and he thought, “He’s going to do something stupid.” And he went up to him, and he said, “Look, I know it’s bad, and I know it’s terrible, and I know you’re absolutely devastated, but you’ve got your mates here, just don’t do anything silly. Maybe when it’s all over, you can patch things up or sort things out.” And he said, “You’ve got to understand it from her point of view. It’s a long way. You haven’t seen you for two years,” this kind of stuff, “so just don’t do anything rash.” And of course, the next engagement, two days later, he was killed. And he said it was just a kind of, he just knew that was going to happen. So it was a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy.
(00:08:49) That’s something I’ve never forgotten, that story, and I just thought, “It’s about human drama, that’s the truth of it,” and how people react to this totally alien situation. For the most part, the Second World War is fought by ordinary everyday people doing extraordinary things.
(00:09:10) And I think that’s something that’s so fascinating. I think, instinctively, I’m quite slapdash, I think. So I think I would’ve bought it literally. I don’t think it would have ended well for me. I’m just a bit careless.
Lex Fridman (00:09:25) Yeah, I think I also have an element in me, where I can believe in the idea of nation, and fight for a nation, especially when the conflict is as grand.
James Holland (00:09:38) There are things worse than death.
Lex Fridman (00:09:39) Yes, as the propaganda would explain very clearly, but also in reality, yes. So a nation, France, Britain, was maybe facing the prospect of being essentially enslaved. The Soviet Union was facing the prospect of being enslaved, literally.
(00:09:58) I mean, it was very, very clearly stated what they’re going to do. They’re going to repopulate the land with Germanic people, so …
James Holland (00:10:06) Well, they’re not just going to do that. They’re also going to starve lots and lots of Soviet individuals to death by the Hunger Plan, for example, which is planned really very casually, and not by the, this is not SS units or anything like this.
(00:10:21) This is the Wehrmacht, this is the economic division of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, the German combined general staff. General Georg Thomas comes up, and Hermann Backe, who’s the, kind of Minister for Food. They come up, “What are we going to do? We haven’t got enough food,” largely because German farming is inefficient, and they think, “Well, this is part of Lebensraum. We’ll go in and we’ll take the food.”
(00:10:50) And there’s been this colossal urbanization of the Soviet Union since the revolution in 1917. “So they’re just not going to get their food, these people in these cities because we’re going to take it all. And that’s going to lead to a lot of deaths.” “Umpteen millions” is the phrase that Georg Thomas used.
Lebensraum and Hitler ideology
Lex Fridman (00:11:11) So let’s talk about the Hunger Plan. How important was the Hunger Plan and Lebensraum to Nazi ideology, and to the whole Nazi war machine?
James Holland (00:11:20) Essential to the whole thing. This is all about this notion that is embedded into Hitler’s mind, and into the minds of the Nazi party, right from the word go is, there is a big sort of global conspiracy, the Jewish Bolshevik plot, I mean, completely misplaced, that Jews and Bolsheviks go hand in hand, and that somehow dovetail. They don’t, obviously.
(00:11:44) And the whole ideology is to crush this. Part of the way the Nazis think, the way Hitler thinks is there is a them, and there’s us. We are the whites, Northern European Aryans, we should be the master race. We’ve been threatened by a global Jewish Bolshevik plot. We’ve been stabbed in the back in 1918, at the end of the first World War. We need to have to overcome, this is an existential battle for future survival. It’s a terrible task that has befallen our generation, but we have to do this, we have to overcome this or else we have no future. We will be crushed. It’s absolutely cut and dry.
(00:12:27) And one of the things about Hitler is that he is a very kind of black and white, them or us, either/or, kind of person. It’s always one thing or the other. It’s a thousand-year Reich, or it’s Armageddon. There is no, there’s no middle ground, there’s no gray area. It’s just one or the other. And that’s how, that’s his worldview.
(00:12:45) And the reason he came to the fore was because of the crystal clear clarity of his message, which is, “We’ve been stabbed in the back. There is a global plot. We have to overcome this. We are naturally the master race. We have to reassert ourselves. We have to get rid of global Jewry, we have to get rid of global Bolshevism, and we have to prevail, or else. But if we do prevail, oh, what an amazing world it’s going to be.”
(00:13:17) So he starts with this. Every speech he does, always starts with the same way, always starts from a kind of negative, and always ends with an incredible, positive, this sort of rabble-rousing crescendo of, if you’re in the front row, spittle, halitosis and gesticulation. I mean, you’ve seen pictures of him. I mean, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen pictures of him. He’s almost, he wants to grab the air and clutch it to him.
(00:13:42) You can see the venom coming out of his mouth, just in a single still photograph. I mean, it’s amazing. There’s apps you can get now, where you can translate his speeches, and it just sounds, by today’s standards, you would just think, “What a load of absolute wibble,” I mean, just total nonsense.
(00:14:03) But you have to put yourself back in the shoes of people listening to him in 1922 or ’23, or indeed, 1933, and see how kind of captivating that is to a certain part of the population. So, yeah, to go back to your original point, Lebensraum is absolutely part of it. So what you do is you crush the Bolsheviks, you crush world Jewry, then you expand. Britain has had this incredible empire, global empire. Germany needs that, too.
(00:14:32) Germany’s stuck in Europe, it doesn’t have access to the world’s oceans. So we’re not going to be a maritime empire. We’re going to be a landmass empire, the whole of landmass of Europe, and into Asia, that’s going to be us. We’re going to take that land, we’re going to take the breadbasket of Ukraine, we’re going to use that for our own ends.
(00:14:53) We’re going to make ourselves rich, but we’re also going to spread our peoples. We’re going to spread the Aryan Northern Master race throughout Europe, and into the traditional Slavic areas, and we will prevail, and come out on top.
(00:15:06) And so, you have to understand that everything about Operation Barbarossa, the planned invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, is totally wrapped up in the Nazi ideology. And people, I’ve read it, that historians will go, “If only Hitler had realized that the Ukrainians have been quite happy to kind of fight on his side, if only he’d actually brought some of these Jewish scientists into the Nazi fold, then Germany might have prevailed in World War II.”
(00:15:35) And you kind of think, “Well, you’re missing the entire point. That’s just never going to happen, because this is an ideological war.”
Lex Fridman (00:15:41) Yeah, this is not a pragmatic rational leader.
Lex Fridman (00:15:46) I mean part of his effectiveness, we should say, is probably the singular belief in this ideology. There’s pros and cons. For an effective military machine, probably having that singular focus is effective.
James Holland (00:16:03) Yes, except that when you’re making military decisions, if those decisions are always being bracketed by an ideology, which is fundamentally flawed, from a pragmatic point of view, as much as a kind of …
James Holland (00:16:19) Reasonable point of view, you’re opening yourselves up for trouble. I mean, this is a problem he has with Barbarossa. They realize very early on, in 1941, when they’re war gaming this whole operation, that it’s not going to work.
(00:16:34) So there’s people like General Paulus, who’s on the staff at the time. He’s in charge of war gaming this, and he goes, “This isn’t going to work.” And Keitel, who is the chief of the OKW, goes, “No, no, no, no, no. Go back and make it work.” He goes, “Okay.” So he comes back with a plan that does work, but it’s bogus. I mean, it doesn’t work, because they don’t have. They don’t have enough motorization.
(00:17:04) They go into Barbarossa with 2,000 different types of vehicle. Every single one of those vehicles has to have different distributor caps, and different leads, and plugs, and all sorts of different parts.
(00:17:19) The interoperability of the German mechanized arm is super inefficient. So you’ve got huge problems, because they kind of think, “Well, we took France in 1940, and that’s one of the most modern countries in the world, with one of the greatest armies and armed forces in the world, and we did that in six weeks.” So, Soviet Union, look, they struggled against Finland, for goodness sake. I mean, how hard can it be?
(00:17:45) But what you’re failing to understand is that attacking the Soviet Union is over a geographical landmass 10 times the size of France, just on the frontage. And you haven’t really got much more mechanization than you had in May 1940, when they attacked the Low Countries and France. And you’ve actually got less Luftwaffe aircraft to support you, and you just do not have the operational mechanics to make it work successfully.
(00:18:10) I mean, it is largely down to incompetence of the Red Army and the Soviet leadership in the summer of 1941 that they get as far as they do. I mean, Barbarossa should never have come close to being a victory.
Operation Barbarossa
Lex Fridman (00:18:24) Let’s talk through it. So, Operation Barbarossa that you’re mentioning, and we’ll go back-
James Holland (00:18:28) Yeah, we’ve jupmed straight into ’41.
Lex Fridman (00:18:29) … to ’39 and ’40, straight into it.
James Holland (00:18:31) I’ve eaten off two years of war.
Lex Fridman (00:18:33) So this is June 1941, Operation Barbarossa, when Hitler invades the Soviet Union with, I think, the largest invading force in history, up to that point.
Lex Fridman (00:18:46) And there’s three prongs, Army Group North, Army Group Center, Army Group South. North is going to Leningrad. Center is going, it’s the strongest group, directly towards Moscow, and South is going and targeting Ukraine and the Caucasus.
(00:19:02) So, can you linger on that on the details of this plan? What was the thinking? What was the strategy? What was the tactics? What was the logistics? There’s so many things to say, but one of them is to say that you often emphasize the importance of three ways to analyze military conflict, of the strategic, the operational and tactical. And the operational is often not given enough time attention, and it’s the logistics that make the war machine really work successfully, or fail.
James Holland (00:19:35) Yeah, that’s absolutely spot-on. And it’s interesting, because the vast majority of general histories of World War II tend to focus on the strategic and the tactical.
(00:19:49) So what do I mean by that? Well, the strategic, just for those who don’t know, that’s your overall war aims, get to Moscow, whatever it might be, conquer the world. That’s your strategy.
(00:19:59) The tactical side of things is, that’s the coalface of war. That’s the attritional bit. That’s the following in his Spitfire, the tank crew, the soldier in his foxhole, it’s the actual kinetic fighting bit.
(00:20:11) The operational bit is the level of war that links the strategic to the tactical. So it is absolutely factories, it’s economics, it’s shipping, it’s supply chains, it’s how you manage your war. And one of the things where I think people have been guilty in the past, historians have been guilty in the past, is by judging warfare all on the same level. But obviously, every competent nation has a different approach to war, because of the nation they are, the size they are, their geographical location.
(00:20:44) So Britain, for example, is an island nation. Its priority is the Royal Navy, which is why the Royal Navy is known as the senior service. And in 1939, it’s easy to forget it now when you see how depleted Britain is today, but in 1939, it has comfortably the world’s largest navy. There’s something like 194 destroyers, I think it’s 15 battleships, seven aircraft carriers, and another kind of six on the way.
(00:21:13) America, it’s got the Pacific Ocean, it’s got the Atlantic Ocean, it’s got two seaboards. It has the second-largest navy in the world, but a tiny army. I mean, the US Army in September 1939 is the nineteen1h largest in the world, sandwiched between Portugal and Uruguay. And it’s just incredible. It’s 189,000 strong, which might seem reasonably large by today’s standards, but is absolutely tiny by 1939 standards. Whereas, Germany’s got an army of three and a half million in 1939. So these are big, big, big differences.
(00:21:48) But America’s coming at it from a different perspective, Britain’s coming apart, from a different perspective. Britain’s empire is all about, it’s a shipping, it’s a seaborne empire.
(00:21:59) Whereas, there’s also another point, which is having large armies is actually inherently impractical and inefficient, because the larger the army, the more people you’ve got to feed, the more barracks you’ve got to have, the more space you’ve got to have for training, the more people you’re taking out of your workforce to produce tanks and shells, and all the rest of it, because they’re tramping around with rifles.
(00:22:21) So there’s an argument saying, actually, it’s really not a very good way of doing things. So very much, the British way, and subsequently, the United States way, and the way of Britain’s dominions and empire, is to use steel, not our flesh, as a principle. Because the idea is that you use technology, mechanization, modernity, global reach, to do a lot of your hard yards. That’s the basic principle behind the strategic air campaign.
(00:22:48) When we talk about the strategic air campaign, we’re talking about strategic air forces which are operating in isolation from other armed forces. So a tactical air force, for example, is an Air force which is offering close air support for ground operations. A strategic air force has got nothing to do with ground operations, it’s just operating on its own. So that’s your bomber force, or whatever, that’s your B-17s and B 24s of the Eighth Air Force, flying out of East England, bombing the industrial complex of Germany, or whatever it might be.
(00:23:17) So it’s important to understand that when you compare, you have to have in the back of your mind that Britain, compared to Germany, for example, is coming at it from a completely different perspective. And I would say one of the failures of Hitler is that he always views everybody through his own very narrow worldview, which is not particularly helpful. You want to get inside the head of your enemy, and he’s sort of guilty of not doing that.
(00:23:41) So when you’re talking about Operation Barbarossa, to go back to your original question, Lex, you’re dealing with an operation on such a vast scale, that that operational level of war is absolutely vital to its chances of success or failure. It doesn’t matter how good your individual commanders are at the front. If you haven’t got the backup, it’s not going to work.
(00:24:02) And the problem that the Germans have is yes, they’ve got their three million men on the front, and they’ve got their kind of 3,000 aircraft, and all the rest of it. But actually, what you need to do is break it down.
(00:24:15) And who is doing the hard yards of that? The way that the German war machine works is that the machine bit is only the spearhead. So people always talk about the Nazi war machine. In a way, it’s a kind of misnomer, because you’re sort of suggesting that it’s highly mechanized and industrialized, and all the rest of it. And nothing could be further from the truth. The spearhead is, but the rest of it is not.
(00:24:38) And this is the fatal flaw of the German armed forces in the whole of World War II, really, but even in this early stage, because in Barbarossa, you’re talking about 17 Panzer divisions out of the 100-odd that are involved in the initial attack. Well, 17, a Panzer division is not a division full of Panzers, tanks.
(00:25:02) It is a combined arms motorized outfit. So, scouts on BMWs with sidecars, armored cars, infantry grenadiers, Panzer grenadiers, which are infantry in half tracks and trucks, mechanized. It is motorized artillery. It is motorized anti-aircraft artillery. It is motorized anti-tank artillery. Of course, it is tanks as well, Panzers. But those are a really, really small proportion of, you’re talking, less than 20% of your attacking force are those spearhead forces. And inevitably, they are going to be attrited as they go. You are going to take casualties. Not only that, you’re not going to just take battlefield casualties, you’re also going to have mechanical casualties, because of the huge spaces involved. You just simply can’t function.
(00:25:53) So what you see is, in the initial phases of Operation Barbarossa, they surge forward. Red Army’s got absolutely no answers to anything. Stalin, weirdly, hasn’t heeded all the warnings that this attack is brewing. And there have been plenty, incidentally.
(00:26:09) And Smolensk falls on the 15th of July, in just less than four weeks. It’s just incredible. Three and a half weeks, Smolensk has gone, they’ve done, overwhelmed the rest of what had been Poland. They’ve surged into what is now Belarus, taken Smolensk. This is Army Group Center. Army Group North thrust up into the Baltic. It’s all going swimmingly well.
(00:26:29) But then, the next several months, they barely go a hundred miles, and that’s because they’re running out of steam. The 16th Panzer division, for example, by the time it’s taken Smolensk, involved in taking Smolensk on the 15th of July, 1941, the following day, it’s got 16 tanks left, 16 out of should have 180. So it’s just being attrited. They can’t sustain it, and they can’t sustain it, because as the Russians fall back, as the Soviet Red Army falls back, they do their own scorched earth policy.
(00:27:03) They also discover that the railway line is kind of a different loading gauge, so they’ve got to change it. So it’s slightly, the Russian loading gauge is slightly wider. So every single mile, every yard, every foot, every meter of the capturing of Russian railway has to be moved a couple of inches to the left, to make it fit the German Kriegslok, in the standard train of locomotive, of the Reichsbahn. Just imagine what that’s like.
(00:27:31) And also, Soviet trains are bigger, so they can take more water, which means, the water stops in between are fewer and far between. So they have to, the Germans, when they come in, their trains, their Kriegsloks are smaller.
(00:27:43) So they have to be re-watered more often, and re-coaled more often. I mean, it’s absolutely boggling just how complicated it is, and how badly planned it is, because they haven’t reckoned on this. They’re having to kind of think on their feet.
Lex Fridman (00:27:57) I love the logistical details of all of this, because yes, that’s a huge component of this, especially when you’re covering that much territory. But there is a notion that if Hitler didn’t stop Army Group Center, it could have pushed all the way to Moscow. It was only maybe a hundred miles away from Moscow. Is that a possibility?
(00:28:20) Because it had so much success in the early days, pushing forward. Do you think it’s possible that if Hitler, as we mentioned from a military blunder perspective, didn’t make that blunder, that they could have defeated the Soviet Union, right there and then?
James Holland (00:28:38) Well, my own view is that they should never have got close. The Red Army has plenty of men to be able to see off anything that the Germans can do. The capture of Kyiv, for example, in September 1941, was a catastrophe for the Soviet Union, and should never have happened.
(00:28:56) I mean, Zhukov is saying to Stalin, ” We’ve got to pull back across the Dnieper.” So I was going, “No, you can’t possibly do that. You can’t abandon Kyiv. It’s the third city in the Soviet Union. You just can’t, no way. No, absolutely not.” And he goes, “Well, we are just going to be overwhelmed, we can’t hold this.” And he says, “Either back me or fire me, back me or sack me.” So Stalin sacks him.
(00:29:22) Obviously, as we know, Zhukov gets rehabilitated in pretty quick order, and Stalin does learn very quickly, thereafter, to learn the lessons. But the opening phase of Barbarossa has been a catastrophe. As a consequence of Stalin refusing to let his men retreat back across the Dnieper, which is a substantial barrier, and would be very difficult for the Germans to overwhelm, had they moved back in time, that’s another kind of 700,000 men put in the bag. I mean, that’s just staggering numbers. But yeah, I mean, there’s so many things wrong with the Barbarossa plan, too much of it. It’s just such a vast area. I mean, you’re talking about, kind of, 2,500 miles or something, of frontage.
(00:30:13) Maybe if you put your Panzer groups, which are these spearheads, and you put them all in one big thrust, and just go hell for leather, straight across, on a much more narrow front of, let’s say, 400 miles, rather than 1,200, then they might have just sort of burnt away straight through to Moscow.
Lex Fridman (00:30:32) They really caught the Red Army unprepared.
Lex Fridman (00:30:36) Is there something to be said about the strategic genius of that, or was it just luck?
James Holland (00:30:46) No, I don’t think so. I mean, what’s happened is, you’ve had the Soviet purges of the second half of the 1930s, where they have executed or imprisoned 22,500 officers, of which, three out of five marshals, God knows how many army commanders, et cetera, et cetera. So you’ve completely decapitated the Red Army, in terms of its command structure.
Lex Fridman (00:31:12) So before that, would it be fair to say it was one of, if not the greatest army in the world?
James Holland (00:31:18) Well, there was a lot of experience. There’s a lot of experience there, that’s for sure.
Lex Fridman (00:31:21) But also, technology material, the size of the army and the number of people that are mobilized?
James Holland (00:31:28) Yes. Yeah, and they’re the first people to adapt, create airborne troops, for example. So yes, I think there is an argument to say that, but the decapitation is absolutely brutal. If you’ve decapitated an army, you’ve then got to put new guys in charge.
(00:31:42) And someone who looks, on paper, like a half decent peacetime commander might not be a very good wartime commander. They’re different disciplines and different skills, and you don’t know that until you’re tested. It’s very hard to kind of judge. And of course, Stalin is existing in a vacuum of paranoia and suspicion all the time, which is unhelpful, when you’re trying to develop a strong armed forces.
(00:32:06) So they go into Finland, in back end of 1939, and they get really badly hammered. They do take about 50, they get the Karelia Peninsula, and they do take some ground, but at huge cost. I mean, the casualties are five times as bad as those of the Finns, and it’s a humiliation.
(00:32:25) So Hitler sees that, and thinks, “Oh, okay, they’re not up to much cop.” Then Hitler loses the Battle of Britain, and he thinks, “I can’t afford to fight a war on two fronts.” That’s one of the reasons why Germany loses the war in 1914 to ’18, is fighting on the Eastern front, but also fighting on the Western front at the same time.
(00:32:43) “We’ve got to avoid that, but I’ve got to get rid of Britain. And Britain hasn’t come out of the fight. Britain is still fighting in the backend of 1940, having won the Battle of Britain. And so, maybe I’ll go into the Soviet Union now, while the Red Army is still weak. We’re not 100% ready ourselves, but let’s hurry the whole thing forward.”
(00:33:00) Because originally, he’d been thinking of planning an operation in 1943 or 1944. So the idea is, you take Poland out, you take out France and the Low Countries, you conquer most of Western Europe, you knock out Britain, so therefore, you don’t have to worry so much about the United States, because they’re over on the other side of the Atlantic.
(00:33:17) That then gives him, buys him the time, to kind of rebuild up his strength for the all-out thrust on the Soviet Union. The failure to subdue Britain in 1940 changes all those plans and makes him think, “Actually, I’m going to go in early.”
(00:33:30) And he’s also been kind of, he’s hoisted by his own petard, because he starts to believe his own genius. Everyone told him that he wouldn’t be able to beat France and the Low Countries. Everyone told him that it wouldn’t work out when he went into Poland, everyone was really nervous about it. “Well, go hang you, cautious, awful aristocratic Prussian generals. I’m the best at this. I’ve told you, I’ve shown you. I’m the genius. I can do it.” He starts to believe his own hype.
(00:33:59) And of course, this is a problem. He’s surrounded by sycophants, and people who are constantly telling him that he’s this incredible genius. So he starts to believe it, and he thinks everything is possible.
(00:34:07) And he’s very much into this idea of the will of the German people, “This is our destiny, and I have a will.” As I say earlier on, it’s the thousand-year Reich, or Armageddon, “but momentum is with us, and we need to strike it, and only by gambling, only by being bold will the Germans prevail,” and all this kind of nonsense. And so that’s why he goes into Soviet Union in June 1941, rather than a couple of, or even three years later.
Lex Fridman (00:34:33) Yeah. He really hated the Prussian generals, huh?
Lex Fridman (00:34:36) Is there a case to be made that there, he was indeed, at times a military genius?
James Holland (00:34:42) No, I don’t think so. Because none of the plan, I mean, even the plan for the invasion of France and the Low Countries isn’t his.
(00:34:50) The concept is from Manstein’s, and the execution is Guderian’s, Heinz Guderian. Heinz Guderian is the pioneer of the Panzer force, of the Panzer thrust, this …
James Holland (00:35:00) … pioneer of the Panzer force, the Panzer thrust, this idea of the ultra mechanized combined arms, Panzer arm spearhead doing this kind of lightning fast thrust. It’s not Hitler’s idea. He adopts it and takes it as his own, because he’s the führer. He can do what he likes, but it isn’t his. And up until that point, until that comes into being, until that plan is put forward to Franz Halder, who is the chief of staff of the German army at that time, Halder is just thinking, “How do we get out of this mess? This is just a nightmare.” Because they know that France has got a larger army, they know that France has got more tanks, and know that France has got double the number of artillery pieces. It’s got parity in terms of air force. And then you add Holland, then you add Belgium, then you add Great Britain. And that looks like a very, very tough nut to crack. I mean, the reason why France is subdued in 1940 is 50% brilliance of the Germans and their operational art in that particular instance, and 50% French failure really, and incompetence.
Lex Fridman (00:36:05) I mean, there is a kind of genius to be able to see, and take advantage, and set up the world stage in such a way that you have the appeasement from France and Britain, keep the United States out of it, just set up the world stage where you could just plow through everybody with very little resistance. I mean, there is a kind of-
James Holland (00:36:32) But it doesn’t. That’s a problem. I mean, he goes into Poland on the assumption that Britain and France will not declare war. He is not prepared for Britain and France declaring war on Germany.
Lex Fridman (00:36:46) That’s right. So miscalculation, blunder. But then France does, right? And then France does not successfully do anything with this incredible army that it has.
James Holland (00:37:01) It has the size. But one of the problems that France has is that it’s very, very top-heavy. It’s very cumbersome in the way it operates. There’s no question that it’s got some brilliant young commanders, but at the top, the commanders are very old. Most of them are first World War veterans, whether, I mean, Weygand, Gamelin, General Georges, these people, they’re all well into their 60s. General Georges is the youngest army commander and he’s 60. It’s too old to be an army commander. You need to be in your late 40s, early 50s. And they’re too just consumed by conservatism and the old ways. And what they assume is that any future war will be much like the first World War. It’ll be attritional, long and drawn out, but static. But actually they’re right on two parts of it. As it turns out, it is going to be long, and drawn out, and attritional, but it’s going to be mobile rather than static. And that’s a big miscalculation.
Lex Fridman (00:38:04) Here’s my question. I think you’re being too nice on France, here. So when Germany invaded Poland, correct me if I’m wrong, but it feels like France could have just went straight to Berlin.
James Holland (00:38:18) Yeah, they absolutely could have.
Lex Fridman (00:38:21) And I know you said, “It’s very top-heavy,” and you’re saying all of these things, but they literally did basically nothing.
James Holland (00:38:28) Yeah, they were appalling.
Lex Fridman (00:38:32) And I think a part of that, and I think you described this well, maybe you could speak to that, is the insanity that is Hitler creating the psychological, with the propaganda, creating this feeling that there’s this Nazi force that’s unstoppable, so France just didn’t want to step into that. Maybe there were legitimately, I hesitate to say these words, but scared of war.
James Holland (00:39:00) A hundred percent they are, because France has been totally traumatized by the first World War.
James Holland (00:39:06) It’s fought on their land, it’s fought in their industrial heartland. They lose three times the amount of people killed that Britain does. Britain’s traumatized by it, but not to the same degree that France is. There is just no stomach to do that again. So that makes them risk averse. And by being risk averse, you’re actually taking a far greater risk. That’s the irony of it. And the truth is also there isn’t the political will. And a successful military can only be successful if there is a political will at the top. And the problem with France in the 1930s is it’s very politically divided. It’s a time of multiple governments, multiple prime ministers, coalition governments, really very extreme coalition governments from the sort of drawn from the left and the right as well as the center.
(00:39:53) And this is not a coalition of two parties. This is a coalition of multiple parties. No one can ever agree anything. I mean, that’s the problem. It’s amazing that the Maginot Line has even agreed, this incredibly strong defensive position down the western side of France border with Germany, which is kind of largely impregnable. But the problem is the bit that’s not impregnable, which is the hinge where the Maginot Line ends, and it sort of basically starts turning towards in a northerly direction and the border with Belgium.
(00:40:24) And what they should have done is built border defenses all along the northern coast of Belgium, because Belgium refused to allow any allied troops into its territory. It was neutral. And France should have said, “Okay, fine. Well, then we’ll defend. We’re not going to come to your rescue if you get invaded. That’s the payoff. And the consequence of that, we are going to stop [inaudible 00:40:50] that, and we’re not going to be drawn into the neutral territory should Germany invade from the west.” But they don’t do that because of the psychological damage of having fought a war in exactly that area a generation earlier. And that’s the problem.
(00:41:05) Germany is so weakened by the invasion of Poland. There is literally nothing left. The back door into Western Germany is completely open. And so they do what they call the Saar offensive, but it’s not. It’s a kind of reconnaissance in force where they go across the border, pick their noses for a few days, and then trundle back again. And it’s embarrassing. And what you’re seeing there is a nation which is just not ready for this, which is scared, which is politically divided, which is then having a knock on effect on the decision-making process, and which is just consumed by military complacency. And that’s the big problem. There is this, the commanders at the very top of the French regime are complacent. They haven’t bought into modern ways. They haven’t looked at how contemporary technology could help them.
(00:42:02) I mean, it is absurd, for example, that there isn’t a single radio in the Chateau de Vincennes, which, it’s the headquarters of the commander in chief of the French armed forces to General Maurice Gamelin. I mean, it’s just unbelievable. But that is the case. And there’s no getting away from that. And it is all the more ironic when you consider that France is actually the most automotive society in Europe. It’s the second most automotive society in the world after the United States, by some margin, it has to be said as well. It has a fantastic transportation system. Railway network is superb. There are eight people for every motorized vehicle in France, which is way above Germany, which is in 1949, that figure is 47, for example.
Lex Fridman (00:42:49) So France is very mechanized, like-
James Holland (00:42:51) Very mechanized. So come on, guys, pull your finger out, get it together. And they just don’t. They’re incredibly slow and cumbersome. And what they think is what will happen is the Germans won’t think of going, they won’t do a pincer movement because you can’t possibly take motorized forces through the Ardennes. That just is not possible, which is the hinge area between the end of the Maginot, the northern part of the Maginot Line, which runs down the eastern border of France and the northern bit. And so, “What we’ll do with that hinge around the town of Sedan, we’ll move into Belgium, we’ll meet the Germans before they get anywhere near France. We’ll hold them. And while we’re holding them, we will bring up our reserves, and then we’ll counterattack, and crush them.” That’s the idea behind it. But the problem is they don’t have a means of moving fast.
(00:43:37) And their communication systems are dreadful, absolutely dreadful. They’re dependent on conventional telephone lines, which dive bombers and whatever are just absolutely wrecking. Suddenly the streets are clogged with refugees and people can’t move. So then telephone lines are down, there’s no radios, so that you’re then dependent on sending dispatch riders on little motorbikes. General Maurice Gamelin sends out a dispatch rider at six o’clock in the morning. By 12 o’clock he hasn’t come back, so you then send another one. Finally, the answer comes back, nine o’clock at night, by which time the Germans advance another 15 miles. And the original message that you sent at six o’clock that morning is completely redundant and has passed its sell by date. And that’s happening every step of the way. So you’ve got overall command headquarters, then you’ve got army group, then you’ve got army, then you’ve got corps, then you’ve got division.
(00:44:30) So the consequence of all that is that French just can’t move. They’re just stuck. They’re rabbits in headlights, and the Germans are able to move them, destroy them in isolation. Meanwhile, they’re able to use their excellent communications to very, very good effect. And you were talking about the genius of war. It’s not Hitler that’s a genius. If anyone’s a genius, it’s Goebbels, the propaganda chief. And it is their ability to harness that they are the kings of messaging. They don’t have X, don’t have social media, but they do have new technology. And that new technology, that new approach is flooding the airwaves with their singular message, which is always the same, and has been ever since the Nazis come into power, and it is using radios. And I think radios are really, really key to the whole story because there is no denser radio network anywhere in the world, including the United States, than Germany in 1939.
(00:45:28) So while it’s really behind the times in terms of mechanization, it is absolutely on top of its game in terms of comms. So 70% of households in Germany have radios by 1939, which is an unprecedented number. That is only beaten by United States and only just. So it is greater than any other nation in Europe. And in terms of flooding the airwaves, it is the densest, because even for those who, the 30% who don’t have radios, “That’s not a problem because we’ll put them in the stairwells of apartment blocks, we’ll put them in squares, we’ll put them in cafés and bars. And the same stuff, the Nazi state controls the radio airwaves as it does the movies, as it does newspapers, all aspects of the media are controlled by Goebbels and propaganda ministry. And they are putting out the same message over and over again.
(00:46:23) It’s not all Hitler’s ranting, it’s entertainment, light entertainment, some humorous shows. It is also Wagner, of course, and Richard Strauss. It’s a mixture. But the subliminal message is the same. “We’re the best. We’re the top dogs. Jewish Bolshevik plot is awful. That’s the existential threat to us. We have to overcome that. We’re the top dogs, militarily, we’re the best. We should feel really good about ourselves. We’re going to absolutely win and be the greatest nation in the world ever. And Hitler’s a genius.” And that is just repeated over, and over, and over, and over again. And for all the modernity of the world in which we live in today, most people believe what they’re told repeatedly.
James Holland (00:47:07) They still do. If you just repeat, repeat, repeat over and over again, people will believe it. If you are a diehard Trump supporter, you want to believe that, you’ll believe everything he says. If you are a diehard Bernie Sanders man, you’re from the left. You’ll believe everything he says because it’s reinforcing what you already want to believe.
Lex Fridman (00:47:30) But the scary thing is radio is the technology of the day. The technology of the day today, which is a terrifying one for me, is I would say AI on social media. So bots. You can have basically bot farms, which I assume is used by Ukraine, by Russia, by US. I would love to read the history written about this era about the information wars, who has the biggest bot farms, who has-
Lex Fridman (00:48:00) … the biggest propaganda machines? And when I say bot, I mean both automated AI bots and humans operating large number of smartphones with SIM cards that are just able to boost messages enough to where they become viral, and then real humans with real opinions get excited also. It’s like this vicious cycle. So if you support your nation, all you need is a little boost. And then everybody gets real excited. And then now you’re chanting, and now you’re in this mass hysteria.
James Holland (00:48:42) And that is exactly what Hitler, and the Nazis, and Goebbels, are doing in the 1930s. Well, they’re doing it in the 1920s as well, but more effectively once they come into power, of course. And Hitler is so fortunate that he comes, he takes over the chancellorship in January, 1933, at a time where the economy is just starting to turn. And he’s able to make the most of that. And if you’re Germans, and you’ve been through hyperinflation in the early 1920s, you’ve been through the humiliation of Versailles Treaty, which was terrible error, in retrospect.
(00:49:16) And you’ve been through, then having got through that, you’ve emerged into a democratic Weimar Republic, which is based on manufacturing. Germany’s traditional genius engineering, and manufacturing, and production of high quality items. They’re merging through that. Then you have the Wall Street crash. And the loans that are coming in from America, which is propping up the entire German economy, suddenly get cut off, and you’ve suddenly got depression again, and massive unemployment.
(00:49:51) And suddenly Hitler comes in and everyone’s got jobs, and they’re rebuilding, and they’re growing their military. And the message that’s coming out is, “We’re the greatest. We’re the best. We’re fantastic.” I was telling you earlier on about Hitler’s speeches, starting with the dark, starting dark and ending in hope, and light, and the sunlit uplands, that’s what you’re getting. You’re suddenly getting this vision of hope. This is sort of, “My God. Actually, this is really working. Okay, so I’m not sure that I particularly buy into the kind of anti-Semitic thing, but we’ll sweep that under the carpet because overall, I’ve now got a job. I’ve got money, I’ve got my new radio.” And then this is a genius about the radios, for example. So they have the German receiver to start off with, the [German 00:50:38] and then they have the [German 00:50:41], which is the German little receiver, little radio. These are genius. This is as outrageous as the arrival of the iPod. I mean, remember that? Suddenly you don’t have to have a Sony Walkman anymore. You can have something really, really small and miniature, and listen to thousands, of thousands, of thousands of songs all at once. What an amazing thing.
(00:50:58) And the [German 00:51:00] is nine inches by four inches by four inches. It’s made of Bakelite. And everyone can have one because it’s super cheap. It’s just incredible. And no one else has said that, because up until that point, radios, generally speaking, are aspirational. They’ve got sort of a walnut lacquer at the front, and you have them if you’re middle class, and you show them off to your neighbors to show how affluent and well-to-do you are, but suddenly everyone can have one. And if everyone can have one, then everyone can receive the same message. And you can also.
(00:51:30) And this is the whole point about the Hitler youth as well. The young guys, that’s where they’re most impressionistic. They’re least risk averse. So they’re most gung ho. They’re most full of excitement for the possibilities of life. And they’re also, their minds are the most opened to suggestion. So you get the youth, you hang on, you get them. And so a whole generation of young men are brought up thinking about the genius of Hitler and how he’s delivering this much better nation, and returning, overhauling the humiliations of the first World War, were overcoming the stab in the back that happened in 1918, et cetera, et cetera. And as a young 16, 17-year-old German, you’re thinking, “Yeah, I want a piece of that. And hey, guess what? They’ve got really cool uniforms, and come and join the SS, and get the throw line. What’s not to like?” You can see why it’s so clever. And what’s so interesting is propaganda today is still using those tenets that Goebbels was using back in the 1930s.
(00:52:34) And this is why I say that history doesn’t repeat itself. Of course it doesn’t. It can’t possibly repeat itself because we’re always living in a constantly evolving time. But patterns of human behaviour do. And what you always get after economic crisis is political upheaval, always, always, always. Because some people are in a worse off position than they were financially before. They’re thinking, “Well, the current system doesn’t work. What’s the alternative?” So in the case of now, we in the West, first of all, we’ve faced the financial crisis of 2008. Then we’ve had the double whammy of COVID. And that has been incredibly unsettling. And so we’re now in a situation of political turmoil. And whether you are pro-Trump or anti-Trump, what he’s offering is something completely different. And he’s saying, “The old ways don’t work. I’m just going to say what I think. I’m going to come out. I’m not going to bother with all the sheen of diplomacy and mealy mouth words that politicians always use, where you can’t trust anyone. I’m just going to tell you as it is.”
(00:53:36) And obviously people respond to that. You can understand why that has an appeal. And if the country already feels broken, and here’s someone who is going to be a disruptor, and going to change the way you go about things, you can see why a reasonably large proportion of the population is going to go, “I’ll have a piece of that. Thank you very much.”
Lex Fridman (00:53:55) And especially one of the countries in the economic crisis like Germany was, I think you’ve written that the Treaty of Versailles created Hitler and the Wall Street crash and the Great Depression brought him to power.
Lex Fridman (00:54:11) And of course, the propaganda machine that you describe is the thing that got everybody else in Germany on board.
James Holland (00:54:18) Yep. It’s amazing, because he comes in with 33% of the vote. He had 37% of the vote in July, 1932. So again, this is another period of turmoil, just like it is in France, where you’re having constant different kind of coalitions and different chancellors, leaders of Germany.
Lex Fridman (00:54:37) So it’s very possible he wouldn’t have come to power.
James Holland (00:54:40) Well, he said, “We will only take our seats if I can be chancellor, otherwise forget it. I’m not coming into any coalition.” So then the government falls again in January 1933. They have the election. The Nazi vote is down from where it was the previous summer, but this time they go, “Okay, Hitler can be chancellor, but we’ll manipulate him.” How wrong they were. He’s manipulating everyone. And then Hindenburg, who is the president, dies the following summer and he’s able to get rid of the presidency. There is no more president of Germany. There is just the führer, him and he gets rid of, he has, actually, Enabling act, which is where all other political parties are disbanded, and suddenly you’ve got a totalitarian state, just like that.
Lex Fridman (00:55:31) I think there’s a lesson there. There’s many lessons there, but one of them is don’t let an extremist into government and assume you can control them.
James Holland (00:55:42) Yes, the arrogance of the existing politicians, you just completely screwed it up.
Lex Fridman (00:55:46) I mean, there is a real power to an extremist. There’s a person who sees the world in black and white can really gain the attention and the support of the populace.
Lex Fridman (00:56:04) Especially when there’s a resentment about like Treaty of Versailles, when there’s economic hardship, and if there’s effective, modern technology that allows you to do propaganda and sell the message. There’s something really compelling about the black and white message.
Joseph Goebbels
James Holland (00:56:20) It is because it’s simple. And what Hitler does throughout the 1920s, is he sticks to this. There is actually, when he comes out of prison, so it is the Beer Hall Putsch in November, 1923, he gets charged with treason, which he has been, because he’s attempting a coup, and he gets sentenced to five years, which is pretty lenient for what he’s done. And he then gets let out after nine months. Nazi party is banned at that point, but then comes back into being. And the year that follows there is then a substantial debate about where the party should go. And there are actually a large number of people who think that actually they should be looking at how the Soviets are doing things and taking some of the things that they consider to be positive out of the communist state, and applying those to the Nazis.
(00:57:16) And Hitler goes, “No, no, no, no, no, no. We’ve just got to stick to this kind of Jewish Bolshevik thing. This is how we’re going to do it. This is how we’re going to do it.” Goebbels, for example, who is very open, Joseph Goebbels, he’s a not very successful journalist, but he does have a PhD in German literature. He’s very disaffected because he was born with talipes, which is more commonly known as a club foot. He’s disabled. He can’t fight in the first World War. He’s very frustrated by that. He’s in a deep despair about the state of Germany in the first part of the early 1920s. He’s looking for a political messiah, a sort of quasi-religious messiah, thinks it’s Hitler, then discovers that Hitler is not open to any ideas at all about any deviation, but then sees the light. Hitler recognizes that this guy is someone that he wants on his side, and so then goes to him, makes a real special effort.
(00:58:17) “Come on, come to dinner. I think you’re great,” All this kind of stuff. Wins it about over. And Goebbels has this complete vault fast, discards his earlier kind of, “Hitler’s right, I was wrong. Hitler is the kind of messiah figure that I want to follow. I want to follow the hero leader.” And they come aboard and they absolutely work. And Hitler completely wins out of all dissenters within what had been the German Workers party, drop, becomes the German National Socialist Party, becomes the Nazis. He comes out, emerges as the absolute, undisputed führer of that, leader of that party. And what he says goes, and everyone toes him behind it. And part of the genius of that, Hitler does have some genius. I just don’t think it’s military, but he does have some genius. And a question about is the simplicity of message.
(00:59:06) What he’s doing, it’s that us and them thing that we were talking about earlier on. It’s the kind of either/or. It’s kind of, “It’s my way or the highway.” It’s kind of, “This is the only way. This is how we get to the sunlit uplands. This is how create this amazing master race of this unification of German peoples, which dominates the world, which is the preeminent power in the world for the next thousand years, or its decay, and despair and being crushed by our enemies. And our enemies are the Jews and the Bolsheviks, the communists.” And what he taps into as well is [German 00:59:44] and [German 00:59:48]. There’s no direct English translation of [German 00:59:51] or indeed [German 00:59:52], but in its most basic form, it’s communities, it’s people, community or front veteran’s community.
(01:00:01) So the [German 01:00:02] is, “We are the guys. We are bonded because we were in the trenches. We were in the first World War. We were the people who bravely stuck it out, saw our friends being slaughtered and blown to pieces. We did our duty as proud Germans, but we were let down by the elites and we were let down by this Jewish Bolshevik plot. We were stabbed in the back.”
(01:00:26) The myth of the stabbing in the back is very, very strong. So, “We’re bound, we’re bonded by our experiences of the first World War and the fact that we did what we should and what we could. And we didn’t fail in what we were doing. We were failed by our leaders, by the elites.” So that’s [German 01:00:47]. [German 01:00:49] is this sense of national unity. It’s a cultural, ethnic bonding of people who speak German, who have a similar outlook on life. And again, that just reinforces the us and them.
James Holland (01:01:05) It reinforces the black and white worldview. And then you add that to this very simple message, which Hitler is repeating over and over again, “Communists are a big threat. Jews are a big threat. They’re the enemy.” You have to have an opposition in the them and us kind of process. And that’s what he’s doing. And people just buy into it. They go, “Yeah, we’re together. We’re Germans. We’re a brotherhood. We’ve got our [German 01:01:38].” So he cleverly ties into that and taps into that. But they’re an irrelevance by the late 1920s. By 1928, he’s not going to get a deal for Mein Kampf Part II, he’s impoverished. The party’s impoverished. Their numbers are down. They’re at best an irrelevance.
Lex Fridman (01:01:59) Which is say he wrote Mein Kampf at this time, when he was in prison.
James Holland (01:02:02) Well, he writes most of Mein Kampf in Landsberg prison. And then he writes the rest of it in what becomes known as the [German 01:02:10], which is this little wooden hut in the Obersalzberg. And you can still see the remnants of that. And unfortunately, there’s still little candles there and stuff in the woods by neo-Nazis and whatnot, what have you. But that’s where he wrote the rest of it. I mean, it Jean-Jacques Rousseau who says, “Man has his greatest thought when surrounded by nature.” That was something that Hitler took very much to heart. There was a mentor of his called Dietrich Eckart. Dietrich Eckart introduced him to the Obersalzberg and the beauty of the southeast Bavarian Alps around Berchtesgaden. And that was his favorite place on the planet, and that’s where he eventually bought the Berghof with the royalties, it has to be said, from Mein Kampf, which went from being almost pulp to suddenly being a runaway bestseller, unfortunately.
Lex Fridman (01:03:02) Can you actually comment on that? It’s a shitty manifesto as far as manifestos go. I think there’s a lot of values to understand from a first person perspective, the words of a dictator, of a person like Hitler. But it just feels like that’s just such a shitty-
James Holland (01:03:18) Yeah, I mean it’s banned in a number of countries. You don’t need to, because no one’s going to read it, because it’s unreadable. I mean, it’s very untidy. It’s very incoherent. There’s no narrative arc, to use a writer’s phrase. I mean, but it does give you a very clear, the overall impression you get at the end of it is the communists and the Jews are to blame for everything.
Lex Fridman (01:03:43) Yeah, but there’s also the component of predicting basically World War II there. So it’s not just they’re to blame for everything.
James Holland (01:03:51) Oh, no. He’s hungry for war.
James Holland (01:03:52) He thinks that this is the natural state, that, “We have to have this terrible conflict. And once the conflict’s over Germany will emerge victorious, and then there will be the Thousand-Year Reich.” I mean, I’m finding myself in talking to you, I keep saying this, “It’s Armageddon or the Thousand-Year Reich. It’s because it’s unavoidable, because that’s how he’s speaking the whole time. It’s just this same message over, and over, and over, and over again.
Lex Fridman (01:04:17) It’s a pretty unique way of speaking, allowing violence as a tool in this picture, that there’s a hierarchy, that there is a superior race and inferior races, and it’s okay to destroy the inferior ones.
Lex Fridman (01:04:32) Usually politicians don’t speak that way. They just say, “Well, here’s good and evil. We’re the good guys. And yeah, maybe we’ll destroy the evil a little bit.” Now here is like there’s a complete certainty about a very large number of people, “The Slavic people, they just need to be removed.”
James Holland (01:04:52) “Well, they need to be made in irrelevance. We have to take it. We have to take it. And in fact, if that kills millions of them, fine. Then they can sort of squish that way over to Siberia or- “
Lex Fridman (01:04:59) Right. It doesn’t matter where they go.
James Holland (01:05:00) ” … Kamchatka, wherever they go. I don’t care. But they- “
Lex Fridman (01:05:01) “We just need to populate this land that belongs to the German people.”
Lex Fridman (01:05:06) “Because they’re the superior people.”
James Holland (01:05:07) There’s no question that he glorified violence and war. He’s absolutely chomping at the bit. And in a way, I think he’s a bit disappointed that in the 1930s, the conquests that he does undertake are also peaceful. March 1938 goes straight into Austria. There’s the Anschluss, not a shot is fired. 1936, goes into the Rhineland, reconquers that, retakes that over from the occupying allies, not a shot is fired. He takes the Sudetenland, barely a shot is fired, and then goes into the rest of Czechoslovakia in March, 1939. And again, barely a shot is fired. And it’s a bit disappointing. He wants to be tested. He wants to have the wartime triumph. You can see him being frustrated about this in the Munich crisis in 1938. He wants to fight. He’s absolutely spoiling for it. He’s desperate to go in. He’s all ready and gung ho. He’s built his Luftwaffe. He is got his Panzers now. He’s got his massive armed forces. He wants to test them. He wants to get the show on the road and prove it. He is an arch gambler, Hitler.
Hitler before WW2
Lex Fridman (01:06:17) You make it seem so clear, but all the while to the rest of the world, to Chamberlain, to France, to Britain, to the rest of the world, he’s saying he doesn’t want that. He’s making agreements. Everything you just mentioned, you just went through it so quickly. But those are agreements that were made that he’s not going to do that. And he does it over and over. He violates the Treaty of Versailles. He violates every single treaty. But he still is doing the meetings. So maybe can you go through it, the lead up to the war, 1939, September 1st, what are the different agreements? What is the signaling he’s doing? And what is he doing secretly in terms of building up the military force?
James Holland (01:07:05) Yes. So part of the Treaty of Versailles, is you’re allowed very, very limited armed forces. There’s restrictions on naval expansion. There’s restrictions on the size of the army. There’s restrictions on the weapons you can use. You’re not allowed an air force. But he starts doing this all clandestinely. There are people in, Krupp has got, for example, which is in the Ruhr, a big armaments manufacturer. They are producing tanks elsewhere, and parts elsewhere in, say the Netherlands, for example, and then shipping them back into Germany. They’re doing Panzer training exercises actually in the Soviet Union at this time. There’s all sorts of things going on. The Luftwaffe has been announced to the world in 1935, but it’s obviously been in the process of developing long before that. The Messerschmitt 109, a single engine fighter plane, for example, is created in 1934. So they’re doing all these things against it.
(01:08:08) And the truth is, he’s just constantly pushing, “What can I get away with, here?” And of course, Britain, France, the rest of the world, the rest of the allies, they’re all reeling from the Wall Street crash and the depression as well. So have they got the stomach for this? Not really. And, “Perhaps actually on reflection, the terms of Versailles Treaty are bit harsh anyway, so maybe we don’t need to worry about it.” There’s just no political will. There’s no political will to fight against what Germany’s doing. Then he gets away of it. So he suddenly starts realizing that actually he can push this quite a long way, because no one’s going to stand up to him, which is why he makes a decision in 1936 to go back into the Rhineland, which has been occupied by French allied troops at that point. He just walks in, just goes, “Do your worst.” And no one’s going to do anything because there isn’t a stomach to do anything.
Lex Fridman (01:09:03) That was a big step in 1936, remilitarizing the Rhineland. I mean, that That’s a huge, huge step of like, “Oh, I don’t have to follow anybody’s rules and they’re going to do nothing.”
James Holland (01:09:15) And he’s looking at his military and he’s also looking at response. So one of the things they do is really, it’s very clever. So they go over the head of the army of the air, Armee de L’Air, which is the French air force, and they invite him over. And Erhard Milch, who is the second command of the Luftwaffe invites him over. “So, come and see what we’re up to. You are our European neighbors, we’re all friends together,” this kind of stuff. “Come and see what we’ve got.” And he takes him to this airfield. There’s a row of Messerschmitt 109s all lined up, sort of 50 of them. And the head of the Armee of the Air looks at it and goes, “Krikey, that’s impressive.” And Milch goes, “Well, let me go and take you to another airfield.” And they go out of the back route out of the airfield, and that’s long, circuitous test route in the Mercedes. Meanwhile, all of-
James Holland (01:10:00) … the airfield and is a long circuitous route in the Mercedes.
(01:10:03) Meanwhile, all the Messerschmitts take off from that airfield, going to land on the next airfield. Here’s another one, and they’re all the same aircraft. And the commander-in-chief of the army of Vienna goes back to France and goes, “We’re never going to be able to beat Germany.”
(01:10:15) Earlier, you were alluding to this earlier on, how much is this, just this chutzpah of this ability to kind of portray the mechanized Moloch? Yeah, it absolutely cowls the enemy, so the increasing the effectiveness of their armed forces purely by propaganda and by mind games and by talking the talk.
(01:10:46) We might all think these military parades that the Nazis have looked rather silly by today’s standards, but you look what that looks like if you are the rest of the world. You’re in Britain, and you’re still reeling from the Depression, and you see the triumph of the will. You see some of that footage, and you see these automatons in their steel helmets, and you see the swastikas, and you see hundreds of thousands of people all lined up and seig heiling and all the rest of it, you are going to think again before you go into war with people like that.
Hitler vs Chamberlain
Lex Fridman (01:11:13) It’s also hard to put yourself in the mind of those leaders now that we have nuclear weapons. So nuclear weapons have created this kind of cloak of a kind of safety from mutually shared destruction that you think surely you will not do a million or 2 million soldier army invading another land, right? Just full-on gigantic hot war.
(01:11:48) But at that time, that’s the real possibility. You remember World War I, you remember all of that. So okay, there’s a mad guy with a mustache. He’s making statements that this land belongs to Germany anyway, because it’s mostly German-populated, and like you said, Treaty of Versailles wasn’t really fair, and you can start justifying all kinds of things for yourself.
James Holland (01:12:16) Yeah, yeah, yeah. And maybe they got a point about the Danzig Corridor. They are mainly Germans, German-speaking people there, and it’s disconnected from East Prussia, they’re saying, I sort of get it. Maybe they’ve got a point. And is Poland really a kind of thriving democracy, anyway? Not really. By 1930, late 1930s, it’s not. It’s, to all intents and purposes, a dictatorship in Poland at that time.
(01:12:36) I mean, it’s not right that you just go and take someone else’s country. Of course, you can’t do that. But you can see why in Germany people are thinking they’ve got a point. You can also see why in France and Britain, they’re thinking, “Do we really care about the Poles? I mean, is it worth going war over?” But there’s bigger things at play by this point. That’s the point.
Lex Fridman (01:13:02) Yeah, but before we get to Poland, there is this meeting, September 1938. So Chamberlain made three trips to meet with Hitler, which culminated in the Munich Conference.
James Holland (01:13:17) Yeah, on the 30th of September. Yeah.
Lex Fridman (01:13:19) Where was Chamberlain, Hitler, Mussolini and Daladier, prime minister of France. They met to discuss essentially Czechoslovakia without any of the government officials of Czechoslovakia participating. And Hitler promised to make no more territorial conquests, and Chamberlain believed him.
James Holland (01:13:38) He chose to believe him, I think, is the thing, is the point. It’s very interesting. So Chamberlain gets a very bad press.
James Holland (01:13:47) Well, no. No, it’s not really uh-oh. I just think there’s too much retrospective view on this. And that’s fine because the whole point of history is you can look back and you can judge decisions that were made at a certain point through the prism of what subsequently happened, which, of course, the people that are making the decisions at the time can’t because they’re in that particular moment.
(01:14:11) So I don’t think Chamberlain did trust Hitler, but he wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt. Britain was not obliged to Czechoslovakia at all. France was. France had signed a treaty with Czechoslovakia in 1924, but Britain had not. So there was no obligation at all for Britain to do this. The only reason why Britain would go to war over Czechoslovakia is because of the threat of Nazism and what the ramifications of not going to war with him.
(01:14:40) But the problem is, is that Chamberlain is interesting because in 1935, he was Chancellor of the Exchequer when they started to sort of think, “Okay, we really do need to rearm.” He was very much in favor of substantially expanding and rehabilitating the navy, so updating existing battleships and so on, and also developing the air force.
(01:15:05) There’s not really much argument for having a large army because if you have a large army, you’ve got to maintain it. Britain is a small place. Where do you put them? You’ve also got to transport them. That’s complicated. You’ve got to train them, you’ve got to put them in barracks, you’ve got to feed them, all this kind of stuff. There’s a kind of impracticality about having a large army.
(01:15:20) Whereas navy is great because you can keep them at sea, and they can be on the water.
(01:15:25) Air force is slightly different. Air power is viewed in very much the same way that naval power is viewed, that this is, we’re an island nation, we have a global assets and air power gives us the flexibility that an army doesn’t.
(01:15:39) So he is all for backing the expansion of the army, of the air force and the navy in 1930s. Then he subsequently becomes prime minister and sticks to his guns on that.
(01:15:47) It is he that enables the air force and the air ministry to develop the first fully-coordinated air defense system anywhere in the world. There is not an air defense system in Poland, nor Norway, nor Denmark, nor the Netherlands, nor Belgium, nor France. There is in Britain, Britain is the only one, and frankly, it pays off big time in the summer of 1940. So you have to give him credit for that.
(01:16:11) Britain interestingly is also the world’s leading armaments exporter in the 1930s, which is amazing really when you think everyone complains about the fact that we weren’t rearming enough. Actually, we were when we had all the infrastructure there and we were expanding that infrastructure dramatically. I say we. I’m only saying that because I’m British. So they were doing that.
(01:16:33) In 1938, Britain wasn’t ready for war. Now you can argue that Germany wasn’t ready for war, either. But Chamberlain was prime minister in a democracy, a parliamentary democracy, where 92% of the population were against going to war in 1938. There was not a single democratic leader in the world that would go against the wishes of 92% of the population.
(01:16:59) Now you could say, ” Well, he should have just argued it better and presented his case better and all the rest of it.” But at that point, there was no legal obligation to go to the defense of Czechoslovakia. Czechoslovakia was another of these new nations that been created out of 1919 and the Versailles Treaty. Who was to say we, in Britain, are able to judge the rights and wrongs of that? How fantastic it would be to go to war with a nation a long way away for people whom we know very little, et cetera, et cetera? I’m paraphrasing his quote.
(01:17:30) But I’m not saying it was the right decision. I’m just saying I can see why, in September 1938, he is prepared to give him a chance.
(01:17:40) Now I do think he was a bit naive, and what he also does is this really interesting thing. So he goes over to Hitler’s flat, completely ambushes him. Goes to his flat on the afternoon of 30th of September and says to Hitler, “Look, I’ve got this, I’ve drawn up this agreement here, and this is to continue the naval agreement that we’ve already made. And by signing this, you are saying that Germany and Britain should never go to war with one another.” Hitler goes, “Yeah, whatever,” signs it.
(01:18:12) Chamberlain comes back, [inaudible 01:18:13] and waves this little piece of paper, peace in our time and all the rest of it, which obviously comes back to bite him in a very big way.
(01:18:20) But it’s interesting that when Hitler then subsequently goes and moves and that they, France and Britain decide in rather the same way that there’s been discussion about deciding that large portions of Ukraine should just be handed back, handed over to Russia without consulting Ukraine a few weeks ago, it is incredible, I think, that France and Britain and Italy with Germany are deciding that, yes, it’s fine for Germany to go in and take Sudetenland without really consulting the Czechs. It’s a sort of similar kind of scenario really, and it’s equally wrong. But when Germany does then go and take over the whole of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, that’s the bottom line. That’s the point where Chamberlain goes, “Okay, I’ve given him the benefit of the doubt. No more benefits than doubt. That’s it. This is he’s crossed the line.” And so you reinforce your agreement with Poland, you do a formal agreement, you go, “Okay, we will uphold your sovereignty. If you are invaded, we will go to war with you.”
(01:19:27) And that is a ratcheting up of diplomacy in politics in a very, very big way. And it is that decision to make a treaty with the Poles is not heeded by Hitler, but it’s heeded by, literally, every one of his commanders.
(01:19:48) And it’s also heeded by Goring who is his number two, and who is obviously a commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe and is president of Prussia and all the rest of it and is the second-most senior Nazi. And he’s going, “This is a catastrophe. This is the last thing we want to be doing is going to war against Britain and, indeed, France.”
Lex Fridman (01:20:13) The Munich Conference is a pretty interesting moment, I would say in all of human history, because you got the leaders of these bigger-than-life nations and the most dramatic brewing conflict in human history, Chamberlain, Hitler, Mussolini, Daladier. It’s interesting when these bigger-than-life leaders are in a room together. Is there something that you know about their interactions?
James Holland (01:20:43) Yeah, I think one of the things that’s interesting is that Hitler’s got home advantage because it’s on his turf and the start off at the first meeting is at the Berghof, his beloved place in the Obersalzburg overlooking Berchtesgaden in the Alps. So he’s pretty confident because, “This is my manor, this is my turf. I’m not going to be bossed around by these guys.”
(01:21:03) But Chamberlain, for example, he’s going there thinking, “I’ve been around the blocks. No one can teach me anything. I’ve been a politician for ages. I’m not going to be kind of capped out by this sort of Austrian upstart.”
(01:21:15) So they’re both coming at it with a slight kind of superiority kind of conflict.
(01:21:23) Interestingly, when you get to the actual meetings at the [inaudible 01:21:27] in Munich a couple of weeks later, Chamberlain is cheered by the crowds when his car comes in, when he goes to his hotel, when he’s moving from his hotel to the [inaudible 01:21:40]. There are cars cheering him, waving Union Jacks, all this kind of stuff.
(01:21:44) Hitler does not like that at all, not at all, puts him on the back foot. And that’s because the German people don’t want war, in the same way that the British people don’t want war, nor do the German people.
(01:21:58) The difference is that Hitler is a dictator and an autocrat and has the devotion of the people so he can do what he wants in a way that Chamberlain can’t. Chamberlain’s hands are tied because he is an elected prime minister, an elected leader, political leader, and he’s not head of state. So there is no question that it is Hitler and Chamberlain that are the top dogs in this particular discussion.
(01:22:24) Daladier takes the back seat. Even Mussolini, although he’s there, he doesn’t want war, either. He wants to be left alone to do his own thing without anyone getting in the way. But he doesn’t want, it’s not in his interest to have a European war so he’s trying to avoid it.
(01:22:37) So it is really, you see that the kind of alpha males in the room are Chamberlain and Hitler, and it’s really interesting because Hitler’s got this sort of slightly garrulous voice and very kind of pale blue eyes and such distinct features, quite a long nose. And he always says this is why he has the mustache is to kind of disguise the big nose. As I was saying to you earlier on before we started recording, he does have a sense of humor. It’s not one that you and I would kind of tap into, but he does have one.
(01:23:09) Whereas Chamberlain, he sounds like bit like an old man. He’s sort of silver-haired, and he looks like your sort archetypal kind of British gentleman with rolled-up umbrella and his Homburg hat and all the rest of it. So they’re both sort of caricatures in a funny sort of way.
(01:23:24) And yet, the consequence of these discussions, these great events happening, you are absolutely going, even which way the Munich crisis comes out, you’re taking a step closer to war. It’s just whether the war is going to happen next week or whether it’s going to happen a year, hence. But the Munich crisis obviously doesn’t stem the inevitability of war at all. It just heightens it.
Lex Fridman (01:23:49) Do you think there are words that Chamberlain should have said, could have said that put more pressure on Hitler, intimidate Hitler more?
James Holland (01:24:01) Yeah, it’s a really tricky one. It’s such a difficult one because you’re always looking at it through… The enemy has a vote, and you don’t know what that vote is going to be, and you don’t know what it’s going to look like. There’s no question that the rest of Europe is cowled by the kind of impression of military might that the Germans have put out. They certainly fear they are stronger than they actually are.
(01:24:27) And then on the other hand, they’re also going, “Yeah, but Germany doesn’t have natural resources, doesn’t have access to the world’s oceans. It shouldn’t be able to win a war.” So they’re kind of contradicting themselves at the same time. So one minute they’re sort going, “Oh God, you don’t want to take on all those Nazis and all those swastikas and those automaton stormtroopers.” But on the other hand, they’re then saying, “But actually Germany doesn’t have much in its basket. It’s got actually quite a lot of weaknesses, and we should be to kind of able to prevail, blah, blah, blah. We’ll just impose an economic blockade, and then it’ll be stuffed.”
(01:24:59) And Britain is not ready to fight a war in 1948, but nor is Hitler, nor is Germany, so one is sort of striking out the other. But it’s very easy to say that in hindsight, but at the time, where people kind of digging trenches in Hyde Park in Central London and barrage balloons going up over London and children being evacuated from the cities and 92% of the population not wanting to go to war, you could see why he takes the course he does.
(01:25:25) I suppose that’s what I’m saying. I’m not saying it’s necessarily the right decision, but I think it’s an understandable decision.
Lex Fridman (01:25:29) Oh, but what about even just on the human level? If I go into a room with a British gentleman versus going to a room with Trump, it feels like it’s so much easier to read and manipulate the British gentleman.
(01:25:46) Because Trump is like Trump-like characters. It seems like Hitler is similar, Churchill is similar. It’s like this guy can do anything. There’s something terrifying about-
Lex Fridman (01:25:59) Yeah, it feels like there’s something very predictable about Chamberlain.
James Holland (01:26:02) Yes, I think that’s true. But also one has to take a step back and think about what Britain represents so, therefore, what Chamberlain represents in 1938. Britain has the largest empire the world has ever known in 1938.
Lex Fridman (01:26:14) Yeah, yeah. We shouldn’t forget that, right?
James Holland (01:26:17) Third of the world is pink, as the saying goes. And that saying comes from the kind of atlas of the world where all British territories are kind of colored pink.
(01:26:24) And on top of that it has lots of extra imperial territories as well. So if you look at, there’s this incredible map of global shipping in 1937, and there’s these little landlines of ships going out, and one of the strongest landlines is going down to Argentina and South America from Britain. So down past West Africa and down in Southern Atlantic, and there it is.
(01:26:47) And that’s because Britain owns most of Argentina. It owns huge great farming estates and ranches. It owns the railway system. It owns many of the port facilities. So you didn’t even need an empire. You need the facilities that overseas trade and possessions can give you.
(01:27:04) And Britain not only has the largest navy, it also has the largest merchant navy. It has 33% of the world’s merchant shipping and access to a further 50% Greek, Norwegian, Canadian shipping that it can access. So if you’ve got access to 80, in excess of 80% of the world shipping, that puts you in an incredibly strong position.
(01:27:27) And actually all sorts of other things have been going on. While they might not have been creating a huge army or producing enough Spitfires that they might want to, up until this point, what they have also been doing is stockpiling bauxite and copper and tungsten and huge reserves. And because Britain has this huge global reach and because it has its empire and its extra-imperial assets, it can strike bargains that no one else can strike.
(01:27:50) So it can go into various countries around the world and can go, “Okay, I want you to guarantee me for the next five years every bit of your rubber supply. I will pay over the asking price to secure that.” And it’s doing that in the 1930s. So when war comes, it’s got everything it possibly needs.
(01:28:09) Now it always need more because it’s suddenly turning into a kind of proper global long drawn-out war. But that is a huge advantage.
(01:28:18) So it is with that mindset that Chamberlain is going into those talks and thinking, “Okay, well, I’m not going to get a war over Czechoslovakia. Who cares about them? But I am going to show Hitler that I mean business.” Hitler’s going, “Who’s this stuffy guy with his white hair? I don’t give a toss about him.” And he’s coming at it from a completely different perspective.
(01:28:37) And I think one of the things that’s so interesting from a dramatic point of view and from a historian’s point of view, or even a novelist’s point of view, in the case of Robert Harris writing his book about these negotiations, which I don’t know if you’ve read it, but it’s terrifically good, it’s the fact you’ve got two men, two alpha males who are going to those negotiations from totally different perspectives and vantage points.
(01:29:01) And I think it’s very easy for people today to forget how elevated Britain was in the late 1930s. The gold standard was tied to the pound, not the dollar. And so Britain was the number one nation in the world at that time, and it just was, and it’s so diminished by comparison today that it’s hard to imagine it.
(01:29:26) And I think one of the interesting things about the historiography, about the narrative of how we tell World War II is that so much of it has been dictated by the shift in power that took place subsequent to 1945. And when people were starting to write these sort of major narratives in the 1970s and ’80s and into the 1990s, is through a prism of a very, very different world.
(01:29:49) And so, one of the reasons why you have this narrative that Britain was a bit rubbish and hanging on the shirttails of the Americans and all the blood was spilt in eastern front and Germany had the best army in the world and was only defeated because Hitler was mad and blah, blah, blah, that kind of traditional narrative, that narrative emerges through the prism of what was going on in the 1970s and what was going on in the 1980s and the changing world, rather than looking at it through the prism of the late 1930s or early 1940s.
Lex Fridman (01:30:19) So there is this moment of decision. What lesson do you take from that? When is the right time for appeasement, to negotiate, for diplomacy? And when is the right time for military strength, offensive, attacking, for military conflict? Where is that line? Where’s that-
James Holland (01:30:45) Well, I kind of think it probably was when it was. I mean-
James Holland (01:30:52) Yeah. Honestly, I’m not sure it would’ve been the right decision to go to war in 1938. I can’t predict because you can’t second-guess how things are going to play out because you just don’t know.
(01:31:07) But I’m not sure that Chamberlain made the wrong decision. I’m not saying he made the right decision. I’m being a bit wishy-washy about this.
Lex Fridman (01:31:16) You could’ve threatened it more. Imagine Churchill in those same meetings.
James Holland (01:31:22) Yeah, but Churchill also appeases. I mean, he appeases Stalin all the time. So the idea that Churchill is this big strong man and never appeases, and he’s gung-ho over war, Churchill’s out of the government at that time. He recognizes that you can’t trust Hitler. He recognizes that Nazism is bad. But he, because he’s out of the government, he doesn’t have a window on exactly where Britain is at that particular time, in a way that Chamberlain does.
(01:31:49) I suppose what I’m saying is Chamberlain is better placed to make those decisions than Churchill is, which again, doesn’t mean that Chamberlain is right and Churchill is wrong.
(01:32:02) It’s just that’s a massive punt to go to war in 1938 when you still don’t have, you’ve got a handful of Spitfires, you’ve got a handful of Hurricanes, you haven’t got enough. Your air defense system isn’t properly sorted at this point. Your navy is strong, but what’s that kind of look like, I mean, if you do go to war? Because it’s not going to be army sweeping into Germany. It’s just it’s going to be accelerated industrialization for a year. So even if you go to war in 1938 over Czechoslovakia, Czechoslovakia will not be saved. France and Britain will not be going in and invading Germany. That is absolutely not going to happen.
(01:32:44) So what’s the point, I mean, if you’re not going to do that? Why didn’t you accelerate your rearmament thereafter, get your ducks in a row, and then you can consider it? I mean, after all, even in September 1939, they don’t really do anything. I mean, we talked about the kind of Saar Offensive, which isn’t really an offensive at all. It’s firing a one round of machine gun and scuttling back again. But I mean, they don’t even do that then. They’re still buying time in 1939, and Britain is only just about ready to take on the onslaught of the Luftwaffe in summer of 1940.
Invasion of Poland
Lex Fridman (01:33:19) Well, nobody’s ready for war.
James Holland (01:33:21) No, and you always want more than you’ve got at any time, even when you’re winning.
Lex Fridman (01:33:25) But like really not ready. Even like you mentioned with Barbarossa, Nazi Germany is really not ready.
Lex Fridman (01:33:41) Fine. But come on, come on. When Nazi Germany invades Poland, I mean-
James Holland (01:33:49) Yeah, it’s terrible. It’s terrible because I also do think that had France gone in, in some force with some British troops as well, had they gone in, what would’ve happened is, is that would’ve, that easily could’ve brought down Hitler because most of his commanders are, his senior commanders are just thinking, “What the hell is going on? This is a catastrophe.” I mean, to a man.
(01:34:12) I mean, even Goring is thinking this is a terrible idea. They are absolutely not convinced. And when Hitler does his big talk to his… He asked all his senior commanders to come to the Berghof to brief them about invasion of Poland, it’s just after the Ribbentrop Molotov back to the 22nd of August. He calls them all to Berghof and says, “Come in mufti, come in civilian suits.”
(01:34:34) They all turn up, and he gives them this kind of huge great speech and says, “This is the moment, this is the time. This is what we’re going to do.” And they’re all going, “What? You’re kidding me. What, we’re going to Poland on the 26th of August, that’s the plan, like two days’ time? Where’s the plan?”
(01:34:51) The whole point is that they’re emerging and growing militarily, but they were supposed to have all these exercises where they’re coordinating ground forces, the Panzer spearhead with operations in the air with the Luftwaffe.
(01:35:04) None of that happens so Poland becomes the proving ground, and actually they discover that there’s lots of things that don’t work and lots of things that are wrong. But it’s flying in the face of all convention, military convention that he does this without any kind of warning.
(01:35:21) And even by the 1st of September where there’s been this kind of five-day delay at the last-minute negotiations. The last-minute negotiations are thrust upon Hitler by people like Goring and by Mussolini and the Italians going, “Oh my God, don’t do this. Don’t do this. There’s got to be a solution,” he was absolutely chomping at the bit.
Lex Fridman (01:35:42) Well, in that case, from a dark militaristic perspective, his bet paid off.
James Holland (01:35:49) Well, except that it ended in ruins in May 1945 with the total collapse of Germany, so you could say the worst decision he ever made was going into Poland in September 1930. Depends the way you look at it, but I mean, yes, it’s successful in that Poland is overrun in 18 days.
Lex Fridman (01:36:05) And there’s so many counterfactuals here.
James Holland (01:36:08) But I mean if you were to say to Hitler on the 30th of April as he’s sort of taking out the pistol from his holster on his sofa in the Fuhrerbank and going, “Yeah, so, Adolf, 1st of September 1939, still backing yourself on that one?” I mean, he might have a different view.
Lex Fridman (01:36:24) The guy’s insane and full of blunder so he probably would’ve said, “Yeah, do it all over again.”
James Holland (01:36:29) Yeah, I’m sure he would’ve done as well.
Lex Fridman (01:36:31) Conquest Poland was not a mistake. Soviet Union was not a mistake.
Lex Fridman (01:36:56) But he was very sure, it seems like, maybe you can correct me, that Britain and France would still carry on with appeasement even after he invaded Poland.
James Holland (01:37:06) Absolutely. He was completely convinced by it. There was clearly a sort of 10 to 15% level of doubt, “But what the heck, I’m going to do it anyway.”
(01:37:18) He’d ratcheted himself up into such a lava of kind of, “This is the moment. I have to do it now. This is fate. I’m 50, and I could be taken out by an assassin’s bullet. I’ve got this important life work that I’ve got to do. We’ve got to get on with it now. There could be no more delay. This is my mission. This is our mission of the German people, and the German people have got the will and the spirit to be able to pull it off.”
(01:37:43) Or “I was wrong, and, therefore, we don’t deserve to be a Thousand-Year Reich. We don’t deserve to be the master race, black or white. [inaudible 01:37:52] same all the time.”
Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact
Lex Fridman (01:37:55) So can you tell the story of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in 1939? So they make an agreement, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, and that leads us, just like you were mentioning, in a matter of days, how compact everything is. It’s just really, really fascinating how crooked-
James Holland (01:38:12) It’s a beautiful summer in Europe, summer of 1939. It’s one of these glorious summers that sort of never rains. It’s just sunshine, sunny day after sunny day. It’s like that sort of golden summer of 1914 as well, where sky always seems to be blue, fluffy, white clouds, everyone sort of, you know, but this sort of the storm clouds of war, to use that cliche, are kind of brewing.
(01:38:39) The Russians have reached out to Britain and France and said, “Come on over, let’s negotiate. Let’s see what we can do,” and there is just no stomach for that at all. I mean, if ever there is, I think, a mistake that’s Britain and France should’ve been a bit more into realpolitiks than they were. It’s such an opportunity to ensure that, to snooker the Third Reich, and they don’t take it. Because in many ways they see the westward spread of communism in exactly the same way that the Nazis see the threat of the westward spread of communism as something that’s every bit as repellent as Nazism, and they don’t want to be getting into bed with these guys.
(01:39:26) Of course, they have to kind of change tack on that one in summer of 1941 in very quick order, and that’s the whole point about Churchill appeasing Stalin. I mean, it’s all very well people saying, “Well, Churchill wouldn’t have appeased Hitler in the 1930s,” but he does appease. He appeases all the time, and they miss that opportunity.
(01:39:49) And the French and British delegation is third-tier commanders, generals going over. Yeah, it was a shit show. I mean, yeah, excuse my French, but I mean, it’s a nonsense that they’re not ready for it. They’re not prepared. The British guy [inaudible 01:40:06] doesn’t have any authority. The whole thing’s a complete joke. It’s never going to get anywhere.
Lex Fridman (01:40:12) You tell the story of this quite beautifully, actually. Again, it’s such a human story. I mean, it seems like the Stalin and the Soviet-
James Holland (01:40:22) They’ve already made up their mind.
Lex Fridman (01:40:40) Maybe it’s a simplistic notion, but that could’ve changed the trajectory of human history right there.
James Holland (01:40:46) I really think it could’ve done. I think that’s much more grievous mistake than the Munich.
Lex Fridman (01:40:51) Why are leaders so hesitant to meet? I’m told now by a bunch of diplomats that, “No, no, no, no. There’s a process. At first, you have to have these diplomats meet, and they have to draft a bunch of stuff.”
(01:41:07) I sometimes have the simplistic notion, like, why not meet? Why not meet? I think there is a human element there, of course, especially when there’s this force that is Hitler.
James Holland (01:41:23) Well, yes, and because we, humans, we like to interact, and you like to see people in three dimensions, and I’m sure that’s why you always, quite rightly, insist on doing your podcast face-to-face. Because you want to get the cut of someone’s jib, and you want to be able to see them, and you want to see the intonation and the expression and the whites of their eyes and all that kind of stuff.
(01:41:46) And that just does make a difference, of course, because we’re fundamentally animals, and we want to be sizing people up. And it’s much easier to do that when you’re a few feet away from each other than it is on a video screen or through the prism of someone else.
Lex Fridman (01:42:02) Yeah, but there’s also just, you see the humanity in others. It’s so much easier, you see this in social media, it’s so much easier to talk shit about others when you’re not with them-
Lex Fridman (01:42:13) … and military conflict is the extreme version of that. You can construct these narratives that they’re not human, that they’re evil, that they’re… You can construct communist ideology, all these… You can project onto them the worst possible version of a human. But when you meet them, you’re like, “Oh.”
James Holland (01:42:36) They’re all just a person.
James Holland (01:42:38) Well, it’s the world’s great tragedy that it’s only a few people that want to go to war, and the vast majority want to live happily contented lives getting on with their neighbors. I mean, it has been ever thus. It’s just it is those few that kind ruin it for everybody else.
(01:42:52) But anyway, to go back to Leningrad, back in August 1939, they go half-cocked. They’re disrespectful to Soviet Union as a result of that. It gets nowhere. Had they been able to put on a really, really firm offer there and then to the Soviet Union, Soviet Union would’ve probably come in.
(01:43:13) I mean, the big thing is, is that the Soviet Union said, “This is a big stumbling block.” The Soviet Union said, “Yeah, but we want to be able to march through Poland if we get threatened by Germany.”
(01:43:25) But the British and French just smell a massive rat there. They’re basically saying if they agree to that, what they fear is that Soviet Union will just march into Poland and go, “Yeah, but you said we could,” and take it, which they unquestionably would’ve done, but it would’ve stopped the World War, probably.
Lex Fridman (01:43:42) They’re willing to appease Hitler. They’re not willing to appease Stalin in that situation.
James Holland (01:43:46) Well, they’re not willing to appease anybody by that stage, that’s the point.
Lex Fridman (01:43:49) Well, they appeased Hitler because-
James Holland (01:43:51) They did, but you have [inaudible 01:43:52] there’s a bottom line, which is Poland, so it’s changed. That’s the point.
James Holland (01:43:59) But anyway, the bottom line is they don’t, there is a reluctance on the part of French and the British to negotiate with the Soviet Union because they’re communists, don’t like them, don’t trust them, worry about what they’re going to do with Poland, are they’re going to be jumping out of the fire into the kind of water, and it doesn’t come off.
(01:44:18) And as a consequence of that, Soviet Union continue to pursue more hardly, more and more vociferously the opportunities that the Germans are offering, which is the split of Poland. Because Soviet Union wants that part of Poland back in its own sphere of influence, and it doesn’t want to go to war just yet.
Lex Fridman (01:44:42) And the agreement that they won’t attack each other, essentially.
Lex Fridman (01:44:46) You think Stalin actually believed that?
James Holland (01:44:49) No, he believed it in the same way that Hitler believed it, that it was a cynical kind of convenient bit of realpolitik for now. I mean, I think Soviet Union was as determined to get rid of the Nazis as the Nazis were determined to get rid of the Soviet Union. I think whoever fired first-
James Holland (01:45:00) … Nazis as the Nazis were determined to get rid of the Soviet Union. I think whoever fired first was not decided at that point, but I do think that from the moment that Hitler takes power in 1933, a conflict between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany is inevitable.
Lex Fridman (01:45:13) So either direction, you think it’s inevitable.
James Holland (01:45:24) Yeah. And they’re doing exercises and stuff and building out, but he’s not ready yet because he knows he’s done the purges and he’s got to get his armed forces back into shape and all the rest of it. So they have this incredibly cynical agreement, but at that point, Hitler’s hands are untied. He no longer has to worry about the threat from the Soviet Union. He’s got carte blanche to go into Poland, and he doesn’t believe that France and Britain are going to go to war over Poland. He’s wrong about that, obviously. But France and Britain, despite going to war with him, still do nothing. So he’s got away with it.
Winston Churchill
Lex Fridman (01:45:57) Who was Churchill, and how did Churchill come to power at this moment?
James Holland (01:46:02) Well, Churchill is this absolutely towering figure in British politics. He’s first minister in the naughties of the 20th century and the first years of the 20th century. First of the liberals, then of the conservatives. He’s a former Chancellor of the Exchequer. He’s a towering figure, but he’s been in the wilderness because he’s out of favor with the Stanley Baldwin government. He’s out of favor with Chamberlain, but he is this towering figure, and he has been very outspoken as a backbencher, which basically means you’re not a minister, you’re not in the cabinet, you’re just an ordinary member of parliament. But obviously you are an ordinary member of parliament, but you’re also an ordinary member of parliament who has had ministries of state and who is this towering figure. So he’s listened to in a way that other backbenchers aren’t.
(01:46:54) And he has been saying, “We need to stand up to the dictators. We need to do this. We need to rearm more heavily,” and blah, blah, blah. So when war is declared, he’s brought back into the admiralty in charge of the Navy, which is Britain’s senior service, and suddenly he’s there. And what happens is Britain doesn’t really do anything. It’s very difficult working with France because France is so politically fractured that they can’t make any decisions. When you can’t make any decisions, you are just impotent. And so Churchill first mentions going into Norway mining the leads. So the idea is that you’re making life very difficult for the Germans to get iron ore out of Sweden. Their main source of iron ore is up in the northern part of Sweden in the Arctic Circle, and then goes on a railway through the northern tip of Norway and then gets shipped down the west coast of Norway into Germany, into the Baltic.
(01:47:48) So Churchill suggests, in September 1939, why don’t we mine the leads? Which the leads are these passageways out of the fjords in the north into the North Sea. Why don’t we mine those and stop the Germans from taking this? And everyone goes, “Well, yeah, that’s quite a good idea.” But they can’t decide, and the French are nervous that if they do that, the Germans would retaliate in bomb France and all this kind of stuff. So no decision is made until April 19, 1940. They go up to start mining the leads on exactly the same day that the Germans invade Denmark and Norway, and so they’re caught off guard. And at that moment, really it’s seen as a failure of Chamberlain’s government. And there is a mounting realization that no matter how good he was or competent he was as a peacetime Prime Minister, he’s not a wartime Prime Minister.
(01:48:36) He’s not served in the armed forces himself. He doesn’t really understand it. It needs a different set of hands. And his government falls on the 9th of May. It becomes inevitable that he’s going to have to resign. And the obvious person to take his place is Lord Halifax, who is in the House of Lords, but you could still be a Prime Minister. And he is, without question, the most respected politician in the country. He’s the former Viceroy of India. He’s seen as an incredibly safe pair of hands, man of resolute sound judgment, et cetera, et cetera. But he doesn’t want to take it. He feels physically ill at the prospect, doesn’t want this responsibility. He is also not really a military man. He’s got a slightly withered hand, which has prevented him from doing military service.
(01:49:23) And he just blanches at this moment, and that really leaves only one other figure that could possibly take on this position, and that’s Churchill. So when Chamberlain resigns on the 9th of May and Halifax says, “It’s not for me,” the only person who’s going to step into that position is Churchill, and he becomes Prime Minister, and he accepts it gladly. He feels like it is his mission in life. This is his moment come of the outcome of the man. But he comes with a huge amount of baggage. He’s known as a man who drinks too much, whose judgment hasn’t always been great. He was Chancellor during the time of the General Strike in 1926. He backed Edward VIII over the monarchy crisis when the King wanted to marry Wallis Simpson, the Catholic divorcee, et cetera, et cetera. So his judgment has been brought into question. He is the man who came up with the idea of the Gallipoli campaign, which was an ignominious failure, blah, blah, blah.
(01:50:18) So there are issues over him. He is seen as a hothead and a man who doesn’t have the sound judgment of Halifax. So the jury is very much out. And I think, again, it’s one of those things where you have to look at this through the prism of what people were thinking in May 1940. Yes, he was considered [inaudible 01:50:38] politician, but he is seen also as a loose cannon and by no means the right person in this hour of darkness. And it is coincidental that the 10th of May 1940, when he takes over as Prime Minister, becomes Prime Minister, not through an election, but by default of a new nationalist government. So no longer a conservative government, but a nationalist cross-party coalition government for the duration of the war, which includes members of the Liberal Party and also the Labour Party as well as conservatives, that it is by no means certain that he is going to be able to deliver the goods.
(01:51:20) And it is also coincidentally the same day that the Germans launched Case Yellow, Operation Yellow, the invasion of the low countries in France. So these are tumultuous events, to put it mildly. And it is also the case that only a couple of weeks before, Paul Reynaud has taken over his Prime Minister of yet another coalition government in France from Daladier. So political turmoil is very much the watchword at this time for the Western democracies, just at the moment that the Germans are making their hammer strike into the West.
Lex Fridman (01:52:00) This might be a good moment to bring up this idea that has been circulating recently brought up by Darryl Cooper, who hyperbolically stated that Churchill was the quote, chief villain of the Second World War. To give a good faith interpretation of that, I believe he meant that Churchill forced Hitler to escalate the expansion of Nazi Germany beyond Poland into a global war. So Churchill is the one that turned this narrow war, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Poland, into a global one. Is that accurate?
James Holland (01:52:41) No, I don’t think it is, not least because the decisions over Poland were made by Chamberlain’s government when Churchill was out of government. So Churchill wasn’t even involved in that decision-making process at the time. No, I don’t think so. Again, I go back to Britain’s position in the world in 1939. If you say, “We are going to defend the sovereignty of Poland,” and then you don’t, that looks really bad globally. Britain’s prestige would plummet. It would lead all sorts of problems. You are saying that you are giving carte blanche to dictators to just run amok and take whatever territory they want. You are risking a future upheaval of the global order away from democracies into the hands of dictators. In the West people believe in democracy and believe in advancement of freedoms of people.
(01:53:37) To echo the words of Roosevelt in August 1941, they’re responding to a world free of want and fear. Now obviously, there are still some issues with the form that democracy takes in the 1930s. It’s not democratic for everyone. Try saying that if you are in Nigeria or India or whatever, or if you’re in the black Southern states of the United States. But the aspirations are there. And I think that’s an important distinction. And I think by saying that Churchill is the chief warmonger of the Second World War, I think, is ludicrous. It’s the same thing about the bombing. The detractors of strategic air campaign always go, “Yeah, but Germans had the Holocaust, but weren’t the Allies just as bad just killing all those civilians?’ It’s like, no, because the moment Hitler stopped the war, the bombing would stop. The moment the war stopped in Hitler’s favor, the killing would continue and be accelerated.
Lex Fridman (01:54:37) So the thing you mentioned initially is the idealist perspective of well, Britain can’t allow this warmonger to break all these pacts and be undemocratic, murder a large number of people and do conquests of territory. That’s idealistic. But if we look at the realist perspective, what decisions would minimize the amount of suffering on the continent in the next 50 years? So one of the arguments that he’s making, I happen to disagree with it, to put it mildly, is that Churchill increased the amount of suffering, so Churchill’s presence and decisions. So we’re not talking about idealistic perspective, we’re talking about a realistic. The reality of the war of Stalin, of Hitler, of Churchill, of France and FDR, did Churchill drag Hitler into a world war? Did he force Hitler to invade the Soviet Union? Did he force Hitler to then attack Britain?
James Holland (01:56:03) Well, no, because Hitler was always going to invade the Soviet Union unless the Soviet Union invaded Germany first. So that was always going to happen. No one asked Hitler to invade the low countries and Norway and Denmark and attack Britain. He does that, of course, because he’s not given a free hand in Poland. But there’s no question that Hitler would have also wanted to subdue France or certainly turn France from a democracy into a totalitarian state as well. I’m absolutely certain about that.
Lex Fridman (01:56:40) So I think there’s pretty definitive evidence, it’s obvious from everything he’s said, from everything he’s written, from everything everywhere, that he was going to invade the Soviet Union no matter what. And France? Most likely yes also.
James Holland (01:56:55) He would have done a deal with Britain. Britain could have coexisted.
Lex Fridman (01:56:59) So actually, there is a possible reality, I don’t know, maybe you can correct me on this, where Hitler basically takes all of Europe except Britain.
James Holland (01:57:10) Yes, but then he would have got so strong that he would have then turned on Britain as well, because the fear is that if you let him do this, then he gets greedy. He wants the next one, then he wants the next one, then he wants the next one, and then he wants to take over the whole world. That is the fear of the British. That is the fear of the Americans. That’s the fear of President Roosevelt. We haven’t even touched on this yet, but he has a very difficult case on his hands because he has come into power also in January of 1933 as President of the United States on an isolationist ticket with a retrenching, with a step away from the European old order. It’s time for the Europeans to stand on their own. It all sounds very familiar right now.
(01:57:58) And suddenly he’s got to do this gargantuan political [inaudible 01:58:01] and prepare the nation for war because he also fears, like Churchill fears, like Chamberlain feared as well, that Hitler’s designs are not purely on Eastern Europe and the Lebensraum there, but would get ever bigger. And I don’t doubt that they’re right. I think if he’d prevailed in the Soviet Union, he’d have always wanted more, because his whole concept is the master race.
Lex Fridman (01:58:29) Yeah, I think it should be said if we measure human suffering, if there was not Britain on the other side, if it was not a two-front war, that the chances of Hitler succeeding in the Soviet Union is much higher, or at least a more prolonged war, and there would be more dead, more enslaved and more tortured in all of this.
James Holland (01:58:52) Yes and ditto. If the Allies hadn’t got involved against Imperial Japan, it would have been catastrophic. 20 to 30 million Chinese dead anyway with American and British intervention. What’s it going to be in China without that? And elsewhere. Because the reason why Japan invades French Indochina, now Vietnam, and Hong Kong and Malaya and Singapore and so on, and Burma is because it’s not winning in China, and it needs more resources because it’s resource poor, and America has cut off the tap. So it’s going into these countries to get what it needs, its rubber and oil and natural resources and ores, precious ores and all the rest of it. And if it had been unchecked, it would have done so, and then it would have absolutely built up its strength and overrun the whole of China with even more deaths.
(01:59:55) So I think one of the interesting things about the Second World War is lots of wars and why people get involved in them are extremely questionable. But I think there is a moral crusade to the Allies and what they’re doing that I think is entirely justified. What I think is interesting also is that as the war progresses, if the Allies are supposed to be on the force of the good, how come they’re doing so much bad? And at what point is doing bad stopping you from doing good? And at what point are you doing good, but also doing bad at the same time? Such as destruction of cities, destruction of monasteries on outcrops in southern Italy, killing of lots of civilians, et cetera, et cetera. These are difficult questions to answer sometimes. They’re also incredibly interesting, and I think that moral component starts to blur a little bit by middle of the war, by 1943. It’s easy to have a fairly cut-and-dry war in North Africa, in the deserts of North Africa, where the only people getting in the way are a few Bedouin tribesmen or something.
(02:01:10) But once you start getting into Europe or getting into the meat of highly populated countries in the Far East, for example, that’s a different color of fish because the scale of destruction is absolutely immense. But it’s also the job of political leaders to look after and defend their own peoples first and foremost. And so what you’re doing is you’re trying to protect your own sovereignty of your own people before you’re protecting other people. And so that’s what leads to the whole way in which the the Western Allies are protracting war is to try and minimize the number of deaths of their own young men as much as they possibly can, whilst at the same time winning the war.
(02:01:56) And that means bringing lots of destruction to your enemies, but also trying to minimize it. And the way you bring lots of destruction to your enemies is by using immense firepower and this concept of steel not our flesh, which I mentioned earlier on, and technology, so that you don’t have to bring to bear too many of your young men’s lives and you don’t have a repeat of the slaughter of the First World War. So it’s really interesting that in our mind’s eye, when we’re thinking of the Western Allies in the Second World War, probably the first thing that comes into mind is Americans jumping out of landing craft on Omaha Beach on D-Day, for example. Those are infantrymen, they’re the front line, they are the cold face, they’re the first people going into the fire of the enemy. And we tend to think about guys in tanks, infantrymen with their Garand rifles or machine guns or whatever. That’s what springs to mind.
(02:02:48) Yet actually they’re a comparatively small proportion of the army. So no more than 14 to 15% of any army, Allied army, is infantry. 45% are service corps, service troops, driving trucks and cooks and bottle washers and people lugging great big boxes of stuff. And that’s because by that stage, the Allies have worked out the way of war, which is to use is what I call big war, this concept of a very long tail, logistics, the operational arts, making sure that people have the absolute best you possibly can, great medical care, huge advances in first aid and medical care of troops, getting them back onto the battlefield. And you’re using firepower and technology and mechanization to do a lot of your hard yards. So that’s the principle behind strategic bombing.
(02:03:37) If you go over and bomb and you can destroy infrastructure and civilians and households, that makes it much harder for Krupp to make those Panzer tanks and tiger tanks or whatever it might be, and guns, and you’re disrupting the transportation system in Germany, you’re making life difficult for them to do what they need to do, then that means it’s going to be easier for those 14, 15% of infantry when you’ve got to jump out of a landing craft to do their job. And you’re trying to keep that to a minimum. And you’d have to say, broadly speaking, that’s a very sensible policy that makes an awful lot of sense. The consequence of that is a huge amount of destruction, and maybe that’s what Darryl Cooper’s driving at. But no one asked Hitler to invade Poland. That is the bottom line. No one asked Germany to go to war. No one asked Hitler to come up with this ludicrous ideology.
Lex Fridman (02:04:30) There’s complex ethical discussions here about just as you described.
Lex Fridman (02:04:37) Which are fascinating. And war is hell, and there’s many ways in which it is hell. Just for a little bit, the steel man, what Darryl, where he might be coming from is since World War II, the simplistic veneration of Churchill, so saying Churchill good, Hitler bad, has been used as a template to project other conflicts to justify military intervention. And so his and other people like Libertarians, for example, resistance to that overly simplistic veneration of somebody like Churchill has to do with the fact that that seems to be by neocons or warmongers in the military industrial complex in the United States and elsewhere, using Hitler way too much, using Churchill way too much to justify invading everywhere and anywhere.
James Holland (02:05:42) Well, I do agree with that. I think oversimplification of anything is a mistake. Life is nuanced. The past is nuanced. It’s okay to be proud about certain things, and it’s okay to be disgusted by other things. That’s absolutely fine. We have a complicated relationship with our past. It doesn’t need to be black and white, and life is not a straight line. And of course, the Allies made plenty of mistakes in World War II. Overall, I think they made the right calls. And I think one of the things that’s really interesting is I think that the Allies, for the most part, use their resources much more judiciously and sensibly than the Axis powers do. And good, because that means they prevail.
(02:06:28) I think there are so many lessons from World War II that could have been brought into the history of the last 30 years, which weren’t, such as if you decapitate an incredibly strong leader, you get a power vacuum. And if you don’t have a solution for that power vacuum, lots of bad elements are going to sweep into that in very quick order, which of course, is exactly what happens in Iraq. So Donald Rumsfeld is going, “We don’t do reconstruction.” Well, you freaking well should do. If you’re going to take on this particular challenge, you’ve got to see it through. That’s simply not good enough. It’s not good enough to go into Afghanistan and go, “We’re going to change things around. It’s going to be great. All the women are going to have education. They won’t have to cover up their bodies anymore. Anything goes. We love liberalism. It’s great. Let’s make Kabul into a thriving city once more,” and then suddenly bug out. Because what’s going to happen? You’re going to undo everything.
(02:07:31) And this is a bit of a segue, Lex, but I remember being in northern Helmand Province back in, when was it? January 2008. And British troops had just taken over an absolute dump of a town called Musa Qala, and I remember talking to this Afghan guy. He just had all his willow trees chopped down to make room for a helipad the Allies wanted, which they put those cages with rubble in the protective wall. Is it called HESCO? I think it was called. Anyway, I said to him, “What do you think about the British being there?” And he just went and shrugged at me and lifted up his hands and said, “Well, if they stayed great, but they won’t.” And he said, “If they stay, then brilliant.” But he said, “I’ll tell you what he said, Taliban weren’t great, they weren’t fantastic.” He said, “But I could leave my purse on the wall and no one would touch it. I could leave it on a wall for a week and no one would touch it.” He said, “Will they bring that kind of order? Will we have peace here? They’ve just chopped down my willow trees. Thanks a lot.”
(02:08:39) You’re seeing a total lack of understanding of the culture, ethnic differences. You’re trying to impose a Western-centric view onto a nation which isn’t ready for that. Now, there are ways in which it looked like Afghanistan was starting to emerge, and there was a path, and then just at the critical moment, the West moves out with catastrophic consequences. What you have to say though is that in the West post-1945, the rehabilitation of Italy, of Japan, of Western Germany was really good. The consequence of all that destruction, all that turmoil was thriving, high-producing democracies, which burst forth into the second half of the 20th century and into the 21st century in pretty good order. So the lessons of the previous generation, from the First World War, had been learned, even though the scale of destruction, the displacement of people is unprecedented in 1945.
Most powerful military in WW2
Lex Fridman (02:09:57) In 1939, what was the state of the militaries? What were the most powerful militaries on the world’s stage at that time?
James Holland (02:10:04) Well, in terms of naval power, Britain, as we’ve already discussed, and the United States. France has a pretty large navy. Japan has a pretty large navy. Italy has a pretty large navy, but Italy’s navy is, by far and away, the most modern aspect of its three services, air, land, and sea, but it doesn’t have any aircraft carriers and it doesn’t have any radar. So they’ve got modern battleships and battle cruisers, but without key modern bits of technology.
Lex Fridman (02:10:32) So Italy is really not ready for it.
James Holland (02:10:34) Oh, it’s so not. It’s so not. It’s just, again, both Hitler and Mussolini, they lack geopolitical understanding. That’s because they’re so focused on their narrow worldview, and they view everything through that prism, but they can’t see that bigger picture.
Lex Fridman (02:10:51) And we should say that Mussolini, maybe you can correct me, but I don’t think at any point he wants a war.
James Holland (02:10:57) He doesn’t want a war. What he does want is he wants his own new Roman Empire, which extends over the Mediterranean, certainly the eastern half of the Mediterranean, North Africa, all the way down to East Africa, controlling the Suez Canal. That’s what he wants.
Lex Fridman (02:11:13) And I think he made clear that he was … There was always this little brother, jealous-of-Hitler situation because he wanted absolute power the way Hitler did.
James Holland (02:11:27) Monarchy. Often forgotten. It’s amazing.
Lex Fridman (02:11:31) So there’s always this limit. And Hitler, quite brilliantly, once he gets some power, he takes it all, complete.
James Holland (02:11:41) He completely emasculates Mussolini. And he likes him though. It’s really weird. Even when Mussolini is about to fall in July 1943, he has a meeting at Feltre just literally a few days before Mussolini tumbles. And he does that because he likes Mussolini. He likes him as a man and thinks he’s been his friend, and he respects him to a certain extent, even though he definitely views himself as top dog. Hitler does, that is. So it’s curious because I don’t think Hitler particularly likes anyone really, but he does seem to Mussolini. But anyway, the problem with Mussolini is Mussolini’s Italy is very impoverished from the First World War, and that, of course, leads to the rise of fascism and the overthrow of parliamentary democracy and why Mussolini takes place in the first place. Again, it’s that there’s been this terrible disruption. There’s been financial crisis. That leads to people looking at an alternative.
(02:12:42) What’s the alternative? Well, Mussolini is going, “We can be proud Italians again,” lots of chest thumping, wearing great uniforms, all the rest of it. And people think, “Well, I want a piece of that,” and it works, and proverbially the trains work on time under him, and so on and so forth. But he just gets ahead of himself. And actually the writings on the war in 1935 when he goes into Abyssinia, and again, what effectively are by first world European standards primitive tribesmen in Abyssinia, they have quite a tough fight there. They do prevail, but it’s not a complete walkover. And they get a bit of a bloody nose at times, and they shouldn’t have done.
(02:13:22) And they’re just not ready. They don’t have the industry. They’re tied up into the Mediterranean. They don’t have access to the world’s oceans. They do have some merchant shipping, but not a huge amount. They just don’t have what is required. They’re dependent on Britain for coal. Britain is the leading coal exporter in the world in the 1930s. So Britain’s approach to fascist Spain and approach to fascist Italy has been very much stick and carrot. It’s like, we’ll let you do what you do as long as you stay in your box, and we’ll continue to provide you with supplies and coal and whatever it is you need as long as you don’t go too far.
(02:14:05) And so that’s why Mussolini is very anxious in 1938, and again in 1939, to be the power broker and not let Germany go to war. But Germany, they signed the Axis Pact of Steel in May 1939, where they become formal allies, this is Hitler and Mussolini, Italy and Germany. But it’s always a very, very unequal partnership right from the word go. And one of the reasons Mussolini signs it is because he fears that Germany has designs on Italy. It’s not because he thinks, oh, these guys are great, they’re our natural bedfellows. It’s a mutually convenient pact whereby Germany gets on with whatever it wants to do up in Northern Europe and Eastern Europe. Italy is given a free hand to do whatever it wants to do. They’ll just watch each other’s backs. They have borders, Austria and Italy border one another, and they’ll just do their own thing, and they’ll help each other out with supplies and stuff. But basically they’ll be their own … It’s a marriage of convenience.
(02:15:09) They’re never expecting to be fighting alongside each other on the battlefield. Not really. There is a kind of obligation to do so, but it’s an obligation with no expectation of it ever actually happening. And so from Mussolini’s point of view, the Pact of Steel is just sailing your flag to one particular mast and trying to cover your back. And so long as he plays his cards right, he can still get his coal supplies from Britain, and he doesn’t have to worry about that. And the Pact of Steel doesn’t make any difference to that. The problem for him is that in June 1940, he thinks that France is about to be defeated and that Britain will surely follow.
(02:15:48) And so he thinks, ah, I’ve got some rich pickings. I can take Malta, I can take British possessions, I can overrun Egypt and now is my time, but I also need to join the fight before France is completely out of the fight. Otherwise, it looks like I’m a Johnny-come-lately, and I won’t get those spoils because the Germans will go, “You can’t have all this stuff. You’ve turned up too late. You need to be in the fight.” So he does it in what he thinks is the perfect timing. And it turns out to be a catastrophic timing because of course, Britain doesn’t exit the fight. Britain is still there. And by February 1941, a very, very tiny British army in Egypt has overrun two entire Italian armies and taken 133,000 prisoners in North Africa.
Lex Fridman (02:16:26) So you mentioned in the sea who were the dominant armies. Who was dominant in the air?
James Holland (02:16:33) Well, in the air it has to be the Luftwaffe, and it is also the Imperial Japanese, both in the Imperial Japanese Navy and the Imperial Japanese Army. They both have air forces. And one of the reasons for that is because the quality of the pilots in Japan is extremely high, because it’s so difficult to get to the top position. You are going to your frontline squadrons with at least 500 hours in your logbook. To put that into some perspective, a British RAF or Luftwaffe pilot will be joining their frontline squadrons with 150 to 170 hours in the logbook. So these guys are disciplined within an inch of their lives. There are academic tests as well as physical endurance tests. They are the elite of the elite, and they are extremely good.
(02:17:20) The problem they have is that there is a good number of them, but there’s not that many. The Luftwaffe is the largest air force in the world in 1939, but it is already at a parity in aircraft production with Britain, and the French have a similar size army, but they’re very, very badly organized. So they’re organized into different regions, and one region is not really talking to another. And one of the problems when Case Yellow, the invasion German invasion of the West starts, France’s army of the air is spread throughout France and has its own little area. So you have one bunch of fighters and bombers in that block in the Marseille area. You have another block on the Brittany coast, and you have another block around Sudan, and you have another that.
(02:18:07) So consequently, they’re never able to bring their full strength to bear. So although they’ve both got about three-and-a-half thousand aircraft on paper and about two-and-a-half thousand that are fit to fly on any one given day, the Luftwaffe, because they’re the aggressor, could choose how they amass their aircraft and where they attack and when. So in other words, the Luftwaffe can send over overwhelming amounts of bombers and fighter planes and pulverize a French airfield and catch them napping. And because the French don’t have a defense system, they can’t see whether they’re coming. So their only hope is to take off and just hope they stooge around the sky and hope they bump into some Luftwaffe. Of course, that’s inherently inefficient, and they get destroyed, and they get destroyed in penny packets rather than en masse.
(02:18:56) The difference with the RAF is the RAF is not done on an Air Force basis where each air corps or air fleet has a handful of bombers, a handful of fighters, a handful of reconnaissance planes. They have different commands. So they have bomber command, fighter command, training command, coastal command, and they all have very specific roles, so they’re structured in a completely different way. And that’s because they’re an island nation and because they see their role militarily in a different way and because the re-arming that Britain has done in the 1930s is all about defense. It is not about aggression at this point, not about taking it to the enemy. It is showing you are tough, but also first and foremost, getting your ducks in a row and making sure that you don’t get defeated.
(02:19:43) So this is the principle behind the world’s first fully coordinated air defense system, which is the radar chain. It is the observer corps, it is control rooms, it is interesting technology such as Identification Friend or Foe, IFF, which is where you have a little pulse. So you have these control rooms, and you have a map table, and you have a-
James Holland (02:20:00) … So you have these control rooms and you have a map table, and you have a tote board in front of you where you can see what squadrons are airborne, what stage of readiness they’re at, whether they’re engaging the enemy, little lights come on and show you. You can see weather maps, you can see the cloud ceiling, you see all that at a glance. Then you are on a dais and then down in front of you is a massive great map of Southern England. You’ve got croupiers, sort of moving plots, so you can, through a combination of radar, which picks up a rough idea of what’s coming towards you combined with the Observer Corps, you have overlapping Observer Corps stations all over Britain covering every single inch of airspace over Britain, looking up into the air and seeing how many aircraft there are and at what height they are.
(02:20:43) And you have a little thing called a pantograph, which is a piece of equipment which helps you judge altitude. You then ring through that. That all comes into the control room along with the information from the radar stations, which is going into a single filter room at Fighter Command Headquarters, which is then being pushed straight back out to the sector stations. So this information is being updated all the time. So you have a plot and it looks like it might be enemy bombers 30-plus, for example. That’s constantly being adapted. So as more information comes in, you would change that and then you can see that actually it’s only 20 aircraft or 22 aircraft or whatever.
(02:21:21) So you’re updating that and that little figure is put on your little plot and moved across and so you can see, and then because you can identify your own aircraft, you can then see where they are moving. And you’re also on, the guys in the air are on the radio to ground controllers, who are in these control rooms and they’re saying, “Okay, well if you proceed at angels 18, 18,000 feet on a vector of 150 degrees, you should be seeing your enemy bombing formation any moment now.” And what that means is that you are not on the ground when the enemy are coming towards you with their bombers to hit your airfield, which means you are in the air, so that all they’re doing is hitting a grass airfield, which you’ve already got bulldozers and diggers and graders and lots of scalping and earth ready to fill in the potholes. And it means you’re good to go.
(02:22:13) And it means as a consequence of all that, when the Germans do launch their all out assault on Adlertag, Eagle Day on the 13th of August 1940, the British are ready. They can see them coming. They know what to expect and they can anticipate, and it means that they’re not being caught with their trousers down on the ground. As a consequence of that, of the 138 RAF airfields that there are in Britain, only one of them is knocked out for more than 48 hours in the entire summer of 1940. And that’s Manston on the tip of the Kent Coast, which was abandoned for the duration.
Lex Fridman (02:22:48) So these are the two biggest Air Forces?
James Holland (02:22:51) So those are the two biggest Air Forces.
Lex Fridman (02:22:52) So Luftwaffe, we should say German, I mean they’re like the legendary, the terrifying Air Force.
James Holland (02:23:05) They’re slightly believing their own hype. There’s no question about it.
Lex Fridman (02:23:08) Well, the rest of the world is also, right?
James Holland (02:23:09) They’ve just had it too easy. So they don’t have ground controllers, they don’t have an air defense system in Germany because why would you need an air defense system, we’re going to be the aggressor. There’s no scenario where we’ll have to defend the airspace of the Third Reich because we’re on the offensive. So they just haven’t prepared it.
Lex Fridman (02:23:27) So there’s that clash, the Battle of Britain, the clash of Air Forces. What explains the success of Britain in defending?
James Holland (02:23:36) Well, everyone always says, the few were the last line of defense against the Nazi hordes and all this kind of stuff, and it’s all rubbish. They’re the first line of defense. Second line of defense is the Royal Navy, which is the world’s largest, and there’s absolutely no chance on earth that a German invasion force made up of Rhine River barges, one out of every three is motorized, and the other two aren’t, is ever going to get successfully across the English Channel and even if they did, they will be repulsed. There’s just no chance. And it is often forgotten that while the Luftwaffe is coming over and bombing Britain every single day, so is the RAF going over and bombing Germany and one of the problems that the Germans have is that these bombers need fighter protection. Fighter planes are there to protect the bombers and they don’t have much fuel.
(02:24:28) And the Messerschmitt-109E, the Emil, as a model of 1940 is the mainstay of the German fighter force in the summer of 1940. And they don’t have much fuel. So they need to conserve their fuel, which means they need to be as close to Britain as they possibly can, which is why the majority of them are all in airfields, which are hastily created in July 1940 following the fall of France in the Pas-de-Calais, which is the closest point. That’s where the Channel is at its narrowest and all the rest of it, and also in the Northern Normandy, and that’s where they’re flying from.
(02:24:59) But what that means is that even if you are completely rubbish bombing, which the British are in 1940, they haven’t developed those navigational aids that create untold accuracy by the end of the war, in 1940 they don’t have that luxury, it’s a target-rich environment. You can barely miss, if you go over to the Pas-de-Calais. It is literally, it’s just like one huge great kind of hub of fighter airfields. And consequently, that means that every single German squadron, which only is 12 airplanes strong on establishment and very often even fewer than that, always has to leave two airplanes behind to defend their own airfields.
(02:25:36) And it’s really interesting when you look at prisoner war statements from Luftwaffe ground crew that have been downed, they’re all bugged in a holding place called Trent Park. You can see the transcripts of these conversations. They’re all going about how annoying it was that the RAF were over every night and they can’t sleep, and if only they’d just shut up and leave them alone and not bomb them. This is just part of the narrative of the Battle of Britain that’s completely left out. It’s always the stocky, the plucky few against the Nazi hordes and all the rest of it. And it’s a complete misnomer.
(02:26:04) And by that time, aircraft production in Britain is massively outpacing the Germans and the best ratio that the Germans achieve in 1940s, July 1940, when the British produced 496 new Hurricanes and Spitfires, single-engine fighters, and the Germans only produced 240 single-engine fighters. That’s the best ratio. And of course, that is the British outproducing the Germans 2:1. And what that means is by the end of October 1940, when the Battle of Britain is officially designated as being over, the single-engine fighter force of Luftwaffe is less than 200, from 750 or whatever it was in beginning of July, whereas the British fighter force had been 650 or whatever at the beginning of July, is now well over 750.
Lex Fridman (02:26:53) And Britain is outproducing?
James Holland (02:26:55) Yeah, to a massive degree. And that continues, and that is a ratio that just increases as the war progresses. Britain produces 132,500 aircraft in the second World War. America produces 315,000.
Lex Fridman (02:27:12) So why is there this legend of the Luftwaffe?
James Holland (02:27:16) Well, because it’s the spearhead of the Blitzkrieg.
Lex Fridman (02:27:18) So it has to do with the Blitzkrieg?
James Holland (02:27:19) It has to do with the Blitzkrieg. The Luftwaffe becomes kind of the bogeyman of the Third Reich. They’re blamed for everything, but that’s because they’re completely abused. They’re the only part of the Third Reich’s Armed services, only part of the Wehrmacht, the Wehrmacht being the Navy, the army, and the Air force, that is in constant use the whole time, or constant abuse, I should say.
(02:27:45) In Britain and America, they rotate their pilots really, really carefully. By the time that you’ve got the eight Fighter Command, for example, part of the Mighty Eighth, the Eighth Air Force operating in Britain, by the end of 1943, you would have, in a squadron, that would have 16, you would never have more than 16 airborne from a squadron at any one time. You would have 40 to 45 pilots to service 16 in the air and similar number of aircraft, which means you’re not overusing these guys.
(02:28:15) And what would happen by that stage of the war, by 1943, a young fighter pilot coming to a Thunderbolt Squadron or a Mustang Squadron, for example, at the end of 1943, beginning of 1944, he’d have 350 hours of consecutive flying because you can train in America, in Florida or California or Texas or wherever, you can process many, many more people because the training is much more intense because you’ve got clear skies. So it’s not a question of, “Oh, we’d like to take you out Fritz this morning, but it’s a bit cloudy and oh, the RAF are over or Air Force are over, so we can’t fly today.” So in Germany, pilot training is constant. Aircrew training is constantly being interrupted by the war, by shortage of fuel, by inclement weather, et cetera, et cetera. In America, you have none of those problems. And Britain, because of its global reach also has training bases in what was Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe and South Africa, Canada as well. And so you are able to process these guys much better.
(02:29:17) You’re able to give them more training, so that when they come, they are absolutely the finished article as pilots. Well, they’re not the finished article, as they say, a bomber pilot or as a fighter pilot. But that’s okay because you join your squadron of 40 other guys with 16 airborne, and the old hands kind of take you up a few times. So you arrive at, I don’t know, let’s say some airfield in Suffolk in East Anglia in England, and you’ll have 10 days to two weeks acclimatizing, getting used to it. The old hands will put you through your paces, give you some trips, tips. You can pick their brains while you’re having some chow and listening on some briefings. Then, the first mission you do will be a milk run over to France where the danger’s kind of pretty minimal and you can build up your experience, so that by the time you’re actually sent over on a mission to Berlin or Bremen or the Ruhr or whatever, you are absolutely in the business.
(02:30:11) So qualitatively and quantitatively, you are just vastly superior to anything the Luftwaffe has got. The Luftwaffe by that stage, in contrast, 1940, new pilots coming to frontline squadrons with 150, 170 hours in their logbooks, less than a 100, 100, 90, 92 hours, something like that. It’s not enough. And they’re just being flung straight into battle and they’re getting absolutely slaughtered. And they’re also because their machines are quite complicated, there’s no two-seaters really, so no two-seater trainers. So the first time you’re flying in your Focke-Wulf 190 or your Messerschmitt-109, it’s this horrendous leap of faith for which you as a young, bright Luftwaffe fighter pilot know that you are not ready for this and it can bite you. And something like a Messerschmitt-109 has a very high wing loading, so it’s very maneuverable in the air, but it’s got its tiny wings. It’s got this incredible torque, this Daimler-Benz DB 605 engine with this huge amount of torque, and it just wants to flip you over. So if you’re not used to it, and it’s got a narrow undercarriage as well, if you’re not used to it, you could just crash.
(02:31:18) So in the first couple of months of 1944, they lose something like 2,400 aircraft in the air and pilots and about 3,400 are accidents.
Lex Fridman (02:31:30) So it has to do with training, really?
James Holland (02:31:33) It’s training and resources and supply. And the Second World War, more than any other conflict is a war of numbers. There are differences, that decisions that generals can make. There are moments where particular brilliance and bravery can seize the day, take the bridge, hold the enemy at bay or whatever. But ultimately, you’re talking about differences, which might make a month’s difference, six months’ difference, maybe even several years’ difference. But ultimately, there’s a certain point in the Second World War where the outcome is absolutely inevitable because the guys that lose can’t compete with the numbers that the guys are going to win.
Tanks
Lex Fridman (02:32:18) So in that sense, you could think of World War II as a battle of factories?
Lex Fridman (02:32:26) What does it take to win in the battle of factories out manufacturing military equipment against the allies?
James Holland (02:32:36) It’s efficiency really. So I always think, let’s take the example of the Sherman tank, for example, the mainstay of the Western Allied Forces and a fair number of them sent to the Soviet Union as well for that matter.
Lex Fridman (02:32:48) I think you’ve said it doesn’t get the respect it deserves maybe.
James Holland (02:32:52) It doesn’t get the respect it deserves. So the Sherman tank, the 75-mm main battle gun, which that’s medium velocity, can fire a shell around 2000 feet per second compared to the notorious infamous German 88 mm, which can fire at third fast again, like 3000 feet per second. But on paper, a Tiger tank coming around the corner and a Sherman tank coming around the corner, it should be no match at all. Tiger tank is 58 tons, looks scary, is scary, it’s got a massive gun, got really thick armor. Sherman tank doesn’t have as thick armor, doesn’t have a gun that’s as big. It should be an absolute walkover. And yet, at about 5:30 PM on Monday the 26th of June 1944, a Sherman tank came around the corner of a road called Rue Massue, a little village called Fontenay-le-Pesnel in Normandy, came face to face with a Tiger tank. And one, how does this happen?
(02:33:47) Well, I’ll tell you how it happened because the commander of the Sherman tank was experienced, had one up the spout. So what I mean by that is he had an armor piercing round already in the breech. Soon as he saw the Tiger tank, he just said, “Fire.” That armor piercing round did not penetrate the Tiger tank, it was never going to. But what it did do is it hit the gun mantlet, which is a bit of reinforced steel that you have just as the barrel is entering the turret. And that caused spalling, which is the little shards of little bits of molten metal, which then hit the driver of the Tiger tank in the head. And he was screaming, gotten him or whatever, and he couldn’t really see. The moment they got hit, the commander of the Tiger tank retreated into the turret of the Tiger. The moment you retreat into a turret, you can’t see, you can see ’cause you’ve got periscopes, but your visibility is nothing like as good as it is when you’ve got your head above the turret.
(02:34:42) Immediately after that, the armor piercing round from the Sherman tank was repeated by a number of high explosive rounds, which are rounds, which detonate, have a little minor charge, then there’s a second charge, which creates lots of smoke. And in moments, in the first 30 seconds, 10 rounds from that Sherman tank had hit the Tiger tank before the Tiger tank had unleashed a single round itself. The crew then surrendered. So you didn’t need to destroy the Tiger tank, you just need to stop it operating. If it hasn’t got a crew, it’s just a chunk of metal that’s inoperable. So that’s all you need to do.
(02:35:18) And what that tells you is that experience counts, training counts. The agility of the Sherman tank also counts. It’s a smaller shelf, therefore it’s easy to manhandle, which means you can put more in a breach quicker. There’s features on a Sherman tank like it’s the first tank to have a gun stabilizing gyro, which means it’s more effective on the move. There’s also an override switch on the underside of the turret so that the commander, if he just sees something out of the corner of his eye, can immediately start moving the turret before the gunner, who is down in the belly of the turret, can react. There’s many different facts of it. But the main fact of all is of 1,347 Tigers built, there were 49,000 Shermans. So that means there’s 36 Shermans to every single Tiger.
Lex Fridman (02:35:59) So you actually have an incredible video. You talk about this a lot from different angles about the top five tanks and then the bottom five tanks of World War II. I think, was it the Tiger that made both the top five and the bottom five?
James Holland (02:36:13) The problem with the Tiger tank is really huge.
Lex Fridman (02:36:15) We should say that you keep saying the problem, but one of the pros of the Tiger tank-
Lex Fridman (02:36:26) I don’t know what the other pros, I guess yeah, the 88 mm high velocity and all the rest of it-
James Holland (02:36:32) It’s pretty fearsome, but there are pragmatic problems. The big problem is the Germans are incapable of mass production on a scale, but Americans could do. Frankly, even the British could do. They’re just not in that league. The reason they’re not in that league is because they’re in the middle of Europe. They don’t have access to the world’s oceans. They don’t have a merchant fleet, they can’t get this stuff. It hasn’t gone terribly well in the Soviet Union. They can’t process it, and they’re being bombed 24 hours a day. And so all their factories are, they’re having to split them all up and that is inherently inefficient because then having to move different parts around and you then having the whole process of having to travel from one place to another to get stuff, you haven’t got much fuel.
(02:37:14) So the consequence of that is that what you do is you think, “Okay, well ,we can’t mass produce, so let’s make really brilliant tanks.” But they’ve lost sight of what a really brilliant is. Really brilliant to their eyes is big, scary, big gun, lots of armor. But actually what conflict in World War II shows you is that you need more than that. You need ease of maintenance, you need reliability. And the problem with having the bigger the tank, the more complex the maintenance equipment is, you need a bigger hoist, which then means you need a bigger truck, which then uses more fuel. So for example, the Tiger tank is so big that it doesn’t fit on the loading gauge of the European Railway system. So they have to have different tracks to roll onto the wagons that will then transport them from A to B, take them from West Germany to Normandy, then they have to take them off, then they have to take off the tracks, put on combat tracks, then move them into battle and hope that they don’t break down.
(02:38:12) The problem is when you start the war, it’s not very automotive and you’ve only got 47 people for every motorized vehicle in Germany compared to three in the United States or eight in France, is that you’ve got lots of people who don’t know how to drive. And it also means you haven’t got lots of garages and mechanics and gas stations and so on. And so you are then creating an incredibly complex beast. But you want that complex thing to be as simple as you possibly can be. And that’s the beauty of the Sherman tank. All those guys in America, they’re used to driving stick cars. There’s three people for every automobile, and that includes the old and children, so almost every young man knows how to drive. And when you get into a Sherman tank, it’s got a clutch, it’s got a throttle. The brakes are the steering mechanism. The clutch is where you would expect the clutch to be. It’s got a manual shift. You put your foot on the clutch and you shove it into second gear and off you go or reverse or whatever. And it literally can be easier.
(02:39:10) Anyone who can drive a stick car could drive a Sherman tank, seriously. Not everyone can drive a Tiger tank. It’s incredibly complex, really, really is. And that comes with a whole host of problems. And of course, you don’t have the numbers. You don’t have the numbers. You’ve got 1,347 of them, you’ve got 492 King Tigers, which are even bigger and at a time where you are really short of fuel and you are really short of absolutely everything. And those shells are huge and they’re harder to manhandle and weird little things that the Germans do, for all their design genius, the loader is always on the right-hand side. Now, in the 1920s and 19 teens and thirties, children were taught to be right-handed. You weren’t allowed to be left-handed, so you were right-handed. So you want to be on the left-hand side of the gun so you can take the shell from your right and swivel it into the breach from your right side.
(02:40:05) But the loader in a Jagdpanther or Panther or a Tiger is always on the right-hand side of the breach, which ergonomically makes no sense whatsoever. Why do they do this? I’ve never found an answer to this. So there’s all these little things, and as a soldier coming up against, you are an American GI and you’re coming up against a Tiger tank, you don’t care about the fact that it’s difficult to maintain or the problems involved of trying to get it to the battlefield. All you care about is this monster coming in front of you, it’s squeaking and clanking away, and it’s incredibly scary and it’s about to blow you to bits. That’s all you care about and quite understandably so.
(02:40:41) But those who are protracting the war at a higher level and historians that come subsequently and look at all this stuff, they do need to worry about all these things. I remember the same Georg Thomas, the architect of the Hunger Plan, I found there’s minutes of this meeting, which I think was either on the 4th of December or the 5th of December 1941, so it’s just before the Red Army counterattacks outside Moscow in the winter of 1941. And it’s a meeting about weaponry, and this is a verbatim quote. He says, “We have to stop making such complete unaesthetic weapons.” In other words, we’ve constantly building over-engineered and aesthetically-pleasing weapons up until this point and they sort of half manage it, but don’t quite.
Lex Fridman (02:41:31) We could probably talk for many hours about each of these topics. We could talk for 10 hours about tanks. I encourage people to listen to your podcast, World War II Pod, We Have Ways of Making You Talk. It’s great.
James Holland (02:41:47) Yeah, we also do, we got a new YouTube channel and website called World War II Headquarters. There are lots of walking the ground and videos of that and all sorts of stuff and little explainers of going around tanks and stuff and the weaponry and documents and photographic archives. So the idea is to turn it into a real hub of anyone who’s interested in this subject. It’s a place where they can go and find out just a whole load more.
Battle of Stalingrad
Lex Fridman (02:42:17) I love it. So like I said, we could probably talk for many hours at each of these topics, but let’s look at some of the battles and maybe you can tell me which jumps out at you. I want to talk to you about the Western Front and definitely talk about Normandy. So there’s the Battle of Midway in 1942, which is a naval battle. There’s Eastern Front Stalingrad, probably the deadliest battle in human history. Then there’s the Battle of Kursk, which is a tank battle, the largest tank battle in history, probably the largest battle period in history, 6,000 tanks, 2 million troops, 4,000 aircraft. And then that takes us also to the Battle of the Bulge in Normandy, the Italian Campaign that you talk a lot about. So what do you think is interesting to try to extract some wisdom before we get to Normandy? Do you find, as a historian, the Battle of Kursk or the Battle of Stalingrad more interesting? Stalingrad is often seen as the turning point.
James Holland (02:43:23) Well, yeah, I think so. It’s really interesting. So they get through in 1941, Barbarossa doesn’t happen as the Germans hope it will. The whole point is to completely destroy the Red Army in three months and that just doesn’t happen. And I think you can argue and argue convincingly that by, let’s say, beginning of December 1941, Germany is just not going to win, it just can’t. And let me tell you what I mean by that. So if you take an arbitrary date, let’s say the 15th of June 1941, Germany at that moment has one enemy, which is Great Britain, albeit Great Britain plus Dominion Empire. Fast-forward six months to let’s say the 16th of December, it’s got three enemies. It’s got Great Britain, Dominion Empire, USSR, and the USA. It is just not going to win. For all the talks of wonder weapons and all the rest, it’s just not going to, it has lost that battle.
(02:44:24) Having said that, Soviet Union is still in a really, really bad situation. It is being helped out a huge amount by supplies from the United States and from Britain, just unprecedented amounts of material being sent through the Arctic or across Alaska into the Soviet Union at that time. It is absolutely staggering how much is committed by Roosevelt and Churchill to try and stem the flow in the Soviet Union because for all the announcements and pride that the Soviet Union has about moving factories to the other side of the Urals and stuff, which they do in 1941, huge amounts are overrun intact by the Germans in the opening stages of Barbarossa, really colossal losses, huge amounts. So the grain is gone, coal is gone, entire factories have gone. Steel production goes down by 80% in the Soviet Union in 1941 and in 1942. So in 1942, despite the vast amount of numbers of men that they have at their hands, they create 80 new divisions in the second half of 1941, for example. Britain never has 80 divisions in the entire Second World War, division being about, rule of thumb, 15,000 men.
(02:45:42) So despite that, and that is because Stalin’s meddling, the woeful state of the Red Army in 1941, et cetera, et cetera, which we’ve already sort of touched upon. So 1942, it’s still in a really bad way, but Germany’s in a really bad way too. The attrition it suffered in 1941, it’s winning itself to death in 1941. So it’s having these huge great encirclements, like the encirclement of Kiev in September 1941, capturing the further best part of 700,000 Red Army troops, et cetera, et cetera. But in the process of doing that, it is constantly being attrited, both in battle casualties but in also mechanical casualties too, just can’t cope. The scale is just too big.
(02:46:27) What happens is with every moment that the German forces, that ultimate victory slips away. So Hitler’s personal handling of the battle increases. And [inaudible 02:46:41] like about him, but he just hasn’t had the military training to do that. He might have amazing attention to detail, he might be able to understand, have an enormous capacity to remember units and where they are on a map, but he was only a half corporal in the First World war. He’s never been to staff college. He might have read lots about Frederick, the Great, I’ve read lots of history, but that doesn’t mean to say I’d be a competent field marshal. So he is not the right person for the job at all. And he micromanages and he looks at statistics and figures and doesn’t understand what it’s like at the actual front, the coal phase. So he’s stifling the very thing that made the German army effective, which is the ability to give commanders at the front the freedom on their leash to be able to make decisions and battle command decisions, and he’s taken that away from them.
(02:47:30) So he’s basically making them go into battle with decreasing amounts of supplies and firepower and with one hand behind their back in terms of decision-making process. And that is not a good combination. The other problem is that he decides rather than going from Moscow in 1942, ’cause basically there’s a cooling off period in the winter because of the conditions, but everyone knows, the Soviet Union know, the Red Army knows that the moment spring comes, there’s going to be another offensive, another major offensive in the summer, that is absolutely as certain as day following night, et cetera. The problem that the Germans have is they just don’t have enough. They have less than they had when they launched Barbarossa the previous year. The Soviet Union has more, it’s better prepared, it knows what’s coming now. It’s kind of learning some of the lessons, starting to absorb the lessons. Stalin coincidentally is pulling back from his very tight leash in the way that Hitler is doing the opposite and increasing his micromanagement and control freak-ery.
(02:48:29) What Hitler decides is rather than going for Moscow, he’s going to go for the oilfields. This is absolutely insane because what’s going to happen when they get to the oilfields? Does he think really that the Soviet Union are going to let those oilfields come into German hands intact? Even if he does let them get in intact, what are they going to do with that oil? Oil needs to be refined. Where are you going to refine it? They don’t have many oil refineries. How are you going to ship that oil to where you need it to be in the factories in the Third Reich and into your process into gasoline and then get it to diesel and get it to your U-boats, get it to your tanks, get it to your armored units. How are you going to do that? How do you transport it from the Caucasus, which is a long, long way away from Berlin, how are you going to do that?
(02:49:20) There’s no pipelines. There’s only some pipelines that have been built by American money and American engineering, and they’re going backwards towards the Urals, not forwards. They have no more rail capacity whatsoever. They just don’t have the oil tankers. So it’s absolute la-la land. It is incredible that when you look at the detailed literature that the Germans have, no one is asking this question in the spring and early summer of 1942.
Lex Fridman (02:49:46) The logistics question in part?
James Holland (02:49:48) No one is saying, “Okay, it’s great that we’re going to go to the Caucasus and get all this oil, but then what?” No one is asking that question.
Lex Fridman (02:49:55) Nor how do you provide resources and feed the soldiers and all that kind of stuff? I mean, it’s…
James Holland (02:50:00) So the Case Blue, first of all, they get distracted by going into Crimea and they go, “Well, we’ve got to do that first.” So they have to get Sevastopol and the Crimea, which they do, and then they have to push on, and at this point, suddenly looming in front of them is Stalingrad on the banks of the Volga, this city, this industrial city, which has Stalin’s name. And Hitler goes, “Okay, what I’m going to do now is I’m going to split my forces. So half of you can go south towards the Caucasus and the rest of you can confront Stalingrad,” and von Bock who’s the commander, just goes, “That’s nuts. That makes no sense whatsoever. You are splitting the mission.” So Hitler fires him. So suddenly they get into this assault for Stalingrad and it becomes this sort of street fight. Street fighting is the worst kind of fighting. The reason why the Israelis have just blown everything up in Gaza is because otherwise you can’t see, you need a field of fire. This is fighting in a buildup area, it’s horrendous.
Lex Fridman (02:51:01) To clarify, we were talking about urban warfare, door-to-door, building-to-building.
James Holland (02:51:05) It’s incredibly difficult, and home advantage is colossal, in this instance. And of course, it’s piping hot when they attack in kind of August into early September, and then it suddenly gets very, very cold. And at the same time, American mechanization and slightly a British mechanization, but primarily American trucks are enabling Zhukov to plan this great pincer movement. And Russians will hate me for saying this, and I probably will get a whole load of bots on the back of it, but the truth is, it is not the street fighting that destroys Sixth Army, it is the encirclement, the subsequent encirclement.
(02:51:45) So the Germans have been sucked into this street battle in Stalingrad, cannot give up. We cannot give up, we cannot back down, we cannot pull out. We’ve got to destroy this city. Meanwhile, while their backs are turned, and while most of their forces are going off to the Caucasus on a wild goose chase for absolutely zero oil incidentally, and they never get remotely close to Baku, this huge pincer movement is being planned and it is only possible through mechanization from the United States. And that is the big turning point because from that moment onwards, the Germans are on the back foot. They’re basically going backwards. There are little small counterattacks, there is obviously the Kursk Salient, for example, but it’s game over. The catastrophe of the surrender of, the final surrender, the writing’s on the wall at the end of 1942, by November 1942. When the two Soviet fronts meet up, then there is no possible chance of escape for Sixth Army and they are consigned, they are toast.
(02:52:53) And their final surrender, obviously, happens at the very beginning of February 1943. But that’s all over. And then, at the same time that that is happening, disaster is unfolding in North Africa because Hitler has insisted on massively resupplying the Mediterranean Theater. And the problem there is the amount of equipment that is lost in North Africa is greater than it is at Stalingrad. I don’t think you could argue that psychologically Tunisia is a greater loss than Stalingrad. It absolutely isn’t. But you have to see them in tandem, as this is two fronts. This is Eastern Front, Southern Western front, and this is the first time that the Americans have been on the ground against Axis forces, and they lose big time.
(02:53:35) The allies become masters of the North African shores on the 13th of May 1943, and it is a catastrophe. And in that time, 2,700 aircraft have been, Luftwaffe aircraft have been destroyed over North Africa between November 1942 and May 1943. And overall, the subsequent summer as well, it’s really interesting, the Luftwaffe lose, between June and October 1943, so this is including the Kursk Battle, which that takes place in July 1943, in that period, the Luftwaffe loses 702 aircraft over the Eastern Front, but 3,704 aircraft over the Mediterranean.
(02:54:13) So I think one has to also, one of the lessons about studying the Second World War is one has to be careful not to assign strategic importance to boots on the ground. It can be of great strategic importance, but not necessarily. No one would argue, for example, that the Guadalcanal is not an absolutely game-changing battle in the Pacific War, and yet the number of troops compared to what’s going on in the Eastern Front or even the Western Front is tiny in comparison. So it is absolutely true that the most German blood is lost on the Eastern Front, but that doesn’t mean to say that it’s more strategically important in the Western Front, and it’s not saying that the Western Front is more strategic either. It’s just you have to be balanced about this. The psychological blow-over for Stalingrad is immense, and you cannot belittle that.
Lex Fridman (02:55:09) When we were talking about the operational side, the material loss of a battle is also extremely important to the big picture of the war. And we often don’t talk about that because, of course, with war, the thing to focus on is the human drama of it-
James Holland (02:55:28) I also think that what’s interesting is the Nazi High Command’s response to Stalingrad, which is not to go, “We’re screwed.” It’s to double down. Then so Goebbels, for example, gives his infamous speech in the Sportpalast in third week of February in 1943, where he goes, “Are you ready for this? This is now total war. The war is coming. This is a fight for survival. We’re all in it together. You are in this as well, every single one, every single German is now. This is a fight for survival and we are now in total war.”
(02:56:02) And everyone is just so depressed by this. I mean, they realize that they are going to reap what they have sown. Because everyone knows what’s been going on in the Eastern Front. Because first part of the war, Germans have loads and loads of cameras. They’re really into photographing everything, taking cine footage of everything, still part of the recording the greatness of the Reich and the triumphs of the Reich. They want it recorded.
(02:56:26) So all this stuff is a bit like the radios, is made very, very cheap, so lots of them have it, and people are sending it all back. And the people that are developing this stuff are all seeing it, and people are talking about it, and then it’s being sent to families, and they’re all seeing it. And they’re seeing pictures of Jews being rounded up and beaten, and they’re seeing Ukrainian partisans being executed. And they’re seeing villages being torched. And everyone knows. They all know.
(02:56:55) This whole idea is do they really know what was going on? Yeah, they do. They do know what’s going on, to lesser or greater detail, of course. There’s some people who don’t. And a bit like people know about the news today, some people do, some people don’t. “Oh, I never read the newspaper. I never listen to the news.” So you have that, of course. But it is widely understood and widely known that really brutal things have been going on in the east. And troops are coming back utterly traumatized by what they have taken part in, what they have witnessed, the kind of unspeakable brutality. This is war on a completely different level to anything that’s been seen in recent years.
Lex Fridman (02:57:35) Yeah, we should mention that the Western Front and the Eastern Front are very different in this regard.
Lex Fridman (02:57:41) So a lot of the Holocaust by bullets, the Holocaust with the concentration camps and the extermination camps is not in Germany, is not in the Western Front. It’s in Poland, it’s in the Soviet Union.
James Holland (02:57:54) Yeah, but don’t forget that even Auschwitz, for example, is part of the New Reich. It is part of an area which has been absorbed into Germany. So as far as they’re concerned, it’s now no longer got the Polish name. It’s now called Auschwitz, which is a German name. It is part of Germany. And there are German people moving there into this, air comma, model town, and they all know exactly what’s going on.
Lex Fridman (02:58:18) Yeah. You, by the way, have a nice podcast series of four episodes on Auschwitz, the evolution of the dream world town that becomes a camp, a work camp, then becomes an extermination camp.
James Holland (02:58:35) On a big boon of factory for IG Farben, which never produces a single bit of rubber.
Lex Fridman (02:58:41) So, this for sure is something I would have to dive deep in. There’s a book you recommended, KL.
James Holland (02:58:50) Yes, it’s just called KL. It’s about the whole concentration camp system, because K is Konzentration, in German. Lager is a camp. It’s an exhaustive book, and I am full of admiration for him for writing it, just because, jeepers, it must have been so… I mean, I was very depressed doing that work on Auschwitz, that deep dive. I just found the whole thing utterly dispiriting. And I’ve been there a few times, and it’s ghastly. So, how he wrote a whole book on it, I don’t know.
Lex Fridman (02:59:21) I think in the details, there’s two ways, I think, to look at the Holocaust. One is Man’s Search For Meaning, but Viktor Frankl, this philosophical thing about how a human being can confront that and find meaning. And what does the human condition look like in the context of such evil?
(02:59:45) And then there is the more sort of detailed, okay, well how do you actually implement something like the Final Solution? So, you have this ideology of evil implemented.
Lex Fridman (02:59:59) And at the fine detail of, what are the different technologies used? What are the different humans and the hierarchy of humans at a camp? What’s the actual experience of the individual person who shows up at a camp? Just get into the details, and in those details, I think there’s some deep profound human truth that can emerge. The mundane one step at a time is how you can achieve evil, and you can get lost in the mundane.
James Holland (03:00:33) Yes, the banality of evil, it’s incredible. I think what is so completely horrific is that half the 6 million were killed by bullets to the back of the head. And the reason they stopped doing that and they wanted to stop doing that was because the guys, the perpetrators were finding it so traumatic.
(03:00:55) Himmler goes and visits an execution in Ukraine, or maybe it’s in the Baltic states, I can’t remember where he goes, but he witnessed some in the summer of 1941. He thinks, “Oh, that’s horrible. They don’t have to do that. I don’t want my men having to do that. Got to find a more humane way of doing it.” When he’s talk about a more humane way of doing it, humane for the executioners, not for the victims.
(03:01:16) Because, trust me, Zyklon B is not a nice way to go. Basically, it’s bursting all the capillaries in your lungs. It’s extremely painful, and you can no longer breathe. And it can take up to 20, 25 minutes. Some people, it can take a couple of minutes.
(03:01:32) But all of those who are standing naked in that gas chamber, first of all, extremely humiliated by this process in the first place. Then there’s a sudden realization of that they’re not having a shower. They’re actually being gassed, and they’re all going to die.
(03:01:46) Imagine what you’re thinking as that processes you, because you might be the first, but you’re still going to… Even the first person is going to know that, “I can’t breathe, and I’m dying.” Everyone else is going to see the first few dying, and then going to realize that is what’s going to happen to them. And you’ve got those minutes, sometimes many minutes, where you’ve got to contemplate that, and that’s in extreme pain and panic. And just think about how cruel that is.
Lex Fridman (03:02:14) While being humiliated all the way through.
James Holland (03:02:17) While being humiliated all the way through.
(03:02:19) So the, inverted commas, humanity of the gas chambers is anything but. It’s disgusting. And the fact that people could do this is just beyond terrific. And then the fact that you are taking your Jewish prisoners and getting them to cut off all the hair, pull out the teeth of the dead before you put them on a lift and incinerate them. If you go to Auschwitz now, and you go to the collapse of the blown up gas chambers, which the Germans destroyed before the Russians overran them, in January ’45, you can still see some of the ash ponds, and there are bits of bone. Yeah, they’re still there, from the ash. It is utterly repulsive.
(03:03:02) And imagine arriving from that train on that incredibly long journey, where you’ve had no comforts whatsoever. Again, you’ve had humiliations and privation, the privations you’ve had to suffer as a result of that, of having to defecate in a bucket in the corner in front of other people. It was just horrendous.
(03:03:18) And then you get there bewildered, and immediately your kids are taken away from you. Or your husband and wife who’ve been married 20 years, they’re separated just like that, sent off into different groups, straight to the gas chambers. I mean, the scale of cruelty is so immense. It’s hard to fathom.
(03:03:35) And the thing that I find really difficult to reconcile, and this is where I think the warning from history is important, is that Germany is such an amazing nation. It’s the country of Beethoven and Strauss and of Goethe, and incredible art and culture and some of the greatest engineers and scientists have ever lived. And look how quickly it flipped into the descent of unspeakable inhumanity, which manifested itself in the Holocaust and the gas chambers and those executions into pits and tiny places and creeks in Lithuania or Ukraine or whatever. I mean, it’s just horrendous. And this is from a nation which, a decade earlier, had been a democracy.
Lex Fridman (03:04:29) It seems like, as a human civilization, we walk that Solzhenitsyn line between good and evil, and it’s a thin line, and we have to walk it carefully.
Lex Fridman (03:05:03) What was the planning? And it was lengthy planning. What was the planning? What was the execution of the Normandy landings?
James Holland (03:05:09) Well, the decision to finally go in… That when the Americans joined the war in December 1941, there’s the Arcadia Conference a few days later, a week later, between the British chiefs of staff and political leaders and Churchill and Roosevelt and his own chiefs of staff, about what the policy should be. And the policy is to get American troops over to Europe as quickly as possible, get them over to Britain, get them training and get them across the channel ASAP and start the liberation of Europe.
(03:05:38) The reality is that, in 1942, the Americans just aren’t ready. They’ve gone from this incredibly tiny army. They’re still growing. They’ve got no battlefield experience. The British are still recovering. They’re good on the naval power. They’re increasingly good on air power, but land power they’ve had to make up from the loss of their ally, France, and expand as well.
(03:05:59) So, ground zero for both America and Britain has been kind of June 1940, when France is out, and suddenly that’s the strategic earthquake, and that’s the issue that needs settling. And they need to just completely realign everything that they’d thought in 1939. They’ve got to start again.
(03:06:17) But it’s also becomes clear that it’s they’re not really ready in 1943 either. One of the problems is that Molotov, who is the Soviet foreign minister, has come over to Britain, in May 1942, and said, “We need you to do your bit and get on the campaign trail against the Germans and fight on the ground.” And the British were going, “Well, yeah, but cross-channel invasion is not really going to happen. We know we’re doing that in North Africa at the moment.”
(03:06:39) Then he goes over to Washington, and the Americans go, “We are definitely going to go and take on the attack to the Germans in 1942.” They’ve made this promise. So the summer of 1942, it becomes clear that they can’t keep that. So Churchill says, “Well, look, here’s an idea. We’ve already got an army in Egypt. Why don’t we land another one in Northwest Africa. That’s run by Vichy France, which is pro-Axis French colonies. Why don’t we take that? We can do that, and then we can meet in the middle. We can pence around. We can conquer the whole of North Africa. You can kill two birds with one stone. It’s because you can get some experience fighting against Axis troops, test some of your equipment and commanders. What’s not to like? And then we can see how it goes.” So, this is a opportunistic strategy.
(03:07:24) Whereas the Americans are very much, “We want to draw a straight line to Berlin, and that’s the quickest way. Let’s do it that way.” So it’s a different viewpoint, but Roosevelt gets that and agrees to that. So, that’s where the whole North Africa-Mediterranean campaign comes from.
(03:07:39) And as a consequence of the huge commitment to Tunisia, three and a half thousand aircraft, huge navies, two Allied armies in North Africa. By the time Tunisia is won in mid-May 1943, they think, “Well, we’ve got all this here. We might as well really try and put the nail into the coffin of Italy’s war, get them out of the battle. Sicily is an obvious one. Let’s go in there, and then we can take a view.”
(03:08:01) But between Sicily happening and the fall of North Africa is the Trident Conference in Washington, and that is where the decisions made. The Americans go, “Okay, enough of this opportunistic stuff. Okay, we get it, we buy it, but no more faffing around. May 1944, one year, hence, we are going to cross the Atlantic.” And the British go, “Okay, fair cop. We’ll do that.” So, that is where Operation Overlord, as it becomes, gets given its code name, its operational name. That’s when the planning starts.
(03:08:32) Serious planning starts at the beginning of 1944. One of the lessons from Sicily to Normandy is that you can’t have commanders fighting one battle whilst preparing for the next one. You have to have a separate command structure. And that’s okay because, by this time, we’ve got enough people that have got experience with battlefield command that you can actually split it. There are very good reasons for going into Italy, not least getting the Foggia airfields so that you can further tighten the noose around Nazi Germany.
(03:09:00) And one of the great prerequisites for the Normandy invasion is total control of the airspace, not just over Normandy, but over a large swathe of Northwest Europe. Why is that? Because the moment you land in Normandy, the cat is out of the bag, and it’s then a race between which side can build up men and material quickest. Is it going to be the Allies, who’ve got to come from Southern England, which is a distance of a slow journey across seas, and a distance between 80 and 130 miles away, or is it going to be the Germans that are already on the continent? Well, clearly, on paper, it’s the Germans, so you have to slow up the Germans.
(03:09:36) Well, how do you do that? Well, you do that by destroying their means of getting there, so bridges. Destroy all the bridges over the Seine. Destroy all the bridges over the Loire hit the marshalling yards. The glue that keeps the German war machine together is the Reichsbahn, the German railway network. So destroy the railway as much as you possibly can and make it difficult for the Germans to reinforce the Normandy British head, as and when it comes. But the way you do that, in turn, is by very low-level precision bombing. And that has to be done by twin engine, faster, smaller bombers going in low. But the problem is you can’t go low and destroy those bridges if you’ve got Focke-Wulfs and Messerschmitts hovering above you. So you’ve got to destroy those, which is why you need to have air superiority over this large swathe of Northwest Europe to do that.
(03:10:21) The problem is that while the industrial heartland of Nazi Germany is in the west, is in the Ruhr area, which is very convenient for bombers coming out of Lincolnshire or East Anglia on the east flats, east side of Great Britain, the aircraft industry is much deeper into the Reich, and it is beyond the range of fighter escorts for the bombers.
(03:10:42) And the American daylight bombers who are going over are discovering that, despite being called flying fortresses, they’re not fortresses. They’re actually getting decimated. And whenever their bombers go in strength over to try and hit the aircraft industry in Germany beyond fighter range, they get decimated, first, infamously, on the Schweinfurt-Regensburg raid on the 17th of August 1943, coincidentally the same day that Sicily falls to the Allies, and also coincidentally the same day that face-to-face negotiations begin with the Italians for an armistice, in Lisbon.
(03:11:13) But on that day of the 324 heavy bombers that the Americans send over to hit Schweinfurt and Regensburg, where there are a Messerschmitt plant and also a ball bearing plant, which is essential for aircraft manufacturing, they lose 60, shot down, and a further 130 odd, really, really badly damaged. And even for the vast numbers of manpower and bombers that are coming out of America, this is too much, so they can’t sustain it. So, they’ve got to find a fighter escort that’s going to be able to escort them all the way into the Reich.
(03:11:43) And the race is on because, basically, if they haven’t got one airspace by April 1944, it’s game over. You can’t do a cross-channel invasion. You have to have that control of the airspace beforehand. So the race is on. And fortunately, they come up with a solution which is the P-51 Mustang, which has originally been commissioned in May 1940 by the British, developed from sketches to reality in 117 days. It’s a work of absolute genius.
(03:12:07) But to start off, it’s harnessed with a really bad engine. The Allison engine is just not right for that aircraft. And it’s not until a Rolls-Royce Merlin, which is the same one that powers the Lancaster, the Mosquito, and the Spitfire and Hurricane, is put into the P-51 Mustang, that suddenly you’ve got your solution because that means it can now fly with extra drop tanks and fuel tanks. It’s so aerodynamic, and it’s so good, the higher it goes with this engine, the more fuel efficient it becomes. It can actually fly over 1400 miles, which gets you not just to Berlin and back, but to Warsaw and back. So, suddenly you’ve got that solution.
(03:12:39) And actually, by April 1944, they have cleared airspace. And by the end of May 1944, just on the eve of the invasion, Operation Overlord, the closest German aircraft that is seen fighting Allied aircraft is 500 miles from the beachhead.
James Holland (03:12:55) So it is absolutely job done. Meanwhile, comparatively new ground attack fighter planes, like Typhoons and Tempests and adapted P-47 Thunderbolts, are attacking the German radar stations all along the coastline because they, now, do have an air defense system. They’re destroying 90% of their effectiveness.
(03:13:18) And in the intelligence game, they’re winning that one as well. They’re just much better because, in Germany, intelligence is power, so people tend to… And Hitler always has this kind of divide and rule thing going on, so you have parallel command structures, which is not conducive to bringing together of intelligence.
(03:13:33) And while much play has been made about the successes of Bletchley and code-breaking and all the rest of it, actually what you have to do is you have to see the decrypts that the Bletchley cryptanalysts do as just a cog. And those various cogs together, from listening services to photo reconnaissance to agents on the ground to [inaudible 03:13:52], the cogs collectively add up to more than some of their individual parts. And so the intelligence picture is a broad picture rather than just code-breaking. But anyway, they win that particular battle as well.
(03:14:03) And what you see, really, with D-Day, I think, is the zenith of coalition warfare. What you’ve got is you’ve got multiple nations who have different overall aims, different cultures, different attitudes, different start points, but they have all coalesced into one common goal. And until they’ve achieved that common goal, they’re going to put differences to one side. Much play has been made about Anglophobia amongst American commanders and America phobia amongst Ally British commanders, but actually it’s nothing. It’s a marriage made in heaven compared to the way Germany looks after its own allies, for example.
(03:14:40) And what is remarkable about the Allies is they’re not actually allies, they’re coalition partners. So, there’s no formal alliance at all, and there is a subtle difference there. But what you see them is that you see them really, really pulling together. And you see that manifest itself on D-Day, I think, where you’ve got 6,939 vessels of which there are 1,213 warships, 4,127 assault craft, 12 and a half thousand aircraft, 155,000 men landed and dropped from the air in 24-hour period. It is phenomenal. It is absolutely phenomenal.
(03:15:22) And while it is still seen as a predominantly American show, all three service commanders are British. Two-thirds of the aircraft are British. Two-thirds of the men landed are British and Dominion.
(03:15:35) You never forget the Canadians who consistently punch massively above their weight in the Second World War, in all aspects, it has to be said, air, land and sea. They’re key in the Battle of the Atlantic. They’re key in air power. Their key D-Day and, indeed, in the battle for Italy, as well. So, the Canadians should never be forgotten.
(03:15:55) But one of the reasons it is the British Navy that dominates in D-Day is because, of course, the incredibly enormous strength of the Royal Navy in the first place, but partly because most of the U.S. Navy is, by this stage, in the Pacific fighting its own fight. So, it’s not slacking by any stretch of the imagination. It is because it’s elsewhere doing its bit for the overall allied cause.
(03:16:18) But D-Day is just extraordinary, and despite the terrible weather, which is such a debilitating factor in the whole thing. I mean, it puts people off course. It means many more people get killed on Omaha Beach than they might have done, and on other beaches besides, incidentally. And actually, in terms of lies lost, proportionally, it is the Canadians that suffer the worst, more so than the Americans. It’s just it’s fewer of them, overall.
(03:16:43) D-Day has to be seen as an unqualified success. I mean, it is absolutely extraordinary what they achieve. And while they don’t 100% achieve their overall D-Day objectives, the objectives are always going to be the outer reach of what can be achieved, and you’d need absolutely perfect conditions for that to happen. And they don’t get perfect conditions, but they’re so balanced, they’ve so thought of absolutely everything, and their logistics apply.
(03:17:09) I mean, even things like the minesweeping operations, it’s the biggest single minesweeping operation of the entire war because there’s huge minefields off the Normandy coast. And ahead of the invasion force, the minesweepers, which amount to, I think, something like 242 different minesweepers in five different operations opposite every single beach, creating lanes through these minefields through which the invasion force can go, not a single ship is lost to a mine in the actual invasion. That is phenomenal and can only be done with the greatest of skill and planning, and all in a period where there are no computers. There’s no GPS. There’s nothing. I mean, it is absolutely astonishing, and the scale of it is just, frankly, mind-boggling.
Lex Fridman (03:17:50) Yeah, and that was really the nail in the coffin, the beginning of the end for Hitler, now, for the European theater.
James Holland (03:18:00) Yeah, once you get the… The only cause for doubt is, will they be able to secure that bridgehead? The moment they get that bridgehead, it is game over. There is no other way it’s going to be because of the overwhelming amount of men and material that the Allies have compared to the Germans at this stage of the war. And, of course, you’re being attacked on three fronts because there’s the Italian front to the south, and of course, in a very major way, you’ve also got the Eastern Front. And Operation Bagration, which is launched that summer as well, is enormous.
Lessons from WW2
Lex Fridman (03:18:33) Let’s go to the very end, the Battle of Berlin, Hitler sitting in his bunker, his suicide, Germany surrender. You actually said that Downfall, the movie, was a very accurate representation.
James Holland (03:18:49) I think it is, really, except that Goebbels took cyanide, didn’t shoot himself.
Lex Fridman (03:18:53) Oh, details, but I think it’s probably… It might be my favorite World War II movie, which is strange to say because it’s not really about World War II. It’s about Hitler in a bunker, but…
James Holland (03:19:06) What was his name? Bruno Ganz, wasn’t it? I think he nailed him.
James Holland (03:19:13) There’s so many accounts of that. There’s so much written about Hitler. There’s millions and millions of Hitler’s words that you can read. There are translations of many of his conferences. You can see what he’s saying. You can get inside his head in a very clear way, and much more clearly than you can Stalin or just about any other leader really. So, what has a very, very strong impression of what Hitler was like in the bunker in those last days. There’s so many accounts of it, and it just feels like they nailed it. It just feels like they’ve got it spot on, to me.
Lex Fridman (03:19:54) I mean, it’s a fascinating story of a evil maniac, and then in this certainty, crumbling, realizing that this vision of the thousand-year Reich is…
James Holland (03:20:11) And Hitler says, “My reputation won’t be good to start off with, but I hope in a few years time that people start to realize that kind of all the good I was trying to bring.”
Lex Fridman (03:20:24) And there’s so many deep lessons there. So, now, you have written so much. You have said so much. You have studied this so much. What to you, looking at World War II, is the lessons we should take away?
James Holland (03:20:41) Well, I suppose it’s what happens when you allow these individuals to take hold of great power and great authority and make these terrible decisions. If you allow that to happen, there are consequences. You have to recognize the moments of trouble when they arise. So when there are financial crisis, you know that political unrest is going to come, and you need to be prepared for that. You need to be able to see the writing on the wall.
(03:21:12) You can’t be complacent. Complacency is such a dirty word, isn’t it? You’ve got to keep your wits, and you can’t take things for granted. You’ve got to recognize, I think, that the freedoms we enjoy in the West are… They’re not necessarily permanent, and you need to make the most of them, while you’ve got them, and cherish them and consider what happens if the milk turns sour and what the consequences of that are. I mean, that’s the overriding theme.
(03:21:46) Because, although I don’t think there will ever be a war on the scale of the Second World War, you’ve only got to look at pictures of those opening days of the war in Ukraine and see knocked out Russian tanks and dead bodies, bloated bodies all over the place. Put that into black and white, and it could be the road out of Falaise in 1944. It could be any number of German battlefields in World War II. And the similarities in the trenches and the people hiding in foxholes, that’s horribly reminiscent, as are the huge casualties that they’re suffering on both sides, whether they be Russian or Ukrainian.
(03:22:24) And it’s a shock. It’s a shock to see that. It reminds you of just how quickly, I think, things can descend. I mean, that’s the other thing. That point I was making about how quickly Germany descended from this amazing nation of arts and culture and science and development and engineering into one of the Holocaust. I mean, life is fragile, and peace is fragile, and you take it for granted at your peril.
Lex Fridman (03:22:57) And you take for granted, at our peril, that nobody will use nuclear weapons ever again. And that’s not a thing we should take for granted.
Lex Fridman (03:23:09) What gives you hope about the future of human civilization? We’ve been talking about all this darkness in the 20th century. What’s the source of light?
James Holland (03:23:20) The source of light is that I think the vast majority of people are good people, who want to live peacefully, and want to live happily, and are not filled with hate. There are some brilliant minds out there, and I think the capacity for the human brain to come up with new developments and new answers to problems and challenges is infinite. I think that’s what gives me hope.
Lex Fridman (03:23:50) James, I’m a big fan. This was an honor to talk to you, and please keep putting incredible history out there. I can’t wait to see what you do next. Thank you so much for talking today.
James Holland (03:24:02) Well, thank you, Lex. It’s a privilege to talk to you.
Lex Fridman (03:24:06) Thanks for listening to this conversation with James Holland. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description or at lexfridman.com/sponsors.
(03:24:15) And now, let me leave you some words from Winston Churchill. “If you’re going through hell, keep going.” Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
This is a transcript of Lex Fridman Podcast #469 with Oliver Anthony.
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Lex Fridman (00:00:00) The following is a conversation with Oliver Anthony, a singer-songwriter from Virginia who first gained worldwide fame with his viral hit Rich Men North of Richmond. He became a voice for many who are voiceless with his songs speaking to the struggle of the working class in modern American life.
(00:00:22) His legal name is Christopher Anthony Lunsford. Oliver Anthony was his grandfather’s name. And so, Chris used this name as a dedication to his grandfather, and to 1930s Appalachia where his grandfather was born and raised.
(00:00:36) “Dirt floors, seven kids, hard times,” as Chris says. He’s happy to be called either one, by the way. I’ve gotten to know Chris more since the recording of this conversation. He truly is as he appears online, and in his songs, down to Earth, humble, and a good man who deeply feels the pain of the downtrodden.
(00:00:59) This is a Lex Fridman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description, and now, dear friends, here’s Christopher Lunsford, or as many of you know him as, Oliver Anthony.
Open mics
(00:01:14) So, I was texting you last night sitting at an open mic listening to a guy perform Great Balls of Fire. Like I told you, he was giving everything he got for, like, five people in the audience plus me.
Oliver Anthony (00:01:26) Well, you were there. I’d have been doing it too, if you were out there. Like, “Oh, that’s Lex Fridman.”
Lex Fridman (00:01:31) No, man. He was this big dude on a keyboard, just everything, sweaty, long hair, you could tell he was there in his own little world. I love the courage of that, of just giving it everything. I don’t think he wants to be famous, I don’t think he wants anything in life except to be there, and to play his heart out. That’s why I love open mics.
(00:01:51) Like, some people still aspire to be famous when they play open mics, but some people, maybe they’ve given up, or maybe they never wanted to be famous, they’re just there for the pure artistry of it.
Lex Fridman (00:02:03) And you said you started out playing open mics at shitty bars. What was that like?
Oliver Anthony (00:02:07) Well, yeah. Real quick before I forget to, a great example of a guy who had that same mindset and was able to maintain it really well was this mandolin player named Johnny Staats in West Virginia.
(00:02:18) To me, he’s one of the best, and he’s won all these awards, and stuff, and he still works for UPS full-time. And he could go out and tour, play mandolin for anybody he wanted to, but, man, when you meet Johnny, you can tell he’s just got this joy in him that I don’t think he would have if he …
(00:02:38) But as far as me with the open mics, yeah, it was just … A lot of them were embarrassing. There was a couple … I remember there was times where I’d go up and try to do … I’d do one song, I’d get halfway through the next song, and I’d be so nervous by that point, I couldn’t remember any of the words, and there’s a couple times I …
(00:02:57) I remember there was one time in particular that I just walked off halfway through the song, and put my guitar in the case, and just left. I couldn’t even stay in there, just total freakout.
Oliver Anthony (00:03:11) And I never drank in bars either. Like, I wasn’t really a social drinker. So, I was just there to try to do the mic. So, I was a little out of place anyway. I feel out of place in a bar to start with.
Lex Fridman (00:03:22) Yeah. This is back when you could smoke in bars. There’s a whole vibe to it-
Lex Fridman (00:03:25) … people smoking and drinking. And, yeah. Definitely bombing in a place like that when the audience is … There’s, like, five people, and they’re bored.
Oliver Anthony (00:03:36) Yeah. There was one like that. It was in Matoaka. It wasn’t that far from where I lived. The place is gone now, but it was about as big as the room we’re in here, if that. Like, the ceiling tiles were yellow from where everybody had smoked in it since the beginning of time. But, yeah. That was my little spot, those little type of spots.
Lex Fridman (00:03:53) You did covers. What’d you play? What was your go-to?
Oliver Anthony (00:03:56) Back then it was, like, I don’t know, Fishing in the Dark, Nitty- Gritty Band, or any of those old Hank Jr. Songs, any of those bar type of … Like, David Allan Coe, You Never Call Me By My Name, any of that kind of stuff.
(00:04:10) And I haven’t even played any of those in forever now, but that was … Any of those ones where you get people singing along, and stuff, that’s what I’d always try to do.
Lex Fridman (00:04:18) Yeah. That song you performed Take Me Home Country Roads, how does that go? “West Virginia”-
Oliver Anthony (00:04:24) John Denver was just one of those guys that who knows where he would have went, long-term, if he wouldn’t have passed, but-
Lex Fridman (00:04:32) You know what’s a fun song that I love, I shouldn’t, but I love is … What is it? Thank God I’m A Country Boy.
Oliver Anthony (00:04:41) I think that’s what I liked about John Denver was he was a little bit … He let himself be a little bit corny in the spirit of having fun with it. Like, a great example, there’s this older guy that not a lot of people have heard of him named Roy Clark, but my farm’s a mile down the road from Roy Clark’s old farm, but he used to be on Hee Haw. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of that old show from the ’60s, or whatever, but a crazy dude. He could pick any instrument up. Like, there’s videos on YouTube of him, but he would just sit there and just pick anything up, and just rip it to death.
(00:05:11) But he would always just be real silly about it. He never took himself too seriously.
Mainstream country music
Lex Fridman (00:05:17) Some people go to the fun place, some people go to the dark place.
Oliver Anthony (00:05:28) Yeah. Well, especially, some of the new songs that are coming out. They’ll be probably not … I don’t know what they’ll be. I don’t know. What is country anymore anyway?
(00:05:38) I don’t know that many people who listen to the type of music that I grew up listening to ain’t probably listening to country radio anymore anyway. Like, I think there’s quite a lot of people who have disowned that space.
(00:05:51) In commercialized country, you only really get what sells, and a lot of what sells isn’t necessarily what matters.
Lex Fridman (00:05:58) Well, you had that whole experience where the take where you record it and “polish it”, try to make it perfect, and in so doing, destroy the soul of the thing. And so, probably that happens with these big artists. They’re so famous. It’s, like, a machine and so-
Lex Fridman (00:06:14) … what the machine does is it over-polishes things. And so, the raw power of the person, the uniqueness of the person, the soul of the person is gone, if you do that.
Oliver Anthony (00:06:26) Yeah. Well, I think professionalism in general … Like, applying the tactics of corporate America to anything that is-
Lex Fridman (00:06:43) Just the soul of the people, it dissipates. It disappears. Why are you all pretending that life is not terrible and beautiful and you’re both scared shitless and excited and this guy’s going through a divorce, this person just fell in love. Like, you’re-
Lex Fridman (00:07:04) … forgetting the intensity of life with this corporate nine to five, “Hi, John. It’s great to see you today.” “Oh, you too. You as well.”
Lex Fridman (00:07:18) “You as well.” But when I look at it, I’m like, “Why am I whining?” I feel like a Bukowski type character, because they’re all really nice. They’re all good people. But something is gone when you have this corporate machine.
Oliver Anthony (00:07:31) Well, they’re there to fill a role, contractually, and I think if they bring too many of their human elements into that, then they jeopardize losing their sense of security. It’s all just out of fear. It’s out of fear of losing your job.
(00:07:44) It’s the reason why all of the songs say Oliver Anthony and not Christopher Lunsford on them. Like, it’s fear of … It’s so difficult to, especially now, it seems … Who knows? I was never around in the ’40s or ’50s to work a job. I’m sure they were probably pretty miserable back then, but they talk about now how difficult it is, like, the impossibility of having a single family household, or anything else, but when you find a decent-paying job that you can do without it just torturing you every day, that’s a pretty important thing now.
(00:08:17) And so, it’s pretty easy to turn yourself into a robot for eight, or 10 hours a day out of fear of … It’s, like, you don’t want to be yourself too much, because maybe part of yourself isn’t something that’s accepted in this dystopian nightmare that you go to work at every day. And so, you’ve just got to do your best to just not step on any toes, or do anything that makes you stand out too much.
(00:08:41) And now when you scroll through some of these videos of people … Even when I was still working my lame job, it was, like, there was this whole big thing of people talking about quiet quitting, or something like that where they were just going to go to work, but not really do anything, but-
Lex Fridman (00:08:58) That hurts me so much. That hurts me when you just stop, when you’re there, but you’re not really there. That makes me so sad.
Oliver Anthony (00:09:05) Yeah. So, then these companies just slowly fall apart, and disintegrate, because they’re so worried about structure and …
(00:09:13) Like, God, man, even in America today, our culture has become … Because so many big corporations own and manage everything that we live under, like, food, agriculture, healthcare, social media, it’s all in corporate structures, that it’s almost, like, a lot of the problems we find ourselves in now with society, I think are like … It’s almost, like, corporate HR has been implemented into our whole thought process of everything.
(00:09:39) I think that’s what you’re touching on, though. It’s hard to be a human, and be a good little corporate employee at the same time. And as our whole society moves more into becoming, basically, one big corporation, it’s, like, you don’t want to piss the HR lady off. So, it’s a lot easier for me to just beep boop. We’re all turning into robots.
Lex Fridman (00:10:06) I’ve talked to great engineers about this, Jim Keller is a legendary engineer, Elon, Elon Musk is another example, that you need that … I don’t know what’s the nice term for it, but you need the asshole, because you want to get to the ground truth of things, to the first principle of things. Like, how do we simplify? How do we make it more efficient? How do we move faster? How do we get shit done? And that has no place for this polite speak.
(00:10:32) And then other great team members swoop in, and repair the damage that the tornado has done.
Oliver Anthony (00:10:41) Do you think that’s … Because I’m not super well-versed about all this. So, I’m probably dumb to even mention it, but this guy who’s been helping me with doing a documentary, he’s been following me around since the very first show, August of ’23.
(00:10:56) His background was doing promotional videos for Boeing. Like, for on their new spacecraft to pitch it to whoever. And so, we touched base a little bit on Boeing, and, of course, they’re having a lot of problems now it sounds like.
(00:11:09) And he was comparing that with SpaceX, or with … I think it’s that, exactly what we touched on with that thought process of that dehumanization within companies.
(00:11:21) I think that’s what, ultimately, causes maybe … I don’t know if there’s a connection there, or not, but it seems like Boeing would be more of that … They don’t have that tornado. They’re very … He was telling me even just with his protocols, and some of the people he worked with, like, everything’s just very, “Lightly touch everything. Don’t touch anything too hard.”
Lex Fridman (00:11:39) So, it’s not just HR. It’s just this managerial class where it’s, like, Bob from this department has to schedule a meeting with John from this department and Debbie … Like, they have to have a meeting two and a half weeks from now, and then there’s paperwork, and then that bureaucracy that’s created in the managerial class just slows everything down.
(00:12:02) And one of the things that slowing everything down does is it really demotivates the people that are actually doing the shit. Like, the people on the ground, the engineers that are building stuff, it’s, again, soul-drenching to be excited, show up, and now you hit this wall of paperwork. Like, you have to wait for John and Debbie and I forgot the third guy’s name that I imagined in my head to have a meeting. And then you slow down, and you disappear in terms of that fire, that passion that’s required to create big things.
Oliver Anthony (00:12:42) Yeah, because they don’t believe there’s a lack of leadership, and if they don’t believe in that leadership, then why the hell would they be motivated? I remember a while back watching Jocko Willink talk about that when he was in leadership when he was leading his guys. I think he mentions it in his book is probably where I remember seeing it, one of his books.
(00:13:06) And he talks about how important it was for the people under him in rank to believe in the actions he was giving them, even if he necessarily didn’t agree with them himself, it was, like, it’s really hard to take orders, and to have human spirit, especially, in something that’s innovative, and not … If you’re working for a company where you just think everybody’s dumb …
(00:13:29) I can, certainly, relate with that. God, at my old job, that’s all we did is we spent half our day just talking about how dumb we thought everybody was that was above us. It’s easy to fall into that in a corporate world.
(00:13:41) And so, yeah. The morale gets terrible, and everyone suffers as a result of it. Like, the people at the top who were implementing all that dysfunction suffer, and the people at the bottom. It’s not good for anybody.
(00:13:54) I had thought now that I’m doing this that I could escape away from that, but that exact same mentality, and that dysfunction, and that inefficiency, I still battle it every day.
Lex Fridman (00:14:07) That’s why it takes unique characters to lead the way. Such unique characters are very much needed in the music industry to revolutionize everything, cut through the bureaucracy, the bullshit that, ultimately, is just the machine that steals money, and doesn’t get anything done really.
Fame
(00:14:23) We’ll talk about it. By the way, all the love in the world to Jocko. He’s great. I’ve been going through lots of ups and downs in life, lots of low points for myself over the past, shit, three years really, but recently, especially, and he always texts in his very high testosterone way of like, “You good, bro? Just checking in.” He’s a good man. He’s a good man. He’s, obviously, an inspiration to millions of people, but also just he’s a good human being himself.
Oliver Anthony (00:14:59) Maybe one thing that we felt similarly, I would imagine, you way more than me is just feeling like, “Wow. I have the ability to influence, or the ability to either bring truth, or to improve people’s lives, or …” Every word that you say sometimes matters so much, and you’re just like, “Man, I’m an idiot.”
Oliver Anthony (00:15:23) Like, I don’t know … Like, I would have never guessed. We were talking about that before about we would have never guessed that this would have turned into all this, but it is a weight that you bear, whether you really even acknowledge it, or not.
Lex Fridman (00:15:38) Yeah. I think the songs you’ve created, they speak to the human condition, to the struggle of everyday working people in a society that has the elites, that try to take advantage of those working people. And you’re just speaking through your music those truths of how life is.
(00:16:04) And that has a huge impact on a lot of people. That’s really positive. But then you also get attacked, and misrepresented and lied about from different angles.
(00:16:15) And just the turmoil, the intense chaos of that, it disorients, it disorients me to be attacked by a very large number of people, to be lied about, to be … Because I love people, I have a general optimism about humanity, it just disorients me. It gives me this feeling like … I generally, just like you said, think of myself as an idiot, not really knowing what I’m doing, and when a lot of people tell you that, “You’re correct. You don’t know what you’re doing,” you start to want to hide. You want to hide from the world, hide from yourself, and then there’s also just the chemistry of the brain. You shake up the brain a little bit. It starts getting weird.
(00:17:08) And then on many fronts, it can get real lonely, when you’re getting attacked, when you’re fucking things up in many ways, it can get lonely. Yeah. And so, you get a text from Jocko like, “You good?” “Yeah. Yeah.”
(00:17:24) And I have good friends. Andrew Huberman’s been great, Rogan’s been great.
Oliver Anthony (00:17:31) Well, you know, Lex, however many years ago was in a different place in society than Lex is now. And so, it’s, like, every conversation you have, or every relationship you have is inherently different, even if you aren’t any different.
(00:17:45) Friends that you had from before maybe, or even just new people you meet, your interactions with them are going to be a lot different than if this wasn’t a thing.
(00:17:52) And so, it’s, like, that can be tricky too. When you’ve spent your whole life from the time you’re three years old and you’re starting to play with other kids, and developmentally learning how to share and how to interact, and you’re playing in the playground with kids and learning how to set rules and boundaries, and how to, basically, fit into society.
(00:18:13) And so, you have this whole learning pattern up until whatever point in time when “success” happens. And then it’s, like, all that shifts pretty dramatically in a relatively short period of time.
(00:18:26) So, how do you think managing your previous friendships, or your … Has that been tricky for you? Or-
Lex Fridman (00:18:34) Yeah. It’s been tough. I value deep, close, long-term friendships. And, yeah. I have amazing friends, but they, certainly, do treat me a little different. They bust my balls noticeably less.
Oliver Anthony (00:18:50) Yeah. And you need that sometimes.
Lex Fridman (00:18:52) I need … Not sometimes. All the time. First of all, it’s how dudes show love is making fun of each other, at least, my friends.
Lex Fridman (00:19:05) Man, I’m going to get in trouble, but when you watch women interact, they’re often really positive towards each other. Like, “Oh, you look great,” dah, dah, dah. Yeah.
Lex Fridman (00:19:13) When you watch dudes interact, like, close friends, they’re just busting each other’s balls, nonstop making fun of each other. And so, yes. That has been a little bit harder.
(00:19:28) I try to break those walls, but that’s why with the famous friends it’s a little bit easier, because they can still … Like, Rogan roasts me nonstop. And it just feels good. I just sit there and get made fun of, and it’s great.
Oliver Anthony (00:19:44) And I still do it all the time. It’s just a different experience now, but I’m, like, a Goodwill junkie. Like, most of even my clothes were from Goodwill, but I have this addiction with buying paintings from Goodwill.
Oliver Anthony (00:20:08) I’ll go in there, and buy, like, 10. So, just even any time you go out into public now, you know it’s going to be a little different than it was. I don’t know if that makes sense, or not, but-
Music vs politics
Lex Fridman (00:20:16) Yeah. Yeah. For sure. I’m trying to deal with it, but although, when you talk to world leaders, when you stop into politics a little bit, and you apparently stepped into politics, even though, you never meant to, you’re not a political person, that world is like, “What the fuck?” It’s very intense. Especially, at an intense moment in history in an extremely divided country.
Oliver Anthony (00:20:41) Yeah. Like, saying that I’m not in politics, people are like, “Well, of course, you’re in politics,” and I don’t know whether I am, or not, but I do think a lot of people in politics … Like, as far as the people who sit on the internet all day, and argue about stuff on X, or on whatever, Facebook, and all, I do think their heart is in it for the right reasons. They observe that there’s a lot of things wrong in the world that they’d like to see different.
(00:21:06) It’s just how do you get those people out of this four by four square and really … They’re entrapped in a same kind of box that the people at Boeing might be with that …
(00:21:23) It’s the tornado metaphor, but it applies in politics too. Like, there needs to just be a tornado through politics, and we need to just lay all this other stuff aside, and just figure out what’s really pissing everybody off, what’s really affecting our quality of life.
(00:21:38) A lot of times we’re arguing over the symptoms of problems instead of identifying the problems, if that makes any sense. If Jordan Peterson were here, he would tell us about fire and how-
Oliver Anthony (00:22:01) It’s all 100% accurate. Yeah. That’s the crazy thing, but it all ties into that same thing. Like, yeah. In politics now, it’s almost like there’s a rule book that you have to follow, and if, “You can’t agree with this unless you also agree with that,” it’s like …
(00:22:15) And maybe it’s, like, the way that we receive information about what’s going on in the political landscape is always so biased, and it’s like the … Well, it’s contingent upon this algorithm, this algorithmic system that we live under where we’re fed … It’s, like, we’re almost fed certain sub …
(00:22:33) And it’s easy to fall into that, because you don’t like hearing things you disagree with. And so, it’s a lot easier to just turn the TV on, or go on Facebook and look at whatever page posts things that you know you’re going to consistently agree with every day, and it’s not going to challenge the way you think in any little way, or expand your thinking at all.
(00:22:50) It’s easy to just … It’s a cult-like type of thing. It’s like, “This is what we all agree with, and if you don’t, then go on git.” But we’re far too complicated for it to really work that way.
Lex Fridman (00:23:06) Well, this actually relates to one of my favorite things in your conversation with Jordan where you’re just shooting the shit about playing live music, and he goes to Kierkegaard.
Lex Fridman (00:23:24) He just goes to Carl Jung and Nietzsche. And there, this idea from Kierkegaard that the crowd is un-truth. There’s elements to the crowd that loses the humanity, and the honesty of an individual that makes up the crowd, because the default incentive of the crowd is to conform to some kind of narrative. It’s, like, a distributed system that arrives at a narrative, and the narrative holds control over that crowd as opposed to the individual humans who are thinking for themselves, and being honest with their own thoughts, and realities, and so on.
(00:24:06) So, he was saying that as a reason from a communication perspective to speak to individuals in the crowd, not to the crowd. So, from the performer perspective, the moment you speak to the crowd, you’re speaking to the lie that is the crowd according to Søren Kierkegaard.
(00:24:23) It’s pretty hardcore. Kierkegaard is pretty hardcore. Jordan’s pretty hardcore.
Oliver Anthony (00:24:28) But that is true. But, specifically, in my case, really, it applies more than it probably does in a lot of cases with crowds, and music.
(00:24:39) Talking about Richmond, I wasn’t necessarily even excited that Richmond did as well as it did. It was, like, in a way, it was almost alarming that it did so well. And so, those crowds that show up, maybe they do like my music, but I also think they’re there for something … There is something bigger about it. I wish I would have done a better job of having people there at shows to capture some of those crowds I had in ’24, man.
Lex Fridman (00:25:08) You mean the size? The intensity?
Oliver Anthony (00:25:09) The intensity. Like, it was revolutionary almost.
Lex Fridman (00:25:12) A song of revolution. Yeah. I think of Redemption Song from Bob Marley. Like, that song, it just connected with people. There’s something there.
Oliver Anthony (00:25:22) Well, and so many people identified different … Like I said, it goes back to when we were talking when we first got here, but it was crazy how it was almost like at the beginning, along with the scrutiny, and some of the other things, it was a lot of different people almost fighting over me, or fighting over it, because it resonated with people who voted differently than each other, which is probably a pretty terrifying thing, if you’re in the business of keeping people divided and angry at each other.
(00:25:51) So, it was one of the only times that I can think where there was that much of a sense of unity among people who otherwise wouldn’t … I think about 9/11 when I was a kid. I was in fourth grade, but, God, man, people just put everything aside there for a little while. And it was, like, there’s bigger problems that just aren’t in our face, and if they’re in your face just for a second, or two, you realize it’s hard in your mind to create a graph that’s got all these …
(00:26:29) But we argue about a lot of these problems, but if you were to really look at them … If you really just stand back and look at all the problems we spend time focusing about on the internet versus all of the things that are affecting us, that really, and probably even at our core piss us off, it’s got to be very disproportionate.
(00:26:48) And the reason it got the reaction it did was because we all … Like, no matter what it is that we’re upset about, or what we think needs to be different in the world, or our opinions of things, or how we’re raised, or what our parents taught us, it’s, like, I think we all feel a little bit out of control in this new society. We all feel like we’re probably …
(00:27:04) We probably all feel like we’re falling into this kind of corporate power structure where we all are just robots, we’re not allowed to be ourselves and be human almost.
Lex Fridman (00:27:17) And there’s enough people feeling that. People on the left feeling like the people in power are fucking over the working class, people on the right feeling the exact same with different words assigned to it, the deep state fucking over middle America-
Lex Fridman (00:27:35) … whatever the narratives are, and they’re just … When enough of that is happening, again, with the corporate polite speak, there’s something about politeness that’s really dangerous.
(00:27:47) I feel like there was a lot of politeness in the Soviet Union.
Oliver Anthony (00:27:50) Yeah. Prime example. Yeah.
Lex Fridman (00:27:53) Underneath that, it’s, like, Chernobyl, which is this nuclear power plant that melted down. I feel like the bureaucracy needs politeness and civility, and paperwork to function, and then atrocities can happen underneath that.
(00:28:13) So, everybody, people in power, with a smile on their face can just do horrific things, and then give propaganda that, “Look, it’s rainbows and sunshine, and unicorns.”
(00:28:27) Yeah. So, people that are rude, and I’m starting to awaken to this a little bit, like, you need a little … Like, Tom Waits says, “I like my town with a little drop of poison.” You need some poison, some swearing, some meanness, some bullshit, some intensity to shake up a system, because when it converges towards this polite bureaucracy, the atrocities can happen and hidden away.
Oliver Anthony (00:28:58) And what’s probably the most terrifying to me is that that politeness is just theatrical whereas it emulates the respect that we would normally give each other in society if we were healthy and functional.
Rich Men North of Richmond
Lex Fridman (00:29:10) What was the process of writing that song? It really spoke to the pain and the anger of millions of people. There was magic there. How many edits? How many lines did you write? Were there any lines that you were tormented by? Haunted by? Come back, “Should I do it this way or this way? Or that?”
Oliver Anthony (00:29:33) Do you have a … I don’t know. Can you pull a TikTok up on this? If you go to my page, so, if you go to-
Lex Fridman (00:30:37) That’s so inspiring. That’s what? A couple weeks before you posted the final-
Oliver Anthony (00:30:44) Well, that’s all I had. Yeah. That’s all I had written at that point. In my mind, that’s the inspiration for the song was that little bit, and I wrote that just because I was on job sites all day, and going into all these just terrible places to work, dealing with different contractors and stuff.
(00:31:03) You were talking about wanting to go and talk to blue collar people, and that’s what I did for work, basically, for eight years was build long-term relationships with people in blue collar. I was in the industrial space. So, sometimes I’d talk to 20 different people a day.
(00:31:17) When you sit in a job site trailer, and talk to a group of dudes and you’re not there with some news camera, you’re just there as a random dude, you hear so much about what really goes on behind the scenes of the structure, of what builds this country, and keeps it going, and I think that’s probably what it was. It was how I felt, but also how I guess a lot of other …
(00:31:41) I don’t know. It just seemed like the truth.
Lex Fridman (00:31:43) And so, you jotted down even to the details, in a notebook? Like, those words.
Oliver Anthony (00:31:48) No. It’s always just on my phone. I would just keep recording. I would just keep …
(00:31:55) So, if you were to go back to TikTok and look at any of those original videos … So, like, the songs that ended up charting, let’s say, like, the ones that were on there that charted with Richmond, like this, I’ve Got To Get Sober. So, literally-
Oliver Anthony (00:32:13) So, literally, what I did was this video I took at my property. This is my carport where my camper was. And I took this video, I went to some sketchy virus-ridden MP3 to WAV file … Or MP4 to WAV file transfer thing. I would rip the audio off of this video, put this on TikTok, and then put that on [inaudible 00:32:33]. And that was the song.
(00:32:35) But, basically, like, this would have been the first time I played I’ve Got To Get Sober all the way through. Like, I would just keep writing it, and working on it, and writing it, and recording myself. And maybe I would record myself 30 times over the period of two months. You know what I mean?
Lex Fridman (00:32:48) Oh, but when you say writing, you mean in your head? Not actually typed out, or written-
Oliver Anthony (00:32:53) Right. It was just video.
Oliver Anthony (00:32:54) It was mostly just video.
Lex Fridman (00:32:55) Over and over it was just videos.
Oliver Anthony (00:32:56) I was just trying to figure out how to make it … Yeah. But that’s what all these … Like, the audio file from all these videos is what ended up on Spotify and all that. You know what I mean?
Lex Fridman (00:33:07) It’s cool to see these videos before you blew up. So, this is a good song. You’re playing … What is this?
Oliver Anthony (00:34:43) Like, that’s just off my phone. All that stuff is just there. You know?
MUSIC (00:34:50) They’ve been saving my soul from the pain that the world’s put on me.
(00:34:54) And Lord, I know that upstairs there’s an old man who cares and one day he’ll-
MUSIC (00:35:03) … man who cares and one day he’ll set me free.
(00:35:07) I’ll go on a whim, start writing the hymn.
Lex Fridman (00:35:12) That’s a genius of song. That’s genius, brother. It’s genius.
Oliver Anthony (00:35:15) It’s just crazy to think about …
Lex Fridman (00:35:20) And what’s this one right before? What is this?
Oliver Anthony (00:35:25) Yeah, so that’s private …
Lex Fridman (00:35:29) And this is a nice recording. Got it.
Oliver Anthony (00:35:31) Yeah, so this video got uploaded and then Draven from Radio WV would’ve gotten a hold of me in between this and that. He watched this and was like, “Dude,” he said, we got to record that one.” And so I didn’t have it all … I just had whatever was in that video is all I had written. I think it was just the chorus in the first verse. Draven saw that video …
Lex Fridman (00:35:54) And said, “We got to do this one.”
Oliver Anthony (00:35:55) Reach out to me to record. And he’s like, “Yeah.” He’s like, “No, we got to do that one.” And I was like, ” Dude, that’s all I got.”
Lex Fridman (00:36:01) Tell me about that guy. Draven.
Oliver Anthony (00:36:05) He’s probably my best friend now. We hit it off with this, and we’re like brothers now, I guess, but-
Lex Fridman (00:36:11) Can you talk about what he’s doing for music in general, for country music, for discovering talent for … He clearly sees something in people.
Oliver Anthony (00:36:21) Yeah, he’s a little bit younger than I am, and he wrote music and played, and he’s got some of his … If you look up Draven Riffe, he’s going to kill me for even saying this, but he’s got some pretty … Dude, if he was like a pop singer, he would be … He can write the most catchy stuff ever. Let’s go. Yeah, so click on, I don’t know.
Lex Fridman (00:37:16) He could probably do, if he does … He could probably be real famous. He’s got a certain look.
Oliver Anthony (00:37:24) That dude will sit there and and he’ll just … We’ll just be sitting there at 2:00 in the morning, and he’ll just all of a sudden do this little thing and he’s got the most amazing first part of this song. We just started to co-write together in the last few months. So I’m really excited for that. But if you go to his … This is really funny too. I’m sorry Draven … I love you, man. So go to videos and go to oldest first. This is what’s so awesome about Draven.
(00:37:47) He was originally working for this lady who was trying to develop different types of hair care products, but he thought the market was too saturated. So he was going to get into beard oil. So he created Radio WV as like a fake plug page for his Burley Boy beard brand he was working with. So if you look at, yeah that very first video.
Oliver Anthony (00:38:10) It’s got all his beard products and if you look, there’s multiple ones like that. So he started it just to do this beard thing with, and then … I don’t know, he just kind of felt called to keep going with it and it just naturally progressed from that.
Lex Fridman (00:38:24) Yeah, that too is inspiring. You start out one way and then you discover something real special. I mean, he’s got an eye for how to bring out … I don’t know what it is, both the audio side and the video side, how to bring out the best in a person.
Oliver Anthony (00:38:39) He says he just wants it to sound like the way he likes hearing it, which makes sense. It’s in the same way talking about when we were talking about setting the cameras up, and a professional would tell you you needed three lights and you’re like, “Well, I think it would work with …” He’s just like, “Well, it’ll just work like this.”
Lex Fridman (00:38:54) And do it in a way where he likes it. Yeah, just do it for yourself.
Oliver Anthony (00:38:57) He does it because he loves it, and it shows.
Lex Fridman (00:39:00) Yeah, you can see it in there, and there’s some good talent. You were showing me this new lady, Gabrielle.
Oliver Anthony (00:39:05) Yeah, she’s got it. But not a lot of people would record her doing that song, but he’s like, “I don’t know, it just was different. I just thought people ought to hear it.” But man, it was a blessing that he came along when he did. It really changed both of our lives.
Popularity, money, and integrity
Lex Fridman (00:39:20) We got to talk about that. So you posted the song Rich Men North of Richmond on August 8, 2023.
Oliver Anthony (00:39:27) I remember I was at work that day when it went up. Yeah.
Lex Fridman (00:39:30) So it blew the fuck up, straight to number one on the charts. Tens of millions of views and listens. And a few days later on August 17th, you made a post that I thought was pretty gangster. It was beautiful and gangster. So one of the things you said is, “It’s been difficult as I through the 50,000-plus messages and emails I’ve received in the last week. The stories that have been shared paint a brutally honest picture. Suicide, addiction, unemployment, anxiety, depression, hopelessness, and the list goes on.”
(00:40:06) And then you went on to write “People in the music industry give me blank stares when I brush off $8 million offers. I don’t want six tour buses, 15 tractor trailers and a jet. I don’t want to play stadium shows. I don’t want to be in the spotlight. I wrote the music I wrote because I was suffering with mental health and depression. These songs have connected with millions of people on such a deep level because they’ve been sung by someone feeling the words in the very moment they were being sung. No editing, no agent, no bullshit. Just somebody and his guitar. The style of music that we should have never gotten away from in the first place.”
(00:40:48) So huge props for that, for walking away from lucrative multi-million dollar record deals, and I’m sure the money that was just coming your way. Huge props. Moments happen where the world tests you, and integrity is what you do in those moments. So huge props for that. What was your philosophy? What was your thinking behind that?
Oliver Anthony (00:41:15) It was all those messages I got. I mean, you can see it in the comment sections of a lot of the videos after everything happened. But people just felt this spark like, “Wow, maybe we actually have a chance to …” Maybe we actually do have some kind of power. Those people put that song there, nobody else, and gave me the opportunity to make, even without signing anything, I was still able to make millions of dollars and have financial freedom and … I felt like if I was going to do anything like that, that I’d be betraying … I would be taking those people and almost betraying them somehow. I hate the big machine just like everybody else, and the last thing I’d want to do is ever support it or be a part of it. I want to watch it crash and burn.
Lex Fridman (00:42:10) See, this is the really important thing is whether it’s betrayal or not, we’ll never know. But you felt that it was and to have the integrity to walk away from the bag of money when you felt that way. That’s fucking epic.
Oliver Anthony (00:42:28) It was also, you got to think a couple months before this, of course I had a wife and kids that I loved, and I had a lot of really important things to live for, but I didn’t have a whole lot to lose. None of this was even really real. I didn’t care about that. I didn’t care to lose this just as quick as I got it. This didn’t mean anything to me. It just meant something to me that I could do something for. It’s like even if I’m not smart enough to figure out how to fix some of my own problems in my life, the fact that I felt like I could help fix somebody else’s, that meant hell of a lot more to me than any … That’s what I didn’t want to lose. I didn’t want to lose those people’s trust or feel … You know what I mean?
Oliver Anthony (00:43:12) And so I’ve just tried to make every decision around as best as I can, what I think the right thing is to do and who knows what the hell the right thing is to do, but I just try to follow … We all have that little voice in us like that. We all have some, and I think sometimes we mask. It’s hard for us to listen to that little voice, whether it’s our gluttony or our lust or we numb ourselves with medications or with alcohol, or we scroll on YouTube for four hours a night and instead of … because we don’t want to listen to our conscience. But there is this very intelligent discerning thing inside of us that’s able to tell us what’s right and wrong, and it’s a spiritual thing I guess, and I just try to listen to that when I can. I don’t know. I just still feel like I haven’t done enough.
Lex Fridman (00:44:05) I think you did a lot. I think you did a lot. I think you’re an inspiration. You have helped a huge number of people and you’re also an inspiration to the other side of it, which is the artists and just to humans to have integrity. I don’t think people realize how much of a test of integrity fame, money, power also is. Rogan and I talk about this quite a bit. We get to see, I mean Joe especially, but I’ve had a bit of the same, you get to see people become famous, and you get to see how they deal with that, and it’s not easy. A lot of people will sell themselves a bit, sell the soul a bit, give away a bit of their integrity of the spirit that made them who they are. You get caught up in the wave of it and so to keep holding onto that, that’s a powerful thing. That’s a really powerful thing.
Oliver Anthony (00:45:07) Yeah, that’s all I got though. When you lose that, what the hell are you? And you see it. You see these celebrity people that just fall off the … They go off the deep end. You have to have something in your life to keep you centered and to keep you your whole perception of reality. And your just existence and reality as all contention upon this center that you exist in and you have to … if you don’t have that, then you’re just flying through … I mean, we’re all just riding on this rock that’s going who knows how fast.
Lex Fridman (00:45:41) You said something I think to Jaco that I really liked. “Everything that has purpose behind it comes with risk.” So in that moment, I mean you’re taking a hell of a risk.
Oliver Anthony (00:45:56) I was terrified. I talked about this a little bit with him too, but I was terrified to even put the song out. I knew I was going to be the subject of scrutiny and judgment, and I knew people were going to … I knew all that was going to happen. I was going back to that talking about crowds, to stand in front of thousands of people and everybody be in some sense of unity. A lot of times when I end the shows, I’ll always end with this statement that just says, “No matter what, no matter how you feel when you go online, everyone feels so small and insignificant and powerless.” But I just say, “No matter how they make you feel online or when you turn on the TV or when you look at polling numbers or whatever, when you just look at all this trash that we digest every day, there will always be more of us than them.” And all that.
(00:46:52) But just to see the light in people’s eyes when you say that, but the truth is, and it’s like who is us and who is them? And it’s us just represents humanity and all the things we talked about so far. Just the fire and the chaos, but also the love and just life. Life is just such a crazy complicated, beautiful, disastrous thing. And then them is like it is. It’s the power structure. It’s that same terrible side of us that created things like the Soviet Union and is ultimately what’s created this monster that we all live under today, which now doesn’t just exist within the confines of the Soviet Union, but seems to almost be a global epidemic.
Lex Fridman (00:47:40) And then that song became the rebel call against that, against the power structures that creates that.
Oliver Anthony (00:47:48) Yeah. It’s like how much fire am I willing to play with? Because I know at some point I am going to get burned from it. I just pray a lot that God … I don’t have a lot of self-worth in myself anyway, so I don’t really care what they say or do to me or I don’t care. I don’t even care if I die, whatever. Just protect the people I love is all. That’s all I ask of God.
(00:48:09) I have this dream of just creating this parallel system that sits beside all these stupid systems that we live under that are all engulfed in this thing that we talked about at the beginning. This type of structure. We’re all just robots. And it’s like if we hate the way music is, and all these artists are complaining about the way the venues are monopolized and the ticket sales monopolize, then let’s just go find other places to play music, because so many people hungry for music in places that don’t ever get it.
(00:48:40) And if you look at it, there’s so many passionate people that are fighting all these different causes. Just in food. It’s the word they use for more or less starvation. It’s a more polite, it’s called food insecurity. But if you look up just in Virginia, just where I live in Virginia in the rural areas, how much food insecurity there is and how many empty vacant farms there are. It’s like this is an obvious problem that we should be on Twitter talking about non-stop. Everyone has to eat. It don’t matter what you vote for or what you look like or any of that crap.
(00:49:18) Why are we living in a country where where half of us are obese and eating shit food and don’t know any better, and then the other half of us don’t have … It’s lack of leadership that’s caused dysfunction. And so if we’re tired of that, then let’s just fix it. We don’t need anybody’s permission. That’s the whole beauty of what America is. We don’t need some greasy-haired corporate schmuck to give us permission to go fix all these things that are wrong. Let’s just go do it. And if they don’t like it, fuck them.
Lex Fridman (00:49:50) In all domains of life from food to the music industry, honestly to education, also to government itself, all of it. Your music is also just the soundtrack to that spirit that makes America great, of just constantly trying to revitalize itself. When the bullshit piles up a little too high, there’s that revolutionary spirit that says we need to fix this shit.
Oliver Anthony (00:50:24) And that inspiration that created this country was from years of people living under tyranny. We forget the story of the people who really created this country. It’s funny. One of the statements I made at the very beginning that got taken way out of context, but I wasn’t in a position to even begin to have a conversation about it, is I made this comment early on at one of the shows about how our diversity is a strength, but that term has been hijacked now to mean something a lot different than what it really means.
(00:50:52) But it’s like think about how many different people came together just at the founding of this country. People who spoke different languages, different cultures, religions, ways of thinking. So many different people came together to even create this place now, and we’ve just forgotten about all that. They didn’t all come here because they wanted to ride on some miserable boat ride and risk their whole lives to live in some crazy jungle essentially that had no structure, no infrastructure, no medicine. They didn’t come here for some glorified camping trip. It’s because they were tired of generations of being persecuted and living under tyranny and not being allowed to practice their …
(00:51:27) It’s not like they wanted freedom of religion and they didn’t want separation of church and state because they were a bunch of goody two-shoes and they love going to church every Sunday. It’s because they weren’t allowed to believe in what they believed in because some asshole king or some hierarchy told them they couldn’t, and they were just tired of it. That’s what we’re losing now, is we’ve forgotten that we’re those people. The same structures that have plagued this country are … they’re multinational corporations and it’s just the ideology behind them, and their structure is what the problem is.
Lex Fridman (00:51:56) Yeah, I mean it’s multinational corporations. It’s nation states that are deeply corrupt and are authoritarian and ultimately abuse power and yes, create elements of tyranny. And from that, the human spirit rises. Like I said, with songs like the ones you Write or at the founding in this country, that’s why all this diverse outcasts come together and write something as crazy as all men are created equal. What a gangster line. I guess not an easy thing. We take a lot of that stuff for granted now, but that’s not an easy thing to come up with. That’s a really gutsy thing, to see the value in all people equally. And of course they also were suffering from delusion. They didn’t see Black people as equal. They didn’t see women as equal. But even that first leap of all men are created equal, that’s a gigantic fuck you to the past.
Oliver Anthony (00:53:08) Taking that leap forward really took a lot in an age and a time when it probably sounded … and it’s not like they just made a statement and put it on Twitter. Think about how much … just think about the insanity. I can’t even conceptualize the insanity of what took place from the time that … even from the Revolutionary War until now to try to preserve that idea. So much has happened and so much sacrifice has been made in just so many hours of labor and thought and intensity.
Blue-collar people
Lex Fridman (00:53:38) Even the 20th century’s got two world wars, and especially in the Second World War, the United States played a very crucial role. And there was a lot of ideological battle of ideas going on at that time, of the role of war and peace, of the role of the United States as the center place for the ideal of human freedom and human rights. We continue to innovate. I’d love to get back to talking to blue collar people you mentioned. Those are some of my favorite people. So it was actually really cool to find out that for many years of your life, basically the way you made a living is talking to blue collar people and getting their story. So I’m traveling across the world for a bit, but of course the world I love the most and I’m most curious about is the different subcultures and towns of the United States.
(00:54:38) So I took a road trip across the U.S. in my early 20s for several months, and that was a transformative experience for me. And that’s something, one of the luxuries I have is to have the freedom to do whatever the hell I want now. And so I want to take a road trip across the United States for several months. And one of the things I wanted to do is just to talk to people in small towns in middle America. I don’t know what words to put on it, but to talk to the very people that you talked about. Construction workers, plumbers, waitresses, oil rig workers, just people that do something real, people that are real, that don’t make much money, that struggle but have as you talked about, have a richness to them. That’s not often revealed. That’s not often talked about. So maybe can you speak to that, to your time with blue collar folk?
Oliver Anthony (00:55:49) When I got all those messages, we were talking about earlier on, earlier in this, so many of them, and even now, even since … even in the last couple of days, I’ve gotten some where they start with, “Hey, I’m a nobody.” But that’s how a lot of those start. The nobodies of the world if you want to call them. It’s frustrating that the people who literally have built and preserve and maintain the structure of society that we all comfortably live in, those people have the least amount of representation. They’re ignored just because of the way the social hierarchy exists. But some of the most dimwitted, irrelevant, terrible people are put here and are idolized and spotlighted, and they’re all over television, and they’re all over the internet and we act like they’re kings and queens and that they’re royalty. And then all these people who do jobs that most of us will be too … either wouldn’t have even the ability to do, we’d be like … How many people are going to go underwater and weld?
(00:57:03) But if we didn’t have underwater welders … One of my best friends whose name is also Jaco, funny enough, the dude works 70, 80 hours every week. He’s on the Chesapeake Bay tunnel job now. But the dude’s gotten up on heights that I couldn’t get on. He’s went underground places I wouldn’t go. And nobody even knows those people’s stories or what they went through or the kind of lives they lived in. And they’re the people who create the fabric of society, and even the waitresses and the waiters and all these factory jobs that I worked in, all those people. Talk about the craziest place I ever worked and the craziest people I ever met was this little place called Perfect Air in Marion, North Carolina, and it was this commercial air conditioning factory, which is I think closed now. But they didn’t pay very well. And so everyone they hired was either people that had criminal backgrounds who couldn’t get jobs elsewhere or idiots who dropped out of high school and couldn’t work elsewhere, like me.
(00:57:59) And so I was 18 years old working in this place with people who were mostly in their 50s and 60s. But you want to talk about being exposed to just a whole nother world of people and just the stories and just … Those people are far more interesting than many of the people that we consider to be celebrities. Most people who are celebrities are just pretty boring and airheaded don’t really even know what real life is about. They’re pretty unrelatable to the rest of the world. And so it would be really cool. I mean that’s the whole reason that I want to go out and do these shows in places that haven’t had music in them in 10 years because those people, that is America to me.
(00:58:32) How many people in Pittsburgh have been an hour outside of Pittsburgh? And even in Virginia. If you lived in northern Virginia and you drive two and a half hours Southwest, you’re in a whole nother planet. The people, the accents, the culture. And so I feel driven in the same way. I would love to find a way to try to bridge that cultural gap to make those people relevant because they are some of the most … And it’s funny because we emulate a lot of those people. Modern country music is a bunch of people emulating those people.
Lex Fridman (00:59:05) And there’s also, I love people that have a skill and become masters of that skill also. So that element is also there, even if it’s insanely difficult work like being a miner. There’s skill to that. There’s stories there. There’s what it takes to do that. I mean, some of my favorite humans are engineers, and all they do is solve really hard problems and they develop. I mean, it’s a pain in the ass, the job. Anything in the factory is extremely difficult, but that you learn so much about what it takes to solve intricate nuanced problems in the physical world. Coal mining, oil rigs, like you mentioned, welding, that’s a fascinating line of work.
Oliver Anthony (00:59:51) And those are trades that are in many cases dying because they aren’t popular in culture anymore. Everything from agricultural to plumbing and electrical, it’s like those are all areas that I think if you were to go out and talk to some of those people and shed light on it, you could change the entire landscape in America of how it’s perceived and make it cool.
Lex Fridman (01:00:16) Yeah, so thank you, what you’re doing on that front. I want to say, I wrote it down. Please, if you know people that will be willing to talk out to me. A good way to do that is lexfridman.com/contact.
Oliver Anthony (01:00:29) This was another one of the things early on that I had an idea about and I thought was getting done, and it wasn’t, that I’ve got to go back and try to figure out, is doing prison shows and doing rehab shows and all that. But I am really intrigued with going into those places and trying to immerse myself in just the mental state that those people are in. And it’s not talked about a whole lot, but …
Lex Fridman (01:00:56) Also people who get out. Ex-convicts. I mean, that’s a hard life. That’s just a hard life, to try to reintegrate back into society.
Oliver Anthony (01:01:06) Yeah. And a lot of those people at Perfect Air that I worked with, they almost all were in some form of legal trouble. There was a lady that worked on the assembly line beside me named Denise, and her and her husband had been manufacturing methamphetamine. And he took the fall for most of it. She only had to go on probation. He was still in prison. But man, Denise was a very sweet lady and aside from the meth manufacturing, she was like, great. And just such a character in such a good way. And so it’s like, yeah, just …
Lex Fridman (01:01:36) Denise, LexFriman.com/contact, let’s talk. I mean, yeah, both the plumbers and the coal miners and Denise with the old meth habits. I mean, they’re walking, the line of … Surviving is hard. So you have to do a real hard job, and then you also have to live life, which is in general hard. Divorce, kids, people die, you lose, medical issues, and that can destroy you completely. All of a sudden something happens, you can’t afford it. Then the insurance system destroys people, all of that. So you have to somehow navigate life while working your ass off in a real hard job. And those people, they have stories that’s a real pain, and from that pain, from that anger, that’s where Rich Men North of Richmond, that you could just feel their pain come through with that song and with your other work. So there is a landscape of suffering.
Oliver Anthony (01:02:50) Yeah. It doesn’t have to be that. We don’t all have to be that decentralized either. If there is that much commonality among people, which I do believe there is, just innately in suffering. Yeah, there’s a guy in West Virginia that I talked to that he’s got a piece of property beside of mine that he was interested in selling, but the reason he’s got this dream of opening … putting some cabins there and renting them out for people to come, Airbnb. He works at Lowe’s full-time, but his son’s got this, his son’s 19, and he has got this heart surgery he’s got to have, and so he’s trying to sell the place for that. And just that guy and all you’d ever see him as is the guy that works at Lowe’s pulling lumber or whatever. But he’s got this very Insanely complex life he’s trying to manage. He doesn’t want to lose his son. He’s just going to sell everything.
(01:03:40) And at one point in time, maybe the church served that role of when people really fell off track and they didn’t have a support system and they were on this tiny bow out in the ocean. They figured out some kind of way to rally. In my mind, that’s the dream of all this. If I die and there’s any legacy left or anything done, it’s finding a way to take all the people that fill that role and organizing them and empowering them and protecting them. It’s rebuilding the community, but in a real way, not in this fairy tale bullshit, everybody’s going to love each other, and we’re all just going to be one big happy family. Everybody’s still going to get mad and hate each other in certain ways, and that’s good. We need those tornadoes, like you said. We need people pissed off and angry, and we need people to feel like they can be angry and open about things that are wrong.
(01:04:25) People should be able to speak their mind, and we shouldn’t all just kiss each other’s ass, and we shouldn’t all just pretend to be overly polite and say, “Hey, Debbie, you have a good weekend?” Like you said, we need all this controversy and this turmoil. And we need the hell of that side that the internet brings out in people, but it just needs to be in real life, and it needs to be in a way where we all are at least chasing the same common goal, which is probably that we don’t want to starve, and we want to have decent health, and we want to be able to provide a decent life for our kids, or at least we just want to live a decent life.
(01:04:59) I think somehow that fixes what you describe, the people who fall in despair and are isolated. It’s a terrifying world to live in. It’s that principle. Again, I need a phone a friend thing where we can just keep calling Jordan for all these things. But he explains, there’s this principle in the Bible about the more you have, the more you’ll receive and the less you’ll receive kind of a thing. And it’s just a universal law in society where it seems like the lower you get to the bottom, it’s almost like the less resources you have available and the less friends you have, and it’s like you, the further you go, it snowballs into where it’s like people just hit rock bottom, and then what? It’s like when you get out of prison, what are you supposed to do? Or when you’re a veteran with mental health, what are you supposed to do? In my mind, that’s what the church is supposed to be there for is … but obviously it doesn’t fill that role anymore.
Lex Fridman (01:05:56) To some people, at least religion does a little bit. It’s at least a foundation of community, a foundation of hope for people when they’re really struggling.
Lex Fridman (01:06:12) You got thousands of messages, like you talked about from people. You’ve gotten to talk to thousands of people about their pain. Through your work, through your music, you’ve been an inspiration to those people to find a way out of the pain. Can you tell the full story of your own lowest point. Before all of this, before the music, before you blew up, can you take me through the story of the depression, the drinking, and just the roughest times in your life?
Oliver Anthony (01:06:49) Sometimes it’s not even … It’s funny, but it’s almost not even where you’re at in life. It’s where you perceive yourself at in life and what your goals are moving forward. I dropped out of high school at 17, basically ran away from home. I have always had this authority problem, and so I just didn’t want to listen to my parents. I didn’t want to go to college. I just wanted to go move into the mountains. I was running away from responsibility, I guess is what I was doing. And so got this girl pregnant, had my first kid when I was 18 or just about to turn 19. And like I said, I’m working in the air conditioning factory with a bunch of convicted felons. And so from there, everything was just reactionary. I never really had a plan. I would jump from job to job just like most everybody else.
(01:07:37) I don’t know. I just got to a point where I guess I just quit believing in myself and I knew that I wasn’t doing … I wasn’t feeling my purpose, and I wasn’t being the best version of myself I could be. And so the alternative to facing yourself in the mirror and accepting that I’m not a shitty person, I’ve just let myself fall. It’s so hard to accept when you’ve had that fall, that it’s just easier just to get drunk and just do the bare minimum you can to keep everything sort of moving along, but you don’t really care if you live or die. You don’t really care about much anything. I don’t know. Life is just so beautiful when you’re a child. You’re so imaginative and exploratory, and you’re learning all these things, and you just can’t wait to be an adult because you’re just going to go out and do all these incredible … and then …
Lex Fridman (01:08:28) You face the reality of it.
Oliver Anthony (01:08:30) Yeah. And the pressure and the fear of failure. I think maybe even my own fear of failure is what drove me into … But yeah, and you think negatively about yourself for so many days and weeks and months, and you don’t even have a real self-awareness of what you’re doing or how destructive you’ve become. But you always have that discernment in you, that conscious, that little voice and your spirit that is letting you know you’re messing up. I was almost like I was wrestling with myself. And so I don’t know. I just got to a point where it was just a very overwhelming sense of numbness. Nothing that mattered before really matters anymore.
(01:09:24) I guess that’s probably, to me, the definition of depression, is when all the things you love and care about are just meaningless, and you can’t really can’t find meaning or purpose or excitement in anything. I think especially with men that commit suicide, it’s a prolonged period of that. It’s not like they just wake up one day and they have a bad day, and they kill themselves. It’s like you self-reflect negatively about yourself and your life, and you don’t do the things that you’re supposed to do every day for a long enough period of time, and it’s … pretty soon you’ve built this whole mountain of-
Oliver Anthony (01:10:03) It’s like, pretty soon you’ve built this whole mountain of mismanaged, neglected stuff, for lack of a better word, this mountain that you have to climb back up in order to fix all these things that you should have been doing all along. And then, on the other side of it it’s like, well, I could just die, that seems like… It’s almost like, I think from a man’s perspective, maybe, the friends that I’ve had that I’ve lost, it seems like, a lot of times you think you’d never see it coming. I don’t know, maybe that’s a general thing with… It seems like a lot of times men mask that better, and you don’t pick up on it as much. But I think it’s like you just dig yourself into a point to where it’s like you have a mountain of responsibility in front of you that you haven’t faced, that you don’t know how to face, and you haven’t been able to do so for a long time, but there’s this really easy detour, and it’s just putting your big toe on the trigger.
(01:11:00) And it’s like, which one of those are… I don’t know. They both seem… But at that point, your perception of reality is so distorted that you don’t… All the things that would normally compel you to move along, like love and joy and your drive to be that, none of that really, it’s not there for you to even contemplate, if that makes sense. It’s like, that part is almost like, at least for a little while, invisible, and all you see is fear and responsibility, and just this, like I said, I just envision it like a mountain that you don’t really know if you’re even able to climb, and then the other option is just… So, I think that’s probably where a lot of people go, and that’s probably where I was, was just…
Lex Fridman (01:11:54) Yeah, there’s the, it’s not just responsibilities, the immensity of it, the mountain, and I think you’re accurately describing how it happens, which is gradually.
Lex Fridman (01:12:06) Seeing yourself in a negative light over time slowly suffocates you, and then the burden of the responsibility that piles up. And unfortunately, of course, one of the ways out is to pull the trigger, and the other way out is the Jordan Peterson, back to Jordan, sort of one gradual step at a time, like make your bed. It’s like, start climbing out, the responsibilities before you, one at a time, every single day, just climbing out, and have faith that it will work out.
Oliver Anthony (01:12:46) That was what was so powerful for me about just beginning to open my mind back up to reading just a little bit of stuff, a little bit of stuff from the New Testament, that Jesus said, and some different perspectives and teachings. But an apostle would be in prison, basically being tortured and facing death, but just overjoyed in writing about talking… It’s all about your perspective of things. Like I said, that’s why I never could understand why celebrities or professional… Giving one example of many, a Kurt Cobain type scenario, where you have a guy that’s just immensely talented, just will always be loved by plenty of people, I never could understand why that guy…
Lex Fridman (01:13:28) There’s a ocean of quiet suffering in a lot of, and I think it is disproportionately men, in a lot of men, and they hide it well.
Oliver Anthony (01:13:39) That’s why blue collar workers have such a high suicide rate in all too, and why it is so important to talk to those people when…
Lex Fridman (01:13:46) Yeah, no, could see it in the eyes, and there is a lot of pain there.
Oliver Anthony (01:13:54) Without trying to open up too many doors, I think that’s probably the best way I would describe it, is just a series of really… Just a series of negligent decisions, and also just misperceptions. I think this was an Andrew Huberman thing where he talks about medications and how it’s a lot more likely for somebody to keep their dog on their medication schedule but not themselves. You love your dog, and your dog is just this great little thing, and you don’t see the flaws and the faults and the sin and the disgust in your dog that you do yourself. So, it’s much more likely for people to make sure their dog has their medication every day. But there’s this alarming statistic with just the amount of people that don’t even fill their prescriptions they need filled, or take care of themselves the way they do.
(01:14:45) And then, that also, over time, if you quit taking care of yourself and you’re not in good health, and you’re not in a good routine, a long series of doing enough of those things, it’s easy for you to just think that your self-worth is zero. Because if you’re not even willing to have basic hygiene, and eat decent food, and try to take care of yourself, t’s like how on earth are you going to go face all these things that you need to face to get your life better? If you don’t even care enough to do that. But it is, it’s a long tragic road to get to that point, I think. At least in my case. The idea that there was something bigger than me, that loved me, even despite I had all these flaws and problems, and just that I was just such a wretched person, that’s what, at least in my situation, that’s what I think helped put… More than anything.
(01:15:41) Like I said, that’s certainly where the motivation to quit the… Once I quit the drinking, it helped a lot because I was able to, even though it was difficult, I was able to actually be able to be honest with myself and reflect on a lot of things that were… And you got to think, like I said, of course, in my case, it was a little unfair of an example because within a month all this stuff had happened, after I quit. But I see it in my friends that have quit, and have tried to turn things around, and it is the most beautiful thing in the world to see somebody come to life again after being in one of those… You’re able to sort of escape this shell of all those terrible things.
(01:16:21) And even if you are still in a bad position, and you got 30,000 worth of credit card debt, and you’re working some shit job, and your car doesn’t start half the time, and your girlfriend left you for some other dude… And don’t matter what it is, that little glimmer of hope, that faith that there is a chance, it’s something greater, that’ll push people, you can push them out aside with that. You can do anything with that. And I think it is important to have a good support structure, when you get to that point, I don’t think anybody should have to face that stuff by themselves. And there’s plenty of other people out there that are in the same position, and I think that’s, again, I think that’s why it’s so important for us to try to get reconnected on a personal level, and not just through digital communication.
(01:17:09) Because all we see of each other online is the good stuff, very rarely are people posting on Facebook talking about… How could you even? It’s like, all you see is the best of people, but I don’t think we realize that we’re all going through a lot of the same things anyway, the low points and stuff.
Lex Fridman (01:17:26) Guess what happens when you either lose your job or can’t quite figure out a good job, and you’re not making that much money, or you’re basically broke, and you have a girlfriend that’s not happy about you being broke, she’s going to leave you. If it’s a wife, that could face divorce, and the breakups and divorce can break a lot of people even when they’re doing well. And now, when they’re not doing well, well, that’s a rough one. And that basically your support system for a lot of people is the relationship, is the wife. And so, that’s taken the support system from underneath you.
Oliver Anthony (01:18:03) I’ve had good friends of mine, I’ve seen getting destructive relationships, and they’ll start to date a girl and then within a year they’re just a shell of what they were, because sometimes… I do think you have to be careful with your self validation, and the way you perceive yourself, and making sure that it’s you giving yourself that and not somebody else. I do think too it’s… Yeah. How are you supposed to, if you can’t even keep a woman around to love you right, how are you supposed to love yourself? It’s easy to think about that. I’ve seen a lot of men get wrecked in bad relationships and stuff too, it’s tough.
Lex Fridman (01:18:41) Yeah. Ultimately, I think, maybe dark to say, but there is a base layer at which we’re alone in this world. You need to be strong by yourself first and foremost. Because sometimes there’ll be times in life where everybody leaves you. The wife leaves you, the job leaves you, and for some people, even people you thought are friends will backstab you. And even then you have to have the strength to find your footing again. That ultimately comes from you, right?
Oliver Anthony (01:19:17) Man, of course, like I said, in all the experiences I’ve been through, I’d be a fool to deny it, but I do think, there is God there that’s always there, but you certainly can self-isolate yourself too, even from that.
Lex Fridman (01:19:29) If you can find faith in yourself, I’ve seen it do wonderful things for human beings. You and God, faith in something bigger than you, yeah, that can give strength to a lot of people. But allowing yourself to derive strength solely from other people can be a dangerous thing. Because people are complicated and they can betray, they can… Just like they fill your life with love, they could also destroy you. That’s also the beautiful thing about life.
Lex Fridman (01:20:05) You make yourself vulnerable to other people, you form deep relationships, that means they can also destroy you. So, that’s life. That’s what makes this whole thing… And then you write really great heartbreak songs.
Lex Fridman (01:20:24) There’s something valuable about people fucking you over and hardship and all that kind of stuff.
Oliver Anthony (01:20:31) Even the best of us have terrible parts of us. We are all flawed inherently because we’re human. And so, there’ll never be another Garden of Eden on earth, figuratively, where we all just live harmoniously and everything’s great and happy and wonderful, but it’s those basic principles that you talk about, like love and those relationships and those connections that we have that make it all… Because think about it, in a lot of cases it’s like, that’s the position you get in when you get so depressed, and you get so low, is like, what’s the point in even doing all this? It is just, for anyone, it is just so crazy, overly complicated, and exhausting to live, isn’t it? Even in this modern society where we have all these wonderful little conveniences, and we can just have food delivered right to our door, if we want, and all this kind of crap, it’s like people are still more depressed now than they’ve ever been, and all the mental anxiety and all the mental health stuff is just probably just as prevalent as it’s ever been.
(01:21:34) People talk about money not making you happy, and it’s easy when you’re… It’s easy when you’re broke to think, man, if I had some money… And of course financial freedom is what you’re really looking for, not an abundance of wealth. But the things that we talk about that make life worth living aren’t things that you can buy, they are things that you obtain through relationships and love and life. And so, it is just an infinitely complex and crazy thing to think about, but that human component of us is what is what’s so important to our long-term existence, our ability to have connection with each other, and the joy we find in that, the purpose we find in that is, it’s not anything that’s replaceable with anything.
Lex Fridman (01:22:26) Yeah, I’ve seen that with just seeing the effects of war on people, and basically war strips away everything. You lose your home, you lose everything. And you get to see what’s actually really important, that’s its other people in your life, friends, family. It’s almost cliche to say, but it’s the people you love in your life that make up the essence of what makes life worth living. It’s not the homes, the material possessions, even the job and whatever else, it’s the humans. So, yeah, yeah, it’s important to remember. A lot of us, especially in the United States, under a capitalist system, are chasing money, it’s important to remember what you’re doing it all for. I got to talk to you about your writing process, you’ve written just a bunch of really incredible songs. You say you’re not a good musician, which is hilarious.
Oliver Anthony (01:23:33) Dude, I have zero self-confidence about any… Just about anything. But when I say that, I’m not being funny, I’m like…
Lex Fridman (01:23:40) Do you get nervous when you get on stage?
Oliver Anthony (01:23:45) Oh, yeah. Yeah, I can think about shows coming up and my hands will sweat thinking about them.
Lex Fridman (01:23:52) Yeah, you told me that you haven’t really played the songs for a couple months, old songs-
Oliver Anthony (01:24:19) A lot of musicians talk about that kind of thing though, right? About this… I don’t know. I’ve heard about that with people, about hating to play songs because of that side of it, but..
Lex Fridman (01:24:30) Oh yeah, I’ve become close friends with Dan Reynolds, who’s the lead singer for Imagine Dragons, and he says every time he performs a song, he has songs that have depression in them and all that kind of stuff, and he says the only real way to do it is to feel it. You can’t just fake it, you have to be in it, you have to really feel the song, as if you’re writing it for the first time. So, as a performer he says that that’s his duty, he has to the audience, but then that takes a toll. That’s not easy to do. Especially with the songs you write. There’s a lot of darkness there in your songs.
Oliver Anthony (01:25:14) Yeah. And I do have some lighter hearted ones too that… The thing is, I’ve only put out, I’m a little funny about… God, I don’t know how many songs I have written that I will probably never do anything with. Probably at least 20 or 30 of them that are just like, I just don’t know why I don’t want to put them out, but just…
Lex Fridman (01:25:38) What does it look like? Do you have a notebook with ideas, or do you mean you have little videos of half-baked songs?
Oliver Anthony (01:25:46) Yeah, I’ve got my old phone, even just that old phone that I recorded all the stuff for TikTok and all on, it’s got loads of little… Just like the way that Richmond one was, where it was in the bathroom, facing the… And I had that. That’s all that, even that one I showed you on there, it had been sitting on my phone probably a couple months before it… That’s why I said, I have too many unfinished songs, it’s exactly what I meant. I’ve got all these little snippets of things, like a little blip here or there. But the writing process is, well, it’s a lot different than I thought most people write, because there’s a lot of people that do these writing rooms and stuff, or you have these co-writes, where they’ll have people sit down, and they sit on the couch and smoke a joint, and they’re like, all right, let’s write this song, and they just start plugging away. And to me, that’s like, I can’t do that, I have to just… It’s like a lot of times the songs come when I’m not prepared for them.
Oliver Anthony (01:26:46) Well, alone in my head, I could be anywhere in it. Some of them I’ll just be in the shower, and I’m like, scram… Because the thing is, it’s a certain part of your brain I guess, that creates that stuff, or picks it up, or does whatever, but they go just as quick as they come. It’s like when you wake up… It’s exactly like when you wake up, you’ve had this crazy vivid dream in your head, and you wake up and it’s all right there, and then you stop thinking about it for half a second, and then it all goes away, and you’ll never remember it again. You can’t remember your dreams like that, it’s exactly like that. It’s like it’ll be there, it’s perfect, it’s all right… It’s almost like given to you, just perfect, parts of it or the whole thing or whatever. And then, you get into this flow state to where you just, it’s all there in front of you, and you just figure it all out, and it’s like somehow you’ve unlocked this little part of your brain that you don’t even really know how to get to, but you just get to it, and it’s all there, and you figure it out, but man, if you don’t get it, it’s gone. You’ll never get it again. You’ll never even be able to replicate that song ever again. It’s like it’ll just go away. And typically, it’s only maybe the first half of the first verse is what I’ll get, or it’ll be the chorus line I’ll get, and then I’ll build the rest of the song around that, if that makes sense, I guess.
Lex Fridman (01:28:03) Well, the words or the music or the melody, what pops into your head?
Oliver Anthony (01:28:07) The emotion, I guess, the words. Sometimes it’s a phrase, like one thing I will do is, especially out in the country, people say the craziest things, and so sometimes I’ll jot down a little bit of… I will sometimes on my phone take a little note, if somebody says something real crazy that I’ve never heard before, and then maybe one day it’ll just pop in my head, like, oh… I don’t know. It’s very random though. I don’t sit and just try to write songs, that’s why I haven’t just been dumping out, even though I have been writing a lot of songs, I haven’t just been dumping out all this crazy music. I don’t want to force it, I don’t want to do truck, beer, girl songs. I don’t want to force songs, I don’t want to like…
Lex Fridman (01:28:49) Do you have any truck, beer, girl songs? Because that would be an interesting-
Oliver Anthony (01:28:53) Yeah, I’ve got this silly one about this guy in West Virginia that, he’s the most laid back… Because I always get in my head and go over analytical about stuff, and get real serious sometimes about things, and he’s like, buddy, you just got to take a drag off this thing. And he’d always peer pressure me into taking a hit off a joint or something, and he just didn’t take life so seriously. So, I’ve written this song about, it’s called Dr. Dan, and it’s about… He’s a doctor, but he’s not a conventional doctor. That’s a silly one that I’ll put out. So, I do have some silly ones like that.
Oliver Anthony (01:29:30) I have a couple funny ones that I’ll never, ever, ever probably play to the public, but I played them at the Mothership, only because nobody has their phones in there. But right after we did Rogan, somehow I got connected with Tom Segura right after Rogan, and we went over to the Mothership and I got to meet him. And I love Adam [inaudible 01:29:52], he was on the thing with Norm McDonald is how I got introduced to him, that show Norm McDonald had. But he just, he’s an awesome dude. And so, we ended up at the Mothership, I think it was the evening after the Rogan podcast, and Tom’s like, “Well, they’ve never had live music in here,” he’s like, “You could be the first one.” And I was like, whatever. And so, we only had one guitar, and I had my guitarist, Joey, with me. So, Ron White was there, it was Tom Segura and then Ron White that night.
(01:30:22) And Ron took Joey in his car, drove him across town to his house and grabbed another guitar, and came back, and we got up there and we did two really silly songs, and then Richmond, in between Tom’s set and Ron’s set. And I was, again, that was one of those moments in my life where I was like, what? What is this? What is this crazy reality I’m in? But I have some funny. Because when I wasn’t playing the open mics… Well, like Brian that you met, a lot of my guitar playing was spent at places like his house, and we were all heavy drinkers, and we were just sitting around at a party playing or whatever. And so, I definitely liked the silly stuff too. But I was really in my head when we were talking about being low, and what I would suggest people to do if they’re in that point.
Nature
(01:31:09) But if I was, not to flip this, but it just popped in my head, but probably what I would tell anybody to do if they’re suicidal and thinking about, if they’re to that point, is just to go find somewhere in nature and go… I missed this step when we were talking about things, but selling my house and buying that property and putting a camper on it and trying to go into this whole off grid thing, really, I don’t know, it does a lot of good for you being reconnected to nature. We are a part of it, but…
Lex Fridman (01:31:42) Oh yeah, I went to the jungle for that reason, being out in nature in every way is beautiful. I say you got some… Maybe that’s what I need to do is get some goats. I saw-
Oliver Anthony (01:31:53) I got two I can give you.
Lex Fridman (01:31:56) I have more questions, why are you giving them so easily? Are there issues I need to know about?
Oliver Anthony (01:32:01) Well, they’re goats. Yeah.
Lex Fridman (01:32:03) There’s no free lunch, man. You got goats, you got all kinds of animals. So, what’s the story of you out in the woods, what were you doing out there?
Oliver Anthony (01:32:14) No comment. I’m just kidding. Just trying to escape this dystopian nightmare that we’re all living under. It was just a form of escapism, I guess. But well, yeah, I think in such a short period of time, my grandfather grew up, they were in a survival estate trying to make enough money to pay the tax on their land, growing tobacco, and then here I am, in this digital world, two generations later, and I’m just like, something’s not… I just felt called to try to figure all that out, and how to get back into that. There’s such a purity to, man, if you raise an animal and kill it and eat it… And I’m not talking about Ted Nugent style, but just raising meat, birds, and pigs, and stuff, and having the ability to put those in the freezer and cook them for dinner, they taste so much better.
(01:33:06) But it’s just, I don’t know how to describe it, but it just brings me joy, being able to grow stuff, and even just flowers and everything else, just watching stuff that’s alive that is just such a… What we’re doing now is I bought this permaculture farm that hadn’t been operational in six or seven years, and they did a lot of herbs, they had a big orchard, blueberries, but my dream there is to create this space that’s the optimal place for humans to go, to fix their mind. So, what’s the animals and the food that I can have there, and the trees that I can plant, and the certain types of wildlife that I can bring in and attract, the noises and the sounds and the smells that are optimal for a human to be in, in order to fix whatever it is.
(01:33:55) I had the opportunity to meet Robert Kennedy Jr early on with all this, and he actually came out to my property and all, and we’re still… I think the idea is that we’re going to launch this healing center thing out there, once they get through all the mess, they got their hands full a little bit right now with things. But whether I go that route or not, it’s like, that’s my goal is to basically create a place that people can go and fix their mind and find the optimal thing. We’ve got laying birds, and meat birds, so we get our eggs and meat, and then we’ve done pigs, and sheep, and goats, and then I’m going to start, I’m going to get cattle in the spring, so we’ll start doing Wagyu, and Angus, and playing around with… And I want to get some funny stuff too. Large animals have a lot of, there’s all these large animal therapies out there for mental health, with vets and stuff, it’s something really relaxing and rewarding about being in that space.
Lex Fridman (01:34:54) What do you find out there in nature that you can’t find anywhere else? Can’t find in the “civilized world?”
Oliver Anthony (01:35:04) Well, everything in civilization seems so, everything we’ve talked about, it seems so… There’s such a level of despair and unorganization and chaos and just all these terrible parts of life that seem so unstructured and just so uncertain. But in nature, everything is certain, everything has a system. Even on the microbial level of soil, there’s this intricate system, and soil fixes it, the bacteria fixes the soil, and you can grow certain types of plants to restore certain types of nutrients, and then that can grow certain types of trees, and then that can bring in certain types of birds, and it’s like this whole big… Nature is just this whole big beautiful system, like Earth is just such an intricate complex system that is structured. And although there is chaos, there’s literal tornadoes, like the metaphor we were using earlier, there are literal tornadoes in nature, and other things, but there’s a piece about observing the structure there.
(01:36:05) And to me, it helps remind and restore my faith that there is something bigger than me, that… Yeah. And there’s a spiritual side to it that I don’t know that I can really correctly articulate, but man, sitting out in the woods with some creek flowing by you, and just sitting in stillness, where you don’t hear anything, there’s no traffic from a road, there’s no… You’re just there in stillness and just watching the Earth do its thing, it’s just…
Lex Fridman (01:36:36) I’ve gotten a chance to spend a day and a night alone deep in the Amazon jungle.
Oliver Anthony (01:36:42) That’s my dream, man. God.
Lex Fridman (01:36:44) You basically take the woods and the creek and the quiet, let’s put that a three on a scale of one to 10, the Amazon jungle is like an 11, because you’re not just listening to the creek, you’re listening to a lot of different species of animal having sex, or trying to kill each other. And you’re just like, birds, monkeys, just everything. And the floor full of insects, bigger kinds of ants murdering smaller kinds of ants, it’s an orchestra of insects. But it’s quiet in the sense that there’s no machinery. The really dark thing about the Amazon rainforest, that sometimes depending on where you are, you’ll sometimes hear in a distance the sound of a chainsaw, you’ll hear… And it pierces the day because there’s just no machinery anywhere around. But once you hear it, it is this undeniable symbol of what human civilization does to nature.
Oliver Anthony (01:37:54) It pains me seeing woods get knocked down and residential subdivisions taking their place. The monkey part of my brain wants to just go burn it all down, it’s just not good. I don’t know, I just instinctually observe it as being not good. And I don’t know exactly how to describe it, but I’m with you. That was, like I said, that’s why I felt so compelled, I had this little house that I had maybe a little bit of equity in, and it was in 2019, and the housing market was up, and I was like, I sold our little house and got that… I was able to find 92 acres for like 1100 an acre, and so I still had to finance it, but it was at least barely within my… And so, that’s what we did. I was paying 600 a month on the land, and I bought a little camper for $750 off this hunt club in Waverly, Virginia, and drug it up there, and that’s what we had. And went and bought a little, I got a little Kubota tractor for 0% financing, and was cutting…
(01:38:57) This property was a mile off the road, so I had to cut basically recut in an old logging road and stuff. And you want to talk about putting a strain on your marriage, that’ll do it, buddy, is selling your modest little rancher and doing that. But man, that’s when I really started to live. And I think probably that was the beginning point of the restoration of me. And I feel bad that a lot of people just don’t even know what that’s like to be on a farm or be out in nature, and I can’t imagine just living in a suburb or a city your whole life and never getting to experience that. It’s good that we have all this technology, it’s great, and the science and the innovation is important, and even the fact that you can go on YouTube and look up how to do almost anything is important.
(01:39:40) It’s just that there isn’t a clear definitive line between what’s beneficial and educational, and what’s predatory and harmful. And so, it happens to me all the time, but I could go on YouTube and look up how to change the brake shoes on my truck or something, and if I click on a Short of somebody doing it, I automatically go to the next video, and I may be three or four videos deep before I catch… I’m watching some lady throw a pie at somebody, and then pretty soon I’m like, wait, I’m changing my brake, that’s the only issue with it.
Lex Fridman (01:40:12) And then, you’re just doom scrolling and it does something to your mind, it just completely takes the humanity away.
Lex Fridman (01:40:21) It is really horrible. That dopamine thing does something in my mind that I hate, which really is the opposite of nature. The feeling I remember being out in nature, and not just a hike, a hike is good, but for prolonged periods of time, several days away from the internet. Away from all that. What is that? I don’t know what that is. But I don’t like what X, Twitter, are doing, I don’t like what Instagram is doing, whatever that is, I don’t think that’s good for the soul. I’m not sure.
Oliver Anthony (01:40:51) Yeah, it’s emulating things that we need to be healthy humans, but it’s just feeding it visually and audibly to us, but it’s not giving us the… It’s giving us the instant gratification of it, but it’s not giving us the long-term pleasure or fulfillment of it. Like I said, and the beauty is we’re in this weird period in time, it’s a breath of time that we’re in, where we are able to conceptualize and observe what life was like in that transition point that’s got us up till now. And we also have the… Because in order for all this to continue to evolve, even with AI, it needs us more than we need it right now, still, for a very short period of time. But we have access to nearly all the information that the world has, theoretically, but we also still have the perception and the memory of what life was like before it.
(01:41:47) And so, this is a very short window of time, like a breath of time, where I think we can find a way to incorporate this into normal life, but I think if that breath leaves us, I don’t know, I think it’s… I believe, I truly believe it is irreversible. And that’s just going to be the end of us, and it could take two or three more generations to get to that point. But I think why don’t we find people that are way smarter than me. And look at all the things that trend on social media, the videos that everybody watches, I don’t know what it is, if it’s wood splitting and plumbing and blacksmithing and doing something with… Let’s find all the things that people are attracted to online, that they obviously are interested in, and just figure out a way to have them in real life for people to immerse themselves in.
Lex Fridman (01:42:38) Yeah, it’s the transitionary state, and one of the responsibilities I take very serious, because I agree with you, is I tried to pierce the bubble that is the San Francisco, that is the Silicon Valley, that is the people that build these technologies, they often live a bit in a bubble. That said, the people that criticize tech folks also live in a bubble. And to, first of all, piercing bubbles in general is good for people to get along, to understand each other, because people that say all technology is evil, unfortunately, even if that’s true, which I don’t think it is, it’s coming. It’s going to be built.
(01:43:18) And so, you have to figure out how to do it in a way that preserves our humanity, that doesn’t drag us into this black hole of just maximizing engagement, maximizing this dopamine thing, where instead of reading Dostoevsky, which I should be doing, I’m looking at some girl shaking her ass on Instagram, and then feeling horrible about myself five minutes later. That, at scale is what seems to be happening. And so, reminding ourselves that this is not the way to steer human civilization to progress, to flourishing.
Oliver Anthony (01:43:51) The problem is I think we’re wasting a lot of our bandwidth. We only have so many minutes in the day to even use our brains, and our brains can only do but so much in a day anyway. And when we’re wasting any of it on just that, it’s like, I see it, in my own professional opinion, as the world is becoming just a little more, in the last decade or two, as the world becomes a little more dreary and dark, and more problems happen, and city streets become more littered, and jobs are… All these kinds of problems that we all argue about all the time, as they become more prevalent, it’s like the internet and just the visuals of the internet become so much more immersive, and video games are so much more…
(01:44:36) Everything’s so much better, everything’s improving at lightning speed in technology, and it’s degrading in society, and in the real world. And somehow there’s got to be a way to find a balance there. But right now, it seems like as technology becomes more immersive and addictive and interactive, the way these algorithms feed us exactly what we want, and there’s so much psychology, and just so much research that goes into making them as addictive as possible, it’s like the real world kind of sucks.
Oliver Anthony (01:45:02) … tip is possible. It’s like the real world kind of sucks. Cities that were beautiful and thriving are now falling apart, and have all kinds of problems that are being unaddressed, and lack of leader… It’s like there’s got to be some kind of way, and so it’s easy for us to feel more and more inclined to escape into the digital realm because the digital realm is becoming more fun while real life is becoming less fun, and there’s got to be some kind of way to balance between the two.
(01:45:26) I’m with you. I’m not against technology at all. I think evil most certainly existed long before there were computers and in even more treacherous ways. Now we have the ability to do… Like I said, we’re in a very temporary state right now in 2025, where the general public has access to basically all the information there is, and artificial intelligence, and just immense, and the ability that a guy can just set a bunch of cameras up, and start doing podcasts, and have even just the fact that your platform could be created is immensely powerful. It probably never existed in world history up until now, but we also still have… The problem is if we just keep going without being careful about losing the real world aspect of it, is that at some point we’re just going to get so lost and so immersed in this space, we’re not even going to know what we’re missing out on. All there’s going to be is Girls on Instagram. All there’s going to be is that.
Lex Fridman (01:46:24) Yeah, I’ve been trying to figure it all out. I just did a super long podcast with Tim Sweeney, the CEO of Epic Games who created Fortnite. He created Unreal Engine, a lot of interesting video games, revolutionary video games. So I don’t know if you know, but Fortnite is this gigantic video game where people go into an online world and they shoot stuff. It’s fun. It’s not like Call of Duty intense, militaristic, raw, real kind of shooting. It’s more fun shooting at each other. But at first I was skeptical, is that a good way to hang out with friends? But then I got to do it with people that I’m actually friends with in physical reality, and you get to hear each other’s voice, and you just talk, and talk shit about each other together.
(01:47:14) It’s basically a phone call, honestly, with some visuals. It’s not about the visuals, it’s about the phone call and it just makes it a little more convenient to connect regularly. But I think you do need to remember that all of that only works if you’re consistently returning to physical reality. In this case, taking the, quote, unquote, “Guy trip.” Not the Brokeback Mountain style, but just friends. Just friends, a trip out in nature together, like dudes on a hunting trip, or just fishing, or just hanging out in physical reality together. We should not forget the importance of that.
Oliver Anthony (01:47:54) You talked earlier about loneliness. I think that got brought up at some point, but I do think that’s a problem that’s caused a lot of our symptoms is that we are all very lonely. Even though we all seem to be so well-connected digitally, we are all so lonely. You got to think, Modern Warfare 2 was a big thing. I was supposed to be in class of 2010, so you can think when I was in whatever grade, eighth grade or whatever, Call of Duty was the thing. I’ve certainly, trust me, I’m not saying that I… I’m right in this space of digital immersion with anybody else. I’ve been there and seen it, but I’ve wasted who knows how many hundreds of hours on Modern Warfare 2, and I really built some great friendships from it.
(01:48:41) There’s a place for all that stuff. We have this innate responsibility to, again, it just goes back to talking about our founding fathers, and the way this country was created, and the importance of what it did for the world. And my understanding is that it was the first time ever that people got together and agreed that, like you said, every man was equal. Because they were created in the image of God, they had uninalienable rights that no government could take away from them, and that’s really important. There won’t be Fortnite if we don’t worry about that. And honestly, just the collapsing in our structure with the mental health with our youth, and the suicide rates with our blue collar workers, and all these things we’ve touched and talked about, those are all just things, we just need more time together in real life to fix those problems.
(01:49:34) Those are just things, like I said, I make the joke, but there’s never been argument that I’ve… There’s never been one dispute with my wife that I’ve been able to figure out how to fix through a text message or a… It takes being in person with people and having human connection to fix any problem and to heal anything. And so it’s difficult. It’s not anybody’s fault that we’re like that. We’re not even able to really get to know each other and understand each other through the internet. We almost have to be together in person to even just get each other’s point of view and perspectives on things, and-
Lex Fridman (01:50:09) Yeah, fuck the division that the internet creates. Honestly, like the left and the right, it is been a nightmare for me just to watch because I see the very simple reality that we’re in it together and that there is a lot more commonality between people. It seems cliche to say, but it’s like now that needs to be said more than ever because when you look on X, it feels like everybody’s divided, but we’re not. [inaudible 01:50:35]-
Oliver Anthony (01:50:34) Well, and people are always going to think differently too, just in our structure and the way we… Again, it goes back to that Jordan Peterson lecture about, I think in Maps of Meaning where he talks about people who think more conservatively or more liberally about things. It’s been applied to politics, but it’s based more in psychology than anything. Some people are going to think more inside the box and some people are going to think more outside the box, but we have to have both in order to have a healthy society.
Lex Fridman (01:51:03) Oh, and also the thing that bothers me, your song, Rich Men North of Richmond, a lot of people, so a pretty even split, people on the left and the right in terms of friends of mine, and sadly, they’ve drifted towards the extremes a bit. Those on the left definitely have developed a case of Trump derangement syndrome. Those on the right seem to think that every person on the left is a radical leftist. It’s hilarious to listen to people talk. It’s like everybody’s lost their mind it feels like. But also on top of that, people on the right see Trump as this savior, as this figure who could do no wrong, who’s going to restore freedom in America and all… You can do a full list of really positive things, and to me, he’s yet another rich man north of Richmond. Biden, Trump, it’s all the same thing.
(01:52:06) Now, some might be able to do more good than others, but ultimately they’re in positions of power, and power corrupts, and those in those positions often forget about the everyday person, the working class, and they leave them behind, ultimately serve the people that are close to them and sometimes serve themselves to maintain power, to grow their power. I think the good thing you can say about them is they, and I could say that about both Donald Trump and Joe Biden, is that they really love their family. I could say that one of the things that I love about both people is that they genuinely love their family. And it was always heartwarming to me to see how much Joe Biden loves his family, and honestly just do anything for his family. And the same is true for Trump, and that just reminds you that they’re human beings. Yeah, all that to say is we need to see the humanity in each of us, and to some degree always distrust the people in power.
Oliver Anthony (01:53:15) The power that people have only exists because we allow it, whether willingly or just through our own negligence. But I think that’s the important thing is, like I said, there’s always more of us than there will be of them. There’s always more nobodies than there ever will be people at the top.
Oliver Anthony (01:53:30) We just have to figure out what to do with that and how to… And I think this is, like I said, a short window of time where we can still figure that out.
Three-legged cat
Lex Fridman (01:53:40) I got to ask you about something before I forget. I think I saw on Instagram you talked about a three-legged cat. Is that a real thing?
Lex Fridman (01:53:47) What’s the story behind the three-legged cat? And the reason I want to ask you that, first of all, I want to hear the story, and second of all, I want to read to you one of my favorite Bukowski poems afterwards-
Lex Fridman (01:53:57) … about another cat. All right, what’s the story?
Oliver Anthony (01:54:00) I had this cat lady neighbor who’s a real sweet lady, but older lady lives in a single-wide trailer, has probably got, I don’t know, 30 or 40 cats-
Oliver Anthony (01:54:16) It was a rainy Saturday morning. It was pouring down rain. It was like eight o’clock in the morning on Saturday. It was going to be a great day, I was going to… And then I hear this lady yelling, “There’s this cat stuck in my car.” She’s all freaking out and don’t know what to do. And like I said, my wife’s a veterinary technician or whatever, so she’s got a little bit more sense about animals than any of us. But we go over there and the lady’s tried to start her car, and there’s this kitten that was up under the hood, and she started the car and the cat, basically, it basically almost ripped its whole front leg off already. There was just a little bit still attached, like some tendon or whatever, but the leg was wrapped up under the water pump, the pulley of the water pump, knocked the belt off.
(01:54:57) There was no way to save this leg on this guy, but the cat was pinned upside down, and so we ended up grabbing a… We asked the lady if she had a knife in the house, so she gave us this terrible looking knife, but it’s all that we had. I was like, we were trying to get this done. So, yeah, my wife was the one that did it, but we got the rest of the stuff cut, and got the cat out. And I don’t know, I was over a grand we spent getting this cat’s, getting it properly sutured or whatever to where the cat could have a healthy recovery and all. But I’m one of those type of people, I couldn’t just let this little… I’m not going to go, they were going to just go put the cat down or whatever, the lady. So, yeah, I named her hop.
(01:55:46) So that’s my little cat and it hops around, but it was one of those things where… Yeah, I don’t know. Great example with animals though. I guess it’s the same way with people. I just always see the best and I just couldn’t-
Lex Fridman (01:55:59) Yeah, that’s one of the most amazing things about humans. It’s irrational to spend that much money on this cat, right? Because there’s so many other cats that are suffering, and dying, and so on, but that’s what makes humans really special. We see the person or the creature suffering in front of us and we’re willing to move mountains to save that person. It’s irrational, maybe it doesn’t make sense because the allocation of money and effort might not be correct, whatever. We just don’t give a shit.
Oliver Anthony (01:56:35) The reason that we’re willing to do it for a cat, like I said, it’s just like the thing with the dogs about giving the dogs your medication by not yourself. So we see all the flaws, and all the problems, and all the disagreements, and all the anger we have with each other. Just like you said, your friends on the right and the left, and stuff. And we could show that kind of compassion, and we do. Humanity does from time to time, show that kind of… But we could show that just undeserved, just love to each other too. Love is like, it’s funny you talked about how both of those presidents, you could say they at least love their family, but love is like, I think everyone’s capable of love. It’s probably the most powerful thing there is, even beyond hate I think is… But it is crazy with… It comes out of us so easily with animals because, to us, they’re just these innocent little lives. We don’t have anything against them. They don’t talk. They don’t have political views. They’re just little creatures, but the reality is we’re all just creatures like that.
Lex Fridman (01:57:43) Yeah. We do that with human children, but we don’t do it enough with adults who are also kinds of children. We’re still fucking lost in this world. So I got to read you this.
Lex Fridman (01:57:56) It’s got to be one of my favorite poems. It’s called The History of One Tough Motherfucker by Charles Bukowski. And people should go look at videos. There’s videos of Bukowski doing interviews with a cat by his side, and that’s the cat he’s talking about. All right, it goes like this, “He came to the door one night, wet, thin, beaten and terrorized, a white, cross-eyed, tailless cat. I took him in and fed him and he stayed, grew to trust me until a friend drove up the driveway and ran him over. I took what was left to a vet who said, ‘Not much chance. Give him these pills. His backbone is crushed, but it was crushed before and somehow mended. If he lives, he’ll never walk. Look at these x-rays, he’s been shot. Look here, the pellets are still there. Also, he once had a tail, somebody cut it off.’.
(01:58:55) I took the cat back. It was a hot summer, one of the hottest in decades. I put him on the bathroom floor, gave him water and pills. He wouldn’t eat. He wouldn’t touch the water. I dipped my finger into it, and wet his mouth, and I talked to him. I didn’t go anywhere. I put in a lot of bathroom time and talked to him, and gently touched him, and he looked back at me with those pale, blue crossed eyes. And as the days went by, he made his first move, dragging himself forward by his front legs. The rear ones wouldn’t work. He made it to the litter box, crawled over and in. It was like the trumpet of possible victory blowing in that bathroom and into the city. I related to that cat. I had it bad, not that bad, but bad enough. One morning he got up, stood up, fell back down and just looked at me. ‘You can make it,’ I said to him. He kept trying, getting up, falling down.
(01:59:56) Finally, he walked a few steps. He was like a drunk, the rear legs just didn’t want to do it, and he fell again, rested than got up. You know the rest. Now he’s better than ever, cross-eyed, almost toothless, but the grace is back and that look in his eyes never left. And now sometimes I’m interviewed, they want to hear about life, and literature, and I get drunk and hold up my cross-eyed, shot, runover, de-tailed cat, and I say, ‘Look. Look at this.” But they don’t understand. They say something like, ‘You say you’ve been influenced by Celine?’ ‘No,’ I hold the cat up, ‘Influenced by what happens, by things like this, by this, by this.’ I shake the cat, hold him up in the smoky and drunken light. He’s relaxed. He knows. It’s then that the interviews end. Although I am proud sometimes when I see the pictures later, and there I am, and there’s the cat, and we’re photographed together, he too knows it’s bullshit, but that somehow it all helps.”
Lex Fridman (02:01:14) … the three-legged cat, there you go. And I think of your music and your life story in the same way. It’s just been through some shit, just like Bukowski. Neither of you two have been through what that cat’s been through, but that’s life. That’s what it’s all about. I was wondering if you could play a couple songs for me.
Oliver Anthony (02:02:04) Call Draven and be like, “Help.”
I Want to Go Home (live performance)
(02:02:11) Well, I guess I’ll do, if I was going to do anything on here from the older songs that was relatable to everything we’ve talked about, it’d probably be I Want to Go Home.
(02:04:49) There’s always some kind of bill to pay.
(02:04:53) People just doing what the rich man say.
(02:04:58) I wanna go home. But if it weren’t for my old dogs and the good Lord.
(02:05:33) Well, they’d have me strung up in the psych ward.
Oliver Anthony (02:05:42) That’s probably one of the first, I don’t know, it’s not the first song I wrote, but one of them.
Lex Fridman (02:05:46) What a song, man. What a song. What a song. What’s the story to that guitar?
Guitar backstory
Oliver Anthony (02:05:52) Well, the guy who made this saved my butt because everything blew up and I was playing that little Gretsch resonator that’s in all the original videos. And my wife had got me that off of Amazon, I think or something, for three or 400 bucks. It’s like just an entry level import, little Gretsch and the pickup never would work right in it. So this string wouldn’t work when you plugged it in. So here we are, everything happens all at once and we’re trying to do these shows. And I think the biggest one I did, so basically what I ended up having to do was go, I bought one of these suction cup rigs that sticks right here, and the mic goes down under here to pick that string up.
Oliver Anthony (02:06:31) And we played a, I think the biggest show I did with it was like 10,000 people, but it was enough to where I couldn’t be doing a $300 guitar with a rigged up thing on it anymore. It just wasn’t going to work. So this guy reached out and Gretsch wouldn’t help me with my… There’s no way to really get ahold of them because they’re such a big company. I finally did get a hold of Diane Gretsch and she’s really nice, and so it’s nothing personal against Gretsch. It’s just at the time I couldn’t get ahold of them. I figured I wouldn’t been able to because everywhere sold out of that Gretsch model when the song blew up. It was a real pop… But I couldn’t get ahold of him. So this guy, Beard Guitar, Paul Beard in Maryland, he reached out, fixed my Gretsch, and then gave me one of these and made it with a… But it’s all handmade and all. It’s like [inaudible 02:07:20].
Oliver Anthony (02:07:27) A little family owned place, and-
Lex Fridman (02:07:31) I know nothing about resonated guitars. Is that like, do you play regular acoustic?
Oliver Anthony (02:07:38) Yeah, it’s just basically a regular acoustic, it’s just a full step down. It’s the only difference. I’ve just got it tuned all the way down.
Lex Fridman (02:07:43) Is that it? Because there’s also the… There’s whole vibe to it.
Oliver Anthony (02:07:47) Oh. Oh, yeah. Well, the body’s different. So you can see it’s got a solid, instead of it being a hollow body, like an acoustic, it’s got that. It almost looks like a hubcap, that black plate.
Lex Fridman (02:07:56) And all the chord, that’s all the same. It’s just a step down.
Oliver Anthony (02:07:59) Mm-hmm. Yeah, it’s just the same. Yeah, I wouldn’t be smart enough to play anything special. It’s just a regular old guitar.
Lex Fridman (02:08:04) I don’t know. There’s a different vibe to it.
Oliver Anthony (02:08:06) Yeah, well, I like that-
Oliver Anthony (02:08:08) Well, I’m real fond of the older music. So where all my family’s from, so my dad was adopted, so I don’t have any… Lunsford’s not really even a real last name to me. It was just my grandparents that adopted my dad. So all of my family’s Ingle, it’s I-N-G-L- E. That’s my real, that’s on my mom’s side of my family. And they’re all from this place about 20 miles from where the Carter family was from. So all that old Virginia bluegrass folk music stuff. And so I was just always attracted to that, and so I like the resonator a full step down because to me, it gives it that old sound. A lot of the instruments back then had bad, dull strings, and they were older, and they were out of a tune a little bit and stuff, and I just, I listen to a lot of that type of music.
(02:09:03) So I like the strings being a little out of tune and dull, and not everything, and just that. Yeah, that’s why I was so attracted to it. Plus, some of the old blues players like playing the Dobro and stuff. But that’s why I wanted to get the resonator, was just because of that old… That’s even why I had to use my grandpa’s name as an alias, but that Oliver Anthony Music is really supposed to represent old music from 1930s Virginia or something like… It’s got that type of feel to it, or at least in its core.
Lex Fridman (02:09:37) It feels like from another time, but it also feels timeless.
Oliver Anthony (02:09:42) It’s also that my music catalog is so limited of what I listen to, that a lot of what’s in my head, because you think about when you’re writing songs and coming up with chord progressions and stuff, whether you realize it or not, it’s all being influenced off of other songs. So when you only have a lot of older music, and a little bit of metal and stuff in there, it’s like there’s not really a whole lot. It’s like that. It’s going to sound that way, I guess, just anyway, what’s in your head already, but-
Playing live this year
Lex Fridman (02:10:08) So you’re going to go out there a little bit this year. What are some things you’re looking forward to? You’re going to travel a bit, you’re going to play a bit.
Oliver Anthony (02:10:19) The idea is to go to a town, like let’s just use Iowa as an example. Instead of the big city in Iowa, playing at the venue where everybody books, let’s find a farm field, 45 minutes outside of that big city, figure out the ingress, egress, the security, find a good promoter that can, a show organizer basically that has experience to where it’s still professional and it’s done correctly. But establish a new venue space that can’t be put under contract by a monopoly, that any artist can go play without. If all these musicians are sick of Ticketmaster and Live Nation, then let’s just start playing in fields and on main streets, and set these venues up, and establish them correctly and professionally to where they exist as their own space. And then imagine the economic impact that would provide to a town that otherwise would never… And imagine what it…
(02:11:12) You want to talk about trying to give blue collar people some hope, or give them some relatability, or do anything for them. Bring a big band to their town that they would otherwise have to drive an hour and a half somewhere to see and couldn’t even afford the tickets to start with. My tour last year, pretty much every show we did that was mine had a $25 ticket option and everybody scoffed at that. And I was basically made fun of for that by people in the professional space, even people I was working with. They just thought it was so stupid. But you know what? There were people at my shows that came up, and the kids were wearing hand-me-down clothes, and you could tell they didn’t have any money. And they said it meant a lot to them that they could come and that there was a $25 option. And I’ll continue to do these shows like this to where any band that wants to come play the show, all their expenses are covered, and I’m sure there’s some kind of tax write-off component to them for them.
(02:12:02) But basically they can come in, do the show, help bring in a crowd. I’m taking the risk, setting the venue up and establishing it. The venue will be owned or managed by either the town, or the farm, or whatever, but it’ll be in a non-profit. And then that space will always exist for people to rent. And the idea is this, man, imagine if I could do 20 of these a year, even if that’s all I can get done. That’s 20 places that will always have music, and will always have a center where people can go and build the sense of community we talked about. It’s almost like a sanctuary if you want to call it that, but it’s just a space that can’t be perverted by corporate America, and just a place where people can go and do all these things that we want to do. What are you excited for this year? Obviously you’re going to travel overseas and sounds like you got some other cool stuff you’re going to do.
Lex Fridman (02:12:55) Yeah, I’m going to see some world leaders, hopefully not end up in prison anywhere. Part of that, honestly, I’m excited, India, to see the same humans, but in very different parts of the world. I’m not a travel guy, but I love seeing humans, that there’s a lot of us humans all over the place, and they’re very different, and they have funny accents, and just funny way of being. So I’m excited to take it all in because I fundamentally love people.
Oliver Anthony (02:13:29) Yeah, man, I would definitely say if you’re ever over towards Virginia or West Virginia, either one there, yeah, it’d be cool to spend a couple days out in the woods, or a day out in the woods and do… I’m really new to the whole psilocybin thing, but I have tried a few smaller doses of it, actually to help with being up on stage and all, and it’s an interesting thing, but-
Oliver Anthony (02:13:54) Yeah, definitely the dogs and the woods part, I got you on that. [inaudible 02:13:59]-
Lex Fridman (02:13:58) I would love to join in. I’ve taken mushrooms a few times and listen, I usually just love everything anyway, but with mushrooms, you just love it a little bit more, especially out in nature.
Lex Fridman (02:14:10) When I’m look out in nature, I’m just in awe of how incredibly beautiful it is. And just I could stare at a tree for hours, and then you take mushrooms and that tree starts having some more dynamism to it. So it’s just a little boost, but I don’t really care.
Oliver Anthony (02:14:28) Yeah, I get into this crazy, like I said, it’s only been a handful of times because I’ve… I don’t know, it’s one of those things where it’s still a little unfamiliar to me, but talking about trees and psilocybin, you start to look in those trees and you think in their relative perspective of time, because they’re constantly moving around and growing, and doing all these things, and you think about in their perspective, maybe we’re just moving way faster than their perception and they’re moving at just a normal speed. It’s just you get into all these crazy trains of thought when you sit out in the woods on that stuff, but-
Lex Fridman (02:15:05) A hundred percent, man. Maybe that’s the history of life. Humans have some chance of destroying 95, 99% of the population when nuclear weapons, and the trees will remain, and they will reconstruct the environment of earth, and help the few humans that remain to survive. And it’ll be the fucking trees that we’d be grateful for, their actual deep, ancient wisdom. So maybe they’re the intelligent ones, maybe we are the idiots.
Oliver Anthony (02:15:37) You’re out in nature like that, and just looking and studying the way all those systems work with soil, and trees, and animals, and how it all just integrates in together so perfectly. It does give you some sense of peace that maybe there is some system at place that’s out of our hands, that can just help us with our faults and our repercussions. And again, for me, just, yeah, I think just being out there, especially now looking at it through the lens of God, it helps. I’ve found no greater peace than just being out in the woods and praying or just trying to focus my mind on that. But yeah, I would love for you to come up there sometime and-
Lex Fridman (02:16:19) I’m 100% will, and visit. See, feeling peaceful out in Virginia in the woods is easy. Try doing it in the Amazon jungle when a-
Lex Fridman (02:16:29) … giant ant crawl and just bites you.
Oliver Anthony (02:16:32) Dude, I would do anything to go to the Amazon.
Lex Fridman (02:16:33) And all the peace is gone. You’re like, “Motherfucker, what is…” And then a second one joins in, kills the first one and bites you again. And then you’re like, “Okay, nature is not all-
Lex Fridman (02:16:55) It’s just the reality of it. It’s sex and violence.
Oliver Anthony (02:16:59) I guess that’s the thing about it though, is it has all the same components of humanity, just almost to a comical level.
Lex Fridman (02:17:07) The real comedy’s the monkeys up in the trees. It’s like little humans and they’re arguing, screaming at each other, throwing stuff, getting into fights. It’s like reality TV, but more pure, more real, more distilled down its fundamentals. We are that. We put on clothes these days, and have fancy words that we say to each other, and look all sexy on Instagram, but we’re the same monkeys, apes.
Oliver Anthony (02:17:40) It’s like the old lobsters, but it really is true. Yeah, we’re all on that same operating system, in a way.
Lex Fridman (02:17:53) Brother, this was a huge honor. I don’t have the words to describe how incredible this was, and I think it was just fun. It was really fun talking to you.
Oliver Anthony (02:18:04) Total honor to be able to come on here for me as well, and especially just to get to meet you in real life and see, you are what I expected you to be, in a good way. You just don’t ever… Yeah, you’re a good dude.
Lex Fridman (02:18:29) All right. Time to wake up. Let’s go back to reality.
(02:18:34) Thanks for listening to this conversation with Oliver Anthony. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from George Orwell, “Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” Thank you for listening, and [inaudible 02:18:58] hope to see you next time.